The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,57

the plane skidded onto the field, the props ripping the ground, Marshall saw Webb slumped, head resting on his chest as if he had just nodded off for a quick snooze.

25.

MARSHALL HAD RARELY TALKED ABOUT THE PLANE GOING down, and he hadn’t told Gordon all of it. He had never felt like taking credit for bringing the plane down safely. Webb was unconscious, perhaps already dead—exactly when, Marshall couldn’t say.

“An FW-190. A mean fucker,” Gordon was saying.

Marshall squirmed. “Your father had been hit. He was slumped over by the time we stopped moving.”

Gordon shook his head. “Damn.” He surveyed the room blankly. “That’s what’s called a bad day,” he said, forcing a laugh. He flexed his fists.

“Nothing was anybody’s fault,” Marshall said. “Your dad did one hell of a job. Nobody could have done better.”

Gordon called to the bartender, “Garçon—what do I have to do to get a refill?”

The bartender raised his eyebrows and turned his back. He made a show of dawdling before bringing the bottle.

“There’s certain things I’ve got against these Frenchies,” Gordon said to Marshall, after the bartender left. “Why they didn’t do the job in Vietnam. Why they hate us for doing the job they couldn’t do. We saved their ass in the World War Number Two, but they forgot about that. They have convenient memory. I tell this to my wife, and she says, ‘Gordon, you’re like a dog worrying a bone. Bury that bone and let’s go add another garage to the split-level.’ Or some other crap.” He laughed again, apparently struck by his own wit.

“Have you been married long?” Marshall asked.

“Linda and I got together after I came back to the States in 1970. Now, that was a bad scene for you, 1970. All those protesters, spitting on GIs coming home.” He swallowed an eye-popping slug of Scotch. “I had some problems with that war from the start, but I did my job. That’s American values.” Webb turned serious. “We had military discipline when I was a boy—lights out, reveille, spit-polish your shoes. When I saw my stepfather in the hall on the way to the goddamn bathroom, I had to salute! He was a career Army man, a colonel. I don’t know when he met Mom.”

He paused. “Then you see what I did to repay him—joined the Air Force!” Gordon rubbed his hands together. “The One-Oh-Wonder! Man, I was one afterburning bastard.”

Gordon asked Marshall a few questions about his father then—how he did takeoffs, what he liked to do on his time off. Marshall tried to paint a lively portrait, but he was flummoxed. It was hard to come up with stirring stories about Gordon’s father.

Then he remembered that he had bicycled into the English countryside with Lawrence Webb and a couple of other crewmates after a tough mission to Bremen. They had made a day of it, biking through peaceful country, racing on flat stretches.

“He was a speed demon on a bike,” Marshall said. “A One-Oh-Wonder.”

He declined another drink. After promising Gordon he would be in touch, he left. He walked to his apartment in the early twilight, shedding the alcohol and feeling his eyes grow clear again.

26.

HIS MAIL CAME TO HIS APARTMENT NOW. IT ARRIVED IN A locked cubbyhole in the lobby. Mary sent photographs of a trip she had taken to the Olympic Peninsula, and Albert sent drawings of a landscape plan for revising Marshall’s backyard with ground covers. No one would have to mow! he explained. Loretta would have had a fit, Marshall thought. Ground covers bring snakes, she would say.

He had received a couple more letters from the crew, in answer to his letter about visiting the crash site, and today he heard from Bob Hadley, his erstwhile escape partner. Hadley wrote from California, saying it had never occurred to him to return to the crash site, but he was glad that Marshall was searching for his helpers. Hadley wrote, “I didn’t know the name of the family that sheltered me in Paris. I didn’t stay there long, because everybody was starving in Paris.” He had no reaction to Marshall’s account of the boy’s father who was killed. But he was wondering if Marshall had written to Hootie Williams’s family. Hootie was single, and no one in the crew had kept in touch with his parents. Marshall thought about the Hootie he had known at Molesworth. He could whip the pants off everybody at poker. He could hold his liquor. He could sew. He could probably do