He patted my other knee and held out a hand, helping me to my feet.
“You’re a lifesaver, Chuck.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
He gave me a wink and then hurried off, his shoulders carrying the weight of the world.
I walked up the two steps to the glorified tent I shared with nineteen others and opened the door, doing a quick scan of the dimly lit space. As usual, there were several women asleep in their bunks, a few others reading or writing letters, and two playing a card game.
Noting my bunkmate’s empty bed below mine, the duffel she used for work missing from the footlocker, I slid my own bag from my shoulder and stored it in my locker before stepping carefully on the frame of the lower bunk and pulling myself up to check for uninvited creatures hanging about. It was a common occurrence to find any manner of bugs, snakes, and other unwanted animals in our beds when we didn’t occupy them for a night.
“It’s like they watch us and wait for us to leave,” Paulette said one day after she’d gone screaming from our tent after finding a rather large grasshopper in her bed.
Satisfied my bunk was clear, I threw on a fresh shirt, brushed my hair and pulled it into a ponytail once more, then headed for the mess hall for dinner.
My presence was instantly noticed as I walked in the room. With so few women on base, we stood out like beacons of something the men missed, desired, or ached for. It wasn’t so much that they wantedus, but more that we reminded them of home. Of girlfriends, wives, sisters, and mothers. Our mere existence provided comfort. Soft voices, soft bodies, long hair and, except when straight off a plane after a mission, nicer smells. It was disconcerting. Uncomfortable at times. The need coming off their persons palpable. And as a woman who tended to keep people at an arm’s length at all times, it was even more awkward.
I pasted on a smile and made my way to the food, grabbing a tray and plate and perusing the evening’s choices. The scent of fresh-cooked food made my mouth water. I was starving, my last meal eaten in a hurry as the sun rose this morning before loading injured men onto the plane. I grabbed two rolls, spooned a pile of potatoes on my plate, some chicken, corn, and piece of pie before circling back to grab two more rolls.
“Where you gonna put all that?” asked a soldier at the opposite end of the table where I sat.
I shoved a huge forkful of potatoes into my mouth and smiled. I hated being underestimated.
A loud crack of laughter echoed throughout the room and I glanced at a table at the far end. Mac was holding court, gesturing wildly as he told some story, probably of his own heroism, while Char sat beside him, a coy grin on her pretty face. She may have been obvious in her desires for him, but she was also in on the joke.
“Oh, I know he’s obnoxious and incredibly high on himself,” she told me in private one day when I woke to find her sneaking back into our tent after curfew. “But when he stops talking and gets down to business, he really knows what he’s doing.”
I’d wrinkled my nose at that and she’d laughed and climbed into her bunk fully clothed.
She caught my eye from across the room now and gestured with her head to join them, but I gave an exaggerated yawn and she nodded her understanding before turning her attention back to Mac’s antics. I stared down at my plate of food and pushed the potatoes around, images of the day before seeping in from the place in my brain where I hid them at the end of each mission. They always found me no matter how hard I tried to forget, haunting me in the quiet hours, which was easily done in my constantly exhausted state.
I took another bite, but the food was tasteless now. I was tempted to throw it away, but for the two things stopping me: guilt for wasting and the idiot who’d challenged my ability to eat my weight in food. Sighing, I shoved a forkful of potatoes in my mouth.
After finishing nearly everything on my plate, I dumped the scraps and made my way through the dark along the familiar path back to the barracks. Most of the women in attendance were asleep, a few with lanterns hanging above their bunks as they wrote letters or read books.
I changed into a pair of pajamas I’d purchased in the men’s department of Bloomingdale’s, as everything offered in the women’s department had ruffles and lace and long, flowing sleeves that ended in elastic at the wrists that irritated my skin. The men’s options were far cozier. Wide legs, roomy tops, and fabrics that were soft, not satiny. I’d bought three pairs of men’s pajamas in the smallest size they had, and every one of the women I bunked with had commented with envy about them.
“I still can’t believe no one’s swiped those from you.”
I glanced over my shoulder to the woman in the bottom bunk next to the one I shared with Tilly as I climbed up to mine.
“It’s not like they could hide it if they did,” I said, pulling back the covers and checking under my pillow for creatures before tucking the mosquito netting around my mattress.
“I’d put them under my nightgown,” she said and I laughed. Paulette was a no-nonsense kind of soul. The kind of woman my aunt would say spoke “from the gut.” She wasn’t mean or harsh, just said whatever she was thinking, and was honest about it.
“Well,” I said, “if I find any of them missing, I’ll look up your skirt first.”
She grinned.
“How’d today go?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said and she nodded and went back to the book she was reading while I lay back and stared up at the ceiling of our large tented home and debated if I wanted to pull out my own book, kept beneath my pillow.
But as my eyes blurred with tiredness, I decided against it and rolled onto my side, pulling the thin sheet and blanket I slept with over me and mulling over the wordfine.
“A word to mask what you’re really feeling, because all you feel is numb,” my aunt once told me after I’d given the word as an answer to how my first day at my new school had gone.
Some days it was all one could say though. No one had died on my watch, but there had been near misses. Moments when I thought I might fail the men in my charge. Seconds I thought the plane might go down, killing all of us.
