“Hey, I’m just asking,” Bryant said. “You guys would piss on your mom’s Sunday clothes.”
“With Mom still in them,” Lewis said. “She used to warn us about that.”
“They sure break good, though, don’t they?” Piacenti said. “Whatever they’re made of.”
“It’s a funny gag,” Bryant said.
“He did it to me, too,” Bean said. “I thought he was gonna crack my skull.”
“I am gonna crack your skull,” Lewis said.
Bean shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I never know when he’s kidding or not,” he complained. Bean seemed to want to believe that the natural order of things was harmony, that conflict came from misunderstanding. His father had run for selectman with the slogan BEAN: I’TS LIKE BEING ELECTED YOURSELF.
“You gotta watch out, Bean,” Piacenti said. “He’s out to get you.”
Bean nodded unhappily, half convinced.
Lewis did seem to have it in for Bean, and no one knew why. It was an instinctual thing, it appeared; pure schoolyard.
“I’m Bean’s personal bogie,” Lewis said. “His own bandit. In the cloud, out of the sun. Whenever he lets his guard down.”
“I should talk to Lieutenant Gabriel,” Bean said. “I don’t see how we’re supposed to work together.”
Lewis shouted and jumped on him. Bean shrieked and Lewis drove them both into the crockery pile. The others laughed and a cup skittered edgewise like a top across the hardstand. Lewis held a teacup to the crown of Bean’s head like a tiny dunce cap, and Bryant laughed, grateful to have been spared the humiliation.
“Leave him alone, Lewis,” he said. As they shifted, the crockery made musical sounds beneath their weight. “Aren’t we a little old for this?”
“Listen to George Arliss,” Lewis snorted. “A year out of high school under his belt. And Strawberry, not even old enough to have a fight.”
“I prefer other forms of contact, if that’s what you mean,” Snowberry said.
“I’m trying to toughen this crew up,” Lewis said. “I know I’m doing the right thing. Bean knows that, even if you don’t. Right?” He glared down at Bean.
“It’s pretty clear to me,” Bean said. Lewis got off him.
“You’re the oldest,” Bryant said. “You should set an example.”
“I am,” Lewis said. “I’m getting pretty tired of you guys not picking it up.” About them as a crew he often said, The third time is no charm, boy, stressing the endless ways they did not, as raw rookies, measure up to his first two crews. He particularly had loved his original pilot, a man named Sewell he described as an “ace tyro,” who flew their plane with a tender, sad care. “Some of these guys, they wrestle and fight the thing,” he liked to say. “Sewell, he understood what I call Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal.” Sewell had been killed in a manner Lewis did not volunteer information on.
He pointed at Snowberry, whose mouth was slightly open in childish concentration, as if he were going to sneeze. “This is what I’m talking about,” he said. He twiddled a cup grimly. “We’re going after the best air force in the world, on their own ground. They don’t have tours — you stay on till you get killed. Makes for guys who are real good. And real unhappy. Which makes them mean. They go head to head with Gordon Snowberry, Jr., here.”
“God help them,” Snowberry said.
“We’re the best Air Corps in the world,” Piacenti said. “Aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Lewis said. “Listen, you fire eaters. I’m not taking on Bean without help, next time. You and you are going to help me.” He pointed at Snowberry and Bryant.
“Come on, you guys,” Bean said.
Lewis tucked in his shirt. A cup handle hung from his belt loop. “My old football coach used to tell the defense, ‘Boys, I want you to show up in groups of two or more and arrive in a bad humor.’”
“You’re not funny, Lewis,” Bean said. “I hope you know that.”
“I appreciate the thought,” Lewis said.
After he left, Bean stood amid the crockery uncertainly, as if it had been his fault. He was an affable and quiet boy who closed his eyes when chewing his food, and Bryant liked him generally.
“Don’t worry, Bean,” he said. “He’ll find someone else.” He joined the rest of the crew, though, in being more or less satisfied that the abuse was centered mostly on Bean.
Snowberry said, “The thing about Lewis that’s hard to keep in mind is that he doesn’t have any good points.”
“I know he’s just kidding,” Bean said. He seemed to doubt it.
At mess Bryant suggested to Lewis he lay off.
Lewis opened his mouth and displayed some masticated food and then looked away. Bryant felt that he’d disappointed him.
“What’re you going to tell me?” Lewis asked. “‘Dislike May Split a Crew’?” It sounded harsher than Bryant would have liked, and he turned away, embarrassed. That had been pretty much what he had been planning to say.
“You think that’s stupid?” he eventually said, trying to sound assertive. Lewis was on his second tour and the rest of the crew regarded that amount of experience and the decision to reenlist with nearly equal awe.
“He’s not any good,” Lewis said. “He’s helpless as a gunner and as a radio op he couldn’t pick up the BBC.”
“He’ll be all right,” Bryant suggested.
“Look,” Lewis said. “I’m flying with him. I can’t teach him his job. I can teach him he’s not all he should be.”
“That’s a nice thing to teach someone,” Bryant said.
“I like to do it,” Lewis said. “My pleasure.”
Bryant felt chilled. He saw himself as no more competent than Bean was.
“Remember the kid from Idaho?” Lewis said. “Navigator? They figure now he thought he had the plane over the North Sea, by his figuring. Told the pilot to get down under the cloud, if he could, to look around. Only they were over Wales. Mountains.”
“He got mixed up,” Bryant said.
“Yes he did,” Lewis said. “Anatomically.”
Bryant ate, intimidated.
“Let me tell you something,” Lewis said. “We don’t have mistakes on Paper Doll. I don’t allow them. I personally don’t allow them. If Gabriel won’t make a thing about this, I will. You make a mistake, it’s your ass on a stick, and I’ll put it there. And you look like you make plenty of mistakes.” He turned his head, and Bryant after a pause stuck out his tongue. “We make a mistake, we’re dead. You make a mistake, we’re dead. Bean makes a mistake, we’re dead. Ten people. You figure it out. Keep that in mind. There are no excuses. Some Nazi flies up our ass because I’m daydreaming in the tail, I’m going to get on the interphone and go, ‘My goof’?”
Bryant had a headache, around the eyes. It seemed his training every step of the way, from high school all the way to England, had been inept and incomplete. His number one goal in high school had been to avoid humiliation — not excel, not learn, not stand out, simply avoid humiliation — and he was distressed to have learned that things hadn’t changed in the Army. He was more frightened of Lewis than of the Germans, and Lewis knew it and used it. Bryant knew nothing. In high school history his senior year they had spent a week coloring in the countries of Europe — blue for France, black for Germany, cross-hatching for the conquered areas — and his Germany Proper had stretched from Normandy to Leningrad. His teacher had held the paper up to ridicule in front of the class. His high school English teacher had shown three weeks of sketches she’d done of the Acropolis and then had tested them on Greek tragedy, and he’d gotten a 17 as a score, on a scale of 1-100. At the bottom of the test he’d written, “Nice sketches,” and she on the report card that went home that fall wrote, “Non-constructive and childish attitude.” He’d seen her on the street a week before he left and she’d congratulated him on becoming an American Eagle, and he’d said, “Why don’t you shut up?”, wishing he’d had a wittier rejoinder.