B for Buster (17 page)

CHAPTER 18

ON THE SECOND OF August, when the moon was new, the bowser king went out at first light and fueled the bombers. The smell of petrol wafted across the field, and the gurgle of the pump set my nerves on edge.

The target that night was Hamburg. But the worst news, for me, came when Drippy stood up.

His weather map was covered with circles and lines. He smiled at us and said, “Thunder, boys. Expect thunder and lightning all the way.”

Bert shouted at his man upstairs when I told him that. “Poor birds,” he said. “It's going to be 'ard on them, sir. 'Ard as nails.” He worried about Percy, who had never seen a thunderstorm from the air. “You'll 'ave to 'elp 'im through it, sir.”

I did the best I could. The moment we took off, I lifted Percy from his box. I opened my jacket and slipped him down into a sheepskin nest, where he settled against my heart. We climbed through churning clouds and heavy rain that dashed against
Buster
like shotgun pellets. At five thousand feet the lightning started, and the rolls of thunder that followed them were louder than the engines.

Percy lifted his head, and I could feel him quivering. In each bolt of lightning I saw his eye-sign glow, the little stars twinkling round his pupil. I pressed my hand against my jacket, pressed the bird against my breast. But he didn't try to struggle free; he lay in there and twitched with each lightning bolt and every peal of thunder.

Ratty told feeble jokes from the rear turret. He called the lightning by its German name.
“Blitzen,”
he said in a terrible German accent. “It's'n blitzen everywhere.” It dawned on me that he didn't care for the lightning, and that he was genuinely frightened in his lonely dustbin far behind us all. None of us really knew what would happen if the lightning hit old
Buster.

The flashes lit up clouds that looked like fists and gremlin heads that were torn and twisted by strong, high winds. Simon shouted like an old sea captain, “It's howling a fury up here.” In stranger Australian than ever, he added, “It's London to a brick that we'll be blown to the never-never.” He couldn't account for the winds that shifted with our altitude, blowing first against us and then behind us.

Will's maps were useless; he couldn't see the ground. I started taking navigational bearings, tuning the loop antenna onto Berlin, onto London, onto anything I could find. I wrote the bearings on bits of paper and passed them to Simon as the rain blasted against us. It dribbled through the bubbles and the canopies, until Lofty sat in a little waterfall, soaked from his shoulders down. Then the rain turned to ice as we climbed. It froze along the wings and on the edges of the tail fins. It froze to the whirling blades of the airscrews, then flew off in chunks that banged against the fuselage. The kite got heavy and clumsy; the engines ran faster.

I rocked Percy in my jacket. “It's okay. Don't worry,” I told him.

Then a weird blue glow filled the Halifax. It shimmered on my wireless, on the struts beside me, on the frame around my window. It was a pulsing jelly, like strands of bluish fire. I switched over from the wireless to the intercom just as Lofty shouted, “Pop! What is it?” Buzz said, “My goddamn guns are blue.” And Ratty yelled over top of them both. “It's lightning! We're gonna get hit.”

“Shut up!” cried Will, in the nose. “Saint Elmo's fire. It's just Saint Elmo's fire.”

I looked up, round the curtain and past the bulkhead. Lofty sat in a flaming seat, his hands on a fiery column. The glow shimmered all around him, on the framework of the canopy, on all his levers and controls. It even pulsed on the end of his pipe.

It was an eerie thing to see at eleven thousand feet—a cold blue fire consuming the kite. It terrified me at first, until I thought of the Green Lantern and the glowing metal that gave him his power. I reached toward the window frame, hoping to touch the flames, to capture their power. “Shazam,” I said to myself as my fingers trembled. But the glow suddenly vanished, fading away like a ghostly fire, to leave us in darkness again.
Buster
went roaring up through the clouds, tossed by the wind as she climbed.

Will spoke in his deep Shakespeare voice. “There appeared a chariot of fire. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind.”

I had never learned the Bible stories. I didn't know what he was blathering about.

We flew on through rain and ice, through lightning, clouds, and stars. The wireless filled with static, and Simon tried all his little tricks. Twice we dropped flares and let Ratty measure the angle of our drift by lining them up on his guns. But we never found the target. We blundered over Germany, in and out of flak and searchlights. We didn't even know where we dropped our bombs; we just let them fall, and turned for home.

The lightning chased us, and little Percy shivered in my jacket. He fell asleep over the North Sea and dreamed some sort of dream that had him twitching all over. I tried to calm him, but he twisted round and nipped me through my pullover.

I felt awful for him, to see him dream. It was as though my own nightmares had been passed to him, for I hadn't had my spinning dream for days, not since I'd taken Percy flying. For three mornings in a row I had woken full of peace, feeling rested and content.

That night was the same. I ate my fresh egg and sat through debriefing, then fell asleep as soon as I crawled into bed. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I thought of Percy dreaming, but no fiery world went twirling around me.

I woke to the patter of rain on the hut's tin roof, a sound I'd come to love. If it drummed like that, there would be no flying, and it drummed like that all week. Yet I found my stomach churning as much as ever as I sat at the breakfast table waiting for the WAAF. Through all the week of rotten weather it churned away each morning. But on the third day I noticed that Buzz and Pop and Ratty were worse—much worse—than me. Their breakfasts sat unfinished as their fingers shook and fluttered. Buzz had a twitch in his left eye, so that he looked a bit like the American gunner we'd met. Pop kept tapping his foot on the floor, his whole leg moving, his knee going up and down like a grasshopper's. Only Lofty didn't seem to mind the waiting; he took turns chewing his sprouts and chewing his pipe. Sometimes he chewed the two together.

I spent the days in the pigeon loft as the rain went on and on. I wondered sometimes if it would ever stop, if we hadn't dropped so many bombs that we'd wrecked the whole sad planet. That was what had happened in Buck Rogers; it made sense it could happen again.

Around the huts, the bit of grass became such a muddy wallow that the erks packed away their cricket bats and wicket things. But the Canadians didn't give up their baseball. They played the same wild game they always had, a sort of tackle baseball that was even wilder in the mud. They turned themselves into clots of earth, into black snowmen that were often heaped in piles among the bases.

At night the sergeants' mess filled to bursting, a dangerous place to be. The twisted airscrew that might have slashed me to ribbons became a giant spinner that was hurled around the room in a lunatic's version of pitch-and-toss. Then the big leather sofa got so badly wounded in a crashing round of Tank that Ratty fetched a pistol and put it out of its misery. Six sergeants bore it up on their shoulders and carried it outside. They dug a massive grave behind the hut, and Buzz played taps on a pocket-comb kazoo as they lowered it down in the rain.

The war went on—it always did—from the South Pacific to the Russian steppes. But it didn't affect our little bit of Yorkshire. At the Four-Forty-Two, the only battles were waged within ourselves. Lofty and the rest went from one feverish game to another. If they weren't getting drunk, they were getting sober; but I wasn't a part of any of it.

I was becoming more and more like Bert, always alone except at the pigeon loft. I spent more time talking to pigeons than I did to people. I collected little treats for Percy, and made a game of letting him choose which pocket they were in. He looked at me, his head tilting, then pecked at one of my pockets. Four or five times a day we played the game, and he never failed to get it right.

I was at the loft, near the end of the week, when Fletcher-Dodge came to see the pigeons. The sun was setting when Percy suddenly snapped to attention, and in through the door came the CO, with a black umbrella that frightened the birds silly. They flapped away as he squeezed it through the door; they squawked while he shook off the rain and closed it.

His buttons were polished, his badges shining. He squinted and frowned at me, as though trying to figure out where we'd met. “What do you do here?” he asked.

Bert answered for me. “Sir, 'e 'elps with the pigeons.”

“Good show,” said Fletcher-Dodge. Below his mustache, his teeth grinned crookedly. “I say, that's jolly dee.”

His red face and perfect clothes made him seem foolish, like a character from a music hall. He tapped his umbrella on the floor and shouted at Bert. “Pigeoneer! Any eggs today?”

“No, sir,” said Bert.

“Blast! That's a bother.” The CO made a puttering sound with his lips. “I was counting on you, Pigeoneer.”

“Yes. I'm sorry, sir,” said Bert.

Fletcher-Dodge set off on a circuit round the loft, tapping his umbrella at the nesting boxes, prodding at the straw. I watched him poke and trundle round, not knowing why he was there. Bert watched him, too, avoiding my eye.

“This is a shower,” said the CO. “An absolute shower. I was expecting better, Pigeoneer.”

Bert nodded. “Sir, I'm trying.”

“Beastly things. They're a miserable lot.” Fletcher-Dodge swept the pigeons away with his umbrella. When he looked up, I was right in front of him with Percy on my shoulder. “Now that's a wizzo bird,” he said. “I should like to see more like that, Pigeoneer.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bert.

“He's jolly dee.”

I was quite pleased, but Bert was miserable. His head drooped lower and lower until the CO—with a “Cheerio, then!”—opened his umbrella and went out through the door. Then Bert shook his head at me. “Do you see what he's up to, sir?”

“No,” I said.

“Why, 'e wants to eat them, sir.”

“The pigeons?”

“Yes,” cried Bert. “Eggs 'e wants. Or squabs or birds. It doesn't matter to him.”

“But they're not his pigeons,” I said. “He can't eat them, can he?”

“Who am I to say what the CO can do?” asked Bert. “But 'e
won't.
No, sir, not on
my
watch 'e won't.”

Bert turned away and pulled the birds from their nesting boxes. “'E's a 'orrible little man,” he said. “I know 'is type, sir. You won't ever see 'im fly nothing but a desk. If that swaggering pigeon-eater ever goes on an op, you'll 'ave nothing to worry about, sir. 'E won't ever risk 'is own skin, that one.”

Bert worked himself into such a fit that he went off for a walk. He left me alone with the pigeons, and the rain came down and the darkness settled. Hours passed, but he didn't return.

I guessed it was nearly midnight when I heard the Morris outside. Through a window I saw its hooded headlights veering down the runway, glowing in the rain. They reminded me of searchlights swinging up from the ground, and I felt a twitch of fear as they turned right at me. I heard voices shouting as the car rushed along. The muffler popped; the tires squealed.

I took a lantern from its hook and went outside.

“Left, left!” someone cried. “Corkscrew left!” and the car spun sideways. There must have been a whole crew aboard, with all the bellowing and laughter. The headlights disappeared, then reappeared, as the car slewed in a circle. Gears clashed and the motor spluttered and someone shouted, “Bomb doors open!”

Something dark and gangly separated from the Morris and tumbled across the ground. “Bombs gone!” cried a voice, and others laughed as the car accelerated. It went racing back toward the huts.

The dark mass on the ground picked itself up and came toward me. It was Lofty, smearing mud from his jacket. “Thank God they slowed down, the silly buggers,” he said. “They pitched me off the running board.”

He was staggering a bit, but not from his landing. Somehow he was still holding a bottle of beer. He tipped it up, but found it empty. Then he belched and said, “You're missing the party, Kid.”

“There'll be another one tomorrow,” I said.

“Maybe not. We might be on.”

Up went the bottle; he'd forgotten already that it was empty. Then he peered through the neck. “U/S,” he said, tossing it away. He staggered up to the pigeon loft, leaned against it, fitting his fingers through the wire mesh. I held up my lantern, and the pigeons twitched and blinked.

“What do you see in these birds?” asked Lofty.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

Lofty was so much taller than me that I could lean in toward the wire below his outstretched arm. I looked at the birds inside, their eyes glowing.

“God, they reek.” He sniffed. “Or is that you? Kid, you stink of birds.”

Lofty banged on the bars; he thumped and rattled at the mesh. Half the pigeons rose in a startled mass, bubbling up in gray and brown, little downy feathers flying.

“Don't do that!” I shouted.

He only laughed, loudly enough to keep the pigeons in a whirring cloud. His hand fell from the wire and landed on my shoulder with a mighty slap. “Kid,” he said, “I think you should spend more time with the
other
birds.”

“What birds?” I asked.

“The two-legged ones.”

I frowned. “They're all two-legged, Lofty.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess they are.” He snickered to himself. “The two-
breasted
ones, I mean. There's a couple of WAAFs at the party who'd like to get their feathers stroked.”