They were not used to all being together with nothing to do, officers and men, and they waited awkwardly. Lewis said, “Bean told someone — and I’m quoting now — that Snowberry here, to get into the ball, has to ‘curl into the fecal position.’”
“You’ve been reading my letters,” Bean said, shocked.
“In a what position?” Willis Eddy asked. His toe nosed Bean’s bag of doughnuts.
“He meant fetal,” Gabriel explained. He made a circular motion with his hand, as if to hurry Rice’s progress with the camera.
“I know that,” Willis Eddy said. “I thought it was funny.”
They waited and took special care with the kind of rumple they wanted to effect and calibrated their expressions and Rice still wasn’t ready. He fumbled with a latch and sweated. Something gave a wicked snap and he seemed to have hurt a finger.
“That the right camera?” Lewis asked politely. “Some of those buggers are tricky.”
From his kneeling position Bryant surveyed the row of profiles on both sides of him with some pride, imagining his father or mother or Lois seeing it. He imagined his mother saying, “That’s the plane they fly, behind them,” imagined his father grudgingly conceding that they looked like a pretty good bunch.
“Paper Do,” Rice said, squinting down into the viewfinder. “What’s that mean, you suppose?” Gabriel colored and moved the lines slightly to the right, to avoid blocking the painted name. Rice took four pictures and everyone put in orders.
“This one’s for Jean, from all of us,” Lewis said. They laughed. Jean was Snowberry’s first girlfriend, a Brit from a nearby village, and she had dated a number of men on the base. Snowberry was sensitive about it. Lewis without his knowledge often compared her ability to say no to that of a particularly placid and acquiescent Red Cross doughnut girl known to all of them simply as Red Myrtle.
“Lewis,” Snowberry said.
“She’s a fine girl,” Lewis said. “God knows.”
Piacenti had once asked Lewis at chow if he thought of Jean as that kind of girl. Lewis had said he thought of her as a farm animal.
As they were leaving, he said to Bryant, “I got a dog story for you. We had a dog, Skeezix, we were going to take him to be fixed, my dad and me. Bit the shit out of me while we were rounding him up. I didn’t punish him or anything, figured what the hell. The next day we picked him up and he looks at me with these wide eyes like ‘Jesus Christ, this is the last time I fuck with you! Bite the guy’s hand and he cuts your nuts off!’”
Bryant when he reflected on it later found the story haunting for the same reason Lewis found it funny: the notion of retribution out of all proportion.
He sat alone in the day room afterwards with some V-mail from Lois. As Nissen huts went, this one was larger and more dismal than most. He sat in a battered easy chair but the corrugated metal walls made the whole thing feel like a construction site. Higher up they were covered with pin-ups no one liked enough to steal, and the pictures were torn and dirty from constant pawing. There was a wooden table next to his easy chair with a lamp on it and a tray of ancient doughnuts. The undersides of the doughnuts were furred with mold.
The day room had been set up for the aircrews’ leisure, and was looked upon by everyone as the nearest thing to a last resort. Bryant spread the letter before him and concentrated on an image of Lois, his high school girlfriend. He saw her on his parents’ sofa, laughing at the radio. He reread the letter.
I guess it must seem strange to you sitting where you are reading this thinking about me and where I am. I’m on Fox near the water, where the railroad bridge goes over. It’s a beautiful day tho it’s been raining lots lately. The war seems very far away and very close at the same time. Everyone’s very excited and pulling and praying for you. Your uncle Tom says you’re probably an ace by now, and your father said he read about a guy who shot his foot off cleaning his guns. (Can you be an ace on a bomber?)
I’m glad you have a dog, because I think they’re good company. Even if you have to share them. It’s too bad that the dog can’t see. I guess you’re a Seeing-Eye person. Your father says he didn’t know you could have dogs. I didn’t tell him what you said about your friend taking a squirrel up in the plane with him because I don’t believe you and that’s that.
Lewis claimed that he had had a squirrel, Beezer, trained to eat out of his hands — the little son of a bitch would sit there like Arthur Treacher, he’d say — and that it had flown two lowlevel missions with him toward the end of his first tour. According to Lewis, at altitude the animal skittered all through the fuselage, its feet sounding like light hail on the aluminum. It showed up on the co-pilot’s shoulder and nearly scared him to death. A rat! he’d screamed over the interphone. Jesus Christ, we got rats! He’d been reassured by the pilot and an amused bombardier that it was no rat, judging by the tail, but he’d cursed throughout the flight to the target that he’d wet himself because of the goddamned thing and that it was probably eating through the control cables right then, while he was talking. Ever see the teeth on those bastards? he kept saying. They were all sitting there laughing, he insisted over the interphone, and pfffft—right through the cables, and into the drink the hard way. They’d bombed some marshaling yards in Holland and Beezer had never been seen again.
Beezer, Lewis liked to theorize, had done a flying one and a half out of the bomb bay. Some Nazi manning an antiaircraft battery got it right in the face. He would mimic the plummeting Beezer, arms outspread, snarling. He speculated on the aerodynamics of the tail. He said, You think anyone’s going to know what he did? We’re talking about unsung heroes here.
So what’s new?
There’a a young boy with the government that moved into the third floor of the Duffy’s (very mysterious) and everyone’s wondering what’s up. All the girls are wild about him. But you don’t have anything to worry about as you KNOW.
Everyone we talk to is thrilled when we say we have a boy in the service. The poor girls who don’t are so left out. People say that’s our part — find a boy, write him letters, maybe even get engaged. Mom says maybe they figure you’ll fight even harder and do a better job if you’ve got someone in mind you’re fighting for. How did I get on to that subject?
Bryant folded the letter and got up. He sighed, and went outside. Lewis was breaking plates over his head.
They made a curious and fragile wooden sound and separated easily into a rain of pieces, like clay pigeons. Snowberry was handing him plates from a tea service, and one by one he was breaking them over his head. Crockery pieces bounced and ticked off the pavement.
“Isn’t it great?” Snowberry said. Bean and Piacenti were standing behind Lewis. “Lewis found all this stuff in the village. He got it all for nearly nothing. Some woman had lost her sons and was selling like everything she owned just right out in front of her house. Flipped. The neighbors were trying to talk her out of it and everything.” He gestured at a small heap of plates and teapots, cups and platters. Lewis broke another and a piece ricocheted a startling distance. It struck Bryant again how young Snowberry was: the same age as Lois’s little brother. He had a fleeting image of Lois’s brother in a B-17, like a boy allowed to sit in the gunner’s seat at a country fair.
“What’s it all worth?” he asked.
“Who knows?” Snowberry said. “You think they give away good china for peanuts around here?”
“Old hell-for-leather Bryant,” Lewis said. “He’d like to be a better gunner, but he knows what the bullets cost.”