Read Online Paper Doll by Jim Shepard - Free Book Online Page A

grass.
    â€œIt’s the hydraulic line,” Tuliese said, instead of hello. “With this turret, it’s always the hydraulic line.” He had hung rags of various sizes from the barrels of the machine guns. Bryant thought of the Italian clotheslines in North Providence.
    Tuliese knew what he was doing, and their working relationship was such that Bryant was asked only to contribute his presence much of the time, to testify to the importance of what was going on. Snowberry, more in the dark than he was, and with more at stake in this case, this being his turret, poked closely at the nozzle assembly and offered odd and tangential suggestions. Tuliese accepted them the way he might have a child’s, and Bryant recalled a Saturday Evening Post cover, a tow-headed boy offering incongruous tools to help with Dad’s Hudson.
    â€œI heard this horrible story from Billy Mitts,” Snowberry said. “Belly gunner in the 100th. You hear it?”
    Bryant shook his head. There were a lot of ball turret stories going around.
    â€œThis guy was in a Liberator that went down short of the field in Long Stratton—did one of those numbers through a thicket, ended up in big pieces all over some guy’s estate. The belly gunner came out of it without a scratch.”
    Bryant nodded. “That’s a great story,” he said.
    â€œListen, listen,” Snowberry said. “This guy, he gets out, it turns out, he’s the only one there. He’s calling and calling, and crawls around the pieces, no bodies, no nothing. Turns out everybody bailed out. They gave the order and his interphone must’ve been shot out. He’d come all the way in and crashed alone.”
    Tuliese snorted to indicate that the idea appealed to him. He was feeding a new length of flexible hydraulic line onto an accepting nozzle.
    â€œI can’t get over that,” Snowberry said. “It gives me the jeebies just thinking about it.”
    â€œListen,” Bryant said. “The word ever comes to jump, I’ll make sure you’re in the know. My mother’s honor.”
    â€œJust leave a note for him, Sarge,” Tuliese said. “Plane goes down, it’s every man for himself.”
    â€œCome on, Tuliese,” Bryant said. “He doesn’t think it’s funny.”
    Tuliese looked at him without sympathy. Sweat stains under his arms connected at his sternum. Word was he hadn’t changed his undershirt since landfall in England.
    â€œWhy not?” he said. “He thinks everything else is.”
    Lewis and Snowberry enjoyed speculating on Tuliese’s family’s political orientation, as they did with Piacenti. Tuliese asserted that his family was American, having come over from Genoa years ago. Lewis and Snowberry called them the Black-shirts.
    â€œHey, come on,” Snowberry said. “Imagine coming in alone like that?”
    â€œYou think that’s bad,” Tuliese said. “You oughta ask Peeters about that poor son of a bitch in Cheyenne Lady. Ott. Dick Ott.”
    â€œIs this the guy in the tail?” Bryant asked. He hated when the conversations took this you-think-that’s-bad direction.
    â€œOtt? The wacko guy?” Snowberry asked.
    Hydraulic fluid squirted from the line connection across Tuliese’s arms. “This guy, don’t ask me why he isn’t off making pencils right now. He was on a ship called Flying Bison , they’re not even over the Channel yet, barely at altitude, and something goes wrong with the oxygen to the waist gunner. He passes out. Pilot goes looking for air and drops them eight thousand feet but panics and pulls out too fast, and the control cables go, and then the whole starboard wing.”
    Many of Tuliese’s stories carried a cautionary component involving reckless pilots damaging well-maintained aircraft, with fatal and grotesque results.
    â€œThe wing root pulls the bomb bay doors off, they shear