B for Buster Read online

  Then, as though I’d jinxed us, Buster started leaking fuel. It dribbled from a valve, from a tank or broken hose. It streamed out behind us in a silvery mist that Ratty said was just like fizzy soda pop.

  “Flight engineer, what’s the story?” asked Lofty.

  “I think we’ll make the coast,” said Pop. “I think we’ll get to England, Skipper.”

  We had to feather number one, then feather number four. The airscrews stopped, their blades edged to the wind. For every mile we flew, we fell a thousand feet, and we flew so slowly home that daylight almost caught us up.

  But Pop was right: we got as far as England, and a little more. Lofty said he’d put us down near Chelmsford, where the Yankees had a base.

  Ratty cheered. “Wheezy jeezy,” he said through the intercom. “I’ll get to speak American!”

  We landed on a runway that was long and fat and smooth, built for the great Flying Forts. We taxied in amongst them, a black sheep, dented and leaking, amid a flock of grand machines.

  I carried the pigeon box out of the kite, then lifted Gilbert from it. I opened the metal cylinder on his leg, pulled out the paper, and penciled out a note for Bert. Then I packed it up again as the others watched, cracking jokes about how the pigeon finally had to work for its living.

  I tossed it up. “Fly home!” I said.

  Gilbert spiraled above us. Round and round he went, wheeling in a widening circle.

  “He’s lost!” cried Buzz.

  I said, “Shut up. He’s not.”

  We all stood staring up, turning like beacons as the pigeon whirled above us. Then off it went across the runway.

  “Straight to Trafalgar Square,” said Simon.

  Ratty laughed. “No lie. That’s where I would go if I was him.”

  The Americans took over Buster as though they had captured the old crate. They pulled her into a hangar and stripped the cowlings from all four engines. It was their first look at a Halifax, and they called this one “a haywire job.” They sent a fellow off in a little one-engined hack to fetch a part from the nearest Halifax squadron. “Take your time,” shouted Ratty to the guy.

  We spent all that day with the Americans, and the night as well. They filled Buster with fuel, and filled us with the best food we’d had in all our time in England. We sat in a gleaming mess and gorged ourselves— like storybook pigs at a fine restaurant—on meat and chips and apple pie and ice cream. “We’ve landed in Oz,” said Lofty.

  The Yankees lived in riches, and shared them all with us. They gave us sacks of chewing gum, a pile of boxes full of candy bars. Ratty really did speak American: it turned out to be a loud language in which everyone was Buddy and Pal. He slapped backs and shook hands and said, “Gee, this is swell.”

  Buzz hovered at his side, as though he was sure our little rear gunner would jump ship and stay forever below the big Stars and Stripes that fluttered from the flagpole. But if I had been Ratty, I wouldn’t have joined the Americans for anything in the world. They had it worse than us, and I could see it in their faces, in the twitches in their cheeks. A gunner who came to sit with us said he’d racked up eleven ops. “Missions,” he called them. “I’m not halfway,” he said. “I got fourteen more to go.”

  “Jeez, we gotta fly thirty,” said Ratty.

  “Yeah, but at night, pal.” The gunner pointed up. “Try hanging there in the sun. Biggest, brightest thing up there. You’re floating bare-assed in a river full of gators.”

  “At least you see them coming,” said Buzz.

  “Wish I didn’t, pal. You’re flying along at twenty thousand feet, and you see ’em crawling up, you watch ’em spiral round and round like a bunch of buzzards coming for you. You see ’em gather, then in they come all at once, from here and there and up and down.” His hands jerked out, as though he was flinging things all over the room. “You see the bits of metal jumping off the Fortresses, then the smoke and then the fire. You see the Forts drop away, and you see ’em break apart. You see your buddies tumble out.”

  The gunner closed his eyes. The corner of his mouth flickered back and forth. “My seventh mission, a guy fell past me. Boom!—right past. He didn’t have a parachute. He was just falling. His legs, they were kicking, and his arms were going like this.” The gunner’s hands, in fists, moved liked a sprinter’s, but only inches forward and back. “He was running in the air, buddy. He was trying to run away. Then I seen his face as he fell past. He looked me right in the eyes, right in the eyes as he went running past me in the air.” The gunner shook; his breath nearly sobbed. “You see that, you don’t forget it, pal. Live to be a hundred, you still end up looking eye to eye every night with a guy falling twenty thousand feet.”

  In the time that the gunner had flown his eleven ops, half his group had gotten the chop. He figured the other half would get it before the end of September. “Reckon I’ll be one of them,” he said.

  Ratty didn’t say very much after that. When we finished eating, he started asking around, trying to find someone from his hometown. Buzz went with him, right at his side, like a bodyguard who was more frightened than the guy he was guarding. I saw them standing in a big mob of Americans, little Ratty right at the center. Buzz was pointing around with his finger, asking, “So, did all of you guys live in cardboard boxes?”

  There wasn’t a chance that Ratty would stay. Even if he could have done that, I didn’t think he would. The Flying Fortresses certainly looked huge and beautiful as we walked out to Buster in the early morning. Looking up at their bellies and the bottoms of their wings, the Forts were the color of the summer sky, while our Halifax—just a few feet smaller—was like a chunk of the night. And that suited us, I thought, as I saw how everyone squinted at the sunlight. Ratty, like each of us, had become a minion of the moon.

  We flew across England in the daylight. We flew north as the Fortresses went south, high above us, in their vast and tight formations. Each one had a long white contrail streaming out behind it, so many lines across the blue that it seemed the Forts were plowing the sky.

  All of us must have seen them, but not even Ratty said so. It was too beautiful a morning to think of the Forts and what they were off to. England lay below like a painting of summer, and I could almost smell the flowers and the trees, and the yellowing grass of late July. Soaring above the fields and the rivers, over tiny forests and pretty villages, I was suddenly sad at the thought that this was probably my last flight. I didn’t want to stop flying, only to stop being afraid. I hoped that Uncle Joe would find something that wouldn’t keep me forever on the ground. I wondered if I could join the ferry service and fly the brand-new Lancasters from their Canadian factories, across the ocean to England.

  The moment we landed, I went to see Uncle Joe with that idea in my mind.

  I knocked on his door. A voice shouted, “In!” I stepped through, and didn’t bother saluting. I said, “Sir, I’m—”

  It wasn’t Uncle Joe sitting at the desk. It was a fat little man with a red face and a mustache so thin that it might have been drawn with a pencil. He said, “You’re a disgrace, is what you are. Stand at attention, man!”

  I snapped my feet together. “Sir,” I said. “I was supposed to see the CO.”

  “You’re seeing him,” he said. “I’m the CO.”

  “What happened to—”

  “Shot down. He bought it last night.”

  I nearly fell over. My hands trembled so badly that I clasped them against my trousers.

  “What did you want?” he said.

  “I was supposed to see him, sir,” I said. “I—”

  “You told me that!” he shouted. “What about, man?”

  “He was going to take me off ops,” I said.

  “Oh, was he? Well, I shan’t. So you’ve no fear of that.”

  “But I wanted him to,” I said.

  “The devil you did!”

  It went downhill from there. I tried to tell the new CO that Uncle Joe had promised to move me into other duties.
But the little red man, with stripes and brass all over him, wouldn’t even let me speak.

  “There will be no malingerers in my squadron,” he said. “No cowards here.”

  He went on and on about it, and all I could do was stand there as he ranted. He got up from his chair, taking a swagger stick from his desk, swishing it back and forth until I was certain that he would lay into me with it. He demanded my pilot’s name. He said, “Go and find him. Send him to me.” Then he threw me from his office, and I stumbled out in tears.

  I found Lofty in the sergeants’ mess. He was staring at the blackboard, and I saw that other names had been erased from the Morris list. T for Tom had bought it on the way in, and S for Sugar had caught a packet coming home. There wasn’t a name now below Lofty’s, and there were only two above him. I had no doubt anymore that I was looking at a chop list.

  “You know, Kid,” said Lofty, “I’m not sure I want that bus anymore.”

  I didn’t want to tell him I felt the same way. “Skipper,” I said, “the CO wants to see you.”

  He smiled. “Jolly good show. What does Uncle Joe want with me?”

  I said, “It isn’t Uncle Joe.”

  He understood exactly what I meant. That smile fell away, and those funny eyes of his looked especially hollow and sad. Then he patted my shoulder. He took out his pipe. “Well, not to worry,” he said.

  Lofty went off to see the red man. I never learned what happened in the office, but when Lofty came back with the gen, his calmness was gone. “We’re on tonight,” he told us. “If Buster isn’t ready, we have to take another kite.”

  Even Ratty didn’t want to go flying. “This isn’t fair,” he said. “No lie. It isn’t fair.”

  “Nothing’s ever fair,” said Lofty. “You haven’t heard the worst of it.” He took a very deep breath. “We’re on for every op. Every night we’re on.”

  Simon groaned, “I should have stayed a gadna.”

  “Cheer up, mate; you’ll get your chance,” said Will. “You’ll be planting daisies pretty soon, I think.”

  Lofty got a huddle going. He formed a circle, arms on shoulders, but I didn’t make myself a part of it. I only watched as the six of them swayed together and swayed apart, the circle never breaking. I didn’t hear anything that Lofty said until the end, when his voice rose into his British whine. “Now, who’s for a nice cuppa tea?”

  I decided not to go with them. It would give Lofty a chance to tell the others what had happened, how I’d schemed to get out of flying, and how they were all being punished for my cowardice. I cleared out as far as I could, hurrying down to the pigeon loft.

  As soon as I saw old Bert coming out through the door, I broke into a run. He thundered toward me in his huge, stamping boots, and we collided on the grass, banging together. He held me by my shoulders. “What a turn you gave me, sir,” he said. “When Gilbert came ’ome on his own. What a fright I got. My ’ands were shaking so, I could ’ardly open ’is little canister to read ’is message.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, no, sir,” he said. “I’m just so glad to see you alive.”

  At that moment he must have been the only one in the world who felt like that, I thought. He opened his arms and wrapped them around me, the first time that anyone had hugged me in ten years or more. I fell against him, collapsing into his arms. I couldn’t stop crying. I just shook and sobbed at all my fears and shame.

  “What’s the matter, sir?” Bert’s hands rubbed across my shoulders. “I’m sorry if I shouted, sir. I’m not really angry at you, sir.”

  “It wasn’t you.” I told him how I’d lost my ray-gun ring, how I’d heard a kite that wasn’t there, and how I’d seen the ghost of Donny Lee. I told him what Uncle Joe had promised, then all about the fat red man.

  “Yes, that’s Fletcher-Dodge,” he said. “Wing Commander Fletcher-Dodge. ’E came in the morning, sir. In a big black car as long as an ’earse.”

  Bert took me into the loft. My hand was still on the door when Percy landed on my shoulder.

  “My, you’re ’onored, sir,” said Bert. He got me sitting down on the feed sacks, and Percy nestled in my hands. He gave me a drink from the pigeons’ water as a clutch of birds clung to his arms. They fluttered their wings when he gestured across the loft. “Fletcher-Dodge was ’ere, sir.”

  “Here?” I nodded at the floor. “Right here?”

  “Yes, sir. First thing ’e did, sir, was drive down ’ere in that big ’earse. With ’is little stick, all ’is buttons polished. You should ’ave seen Percy, sir.” Bert shook off the birds. He stood with his neck thrust out, bent forward with his arms tight at his sides and his elbows pulled back like wings. I smiled at his picture of Percy striking a puffed-out pose at the sight of all the red man’s brass and stripes and bars. “Fletcher-Dodge came right through that door, sir. Said ’e wanted to see the pigeons, sir, and didn’t I think, ‘Now ’ere’s a pleasant change’?” Bert sighed sadly. “Uncle Joe—bless him— never came to see the pigeons, sir.”

  “I know.”

  “Fletcher-Dodge, ’e looked in the nesting boxes. ’E looked in every one.” Bert pecked his head around to show me how the CO had looked. “Then ’e asked ’ow the breeding was going, and ’e told me to step it up, sir.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t see it, sir,” said Bert, his head shaking. “This war will finish pigeons, like the last war finished ’orses. They’re on their way out already, sir. Won’t be long until there’s no use for pigeons, then they’ll be gone; their sun will set. The big Lancs, sir, they don’t carry pigeons.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “It’s true, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t need them, sir. It’s . . .” He paused, looking anguished.

  “It’s what?” I asked.

  He sighed. “Your wireless, sir. It’s your wireless that’s replacing the pigeons.”

  “How?”

  “The boffins keep making them better, sir. The Lancs have a portable that goes in the life raft. If you can transmit from the life raft you don’t need a pigeon, sir.”

  “Are we going to convert to Lancs?” I asked.

  “Sooner or later,” said Bert.

  “What will happen to the pigeons?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “Not exactly. I suppose they’ll go ’ome, sir—the ones that ’ave a ’ome. Back to their lofts ’ere and there. And the others, sir? The poor things?” He looked down at the birds that milled on the floor. Then he shook a fist at the roof and shouted, “Damn you!” loudly enough to set the pigeons rustling.

  “Why are you shouting at God?” I asked.

  “At God?” He laughed, then clamped his hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry, sir. But I’d never raise my voice to God, sir. I get angry at ’im!”

  “Who?”

  “Bomber ’Arris,” he snarled.

  The chief of air command. Dirty Bert’s “man upstairs” really was a man.

  “’E doesn’t care,” said Bert. “Sitting down there in High Wycombe; ’e doesn’t even think about the pigeons, sir.” Bert reached up to a shelf above me. He took down his little tin of suet, and I realized how close I was already to flying again. “The brave little birds. I just wish I knew what will ’appen to them, sir. It doesn’t matter what becomes of me, but I can’t sleep when I think about the pigeons.”

  I felt ashamed that I hadn’t even wondered what would happen to old Bert. “Where will you go?” I asked.

  “Wherever they send me, sir,” said Bert. “Somewhere terrible, I’m sure.”

  He pried the lid from the tin, then pulled out a twisted old spoon that he clanked on the rim.

  The birds swarmed up to his shoulders and his arms again, and to the roosts above him. They flapped and whirred through the loft, and Bert laughed like a boy. But Percy didn’t move from my hands. He only watched the other birds as the little halo gleamed in
his eye.

  “What’s wrong with Percy?” I asked, shouting over the clamor of the pigeons.

  “Nothing, sir,” said Bert. “’E knows ’e won’t be getting suet, so ’e doesn’t bother asking.”

  The others weren’t as smart. They whirled around the tin like a cloud of giant bees, until Bert had to guard it in the crook of his arm and fend off the birds with his huge right hand. But he never stopped laughing as he doled out the suet to the pigeons that were on for the night. There were only four of them, and I watched him feed big dollops to the first three, then look around for fat little Gilbert. “Where are you, my pet?” he said. “Gibby!” He clanked the suet tin again.

  Then his laugh died away. “Oh, crikey,” he said. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  He was looking down at the nesting boxes. “Gibby doesn’t want ’is suet, sir.” The swarm of birds moved with him, across the loft toward the nesting boxes. His coveralls were clotted with white splotches.

  I could see Gilbert cowering in the box as the mass of pigeons flew back and forth. His feathers were ruffled, his eyes rolling. His beak was open, and he pecked at Bert’s hand when the pigeoneer reached toward him.

  “Oh, crikey,” said Bert again. “’E doesn’t want to go. ’E’s frightened, sir.”

  The pigeon was crying in a strange, croaky voice. I saw absolute terror in his eyes, and that fear seemed to leap from him to me. “They always know when their number’s up,” the pigeoneer had told me.

  I tossed Percy away and ran from the loft. I saw him tumbling down in a feathery heap on the floor, but I just plowed past him and fled to the sunshine.

  Bert came after me. He seemed surprised that I hadn’t kept running, that I was just standing a couple of yards from the door. He said, “Gilbert’s only a bird. They don’t always know, sir.”

  “Well, I’m not flying,” I said. “I’m never going again.”

  “You’ve got no say in it, sir.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” I said. “I’ll just refuse to go. What’s the worst that can happen?”