you look like heaven tonight

Ev tips his chair forward, four feet to the floor again. He’s sitting behind his desk. They give him a big desk not long after they promote him to major and tell him he can’t fly anymore. There’s a lot of paperwork, stacked by the inch. Sometimes Doug thinks about giving it up over the length of it, and watching all the paper flutter away as it was swept to the side as Ev made a bawd of him. 

Wouldn’t that be something? An awful big mess. 

“There’s these two German tailors, and they’ve got a dog. One day Fritz shrieks to Hans, “Ach! Bismarck has swallowed ze tape measure, und ist dying by inches. “Quick!” cries Hans, “Open ze door, und let him die by ze yard.” 

Ev waits, mouth caught around a smile with the last word. A cigarette plumes between his fingers, dancing toward the orange ceiling light. Doug’s sure it’s supposed to be yellow. 

“You’ve told that one before, asshole,” he says. 

Ev stubs out his cigarette as Doug lights another, fighting with the click of his lighter. He exhales and it makes the room grey. Anymore of it and they could lose each other through the thick of it, groping around blind. It’s probably how it should’ve ended, shot out of the sky like every other fella they’ve shared a bunk with. 

“Made you laugh before,” Ev says. 

“Maybe I wised up.” 

“Bucky would’ve laughed,” Ev says then, for whatever reason.

Maybe he’s been thinking about him. It’s not some unspoken rule that they shouldn’t, even if it doesn’t make things easier. Doug does sometimes, between trying to teach kids how to drop bombs and getting Ev’s dick in his mouth. Thinks about him and Buck and Crank and Hambone and Brady. Thinks about them tumbling out of the sky, into the havoc they made. Sleeping with rats and freezing their asses off in Red Cross knits. 

Sometimes, though, Doug thinks about other stuff, from before. 

“Bucky sure seemed beat up over Buck going down.”

Ev makes a sound, as though in agreement. He’s got his hands steepled over his chest for a moment, but then he moves, a finger pressed along the seam of his lips as though keeping something in. His arms move again, elbows to the table. Even when his eyes shift his face doesn’t. They never quite settle on Doug. He crosses his arms. 

“D’you ever reckon—”

“What?”

Ev’s looking at him now, at least. 

“That there was something—like we got going on?” he asks. 

Ev laughs, like the last twenty seconds have collapsed in on themselves and Doug has responded to his joke in kind. His tongue wets his bottom lip. He touches his fingertips to the rim of his ashtray with an uncertainty with which Doug never saw him handle a plane. It’s unnerving, like seeing his daddy cry for the first time. 

“Now that’s a hell of a thing to say,” Ev says. 

Doug can only shrug to it. 

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but I know if they’d have shot you down, I don’t think there’s enough ammo out of Missouri that could’ve raised enough hell for ‘em.”