B for Buster (3 page)

But Lofty laughed and kept the throttles open, and flew the kite more slowly than she was meant to fly. “Eighty-five knots,” he said as
Buster
rattled like an old car. “Eighty, boys. Look at that!” Then, finally, a wingtip dropped and down we went in a dizzying turn.

We flew for two hours, hoping that a flight of Hurricanes would come along and launch a mock attack. But the sky was all ours until we headed home, and Lofty sent me down to my wireless.

I poked through my little space, peering into the corners and under the seat. Then I looked up and saw, penciled on the ceiling, the first lines of the poem that all of us knew. I smiled to see it written there, and read it over and over, louder and louder, until I shouted it out against the din of the engines.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings

I thought it was the best poem ever written. It said better than anyone possibly could—except maybe Will—what was in my heart and why I flew.

I stood up and looked more closely. The letters were small and tidy, printed on very faint lines drawn by a ruler. I wondered who had bothered to do that, to get the poem as perfectly arranged as a sampler in a kitchen. How many times had he looked up and read the words?

Then I wondered where he'd gone and what had happened to him. Was it true that the last person who had sat here had vanished? What had happened that night in the dark hull of
B for Buster
?

I shivered, then laughed. It was like a campfire story that could chill you through the hottest flames. I didn't want to think about it then, as we flitted across the fields to home.

CHAPTER 3

ON THE TWENTY-NINTH of May, Lofty went on his dickey flight. It was only a fifth-wheel sort of business, “a passenger trip,” as he called it himself. But we were green with envy when he climbed into the truck with his escape kit and all his gear, and headed off to Uncle Joe's own kite. I wished they sent everyone as second dickey, but only the pilot ever went. He would wedge himself into the folding seat beside the pilot's, and watch the CO fly the crate.

We gathered at the tower to wave at Lofty, feeling foolish that we were staying behind. The only other ones who were waving were the girls of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and the bookish types who never flew, who seldom left their offices. The Royal Chair Force, Ratty called them.

We watched the bombers taxi from dispersal. They separated from a great tangled mass into a stately parade, with the air shaking from their engines. They rumbled through the hazy twilight like a fleet of battleships heading out to sea. Uncle Joe was the first off, and a thrill went through me to see his black bird thundering along the runway. The tail came up just as it passed us. We waved, and I tried to look for Lofty in the glass pulpit of the cockpit. But in an instant he was fifty yards beyond us, and we were clamping our caps to our heads as the propwash gusted by, smelling of smoke and petrol.

The rudders were pushed over, the flaps down. The Halifax hurtled along in that blistering sound that was better than music, such a blur of tires rumbling and cylinders popping and airscrews turning that it was impossible to sort out any one part of it. The sound vibrated in my chest and roared in my ears. Then the kite lifted up, and I felt my breath snatched away to see such a magnificent machine become weightless and free. It soared over the hedge and over the field, and the throttles gurgled back as it banked to the right. The wheels were rising, the flaps pulling in. It seemed to be changing, becoming a creature of the sky. The orange light of the setting sun flashed from the wing and the belly, from the little globe of the rear gunner's turret. I blinked to knock away the tears that came bubbling up at the beauty of it.

We watched the rest of the aircraft taking off, but we left the waving to the WAAFs and the Chair Force. We put our hands in our pockets, and ducked our heads to keep our caps on. Even I tried to be the picture of nonchalance. We were airmen, after all.

The bombers were off to Wuppertal, and it would be hours before they came back. Will and Simon drifted away to the place where only officers went. I imagined long tables covered with fancy food, knives and forks of the finest silver. It seemed strange that they got all of that just because they had finished at the top of their classes in training. Everyone did the same job, but for the rest of us it was back to a hut where the furniture was broken and the air always smelled of cigarettes. We found it nearly empty, the wireless set blaring out dance tunes. We settled in a corner where a pair of wicker armchairs faced a sofa. Pop took the sofa, stretching out on his back. Buzz settled into one of the chairs, and Ratty folded into the other the same way he fit himself into a rear turret—with his knees drawn up until they nearly touched his chin. I perched on the end of the sofa, by Pop's smelly feet.

“I wish we were flying,” said Buzz.

“No lie.” Ratty peered up from his chair. “You know where I want to go? More than anywhere?”

“Yeah. Berlin,” said Buzz. “You only told me a million times.”

“The Holy City,” said Pop, already half asleep.

“That's why I joined up, you know. To see Berlin. No lie.”

Buzz searched through his pockets until he found his crossword puzzle, the only one he ever did, the same one that he had torn from the Sunday
Telegraph
on his first day in England. Why he didn't get a new one, I didn't know. If he was waiting to finish that one, he would be a geezer before he was done. He had written and erased so often in the little boxes that the paper was gray and thin. I had heard the clues a hundred times, each one a little riddle on its own.

“Here's one,” he said. “‘Southern Canadian becomes embarrassed? No, he's terrified.'” He drew his lips open, and tapped his pencil on his big front teeth.

I groaned to myself. They would go at it for hours, the two of them, and never find an answer. Ratty would ask, “How many letters?” Buzz would count them aloud. Ratty would say, “You got any?” And Buzz would say, “No, not yet.” For weeks I had watched them do this, and they
still
hadn't found more than three answers.

“How many letters?” asked Ratty.

I went outside. The sun had set, and the runway flares had been extinguished. There were high clouds covering most of the sky, with only a band of pale stars above the southern hills. The airfield was utterly dark, heavy with a sense of emptiness, a silence where I wasn't used to one. I heard memories of noise: the rumble of the bombers, the laughter of the airmen. I walked across the runway and didn't see
Buster
until she suddenly loomed above me, against the sky, with her enormous wings spread wide.

I went right around her, reaching up to touch the airscrews, the rudder fins and ailerons, the panels of the rear turret. I stood and gazed at the hugeness of her, then opened the door and climbed inside.

I could see absolutely nothing. Though I stood only a few feet from the rear turret, I couldn't tell if its doors were open or closed. I had to grope my way forward, passing under the black holes of the upper turret and the astrodome. Even in the cockpit, with walls of glass around me, I could only barely see the levers and controls. Farther on, one deck down, the entire nose was as dark as a cave. I sat in Lofty's seat. I put my hands on the column, my feet on the rudders.

There was no ground below me, no runway or buildings, nothing to be seen at all except the southern horizon with its humps of hills. It was easy to imagine that I was flying. And suddenly I was high over Germany, slipping through the darkness. I held the column, and heard in my mind the drone of the engines. Then a night fighter came swooping in from ten o'clock high, and I banked to the left, climbing to meet him. He zoomed past, so close to the cockpit that I ducked my head. Then I rolled us right over, pulling back on the column, and we went spiraling down in a corkscrew. I felt the kite shaking, but I held it steady. I leveled out at a hundred feet and dashed along above the ground, weaving past trees and houses, over hedges and under wires. “Pilot to navigator,” I said. “Pilot to navigator.”

And I heard his voice; I really did.

I heard it in the darkness, in the silence of the bomber. It was faint and tinny, a breathy whisper through an intercom that wasn't plugged in. It was a terrible voice, full of worry and fear. “What's the course?” it asked. “What's the course for home?”

I bolted upright, my hands jerking from the column. I listened to the silence, to my own breaths. Then I looked behind me, down the empty length of the fuselage. “Ratty?” I shouted. My voice rang through the metal tunnel. “Ratty, you there?”

It was something he would have done, scaring me with whispered voices. But no one answered.

“What's the course?” whispered the voice again. It echoed in the fuselage. Another answered, “Two-one-niner. Steer two-one-niner.”

My skin prickled all over. From my head to my feet I felt touches of ice.

To the south, the spidery crescent of the new moon came riding up the hills. Its silver glow fell through the canopy and the Perspex in the nose, and I saw the navigator seated at his desk. He was there but wasn't there; he was the gray and silver of the moonlight, the blackness of the shadows. He was a collection of shapes. But I saw the leather on his helmet and the sheepskin at his collar. I saw the light shining on his rubber mask as he slowly turned his head.

I bounded from the chair and went clanging through the bus, nearly panicked by the noise I made. What sounds were hidden in my thudding and my banging? Was the navigator clomping up the steps? Were the buckles jangling on his boots? Was he shouting at me in his ghostly voice, “Where the devil are we?”

I reeled from wall to wall, half crouched, half running past the struts and past the beds. I tumbled through the door. I fell, got up, and fell again. Then I scrambled away like an animal, my hands just paws on the ground. But fifty feet from
Buster,
I stopped and pulled myself together. Sounds and moonlight; that was all that had scared me. I had heard creaks of metal, maybe crows on the roof. I hadn't heard voices, and I hadn't seen people at all.

It was easy to tell myself that, but harder to believe it. Crows didn't fly at night. But I had never doubted that ghosts were real.

I made myself turn back and look at
Buster.
I half expected to see the gunner in his upper turret, the bomb aimer peering out, white-faced, from his bubble. But there was only the machine, huge and empty.
Nothing
there,
I told myself.
Nothing there.

I backed away from
Buster,
then turned around and ran across the field. I never stopped until I reached the huts.

Ratty and Buzz looked up as I stumbled in, but only for a moment. They were used to seeing me running places, barging in through doors.

“He's terrified,” said Buzz.

“Who?” I said.

“The Southern Canadian,” said Buzz. “I bet that's important. Hey, Kak, what's a six-letter word for
terrified
?”

They were still at their crossword; they were still on the same clue. But the sofa was empty.

“Where's Pop?” I asked.

“He just
popped
out,” said Buzz. He shook with his horsey laugh.

I stretched out on the sofa, trembling inside, wishing I had never gone to see stupid
B for Buster.
I heard my mother's nagging voice:
“Well, you got just
what you deserved. That should teach you,”
Mother always said.

I stared around the walls, at the painting of King George VI, at the dartboard on a wall riddled with tiny holes. The dance music ended on the wireless, and a posh sort of voice started reading the news. Back home in Canada, the government was rationing meat. The American army was beating the Japs on Attu Island, way far away in Alaska. I couldn't have cared less.

I rolled on my back and looked at the curved ceiling, then down along the blackened pipe that twisted toward the coal stove. I saw the light shining on it, and it looked like an arm, like a tentacle, groping toward the ceiling.
Buster
was jammed with pipes like that, with hoses that snaked in every direction. That was all I'd seen, just a bunch of wires and pipes and hoses. I laughed from relief.

“What's so funny?” asked Ratty.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Popped out,” said Buzz, without looking away from his crossword. “He just got the joke.”

He made me think now, with that stupid joke. I lay on the sofa where Pop had been and wondered if there wasn't another explanation for what I'd seen. Maybe there really had been a person in
Buster
's dark nose. “Where did he go?” I asked Ratty. “The old guy?”

“Wheezy jeezy, I don't know.”

“You think he went out to see
Buster
?”

“Why?”

I shrugged, as though I had no idea why
anyone
would do that.

“Maybe he's pretending to fly,” said Buzz. “Bet he is. I bet he's sitting in Lofty's seat, pretending to fly the crate. He's crazy, that guy. Just like a kid sometimes.”

I was sure I was right. He was probably
still
out there, sitting in the doorway and laughing at his joke. Maybe he was just where I'd left him, waiting to scare me again. “Let's go and see.” I leapt from the sofa. “Let's surprise him.”

Ratty frowned, looking more like a rat than ever. “No,” he said simply.

I went by myself. I stepped out of the hut, onto the grass, and stared across the field.
Buster
stood in the moonlight, black on black, looking sinister and not quite real. I didn't go any closer.

Metal squeaked behind me; a breath grunted in the darkness. I smelled birds and rotten straw. And out of the night came Dirty Bert, pulling a bomb trolley. He had a pigeon on his shoulder, and he walked in a hunch, like a half-crazy old pirate.

Every squadron had a pigeoneer to care for its flock of homing birds. In every bomber, on every op, a pigeon went along. It carried a metal cylinder strapped to its leg, and would fly home with a message if the kite was forced down. At our Operational Training Unit the pigeoneer had been a smart young man who had always dressed as though on parade. He had raised the birds as a hobby in peacetime, and had asked to look after the loft. He kept it as clean as a kitchen, and when he wasn't tending pigeons, he was tuning instruments on the bombers. But here at the Four-Forty-Two, the squadron's pigeoneer was a dismal man.

He was known as Dirty Bert. He lived in a hut adjoining the loft, and everywhere he went, he carried the smell of birds. Day in and day out he wore the same blue coveralls, crusted with mud and droppings. His entire life was spent caring for birds, and washing latrines.

I was sure he would pass me by. He rarely spoke to anyone, nor anyone to him. But he called out as he trundled toward me, “Good evening, sir.”

No one ever called me sir. I was only a warrant officer, no more than a glorified sergeant. I actually looked behind me to see if there wasn't a
real
officer there. But Bert was talking to me.

“Lovely night, isn't it, sir?” he said.

“Yes. It is.”

“Not flying tonight, sir?”

“No.”

He swung his bomb trolley round in a circle, not even grunting at the effort. It was a massive thing, meant to be hauled by a tractor. But Bert just pulled it by hand. “Having trouble with the motorized, sir,” he said.