B for Buster (2 page)

I thought it was lucky that there were five of us and five empty beds in one hut. But Ratty figured out the truth. “Hey,” he said. “Who do you think slept here last?”

“Some other crew, I guess,” said Buzz.

“Yeah, and what happened to
them
?” asked Ratty. “They got the chop, didn't they? They must have done; no lie.”

That was his second favorite expression: “no lie.” It was as though he thought we doubted everything he told us. But I stretched out on my bed, and I knew he was right. Mine and all the others were empty because a bomber hadn't come home. Our beds didn't only
look
like rows of graves. That was exactly what they were.

CHAPTER 2

WE WALKED ACROSS THE field at dawn, with our parachutes and our yellow Mae Wests. We didn't bother with our fur-lined clothes; we wouldn't be going high enough to freeze to death on an afternoon in May. We walked in a row, with Lofty in the middle, and I felt like Doc Holliday stepping out with the Earps. I swaggered, and swung my chute.

But I forgot about cowboys as I got close to the bombers. They were huge, fantastic things, with little men working underneath them. Their black wings, wet with dew, reached a hundred feet from tip to tip. Just the wheels were nearly as tall as a man, and they towered up from those—on their struts and engine pods—with their long noses thrusting out even higher. At their very top their canopies sparkled, as high above me as third-story windows. I wished I could sit up there, in the pilot's “front office.” The nearer we came, the more our heads tipped back to see them, until my cap fell clear off my head. I picked it up and jammed it on again, embarrassed to think I'd been caught at a silly game. Desperate to look like Uncle Joe, I had hidden in the lavatory and torn the stiffening wire out of the cap. I'd crumpled the cloth, and now the darned thing was too big. But no one even noticed. They all gawked at the bombers as we strolled toward them.

The little men—the erks—that bustled round seemed like the keepers of fabulous beasts. They passed in and out of the shadows, behind the tail fins, under noses. They swarmed over the wings and round the wheels.

I couldn't walk as slowly as the others, or wait the extra minute to see our
B for Buster.
I started running, first with my head down in a sprint, and then with my arms spread out and my parachute swaying, my feet dancing me along in spirals and hops. I swirled in among the erks, and they all stopped working to watch me. Two were tightening bolts on a wheel; another tapped at a tail fin. One was high on the wing, crouched like a gargoyle, and I smelled the petrol that he was pumping into the tanks, and saw how the fumes shivered and shook him.

I stood beside the fuselage, below the little window that was fitted in where I would sit, at my own desk with my own wireless and all the controls. I grinned at that small opening, imagining myself staring out of it, looking down through miles of sky at a land like a toy-train world.

Above my window, tiny white bombs were painted on the metal in columns and rows. I counted them, and saw that
B for Buster
had flown forty-four ops already. That was good, I thought. She knew her business. Farther forward, at the nose, a mule was painted on the metal. Head down, heels up, it kicked at a frightened little Hitler. But Hitler had no legs, and the mule, no ears. The metal was patched in those places, the painting never redone.

Lofty and the rest came sedately, but grinning as well. They stood in their row right under the nose, and
Buster
towered above them. Lofty said with a nod, “She's a pretty good bus,” as though this wasn't his first one. Then we took a walk around her, and one of the erks came, too, the chief of the bunch. He said his name was Sergeant Piper—just like that—“I'm Sergeant Piper,” he said, as though his mom had named him Sergeant. He carried a clipboard, and he pointed at all the metal plates that were newer than the rest; he told us how each had come to be there. He talked about night fighter cannons, and flak, and eighty-eights. He pointed at a wingtip and said a tree had whacked it once. “Silly bloody tree,” he added. “So the pilot said.”

It seemed that
Buster
had healed herself from a thousand wounds, her metal plates regrowing. Up and down the fuselage, on both the wings and right across the double tail, the scars stood out in strips and squares.

“She seems a bit unlucky,” said Buzz.

“No lie,” said Ratty. “Wheezy jeezy.” His number one expression.

The erk had a smear of oil on his face. He rubbed at it with the back of his hand. “Well, there's truth in that,” he said. “Yes, there's truth in that, all right.” And he spat on the ground.

He was a funny erk, a sort of
middle
guy. He wasn't old or young, not tall or short, not thin or fat or mean or nice. In every way he was somewhere in the middle.

Lofty squinted down at him. Lofty was so tall that he looked down at just about everybody. “There's no such thing as luck,” he said.

“That so?” said Sergeant Piper. “That so, is it?”

“Yes, it is,” said Lofty.

“Well . . .” The erk rubbed at the oil. “Seems to me there is, all right. Yes, seems that way to me.”

“Then you're wrong, old boy,” said Lofty in his British whine. He turned his back and pointed to the starboard tail fin, a mass of new metal. “What happened there?”

“It got shot up,” said the erk.

“Silly bloody bullets?”

Sergeant Piper grunted. “Well, I don't know, you see. There was no one left to tell us.” He looked at the oil that he had smeared now to the back of his hand. “Only two came back. We used a fire hose to wash out the rear gunner, and—”

“Wheezy jeezy,” said Ratty, our rear gunner.

“The flight engineer died in the cockpit,” Sergeant Piper continued. “He was a goner before anyone reached him.”

“What about the pilot?” said Lofty.

“Wasn't there,” said Sergeant Piper. “No pilot. No wireless operator. No navigator.” He ticked them off on his stained fingers. “No bomb aimer. No mid-upper gunner. Gone. All of them gone. The flight engineer landed the bus. Beautiful landing, too.” He shook his head. “A real daisy cutter.”

It was a chilling story, if I thought about it. The entire crew now dead, but the kite still here and ready to go again. We stood with our fingers at our chins, staring at the tail, and I—at least—wished the erk had kept the story to himself. Pop was frowning, and Ratty looked a little frightened.

The erk shook his finger at Lofty. “Now, wouldn't you say that that was bad luck,
old boy
?”

Lofty glared back. His nostrils opened and his eyebrows narrowed, until he looked a bit like a dog getting ready to growl. Then he laughed and said, “What a load of rubbish.”

“You think so?” asked Sergeant Piper. “Is that what you think?”

They studied each other for a moment. Then Sergeant Piper nearly smiled. He held out his clipboard, and Lofty signed the Form 700, which said he was taking responsibility for the kite.
Buster
belonged to the erks, and we could only borrow it, signing it out for each flight like an enormous library book. Sergeant Piper spat again, then walked away under
Buster
's nose.

“Impossible fellow,” said Lofty. He made himself British in the worst way, all puffed up with a funny pout on his face, his eyes bulging. “Im-
poss
-ible!” Then he shook himself. “Come on, boys. Let's take a look inside.”

I went like a kid to the fair, but Pop held me back. “Let Lofty go first,” he said quietly. “He's the skipper; she's his ship.”

I stepped back, and Pop smiled. “That's a good lad,” he said.

We climbed through the door on the starboard side, down toward the tail. Will followed Lofty, and Simon followed him. Then Pop nodded at me. “Up you go,” he said, and I put my knee on the sill and hoisted myself into the fuselage. I went forward, climbing uphill through the tunnel above the bomb bay, past the little toilet and the two bunks, through the flight engineer's narrow compartment. Beyond the bulkhead, on the left, Lofty was settling into his seat. I stepped down to the nose, into a smell of leather and petrol and kerosene.

Right at the front, Will was hunched over his bombsight, holding the button on its twisted cord as though he imagined himself on a bombing run. Simon was at his navigator's desk, facing the starboard side. I slid to my left and dropped into the seat by the little square window. I twiddled the knobs on the wireless.

We put our helmets on, buttoned our oxygen masks, and plugged into the intercom. Lofty called out our names. Then he said, “Right. Let's get this bus in the air.”

There seemed a hundred gauges that had to be checked, a thousand buttons and switches to press. Finally the engines were started, and the four airscrews buzzed in big gray circles. The erks pulled the chocks away. We taxied to the runway, talked to the tower. Lofty said, “Hang on.”

The throttles opened; the noise was nearly deafening. We rushed forward, and I felt myself pressed against my seat. Fields of green went shooting past my window. The tail lifted; Ratty said, “Oo-oop!” as though the bounce had made him airsick. We shimmied left, then right; we lurched and bubbled. And up we went, free from the ground, banking in a turn.

“Shazam!” I cried into the intercom.

Someone laughed, and I knew it was another stupid thing I'd done. I slapped my helmet and called myself an idiot.
Quoting Captain Marvel. What a fool you are,
I thought. But, still, it was the way I felt, that I could— like Captain Marvel—use the wizard's spell to change myself from a boy to a hero. In the bomber, in the sky, with my wireless and all, I really did gain the powers of the six gods that I summoned with that cry. I was Solomon, Hercules and Atlas, Zeus and Achilles and Mercury all rolled into one. I whispered to myself that magical word made of their initials.
Shazam!

We flew toward the west, two thousand feet above the ground. Farms went by, and villages, and little carts and horses on the roads. We wheeled and turned, dipping into valleys. We flew so low across the hills that we mowed the grass along the crests.

The kite tilted. Will whooped like a cowboy as the ground zoomed up toward him. Then Ratty did the same as it fell away behind, and the words “jolly rovers” popped into my mind, and a picture of sailors laughing. We were like that: like sailors in the sky. I felt warm inside, as happy as I had ever been. Suddenly it didn't matter at all that I was too clumsy to ever be a pilot; it was good enough to go roving in the sky.

My life right then was nearly perfect. If a genie had appeared in
Buster'
s cramped nose and offered me three wishes, I would have taken only one: to be older by two or three years. It was a curse to be young.

The rest of the crew—like all the crews—stuck together as though they had magnets in their clothes. They liked me well enough, or I thought they did. But I had to keep myself apart, from a fear of being discovered. I knew that I stood out too much when the others started drinking or gambling, or just talking about all the things they'd done. On the outside, in my uniform, I looked old enough; I looked nearly the same as them. But inside I was shy and awkward, sometimes loud and stupid, and often felt that I didn't fit in. Even my voice still squeaked now and then. I had to
pretend
to shave, sometimes nicking my skin—with a grimace and a quick flick of the razor—to raise a drop of blood. Each night I was terrified as I slipped into bed that someone would see my nearly hairless body or, worse, the part of me that so often stood at attention no matter what I was thinking.

In the air, though, I never had to worry. Hidden at my desk, just a voice on the intercom, I was equal to them all. They needed me then, all right. I was the ears and the mouth of
Buster,
and without me they were deaf and dumb.

We flew over Harrogate and on toward Settle. Puffs of clouds floated by, shining in the sun like steamy parachutes. I wished I had a glass bubble around me, as the gunners did, and the bomb aimer. Only Simon could see less than me; the navigator had no window at all.

I pushed the button for my intercom. “Skipper, can I come up?” I asked.

“Be my guest, old boy,” said Lofty.

I went and stood beside him. I leaned on the side of his seat and watched the clouds race toward us. They looked solid from the cockpit, like giant cue balls sliding through the sky. I loved the way they tore apart as
Buster
went ripping through them, and I muttered, “Bam! Kapow!” as they shredded open. I felt the giant bomber shake and lurch, and I heard the thrumming of the airscrews, a roar that was always with us. I saw the sunlight flashing on the metal wings, the feathery streams of our vapor trail, and I felt like Buck Rogers racing through space in a fabulous ship. “Roaring Rockets!” I said, my voice drowned out by the engines.

I wished that my friends from Kakabeka could see me. I wished that my
dad
could see me, and know that I had done better than him. Already I had gone farther and seen more than he ever would, and one day I would go home covered in medals, and I would walk past him on the street and pretend that I didn't even know him. That would make him feel sorry, I thought, for all the things he had done, and I planned for that day, but dreaded it, too. The war had made me special, and I didn't want it to end. My secret hope was that I would still learn to fly, and then—at the end of the war—the air force would give me a Spitfire as a kind of reward, and I would go barnstorming all across Canada.

Lofty adjusted the pitch on the number one engine. He worked the lever, then tapped a gauge. He was always moving, pushing the column back and forth, pressing his feet at the rudders. His head tipped and nodded to watch the sky, and I watched
him,
almost green with envy.

Whenever we flew, I imagined Lofty passing out or something. I imagined everyone panicking, but me staying calm, rushing up to take the controls, sitting in that fabulous chair in the great “front office,” surrounded by switches and dials. I could take her down, I thought; I could land the bus.

Lofty made it look so easy. He flew old
Buster
as low as he could, then as
slow
as he could, with the wheels down and the flaps down and the bomb doors open. He had to run the engines flat out to keep her going like that, and he shouted the airspeed, and it was so impossibly slow that everyone whistled and clapped. Except for Pop. “She'll stall,” he said. “You'll put us in a spin.”