B for Buster

I left a town where fewer than a thousand people lived. I traveled half the world, in the middle of a war, to get away from there. By the spring of 1943, when I finally arrived at a lonely airfield among the hills of Yorkshire, it seemed I had gone as far from Kakabeka as the moon was from the earth. But the first thing I saw when I walked through the door of the sergeants' mess was a guy I knew from home.

He was standing beside the piano, and I saw him only from the back, but I knew right away it was Donny Lee. No one else had hair as red as that, or ears as wide as those. No one but Donny looked so much like a clown from the back.

I thought of running away, but there was nowhere to go. I wanted to hide, but I couldn't. Lofty and Ratty and Buzz had come in behind me, filling the door of the Nissen hut. I just stood with my duffel bag in my hand as Donny turned toward me.

Just then, for a moment, I thought that it wasn't him after all, that it was someone older by many years. His face was a man's, with wrinkles and lines and dark blotches below his eyes. He couldn't be the boy I had seen just two years before, grinning as he climbed on an eastbound train. But his head started back in surprise and his mouth opened wide, and it was Donny, all right. He shouted across the crowd of airmen, "Hey! It's the kid from Kakabeka."

"Donny!" I said. I dropped my bag and pushed away from Lofty and the others. The tin hut was full of smoke and noise, of laughter and a dreadful singing. I pushed my way through groups of fliers, desperate to reach the piano, to get to Donny before he blurted out my secret.

He kept shouting in a voice that was too loud, as though he had gone deaf as well as old. "It is!" he cried. "It's the Kid. It's the Kakabeka Kid!"

He had never called me that at home, and I wished he would stop it now. He was too much older and wilder than me, and we'd never really been friends. But now he threw his arms around my shoulders and hugged me like a brother. He turned me round and introduced me to his crew.

In all of England only Donny knew the truth about me, and I was sure he'd tell the others. But all he said was that we'd gone to the same crummy school in the same little town. He said that he had been my hero, which wasn't exactly true. Then he steered me behind the bar and backed me into the corner made by the storage room.

"Hey, Donny," I said. "How many ops have you got?"

He didn't even answer. He pinned my shoulders to the wall and asked me, "What are you doing here?"

"What do you think?" I said.

"You stupid kid." He thrust his face near mine, and his voice was angry. "You're only sixteen."

If he had said it any louder, everyone would have learned the truth right there on my first day. But all the sergeants were busy with their bottles and their glasses, not even looking at me anymore. Lofty and little Ratty, still in the doorway, were gawking round the hut like tourists at a zoo, while Buzz just looked as half-witted as ever.

Donny lowered his voice, but didn't back away. His breath smelled of beer; his eyes seemed strange. "Go home," he said. "Tell them you lied and you want to go home."

"You're nuts," I told him.

"Do it." He pushed me again, so hard that the wall rattled. "Now. Before it's too late."

He grabbed my sleeve and twisted it round my arm. He stared at the blue patch where a fist held a sheaf of lightning bolts, then down at the cloud-shaped badge of a warrant officer. "Man, oh man," he said. "You must have told some beautiful lies."