Read Online The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason - Free Book Online

hadn’t even flown that day. Marshall and his crew did not go out because the Dirty Lily had a fuel-line problem. They watched forty-one B-17s depart, and for the rest of the day they sweated out the mission with the ground crew.
    By tea time everyone’s nerves were on edge.
    As the first returning planes began to roll in, the jitters only intensified.
    “What’s the count?”
    “Twenty-seven, I think.”
    They watched and listened, long past tea time, but no other planes came. Four planes had aborted early. Ten planes were missing.
    Marshall imagined the lord of Lilford Manor having his tea, whether or not the planes returned. He shared his fancy house with a flock of nurses. Marshall had been to the place for a nurses’ dance. Long-legged Nurse Begley—where was she now?
    At mess, they heard a familiar rumbling, then the siren of the ambulance. They rushed out, mouths still full, to see who was coming home. It was not one of theirs but a Fortress from another base, a straggler that couldn’t go any farther.
    “At least somebody made it,” Marshall said when they returned to their quarters. “Whoever the hell they are.”
    One of his roommates, Al Grainger, threw his boots at the wall and said, “If I get back to the States alive, I’m going to fuck the first fifty girls I see, including the Statue of Liberty.”
    “Is she carrying a torch for you?”
    “I think so. I’ve lost my torch.”
    “It’s under your bunk.”
    Grainger rummaged beneath the bed and retrieved his flashlight.
    But all light was forbidden outside at night. He dropped the light on his bed, and they headed to the Officers’ Club to get drunk.
    “Where the hell is Oschersleben anyway?” asked Grainger.
    That night Marshall wrote to Loretta, Same old same old today. Trying to do my job. I’m starting to like English tea. I polished my shoes; etc., etc. Miss you badly, honey. Lights out now .
    “HIT ME,” MARSHALL SAID to the dealer. The snap-snap of cards distracted him from the roar in his ears left over from his pleasure jaunt over Bremen the previous day. He had been in the lead plane of his squadron, and he felt cocky. The losses on January 11 had made him angry, and he suspected that Webb was scared. Webb sat at the yoke mostly in silence, and he seemed unnerved when they neared the target. When he handed off control to the bombardier, he pressed his trembling hands on his knees. The landscape below was a dusty white, patches of snow below.
    Hootie couldn’t stop talking about a pilot named Gorman, who hadn’t come back from Oschersleben. Hootie, furtively regarding his cards, said, “What do you think—he could have escaped and gone over to someplace safe, some nice island with a white beach, nice sand. Good landing strip, long flat beach. He could be there, with women in little swimming-suits made out of feathers, and they could be gobbling coconuts and oranges.”
    “Ambrosia,” said Marshall. They looked at him. “Coconuts and oranges. My mother made it. It had bananas in it too.” He was recalling a dish so special, so rare, that it was like a taste of paradise. Ambrosia. Only at Christmas.
    “Yeah, bananas. A banana tree right there. Gorman would pick a banana and peel it back and put it in her mouth just so—” Hootie was demonstrating, but the laughter around him was hollow.
    “Knock it off, Hootie.” He was a goofball, always going off on a mental tangent.
    “You’ll get grounded, you keep rattling your mouth like that,” said a radio operator, a glum guy who never cracked a smile.
    “Who’s in?” asked the dealer.
    Guys like Gorman left and didn’t come back. They disappeared. A magic act— poof . There one day, gone the next. No one saw or heard what had happened. Poof .
    Marshall studied Loretta’s portrait, the flat, two-dimensional inanimate thing made of light and shadow, and wondered how he could possibly hold it dear. It wasn’t her. He should save her for later. If he succumbed too deeply