“Her tits are too small.”
Shorty looked down to see Gus Garrett squinting up at him. Blue eyes in a work-tanned face, hair the color of cornsilk. A worn ball glove hung on his left hand.
“Too small for what?” Shorty asked.
Garrett grinned. “For me, for starters.”
Shorty shook his head sadly. “You just remember them bigger,” he said in Jack Benny’s instantly recognizable voice. “Because you haven’t seen any in so long, y’know.”
“I wanted ’em bigger then, too,” said Garrett, and turned back to the game of catch going on around the bomber parked on its hardstand.
Shorty shook his head and went back to work painting the nose art. He’d already drawn the shape in chalk and then painted in the face, the flesh tones, the blue leotard, the gauzy windblown cape. Flesh tones were hard, but at least he was working with oils, thanks to Corporal Brinkman’s run into town for more art supplies.
Sunny days in June seemed about as common as rocking-horse shit here in southeastern England. Shorty was squeezing everything he could out of it, but soon he’d be losing the sunlight, and he still had to do the black ink outlines and final highlights that would make the whole thing pop and give it life.
Below him someone cleared his throat and spat. Shorty looked down to see Flight Engineer Wendell Bonniker squinting up at the painting in progress. Wen was a beefy, sandy-haired guy who was always looking at things as if he were trying to figure out how to fix them. People included. Four years ago he’d quit high school to run moonshine outside of Charlotte, and he’d outrun feds and sheriffs on endless miles of winding country road in cars he’d built and modified and repaired since he’d been old enough to reach the pedals. Wen claimed he could drive or fix anything with wheels on it, and given the magic he worked on a ship, no one had any reason to doubt him.
“That farmboy gettin’ in your hair?” Wen called up.
Shorty wiped his forehead with the arm holding the brush. “Says her tits are too small.”
“Sheeit,” said Wen. He raised his voice. “That tractor jockey never saw tits on nothing he didn’t have to milk at five a.m.”
Shorty grinned and turned back to his painting.
“Legs could be longer, though,” Wen added.
Shorty sagged. “For crying in the sink,” he said. He glared over his shoulder and shook the brush at Wen. In Jack Benny’s voice he said, “Don’t you have a ball to throw, Cinderella?”
Wen smirked. “Man, you arty types sure are touchy.” He touched the bill of his worn A-3 cap and spat tobacco juice and went to rejoin the game of catch.
The crew liked to go out to the bomber and throw the ball around after chow. It let them blow off steam and bitch about the Army and insult each other without it getting too personal. It worked pretty well.
Today they had another reason for their ritual game of catch. The B-17F heavy bomber that Shorty was painting was brand-new, delivered the day before yesterday and parked on a hardstand in the slot the much-reviled Voice of America had occupied for half a dozen straight missions.
At the moment the new bird was just a number, unchristened and untested. And even though her delivery had also been her shakedown cruise and she’d been checked out on arrival—and would be gone over again by the ground crew if Ordnance got the go-ahead tonight—Wen had told Captain Farley that a little tire-kicking session might be a good idea.
Farley had agreed. This was one of the world’s most complicated machines, about to be loaded with four tons of coiled death and thrown into the sky with ten young men who squabbled like close brothers even though they had been strangers to each other the year before, and schoolboys the year before that. A successful mission and those ten lives could turn on a tightened oil gasket, a correctly loaded ammo belt, or any of the ten thousand other things that could go graveyard wrong. When that huge and intricate web could be undone at almost any strand, you bought yourself whatever insurance you could.
So today’s game of catch served as a smoke screen to let the crew check out the ground crew’s work without looking as if they didn’t trust the ground crew. Because you had to trust the ground crew. The alternative was to worry that one link in that chain had not been done right, and go completely out of your mind. And the crew couldn’t afford that, because doing their own jobs right could drive them foxhole crazy if they thought too much about what they were doing. USAAF hospitals were full to bursting with promising young men who had looked too long and too hard into the wholesale abattoir that was the new science of aerial warfare. Human brains might have invented it, but they sure as hell weren’t built to endure it. As Lieutenant Broben put it, going daffy was the only reasonable thing a man could do in these conditions.
Somewhere behind Shorty a ball clapped into a leather glove and someone shouted a friendly insult. Shorty could listen to it all day. It sounded like home.
Every so often one of the men would take off his ball glove and jump up into the main hatch of the bomber. Sometimes the crew heard banging from inside. Sometimes swearing. They ignored both. They played catch and smoked cigarettes. Or, in Boney Mullen’s case, a pipe. A few minutes later the missing crewman would hop back down to the concrete and put his glove back on and quietly rejoin the game, and the ball would come his way and he’d give a little nod.
At one point Shorty heard Plavitz yelling up at him, and he patiently finished painting a section and turned around to see the navigator shaking a finger up at him. “What are you doing with my sticks?” he demanded.
“Simmer down, Gene Krupa,” Shorty said. “I saw them laying around and I knew you’d blow a gasket if they turned up missing, so I grabbed them. Here.” He drew Plavitz’s hickory drumsticks from a rear pocket and tossed them down.
Plavitz caught them up and twirled them in the same fluid motion. “I never,” he said.
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” Shorty said in Bugs Bunny’s voice, and turned back to the painting taking shape before him.
“Yeah, okay, thanks,” said Plavitz, and disappeared into the bomber. A moment later rapid-fire rolls and lazy paradiddles sounded from different parts of the aircraft.
Shorty mixed paints on a page torn from an old Yank magazine and leaned back to study the figure he was forming on the metal. He dipped his brush in a sheared beer can of black paint and pulled the wet bristles between his thumb and forefinger several times, testing the flow. Then he got to work on the black lines, starting with the legs, which were bare from ankle-strap high heels all the long way to the dark blue leotard at her pelvis. They were plenty long enough, thank you very much.
The drumming stopped and Plavitz hopped out of the aircraft. “It’s still got that new-bomber smell,” he announced.
Shorty made a pained face. “Your parents must be some very patient people,” he said. “Or deaf.”
Plavitz twirled a stick like a majorette. “You’ll be laughing when I’m playing with Glenn Miller,” he said, and hurried to rejoin the game of catch.
Shorty shook his head. Plavitz was okay, except when he wasn’t.
Shorty’s father, Howard Dubuque, owned a radio sales and service shop in downtown Grandville, Michigan. Little Wayne had grown up surrounded by radios and radio programs. He had learned to tell time by what show was on the air. In fifth grade he had built his first wireless radio with a piece of galena crystal and a safety pin, and he still remembered the thrill of hearing Fibber McGee’s voice come over a speaker he had salvaged from a busted radio.