The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason Page A

simply disappeared, and he didn’t think about them again. Pilots sat far removed from consequences, anyway. Bombs didn’t really miss their targets and kill children at a skating rink, or dismember mothers in a park. You didn’t see bodies flying apart or hear the shrieks. You flew along, dropped your load, and flew away.
    THE ENGINES OF THE 747 were droning comfortingly in the night, as the passengers settled down to watch the movie. The captain made a brief visit seatside for obligatory pleasantries. “Glad to have you on board, old-timer.” The B-17 could have almost fit inside this luxury bus, Marshall thought. The bomber’s waist windows were open, and the fuselage rattled and shook. Riding through the formation’s churned-up air was like jouncing along a creek bed in a rattletrap Model A Ford. Cruising speed was about two hundred miles an hour, and it was a long way from England to the heart of Germany.
    Marshall flipped through the V-mail again. What a youngster he had been. He saw that at each stage of life a person reassessed the earlier stages, and a new perspective, almost a new identity, took form, as if the shifting views of the past were museum dioramas before him. He felt the power of ignorance, the drive of youth. Only oversexed young men could have fought that war. He was feeling nostalgia for a terrible time, and he didn’t know what this meant. He had gone to war with a willing heart. What did he want now?
    At Molesworth, he truly felt he was the hotshot pilot Loretta believed in. He knew the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs wouldn’t get him. Other guys—immediately nameless and faceless—got shot down, but he wouldn’t. He believed this. He had to believe it, or he couldn’t have flown the next mission.
    After a mission, the Doughnut Dollies appeared, American girls in their Red Cross Club-mobile, their dull-green bus that paid its good-will visits to the flak-weary bomber crews. The girls’ hair was breathtakingly seductive, and with their cheerleader voices and plush warmth they were as alluring as any of the stars in the movies he saw at the Officers’ Club. All the crews ran for the hot coffee, the doughnuts—their reward, lovely girls offering their wares.
    One evening he was at a rooming house in Kettering with one of the American girls. “The Red Cross girls aren’t supposed to step out like this,” she said, giggling.
    “What your mama doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” he said.
    The girl, nameless in his memory, wore something lacy beneath her skirt. She cuddled with him for a long while before they went ahead. She said, “It’s good; it doesn’t matter. It’s all right, baby.”
    “Hold me close.”
    “Sure, baby.”
    He wanted her warmth. He wanted to be enclosed, blanketed with her soft flesh.
    “This is stupid to say,” he said, “but you’re soft like those doughnuts you bring. And sweet too.”
    She only giggled and didn’t mind. She smoothed and admired his shoulders; she deposited little breathy kisses all over his stomach. She sat up, hands on her hips, and said, “Let me be the girl on your bomber nose. You do have a girl on your plane nose, don’t you? You all do.”
    He laughed, but he wouldn’t utter the name Dirty Lily . She didn’t pry.
    When it was time to leave, she pulled on her stockings carefully, snapping them to the belts, straightening the seams, checking her look in the mirror. He thought he would not see her again. He was going to bomb Hitler to hell, and she was giving him energy for the job, obtained without regret or guilt or pain.
    She said, “Come to the Rainbow Corner whenever you get your pass to London. Ask for me. There’s always something going on there. And so much dancing! Some of these guys can dance all night. Ask for Miss—”
    After a mission to Bremen, he went to the Rainbow Corner, the Red Cross canteen, but he did not see her anywhere in the crowded room. He asked for her, but she wasn’t on duty. He gathered with