dried-up father, and sworn off pregnancy. Pregnancy was the most vicious disease imaginable. Now, she actually welcomed the murderously tight fit of her dancer's costume. It was tight in the top, too, so that her ample jugs were like tortured balloons that might squeak free and fly away. The costume had no back whatsoever. It was cut to her dimpled ass and gave a hint of backside cleavage. She might as well have been nude. That was the idea.
“Why don't you come outside?” Lily asked the pilot as she watched him watch her jugs. “We'll go for a walk.”
“I don't feel like it,” the pilot said, watching her crotch now, his fine eyes desperately searching for a stray, curling pubic hair.
He always refused to get out of his plane when he landed. He told the men in Kelly's unit that he had been given a vision in a dream, and that this vision had warned him not to get out of his plane when he landed supplies there. In the dream, the pilot had seen FDR and Truman sitting on matched commodes with their faces wreathed in golden light. In unison, speaking as sweetly as angels, they had warned the pilot with this: “If you ever leave your plane at Kelly's camp, your life won't be worth a fart.” Then they farted in unison, for emphasis. When Lieutenant Slade first heard about the pilot's vision, he said, “Inspiring!”
“Oh, come on,” Lily said, holding a hand out to the pilot.
“No.” He was adamant. He had suddenly abandoned his pubic-hair search and had focused on the bulkhead beside her.
Abandoning all pretense, as she always had to, Lily said, “Take me with you, please!”
“You know we can't, Lily,” the pilot said. Though he was looking at the wall, he was seeing Lily in his mind's eye. He began to sweat.
“Why can't you?” she asked, pouting her full lips.
“Officially, you aren't here.”
She twisted slightly, leaning against a steel strut that reinforced the cabin walls against major flak damage. She was lighted exotically by the green and amber scope bulbs on the control panels, and she looked very good. Long legs, perfectly curved. Firm thighs. Hips just wide enough. No waist at all. Swelling breasts, jammed up, nipples almost peeking over velvet cups. Face half in shadow, full lips parted with a promise of more than just a kiss. She looked tremendous.
“You look tremendous,” the pilot said, still staring intently at the wall. “But that won't do you any good. You aren't here; no one's here.” But he looked back at her jugs, now, as if
“You can't deny your senses,” Lily said.
“Yes, I can,” the pilot said.
“If I'm not here, who are you talking to?”
The pilot was silent awhile, thinking about that. The sounds of the ground crew unloading the big transport through both its bay and cargo doors were audible but somehow removed from his reality, a distant background noise that reminded the pilot of carnival workers setting up tents and stands and rides in the fairgrounds near the house where he lived as a child. He would have liked to think about that some more, except he remembered where he was and was too terrified to think about anything but death.
“Who are you talking to if I'm not here?” Lily asked again.
“A figment of my imagination,” the pilot said.
“Major Kelly's already used that one,” she said.
“What?”
“Never mind.” She thought a moment. “If there isn't anyone here, who are these supplies for?”
“What supplies?” the pilot asked. He was gripping the edges of his battered flight seat with both hands, fighting off an urge to rise up and rip her clothes off and fuck her through the floor of the plane. His face was sheathed in sweat.
Lily sighed. “If you're not behind German lines, where are you?”
The pilot smiled and relaxed a bit. “Iowa City, Iowa.”
“What?”
“I can see the cornfields from here,” the pilot said, looking out of the windscreen at the cornfields.
Lily followed his gaze but could see nothing other than darkness and a few men carrying heavy crates of supplies. A small collapsible loading crane trundled toward the transport's cargo doors. But no cornfields.
“You're crazy,” she said.
“No. I see fields of corn, endless fields, tall and green.”
Lily stepped forward and touched the pilot's cheek as he stared out through the windscreen, and she jumped in surprise as he nearly leaped out of his flight seat. He smiled nervously and tried to pull away. He was pudgy and redfaced and in need of a shave; even when he wasn't terrified, he would have looked rather ordinary and unappealing. Still, she said, “I think I could get to like you.”
“What's there to like?” he asked. “A knot of nerves, spastic colon, stomach ulcers… nothing… ”
“Still, I could,” she said. She bent closer to him, her jugs right in front of his face now. She was willing to tell the pilot anything to convince him to take her back to Allied territory. Actually, she found him revolting; however, telling him these fantasies didn't hurt anything. “We could have lots of good times.”
The pilot took a thermos from a pouch on his seat, opened it, and poured himself a cup of steaming coffee. He did all this slowly, deliberately, as if he were trying to give himself time to gather his wits and meet the challenge she presented. His hands shook so badly that the coffee kept slopping over the rim of the cup. He said, “I'm sorry, Lily, but you don't arouse me at all.”
“Don't I?”
“Not at all.”
Suddenly, Lily could see only a bleak future. She could see another week here at the camp, another week of waiting for the inevitable flight of Stukas, another week of wondering if she would go home as a corpse or as a girl with a brilliant theatrical career ahead of her. Those were the only two possibilities, because she couldn't see any way she could go home as a
“So you might as well go,” he said, slopping coffee all over his hand.
She reached behind, found the zipper on her velvet costume, tugged it down and peeled to the waist. Her large, fine breasts fell forward, a symphony of jiggling flesh, the dark nipples high on the top of their matched upward thrusts, hard and prominent.
“Gosh,” the kid from Texas said. He squirmed in his seat, making the cracked leather squeak.
Lily ignored him. She had to ignore him. For one thing, he couldn't help her get out of the camp. For another, if she paid him any attention at all, he'd lose his head and take her while her back was turned.
The pilot watched her jugs. He seemed hypnotized. When he began to speak, he sounded far away, as if repeating something he'd memorized in church but had never really believed. “I am not aroused by you, because General Blade wouldn't like it if I were aroused by you and brought you back. You'd go around telling everyone about Kelly and this camp and the general's contingency plan, and you'd get the general in all sorts of trouble.”
She moved slightly as she shook her head and her breasts shivered deliciously, the nipples swelling, the cleavage touched with a blush. “No, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't tell a soul. What would happen — you and I would have lots of fun. That's all that would happen.”
“Gosh,” the Texan said, still squirming. “Gosh.”
The pilot licked his lips. He was shaking like a train on a bad track, close to derailment. Half the coffee in his cup was gone now, though he had not drunk any of it. “I know you better than that,” he said. “I've heard you curse the general, and I know what you'd do. The general wouldn't want you to come back. Whatever the general wants, I want. There's a war going on. In a war, the little people only survive if they do what the big people tell them to do. I'm a little people. The general is a big people. The general doesn't want me to be aroused by you, and therefore I'm not aroused.”
Lily slipped out of her costume altogether.
The Texan sucked in his breath and almost choked.
