With a craftsman’s care he produced a series of sweat impressions with his palm on the pages of the field manual for the Sperry turret. The moisture made the paper curl.
The summer heat made the great mounded hangars waver like hills in the humid distance. Armorers bandoliered like Mexican bandits with cartridge belts humped their loads across hardstands too hot for England.
Word was Lewis had talked to a guy whose job it was to fill out the Statements of Effects forms for lost or missing airmen. Lewis had caught this guy in one of the huts going through somebody’s stuff. The stuff had turned out to belong to a waist gunner from Boom Town named Gus Fleener, who had had his left arm taken off by flak over Kassel. They hadn’t been able to apply a tourniquet because how do you tourniquet a shoulder? So his crew buddies had made the decision to bail him out and rely on local hospitality to get him to a German hospital in time. He’d gone into shock, though, and pulled his own ripcord, there in the plane, and they’d had to bunch up the chute under his remaining arm and throw him out so it didn’t catch on the tail. The belly gunner and tail had reported seeing the chute open but no one was overly optimistic. The wound did not allow for much delay. And they knew enough about the lamentable spread in their bombing patterns to assume what the CO termed “ill will” on the part of the German inhabitants of the countryside. They’d heard stories of hapless chutists being pitchforked, or run down with hoes and sickles.
So this guy went through all of poor Fleener’s personal property, the crews heard, making out a list, while Lewis watched: socks, 4 ea., letters, 8 ea., combs, 2 ea., photos, 2 ea. Final disposition of this stuff, the guy confided to Lewis, was a touchy bit of work: some poor schmoe’s widow, he said, the last things she needs to see are some of these French postcards, or love letters with the wrong names on them. Air Corps policy was to remove the property in question as soon as possible once the airman was known to be missing or lost, so his buddies wouldn’t brood any longer than necessary on the loss. The result was the approximate opposite of what was intended. The Statement of Effects man told Lewis wistfully that he didn’t make a lot of friends.
Morale dropped as the story circulated. Snowberry at one point mused in Bryant’s presence, “Ever notice how morale here keeps going down without ever going up?” Someone posted in the ready room a list headed with the title What Won’t Work, and filled with items all the way from “Honey, You Know You’re the Only One for Me” to Prayer. Saluting was becoming more overtly a way of saying Fuck You to those who demanded it; the practice had often been considered “chickenshit” by the men in the first place, generally ignored except for the CO, the visiting brass, and formal occasions.
It was no longer uncommon, after missions, to find Norden bombsights, so obsessively protected in training in the States as the secret weapon the Axis would give Italy for, lying in the grass unattended near the hardstands like mysterious, useless gizmos cleared from the attic. Men were becoming geniuses at hoarding small slights. Unpleasant jobs and missions mornings produced a variety of obscure ailments, which debilitated no one and enriched everyone’s rotten humor. Everyone had a different method of following what was perceived to be an emerging pattern of sinister design, based on irrefutable omens. Half of three squadrons developed diarrhea.
Bryant didn’t and Snowberry did. They sat together watching Tuliese, who had quite a talent with the brush, paint the nose illustration onto Paper Doll. Now that he’d finally gotten around to it, there was little enthusiasm among the crew for ornamenting their B-17. Snowberry clutched his knees to his stomach and rocked every so often, glancing at the latrines regularly to assure himself they were there and that he could make it. Tuliese leaned close, giving special attention to the thighs. He was known as a master of shading.
The paper doll in question was a naked redhead vaguely modeled on Lana Turner. When he’d been informed that Lana Turner was not a redhead, Tuliese had answered menacingly, So what? Everyone had shrugged. She was being clothed with a filmy slip of what was supposed to be a nightgown inadequately covering her private parts. There was an unofficial contest between crews to be the most daring with their nose art, occasionally interrupted by halfhearted clean-up attempts when the brass considered things to be getting out of hand. Bryant thought of some of the flak-smashed noses he’d seen and considered how many hours of loving work were being erased in instants.
Lewis meanwhile was becoming obsessed with speed. His latest idea was the stripping of the camouflage from the B-17’s. With the paint gone there would be reduced weight and smoother surfaces, translating into fleeter Fortresses. “I mean, who are we kidding with camouflage?” he said. “They can’t see us?”
“You want to fly in a silver plane in the middle of one of those formations?” Bryant asked. “What about just carrying a sign in German that says, ‘8th Air Force Commanding Officer’?”
“Not just us,” Lewis said, with the tone of someone teaching the hopelessly limited. “Suppose they were all silver. All the planes.”
Bryant had no answer. “They’d reflect the sun,” he said. “We’d blind each other.”
Lewis thumped his cheek with his middle finger and surveyed Bryant a good long time. He said, “Sometimes you make it too easy for me.”
And Snowberry, trying not to laugh, imagining no doubt the tremor through his bowels, said, “I think Lewis means he doesn’t see the drawback.”
Bean received word that his best friend had been killed in the Pacific theater, and he was inconsolable. He did not eat and could barely speak and so worried Bryant that he decided to follow Bean around for a little while and keep an eye on him. All he was able to get out of Bean was that his friend had been involved in the bombing of New Georgia Island and had been trapped in a burning Dauntless. He sat around the day room feeling useless while Bean stared blankly at a Liberty Magazine. He had tried mentioning food, and Billy Conn, and home. Bean gazed at the table and touched an ashtray with his finger.
Snowberry slumped in a chair by the folding magazine rack. He’d been throwing up for two days now and he looked drawn. He had his sketchpad propped at an angle that allowed Bryant a look. The pad was blank. Every so often Bean shivered and rubbed his arm.