Paper Doll Read Free

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.’”
    â€œYou’ve been reading my letters,” Bean said, shocked.
    â€œIn a what position?” Willis Eddy asked. His toe nosed Bean’s bag of doughnuts.
    â€œHe meant fetal,” Gabriel explained. He made a circular motion with his hand, as if to hurry Rice’s progress with the camera.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œThat 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.
    â€œ 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.
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œLewis,” Snowberry said.
    â€œShe’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.