THE DAWN PATROL
I’m not dead yet.
You’d think that I am, the way that they’re carrying on. Christ! You should hear them, going on about it like a troupe of professional mourners. And that’s exactly what they sound like too, professional mourners: sniffling; whimpering; whining to each other, with their remember-when’s, and I-wish-we-had’s — thinking of me as already dead — but not willing to let me move along in peace.
How do I tell them I just want to rest in peace?
I can hear Bev crying — the boys are with her, Ronnie too — and Christ, doesn’t that bring back memories? I told Bev a long time ago, I didn’t want any tears when I died. We cried enough when my dad died, the bastard. I told her, if I’m ever like that — if I’m ever laying here like I am now — please, pull the goddamned plug. Let me die with some dignity. That’s all a man can ask for — that’s all anyone can hope for — because everyone deserves a little bit of dignity rather than suffering through the ignominy of dying in the first place. I don’t want to lay here for two weeks and have a parade of relatives passing in front of me, paying their last respects, when I know goddamned well they don’t mean it.
*
I learned during the War that you don’t have a lot of time when you’re coming in at 10,000 feet on a bombing raid over enemy territory; flying through Flack, and the heavy caliber machine guns of the Messers coming at you so fast you barely have time to think — the smoke so thick, you can barely see. You’re just praying to God the Triple A’s on the ground don’t latch onto you, because if they do, you’re dead. One hit of Flak and that’s all it takes. An engine goes, or a wing gets shot off, and you know you won’t have enough time to get out — not at any height. Pretty soon, you’re up there like a sittin’ duck, the Triple A’s are closing in on you. You look around and see everyone with you has fucked off, even though they told us to stay in formation. But there were only eleven of us left, and by then, nobody wanted to get hit with a stray shot. Peripherally fucked-up, that’s what we called it, and that’s what always did you in. There’s no distinction in a death like that, no matter what you might think. You’re just fucked.
And there was nothing I could do about it; not for me, or the kid sitting beside me holding his guts in his hands, screaming bloody murder and telling me: It hurts, it hurts, can you please make it go away?
Well, of course it hurts, I wanted to scream back at him, you’re holding your fuckin’ guts in your hands!
It was all I could do to keep the goddamned plane in the air with him screaming in my ear the entire way — all the way back to Dover. Screaming and crying and going on about it, while all I was thinking was that the Messers are gonna come back in and finish us off. It was either that, or we’d fall through that big hole in the side of the cockpit — that’s where the shot came through that blew the kid’s guts open — right through the goddamned armour plating. That’s not supposed to happen!
The sad part is, I can’t even remember the kid’s name. Don’t get me wrong, I can remember what he looked like, sure — and I’ll never forget his screaming and crying, or the blood pourin’ out of him like a goddamned water clock — thick and red, and soaking him so that he looked like an oversized inkblot — or the wind coming in through that hole spraying his blood all over me. I can remember that, just not his name. But I was staring through that hole in the side of the plane as the early morning dawn spread out across the countryside below us, thinking how it looked like a water colour my Dad might’ve painted.
Then we were over the beaches of Normandy where half-sunk landing crafts and bodies were floating in the water. The beaches were still under fire, with the big ships returning fire in endless clouds of black smoke. Even knowing Jack might be down there somewhere, all I was thinking of was Dad gutting chickens and telling me this is what it looks like — this is what you’ll see when a man dies. And he was asking me if that’s what I wanted to see as he held chicken guts up in his one hand with the blood and insides sliding through his thick fingers, the egg sack a mucous bag of snot with tiny unformed eggs inside, broken and glistening. And still I was thinking it looked like something Dad would’ve painted.
And the kid kept screaming at me.
I tell you, it was all I could do not to pull my gun out and shoot the bastard right then and there. I did pull it out. I showed it to him and his eyes went as big as Freddie’s at Christmas dinner, but it didn’t stop him from screamin’. Oh no, not him.
Hurry up and die kid, I was thinking. Just hurry up and fuckin’ die!
The stupid bastard wouldn’t though, would he? He’d only been in the Big Show for one month. This was supposed to be his first mission. He was too excited to be scared — and too stupid to know any better. I was hoping to get rotated back home — just grateful to have made it as long as I had — when they went and changed the fuckin’ rules. Thirty missions they said. Thirty! I was looking at eight more now, instead of three. That’s when I told myself they expect us to die.
By that time, I’d been shot down three different times, ditched my plane twice, and had to bail out over the Channel another five times. That’s a forty percent failure rate. They tell you going in that your chances of survival are one in four — twenty-five percent. I was living on borrowed time, and I knew it.
They told us there weren’t enough pilots; that was their excuse for keeping us there. Well of course there aren’t enough pilots we said, we keep getting shot down; that was our excuse for wanting to leave. Our planes were getting blown up with us in them, but that was okay they said, because they didn’t have the parts to keep them flying anyway.
When can we go home, we asked?
God, we were screwed before we even knew what was going on.
That’s how I ended up flying across the channel with the kid beside me, wishing he’d die so I didn’t have to listen to him anymore.
Just die already, I was thinking.
We started losing altitude over Dover, trailing thick, black smoke, with flames coming out of our engines like some goddamned Chink firework — and while I was waiting for the fuel lines to catch, the kid was still screaming at me that it hurt. But he wouldn’t pass out. Oh no, that would be too easy for him, wouldn’t it? He wouldn’t die, either.
He had to sit there beside me. Screaming.
I put my gun in his mouth and he nodded — begging me — and as I pulled the trigger I remembered that he'd taken Ray’s place.
THE DAWN PATROL