ROY DIVED for the ball but missed. It pinged off the table and bounced along the floor. Frankie whooped and pumped his fist. “Is that what you call your A-game, Roy?”
“Now you owe me a dollar,” George added from where he was sitting against the wall, watching their Ping-Pong game.
“You know I don’t have any money ’til we get paid,” Roy told him and then turned back to Frankie. “And you, couldn’t you have gone easy on a fella, for once?”
The door to the rec room opened, and Frankie watched as Jim and some other mechanics entered, heading for the dart board. “Hey, I have to maintain my title as Ping-Pong champion,” he said, turning his attention back to Roy. “Honor of the squadron and all that.”
“Give me a rematch at least. Let me win some of my money back from George.”
George guffawed. “It’s just going to put you deeper in the hole.”
Frankie glanced over to the other side of the room and thought Jim was watching him, but the next second, Jim shouldered his way into position, a dart poised in his fingers. Frankie jerked back around to the Ping-Pong table. “Sure, I’ll play you again. But you’re not gonna beat me.”
“Pride cometh before a fall,” Roy shot back and served quickly.
Frankie lunged for the ball, settling into the rhythm. He beat Roy even faster this time.
“Mercy!” Roy cried, pretending to be hit in the chest. He sprawled over the table. “Take pity on me, O cruel one.”
“You’re the one asking for it,” Frankie replied, smiling and hauling him to his feet. “Come on, George, let’s go cheer him up.”
“Hold on a minute,” a voice said, and he turned to find Jim standing there, dart game abandoned. “Care to play a real opponent?”
“Hey!” Roy began, outraged, but Frankie cut him off.
“You think you’re that good, huh?”
“I know I’m that good,” Jim returned.
George whistled. “Show him the error of his ways, Frankie.”
“Yeah, all right.” Frankie handed Jim the paddle Roy had been using. “Just don’t say I never warned you.”
Jim grinned. “Famous last words, Dorothy.”
“For the last time,” Frankie said, slamming the ball down the table, “I am not from Kansas!”
Then they couldn’t talk, too absorbed in following the quick movements of the ball. It darted back and forth. Frankie almost missed one, misjudging the swing, but managed to catch it in time. Jim was good—better than Roy, certainly. At last Frankie sent a ball whizzing so fast that Jim just couldn’t get there soon enough.
Roy and George cheered and slapped him on the back. Frankie grinned and panted, chest heaving.
Jim stared stony-faced at Frankie for a moment, but then a smile slowly spread across his face. “Good game.”
“Thanks,” Frankie said, startled but pleased. “You too.”
Jim nodded. “See you around, then,” he said and jogged back over to rejoin the dart game.
“Not a very talkative guy, is he?” Roy observed.
“He can be when he wants to,” Frankie replied, remembering some of Jim’s choicer insults. He watched as Jim threw and the dart thumped into the cork.
“Come on, Frankie, let’s hit the showers,” George said, and Frankie turned away to follow them, musing on this new side of Jim, a Jim who smiled and didn’t insult Frankie with every breath he took.
THE NEXT time he stumbled on Jim, he was taking a shortcut behind a utility shed to get to his meteorology class. He literally almost tripped over him because Jim was propped up against an old barrel, taking a nap. Jim blinked awake at the sound of Frankie’s cursing.
“Hey,” he said, stretching and shading his eyes against the sun.
“You know if you get caught, it’ll be demerits,” Frankie told him.
“I never get caught.” Jim fished into his pocket and pulled out a packet of Mallo Cups. He ripped it open and popped one of the coconut-filled chocolates into his mouth. “Want one? They got a little melted, but they’re still good.”
“Um, no thanks, I have to get to class.”
Jim hummed and shut his eyes again.
After that, Frankie noticed Jim often took little catnaps whenever the opportunity presented itself. Two days later, when Jim met him after he came in from a flight, he saw Jim hiding a yawn. “Did I wake you up?” he teased.
“I fell asleep because you were taking so long out there,” Jim retorted. “You know these things go faster than forty miles per hour, right?”
“Yeah, I got that figured out.” Frankie grinned. “It’s my favorite part. You know in Kansas, we all drive buggies. Can’t go faster than a brisk trot at best.”
Jim laughed. “See? Knew you would admit to your native state someday.”
JOKING ASIDE, Frankie did like going fast, and now they were getting to do mock dogfights in addition to air-to-air gunnery and dive bombing.
“Stay in formation, Red Two,” the flight instructor’s voice said, crackling over the radio, and Frankie pulled back, slipping in behind Roy, even though he itched to zoom ahead. Blue Flight was waiting for them somewhere up ahead, and he kept craning his neck, looking up into the sun.
Finally Ed’s voice snapped, “Bogies, two o’clock high.”
“Red flight, engage,” their instructor said.
Frankie snap rolled to the left and then pulled up sharply. A plane hurtled past his right side, and he turned, trying to get on its tail. The pilot dropped down and flipped over, intending to circle around and come up behind Frankie. But Frankie followed him, adrenaline surging as he suddenly found himself looking up at the ground. Then he righted himself, but his opponent had disappeared.
Cursing, he targeted a plane following closely on Ed’s tail. “I’m on my way, Red Four,” he said, gunning the throttle. The other pilot was so intent that he didn’t even notice Frankie for a good minute. Frankie pretended to fire the guns, concentrating on keeping the target centered.
“Got a kill,” he said to Jim back on the field, hopping a little as the excitement of the fight lingered.
“And look at the stress you put on the damn aileron,” Jim muttered. “Are you actually trying to break my plane?”
“Your plane?” Frankie laughed. “She is definitely my plane.”
“No, you just get to borrow her occasionally. I’m the one who provides the care and feeding, and slaves over her after you try to tear her to pieces.”
“Hey, if your little delusions make you happy,” Frankie said and walked off, laughing at Jim’s glare.
IF HE didn’t know better, Frankie would have thought Jim was following him around. He seemed to run into his crew chief everywhere. Even his barracks weren’t immune, as one afternoon Jim appeared out of the blue, poking his head around the door and asking, “Want to shoot some hoops?”
Frankie groaned. “Does it look like I want to play basketball?” he demanded, gesturing at the heavy wool dress uniform he had worn while marching off some demerits, thanks to a scrap he had gotten into with some guys from another squadron the day before. With the end of their training drawing near, tempers were running high as everyone waited on tenterhooks to find out where they would be posted. He couldn’t even remember how the fight had started, only that it sure had been nice to release some tension and throw a few punches. Now, after marching for two hours, it seemed like a pretty stupid thing to have done. He was sweaty and exhausted but had flight training in an hour that he couldn’t miss. “I don’t have time anyway.”
“Hmmm.” Jim wandered over and flipped through the stack of postcards Frankie had scattered around. Frankie snatched them back.
“Hey, those are private.”
Jim raised an eyebrow. “Love letters? You got a gal back in Kansas?”
“No. They’re from my mother. Mostly.”
“Oh, a momma’s boy.” Jim grinned. “Should have known. Are you even shaving yet, Dorothy?”
“Would you scram?” Frankie snapped. “Go do whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing. Like looking after my plane.” He had taken off his uniform coat and now stripped off his sweaty undershirt, searching for a dry one.
“A dollar says I can shoot more baskets than you,” Jim said, moving a few feet away but lingering.
Frankie snorted. “Fine, I’ll play you tomorrow. But your wallet will be lighter when we’re done.”
JIM MOVED fast on the court, keeping easy control of the ball as it bounced between his feet. But Frankie had the height advantage and always grabbed the rebounds. After thirty minutes Jim sagged against the wall, panting, and called a halt to the game.
“Don’t smirk,” he said, handing Frankie a dollar.
Frankie held up his hands. “I’m not. I won’t even say I told you so.”
“First Ping-Pong, now basketball.” Jim shook his head, but he seemed to be taking his loss with good grace.
“You played really well. I’m just taller than you.”
“By two inches at the most.” Jim crossed his arms over his chest, giving Frankie a once-over. “’Sides, you’re dang skinny. I could probably knock you over with one hand.”
“You could try,” Frankie retorted, instantly on the defensive, curling his hand into a fist.
“Hey. Easy, Dorothy.” Jim grabbed his shoulder and gave him a little shake. “I’m not looking to pick a fight. I enjoyed our game. We’ll have to play again sometime.”
Frankie shrugged, abashed.
“I know why you’re wound so tight,” Jim continued. “You’re hoping to find out where you’ll be posted so you can get the hell out of here. Just like the rest of us.”
Frankie nodded. “I’m sick of waiting. I want to get my first mission over with so I can stop thinking about it.”
Jim put a hand on his back and propelled him toward the door. “What you need is a stiff drink. Let’s go into town. I can borrow my buddy Roger’s car.”
“I don’t know,” Frankie began, not sure he wanted to spend an entire evening in Jim’s company. Although he had to admit that in the past few days, Jim’s insults had come to lack the bite they had originally possessed. Now they were almost… fond, and instead of a spike of irritation whenever he saw Jim, Frankie had almost started to look forward to their interactions. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He had horsed around with and teased David and Pete, of course, but with Jim it was somehow different. Frankie couldn’t figure if Jim thought of him as a friend or if he was still just someone who provided a handy source of amusement half the time and had to be tolerated the other half.
“Aw, come on,” Jim pleaded, and he looked so genuinely disappointed that Frankie gave in.
It turned out they wouldn’t be alone, anyway, because Roger wanted to come, and then two more guys caught wind of the scheme, and so he ended up crammed in the back of Roger’s car, while Jim sat up front in the passenger seat and fiddled with the radio.
“So you’re Jimmy’s pilot, huh?” Roger shouted over the sounds of “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.”
“Uh, yes,” Frankie replied.
“Well go easy on that plane, would you?” Roger continued. “Jimmy won’t shut up about it. Drives me nuts.”
Frankie stayed silent, not sure how to reply to this.
“Says you did an Immelmann yesterday that practically took off a wing.”
“I did not,” Frankie protested loudly as a trumpet blared.
“Can’t do that kind of roll, huh?” the guy on his right said. Frankie couldn’t remember his name. Webster? Wallace?
“No, I did the roll, but I didn’t—”
“I could never hack it with all those twists and turns,” Wallace said, interrupting. “I’d puke up my guts all over. You ever done that?”
“No.” Frankie tried to shift into a more comfortable position. Jim was staring out the window, one foot propped on the dashboard, apparently uninterested in the conversation. Frankie thought this was a bit rude, seeing as how Jim had talked him into going to town in the first place.
“My stomach, it’s real sensitive,” Wallace continued. “I eat one wrong thing, and that’s it. Like artichokes. Boy, I can’t stand artichokes.”
“Will you shut up about your stomach, Woodrow?” the guy on Frankie’s other side said. “Christ.”
“The doctor even warned me about it,” Wallace—no, Woodrow said, soldiering on, undaunted. “He said, ‘Private, if you don’t want to end up in sick bay for a month, you’ll stay away from that chili powder.’”
“Maybe that cute gal Melanie will be at the bar again,” Roger said, oblivious to Woodrow’s sorrows. “I almost got her the last time. A few more kisses, and I would have been home free.” He slapped his hand on the steering wheel. “She’s stacked too!”
Woodrow leaned closer to Frankie. “And then there was the one time I ate the mango.”
Smothering a sigh, Frankie let his head drop back against the seat.
When they finally got there, the bar smelled of heat and stale smoke. Frankie grabbed a beer—no way was he trusting himself to Jim’s tender mercies if he got smashed—and sat at a booth in a corner. Jim found him a few seconds later.
“So, that dollar,” he began, “could I, um, borrow some back?”
Frankie stared at him. “You have got to be kidding. You want me to loan you the money I just won from you?”
“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”
Blowing out an exasperated breath, Frankie pulled out his wallet. “You could have just not played the game with me, you know. It would have been a hell of a lot easier than playing the game, getting beat, and then convincing me to come here so you could get your money back.”
“That’s not why I asked you,” Jim protested. “I forgot I didn’t have any more cash. I didn’t bring you here just to pay for my drinks, Frankie.”
“Could have fooled me,” Frankie muttered.
Jim hesitated and then sat down across from him. He ignored the dollar bill Frankie held out. “It’s true. And I didn’t mean for those idiots to come along, either.” He waved his hand at Roger and the others, who were chatting up two girls at the bar.
Frankie studied Jim’s expression and then nodded. “We’ll call it even if you sit by Woodrow on the way back.”
“You don’t make it easy to get back in your good graces, do you?”
“I didn’t think you cared about being in them.”
Jim shrugged. “I need someone to fly that plane after all the work I put into it. And you’re not the worst pilot I could have been stuck with.”
“Gee, thanks,” Frankie said dryly.
“That Roy Kozlowski fellow, for example.”
“Hey, lay off Roy,” Frankie protested. “And take the damn dollar and go get yourself a beer.”
Jim returned to the booth after doing so and handed Frankie the change. “That girl over there is making eyes at you,” he said, nodding at a blond in a white sundress. “Now that’s definitely a way to relax. She’d make you forget all about where they’re going to send you.”
Frankie took a careful swallow of his beer. He should agree. He should go over and talk to the girl and dance with her. “Maybe another time.”
Jim watched him for a long moment and then shrugged and took a swig of his beer in turn. “So where do you think they’ll send us?”
“Maybe Italy. But it might be the Eighth Air Force, too, over in Britain. We just stormed the beaches at Normandy and got a little foothold in France, after all.” It had been all over the papers a week ago, the headlines screaming about the D-Day invasion. “I figure they’ll be looking for more pilots to go on raids deeper into Germany.”
Jim nodded. “You have any brothers fighting?”
“No. I have two older sisters, and my little brother is four years younger than I am. God, I hope the war is over before he turns eighteen.”
“My older brother is in the Army. Somewhere in the Pacific, last I heard.” Jim took another drink. “He thinks I should be fighting instead of ‘sitting on my ass fixing propellers,’ as he put it.”
“Well, that’s just dumb. If we couldn’t fix the planes, we couldn’t fly them or fight them.”
“Oh, so you do appreciate me.” Jim gave Frankie a grin.
Frankie huffed. “A bit. Maybe.”
Jim laughed.
“So why did you decide to go into aircraft maintenance?” Frankie asked, curious to know more about Jim.
“My uncle owns an auto repair shop,” Jim replied, leaning back against the wall and stretching out his right leg along the seat. “He took care of us after my mom and dad died. I started working there when I was, oh, probably eleven. Since I already knew my way around a screwdriver, the Big Wheels decided fixing planes was how I could best serve my country.”
Frankie thought of asking what had happened to Jim’s parents, but he didn’t want to sound morbidly curious. “Will you go back to it, after the war?”
“I guess.” Jim took another swallow of beer. “I never did so well at school. Only other thing I can think of doing is playing basketball, but I’m not tall enough that anyone would ever pay me to do it.”
“I think I might like to stay with the Air Forces. If it meant I could keep flying.”
“You love it that much, huh?”
Frankie nodded, drumming his fingers on the table.
Jim looked at him a moment and then tilted his head against the wall, closing his eyes. “I have to admit that you aren’t too shabby at it. Although I think they need pilots so bad they’ll take anyone who can get a plane off the ground and stay up for twenty minutes.”
“Your confidence is so inspiring.”
A smile crept over Jim’s mouth, and he raised his beer to Frankie.
Frankie finished off his own beer and then ran his thumb around the rim, pensive. Suddenly a thought occurred to him, and he sat up. “Jeepers, I just realized you’ll be coming with me to wherever I get posted.”
Jim snorted and cracked open his eyes. “I am your crew chief. That’s the whole point of transition training, to get all of us working together as a cohesive squadron. Did you think I was going to foist you off on some other poor bastard? I’ve already composed a letter of condolence to whatever plane gets assigned to you.”
“Oh God.” Frankie slumped back. “I’m going to have to deal with your Kansas jokes my entire tour, aren’t I?”
Jim grinned. “Hey, you know what they say—war is hell.”
ON THE way back to the base, Jim did sit next to Woodrow as promised. Frankie sat in front and let the night breeze wash over him through the open window, drowning out the sounds of the others’ chatter. When they returned, he waved good night. Jim looked like he wanted to talk some more, but Roger grabbed his arm, and Frankie seized the opportunity to jog off. Jim sometimes put him on edge. Tonight had been all right, and he guessed he could call Jim his friend now. But there was still something different about the way Jim looked at him and talked to him. For a second he entertained the wild notion that maybe Jim was attracted to him. He pictured those dark brown eyes sliding shut, Jim tilting his head up for a kiss. But no. Frankie shut that thought down fast, even as a curl of lust tightened his stomach. He’d already been through this once with Pete. No way was Jim queer. He wasn’t going to go through the heartache of pining after someone who just wanted to be friends. Shrugging it off, Frankie swerved aside from the path to the barracks and went to the darkened hangar instead.
He leaned against the metal wall, looking out over the landing strip. A light shone in the control tower, and up above, the stars covered the sky, half-obscured by a fat moon hanging low in the west.
Frankie wished he could just hop in a plane and take off, skimming low over the fields, admiring the lights of towns swirling together in bright clusters.
He wondered what anti-aircraft fire would be like. All the flak bursting around him.
Two hundred and fifty hours flying missions.
Well, there was no point thinking about it. If he was meant to survive, he would survive. And in the meantime, he’d fly the hell out of that Mustang.