Paper Doll by Jim Shepard Read Free Book Online

flaps on the fuel bowsers, billowing and wet in the darkness.
    He remembered field-stripping the fifty-caliber Brownings day after day at Harlingen in the dreamy Texas sun. In only shorts and boots, on a square piece of olive canvas dusty and patinaed with grit. The gun was heavy and difficult to manipulate, smooth with oil. There were cocking levers and bolt assemblies, firing pins and sears, belonging to a system of order which had to be retrieved once broken down, and Bryant had always been the slowest, the clumsiest. He mashed fingers and skinned palms repeatedly wrestling with oil buffer body spring locks. The procedures were difficult to hurry, though the stripping and reassembly were being timed. In the intense heat there was an unpleasant, dreamlike effect of having to do something rapid and intricate while submerged in warm water. Men he knew slightly and would never know again were spread in distant rows on the canvas squares across the baking and flat earth. The impression was that of a series of desolate, individual picnics. On good days shirts were piled and tied sheik-like on heads, and the rotating, depressing, releasing, and the click and clatter of interlocking metal components coming apart proceeded with a more ordered if still-hesitant smoothness.
    There was one instructor, a Sergeant Favale, whom he remembered with fondness. Favale was a heavy-set Italian who’d been through two whole tours and seemed almost thirty, and had always had for Bryant a sly and kindly manner to go with an impossibly coarse sense of humor. Favale had guided him through the field strip drills, always benevolently late to start the stopwatch, with long and pointless dirty stories that he now understood had been intended to help him relax. Bryant remembered the surreal discomfort of having to endure the drills blindfolded and wearing flying gloves, oversized and lined with sheepskin, that soaked up their sweat and swaddled their arms in the heat like great floppy weights, while Favale reported his sense of what ways of dying most flyboys preferred. Bryant had fumbled and lost parts and Favale had ticked off flak, anoxia, shellfire, burning. He remembered clearly the exhilaration of finishing and ending the frustration, tearing off his blindfold and gloves to grin sweatily up at a happy Favale, the two of them looking around at others still working blind with their oversized and swaddled hands, like prisoners of a mysterious sect. A hopelessly frustrated boy, still blindfolded, had called out to him across the spread tarps, “What way do you want to die, Sergeant?”, and Favale had said, “Boys, the only way: I want to melt and drain out my prick.” The tarps had rocked with laughter, and Bryant remembered the moment, blindfolded and laughing boys all around him slapping their thighs with gloves like enormous weighty potholders.
    He remembered Favale as having pins and plates everywhere in his body, everyone knew, having been wounded over France, all two tours of missions done. He remembered Favale’s small fat figure in the late afternoon on the thirty-caliber range, a lunar plain with stumplike mounts in a lonely line, the instructor off firing absently by himself, the tracers a curving hot arc under the sun, bouncing and trembling where they intercepted the target.
    He woke again in the night from a dream in which Snowberry and some Germans had been pointing at the nose of Paper Doll and laughing.
    Gabriel had pulled rank for the name in Gander. The final choice—he remembered Miss Behave and Wrecking Ball as other finalists—had been explained to him in a complex and confusing way and was lost to memory. A series of in-jokes had been involved. He hadn’t been unhappy with the name, though he remained slightly uncomfortable with the suggestion of flimsiness. But that was part of the bravado, he understood: with the Flying Fortress, word was you could fly into a cliff and need only to replace the