Anita Shreve Read online

  Jerry, from the east, always had the advantage. Ten Me-109s out of the sun. Oh my God, look at that. Jesus, they're hitting the high squadron. We've had it now. Hail Mary, Mother of God … They're cutting them down like flies. B-17s—hit, exploding. Falling in front of his eyes. Ted dove suddenly and steeply. Everything loose in the plane hitting metal. The gunners pinned against the bulkheads, lips flattened back over their teeth. No one could speak. Then pulling out, leveling off, climbing again. Jesus Christ, what was that? A near miss with a falling Fortress. Bring her up. Rejoin the formation. The Me's going for the low squadron now. My gun is jammed. He couldn't identify the gunner. Left waist call in. The German fighters pulling away. Dull whoosh of flak. He could smell the cordite. They must be near the target. Flak jackets and helmets. They didn't have to be told a second time. Panic, pounding, the shrapnel like a shower of marbles on the metal skin. Screaming in the intercom. Two of the guns had frozen.

  Old Gold was dropping back.

  What?

  There was Baker to talk to, and Shulman in the nose. Is she hit? I don't think so. You see a fire? Nothing I can see. Losing altitude? Maybe a little. Break radio silence? I can't. Why wasn't Old Gold calling him? Why wasn't Old Gold telling him to take over the lead? The radio shot out? Possibly. His orders were to follow the lead. He had to do it, throttle back, break formation. Would the others follow? This was suicide. He broke silence then. Had to. Old Gold, this is Woman's Home Companion. Do you read me? Silence. Come in Old Gold. Are you hit? Silence. He was angry now, yelling. Old Gold, son of a bitch, what's going on? Silence. The radio was out. The lead plane was losing altitude now, but why?

  Old Gold banked slightly, and they saw it.

  Her fuel was pouring out, a splash of pale ink across the sky. The plane was dropping faster now. They saw the chutes. One, two, three. They waited. Four… five … They waited. Only five. The plane, a thousand feet below them, dipped its wing and lurched onto its back.

  For a moment, there was silence over the intercom.

  Navigator to pilot. Sir, we're sitting ducks. You've got to get us out of here.

  Case was bent over at the waist. We can make it to the Channel, Brice. We can ditch. For Christ's sake, don't go down here.

  Bombardier to pilot. We've got to rejoin the formation.

  Ted throttled up, pushed his plane as hard as he dared. The navigator plotting coordinates, trying to calculate how long they had to rejoin. Ted fixing the mixture; they'd lost precious fuel of their own in the fuckup. Scanning the skies till his eyes burned. They were all doing it. Without the formation, they were as vulnerable as a baby. Someone over the intercom was crying. He couldn't make out who. Case still bent over, his head below the instrument panel, retching again on the floor.

  Ted looked up. The sky was ablaze—theatrical and wondrous. He thought he had never seen so many fighters. They were silver, sparkling in the sun. He had in his mind the image of hunting dogs with a fox.

  Ripping it to shreds.

  There was screaming on the intercom. Right waist to pilot. The tail's been hit, sir. A crack, a new vibration in the controls—severe on the rudder pedals. The control cables were damaged. Losing altitude. Put the nose down to avoid a stall. Pilot to rear gunner. Check in. Silence. Rear, check in. Silence. Left waist, check on Ekberg. Callahan moving toward the tail. Left waist to pilot. We've been hit bad. Pieces are flying off the tail. And Ekberg? I dunno, sir. Not a scratch on him. I can't see any blood. Concussion? I think so, sir. OK, pull him into the waist. Get back to your gun. Another hit and another. Everything falling. Everything pummeling. The instrument casings shattered. A direct hit on number-four engine. Feather the propeller so it won't bash and tear the engine cowling. Then a terrible scream. It's Warren, sir, in the ball turret. The screaming filled the intercom.

  Jockey around. Evasive acton. Bandits everywhere. So close he could see the bladders of their oxygen masks pumping in and out fast, like his own. Another engine hit. Let's get the hell out of here. Baker was yelling now. He didn't know where they were. Pieces of the fin peeling off in the slipstream. Ted dove for cloud cover, banked, turned west. They were losing altitude and fuel. Number two's on fire. Case screamed again, We can ditch in the Channel. Head for the Channel, you son of a bitch. No we can't. We have wounded. It would kill the wounded. Screw the wounded, Brice. That's only two. There's eight others of us here who will get picked up. Get Warren out of the turret. Can't see the fighters, sir. Couldn't see the ground either. The cloud was a gray protective blanket— but lethal in its way. Bombardier, drop your bomb load, but do it over a field. The bombs were armed, sir, at the IP. Get rid of them now, bombardier. This is an emergency. He waited for Shulman to push the toggle switch to Salvo. Left waist to pilot. Just seen a piece of the stabilizer come away. Ted was fighting to control the rudder, losing altitude fast, trying to keep the plane level. He heard a whoosh—the bomb bay opened. The plane was close enough to the ground that they could feel the concussion. In the breaks, it looked like farmland, but the clouds were thick, the sky gray. Who could tell? Two thousand feet. Could he make it to the Channel? One's duty was to the living. But how could he take two men to certain death? Pilot to all crew. Throw everything out you can. We're going in on our belly. He saw a village in the distance. Pilot to navigator. Where are we? Don't know, sir. Fifteen hundred feet. Beyond the village a plateau, maybe a field. A thousand feet and falling. Pilot to crew. Assume positions for crash landing. Eight hundred feet. Pilot to left waist. Is Warren out of the turret? Yes, sir, but he's hit real bad. Beside the pilot, Case was crying. You can make it to the Channel. Five hundred feet. He was over the village, dipping, rising slightly, the engines straining. Get as far west as he could. Please God, let us make it to the pasture. He could see the field now. Maybe it was enough to land. A belly landing would slow them down. If it didn't, they'd hit the trees. Baker, still reporting. Two hundred feet. They were losing fuel. Sir, do you read me? Sir, do you read me?

  He heard the screaming in his ears. Vibrations threatened to disintegrate the plane, snap a wing. He fought to keep the bomber level. He saw the steeple of the church, a pasture. Cows stumbled in the unspeakable roar; a horse reared. The wing dipped, and he righted it just as they came in. He felt the sharp hit, the first bounce, the second, the skid on the belly. There was frost on the grass.

  And finally there was silence.

  Inside his jacket, the boy began to shake. It was not the fear or the cold; it was instead, this time, the brambles, the gray sky, the fallen plane. It was as though he had never been, until this moment, in the war itself. It was one thing to imagine finding an American flyer in the wood, quite another to be staring at a soldier's feet. The man must be dead, Jean decided. He sank to his knees, crawled around to the other side of the brambles. He stared at the tangle in the gray light, afraid to find what he was searching for.

  Jean saw the face—scratched, with blood on it, lying on one cheek, eyes shut. The face was pink still; the American did not look like the dead man beside the plane.

  “Hullo,” Jean tried, his only English, his voice cracking.

  The pilot opened his eyes. Even in the dim light, Jean could see their color—a translucent green, the green of the sea glass that his mother kept in a box on her bureau. He had never seen such eyes on anyone before—the only color in the dun forest.

  Jean whispered urgently in Walloon, “I am Belgian. You have fallen on Belgian soil.”

  The American looked intently at the boy.

  Jean, shaking violently inside his jacket, tried again. He spoke, but this time he accompanied his words with gestures. Pointing to himself and to the soil, then again, then once more, repeating the word Belgique over and over. Insisting.

  The American was motionless, except for his eyes scanning Jean's face.

  The boy removed the cheese and bread and the bottle of water from his pockets. He mimed taking a drink. Jean could not reach the American through the brambles, however. He had somehow to get
the man out. But how? Did he dare touch the injured leg?

  As if in answer, the American began a slow slide backwards, on his belly, until he had released himself from the tangle of thorns. Jean moved on his knees to meet him at the other side of the bushes. He watched as the American rolled over and lay flat on his back, staring at the tree-tops. The effort seemed to have exhausted him.

  Jean opened the bottle of water, cradled the American's head at an angle so the man could drink. The leather at the back of the American's head was cold to the touch. Jean's hand was shaking so badly he was afraid he would spill the water down the soldier's chin and neck. The American propped himself up on his elbows then, took a long swallow. He said an English word the boy could not understand.

  The American pulled himself to a nearby tree, managed with his wrists to make it to a sitting position. Careful not to touch anything that might be injured, Jean gingerly held out the bread. The American—pilot? gunner? navigator? Jean couldn't tell—took the bread in cupped hands, angled it with his wrists and bit into it. The loaf, however, was tough, and the American had no strength in his wrists, no grip, to pull it free. Jean reached in and steadied the bread for the American, feeding him. He saw that the fingers of the man's hands were stiff, unbending, the skin an unnatural and waxy white.

  The American chewed, swallowed, spoke again. Jean could tell by the inflection that the words formed a question, but he could do nothing but shake his head.

  “Can you speak French?” the boy asked very slowly. This time the American shook his head.

  The boy asked again, though the likelihood was improbable, “Do you speak Dutch?”

  The American seemed not to understand.

  Fearful that the tentative link between them might now be severed, with no words left to share, Jean pointed to his own chest. “Jean,” he said.

  The American nodded. He pointed to himself. “Ted.”

  Jean wished he were smarter. As he fed the American the bread and cheese and water, he tried to figure out how to convey his plan—a plan that had to be executed quickly, or the Germans would find the American. The frustration of being unable to speak made him want to cry. Wildly he pointed to himself, to the northern edge of the forest, and then made an arrow with his fingers that returned to the brambles.

  The American studied the boy. He said something in English, shook his head, indicating he did not entirely understand.

  Jean tried again.

  “Germans,” he said, pointing to the trail the soldier had made, leading to the pasture and the plane. But the American stared blankly at him.

  “Ted,” Jean said urgently, pointing to inside the brambles.

  The American nodded.

  “Jean,” Jean said. He again pointed to the north, then back. He repeated the gesture. In exasperation, the boy said in French, “Hide yourself. I will return for you.” And the American seemed to catch in the sentence a word that sounded familiar.

  “Return?” the aviator asked slowly.

  Jean, too, heard the word in his own language. He nodded vigorously and smiled, nearly exultant.

  The flyer began to smile too, then suddenly blanched with pain. Jean looked at the leg, at the flight suit, which in his attention to the man's face and eyes he had missed. One leg of the flight suit was covered with blood, dried brown blood. Jean felt lightheaded, dizzy.

  “Quickly,” he urged the American, pointing to the brambles. “Quickly.”

  The tone of the boy's voice, rather than the word itself, seemed to reach the American. Carefully, he lowered himself, used his forearms to pull his body into the hiding place.

  Jean studied the hidden American. The Germans would find him, just as Jean had, he was sure. Unless he could outwit them.

  He scooped up handfuls of pine needles and bark and dried leaves and buried the American's protruding feet in mulch. But that wouldn't be enough.

  The extra minutes his idea would take were critical, Jean knew, yet it had to be done.

  The boy retraced the matted trail, running until he was fifty meters from the pasture. He could hear voices, though he could not make out the words or even their nationality. He began to destroy, backwards toward the bramble bush, and as best he could, the existing trail. But when this proved impossible—the matted grasses would not rise up; the broken branches could not be mended— he devised another plan and was momentarily excited by his own cleverness. He made other paths, diversionary spokes, leading out from the central hub. In a kind of madness, he dragged himself on his back, bending branches and twigs, scuffling leaves with his feet. He tried to calculate the odds that the Germans would enter the forest at the correct point and then would choose the precise spoke to the American.

  He surveyed his work.

  Whatever else happened, he told himself, he had at least done this.

  Turning north, he bent his head to protect it, put out his arms, and scrambled at a near run through the forest. It was December, and darkness came early.

  The bicycle shuddering, the tire nearly flat. Shit, why hadn't he paid attention to the tires earlier? People in doorways, hanging out of windows. A plane in the village, fallen from the sky like an omen. Head down, keep the head down, blend into the stone, look inconspicuous. Antoine should slow down; people would notice they were racing. Antoine in the kitchen with Claire. Antoine stank of pigs. He was ugly with his pink face, his small eyes, and that greasy, thin, white-blond hair.

  Claire in the kitchen. Did she know he had been drinking in the barn before he'd gone into town? Her breasts in her rose sweater, the way she stood with her arms folded under them. If she died before he did, he would remember her that way. And the way she was able to make a meal out of nothing. It was a trick, a gift she had. Like her silence, the quiet of her. She was from his mother's side of the family. Sometimes too quiet. Though he'd rather have that than what Antoine had got himself—a shrew with a high-pitched voice. That terrible whine. You could hear it all the way to Rance. How did the man stand it? Maybe it was why Antoine had been so quick to go with the Maquis. Get away from the old woman.

  The brakes squealing from lack of oil. A dull ache up the back of his neck from the beer. Heavy, flat beer; maybe it was going bad, that's why he had the headache. How many bowls had he drunk? He wished he hadn't, but who knew a plane was going to fall out of the sky?

  The drink took the edge off the cold, made the hours move. The drinking was illegal, the beer contraband, all, that is, except for the weak beer that tasted like cat piss that they let you have in the cafés. All the real alcohol was supposed to go to the German front. But Henri, like Antoine and Jauquet, made his own beer and then kept it hidden in the barn.

  Every morning the same routine: the bread, the awful coffee, the fricassee that no longer had any bacon. Then the frigid air of the barn, where he pretended he had work to do. When the war was over, if it ever ended, the farm would be exposed for what it was—a ruin. Nearly sixty head of dairy cattle gone, the Germans would get the rest before the winter was out. His father's legacy— his father's father's legacy—slaughtered. He'd keep the house, get a job in the village, maybe Rance or Florennes. But what was there to do? What could he do except make repairs to nonexistent machinery?

  But nothing would ever be the same again, so what was the point of worrying? Who knew what would be left when the Germans were through with them? He'd known nothing would be the same since the day Antoine had come with the news Belgium had fallen, and then had asked him to join the Maquis. You couldn't say no. If you were asked, you had to join. He didn't like to think too long about what might have happened to him if Antoine hadn't asked. Ride the war out is what he'd have done. And there would have been some shame in that. If he had any motivation, and it wasn't much, it was that when this goddamn war was over he wanted to have done the right thing. Not the same as wanting to do the right thing. Not like Antoine. Not like Claire. With her nursing and her languages.

  The truth was, say it, he was scared, scared shitle
ss every day they had a Jew or an aviator in the house, scared just to be in Antoine's presence. He'd heard the life expectancy of a Resistance fighter was three months. Then how had he and Antoine made it so long? And didn't that mean their time was up? You knew you would be caught one day, shot. It was the only way you could get out.

  When Antoine had asked, Henri had known he couldn't say no.

  Léon now. Léon had courage. Léon had nothing left to lose. His son dead in the single week of fighting when the Germans had trampled over Belgium. Léon, angry, still grieving, but too sick for heavy work. He waited at the Germans’ tables at L'Hotel de Ville and listened to the talk, sometimes brought Antoine messages. Léon with his steel glasses and his workers’ cap. It was a wonder the Germans hadn't killed him already. He looked like a Bolshevik.

  Henri didn't want to find an American flyer. He didn't want to have to hide an American flyer in his attic. If the Germans caught him at this game, he would be shot, and the American would be given a beer.

  Shit, it was cold. The cobblestones made his teeth hurt. The sky the color of dust. Days like this, the cold seeped in, stayed through the night. You couldn't get rid of it no matter what you did. A young girl in a doorway. Did she wave at him? Was that Beauloye's daughter? The girl in dark lipstick. How old was she, anyway? Fifteen?