Paper Doll by Jim Shepard Read Free Book Online Page A

Plexiglas afterwards. You could joke in those terms.
    He remembered standing outside their cold and low Nissen hut and Snowberry’s noncommital attitude toward the winning name. Snowberry had crouched beside him against the cold wind, stroking the greens and grays of the lichen and pronouncing the words for the new plane, Paper Doll , and this new place, Gander , slowly, exaggerating the enunciation.
    All of them but Lewis had met as a crew weeks earlier, in Florida. Lewis had joined them in Britain, much later, a replacement for a boy named Fichtner who’d been the original tail gunner, a pale boy from Missouri with white spindly hands who told them only that he was a musician, and cleared his throat with a quiet precision that annoyed everyone. He had seemed anything but their idea of a Southerner, and they had been frankly relieved to discover he’d gone AWOL one morning soon after their arrival in Britain. There was an official notion of crew compatibility as the basis for assignments, and if they were in a group with a guy like that, Piacenti had wondered aloud one night, eyeing Bean as well, what did that say about them?
    They’d imagined themselves arriving by train from all parts of the country to come together as a permanent crew, a lean and single-minded fighting force. As they got to know each other, the suspicion grew that there had been a series of unobtrusive mistakes, that the selection process had involved dice or cutting decks of cards. The immediate blood bonds they had heard about seemed something for other crews, and they got to know each other slowly. Other crews seemed more confident, more raunchy—their slang for anything casually masculine—more competent.
    Florida struck Bryant as the way he would have imagined a casual penal colony. They slept on raised wooden platforms screened on four sides with canvas traps. Bryant assumed a steady stream of lethal nightlife passed routinely beneath the boards and listened for every scuttle. Bean hectored them into the night about the horrors of the insects’ size and persistence, and distinguished himself as well by being maddeningly clumsy around the zippered door, his embarrassed and muted struggles when returning from the latrine letting in clouds of mosquitoes which sang and tortured Bryant in the humid darkness until he found himself spending hours resolving to kill Bean and stuff his mouth and ears with insects.
    The field looked as though it had been leveled in an afternoon. Half-crushed spider lilies with thick white stamens and stinging nettles grew and bloomed at oblique angles, and stagnant puddles filled the bulldozer tracks, giving off at dusk still more mosquitoes. Palmetto swamps bordered the asphalt runways. While they waited for their first Fortresses, they stayed out of the sun and flipped gravel at posing lizards and gazed at the groups of brown and ugly B-24’s spread along the aprons like giant dragonflies in the waves of heat. They sweated through their shirts by seven each morning and talked with enthusiasm of their good fortune in drawing Fortresses. When the Fortresses finally appeared, they delighted in comparing the two heavy bombers: the Forts, like swept-back and low racers with their noses in the air, alongside the hopelessly boxy Liberators, each with all the military aplomb of an old flying boat. They liked to say that the Liberators were the crates the Fortresses had been shipped in. When the time came, they flew two unremarkable orientation flights in a tired old E variant, their first B-17.
    Bryant had risen early the morning of that first flight and had gone over the plane nose to tail with the ground crew chief as the sole flight engineer for the first time, feeling fraudulent and redoing and botching checks, whispering to himself. He had waited, later, until Gabriel was seated in the cockpit and gazing at him pointedly before officially pronouncing the engines ready, in a voice so constricted