B for Buster Read online

  “Come on,” said Donny. He shook the keys, and they jingled in his fingers. “Doesn’t anybody want the bus?”

  They must have seen the sadness in his eyes. They must have known that he was serious. Seven sergeants came suddenly leaping from their chairs, and Lofty was among them. They ran toward the piano and made a little mob around it, shouting out, reaching for the keys.

  Donny laughed; he was pleased by that. He walked a circuit round the piano as the sergeants’ fingers brushed against his knees. “A list!” he cried. “We’ll make a list. Write your names on the chalkboard, and the first one gets the Morris.”

  The seven went off at a rush. “Go, Lofty, go!” shouted Buzz. And Lofty hurdled tables and wrestled with a gunner; then all of them were crowded in the corner by the blackboard.

  “No shoving, now,” said Donny Lee. “You might all get a turn if you’re lucky.”

  The sergeants struggled. “Lofty! Lofty!” shouted Buzz, and others chanted different names. They laughed and cheered the seven on as they battled for the chalk, as they flung themselves like blue waves against the wall. Their arms reached up; their legs kicked out. When at last they fell away, Lofty’s name was sixth. At the top of the list was the navigator from J for Jam, a big and burly fellow.

  Donny stepped down. He hung the keys on the nail beside the blackboard, where he hung them every time he flew. “First guy gets it,” he said. “Then the next, and the next.”

  He came and stood beside me, flushed and happy— truly happy. “They’ll remember this for years,” he said. “For years and years. In every mess in every squadron they’ll talk about the guy who stood on a piano and gave away a car.”

  I saw that was all he wanted: to be remembered, to be famous in a way. He could easily refuse to fly that night, be marked as LMF and wonder forever if he would have got the chop or not. Or he could give away his lovely Morris and go off on his op, to catch that train to a different place. And even if he was wrong, and he came home, people would remember.

  He seemed his old Kakabeka self, his cares stripped away. He told me, “Kid, if you ever want out, go and see Uncle Joe. Go talk to him, okay?”

  “Why won’t you?” I asked.

  “We’re different,” he said. “You can do it, but I can’t. Kid, I gotta go.”

  I thought he wanted to be by himself for a while. So I said, “Okay. I’ll see you later, Donny.”

  But he laughed, and I realized he’d been talking about his op, that he had to go on that. “Yeah,” he said. “I think you will, Kid.” Then he turned around and nearly ran from the room.

  He went and wrote a letter, as it turned out. He wrote a letter to his mom, then left it with his other things, in a tidy pile, so that it wouldn’t be any bother to the fellow who would have to come along and pack it all in a box. That was what bothered me later, thinking how he’d told me that he had to go, as though he hoped I would talk him out of it.

  I didn’t try hard enough. In the end, I let him down. I watched him run from the sergeants’ mess, and I saw him only one more time before the op, as he climbed into the back of the truck that would take him out to his bomber. He stopped halfway, with one leg hooked over the tailgate. He waved at me, one-handed. He said, “Hey, Kakky. Look after yourself.” Then he winked. “I’ll be seeing you, Kid, okay?”

  “You’re coming back,” I said.

  He shook his head, and I got angry. “Then don’t tell me that,” I said. “Don’t jinx me, Donny.”

  It was a terrible op, worse than the first one. We nearly collided with another Halifax high above the sea. Nobody saw it in the utter blackness until our wings were overlapping. Then we veered across the bomber stream, shaken by the propwash of aircraft that seemed invisible.

  Gilbert rustled nervously in his pigeon box as we crossed the enemy coast. He fluttered from side to side in there, so violently that a little feather drifted out through the hatch. I looked around, wondering why, and saw through my window that the clouds I’d thought would hide us were worse than no clouds at all. The searchlights splashed across their bottoms and turned their tops into glowing sheets as bright as movie screens. And I thought of the night fighters above us and how, to them, we would stand out against those clouds like a cockroach crawling on a pure white floor.

  Our turrets whined round and round as the gunners watched the sky. But they didn’t see the night fighter that pounced from above. The tracers suddenly flickered past, and Ratty cried, “Corkscrew left!” But Lofty didn’t react; he flew us straight and level. “Corkscrew! Corkscrew!” Ratty shouted. The kite shook from our own guns, and at last Lofty sent us cartwheeling through the sky. We plunged into the clouds and went tearing right through them, nearly out of control. My arms were pinned at my sides, my feet to the floor. We came hurtling out into the searchlights and flak, plummeting down in a tight spiral. Pop shouted at Lofty. “Pull up, pull up!”

  And down we went.

  I saw the ground spinning fast, a pinwheel of searchlights and tracers and flak. Someone vomited, and the reek of it came oozing through my mask. Ratty, in the tail, kept crying out, “He’s still behind us!”

  The wings thumped. The rudders creaked. Buster came shuddering out of its dive with its nose high, its wings tipped over. I felt the airspeed falling off; I heard the shriek of wind fade to a whisper. “Watch it!” said Pop. “You’ll stall her now.”

  Slowly, Buster rolled over. My window faced the ground and now the sky. My stomach filled with butterflies as Buster tipped and rolled, then tumbled again through the night. We fell a thousand feet to our right, a thousand more to our left. Then Lofty brought the nose up and hauled us round in a swooping turn.

  He set the throttles; he set the trimming tabs. And up we climbed toward the clouds, back on route to Bochum. I shone my light into the pigeon box and saw the bird lying on the floor, twitching like a dog in a dream. I gave him water, and he settled down a bit.

  Our engines growled; the deck was slanted as we climbed. Then Lofty, breathing heavily, came on the intercom. “Will. You okay?” he said.

  “Okay, Skipper,” said Will.

  He was the one who had thrown up, dizzied by the motions. He was crawling now across his splattered Perspex, cleaning up as best he could.

  “Simon?” asked Lofty.

  “Here, Skippa,” he said in his Australian way.

  “Kak?”

  “Yes,” I said. My voice cracked in a high tremble.

  “Pop?”

  “Right here.”

  “Buzz?”

  “Here, Skipper.”

  “Ratty?”

  There was no answer from the tail.

  “Ratty?” asked Lofty again. “Ratty!” he said more loudly.

  “Roger,” said Ratty. He sounded frightened. “Skipper, I’m okay.”

  We carried on and bombed the target. It was a nightmare over Bochum, with the clouds lit up, and the night fighters floating bright white flares above us. We never saw the buildings we were hitting, only the flashes of the bombs and the reddish glow of a spreading fire. We bombed on sky flares that drifted, red and green, through the canyons of the clouds.

  Then I dropped the photoflash. We took our picture and turned for home in the bomber stream. Lofty kept us jinking left and right as we flew a weaving, droning course.

  An hour after midnight, somewhere over Gelsenkirchen, Donny Lee and all his crew vanished from the sky.

  CHAPTER 10

  THAT MORNING I DREAMED that I was falling. I went spinning through the sky, and a fiery earth went round and round below me. It looked exactly as the ground had looked from Buster’s window, but in my dream I fell alone, without the kite around me. I spun through empty air, through darkness, feeling that I was floating instead of falling. I tried to run, and woke up kicking at my blankets, clutching my pillow to my chest like a parachute. I was thumping at it desperately, trying to tear it open.

  It all seemed so real that it took me a minute or more to shake the dream away.
I had to make myself remember that Buster hadn’t really broken up over Bochum, that we had come safely home before dawn. I remembered the surge of the engines as we floated over the hedge, the little shriek of the tires touching the runway.

  I even heard Ratty’s voice, his laugh. “That’s two. Just twenty-eight to go.”

  I stayed in my bed, in the gloom of the hut, thinking of Donny Lee. I tried to picture the boy I’d known in Kakabeka, but all I could see were searchlights sweeping, and the gleam of his bomber in the sky.

  We had seen it happen, on the homeward trip. The searchlights had coned him over Gelsenkirchen. There had been bursts of flak all around him, but they didn’t seem to hit his Halifax. It rolled on its side and went corkscrewing down, and the searchlights flailed as they tried to find it. But the whole black sky was empty.

  I lay trembling in my bed. Lofty patted my shoulder on his way from the hut. So did Pop a few minutes later, and Buzz and Ratty after him. They just touched me and kept on going, and I squeezed my pillow and closed my eyes.

  When the room was empty, I got up. Three of the beds were utterly bare, stripped of blankets, pillows, and sheets. The boys who had slept there would never be back. Everything they had owned had been packed into boxes, and even the boxes themselves had been packed away.

  I didn’t know what had happened to those boxes. Maybe there was a room somewhere, maybe off in Hangar D, where all the boxes went—seven that night, seven the night before—filled and folded shut. I could imagine them piling up in some secret, hidden place. And I could imagine another stack of boxes still unfilled. There were two dozen bombers; there must have been scores and scores of boxes waiting somewhere.

  I went to breakfast, dreading the moment when the speaker would crackle. But the others just sat and stared at nothing, and I wished that I could be so calm.

  At last the WAAF came on. I wondered where she sat and what she looked like, if she was smiling or if her eyes were filled with tears. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said.

  Lofty took out his pipe. Ratty’s eyes nearly closed; his hands tightened into fists.

  I found that I didn’t really care what she would tell us. If we didn’t go flying that night we’d go the next, or the one after. Just get it over with, I thought.

  “You are stood down for tonight,” said the WAAF.

  The sound from the airmen was like one huge breath let out. Someone laughed. A bit of toast went soaring across the room. The joy I felt surprised me. I felt incredibly free, as though tons of weight had been lifted from my back.

  Lofty leaned forward. “I think we should raid the Merry Men,” he said. “You up for an op, Ratty?”

  The Merry Men was the local, down in the village five miles away. None of us had seen it, but we’d heard the talk of what a wonderful place it was. “Sure,” said Ratty. “I want to get blotto.”

  Buzz and Pop both wanted to go. Lofty said he’d tell Simon and Will. He tapped his pipe on the table, put it back in his pocket. “We’ll take off at eighteen hundred,” he said. “You coming, Kid?”

  I had gone to a bar only once, and gotten so sick that I’d sworn I would never drink again. If I went and sat there, not drinking or smoking, they might see how young I was. If I stayed behind, they might know.

  “Kid?” asked Lofty.

  “Well, I’ll try,” I said.

  “Try?” Buzz almost leered. “What’s the matter with you, Kid?”

  I could see my whole world of little lies about to collapse. But Pop stepped in and saved me. “He’s probably got something better to do,” he said. “We’ll hope to see you there, if you make it.”

  They went off in a group, each of them feeling through his pockets to count his money. I went the other way, down toward the pigeon loft, and old Bert seemed overjoyed to see me. He called out when I was still yards away, “Well, ’allo, sir! I wasn’t expecting you so early, sir.”

  He was plucking weeds from a small garden. On his shoulder stood Percy, stiff-necked, wings at his side. “Stand easy, now,” said Bert. He gave the pigeon a shoot from the garden. “I grow their greens ’ere, sir,” he said. “They like their greens.”

  He took me into the loft, and I was sorry that I had waited so long to see it. Warm and bright, it thrummed with a sound that took me straight home in my mind. The cooing and the clucking of his birds made me think of the great flock of pigeons that roosted under the railway bridge at Kakabeka. Then, they were pests, only targets for stones. I had never killed one, but I had sure tried hard enough.

  The pigeons swarmed around my feet, nudging like cats at my trouser cuffs. It was kind of creepy, but I liked it.

  “Don’t squash them, sir,” said Bert. “Mind where you walk, now.”

  The loft wasn’t as dirty as I’d thought it would be. Buckets and bags were stacked in one corner, along with bales of straw. Clipboards bulging with papers hung from a row of nails. There were troughs of water on the floor, roosts and nesting boxes everywhere. I waded through the pigeons, laughing as they scurried away in a mass of feathered backs. Only one bird was still on the perches, standing right below the wire mesh that made the roof.

  “What’s that one doing?” I asked.

  Bert sighed. “She ’asn’t moved a muscle all this day,” he said. “She ’asn’t moved since lights-out yesterday.”

  “Is she sick?” I asked.

  “She’s sad,” said Bert. “She misses old Ollie something terrible, I think.”

  “Where’s old Ollie?”

  “From L for London, sir.”

  That was Donny’s kite. “My friend was the pilot,” I said.

  “Then I’m sorry, sir,” said Bert. “I’m sorry as can be.”

  He looked it, too. He looked suddenly miserable, and tears nearly came to my eyes. Just looking at him made me want to cry myself.

  “There’s not a ’ope in ’eaven, sir,” he said. “Ollie could ’ave flown from Berlin by now. I fear the worst.”

  “I think the flak got them,” I said.

  “The flak?” Bert looked shocked as well as sad. He raised his head to the wire roof, and all the veins in his neck stood out. But instead of shouting at his man upstairs, he nearly whispered. “Damn you all to ’ell.” He didn’t want to frighten the pigeons, I saw, as he gazed down at their backs. “They always know, sir. See how Ollie’s mate is pining away? Why, she’s even letting the babies starve.”

  He made me kneel among the birds and look into one of the nesting boxes. Percy leaned forward from his shoulder, peering in along with Bert. There were two babies inside, purplish blobs with oversized heads and enormous eyes. “The one on the left,” said Bert, “ ’e looks just like Ollie, sir.”

  Poor Ollie, I thought. The baby was clumsy and ugly, too awkward to stand. It just sat there, trembling all over.

  “They’re goners, those babies,” he said. “If she doesn’t pull out of it.”

  “Can’t you feed them?” I asked.

  “Not all day and all night, sir,” he said. “I ’ave to keep up with the work. I ’ave to sleep.”

  “No one’s flying tonight,” I said. “I could come and feed them.”

  “Bless you, sir,” said Bert. “That would ’elp a lot.” He showed me how to do it. He got a medicine dropper and a can of milk, and let me hold the babies as he dribbled trickles down their throats. Their eyes swiveled, their throats pulsed, and they seemed to bloat with the milk they drank. Then they flopped down in the straw and went to sleep.

  I had thought we would fly the birds in the sunshine, but Bert said we would have to wait until twilight. “They’re night flyers, sir,” he told me. “You don’t train ’oming pigeons to fly at night, then turn around and fly them in the day. Not that you’d know, sir.”

  We fed and bathed the pigeons, did the paperwork in triplicate, then tinkered with the motorized loft that was parked behind the building. Like a hillbilly’s shack stuck on the frame of an old truck, it had cages on the sides and space below them for the
boxes. The bonnet was open, and an old sack of rusted tools was set down by the fender.

  The wrenches were so rusted and the motor so old that we worked for hours to loosen one bolt. Bert’s hands got bruised and cut, but he didn’t complain. He just went doggedly on, whistling “Roll Out the Barrel” between his quiet cries of “Ouch, sir!” and “Ooh, sir!” as the wrenches kept slipping.

  We gave it up when the sun was close to the hills. Bert said we’d use the trolley instead. So we snatched up pigeons and stuffed them into boxes, and when the trolley was full, we each took a side of the handle. But it was Bert who did all the pulling. He grunted once, then put his weight on the handle and got that heavy cart rolling so quickly that I had to trot beside him just to keep up. We trundled down a path that became a lane that wound its way between the hills.

  Five miles from home, when the sun and moon went down nearly together, we stopped to let the pigeons loose. Bert took them from their boxes one at a time, held them just so, and tossed them into the air. Each rose in a spiral, its wing feathers whistling, until it found its direction and flew off toward home.

  Bert paced them slowly so that they couldn’t follow each other, and I lay on the grass looking up at the stars coming out.

  “Do you like to fly?” he asked suddenly.

  I wasn’t sure what to tell him; I didn’t really know Bert very well. But right then, all alone with him in an empty land, I thought that I could tell him most anything I wanted.

  “I like the flying,” I said. “I love to fly.”

  “But you don’t like dropping bombs? Is that what you mean, sir?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind that,” I said. I’d hardly even thought about it. “I don’t care what happens to the bombs. It’s all the rest. The searchlights, the flak. The fighters. I don’t like people shooting at me.”