Paper Doll: A Novel

By Jim Shepard

During the air war over Germany, the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress tries to achieve some competence as a unit before their most catastrophic mission yet

They call their plane “Paper Doll,” the joke being its suggestion of flimsiness, inconsequence, and perishability, and none of them, from the veterans to the newcomers, feel the bravery they’d like to project. But now, despite their myriad limitations, they’ve been tasked with living through the tension and boredom of base life, saving one another’s lives, and rejoicing at those missions they’ve survived—until they’re confronted by the shock of a mission directed against the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, a mission that will outfly the capacities of their fighter escorts and take them hundreds of miles through the most heavily defended sectors of the German Air Defense.
 
National Book Award finalist and author of The Book of Aron Jim Shepard brilliantly illustrates both the lunacy and intimacy of these young men’s lives on the ground as well as their growing disillusionment and terror at what lies ahead. Unsentimental and unsparing in its honesty, Paper Doll portrays with stirring clarity the realities of war and the bonds forged in the face of death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Dec 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504026680

Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard (b. 1956) is the author of four short story collections and seven novels, most recently The Book of Aron, which has been shortlisted for both the Kirkus Prize and the American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal. Originally from Connecticut, Shepard now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches creative writing and film. He won the Story Prize for his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Shepard’s stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other publications; five have been selected for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize.

Book preview

Part One

The Baby Train

They lay on the hardstand under the wing of Archangel, more or less uncertain as to what they were supposed to be doing. Their commanding officer had been a car salesman from Pocatello, Idaho, and there was no acute sense around the base, yet, that the aircrews’ ground time needed to be filled. The sun was warm and welcome on their legs. They’d just been playing with hoses and Lewis was letting his shirt dry on him. Bobby Bryant had spread his over a dismantled engine nacelle. Bean lay asleep on the grass with his head on a bag of doughnuts. His cheek and open mouth were turned to the bag, and the illusion was that of a swimmer taking a breath, or someone eating in a novel way.

They were new to all of this and fairly sure they had a good deal more to learn, but no one was going to ask for work. From what they could understand, the 8th Air Force was still in a disconcerting state of confusion.

Bobby Bryant was talking about back home, Providence, Rhode Island, and Lewis and Snowberry were lethargic enough to give him their attention, and Bean was asleep, so there was no one to interrupt him. He was encouraged.

His family had owned a series of dogs, all kept outside, all high-strung and aloof from Bobby—all his father’s dogs, his mother liked to say. He remembered at five or six sitting in the hot sun with one of them, Toby, a small squat mongrel with German Shepherd somewhere in its bloodlines. Somehow he had reached for it and Toby had nipped his fingers, forearm, and bicep in a frenzy of irritation, and then had almost immediately resumed a sort of placidity. He’d been terrified of the dog after that, and the dog, as if to torment him, had developed a way of covertly lifting a lip in a silent snarl when only Bobby was looking. He did not risk his father’s contempt by bringing it up.

They got the dogs through the mail—unflagging and omniscient hunting breeds promised from faraway kennels—and unfailingly the dogs arrived with some affliction—one eye ruined, a serious limp, odd lumps on the neck or chest—and a disposition soured by it.

They fell like Limeys at the Somme, his uncle who fancied military history liked to say. Toby was hit by a car. Corky tore off in full throat after a bird of some sort and plummeted, still baying, from a rocky outcropping. King died of an infection that made an eye swell up grotesquely. Someone poisoned Snapper, an animal of such epic nastiness that it had to be chained at all times. Neighborhood children, Bobby remembered, gathered at safe distances to watch it foam and tear with a chilling intensity at its chain and collar, in such awe of the animal’s fury that they did nothing to tantalize it further, only watching day after day in hushed silence, as one might watch a volcanic eruption.

Tippi, Bobby’s favorite, a smallish white and black animal with an inexplicably crushed ear, disappeared on one of his father’s hunting trips and was never heard from again. The notion haunted Bobby that perhaps the dog had been hurt and left to fend for itself, and was even now dragging itself around the same stretch of forest in eastern Connecticut, its eyes wide with hunger.

All the dogs had frightened his sister Amy terribly—Toby had even stalked her when they were alone, its head low in wolfish concentration—and she kept as a talisman against them a gingham stuffed animal resembling a pork chop that her mother had made for her. She called it Miss Ebboo, introduced it only to Bobby, and lived in fear her father would find it.

Miss Ebboo, Lewis said. It did not sound as if he was enjoying the story.

When he was a kid, Bryant went on, about seven, and the Depression had really hit, he remembered that it was clear to even the smallest kids in the neighborhood that there was something screwed up about the world the way they understood it and that a guy like his father or a neighbor could work hard and be good at something and still find out no one wanted him. He had told his sister then and there that he was going to be a pilot someday, flying around Texas and the ocean.

Why don’t you give it a rest for a while, Lewis said, and Bryant stopped talking. He closed his eyes to the sun and remembered St. Louis winning the World Series, cheating his Athletics. He remembered Capone going to jail, as if having just given up. He remembered his parents refusing to let him see Frankenstein, his mother herself in fact refusing to go, and his father taking it in one Saturday night alone without telling him, breaking his heart, and returning to pronounce it windy. He remembered his father leaning conspiratorially close and allowing, with a cruelty that still left Bryant breathless when he thought about it, that the monster was certain as ants something to see.

He remembered the world and his father shutting down possibility, and pilots—aero-men—as always the vivid exception. He resolved maybe then, thinking of the monster he still had not seen, the monster they wouldn’t put on the advertising posters, that he was going to fly. The possibility of washing out was too terrible to entertain.

They lay spread out with the other crews beneath the wings of B-17F Flying Fortresses. They had been discussing with intermittent interest the possibility of the Wing’s acquisition of impressive new B-17G Flying Fortresses. The interest in the G variant was not casual: it was supposed to feature a remote-controlled turret in the nose beneath the bombardier’s station, forming a kind of chin on the plane. The turret held two fifty-caliber Brownings and struck them all as an enormous improvement over the single pivot-mounted machine guns in the nose of their F. German interceptor tactics for confronting the massed Fortresses had evolved almost exclusively into head-on passes to take advantage of the relative futility of the F’s nose armament. And, as Lewis liked to remind them, the relative futility of the F’s gunners. The tactics had become very successful. They thought about the G’s with a healthy and selfish dislike for any other crews that might receive them first.

The first airplane Bryant had ever seen had crashed while he was watching. It had been an old yellow De Havilland biplane, looping and sideslipping over Narragansett Bay, perhaps for the entertainment of the bathers on the surrounding beaches. Bryant had been standing knee deep in a warmed and reedy part of an inlet. The water around his legs lapped and rippled quietly. The engine changed pitch and the biplane had trembled in mid-air, and while he watched, it folded at the center as if on delicate hinges, collapsing upon itself and twisting apologetically downward. Rowboats had labored out to the point of the splash.

Their crew chief, an unpleasantly beefy twenty-four-year-old named Tuliese, was standing on a rolling metal scaffold beside their plane, Paper Doll, a few hundred yards down the flight line. He was painting a small vertical yellow bomb six feet or so beneath the pilot’s side window. The bomb denoted a mission flown, and now there were two on the plane. Tuliese held the piece of sheet steel he used as a palette aloft to block the sun while he worked. The flashing dazzled Bryant.

Snowberry was practicing his Crosby, nestled comfortably against some folded tarps the line crews used to protect engines under repair. He introduced himself as Tech Three Gordon Snowberry, Jr., somewhat proud of being the lowest-ranking crew member in Paper Doll, and made just about everyone who met him wonder at exactly what age the Army Air Forces decided someone was too young for service in the Air Corps. He was blond and small and did not shave, and was convinced his voice had a mellow resonance uncannily matching Bing Crosby’s. He hoped to be a dentist when the war was over, and often pointed out while the men ate what Oh Henry!s and Baby Ruths could do to their molars. He liked to sketch, and had no aptitude for it. He enjoyed telling people about his past that he had just flat walked out of school and signed up to get in on this thing. He was a ball turret gunner, which was a job, Lewis liked to say, for small fanatics or pinheads, and he accepted with happy equanimity his position. He believed he was a good gunner. He had only been at it for two missions. A good friend of his with the unlikely name of Sneeb had been unlucky enough to be flying in the belly of a Fortress sustaining minor damage on the raid to Emden, flak shearing away a small piece of the rotating mechanism that allowed escape from the ball, and when the undercarriage had collapsed upon landing, the full weight of the sixty-five-thousand-pound Fortress had come down upon the ball turret, and Snowberry’s friend. Speaking of it later, he had only been able to cry, his breath coming in small whoops. Bryant had been embarrassed to be present, and not much help.

Snowberry had settled in now, hands in his pockets, testing various scat phrases. He’d diversified recently to duets, a fact of which he was secretly proud, and he began both parts of An Apple for the Teacher: You’re sophis-ticated. I think I’m naive. He softened his tone to affect the transition from Connie Boswell to Bing. Part of the key to Crosby was that certain insouciance.

Lewis opened an old forwarded newspaper he’d brought along to read in the sun and flapped it in Snowberry’s general direction. Snowberry lapsed into a more unobtrusive run: Buh buh buh bum, buh buh buh bum.

Story here, Lewis said, about an Army Trainer that lost it and pancaked onto a funeral procession. Bryant opened his eye a crack to see, but Lewis was folding the paper, the Dayton something.

Pilot error, Snowberry said.

That One Check He Didn’t Make, Bryant said.

So the headline, Lewis said, "is What Began As a Funeral Ended in Tragedy."

They were quiet, thinking about it. Can’t deny it, Snowberry finally said.

You know what I feel like? Bean was awake. He hadn’t opened his eyes, though he looked considerably more dignified with his mouth closed. He was Paper Doll’s radio operator, and unpopular. He was fat around the face in a way that seemed childish, and was instantly recognizable as unathletic. He was already well known for his inability to touch wriggly things. Squadron if not base opinion was that he was insufficiently masculine.

I feel like Mexican food, he said.

Bean had once confided to Bryant and Lewis that he always kept thirty-five cents in mad money on his person, at all times.

Mexican food, Lewis said grimly.

Lewis doesn’t like Mexican food, Snowberry said.

Lewis bounced something small and light off Bean’s head. You think they’d be swimming that river if the food on their side was good? he asked.

Whatever Lewis had thrown, Audie had gotten to and was now eating. Audie was one of the base dogs, blind enough that they’d often hear around the base the small-scale collisions and yelps involving the dog and recently moved equipment. When there was major movement going on, the dog stayed in one spot, next to their Nissen hut. A jeep had knocked her sprawling once, and the sound of the engines and brakes had made a lasting impression.

Bean tried to pet her, and she pulled away. Bryant had toyed with the idea upon first seeing her that here, finally, was his own puppy, but she had proven too stubbornly independent for that, disappearing for long stretches even as she seemed to recognize and acknowledge their kindness.

Bryant wondered aloud, gazing at her, when the G variants might come through.

When they’ve used up all the F’s, Lewis suggested.

That’s not very funny, Bean said.

Shut up, Lewis said.

Bean apologized. He seemed to feel he was always saying something to irritate people and never knew why, and his method of handling it was to apologize frequently in general, hoping to suggest that he meant well.

Lewis stood and straddled a child’s bike he had bought in the village. Or claimed he had bought in the village. He began pedaling in wobbly circles, his knees high and wide on the undersized frame, the front wheel nosing erratically about as he attempted to gain speed. He leaned dramatically over and, picking up velocity, scooped up a deflated Mae West with one hand.

"Where is everybody? he asked. We’re supposed to be taking a picture here. Don’t tell me I hosed down for nothing." He took a swipe with the Mae West at Bobby Bryant as he went by.

They said they’d be here, Bryant said.

You got somewhere to go? Snowberry asked. Lewis swept past, trying to hook the soft noose of the Mae West collar around his head. He whapped Snowberry in the face.

Lewis is the kind of guy, Snowberry said, it said in the yearbook, ‘Enjoys a good practical joke,’ and what they meant was he likes to kick people’s teeth out.

Lewis ran over his hand.

You know, all you’re doing, Snowberry said, is making enemies of the very people on who your life may depend.

I don’t have enemies, Lewis said. Though some of my friends could stand watching.

Snowberry said, In my mind you’re riding in a hole that’s getting deeper and deeper.

Audie could hear the motion and sniffed the air nervously. She stood and stretched and curled deeper behind Snowberry into the tarpaulins.

What a stupid dog, Lewis said, and swished the Mae West at her. Her ears curled back. We get dog stories and blind dogs and every other thing. I’m sick of dogs.

I like dogs, Bean said.

"What do you know? Lewis asked. I heard you once go ‘Somebody get the door’ during a Lionel Hampton solo."

Dogs for sale, Snowberry crooned. Appetizing young dogs for sale.

Lewis stopped riding. The rest of the crew was waving them down to Paper Doll. Tuliese had finished the bomb and was rolling the scaffolding away.

Their pilot, a first lieutenant named Gabriel, had arranged a photo session to promote crew esprit de corps and give everyone something to send home. Lewis was on his second tour and third crew and rarely tired of comparing the present group unfavorably to any other group in the ETO. On the way back from their first mission together he had angrily suggested changing the plane’s name to Chinese Fire Drill, in honor of the overall coordination and performance of the ship’s gunners.

Gabriel had a chart on which he’d figured the positioning for the photo, and he read it aloud: Kenneth A. Gabriel, Jr., pilot, Ellis Cooper, co-pilot, Willis Eddy, bombardier, Samuel Hirsch, navigator, standing, back row; Sebastian Piacenti and Lambert Ball, waist gunners, Harold Bean, radio operator, Robert Bryant, flight engineer, Gordon Snowberry, Jr., ball turret, and Lewis Peeters, tail gunner, kneeling, front row. While Gabriel read, they snickered at each other’s names.

They lined up in that order and Bryant retrieved his shirt from the engine nacelle. Gabriel approved of their sloppiness in terms of the picture: it gave them that casual veterans’ look.

He had talked another pilot, a guy named Charley Rice who flew Boom Town, into taking the picture. It was one of Rice’s hobbies.

Rice had sauntered up while they were positioning themselves and had begun unfolding the camera tripod before them without comment.

I figure you should frame it, Charley, so that you can see the name, too. Gabriel pointed at the name behind him on the nose of the plane.

Rice did not answer. He was trying to affix the box camera onto the tripod. It was apparently an arduous task.

They were not used to all being together with nothing to do, officers and men, and they waited awkwardly. Lewis said, Bean told someone—and I’m quoting now—that Snowberry here, to get into the ball, has to ‘curl into the fecal position.’

You’ve been reading my letters, Bean said, shocked.

In a what position? Willis Eddy asked. His toe nosed Bean’s bag of doughnuts.

He meant fetal, Gabriel explained. He made a circular motion with his hand, as if to hurry Rice’s progress with the camera.

I know that, Willis Eddy said. I thought it was funny.

They waited and took special care with the kind of rumple they wanted to effect and calibrated their expressions and Rice still wasn’t ready. He fumbled with a latch and sweated. Something gave a wicked snap and he seemed to have hurt a finger.

That the right camera? Lewis asked politely. Some of those buggers are tricky.

From his kneeling position Bryant surveyed the row of profiles on both sides of him with some pride, imagining his father or mother or Lois seeing it. He imagined his mother saying, That’s the plane they fly, behind them, imagined his father grudgingly conceding that they looked like a pretty good bunch.

"Paper Do, Rice said, squinting down into the viewfinder. What’s that mean, you suppose?" Gabriel colored and moved the lines slightly to the right, to avoid blocking the painted name. Rice took four pictures and everyone put in orders.

This one’s for Jean, from all of us, Lewis said. They laughed. Jean was Snowberry’s first girlfriend, a Brit from a nearby village, and she had dated a number of men on the base. Snowberry was sensitive about it. Lewis without his knowledge often compared her ability to say no to that of a particularly placid and acquiescent Red Cross doughnut girl known to all of them simply as Red Myrtle.

Lewis, Snowberry said.

She’s a fine girl, Lewis said. God knows.

Piacenti had once asked Lewis at chow if he thought of Jean as that kind of girl. Lewis had said he thought of her as a farm animal.

As they were leaving, he said to Bryant, I got a dog story for you. We had a dog, Skeezix, we were going to take him to be fixed, my dad and me. Bit the shit out of me while we were rounding him up. I didn’t punish him or anything, figured what the hell. The next day we picked him up and he looks at me with these wide eyes like ‘Jesus Christ, this is the last time I fuck with you! Bite the guy’s hand and he cuts your nuts off!’

Bryant when he reflected on it later found the story haunting for the same reason Lewis found it funny: the notion of retribution out of all proportion.

He sat alone in the day room afterwards with some V-mail from Lois. As Nissen huts went, this one was larger and more dismal than most. He sat in a battered easy chair but the corrugated metal walls made the whole thing feel like a construction site. Higher up they were covered with pin-ups no one liked enough to steal, and the pictures were torn and dirty from constant pawing. There was a wooden table next to his easy chair with a lamp on it and a tray of ancient doughnuts. The undersides of the doughnuts were furred with mold.

The day room had been set up for the aircrews’ leisure, and was looked upon by everyone as the nearest thing to a last resort. Bryant spread the letter before him and concentrated on an image of Lois, his high school girlfriend. He saw her on his parents’ sofa, laughing at the radio. He reread the letter.

I guess it must seem strange to you sitting where you are reading this thinking about me and where I am. I’m on Fox near the water, where the railroad bridge goes over. It’s a beautiful day tho it’s been raining lots lately. The war seems very far away and very close at the same time. Everyone’s very excited and pulling and praying for you. Your uncle Tom says you’re probably an ace by now, and your father said he read about a guy who shot his foot off cleaning his guns. (Can you be an ace on a bomber?)

I’m glad you have a dog, because I think they’re good company. Even if you have to share them. It’s too bad that the dog can’t see. I guess you’re a Seeing-Eye person. Your father says he didn’t know you could have dogs. I didn’t tell him what you said about your friend taking a squirrel up in the plane with him because I don’t believe you and that’s that.

Lewis claimed that he had had a squirrel, Beezer, trained to eat out of his hands—the little son of a bitch would sit there like Arthur Treacher, he’d say—and that it had flown two lowlevel missions with him toward the end of his first tour. According to Lewis, at altitude the animal skittered all through the fuselage, its feet sounding like light hail on the aluminum. It showed up on the co-pilot’s shoulder and nearly scared him to death. A rat! he’d screamed over the interphone. Jesus Christ, we got rats! He’d been reassured by the pilot and an amused bombardier that it was no rat, judging by the tail, but he’d cursed throughout the flight to the target that he’d wet himself because of the goddamned thing and that it was probably eating through the control cables right then, while he was talking. Ever see the teeth on those bastards? he kept saying. They were all sitting there laughing, he insisted over the interphone, and pfffft—right through the cables, and into the drink the hard way. They’d bombed some marshaling yards in Holland and Beezer had never been seen again.

Beezer, Lewis liked to theorize, had done a flying one and a half out of the bomb bay. Some Nazi manning an antiaircraft battery got it right in the face. He would mimic the plummeting Beezer, arms outspread, snarling. He speculated on the aerodynamics of the tail. He said, You think anyone’s going to know what he did? We’re talking about unsung heroes here.

So what’s new?

There’a a young boy with the government that moved into the third floor of the Duffy’s (very mysterious) and everyone’s wondering what’s up. All the girls are wild about him. But you don’t have anything to worry about as