Hanging on

“You've got an erection,” Lily told the pilot.

“I haven't.” He was shaking so badly now that his coffee cup was empty. The controls in front of him gleamed wetly; steam rose off them.

Lily dropped one hand to the juncture of her thighs and performed a magic trick in which one of her fingers disappeared. “Yes, you have.”

The pilot looked down at his lap, at the telltale, arrow-headed bulge in his slacks.

Lily was running both hands up and down her body now, cupping her fine breasts, now her buttocks, caressing her thighs, almost encircling her waist.

The pilot opened his thermos bottle and dumped the whole batch of steaming coffee into his lap. He winced, bit his lip until blood came, but did not move otherwise.

“It didn't work,” Lily said.

The pilot looked at his lap. He was still erect. “Damn,” he said. By now, he had bitten his lip so hard that blood gleamed on his chin. His clothes were sodden with perspiration, and his hair lay in lank, damp strands across his dripping forehead. “I want what the general wants.”

“You'll run out of coffee sooner or later,” Lily said.

“No, I won't,” the pilot said. “I brought three thermos bottles.” He showed her the other two. “I want what the general wants,” he repeated.

She stared him straight in the eye for a long minute, then sighed. She stopped caressing herself and picked up her costume. “I guess you're telling the truth.”

“I am.”

“It's sad,” she said.

She turned and started out of the cockpit.

“Wait a minute, Lily!” the Texan said.

She turned, breasts slapping together, flushed green by the control lights. “What is it?”

His Adam's apple hobbled up and down. “I — Well, I don't care what the general wants.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But you aren't the pilot.”

“I could be — one day soon.”

“Hey!” the pilot said. “What's that supposed to mean?”

The Texan shrugged. “You might take a flak fragment in the neck.” He smiled at Lily, as if he were anticipating that development with pleasure.

“If it happens,” Lilly said, “then we'll talk.”

She went back through the plane, down the narrow corridor in the center of the fuselage, toward the hatchway where she had come in. She stopped only once, to slip back into her velvet costume and pull up the zipper.

Outside, on her way back to the hospital bunker, she began to think about the only two words that mattered: death and sex. Deep down in every man or woman's mind, those were the two words that really counted for anything, two animal urges or conditions of the species which drove you relentlessly through life. You tried to avoid death for as long as possible, while grabbing all the sex you could get. Ordinarily, built as she was and uninhibited as she was, she would be able to function well in a world governed by those drives. But the war had turned everything around. She had sex to offer, and that was how she could avoid death. But the only way the pilot could avoid death was to refuse sex. The irresistible force and the immovable object. Two deer, they were, with antlers locked and no way to escape.

“Nice night, isn't it?” an enlisted man asked when she passed him on her way to the bunker.

“Fuck off!” she said.

He stopped as if he'd walked into a wall. “Jesus!”

Sulking, she went down the hospital bunker steps, calling for Nurse Pullit. She needed a shoulder to cry on.

9

Three days after the bridge was bombed out, it was nearing completion once again, straight and true, spanning the gorge and the river in the middle of the gorge and the unsalvageable ruins of the previous bridges that the Stukas had destroyed. This speed was not particularly amazing, since Major Kelly was commanding a trained crew of construction workers and some of the best Army engineers in the war. In fact, their progress with the bridge was amazingly slow. After all, with the guiding help of the Army engineers, only twelve thousand American and Canadian workers had built the monumental Alcan Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska: 1,671 miles of roadway completed in only eight months, when it was clear that the Japanese were operating in the Aleutians and that such a highway was desperately necessary for North America's defense. In the Pacific theater, the Army engineers had cleaned out the demolished ruins of old bridges and had spanned jungle rivers with portable Bailey bridges in mere hours. Later in the war, when the Ludendorff Bridge would be damaged under Nazi attack and eventually fall apart carrying Allied traffic, Army engineers would replace the span in less than half a day, though it was 1,068 feet long. Therefore, Major Kelly's unit was actually ponderously slow in replacing the ruined bridge by their camp. There was a reason for this. So long as the bridge was unable to bear traffic, no Stuka flight would be dispatched to bomb it, and they would be able to count on some peace and quiet. Once the bridge was up again, however, they'd have to sit around on tenterhooks, waiting for the dive bombers. The longer they took to rebuild the bridge, then, the better.

In fact, Major Kelly would have liked to take about a month or six weeks to rebuild the bridge. The only thing that kept him from taking that long was the realization that General Blade would order Lieutenant Slade to kill him and assume command.

As the bridge neared completion, Major Kelly and Lieutenant Beame inspected the bearings on the new bridge cap after the nearside canitlever arm had been fastened down on shore and to the pier. All that remained, when their inspection was completed, was the anchoring of the suspended span between the two cantilevers. While they were still beneath the bridge, clinging to the concrete supports by means of belts and mortared chain handholds, soaking up the cool shadows while they worked, Sergeant Coombs came to the edge of the river and yelled down at them.

“The Frog's here!” he yelled.

That was Sergeant Coomb's way of saying that Maurice, the mayor of the only French village nearby, had come to see the major. Sergeant Coombs had few friends among the peoples of other races and religions. The sergeant didn't particularly care. As he often said to Slade when they spent an evening together reading over the Army field manual, “There was a rich kid in my hometown who had a black governess, a big ugly woman. Parents thought it was classy to have a nigger tending their kid. Worse than that, she wasn't a citizen of the States. She was French. A frog nigger. Or a nigger frog, whichever way you see it. Top that off with the fact she was a Catholic. A mick frog nigger. Or a nigger mick frog. Or a frog nigger mick. Whichever.” When Lieutenant Slade would ask what had happened, as he always did, the sergeant would cluck his tongue and finish the story. “The mick nigger frog was with them twenty years. The kid grew up, got drunk, raped a girl, and slit her throat. Got electrocuted. The kid's old man started taking up with whores, gave his wife the clap, and had nearly everything taken from him in the divorce settlement. The wife started betting the horses and running with young jockies and lost most of what she took off the husband. If they hadn't hired that nigger, where might they be today?”

“The Frog's here!” the sergeant shouted again.

“I heard, I heard!” Major Kelly said, scrambling up the ravine, dust rising in clouds behind him, stones kicking out from under his feet and falling down on top of Beame who tried to keep up with him.

“I am not a frog,” Maurice said, stepping into sight a dozen paces from Coombs. “People are not animals — except, perhaps, to the Nazis. One should never refer to human beings with the names of animals. It is degrading. I refrain, after all, from calling Sergeant Coombs a pig.”

Sergeant Coombs colored a pink, hamlike shade, and turned and stomped back to the corrugated shed where he tended the construction machines that he loved. He didn't salute Major Kelly or request his commanding officer's leave. He did, however, say, “Bullshit.”