Free Paper Doll by Jim Shepard Page A

like I’m using a garden hose and I squeeze off bursts that are too long. My training officer told me he was going to ration me, but he can’t, of course. I have to be through in the next week and a half or it’s washeroonie. I don’t think I’ll wash, though. On the flexibles me and another guy named Flynn flying tandem cut a tow target clear in half this morning, and that’s good work! The tow plane even had it dipping and weaving, like real Jerries.
    I still like the idea of being a dentist. I talked to the guy who examined me at the induction center and he said I’d be looking at big money and mucho opportunity after the war and the government would help out in terms of school like I couldn’t believe. Mom’s nuts about the idea, of course, and wouldn’t she be surprised to hear we agree on something. Mom said Liz said I’d never do it because I’d have to wash my hands. Ha. Ha.
    Snowberry was gazing lazily ahead, humming “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.”
    Bryant said, “You never said you had a sister.”
    Snowberry looked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t.”
    Bryant closed the book and stretched, his finger holding the place.
    â€œKeep reading,” Snowberry said. “It gets better.”
    I remember before Dad died we’d go camping out at Port Jefferson. Somebody owned the land and Dad didn’t care, though I never wanted to have a fire, I thought they’d come and start shooting. We went for my birthday once. I loved the woods and stuff. There were never any stores or lights and you didn’t have so much noise. We saw a shooting star. Dad said on my tenth birthday I saw a shooting star and on my first birthday I saw Babe Ruth clout number forty-six on his way to sixty, and he didn’t think if I lived to be a hundred I’d ever see the like of either again. Though of course I don’t remember the home run.
    Bryant did some quick figuring, and confirmed Snowberry’s age as seventeen. He was underage, something everyone suspected and joked about.
    He thought again with regret about how rarely he was able to remember the kind of father and son stories Snowberry always told, recognizing with a pang Snowberry’s references to the private jokes that seemed the code of a happy family. His only memory of a camping trip had involved a weekend in Block Island with his father. His father had always called it in an unpleasant way Our Only Night Out. He had had to go to the bathroom late the first night and had stumbled out of his bedroll and up the dune ridge. Above him, the night was coming down in curtains, silver and red and purple. He hadn’t been able to think of the word for it, and had called to his father, who’d come hurrying up the dune and then had stopped short and said, “The northern lights. For God’s sake.” But he had wrapped an arm around him.
    He remembered it as their happiest time together, maybe their only happy time together. He remembered that they had fished and hadn’t caught anything, and that his father had said, “The buggers are unionized.” His father had pulled from an old pack some bread and a roll of provolone cheese that he called guinea cheese, and then had gone down to the cove sheltered by the dune ridge and had collected saltwater snails in a pan, a small black figure against the wavering light off the water. The snails had looked like little rounded black pebbles, and he had cooked them in saltwater and split them with Bryant. They had had twenty or so apiece, and had eaten them out of their shells with a pin. They had been terrible.
    The next night they had had corn dogs and bluefish. They hung netting against mosquitoes on a crisscrossing pole thing he’d rigged up, on a wide flat sandy stretch at the bottom of the dunes on the west side of the island, away from the cliffs. His father had