Paper Doll by Jim Shepard Read Free Book Online Page B

with fear over the interphone that Snowberry had later compared it to Andy Devine’s. The four old Wright Cyclone engines, decommissioned after fifty or so missions over God knew where in France and Holland, performed with efficiency, and by the end of the flight his checks had become routine. His confidence had grown. He had imagined his fellow crew members admiring his steady professionalism, and then had discovered that Gabriel had been having the crew chief double-check the important systems.
    They had flown without warning from the Floridian heat to the Newfoundland cold. Fichtner had sat on the gray and cold rocks of Gander like a seabird. They’d flown from Florida to Texas to Iowa to Newfoundland and he was disoriented by the changes. The crew had treated him as they might have treated a strange dog in camp that was behaving erratically. They spent much of their time waiting for assignment to a bomb group, pulling chairs around the stove of their Nissen hut. The stove had thrown off heat so feebly they had nicknamed it “the Icebox” and had all urinated on it together the day their orders had come through.
    Besides Fichtner, only Bryant and Snowberry spent any appreciable time outside. The sky was gray and roiling and close, and clouds moved aggressively offshore, flapping windsocks and causing splashed mud to spatter dismally and unpredictably. Gulls cried and sideslipped over Fichtner, who spent whole half days off by himself, perched above rocks washed black by the swells.
    They had sat in small groups the night of their transatlantic flight, Bryant talking quietly with Snowberry. The water was black and vast over the rocks beyond the airstrip. Seabirds huddled near the leeward sides of the huts like pigeons, their feathers puffed against the cold. The support staffs had gone ahead by boat, and the aircrews would make the flights alone, under cover of darkness. They felt isolated and closer, not only as a squadron but as a crew. Reticent girls in blue Red Cross uniforms at a makeshift canteen served them a sad and metallic tea while they waited. All of their gear, stowed in huge green duffels, had been piled in the nose, and they were waiting for a cold front to pass. The wind was high and the sky low and opaque and they could hear the sea. Ice glazed Paper Doll ’s rubber tires like doughnuts. Hirsch and Gabriel and Cooper worked the charts and reckonings, and rechecked agreed-upon headings by flashlight, their murmurs reassuring.
    On takeoff he remembered clearly the sensation of the plane gathering speed in the darkness in its rush down the runway, and the gentle shift in his stomach as the Fortress lifted into the air, banking around to the north. He climbed into his station in the top turret for the view and saw the lights of the field behind and below them, turning slowly away, and the red lights of the Fortresses ahead of them, lifting into the cloud cover. They climbed until they broke through the clouds like something emerging from the sea, and the half moon illuminated the entire world.
    Far ahead they could see the other 17’s. He stayed in the top turret, his weight back on the turret’s padded sling. His goggles were up on his forehead and the elastic strap bunched the crown of his soft, sheepskin-lined headgear. Cooper and Gabriel threw shadows in the yellow glow of the cockpit before him, and the enormous wings extended out beyond him dark and reassuring on both sides.
    The stars were brilliant and foreign and extended undiminished to the cloud line. Every so often Hirsch’s head appeared in the glow of the smallish astrodome in front of the cockpit, taking a fix with the sextant. The plane tipped and rocked smoothly. His toes curled and flexed in the sheepskin linings. St. Elmo’s fire shimmered and glowed furtively around the wingtips and propellers. Hirsch intruded on the interphone in a low voice to give new headings.
    Still hours from first light or landfall