“Think of it like the Brits,” Lewis counseled. “You know. They talk about it like polo or something. These are just the single elimination playoffs.”
“I was talking to Hirsch,” Bryant said. “He was saying nothing was haphazard, you know? and that if you had all the figures, you could have predicted—”
“Everything is haphazard,” Lewis said with vehemence. “You don’t predict nothing. I blow up your house, you tell me which way all the pieces are going to fall.”
“But don’t you think—”
“Shut up,” Lewis said. “You give me a headache. Don’t open your mouth.”
“I want to go home,” Snowberry said into the pillow. “I’m tired of this war.”
There was no response. The principal sound in the metal hut became the squeaking of Piacenti’s bunk as he scratched himself with an annoying industry. Bryant closed his eyes and nursed his humiliation, imagining Lewis gloating, imagining various forms of comeuppance.
Nothing was on for the next day. In the middle of the night he was aware that Snowberry was awake, and when he got up in dull insomniac frustration to go to the can, Snowberry followed. He sat on the can just for a place to sit.
“Some night,” Snowberry said. He ran water on his hands and looked at it.
Bryant was hours past answering. He fancied the water beneath him was rippling quietly in the bowl.
Snowberry produced his little red journal, opening to a marked page. He began reading after settling in with his back to the wall, his lips every so often forming ghostly words. Bryant rose and hoisted his shorts and returned to his bunk.
In the dark, vague shapes telescoped toward and away from him. He followed elusive ribbon-like creatures he hoped were temporary retinal imperfections of some sort until he had to get up, and hissing in frustration he lowered his feet to the floor and padded back to the latrine, concentrating dimly on some notion of a drink of water.
Snowberry was asleep, still seated upright, swaying with tiny starts like a doddering grandfather. Bryant sat beside him and when he didn’t wake extended a finger slowly and touched his nose. He didn’t stir. He waggled his fingers grimly before Snowberry’s face. His journal was opened on his lap. Bryant picked it up and began reading without high hopes. He skipped a section on Frances Langford. The next sections were drafts of letters.
This whole thing has really been something in terms of showing me the world and how different everyone is. Before the service I’d never met anyone from other places and now I know guys from Rhode Island and Ohio, and I’ve met guys from Texas and New Mexico and places like that. I always think about what Dad used to say about people from upstate and stuff, and I wonder what he would’ve thought about this crowd.
I eat good. The chow here is really good for the most part though everybody gripes about it all the time. I guess it’s something you’re supposed to do in the service. You can’t believe how important food is here. If Mom knew she certainly wouldn’t worry on that score. Guys’ll sit around and just talk about eating and never change the subject. Guys are always talking about how their mother made this or that, and everyone listens like their lives depend on it. Sebastian Piacenti, one of our waist gunners I told you about, has this knack for talking about his mother’s cooking so that the guys can almost smell it. He went on the other day in the jeeps after a mission about this veal dish with tomatoes that had the guys moaning and biting their hands.
Snowberry then attempted, with limited success, Bryant judged, to recapture some of Piacenti’s magic. He skipped ahead.
The guy who wrote to ask for the picture of Sis is Harold Bean. He’s got a girl here but I guess things aren’t going so well between them, and I was really talking Sis up in front of him one day, so I guess he was sold. He’s a nice guy, I think, though Lewis rides him pretty hard. Lewis says Bean raises a crew’s buggeration factor — that’s the phrase we got from the Brits for chances of something going wrong — but I think he’s just pretty much like the rest of us. Maybe more so. We don’t want to let each other down, and I think we do a pretty good job.
Lewis thinks Bean’s getting jumpy and says you mark his words, he’ll end up in a flak home, but I think it’s more this thing with the girl, and the rotten luck the squadron’s been having. I worry more about Piacenti. I don’t know that much more about Bean. He’s from Pennsylvania, but I think he told you that. He’s a good-hearted guy. He’s not a wolf. I think he looks fine but Lewis likes to say he’s got a face like an unmade bed. I think he looks like the little guy in Lost Horizons. You know the one I mean?
I’m okay. I think we’re all pretty blue like I said right now. I’ve heard some great new stuff from Der Bingle on the Armed Forces Network, and some new Vera Lynn stuff on the English stations. Tell Sis I’ve been working on the harmonies.
I find myself daydreaming more than I used to, and I have to watch it, or the guys’ll think I’m ready for the flak farm, too. I have these other dreams, too, though I don’t think they’re going to last forever. The guys call dreaming like that pulling a lot of night missions. I have this one where there are German fighters all around us and my turret mechanism is like it has sand in it or something, and the gun controls are all floppy and loose. It gets me in a real sweat.
It seems like what we were taught and everything isn’t good enough to handle everything
The entry stopped. Bryant closed the book and woke Snowberry, getting him to his feet and leading him gently to his bunk, as if putting to bed a sleepy child on Christmas Eve.
It seemed to them that it had been decided to keep them flying missions until they were dead. They were informed at the morning briefing that the target of the day would be Kassel, and a lieutenant known to most of them as a good man and a steady co-pilot stood up and said with frightening calm that he was no longer willing to fly these goddamn things, and that he wanted out. When he refused to sit down, he was escorted from the room.
On the hardstand Hirsch and Gabriel alone seemed capable of smooth movement, the rest of the crew drooped and jerked like marionettes waiting for their turn to board. Bean was learning German phrases from the little sheet in his escape kit: Danke, Bitte. Zug. Schnellzug. Dritte Klasse.
Snowberry was white. “I’m not gonna make it,” he whispered to Bryant. “We were so cocky before. Why were we so cocky before?”
Bryant understood, he thought: It was as if the present situation represented an invited retribution.
“This paper pusher I met in London told me, ‘You want to make breakfast, you gotta break some eggs,’” Lewis said. He was blowing on his gloves to further dry them out.
“That’s what they tell the eggs,” Willis Eddy said from within the plane.
Lewis shook his head with the expression of a man with insects on his face. “I clocked him. I got these little marks on my knuckles from his teeth. I hope he gums Farina the rest of his life.”
They were thirteenth off the runway, climbing into the lightening sky behind the banking silhouettes of the 17’s just ahead of them, and they rose east to the assembly points toward the brighter air. The contrails of the highest aircraft stood out in dark relief.
They flew to Kassel without the usual talk, the periodic oxygen checks the only communication. Most of the way, they had an escort of P-47’s with their reassuringly fat milk bottle fuselages, and the leading and trailing elements of the formation far from them attracted the German interceptors once the escorts had sheered off for lack of fuel.