Drink for the Thirst to Come (16 page)

“All of him walked in, half of him walked out,” First Shirt said. That’s how Soc put it down.

“A lesson to us all,” Doas said and passed the bottle.

Soc was riding
Gale’s Wrath
. He loved her. That was going to be his novel, he said. Gale was his pilot’s girlfriend. Soc wanted to meet her after the war. His pilot said, “Sure you do.”

We flew practice, high level, low level, made phony bomb runs. We did night flights, day raid simulations, threw up together through maneuvers. We got used to each other, the plane, the Bomb Group. Our first mission would be a piece of cake. Headquarters said so.

In the tail, you’re alone. At Angels Sixteen your breath freezes your mask to your face, your head is in your glass box, and sky is everywhere. The world is contrails streaming aft, above below. The war being fought by the rest of your plane and your nine buddies is a rumor on the headset. Except for the engines, everything you hear is on headset. Seventy feet up front, everyone knows everything. They’re yelling, “Watch for it, Shorty! Get him, Ern! Get it, get it... Come on, oh Jesus Christ take him, Brandon, oh fuck, five o’clock low, that’s LOW, Goddamnit, nononono!”

Like that. The 17’s a Sunday drive with nine backseat drivers.

From my seat in the tail, I watched backward. Now and then something flew by or came rocking in from the side, swinging back and forth trying to kill me. Felt that personal. I shot back until they went away. I don’t know if I hit anyone. I tried.

Sixty-five thousand pounds of
Gremlin
bumped and quivered whenever all thirteen .50s spit short chatters at the MEs and F-Ws that rammed past.

We neared the target. The fighters disappeared. For seconds it was just us and quiet. Then the air opened up.

Let me tell you about flak: It’s high explosive wrapped in scrap-metal. Big anti-aircraft guns throw it up to where we are, then it explodes. Thing about it: It’s beautiful. In the big emptiness all around, white, black and pink puffballs blossom, blots of color bump the air. You see it wrinkle, the air. When it’s heavy you can smell it. The smell is like a fired off 12-gauge: hot powder and burnt metal. Flak chews your control surfaces, peppers your hydraulics, it can whip your belly open like-that, unravel your guts around the plane, spin your head clean off—all while you watch in wonder and breathe that back-home smell of duck season on the Red!

I sat in my glass house and waited to explode.

Doas ignored everyone, did his job, drove us to the target, released
Gremlin
to the bombardier, whose Norden bombsight inched us over whatever we were trying to kill that day—I disremember—and loosed our load. We bounced up, light and happy, and
Gremlin
and
Gale
returned to Cornhole without a scratch.

Soc and I got drunk because everyone said we’d stand down till headquarters evaluated the fuck-up, why intelligence promised a milkrun and the Germans fed us a buzzsaw. Sorry, Soc, I’m mixing what you call your metaphors.

And we didn’t stand down. Next day we were up again. Again,
Gremlin
and
Gale
came home untouched and Soc and me decided drunk was lucky. Maybe Soc was starting to believe in superstition.

As a reward, we got sent back the very next day. Hungover, boozy, focused by pain, we clobbered the target that third time. Whatever it was.

Three missions and the
Gremlin
s and the
Gale
s were untouched. Not one piece of flak, not one bullet, not one drop of blood. It shit-scared us.

On Gremlin’s fifth mission, a pair of Focke-Wulfs stitched us across the middle and took out one of the waist gunners. Burdette. A big guy. Quiet. Always a little smile like something funny had… Well, that was that.

On seven, we took a burst in the gut and the ball-turret was gone, the ball-turret gunner just a smear along the underside almost to my ass in the tail. What the hell was his name, the ball turret gunner?

Okay. What I didn’t tell the debriefing crew was that during the mission—okay, all the missions—I’d heard things. First, I thought I was picking up Kraut radio on the headset. That happens. Don’t know why. Listening, I knew I heard no radio and what I heard was not on headset. The voices were in the air, in the flames and noise, cripes, in the smell of the plane, the caibo shit, oil burning itself at pressure, flak and cordite fumes whipping back from the waist. I know a little Kraut and the singing words were not
Deutsche
, they were... Okay, they were older. Older like Daddy’d said older. On the headset, I hear Doas’s Kentucky drawl, the other guys’ shouts, what’s-his-name, the ball-turret gunner’s final chirrup before he became a streak of grease down the belly, all that was there. And I hear it. I hear engines, guns, I hear the flak. But wrapped around all that is a tom-tom chorus and a bull-roar hum. I hear the air itself and the air’s flames. They’re all a choir at some old, old church. The voices are explosions and the flak that peppers us, the engines, our guns, theirs, the fighter’s buzz and the rushing air, all seem to be… No, it all is… it all was liquid music. Music and laughter.

I said nothing. Not to Intelligence, not to Doas, not to Soc. As I said, tail gunner’s pretty far back there.

Anyway, we were blooded and felt better. Not happy Burdette and what’s-his-name, the ball-turret gunner, were dead. No. But we didn’t have to worry about what was going to happen first, because the first thing had already happened.

So it got to be routine: missions, stand-downs, scrubs and rainouts, losses, escapes. We were combat vets.

Mundt! That was the ball-turret gunner.

Soc and I were working our pre-mission hoodoo at the Ploughman in Lakenheath. Soc had fallen to the wiles of a country girl still with all her teeth from somewhere by the River Ouze. He’d told her about the book he was writing. “
By River Ouze,
I call it,” he said. She was impressed and when they closed the boozer, he and she were off talking books. They left me without even a bike to pedal myself back to base on, so I walked. I liked walking fields. Day or night, I liked talking to the critters, to the noises in the earth. This is best done alone. The time I did so in Soc’s hearing, he wrote me down and said I was colorful.

At Lakenheath Lea, I considered risk: cross the decoy field or hoof the long way around? A lone cow sat in the mist under the wing of a decoy plane. I asked what she was doing, out.

Left behind in someone’s haste
, she said.

I laughed. A rabbit, then another, leaped the painted lines and went dodging among wood and canvas shapes in the fog.

I thought to risk it.

When the night raiders showed it was like a movie director said, “Lights and action!” Searchlights like ice fingers shot into the mist. Sirens sighed from low to high and back. The drone of radial engines sifted through broken sky. Anti-aircraft—what the blokes called “ack-ack”—bloomed among the stars.

The ruse must have worked because Lakenheath Lea heaved. Earth filled the air. I did the dodger’s run, left my own staggering drunk behind running till I ran out of field and was over the fence without climbing. I flopped up one side of a little hill, then rolled down the other and ate mud like Daddy done in his trenches.

When I peeked over the crest, the booze must have jumped back inside because I was drunk again. It was all so damned beautiful, music, light, and song. Wave over wave of air washed out from the bursting bombs like wet wrinkles. I would have stood to conduct if I’d had that talent, but I didn’t so I lay and breathed it.

When the old guy next to me in the dark ditch howled like a steel-cutting saw, I about jumped from my skin. By bomb’s light, he was hairy and old. Black, see? Not like a Colored man, he was old iron black and the dark of rich loam. He was all the shades of the world black. Except for that he could have been the bus driver bloke.

I thought he was drunk as I was and said something like, “What’re we doing here, mate?”

He answered like a yard full of geese. Well, I was just learning the language there in England, and that night’s lager had settled back in me after my dodge. Thing was, I understood. Got that he’d come up to the Lea for this. Come up, special. As if he’d been, well, down somewhere. Don’t know where. Him and the others—he waved his arm—they were here for this. This special thing we were doing.

A stick of incendiaries threw bright heat and I saw the hillside filled like a stadium for homecoming. The old guy and the rest howled like a steel mill chorus at a midnight pouring.

On the Lea was more of him. More, different, their shadows danced with the flames.

Soc would have loved it, hundreds of little hairy critters. They ran, spun, tornadoed the dirt. A bomb whistled. I looked. Foolish, but damn if there wasn’t a girl on it. Okay, not on it, she slow-danced it down the sky. Which is why I could see it at all. Behind her, a whole rack of Kraut 500-pounders cavorted in the arms of little women. Okay, not women. The
idea
of women. They sweet doe-see-doed those clumsy iron bubbles, something Walt Disney could’ve made in that
Fantasia
picture. When the bubbles burst, they blossomed, yellow-white and rose-touched. Snake flames licked the ground and skittered, rolling, growing, growing so fast, twisting into the air with wood, canvas, and painted earth. The howl of blooming steel washed over us and I know, I know, a dozen, two dozen of the folk were pulverized in the blasts, pulverized and shot aloft where the spray of parts and pieces rejoined and laughed down as shadows, black shadows, against the heat and shock and thrumming strings. Sounded like it anyway.

Then it was over: bombs, planes, ack-ack. Drifting smoke, air-tossed muck, skittering sparks remained. Then a lady-rain came to clean it all. The rain was part of it and fell like light. As if all the fire and light, all the burning planes and men that had fallen from the sky in steel and armored drops, the glowing bits of bone and chary rags and spatters of liquid plastic, were distilled to hazy mist. All that dropped gently in a cleansing rain. Wondrous.

My old black bloke said something to me and rolled his head back. I thought he’d laugh. He did and came apart in joy, then sank. That was it. He sank into the hillside. The music of rain and air, wrinkled and was gone. All was gone, waiting for the next… What?

Festival
is the word I’d caught. This Festival we were making just for them.

When the all clear sounded I was sober again for the third time that day. I stood. Common mist rolled across Lakenheath Lea. The surviving flames were ordinary fires, dying in the wet. In the light, the carcass of my friend the cow lay opened, burning. I didn’t see rabbits.

I was in my rack when the Sergeant rolled us out, calling “Wakey-wakey!” like the blokes.

Jammed into the briefing room, we sat in body heat and wool, staring at the curtained blackboard on the stage. The place was blue with cigarette. When Col. Cawdor came down the aisle, the air parted and we came to attention, coughing.

“At ease,” he said. He looked at the officers, looked at us. “Gentlemen, your target is Schweinfurt.” Then he left. The Air Exec conducted the rest of the general briefing before we separated into crew briefs.

Let me tell you about Schweinfurt. That October, the 8th Air Force lost a quarter of the planes it sent to take out the ball bearing factories of Schweinfurt. Ball bearings, now, ball bearings are the soul—the heart, anyway—of modern war. Without ball bearings, you’re fighting the last war’s war.

Since that bloody October, the 8th had a grudge against those ball bearings and be damned if we could knock out the plants. We kept going back.

There were the usual hoots, whines, and whimpers, the fake screams that covered real ones. In the end, we were going back to Schweinfurt, its two thousand ack-ack guns and crack crews and where half the Luftwaffe waited for us to come to try to kill their ball bearings.

Schweinfurt. Shit, guess I DID want to live forever.

We jeeped to the perimeter and ran preflight. Just another pretty day of dying. HQ teased us with a hold while meteorology waited for the numbers to say the target skies was clear. I was hoping the mission would stay held, get scrubbed, go away. It didn’t.

Some of the guys from
Gale’s Wrath
and
Gremlin
tossed a baseball ’round a circle, others stood and laughed or lay sacked out against the landing gear. Soc wandered across the pad and squatted on wet grass next to me. We were quiet. I wanted to say nothing about last night’s Festival, figuring it was mostly booze, anyway.

“About science,” Soc said, “see, you should be able to know—to figure, anyway—when your number’s coming, well, not up, but around.” He looked at the sky. “Gotta say, I’m feeling it’s close.”

The day was sunny and cool. Last night’s rain lay in thin sheens across the tarmac. Behind the perimeter fence, cows grazed like they had forever. Nothing had changed for them. Or me. Hell, I was still a farmer, mostly dirt, spit, and hot air. A while ago I was doing what my folks had done for as long as those cows had been in their line of work. This flying in the air, flames, tearing metal and spraying blood, that was a just something to be done before getting back to the earth.

Soc didn’t say anything, then he said, “You know, I’ve seen things.” He tilted his head back. “Up there…” He looked at me and laughed. “Nah. No such thing.”

“Yes. Yes, there is,” I said. “Socrates. There is!” I grabbed his arm. I was going to unburden me about last night, the voices, the music.

Then Ops popped the Very pistol and it was time to go. The engines revved and prop blasts blew last night’s puddles away.

Soc smacked me on the leg with his flight gloves. “Got to tell you about my book! I think I’ve got it! Finally got it!” And he was off to die. I knew that.

He did. After the fighters left us to fly alone into the flak of Schweinfurt’s two thousand ack-acks,
Gale’s Wrath
, leading on high approach to the drop point, caught a shell in a soft spot. There was a puff and the plane folded, wings, tail, nose. The whole thing drifted apart and rained people and pieces over the low-level flights, rearward. It was almost artful. Soc could have done it justice and maybe would have appreciated the numbers of it all. No chutes.