Love and Hydrogen (32 page)

Uhlhorn had his motor cut out when he was hardly a thousand meters from the formation. Ziegler's cockpit filled with steam on his first pass. Rösle's Komet flipped on landing just before the perimeter. It didn't explode and he was pulled from it just conscious, but pints of the fuel had run over his back while he hung there, and when they tore off the flight suit, the skin underneath was a jelly. He was on enough painkillers to last until April.

The entire thing was witnessed by eighteen new trainees who arrived just after we'd taken off. Many of them, it's clear, now deeply regret their daring. Seven have already left.

But up in the thicket of the bomber stream, while the rest of us were wasting time and fishtailing about to no great effect, Wörndl's cannons tore the wing off one Fortress and the tail off another. Both were confirmed.

“This was a high-altitude interception that took
less than five
minutes
from when we first spotted them,” he reminds us. His big ears are red from the sheer love of our enterprise. He's commandeered my chair and slung his temporary cast onto my bed to keep his ankle elevated. “Who'd return to a Bf 109 now? And take a half hour to get upstairs? If we're unhappy where we are, our Komets can have us somewhere else. Faster than we can say, ‘somewhere else.' ”

“Somewhere else,” Ziegler says, standing with his arm on the windowsill. “But, I'm still here,” he smiles, when we all look at him.

AROUND NOON there's a short snowfall. The airfield is lightly covered. Cumulus clouds have arrived. I'm instructed to rest my face.

I've received a letter from my sister.
Do you remember the way
you hoarded candies?
she writes.
The way we all joked you'd end up
a landlord, or a miser alone in his room?

The Komets are back on the line, topped up and ready to go. No one imagines the Americans are going to waste weather like this this afternoon. Uhlhorn, Bamm, Ziegler, and some of the new arrivals have a snow-fight. Wörndl and I visit Rösle, who's asleep on his belly with his mouth open. The dressings on his back are soaked through.

Wörndl gazes at his face for longer than seems necessary. “When we write our squadron history, every chapter's going to be entitled ‘Our Numbers Dwindle,' ” he finally remarks.

As if under a far-off pot, Leipzig's air-raid sirens begin to howl.

We step outside. The burned part of my face feels slapped in the sunlight. Wörndl leans on an oaken stick the medical orderly has dug up for him. At the operations post, we struggle into our flight suits, and then I walk with him, at his pace, to the starting line.

Ziegler, Bamm, Uhlhorn, four of the less-new trainees, and our CO are already aboard their rides and at Immediate Readiness, all of them listening intently to situation reports over the R/T. Wörndl and I climb our ladders into adjacent aircraft. We settle in, strap in, and plug in.

The regional spotter sounds as though he's calling a close finish at the racetrack. They're coming directly toward us. Leipzig or Berlin. Leipzig or Berlin. They're changing course. No. Back on course. Leipzig.

Our sky is a washed bowl. The occasional cumulus has moved off to the west. Over Leipzig and the Leuna Works there's a browner haze.

High above to the north, finally, a phalanx of contrails. I think of drypainting: someone dragging a dry white paintbrush across the clear dome of the sky.

Voices volley through the R/T. Three hundred planes. No, five hundred. No, more.

Slightly behind and below them, silken threads, just visible: the fighter escorts.

There's a stunned lull in our earphones. Wörndl calls me on the R/T. I can see his eyes through his canopy. He hasn't lowered his goggles yet.

“You've got a lot more luck than sense, Pitz,” he says. He seems to mean it as a compliment. His voice rattles and pops in my ear.

“My mother says the same thing,” I answer. He laughs.

It occurs to me that we missed celebrating his birthday on Friday. It's our custom to celebrate birthdays on the anniversaries of days on which someone should have died. Wörndl, for example, has six, all clustered in the winter.

Eli and Otto and our ground crew members move from aircraft to aircraft performing final checks. The ground crew members peer worriedly at us, as always, torn in their allegiances between aircraft and pilot.

I'm not interested in love, or wealth, or fame, or wisdom, or in being longed for, or in being admired for my perspicacity, or for my sage and considered advice. I'm not interested in my family's admiration, or in politics. I'm not interested in alcohol. I'm not interested in killing. I'm not interested in me.

See if you can understand: I'm not interested in what drives you. I'm not interested, as Wörndl is, in philosophy. He had a phrase for what I want. He called it “being the perfect expression of my own instrumentality.”

On my left, engines are roaring. Thumbs-up are moving down the line. Wörndl slams shut his canopy. I slide shut mine. “Climb aboard the mighty flea!” he shouts in my earphones. “Climb aboard the mighty flea!” I shout in his. Out on the grass before us, someone's Komet is already slingshotting away toward the perimeter fence. Whoops and Red Indian yells are starting to fill the R/T.

In the future, the short future, those of us who survive this day of the Komet's greatest success will be eradicated by accidents, collisions, and Allied fighters dawdling over our airfield, waiting for the helplessness of our landing approaches, having finally puzzled out our Achilles' heels. One day Mustangs, one day Lightnings, one day Thunderbolts. There will be requests for volunteers for ramming attacks. There will be, in the evenings, the misery-inducing spectacle of the mess: puddles of spilled wine under dirty glasses. Empty seats. Tobacco smoke still in the air.

That group will have found itself well on the other side of anxiety. The far shore. That group will climb into their B's as though they were rowboats on a lake. That group will finish what rations are delivered in those final days and deliver itself to St. Immolation.

This group is hurtling upward, wingtip to wingtip, to engage the biggest bomber stream any of us has ever seen. The roar beneath us will never stop. We reach that part of the sky that turns from turquoise to green to dark blue—
fifteen thousand meters up
— before our engines stop and we tip and falter and prepare to fall onto the bombers' heads. We bank and dive like swallows. My cockpit is clear of fumes but still I'm weeping. There's Wörndl, a good thousand meters below me, drawing helixes from the contrails of his spiraling wingtips. There's Ziegler, right behind him, rocking from side to side like a boomerang from hell. Flights of Thunderbolts, sluggish specks, struggle upward to meet us. No one's speaking. Our ears are on the slipstream. Our thumbs are on the cannon triggers. Our hearts are in the dive. We have become the inexplicable. We have become the unbelievable. We are our own descendants, the children we have always wanted to be.

JIM SHEPARD

LOVE AND HYDROGEN

Jim Shepard is the author of five previous novels, the story collection Batting Against Castro, and Project X, a novel to be published in hardcover simultaneously with this collection. He teaches at Williams College and lives with his wife, two sons, worrisome dog, and tiny, tiny daughter in Williams-town, Massachusetts.

ALSO BY JIM SHEPARD

Flights

Paper Doll

Lights Out in the Reptile House

Kiss of the Wolf

Nosferatu

Batting Against Castro: Stories

Project X

AS EDITOR

You've Got to Read This

(with Ron Hansen)

Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs

(with Amy Hempel)

Writers at the Movies

A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, JANUARY 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Jim Shepard

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and
colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

“The Gun Lobby” and “Eustace” appeared originally in
The Atlantic
Monthly; “Love and Hydrogen,” “Runway,” and “Ajax Is All About Attack”
in
Harper's
; “Alicia and Emmett with the 17th Lancers at Balaclava” and
“John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me” in
Tin House
; “Glut
Your Soul on My Accursed Ugliness” in DoubleTake; “The Creature from
the Black Lagoon” and “Won't Get Fooled Again” in
Playboy
; “Batting
Against Castro” and “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea” in
The Paris Review
;
“Astounding Stories” in McSweeney's; “Messiah” in GQ; “Reach for the
Sky” in The New Yorker; “Descent into Perpetual Night” in SEED; and
“The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich” in
Fiction.

“Mars Attacks,” “Spending the Night with the Poor,” and “Krakatau” originally
appeared in the collection Batting Against Castro, copyright © 1996 by Jim
Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York).

“Piano Starts Here” originally appeared in the anthology
You Don't
Know What Love Is: Contemporary American Love Stories
, edited by
Ron Hansen (Ontario Review Books, 1987) and subsequently appeared
in the collection Batting Against Castro (Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 1996).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shepard, Jim.
Love and hydrogen: new and selected stories / Jim Shepard.
p. cm.—(Vintage contemporaries original)

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-42671-0

v3.0