I heard someone weeping, and at first I thought Francesca had crawled into bed and was crying because of the way we’d talked to her earlier. I guess that was why I readied out, I’m sure that was the reason, thinking that Francesca was the person crying, and putting my arm over her shoulder next to mine, and then hearing Ace say, “Skipper, I’m afraid,” and knowing all at once it was not Francesca, knowing that Francesca was not lying between us, she had not come to bed. “I’m afraid,” Ace said, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” and I kept my arm over his trembling shoulder, and he moved his face in against my chest, his tears falling on my skin, and said, “I’m afraid, oh Jesus I’m afraid, Skipper,” and I said, “Come on, Ace, it’s okay, come on now.” He must have recognized then that I was not his older brother but only a friend named William Francis Tyler who had flown a harrowing mission with him that morning and afternoon, he must have realized then that we were not brothers. But he did not move away from me, he seemed to come closer instead, and I suddenly found both my arms around him, cradling him as though he were a baby, while he wept against my chest.
I’m certain it was Ace who started what happened next, but it doesn’t matter. It may very well have been me. I’m certain, though that his hand as he lay cradled in my arms accidentally brushed against me, and I’m equally certain that I was unaware of it at first. And then it happened again, and this time I felt the whisper of his fingers and this time I knew he had touched me, and I felt myself lengthening in response, felt quick creeping tendrils of excitement in my groin and along my cock, and was suddenly embarrassed. I think I wanted to move away from him, I think I wanted to call for Francesca, wanted her to bear the onslaught of whatever was beginning there in that pitch black room, but I could not turn away from Ace — he was my friend, he was crying bitterly, he was terrified. His hand tightened around my cock, he clung to my cock as if it were his own, as if by clutching the stiffening member between my legs he was reclaiming whatever maleness had been robbed from him in the sky over Poland that day. I moved my hand onto his groin. I reached in the darkness for him. To my surprise, I discovered that he was already hard, and I began crying too, inexplicably, uncontrollably. Sobbing together, we fitfully jerked each other into oblivious orgasm, and the next morning accompanied a thousand Fortresses and Liberators against transportation chokepoints in Hungary.
III
January
There was, I had not expected, it appeared so suddenly, gray, shark-gray, shark-nosed, turbojets streaking fire from beneath swept-back wings, I was not sure, I thought at first, “Nine o’clock high!” I shouted to Ace on my left wing, but it was gone. I snapped my head around. “Did you see it?”
It came again. I could not believe there’d been enough time to execute a turn, but it, there, Colombo flying wing to the element leader shouted, “Jet above you, Ace!” and in that frozen moment Aces High burst into flame. The jet was gone. Streaking high over the formation, it swept up and out of sight, and I heard Ace yell, “I’m hit!” and Colombo shouted, “Where the fuck’d it go?” and I found myself unable to speak, unable to utter the commands a flight leader should have known to, Get out, I thought, “Ace!” I shouted, “What was that?” a pilot in one of the other planes asked.
We were fifty P-38s on a mission over Fiume, forty-eight actually because we had lost two to flak as we swarmed over the refinery, Ace in flames now, Get out, I thought again. He was on my left wing, slightly below me, and I could see the three big holes the shells had left at his wing joint, between the gondola and the engine nacelle, flames lashing up out of the shattered wing tanks, and Ace’s voice erupting into my headphones, “I’m on fire!” and I thought, Yes, I can see, and he screamed, “Selector valve! Fire in the cockpit!” and I thought Get out, Ace, ditch her, get out, get out, “Get out!” I yelled, “Fast!” I yelled, and saw him reaching forward and up for the emergency hatch release control and then suddenly pulling his hand back to slap at his flight suit, “I’m on fire!” he screamed, and I saw flames enveloping the cockpit as he rose from the armor-plated seat, still struggling with the release handle, desperately trying to get it open, “Hatch is stuck, Will,” he said very quietly, eyes wide above the oxygen mask, hands fluttering wildly, and in that instant the tanks blew. My own airplane rocked with the blast, I pulled my head to the right in reflex, left shoulder coming up protectively, and then immediately looked down to see that the right wing and nacelle of Aces High had sheared off in the explosion and was dangling helplessly from the boom, suspended for only a moment before it broke away completely and began falling toward the ground. The gondola was gone, there was only a jagged open hole where it once had been, blackened twisted metal like a gaping rotten mouth.
The demolished hulk of the airplane started a plunging deadfall.
There was another explosion when it hit the ground.
February
I woke up trembling.
In the dream, my brother-in-law Oscar had come to me in full tribal regalia, headdress bristling with feathers, strings of beads and bones dangling from his neck and spread across his chest, lifting his hand, extending one long brown linger, and solemnly intoning, “Why did you steal our lands from us?” I backed away from him, close to the open mouth of the drum barker, and shouted over its tumbling roar, “Why did you steal my sister?” but he kept moving closer to me, closer and closer until I thought I would fall into the drum and have my clothes torn from me, thought I would be tumbled and tossed until I came out at the opposite end stripped to my skin, naked and white. I sat up. I was wearing a flannel nightshirt, and the bed was cozy with the warmth of Nancy’s body, but I could not stop shaking. The image of Oscar lingered, and then faded slowly. I blinked my eyes against the approaching dawn. It was almost time to get up. It was almost time to get dressed for work.
I did not know what was happening to me. I guess maybe I had hoped to set Chicago on its car, become a paper tycoon within a week, branch out into New York and London, Paris and the world. I guess I’d nurtured, while listening to the pounding of the drum barker, wild dreams of owning countless mills, monopolies, cartels, the bark dropping down through the open still ribs and being whisked away together with remnants of the forest, twisted leaves and clinging dirt, my dreams soaring upward — Bertram A. Tyler, Chairman of the Board, I would smoke big cigars and hold meetings and they would whisper my name in the same awed breath as J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. But I had been with Ramsey-Warner for almost ten months now, and whereas I was now earning twenty-seven dollars a week, I was still rolling logs over to the woodpecker, still caught between the pounding and the drilling and the grinding, a long long way from becoming the powerful magnate I imagined in my fantasies. In fact, I considered myself just a step outside the poorhouse door, what with eggs costing eighty-three cents a dozen, and bacon selling for fifty cents a pound, and butter priced at seventy-four cents a pound, and shoes (which you could get before the war for three or four dollars a pair) now selling for upwards of ten dollars. And even though prices were government-fixed for coal, milk, and bread, twenty-seven dollars a week didn’t go very far when there were two mouths to feed and two people to keep clothed against the bitter Chicago winter. (February so far had been a prize month, with temperatures recorded at six below zero, and the wind — as Nancy put it — “whistling to blow the marrow from your bones.”)