They watched Ball and Piacenti heft a box into the waist.
“No, I’m not gonna argue for more weight,” Lewis said. There was a crash from within and Piacenti said, “Lift it! Lift it, for Chrissakes!”
“Imagine all the bullets that are going to Schweinfurt?” Bryant said.
“I know.” Lewis headed for the hatch near the tail. “We may not hit any fighters, but we sure might knock a few cows silly.”
According to Hirsch it was coming up on 5:15 a.m. Bryant climbed aboard and went through the flight engineer’s panel with Tuliese, and then ran through his checks with Gabriel and Cooper. Finally there was nothing more to check, and Tuliese turned the plane reluctantly over to them and climbed out. Bryant could see him gazing back at Paper Doll like someone who’d left family heirlooms in the hands of vandals.
Ball and Lewis were up beside him, for no reason, it seemed, before going back to their stations. Ball hesitated at the catwalk over the bomb bay, waved, and held a thumbs-up signal. “I guess it’s like it’s in the hands of God, now,” he called.
“God didn’t pick Schweinfurt,” Lewis said. Ball stopped halfway across the catwalk and knitted his brows to indicate he hadn’t heard, and then his face brightened and he pretended he had, and he nodded.
“Idiot,” Lewis muttered. He shook Bryant’s hand. He crossed the catwalk to the radio room and shook Bean’s hand. Bean removed his headphones for the occasion but Lewis didn’t say anything, and disappeared through the door to the waist.
Bryant climbed into his turret sling for a quick test and raised his head into the Plexiglas. The black guns and the glass encased him like a pickle in a jar. He connected his interphone. Cooper was already checking the stations over it, and he gazed ahead at all the dark bustle. The clouds were surprisingly thick and low; it was like being in a vast room. He noticed without enjoyment the beauty of the lights of the trucks and the tower spindling out and intersecting, and the arrayed red and green lights of a runway full of B-17’s.
Willis Eddy seemed to be filing or sawing something up in the nose, the sound coming rhythmically over the interphone as a background to his voice. “Anything’s better than a month of going after U-boat pens,” he said. “The way I figure it. Solid concrete.”
“What are you doing?” Gabriel asked him. “What’s that noise?”
The noise stopped.
“0530,” Hirsch announced.
The ceiling had lowered still more. North of the tower the clouds were dropping and were now so low that the term “ceiling” seemed a little foolish.
“This is fog,” Eddy called from the bombardier’s perch. “What’re they talking about, no fog?”
“Stormy,” Bryant lamented. “What happened?”
“It’s always the weather nobody figures on,” Gabriel said. The lights all around them were reflecting in carnival-like patterns on the cloud wall above. The grayness drifted in to the point of easing No Way into a shadowy uncertainty beside them.
“We can get up in this,” Cooper said. “But I hate to think about assembly.”
“We try to assemble in this,” Lewis said from back in the tail, “we’re gonna have a few unplanned mergers.”
“It just came over,” Gabriel said. “We wait.”
They piled out and sat or lay around the hardstand on excess equipment. Bryant sat on a coil of rope. Snowberry sat on a squat twelve-gallon drum of hydraulic fluid. Ball settled in Indian style against an empty fifty-caliber box and was eating his candy. Piacenti wagged a finger and warned him he’d wish he had it later.
Audie appeared out of the fog, nosing her way over. Bryant said, “Hey, Audie, where you been?” and the dog’s tail wagged and she padded gingerly over to him. She lay down to wait with them, her muzzle tucked between her front paws. Bryant gave her one of his Baby Ruths. She chewed exaggeratedly, the caramel sticking to her molars.
Bean was down on his hands and knees as though he had lost something or was studying the surface of the hardstand. He threw up, bracing himself with his hands spread wide, and shuddering, and then made an effort to clean it up.
“National League,” Snowberry said. His hands were together between his knees and he was looking out toward Bryant. “Goobers Bratcher. Chops Broskie. Played for the Cards and Braves. Skeeter Scalzi. The Giants. Bunions Zeider. Spinach Melillo, Inky Strange. Podgie Weihe. Yam Yaryan.”
Bean rose and worked his way unsteadily down to the nose. He sat by himself.
“I think Bean asked that girl to marry him,” Piacenti theorized.
Lewis was flicking small stones into the mess Bean had made. “That’s one way to solve your problems. How do you know that?” They all gazed at Bean, a small Buddha out in the fog under the nose, crosslegged in his heavy jacket.
“He showed me. He gave her a ring I think he got at Woolworth’s. Probably turn her whole arm green.”
“Jeez,” Ball said, wrapping the end of his Oh Henry! and repocketing it. “Married. Jeez.”
They were silent. Someone slammed a hatch door violently way off in the fog.
“American League,” Snowberry said. “Inch Gleich. Bootnose Hoffman. Whoops Creeden. Boob McNair. Ping Bodie.”
“Ping Bodie,” Lewis said. “I remember Ping Bodie. Somebody once asked him what it was like rooming with Babe Ruth. He said, ‘I don’t room with Babe Ruth. I room with his suitcase.’ Ping Bodie.”
Bryant gave Audie another pat and got up and went over to Bean. He sat beside him and Bean nodded and rubbed an eye with the back of his hand. Bryant wondered whether or not to congratulate him. Bean was looking out into the fog, concentrating on something. “Habe,” he said. “Ich habe ein … injury,” he finally added. “I don’t remember the word for injury.”
“How you doing?” Bryant asked. “You all right?”
“Oh, I’m okay,” Bean said. He sounded tired and sad. “I just hate this waiting.”
“It stinks,” Bryant agreed. “You know what Lewis is always saying — as long as it keeps happening quickly.”
Bean seemed further discouraged and Bryant regretted bringing Lewis up.
“You know, in some way, this is just worse odds,” Bean said. “We’re all gonna die, you know, someday, and anything could happen. This is just worse odds.”
“That’s a good way of thinking about it,” Bryant said quietly.
“Except it doesn’t help,” Bean said.
“I have some extra candy,” Bryant said, although he didn’t. “Want some?”
Bean shook his head. “You know, I don’t really think about getting killed,” he said. “I’m scared of getting hurt. I can imagine disappearing, or not being around anymore. But I don’t want to feel it. Imagine how some of those guys felt?”
“A lot of guys say that,” Bryant murmured. “Me, I worry about dying, too.”
“The one thing I can’t figure,” Bean said, “through all of this, is why Lewis signed up to go through it again. Even Lewis.”
Bryant thought about it. A jeep swept by, the mist soupy before its headlights. “He told me once he’d rather listen to us idiots talk about the war than the idiots back home,” he offered. “So I guess he wasn’t happy there.” It sounded obvious and lame.
“One night he had this horrible dream,” Bean said. “You know, like Snowberry has. We were alone in the hut, sacked out early. I woke him up. I asked him then. He said, ‘Harold, it’s a shithouse bind. You become a real American by fighting in another country.’ Then he tried to go back to sleep.”