Prudence (9 page)

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F
rankie adjusted the focal length of the camera, just for something to do. The desert remained the same, always the same—self-evident. Here and there the sand and creosote were broken by an outcropping, a little hump of rock not tall enough to cast a shadow. Everything that needed to be seen was seen. The plane banked to the north, climbing a few thousand feet, then dropped back down, to simulate slipping through cloud cover. Each shift in altitude and bearing was announced, and each demanded that the bombardier make adjustments. Everything that needed to be seen and known in the USAAF was seen and known, and if you didn’t see it or know it, there were always more tests, more drills, more and more and more.

If only life had had a similar clarity back before training, back at the Pines. If only he had known seven months ago what he knew now. That day he got off the train and saw Billy standing on the platform in his new coat, and then Ernie and David came tumbling out after him and they stood in the heat and the humidity, smiling stupidly in the stupid sunlight. He had wanted so badly to show them all—dumb, bright Ernie and Jonathan, his sour face floating down over the lawn to the dock, and Emma, her face so contorted by rapture at his return that she looked insane—to show them that he was no longer the boy who kicked his legs under the table and grimaced at the liver on his plate, who followed Felix around or snuck into one of the cabins with Billy when everyone else was asleep. He’d wanted so much to be a man for Billy, for him most of all, in ways he never cared to be for Jonathan. That wasn’t the mark of a man, though. It was the anxiety of a boy. Get the Kraut. Let’s go get a Kraut. God, how stupid, after all.

If only he’d found some way to let them know—Emma and Jonathan and Felix and Billy, all of them—that he was no longer the boy he’d been. But how could he express that when the boy he’d been,
really been, was submerged under the different versions of him they cherished, while the real version, the real boy, had been as unexpressed, as unable to be expressed, as the man he was now?

These days Emma seemed to feel that her job as a war mother was to give him the news, every bit of news, about what was happening on the “home front.” A whiff of antic worry clung even to her letters. She told him how Chicago was finally livable again as a result of gas rationing. Lakeshore Drive and Michigan Avenue were virtually devoid of traffic and one could ride one’s bike around the Loop and actually breathe the air (not that she did, not that she would). You could hear the waves and gulls at Chicago Harbor, and it took only fifteen minutes to get from Oak Park to the Loop on the wide-open streets. Chicago was quiet, but Calumet and Gary, far to the southeast across the bay, growled and glowed like “some demon in hell” because the factories were going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A lot of the blacks worked there and even some women (not that Emma did, not that she could). And instead of cars, they were building tanks! Emma informed him that she had donated his old bicycle to the government. They needed all the metal they could get—old railings, wagons, even toys and typewriters (though she had saved the Underwood he used at Princeton, not to worry). It was impossible to find dried fruit, jam, butter, eggs, and especially sugar in the stores unless you knew someone, and even then you could never get as much as you would like. Jonathan had begun accepting payment from his patients in goods rather than money: silk, coffee, sugar, ink.

As for the Pines—it was as it always was, not even the war had changed it much. The camp across the way was getting bigger, more bunkhouses were being built for more prisoners, but there was no gas to be had, so the Chris-Craft was up on cribs and covered in tarps and Felix had to paddle to town, but he was an Indian, after all, and used to such things. With no one to cook for, because gas
rationing forbade touring and sightseeing by automobile, the kitchen girls had been let go. Harris reported that they had all found work on farms—baling hay, milking, painting—because with so many men in service, there was no one else to work the fields. And the cripple Mary was working for Harris himself, the skinflint.

Speaking of the kitchen girls—the pretty one, Stella (did he remember her?) married Billy this past November. That was a surprise, wasn’t it? But then again, the war was making everyone grow up fast, and as a married couple they would get extra rations. And now that Billy was drafted into the infantry, he would get extra pay, which they’d need for the little one that word had it was already on the way. Wouldn’t it be quite the coincidence if he and Frankie ended up serving together somehow?

He tried in his own letters, to Emma and to Prudence, to sound cheerful, upbeat. Another act.

Dear Prudy (I hope I can call you that—I hear that’s your nickname at the Pines and around town),

They’re keeping us busy. Classes and training. Training and classes. We have parades and PT (that’s physical training) and even KP (that stands for “kitchen patrol”). We get up and make our beds and march and go to class and march and eat and study and march and study and go to bed and get up and make our beds. Still, we’ve actually begun flying, and that’s a relief. It’s a relief to get up off the ground, to feel the air underneath you. To know that nothing except the air and your movement are keeping you up.

When I get back I’ll take you flying. Everything looks different from up here. I imagine the Pines is even prettier from the air, with the trees and the water. I’ll take you up someday.
That’s a promise. I hope you’re listening to Felix. He’s a good egg. I’m sure it gets lonely with everyone gone. But when the war’s over, everything will be different.

I hope this letter finds you happy. And that you’re doing everything you’re supposed to be doing. At least spring is on the way. You’re in my thoughts all the time, Prudy. I hope you know that.

Your Frankie

Even a letter like that took some effort. But after what she’d been through, it cost him only some paper and a few minutes. Emma, back in Chicago, had urged Frankie to write her, care of Harris, at the Wigwam, at least a letter or two.

She had Felix, of course, to look after her, but there was no one else. She’d had no other family but her sister, and there had been no place to send her back to. She was in school and doing quite well—he really should write her, it must be dull for a girl her age with only Felix around the place, and Emma stuck in Chicago with a million little things to do.

Frankie had done that much, it was the least he could do. Not that he could say anything of real importance, but it felt good to send her letters of his days and his hopes for hers, and stories of the Pines back before everything went to hell.

What a mess. What a pointless mess, after all was said and done. He took in Emma’s weekly news—the rationing, Billy’s marriage, wartime Chicago—with a kind of numb amazement: not so much at the news itself but at the idea that life elsewhere continued. It was as if all the news were part of some story, some story made up by life’s author that had nothing really to do with life itself. If only he could send Emma and Prudence his news, his
real
news. If only they saw
what he had seen. He wasn’t allowed to say anything, of course. Their mail was censored and would be until they were, officially, officers, at which point they would be expected to censor their own mail. But even uncensored, what could he say and how could he say it in such a way as to make them understand? They couldn’t possibly. They couldn’t possibly understand the bombardier’s manual or the Norden sight or why all of it was so important. They would never get it.

Sometimes, when he let it, that day in the woods when they went after the Kraut came back to him—the heat, the heavy air, Billy’s sheepish smile as he picked the twig from his hair, then the shot, and the girl’s legs twitching and jerking, spending their agony in the leaves, and the awful silence afterward—but he pushed it away. Compared to what he was doing now, all those years at the Pines and that one sad, awful day vanished below him, lost in the desert.

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T
he day the B-17 pilot training manuals were distributed, the lieutenant in charge of their instruction had said, “Read this. Memorize it. This is your code.”

And he had.

Accurate and effective bombing is the ultimate purpose of your entire airplane and crew. Every other function is preparatory to hitting and destroying the target.
Nothing he studied at Princeton had that clarity of purpose. The manual went further:
The success or failure of the mission depends upon what he accomplishes in that short interval of the bombing run.
He took this to heart, too. Reading further, in that hot classroom, he felt a lump rise in his throat.
When the bombardier takes over the airplane for the run on the target, he is in absolute command. He will tell you what he wants done, and until he tells you “bombs away,” his word is law. A great deal, therefore, depends on the understanding between bombardier and pilot. You expect your
bombardier to know his job when he takes over. He expects you to understand the problems involved in his job, and to give him full cooperation. Teamwork between pilot and bombardier is essential.

To read those words, so dry and precise (never mind the shifting point of view and audience), was a profound experience for Frankie. No words had ever rung more true or more necessary for him. Not even the many passages of
The Iliad
he had committed to memory. Not,
Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus
. Not,
A dark cloud of grief fell upon Achilles as he listened. He filled both hands with dust from off the ground, and poured it over his head, disfiguring his comely face, and letting the refuse settle over his shirt so fair and new. He flung himself down all huge and hugely at full length, and tore his hair with his hands.
Those passages, among others, which had moved him so much when he first encountered them as a student at Fenwick’s—and treasured again at Princeton because he had secretly cast himself as Achilles and Billy as Patroclus and had gone so far as to underline, in pencil, the passages where Achilles mourns the death of his friend—seemed secondary to these sober, clear, necessary instructions.

He took to heart the urging of the manual that “there are many things with which a bombardier must be thoroughly familiar in order to release his bombs at the right point to hit his predetermined target.” The manual went on, rightly, to list those things, set off by bullet points:

• He must know and understand his bombsight, what it does, and how it does it.
  
• He must thoroughly understand the operation and upkeep of his bombing instruments and equipment.
  
• He must know that his racks, switches, controls, releases, doors, linkage, etc., are in first-class operating condition.
  
• He must understand the automatic pilot as it pertains to bombing.
  
• He must know how to set it up and make adjustments and minor repairs while in flight.
  
• He must know how to operate all gun positions in the airplane.
  
• He must know how to load and clear simple stoppages and jams of machine guns while in flight.
  
• He must be able to load and fuse his own bombs.
  
• He must understand the destructive power of bombs and must know the vulnerable spots on various types of targets.
  
• He must understand the bombing problem, bombing probabilities, bombing errors, etc.
  
• He must be thoroughly versed in target identification and in aircraft identification.
  

Frankie took all the directives in the manual very seriously. He studied the schematics of the B-17 from tip to tail, though he hadn’t yet seen one in real life. He spent extra time at gunnery practice, and could field dress the .50-caliber machine guns almost as quickly as the waist, turret, and tail gunners. He had never been very mechanically inclined, though he always got a thrill out of helping Felix fix the big motor on the Chris-Craft. But he found that he excelled at loading and fusing the bombs in the bomb bay of the trainers. When the racks got stuck on practice missions, he and the engineer would stand over the open bomb bays at 24,000 feet and, with screwdrivers, release the payload.

At the end of their instruction, he and the rest of the bombardiers had been assembled on the hardstand at Maxwell Field, in front of their training officers, who stood on a raised wooden platform. They raised their hands and repeated after the officers in charge:

Mindful of the secret trust about to be placed in me by my Commander in Chief, the President of the United States, by whose direction I have been chosen for bombardier training . . . and mindful of the fact that I am to become guardian of one of my country’s most priceless military assets, the American bombsight . . . I do here, in the presence of Almighty God, swear by the Bombardier’s Code of Honor to keep inviolate the secrecy of any and all confidential information revealed to me, and further to uphold the honor and integrity of the Army Air Forces, if need be, with my life itself.

There was a lump the size of a bread box on the dais, covered in a white sheet. After they recited the oath, the lead instructor lifted the sheet to reveal the famous Norden bombsight, which they’d studied but never actually seen. It looked like a spare car part, but it would be treated with utmost secrecy, escorted to and from the plane in a canvas bag under armed guard.

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O
ver the intercom, the pilot announced they were commencing the bombing run. Frankie bent over the camera and began shooting pictures, one every five seconds for the five minutes until the bombardier announced, “Bombs away.” The other cadet released the racks. The bomb bay doors opened and the heavy, close air inside the uninsulated body of the AT-11 Kansan was sucked out, and Frankie’s skin, awash in sweat, suddenly cooled. The pilot spoke again and the student acting as bombardier answered and took over the controls. The plane was now being flown by the bombardier.
They held level. Frankie snapped pictures. Desert. More desert. He tried to remain empty of everything except the task before him. All his thoughts—about the dead girl and the live one, about Billy (Where was he now? Was he really married? And, oh, those hands of his and that smile of his . . .), had been sucked out of the plane, along with the heat. The bombardier announced, “Bombs away,” and the third student pulled the lever on the rack and the bombs—all ten of them—dropped out. The plane lifted forty feet higher in the air, suddenly unencumbered. Frankie breathed in a sudden
oh!
as he was lofted along with the lumbering metal, his body suddenly weightless and empty and free. A little foretaste, a sample, of the freedom that would be his when he finished training and was matched with a real crew and a real B-17 and was shipped overseas.