B for Buster by Iain Lawrence

him a poke.
    From up and down the kite came thuds and bangs as others stowed their things. We examined everything from the bombsight in the nose to Ratty’s twin guns in the tail, then went out to lie in the grass and wait.
    The sun was nearly down, the moon not risen yet. The tiny blackflies—midges, the English called them— swarmed around in swirling clouds. Dew had settled on the grass. Ratty and the others who smoked got out their cigarettes and puffed circles at the sky. Buzz lay stretched on his side, digging with his fingers at the soil.
    I couldn’t sit still. I tingled all over with the excitement of flying, and I sat up and lay down and sat up again.
    Lofty and Pop went walking around
Buster,
tugging at the trimming tabs, patting at the wheels. Sergeant Piper went with them, his hands in his pockets, talking like a car salesman about every little thing. The three of them bent down to look at the tail wheel, and I saw a flash of silver at Pop’s throat. He was wearing a crucifix that I hadn’t seen before.
    It was for luck, I thought. He wasn’t the only one who carried something with him. Little Ratty had a rabbit’s foot that he had brought from the States. He had hung it round his neck for his very first flight, on the Canadian prairies, in one of the canary-colored trainers we knew as Yellow Perils. He had never climbed into an aircraft without it. Will had a picture of a girl tucked in his helmet. We all knew she was his wife, and we all knew he kept her picture there, though he was always very secret about the way he slipped it into place before a flight. Simon, somewhere, had a white handkerchief that smelled very faintly of perfume. Buzz carried nothing with him, yet he never flew without a charm, and he was busy digging in the grass now to find one.
    I had a ray gun. It was just a ring—a kid’s silly ring— such a stupid thing to carry that nobody knew I had it. It was buttoned in my tunic pocket, and it would stay there until I was alone in the darkness, bent over my desk where no one could watch me.
    Only Lofty had no lucky charm, and no belief that he needed one. He had smiled at the stinky handkerchief, and chuckled at the rabbit’s foot, and he certainly would have howled at my ray-gun ring. It wasn’t stuff like that, he’d said, that had kept us alive through our training, while so many others had bought the farm. “You don’t need
luck,
” he’d told us. “You’ve got
me.
”
    I patted my pocket. The ring was still there.
    â€œHey!” cried Buzz, suddenly sitting up. “I found one.” He held up his trophy, a tiny four-leafed clover.
    Ratty applauded; Will made a wolf-call whistle. Buzz wedged the clover into his flying glove, up to the tip of his trigger finger. By the end of the flight it would be a green smudge, like a bug squashed on his skin.
    We spent half an hour loafing around on the grass before Lofty signed the 700. Then we climbed aboard for another half hour of waiting in the kite. The sun had warmed the black metal, and
Buster
was oven-hot. I sweated in just my jacket and my trousers, and pitied the gunners bundled in their leather coveralls. At seventeen thousand feet their sweat would freeze into ice. So would Lofty’s. He was such a great guy that he kept the hot-air outlet aimed down toward me and Simon instead of at himself. I would always be warm.
    Gilbert squawked. I rapped on the box, but he squawked even louder. Then Simon shouted at me, “Why’s that bird throwing a wobbly? If he doesn’t shut up, he’ll come a gutser.”
    I didn’t know exactly what Simon meant, but it sounded awful. I banged on the box and told the pigeon to be quiet. It bashed around, then settled down. And through my window I watched the darkness close in. The other bombers stretched away in staggered rows. The closest one was
E for Eagle,
and I could see the pilot in his cockpit, a