“How do you know he burned to death?” Bryant asked in a low voice.
Bean didn’t seem to hear. He fingered an old snapshot of his friend that now held a deep bronze tarnish, and let it drop. He said, “He was my best friend. What’re you guys?”
Bryant said, “Look, Bean, I’m going to write a letter, okay?” He pulled out paper and a pencil to underline his intention. Instead of oversolicitousness he intended to try something in the way of Life Goes On.
Bean simply sat, as still as a vacant house.
“I think Bean’s stepped off the curb,” Snowberry said. “If you want to know what I think.”
Bryant wrote the date on his paper and Dear Lois, and a series of lazy, slanted lines.
Beside him Snowberry noisily began to work and with quick listless strokes sketched a four-engined plane: a fat childish cross. After a moment he added a squiggle of smoke curling upward from the tail. He drew flames as fat parallel fingers and Bryant said, “Gordon,” as a warning. Without looking up, Snowberry changed the flames to bullets spraying out of a turret.
Bryant wrote, I guess these sorts of letters are supposed to go the other way, and stopped, and then tried, I’m writing because I got myself into a mess that you should know about, and stopped again, and finally wrote, How are you? and decided on that as an opening.
How had he gotten himself into this? What did he want? Lois, and his high school, his town, his friends, all seemed like a half-remembered birthday party. Lois had a right to know what was going on, he told himself, and he felt a loyalty to her that was sincere and nostalgic. But he considered: Could he have written to his prewar self and communicated anything? He thought of Snowberry’s fishing trips from the journal, and blackfish rocking gently in the sand with staring eyes and mouths opening and closing as if speech were prevented by this alien medium of air.
Before, he had vaguely hoped for a Dear John letter from her, and had thought melodramatically that he deserved it. Now he was beginning to understand that his country, for whatever its reasons, had informed him that he and his friends were in the most serious way on their own.
He became aware that Snowberry was holding his pencil motionless an inch from the pad, and was staring at it. The pencil point was trembling.
Bryant crossed out How are you? and started again.
August 14, 1943
Dear Lois,
Things here have not been going well. We have been pushed very hard and have seen many things and the rumors are something big and terrible is coming up.
I have always wanted to be honest with you so I write this letter. I have been dating another woman here, an Englishwoman, and I don’t know how serious it is.
I didn’t know whether to tell you or not but as you can see I decided to.
He folded the paper. A dispatch from the front, he thought. If and when things ever cooled down, and he were still alive, he would use it. Word was going around about a colonel in the 379th who had told his crews that the key to fighting the kind of war they were fighting was to make believe you were dead already, and then the rest came easy. Hirsch in line for chow had fiddled with calculating on his slide rule the odds on their completing their tour alive based on the squadron’s current 6.4 percent loss rate and after some angry refiguring had thrown the slide rule away. Bean had left the line to retrieve it, handling it gingerly and reading the cramped lines and numbers as though it might have made a mistake and could be coaxed out of it.
“He was flying low squadron in the low group,” Bean said. “The guy who wrote me we both knew in school. He said before it went up, the wing tanks were hit and were spraying gas all over, that you could see it raining off behind the plane.”
Snowberry dotted his pad loudly and rapidly and made a peppery trail away from his box plane. “If Piacenti hears about this he’ll never leave his bunk,” he said.
Bryant felt some dull sadness for Bean but none for his anonymous friend. He thought of the grim white-faced officer standing among the wreckage of Lemon Drop after it had crashed, and his order, strident and unnecessary: Get this cleaned up. A strong sense was growing in everyone that the dead were just part of the mess.
“He was eighteen years old,” Bean said. “Little older than Gordon. Six months out of flying school.”
“Would you cut it out?” Snowberry said murderously.
They sat quietly without speaking. While Bryant watched, Bean dipped his fingers into the ashtray before him, distractedly, looking off at something else, and brought his fingertips, powdered and gray with ash, to his mouth.
When they pulled back the curtain on the mission board the next morning, the red yarn ran to Paris, and an enlargement of the target area was headed Le Bourget. Snowberry and Bryant looked at each other immediately and understood. Le Bourget was where Lindbergh had landed after the solo Atlantic flight. Le Bourget had always been for the two of them part of the legend. It was as if they were going to bomb The Spirit of St. Louis.
They were going after the depots where reserve aircraft and crews were believed to be. Lewis didn’t like it. “Fighters,” he said in a low voice during the briefing. “Why are we going after fighters?” Bean sat beside him and registered nothing.
They would have fighter escort the whole trip, they were assured, P-47’s all the way there and back. Enough Little Friends for a party.
Lewis murmured about fighter suppression as they filed out: Why were they using B-17’s for fighter suppression? There was something strange about it: the operations map showed clear weather over most of western Europe, and there were plenty of more important targets spread in an arc across the map. Bombing airfields was not the most efficient use of heavy bombers. The crews didn’t complain — the airfields were not as heavily defended, usually, as strategic targets.
“Just do your job, General,” Snowberry said. “Nobody said it had to make sense. Let someone else run the war.”
“Maybe they want to give us a rest,” Bryant suggested.
“I think you hit it,” Lewis said. “I’m worried about why.”
In the jeep to the hardstand he added, “I don’t think it’s for what we did. I think it’s for what we’re gonna do.”
In the dark and cold plane Bryant swung experimentally on the sling seat in the turret and eyed the turret canopy critically. He wished he’d overseen the day’s cleaning of the Plexiglas; now it was too dark. Gabriel asked over the interphone with some sarcasm if he’d like to be a part of this morning’s pre-flight systems check.
They waited two hours for the ceiling to lift so they might have a safer assembly and finally went off just at dawn, a vivid orange band beneath a purple one behind the darkened and backlit horizon. The Plexiglas surfaces of the ships ahead of them in taxi position glowed with the colors.
They hooked up with a reassuringly large flight of olive green razorback Thunderbolts — as far as Bryant could tell, there were more escorts than bombers — and the gunners joyfully called in each P-47 flight as it slipped into place until they felt they were approaching Paris cocooned in Air Support.
The Thunderbolts positioned themselves above the formations and wove lazy-S patterns to maintain contact with the slower Fortresses. No one in Paper Doll saw enemy fighters until the formation made its wide turn out of the echeloned vees into the column of groups that formed the long train for the bombing run. The higher squadron swung in alongside Paper Doll and in the process, in a rare instance in which the purest chance crystallized like a well-laid plan, they trapped inside their newly formed defensive box a hapless lone Messerschmitt Me-110 that had magically appeared at three o’clock low just outside Piacenti’s window. The unhappy Messerschmitt flew level between them for a long moment. The pilot was gazing over at Bryant like someone about to get it in an old Mack Sennett short. His fuselage was dark gray with a white nose, with what looked like a little green fanged worm on the cowling. And then all hell broke loose, Bryant and Piacenti and Snowberry together hosing the fighter with tracers as the other planes around them opened up as well, the tracer lines converging from all directions like a starburst in reverse. The 110 seemed to stop and rear in mid-air, and pieces flew off like bits of confetti. It turned a baby blue underside to Paper Doll and then three tracer streams converged dazzlingly on the same point, like a mirror catching sunlight, and it disintegrated and flew backward out of the formation in a rain of shapes.