elbowing of his fellow waist gunner. Of course, like a great many gunners, Garp dreamed of his fiftieth mission or so, whereat he hoped to be transferred to the Second Air Force—the bomber training command—where he could retire safely as a gunnery instructor. But until Fowler was killed, Garp envied Fowler his private place, his jockey's sense of isolation.
“It's a foul spot to be in if you fart a lot,” Fowler maintained. He was a cynical man with a dry, irritating tickle of a cough and a vile reputation among the nurses at the field hospital.
Fowler was killed during a crash landing on an unpaved road. The landing struts were shorn off in a pothole and the whole landing gear collapsed, dropping the bomber into a hard belly slide that burst the ball turret with all the disproportionate force of a falling tree hitting a grape. Fowler, who'd always said he had more faith in machines than he had in horses or in human beings, was crouched in the unretracted ball turret when the plane landed on him. The waist gunners, including Sergeant Garp, saw the debris skid away from under the belly of the bomber. The squadron adjutant, who was the closest ground observer of the landing, threw up in a Jeep. The squadron commander did not have to wait for Fowler's death to become official in order to replace him with the squadron's next-smallest gunner. Tiny Technical Sergeant Garp had always wanted to be a ball turret gunner. In September of 1942, he became one.
“My mother was a stickler for detail,” Garp wrote. When they would bring in a new casualty, Jenny Fields was the first to ask the doctor how it happened. And Jenny classified them, silently: the Externals, the Vital Organs, the Absentees, and the Goners. And she found little gimmicks to help her remember their names and their disasters. Thus: Private Jones fell off his bones, Ensign Potter stopped a whopper, Corporal Estes lost his testes, Captain Flynn has no skin, Major Longfellow is short on answers.
Sergeant Garp was a mystery. On his thirty-fifth flight over France, the little ball turret gunner stopped shooting. The pilot noticed the absence of machine-gun fire from the ball turret and thought that Garp had taken a hit. If Garp had, the pilot had not felt it in the belly of his plane. He hoped Garp hadn't felt it much, either. After the plane landed, the pilot hurried to have Garp transferred to the sidecar of a medic's motorcycle; all the ambulances were in use. Once seated in the sidecar, the tiny technical sergeant began to play with himself. There was a canvas canopy that covered the sidecar in foul weather; the pilot snapped this coveting in place. The canopy had a porthole, through which the medic, the pilot, and the gathering men could observe Sergeant Garp. For such a small man, he seemed to have an especially large erection, but he fumbled with it only a little more expertly than a child—not nearly so expertly as a monkey in the zoo. Like the monkey, however, Garp looked out of his cage and stared frankly into the faces of the human beings who were watching him.
“Garp?” the pilot said. Garp's forehead was freckled with blood, which was mostly dry, but his flight hat was plastered to the top of his head and dripping; there didn't seem to be a mark on him. “Garp!” the pilot shouted at him. There had been a gash in the metal sphere where the fifty-caliber machine gun had been; it appeared that some flak had hit the barrels of the guns, cracking the gun housing and even loosening the trigger handles, though there was nothing wrong with Garp's hands—they just seemed to be clumsy at masturbation.
“Garp!” cried the pilot.
“Garp?” said Garp. He was mimicking the pilot, like a smart parrot or a crow. “Garp,” said Garp, as if he had just learned the word. The pilot nodded to Garp, encouraging him to remember his name. Garp smiled. “Garp,” he said. He seemed to think this was how people greeted each other. Not hello, hello!—but Garp, Garp!
“Jesus, Garp,” the pilot said. Some holes and glass cracks had been visible in the porthole of the ball turret. The medic now unzipped the porthole of the side car's canopy and peered into Garp's eyes. Something was wrong with Garp's eyes, because they rolled around independently of each other; the medic thought that the world, for Garp, was probably looming up, then going by, then looming up again—if Garp could see at all. What the pilot and the medic couldn't know, at the time, was that some sharp and slender shards from the flak blast had damaged one of the oculomotor nerves in Garp's brain—and other parts of his brain as well. The oculomotor nerve consists chiefly of motor fibers that innervate most of the muscles of the eyeball. As for the rest of Garp's brain, he had received some cuts and slashes a lot like a prefrontal lobotomy—though it was rather careless surgery.
The medic had a great fear of
“Garp?” Garp said to the medic, trying his new word.
“Garp,” the medic confirmed. Garp seemed pleased. He had both his small hands on his impressive erection when he successfully masturbated.
“Garp!” he barked. There was joy in his voice, but also surprise. He rolled his eyes at his audience, begging the world to loom up and hold still. He was unsure of what he'd done. “Garp?” he asked, doubtfully.
The pilot patted his arm and nodded to the others of the flight and landing crew, as if to say: Let's give a bit of support to the sergeant, men. Please, let's make him feel at home. And the men, respectfully dumbstruck by Garp's ejaculation, all said, “Garp! Garp! Garp!” to him—a reassuring, seal-like chorus intent on putting Garp at ease.
Garp nodded his head, happily, but the medic held his arm and whispered anxiously to him, “No! Don't move your head, okay? Garp? Please don't move your head.” Garp's eyes roamed past the pilot and the medic, who waited for them to come around again. “Easy does it, Garp,” the pilot whispered. “Just sit tight, okay?”
Garp's face radiated pure peace. With both hands holding his dying erection, the little sergeant looked as if he had done just the thing that the situation called for.
They could do nothing for Sergeant Garp in England. He was lucky to have been brought home to Boston long before the end of the war. Some senator was actually responsible. An editorial in a Boston newspaper had accused the U.S. Navy of transporting wounded servicemen back home only if the wounded came from wealthy and important American families. In an effort to quell such a vile rumor, a U.S. senator claimed that if
Not only was Technical Sergeant Garp an orphan; he was an idiot with a one-word vocabulary, so he was not complaining to the press. And in all the photographs they took, Gunner Garp was smiling.
When the drooling sergeant was brought to Boston Mercy, Jenny Fields had trouble categorizing him. He was clearly an Absentee, more docile than a child, but she wasn't sure how much else was wrong with him.
“Hello. How are you?” she asked him, when they wheeled him—grinning—into the ward.
“Garp!” he barked. The oculomotor nerve had been partially restored, and his eyes now leapt, rather than rolled, but his hands were wrapped in gauze mittens, the result of Garp's playing in an accidental fire that broke out in the hospital compound aboard his transport ship. He'd seen the flames and had reached out his hands to them, spreading some of the flames up to his face; he'd singed off his eyebrows. He looked a lot like a shaved owl, to Jenny.
With the burns, Garp was an External and an Absentee all at once. Also, with his hands so heavily bandaged, he had lost the ability to masturbate, an activity that his papers said he pursued frequently and successfully—and without any self-consciousness. Those who'd observed him closely, since his accident with the ship's fire, feared that the childish gunner was becoming depressed—his one adult pleasure taken from him, at least until his hands healed.
It was possible, of course, that Garp had Vital Organ damage as well. Many fragments had entered his head; many of them were too delicately located to be removed. Sergeant Garp's brain damage might not stop with his crude lobotomy; his internal destruction could be progressing. “Our general deterioration is complicated enough,” Garp wrote, “without the introduction of flak to our systems.”
There'd been a patient before Sergeant Garp whose head had been similarly penetrated. He'd been fine for months, just talking to himself and occasionally peeing in his bed. Then he started to lose his hair; he had trouble completing his sentences. Just before he died, he began to develop breasts.
Given the evidence, the shadows, and the white needles in the X rays, Gunner Garp was probably a Goner. But to Jenny Fields he looked very nice. A small, neat man, the former ball turret gunner was as innocent and straightforward in his demands as a two-year-old. He cried “Garp!” when he was hungry and “Garp!” when he was
