Lewis took Bryant’s roll and smoothed whitish margarine onto it with a finger. “Ah, we were as bad as you are,” he said. “Worse. We were cockier. We used to shout, ‘You’ll be sor-ry!’, at incoming crews. You get over that fast.”
“Not funny,” Bryant said.
Lewis leaned dangerously far back in his chair. “I’m in love with Gene Tierney,” he said. “I’ve got it bad, and that ain’t good. We’ve got this afternoon to kill. Any ideas?”
Bryant shook his head, and Lewis pulled a small assemblage of leather straps out of his pocket, and unfolded it. It looked like a small and complex muzzle.
After a moment of silence Lewis said, “It’s a cat harness.”
Bryant went on looking to indicate he needed more information.
“I’m thinking about organizing a cat throw,” Lewis said. “You interested?”
Bobby Bryant shook his head. “I’m disgusted, is what I am,” he said. “Really and truly.”
“It’s absolutely safe,” Lewis said. “This design is based on our parachute design. Distributes the stress.”
Bryant finished his milk. “Who says our parachutes distribute the stress?”
“You got me there,” Lewis admitted.
“Why don’t you do something normal?” Bryant asked. “Like read a magazine?”
“Or smell the flowers,” Lewis said. “Or both at the same time.”
“Well, don’t tell Bean, whatever you do,” Bryant said. Bean loved cats. It dawned on Bryant that that was the point.
Lewis said, “You just go read a book, Commander. Maybe this isn’t your event.”
They sat together under a huge hangar door and looked out at the steady drizzle. Ground school had been canceled and no one was forthcoming with any reasons why. The day had clouded up badly, as expected, and the sky was a depressing color. On nearby concrete engine block supports, water marks from the rain drooped like icing. Piacenti, Bean, Snowberry, and Bryant were rolling dice.
“This is what they call ‘bright intervals,’” Piacenti complained.
Snowberry was picking at his scalp. “Now usually I hate bedbugs in my hair,” he said. “But this one had that Certain Something.”
They hadn’t formulated a game and were simply noting who rolled higher numbers. It was not an interesting way of passing the time. Bean and Piacenti sat with their backs to the hardstand and behind them in the distance a small knot of men had formed around Lewis. Bean glanced over his shoulder and returned to the dice.
“What’re they doing over there?” Piacenti asked.
Snowberry shrugged. A small flailing object was tossed upward, a thin cord twisting behind.
“Lewis is having a cat throw,” Bryant said. He had decided he owed it to the cat.
Bean stood, without turning. “Was that a cat?” he asked.
The cat gained speed behind them, swinging now in a distant ellipsis around Lewis’s head.
“He wants you to go over there,” Snowberry said. “That’s why he’s doing it.”
“Someone should do something,” Bean said.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Snowberry asked. “It’s a trap.”
“That’s wrong. It’s horrible,” Bean said. He turned from them and took two steps out into the drizzle.
“Concentrate on what I’m saying,” Snowberry said. “T-R-A-P.”
Bean strode off.
Snowberry rolled the dice. “No hope,” he said.
Bryant and Piacenti stood up, as well, and Snowberry looked up at them in surprise. He said, “All right, all right,” and got to his feet. He added, “He showed me the harness. It was well designed.”
They walked through the light rain in an echelon, like gunfighters. Bryant felt self-conscious and faintly silly.
Snowberry squinted ahead at Lewis. “Imagine,” he said, “if he’d turned his genius to good, instead of evil.”
The men were cheering in the chilly drizzle. Ahead, Lewis had given the cord a few sharp wristy turns and let fly, sailing the cat out over the tarmac. It flew with legs outspread, like extended landing gear. It landed with some force and scrabbled up, stunned. Lewis and the men made a show of calling off the distance, footstep by footstep, and Bean reached the cat first, bending over it with a tenderness evident even at Bryant’s distance. Bean looked over at Lewis and the men with hostility and Bryant could see the cat’s tail curling slowly and alertly behind his protective back.
As they closed in on the group, Lewis asked for the cat and Bean refused to give it. Lewis hit him in the face and he fell onto his back. The cat sprinted free and crouched nearby, indecisive with fright.
Snowberry and Piacenti tried to break it up, and someone from Boom Town jumped on Bryant’s back. Bryant recognized him as a tech sergeant named Hallet and abruptly found himself twisting on the wet tarmac on his side, trying to free himself from an armlock. Hallet tore at his hair.
“Hey, you guys, an officer,” someone said.
Gabriel broke it up with the shaky authority of a more or less new first lieutenant. Bryant pulled himself clear with a hot ear and a painful scalp and slapped Hallet’s hand away. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Are you crazy?”
He trooped them into the hangar, out of the rain. Bean’s mouth was bloody and the blood bubbled onto his chin. Lewis rubbed a toothmark out of his knuckle. Bryant’s ear was burning and he wondered what Hallet had done to it.
Gabriel confronted them with his hands on his hips. “So,” he said. “Let me ask you: have any of you come across, in your experience, the phrase ‘Dislike May Split a Crew’?”
Bryant gazed straight ahead. He could not look at Lewis.
Gabriel proceeded to dress them down. He was only a first lieutenant and not a very impressive one, though he meant well. Bryant thought about bacon.
He asked them if they thought he liked having to do this. “Is it that you don’t have enough to do?” he said. “Do we have to fill up every minute to keep you out of trouble?” Boredom was getting to be the explanation accepted for any of the aircrews’ actions that seemed unusually peculiar or pointless.
Bean and Lewis and Bryant spent the night guarding the fuel bowsers — huge, hulking, and filthy trucks that fueled the Fortresses before missions. The bowsers did not need to be guarded. The rain was a good deal more insistent. They stamped their feet endlessly in enormous shallow puddles and Bean hunched as though that would save some part of him from the wet, and touched his mouth tenderly with the tips of his fingers. He grumbled once that he got into trouble every time he associated with them, but otherwise the three of them remained silent, with the rain a steady rushing sound around them, and the chilled water sweeping down Bryant’s back under his rain gear like a sluice.
Ground school was back on the next morning. The weather was awful and there’d be no flying for the third day in a row. No one was complaining.
Bryant had arrived early, with Willis Eddy and Bean. Aircrew filled the seats in the briefing hut without excess enthusiasm. There was always the vague and unspoken hope that at some point they’d pick up something useful. Those attending expected little, did not sit quietly or refrain from cracking wise, as Snowberry called it, and remained stubbornly scattered throughout the room whatever the size of the crowd. They chewed gum and tested postures which might seem at once insolent and military. They yawned languidly. Someone nearby faintly tapped out what sounded like Gene Krupa. Bryant noticed Sam Hirsch alone a few seats ahead.