Blue Skies Tomorrow (19 page)

This was no overture to a romantic second act, but a pastor reaching out to a broken person. In her brokenness, Helen placed a sheet of stationery on the box propped on her knees. Perhaps she could sort out the mess of her life through this correspondence, not only from Ray’s wisdom, but also the very act of writing.

She uncapped her pen. “Lord, help me know what to say and what not to.”

Dear Ray,

Thank you so much for your letter. I’m pleased to hear you’re doing well at the training center. What a joy for you to fly again and to see your brother. I know the Lord will be with you and keep you safe, and that you’ll do well in your new position.

Helen huffed out a sigh. If only she could write, “Please, please forgive me for calling you a coward. I spoke in anger—rash, unthinking words, and I love you as you are, gentle and kind and thoughtful.” Instead she wrote:

My job is going well, although the hours are long and I’m falling behind in my volunteer work. The town proved it can function without me and raised $440,000 in the Fifth War Loan, 126 percent of our goal, while northern California came in at only 39 percent of its goal. However, our Red Cross branch is far behind in preparing surgical dressings, and I long to help. Most of all, I miss my heart’s work, what I do best and serves the Lord most.

I remind myself this is necessary so I can get my own place. I try to be firm with Jay-Jay, but it’s hard with doting grandparents in the house.

Helen leaned her head back against the wall. That ran deeper than she could reveal. Over dinner, Mr. Carlisle called his wife stupid for forgetting the pepper in the meatloaf, and she’d agreed with effusive apologies.

Jim used to belittle Helen like that, and she’d learned to apologize for her failings, hoping to stave off a beating. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

Did Mr. Carlisle beat his wife? Was that why she was such a shrunken, pathetic thing?

Even in the summer heat, Helen shivered. If Jim had lived, would she have shrunk as well? They’d only been married three and a half years, the last blessed year apart thanks to the institution of the draft. Helen had nudged Jim to patriotism. Wasn’t it better to volunteer and pick his service than to let Uncle Sam draft him and make the decision? He chose the Navy, and Helen told him what a hero he was, her brave husband, she said, swinging the Grim Reaper’s scythe, longing to be widowed, to be released.

She clenched her arms around her middle, and the sweat on her stomach soaked through to her bare arms. Some words could never be written.

Over France
Friday, July 14, 1944

“There’s the next bonfire,” Lt. Earl Radovich called from the navigator’s desk down in
One O’Clock Jump’
s nose compartment. “Right on course.”

“Check,” Ray said. Two thousand feet below in the darkness, an orange dot throbbed on French soil, as if imitating the sliver of rising sun ahead on the horizon.

He nudged the control wheel forward to descend to five hundred feet for the supply drop to French resistance fighters. Instead of using radio navigational aids that might tip off the Germans, the 94th Bomb Group had only the ancient glow of bonfires to guide them.

The long black shapes of the thirty-three other B-17s stood out against the reddening sky.

This mission was a test for Ray, and he knew it. The medium-altitude approach meant no oxygen and no excuse to abort. Not that he needed it—no odd singing from Hewett, no trance from Buffo, no tingling lips from Burgess. And no fear in Ray. None. Nothing but peace.

What Jack couldn’t have known was how the nature of the mission removed Ray’s concern about killing people. Unless a supply canister hit someone on the head.

“Excuse me, kind sirs.” Between the pilots’ seats, Lt. John Buffo, the bombardier, wiggled his large frame out of the passageway from the nose compartment. “Perhaps the Army Air Force wasn’t the most appropriate choice for a man of my delicate constitution.”

“Who else would take you, Proffo?” Goldman said.

Ray grinned at the juxtaposition of an English professor’s brain with the name and body of a football lineman.

Buffo squeezed past Hewett’s top gun turret to check on the supply canisters in the bomb bay. “Curse my keen mind and love of all things aerial.”

By the time Buffo returned, the day had brightened to yellow, the planes to silver, and the lead Forts sprouted wheels beneath them like birds poised to grab a telephone wire.

Ray checked the altimeter. “Thousand feet. Lower the landing gear.”

Beside him, Leo Goldman flipped the switch. “Check.”

“Bomb bay doors open,” Buffo said.

The grinding of the undercarriage added to the engine noise, and
Jump
’s speed fell as planned to increase the accuracy of the drop.

The land below beckoned with wooded hills and wide green meadows. The French Maquis had chosen a sparsely populated area in the Rhône Valley for the drop, while the rest of the Third Bombardment Division delivered supplies in six other regions, and the B-24 Liberators of Second Division hit airfields as a diversion.

Eight hundred feet, seven hundred, and the flying grew tricky even at the reduced speed of 130 miles per hour. Ray kept a close eye on the formation and the terrain. Five hundred feet wasn’t quite buzzing, but close.

“We’re approaching Area 5-A.” Radovich used the code for the classified area. If shot down and interrogated, they could compromise the resistance if they knew too much.

“I see them.” Buffo had the best view from the clear conical nose.

The lead plane released its load, and the others followed suit as they crossed the target area.

“Canisters away.” Buffo released twelve 300-pound containers of food, medical supplies, and ammunition, and tiny parachutes blossomed in red, white, and blue for Bastille Day.

“They’re waving,” Buffo said. “I think—yes, they’re giving us the
V
for Victory.”

Ray stole a quick glance below, where miniature people waved and blew kisses. He snapped his gaze back to the formation, the altimeter, and the airspeed indicator. His throat and heart felt full. Those men and women had lived under the fist of Nazi tyranny for four years. They risked their lives to aid fugitives, commit sabotage, and gather intelligence. True heroes.

They couldn’t see him, but he saluted anyway. “May you celebrate next Bastille Day in freedom.”

Ray thought he was so brave flying a plane over enemy territory, but he was high above, not down there making hard decisions. What was best? To submit to authority as the Bible taught? Or to resist evil schemes as the Bible also taught?

With the landing gear tucked in place, Ray gained speed and altitude and wheeled away with the group. The Germans hadn’t sent up the Luftwaffe or any antiaircraft fire—yet. He busied himself with the hard work of flying a four-engine bomber in formation, glad his crewmates would handle the shooting if it came.

“Say, fellows, keep an eye on that cloud at two o’clock high,” Hewett said, his head in the Plexiglas bubble in the roof behind Ray. “I saw flashes.”

“Buffo, Hewett, watch that area,” Goldman said. “The rest of you watch your sectors.”

One O’Clock Jump
had twelve guns. Buffo had twin .50 caliber machine guns in the chin turret, while Radovich manned a single in each cheek, and Hewett had twin guns in the top turret. Back in the waist compartment, Tucker and Paladino worked .50s in each window, and Finley curled around two guns in the ball turret hanging below the fuselage. Off by himself, Burgess operated the two stingers in the tail.

Ray glanced up to the right. The silver flashes grew bigger, and Ray’s stomach twisted around itself. The seat-pack parachute felt reassuring under his backside, but he didn’t feel like practicing his German today.
Lord, please get me through this. Don’t let me do something stupid.

Hewett spun the top turret. “Okay, boys, bogies at two o’clock high.”

Ray drew a deep breath, which caught on his dry throat. Stay in formation. No evasive maneuvers. Concentrate on flying, let the gunners do their jobs. Keep calm. Keep steady. Keep praying.

The flashes took shape—eight little single-engine Messerschmitt 109s, fast and nimble.

“Reminds me of a poem,” Buffo said on the interphone. “ ‘Storm’d at with shot and shell, boldly they rode and well, into the jaws of Death.’ ”

“ ‘Charge of the Light Brigade,’ ” Ray said.

“That it is. Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

“They all died.”

“Not all.”

“Leave it to the prof to cheer us up,” Goldman said. “Why don’t you assign a twenty-page term paper while you’re at it?”

As the fighters zoomed in, Ray understood the brigadiers better. Their courage took a different form than that of the Maquis, to charge forward into danger when they had no other option.

“ ‘Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die, into the valley of Death rode the Six Hundred.’ ”

Goldman hunched his shoulders and groaned. “Thanks, Proffo. Now you’ve got Pops spouting doom and gloom.”

Right. He shouldn’t be chattering in the first place, and as a pastor, he should speak words of comfort, but how could he when the lead Me 109 tipped and dived, spitting death at the high squadron?

Some men liked adrenaline, even longed for it, but Ray disliked the tinny taste of it, the erratic heartbeat, the tightened muscles, and the way it addled his brain.

Another Me 109 peeled off for the low squadron, but
Jump
was in the high element, to the inside of the combat box. The fighter zipped past the Forts to Ray’s right, the fire of tracers crossing midair.

Burgess whooped from the tail. “They got him. He’s going down.”

Less than a second. It all took less than a second. The adrenaline chilled in a bilious pool in Ray’s stomach. “Is there a chute?”

“Oh yeah, there is. Too bad. He’ll come back up tomorrow.”

Ray breathed out an unpatriotic sigh.

“Eyes open, boys,” Goldman said. “Here come some more.”

Six fighters swooped down like hornets, every which way, but Ray kept his hands steady on the controls and throttles. He had no choice but to forge ahead. Into the valley of Death.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” Thou art with me. Thou art with me.

Jump
’s guns opened in an ear-splitting staccato that jiggled the plane. German bullets frayed the trailing end of the right wing, but not the flaps or ailerons, nor any of the hydraulic lines, fuel lines, and control cables that ran through the wing. And Ray pressed on.

Then the fighters broke off the attack, and no one was injured, and not one bomber had fallen in the 94th, and they entered Normandy—Allied territory.

“Good job, men. Good job.” Ray clapped Goldman on the shoulder. His cheeks hurt, his smile was so adrenaline-wide.

He couldn’t wait to tell Helen, even if she never read the letter. He couldn’t wait to see Jack’s face. And for the first time ever, he wanted to buzz the tower.

19

Naval Magazine, Port Chicago
Monday, July 17, 1944

Vic had never kept Helen this late.

She leaned her elbows on the desk, pressed her fingers over bleary eyes, then fanned her hands out to the side. Yes, the clock actually read 10:10. A new record.

She closed her eyes.
Lord, I can’t keep up like this. I need more time with Jay-Jay, more time with you. Please give me courage to speak up and wisdom to know what to say
.

Ray had both courage and wisdom.

In his last letter, he said God would give courage for Ray to get through combat and for Helen to face her battles.

A rush of warmth turned up her sleepy lips. He had sent three letters even though he hadn’t received her replies. Sometimes, in censor-pleasing vagueness, he described the beauty of a sunrise from above the clouds or the quirks of the men at his base or the quaint villages in the area, and other times he delved deep and opened up about his fears and concerns.

When she wrote him the day before, she declared Sir Raymond the Valiant would slay his dragon as surely as Saint George had in olden days.

Helen headed into Vic’s office. She had some slaying of her own to do. “It’s late. I want to go home.”

“Sure.” Vic grinned and snapped shut the latches on his briefcase. “We got a lot done today.”

Did they? It seemed like busywork to her. Papers passed back and forth, but the men’s complaints never changed. Did the Navy send Vic only for appearance’s sake?

He held the door open. “After you, my dear.”

Helen looped her shoulder bag over her head and across her chest, and headed out the door. She stumbled over the threshold.

“Careful,” he said. “Why don’t you hold my arm?”

She marched down the hall and out into the cool night air. “I don’t need your arm. I need to go home. It’s late and I’m tired.”