Fly Boy (3 page)

“I understand. But you’d better write, a lot, and not just the letters to keep your mother in the dark. You write and tell me what’s really happening, all the time.”

“Now you sound like my sweetie or my wife. You’re not going to try to kiss me goodbye, are you?” I asked with a smirk.

“I might
kick
you goodbye if you give me any more of your lip.”

I held up my hands. “No more. I need you too much.”

I looked down the tracks. There was a train, smoke billowing from its stack, making its way into the station. Its brakes squealed, and the engine spewed out excess steam as it slowed down and slid to a stop alongside the platform.

“I think this is it,” I said. For some reason, just then I was finding it kind of hard to breathe.

A soldier—no, an airman, I could tell by his light blue
uniform—was standing in the middle of the platform, and he started calling out names from a list he was holding. For each name, a man came forward, bag in hand, and reported in, and his name was ticked off the list. The names were in alphabetical order, so I’d be somewhere in the middle.

There were lots of hugs and kisses and tears before each man climbed onto the train. Then, one by one, windows opened as men who had already boarded leaned down and kept talking or clasped the hands of their loved ones still on the platform. I suddenly wished my mother were here, or my brother or sisters, or that I had a girlfriend who would be broken up by my leaving. All I had was Chip. Still, I imagined that was better than just standing there by myself.

“McWilliams, David James!” the airman yelled.

“Okay, I’m off,” I said to Chip. “Take care of those letters for me.”

“I’ll take care of everything at this end. Just don’t go getting yourself killed.”

“Not planning on it.”

“Good luck, old chap.” Chip held out his hand and we shook.

“And good luck to you. I hope you can survive another year of old Beamish at your throat.”

“I hope he can survive another year of
me
.”

“McWilliams, David James!” the airman yelled again, louder this time. He was sounding annoyed.

“I’d better go.”

I grabbed my bag and hurried down the platform, dodging around the people still waiting to be called.

“McWilliams, David James, reporting for duty,
sir
!” I said.

The airman looked me up and down. He appeared none too happy. I threw my shoulders back and tried to stand taller.

“See these stripes on my shoulders, McWilliams?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That makes me a sergeant. You don’t call me ‘sir’ because I’m not an officer. I
work
for a living. Understand?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Good. Now get on the train with the rest of the acey- deucies.”

What in the name of all things holy was an acey-deucey?

“You waiting to be carried up the stairs?” he yelled.

“No, of course not, Sergeant!”

I jumped up onto the steps and climbed aboard the train. The car was already crowded with men, those at the windows looking or leaning out. I stopped and was bumped from behind.

“There are seats in other cars! Keep moving!” somebody yelled from behind.

I squeezed by and went through the door leading to the next car. It was far less crowded, and another airman—another sergeant—was barking out orders to keep moving. I didn’t hang around for more directions—and I definitely wasn’t about to call him “sir.”

The next car was even more sparsely populated. There was another airman—he only had two stripes, a corporal—and he was giving the orders.

“These seats will fold down into beds at night—upper berth and lower berth—so pair up in twos!” he called out.

I looked around. Men were starting to partner up. I really wished Chip were here with me.

“Do you have a partner?” a man asked. He didn’t look that much older than me, but he stood a good six inches taller and
was bigger all over. I thought maybe he was a farm boy; he had the kind of build that you get from baling hay or pitching straw all day.

“No,” I answered, shaking my head.

“Do you want the top or bottom bunk?”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“In that case, how about I take the bottom and you take the top.” He held out his hand. “I’m Jim Casey.”

“Good to meet you. I’m—” I stopped short just as I was going to call myself Robbie. “I’m David McWilliams, but my friends call me Dave.”

“Good to meet you, Dave. My guess is, before this is over, we’re going to need all the friends we can get.”

“I think you might be right.”

The train shuddered forward a foot and stopped, and I stumbled, grabbing the back of the seat to keep my balance. It then started slowly pulling out of the station.

“Looks like we’re getting going,” Jim said. He slumped down in his seat.

I went over to the window and searched for Chip. I couldn’t see him amongst the mass of crying, waving people on the platform. Maybe he’d already left.

“Wife or girlfriend?” Jim asked.

“I’m a little young for a wife,” I said.

“Figured if you were old enough to fight, you were old enough to marry. One battle is as rough as the other.”

“Just a friend who came down to see me off, but I think he’s gone. You?”

“I said goodbye to my mother and girlfriend this morning. I didn’t see any point in them coming down here to shed more tears.”

I guess that made sense, and there really wasn’t any point in Chip waiting around any—

“There he is!”

Chip was standing on a bench, so he was head and shoulders above the crowd. He had one hand above his eyes and was trying to peer into the cars. I opened the window, leaned out, and waved as we chugged by.

“Be safe!” Chip yelled.

“You too!” I called back before I realized just how stupid that sounded.

I turned and watched as we picked up speed and left him farther behind. I kept watching as he got smaller and smaller, but he kept on waving until finally he jumped down from his perch and disappeared into the crowd.

I sat down in the seat opposite Jim’s. This was all happening. This was all real. I was leaving behind everything I’d known. I suddenly felt very small and very alone.

“Here.” Jim was holding out a small silver flask.

“What is it?”

“Whisky. Have a shot.”

I hesitated.

“Don’t worry, it’s good stuff. No rotgut.”

I took the flask and tipped it back and took a little sip. It tasted awful and burned all the way down my throat. I handed him back the flask.

“Probably not the best you’ve ever tasted,” he said.

“But not the worst either,” I lied.

He held the flask up. “To new adventures and new friends!” He tipped it back and took a big slug.

Maybe I didn’t like his whisky, but it was good not to be so alone. To new adventures and new friends.

“Not much to look at,” Jim said.

“Nothing but fields of wheat since we left northern Ontario, except for Winnipeg … I wish we could have gotten out to look around.”

“I wish we could have just gotten off the train for good. Two days is too long to be riding the rails.”

“It’s been a long time,” I agreed.

The motion of the train had made Jim sick—not the best thing for somebody who wanted to be a pilot—but I’d actually enjoyed the ride. I’d never been west of Toronto before, and I would have stayed awake the whole time if I could have.

“Not much longer, at least,” Jim said.

I looked at my watch. “Less than ten minutes.”

The sergeant had come through twenty minutes ago to tell us to get all our gear packed and be ready to disembark in thirty minutes.

“It’s so empty out here,” Jim said. “Hardly any people at all, just a few scattered houses in the distance.”

“I think that’s why the training school is out here, so it can be away from everybody.”

“Makes sense,” he agreed.

Over the two days, I’d gotten to know a lot of the other
guys. There were over three hundred men, and they could be divided into two groups: older guys, some even in their thirties, who were married, with kids, and younger, single guys, some not much older than me or Jim. Jim was only nineteen, but big enough to easily pass for a year or two older. Once the train had gotten underway, the two groups quickly separated, with people even shifting their sleeping berths so they would be on different cars of the train.

Both groups had done a lot of loud talking, card playing, shooting craps, and drinking. Especially drinking. Jim wasn’t the only one with a flask. Bottles seemed to materialize out of nowhere, and I got the feeling that some people had brought along more booze than they had clothing. I’d even heard that a couple of guys had almost been left behind in Winnipeg when they’d dashed off the train to run to the liquor store to replenish their supplies.

I’d had a couple of sips from Jim’s flask, but nothing more. Neither of my parents were drinkers, and there wasn’t any alcohol in our house. It had never really appealed much to me, and now, after spending two days on a train with some guys who couldn’t hold their liquor or their tempers, I was even less tempted to take up the habit.

There’d been more than a few arguments, and at least twice, when push came to shove, a couple of guys were ready to have a set-to. The nearby presence of the sergeants and the calmer heads of others kept things from heating up any further.

The other thing that seemed to occupy time for a lot of the guys was gambling. I’d seen them trying to play craps—dice—but the movement of the train kept interfering with the rolling of the dice, but they still played, trying to
compensate for the train’s movement tipping the dice one way or another. Instead, there were lots of card games going on. I’d never played cards before—at least not for money—and a lot of bills were on the table.

My money—my
parents’
money to pay for my year in boarding school—was safe, squirrelled away in a sock at the bottom of my bag. I felt bad about even having it, but I had to take it with me. It would have been pretty hard to explain to my mother why she didn’t need to pay tuition for my schooling that year. When this was all over, I’d just give them back the money. Besides, it wasn’t bad to have a little extra cash, just in case.

When I wasn’t looking out the window at the scenery, I just stood off to one side and watched the games being played. I’d found that was the safest place, because some of the guys got antsy when you stood behind them, as if they thought you were giving signals and helping somebody cheat them.

I’d already been asked about my age. It wasn’t just that I was younger, I really
looked
younger. A couple of the older guys had been giving me a hassle about being so young when Jim walked by. He just told them that guys like me and him were brave enough to “enlist as soon as we could,” not like some “lily-livered zombies” who had to be drafted. Calling somebody a zombie was about the worst insult you could give, and for a few seconds it looked as if Jim had only helped me get into a fight. But then they’d smiled and laughed and offered us both a drink from their flasks.

I knew I had to start doing things that would at least make me
seem
older. The moustache thing wasn’t going to work. Other guys had had to shave a couple of times during the trip,
but I could practically have used a face cloth to wipe away the peach fuzz that was starting to form on my upper lip.

I thought about taking up smoking, but trying that for the first time might even make the situation worse. What if I started to cough when I lit up or, worse, turned green and threw up, the way I’d seen some guys do? The thick haze of smoke that hung in the air was almost enough to make me feel sick, and a couple of times I’d had to go outside between cars to catch some fresh air.

I felt the train start to slow down, and I could see a few small houses out the window. We were obviously on the outskirts of Brandon. As we continued to slow down, more and more houses and even stores appeared, until we finally pulled up to the station. There was no elevated platform here, but there were trucks—RCAF trucks—waiting beside the tracks.

The train shuddered to a final stop. It would be good to get my feet back on solid—

“Move it, move it, move it!” screamed one of the sergeants. “Do you men think this is the start of your vacation? Get your butts off this train and onto those trucks, double time!”

There was a mad scramble as men jumped to their feet, grabbed their bags from the luggage compartments, and pushed forward to get off the train. I wedged myself in behind Jim and joined a stream of men flooding down the aisle and out the door, leaping to the ground.

The tailgates of the trucks were down, and we tossed our bags in one truck and climbed up. There were benches on both sides, and we plopped down on the hard wooden seats. It filled up quickly, and then a couple of airmen lifted the tailgate and slammed it closed with a loud thud that shook
the whole vehicle. They then pulled the canvas flaps closed, blocking most of the view. I felt a little claustrophobic, stuffed in with twenty other men, sitting shoulder to shoulder, my knees almost touching the person facing me. Quickly it started to get hot and stuffy in there.