Articles of War (9 page)

They were quiet a minute.

“I've lost her,” Heck said. “I don't know where she is.”

“You have to find her.”

“I don't know where. I don't even know where to look.”

“What's important is to search.” Quentin spoke with a rapid, hissing insistence that alarmed Heck. “You'll find her.”

“I hardly know her.” Heck put the music box away. “We don't even speak the same language. Her father is insane.”

“Well, perhaps you're not in love.”

Heck stared at his feet.

“Are you in love?”

Heck said nothing.

This seemed to give Quentin new confidence. He said happily, “Confused is a part of love. The confusion isn't important. What's important is what you do. If you search, it's love. If you don't search, it's not love. You're going to search?”

Suddenly Heck despised Quentin. “No,” Heck said without looking around. “No. There's nowhere to search.” But after a minute the bitter emotion was already fading, and he longed to take the music box out again.

The next day he began to try to write a letter to his father. But it all seemed so embarrassing—his foolish injury, this useless waiting. It seemed that from any words he wrote, any words at all, shame would ooze like blood from razor-cut flesh. He rolled over toward Quentin. “Hey.”

Quentin was finishing his day's letter packet, folding it and wedging it into an envelope. “Yes?” he said, without looking up.

“What should I write to my dad?”

Quentin shrugged.

“Well, what is all this that you write to your fiancée?”

“I tell her how much I love her.”

Heck wrote, “Dear Dad.” He stared at this a minute. He said, “Okay, but what else?”

“The weather, the food.”

Heck couldn't imagine that his father would care about these things. He wrote, “I'm doing all right. Little action.” After a moment he added a bald lie: “But they keep me busy.” He capped his pen and set it aside. To Quentin he said, “Do you have a picture of her?”

“A picture?”

“Sure.”

Quentin looked away and did not answer. He sealed his envelope and put it into a canvas rucksack under his cot. Heck watched him a moment, then frowned and lay back.

An hour passed and several of the men were already asleep when Quentin leaned over and whispered, “Heck.”

Heck rolled to look at him. Quentin's Adam's apple dipped as he swallowed. The soft blue veins at his temples pulsed. Heck tried to picture Quentin fighting a war, killing men. It was not an impossible image, but it was awkward—it could be constructed only as collage, its parts in disproportion to one another. Quentin said, “She doesn't exist.”

“She's not your fiancée?”

“She doesn't exist at all. I wish she did. I wish she did so bad that I can see her, I can hear how she talks, I know what she does all day. I know what she smells like and what her favorite foods are and the kinds of clothes she wears. I know how she would write her letters back to me. She has a lot of questions, and I try to answer them all. But she doesn't exist. She's all made up.”

“Quentin—”

“That's why you've got to find your girl, Heck. I've been thinking about this. You have a chance at someone real. She talks funny and her father's crazy, so what? So what? She loves you—why else would she give you that beautiful music box? That's why you've got to find her, Heck. She's a real girl. She loves you. You love her.”

“Quentin, I—please.”

Quentin looked around. “No,” he whispered, apparently to himself, and shook his head. “No, of course not.” After several seconds, however, he added, “But what else have I got? I haven't got a real girl. I'm in bad shape. I'm in lousy shape. You have a real girl, Heck. A real girl. You have to find her. Promise me you'll find her?”

Heck stared at him.

Quentin slumped. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Forget it.”

It turned out to be very easy to go back. He was only forty miles from the Normandy beaches and the Channel waters, and he got a ride on a supply truck that was returning to Omaha Beach. The dead had been cleared from the roads and even some of the potholes had been filled. The driver whistled as he drove and he drove as if he knew nothing of death—Heck lost count of the number of times they were up on two wheels and came down again to four with a crash and a violent rocking of the truck. In a screaming of rubber they halted for a rangy-looking cow that stood in the middle of the road. They sat looking at the cow—the driver whistling “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Heck silent, the cow chewing cud—and several minutes passed before the cow moved listlessly away and the driver raced the engine and popped the clutch.

The driver began talking about his girlfriend back home. “She's got eyes like lanterns. One if by land, two if by sea—I'm coming back by sea. And her, you know,
melons,
they're big like her eyes. She complains, she says they're too big, can you imagine? Too big? I tell her they're just the right size for me. I'm a big guy; I got to have a big pair of melons.”

Heck glanced over. The driver did not look like a particularly big man. He thought of Claire, the feel of her breasts. He said, “I prefer them smaller.” Then he blushed.

The driver, however, didn't even look at him. He said, “Well, sure, some guys do.” He began to whistle again.

Omaha was still crowded with fresh armor and mountains of supplies and general anarchy. The low, half-formed waves in the distance of the Channel were the color and shape of weals on flesh. Heck set away immediately for the château. He walked with the pulsing noise of the sea pacing him on the right, then turned and pushed inland. He passed rapidly through the little glade where the beehives stood. The hardwoods were dropping yellow and red leaves across the ground. The still-green pines looked a little odd, as if overly optimistic.

He reached the house and there was no movement, no sign of life. The door stood open and the doorway gaped blackly. In the mud outside were dog prints of various sizes.

Inside, his eyes adjusted slowly, parting the darkness in slow increments. It appeared as if no one had been here in months, or years. The little table was gone, as well as all the bedding, supplies, and even the garbage. A fine layer of dirt and dust lay undisturbed across the floor. He walked over to where he remembered the fire burning, but he could detect no trace of it: no ash, no blackening.

He looked up and above him floated the irregular hole in the ceiling that had vented the cooking smoke. In it the sky glowed with a clouded, parchment-colored light. It smelled here of animal feces and wood rot. It was strange to be here again—it had the quality of returning to a place not seen since childhood. He scuffed his foot in the dirt to mark for himself his physical existence. Then he stepped outside and stood in the relief of daylight and tried to think where they might have gone. But he had no idea; they could have gone anywhere.

He walked for a while unaware of his surroundings, thoughts shifting over his burdens of worry, what had happened to Claire and her family, how he would get back to the hospital, his cowardice, his fear. He pondered going back to the cave where she had taken him, but what would he do, crawl alone into the dark? He had no desire for the close darkness.

A hum of bees. He was in the clearing again. The noise of the bees was weaker and more sluggish than it had been when he was here with Claire. He stopped and stared at the hive she had opened. Then, slowly, he moved toward it.

He unlatched the front and peered in. He could see nothing but the seething movement of bees. With one hand he groped inward, trying to move his hand and fingers slowly and unthreateningly to feel in the corners, and he winced and muttered as he was stung once, twice, then three times. A fourth sting caused him to yank his hand out and stumble backward. His fingers were sticky and the places where he had been stung were already swelling. There had been nothing, nothing in there. The pain was intense.

He found a piece of paper in his pocket and, writing awkwardly with his left hand, printed on it, “Dear Claire, where are you? I love you. Iowa.” He folded the paper and took out the music box and placed the note inside it. He was stung once more as he put the music box into the beehive and closed and latched it. Then he turned and sprinted through the woods toward the Channel.

Back at Omaha Beach he went into a medical tent and a nurse frowned over his hand and gave him a couple of aspirin and a moistened bandage. Then he wandered among the trucks. There were scores in various stages of arriving and departing, loading and unloading, idling, waiting in lines, maneuvering for position. He discovered the same driver who had brought him here. He looked at Heck's bandaged hand, looked at Heck. “Need a ride back?”

“Please,” Heck said, nearly choking on the word and his gratitude.

4.

INTERMITTENT RAINS HAD FALLEN ALL DAY. THEY CAME AND
went so slowly, and the trees and the tent flaps dripped so regularly into the brown standing water, that even when the rain paused it still seemed to be raining.

Heck stepped out to use the latrine and when he returned he found an envelope on his cot. On it was written only his name. No one else was in the tent. He lay on his cot with the envelope in his hands and the pinpoints of light that punctured the tent canvas seemed to be moving, twisting. Heck closed his eyes.

After a minute he sat upright and examined the envelope. The paper was thin and weak. He tore it open and found inside a single sheet of paper, folded once. He set the envelope aside and sat a moment with the paper in his hands, looking at it, wondering. With a movement of his thumbs, he flipped the page open. It said: “You God damned bastard.”

Heck stared at the words, one after the next, forward, back. He closed the page, opened it again, closed it, until the shapes of the letters were etched into his brain. He put the page back into the envelope.

Quentin came in. “Letter from home?” he asked.

Heck nodded. Then he laughed. He did not know why he was laughing, but he laughed hard. Quentin stared at him. This was the most noise he had made in days.

Finally, gradually, the laughter dropped. Quentin asked, “You all right?”

“I'm fine,” Heck said. He looked at the envelope and wondered, who had put this here. Which of the men had done this? It might have been any of them: to Heck, mired in his own problems, the men around him had all remained more or less indistinguishable, except for Quentin and the fellow who had cowered from the falling pans, but that one had been sent away a couple of weeks before. Heck didn't regard any of the others as particular friends or enemies. They came and went, from the hospital, to the front, faces, bodies filling cots; they became a blur and he gave them little heed. But one of them had noticed him. Perhaps this was just a joke.
You God damned bastard.
No, more likely someone had finally noticed that he was idling and wasting time here, that his wound, never serious, was now largely healed, that there was no discernable reason he should not be sent immediately back to the line to face the same risks that the others here had faced.

A red-haired boy with a white bulge of bandages taped against his right ear came into the tent, took something from the duffel bag under his cot, and left without glancing around. Men could be heard playing football in the mud outside—the quarterbacks shouted their snap counts, bodies smacked into bodies and into the mud. Occasionally the players broke into laughter. From the opposite direction came the tentative notes of someone testing a bugle. Boots struck the wooden boards laid over the muddy grounds with a cold dull impact followed by a faint suction. A jeep, far away, raced its engine as it spun in the mud, the engine whining higher and higher, as if the driver were determined to defeat the mud by sheer stubbornness. Then it stopped.

Heck wanted very badly to be rid of the envelope in his hand. He looked at the coal stove beside Quentin, who was loading a clean sheet of paper onto his clipboard. The stove was burning, but he didn't want to answer the question Quentin would sooner or later ask. He put on his coat and went out.

From the ranks of tents rose ranks of streaming smoke, released by improvised stovepipes built of rusting ductwork or cans welded end to end or, in one case, a 75mm gun barrel turned upright. The men playing football were extravagantly dirty and moved slowly in the chill, a race of mud-men engaged in strange ritual combat. Heck stood a moment on a muddy plank, touching lightly the envelope in his coat pocket. He looked at the tents and all the columns of rising smoke. He turned slowly. The bulk of the brick warehouse of the temporary hospital stood in the distance. There were several large woodstoves there. Heck stepped gingerly across a couple of planks, but the planks had become so interred in the filth that they offered little protection, and he soon gave up and set out directly across the mud.

He toiled across a churned and muddy field and by the time he reached the warehouse he was heaving forward his sodden, filth-covered boots as if they were cloven hooves. A pair of ambulances stood near the door and some wounded were being unloaded. A stretcher went by bearing a cocoon of gauze—it was impossible to say whether anything human lay inside. A couple of orderlies were lounging by the door on a high-backed, ornately carved church bench. They were eating steaming soup from cans, gripping the hot metal awkwardly with pliers. A nurse hurried by, spattered from neck to knees with blood. One of the orderlies looked up as Heck knocked his boots clean. “What you want?” the orderly asked.

Heck had prepared for this question. He drew a pair of cigarette packs from his pocket for evidence. “Visiting my cousin.”

“Brought him scags?” The orderly turned his attention back to his soup. He shifted his grip on his pliers, scraped with a spoon inside the can. “Stay away from the surgical areas.”

Inside the only illumination came from occasional electric lights hung by long black wires from the ceiling. The odors of alcohol and cleaning chemicals were inadequate to obscure the vaporous presence of bile, pus, excrement, and human rot. The men in their beds either twisted and knotted themselves in the sheets or remained strangely still. Heck felt sorry for them all. He touched the envelope in his pocket and hurried toward the corner, where the nearest stove burned. A pile of wood as tall as Heck himself stood beside it. A spindly old man with gnarled fingers was tending the fire, and when he opened the stove door to fling a log inside, Heck strode up beside him, crumpling the envelope in his hand, and tossed it into the flames.

Moving away, he glanced back and saw the fire tender looking curiously after him. Heck abruptly turned down an aisle between long rows of wounded. He slowed and watched the faces as he walked. He told himself he had no reason to be surreptitious. He came to a soldier who looked lucid and calm, his legs wrapped in bandages, his left foot missing entirely. Heck said to him, offering the two packs of cigarettes, “Would you like some smokes?”

The wounded soldier's eyes neither blinked nor widened. “Sure.” But he did not move to take the cigarettes, so Heck put them on the bed and hurried away in embarrassment.

He wanted to exit through a doorway opposite from the one he had entered. He moved rapidly down an aisle of wounded with, on one side then the other, the noise of pained breaths sliding past him. He reached the end of the aisle with a feeling of relief. Starting toward the door, he saw the doctor who had first assessed his injury in this same hospital. He hoped the doctor might have forgotten him, but already the man's big square head and thick dangling mustache had turned to Heck, and his features had tightened in recognition. “You're still here,” he said.

Heck stopped. “Yes, sir.”

The doctor had a clipboard in his hand and he gestured with it as if driving nails. “Why are you still here?”

“I've been awaiting reassignment. Sir.”

“Why don't you go back to your unit?”

“No orders, sir.”

“No orders.”

“No, sir.”

“How is that cut on your leg? Infected?”

“No, it's been all right. Sir.”

“Haven't you made any inquiry as to your return to your unit?”

Heck had no answer. Seeing this, the doctor interrupted: “I'll see to it. What is your name?”

Heck thought of lying, but he remembered the note he had just burned, his daily sentiment of guilt. He said, “George Tilson, sir.”

The doctor lifted a page on his clipboard, made a note, turned away.

When Heck stepped outside, even the thin light of the clouded sky seemed blinding. He wandered toward town in a state of aching anxiety.

As he walked through the streets the rain renewed itself. When occasionally he saw other people, they were huddled into the collars of their coats and under their hats and emerged out of the obscuring rain like headlong phantoms intent on tasks in the distance. Finally the wet and the cold began to penetrate into his consciousness, distracting him from his fears. He retraced his route back through town and past the warehouse.

Inside his tent it was warm and crowded and smelled of human filth and damp wool, burning coal and tobacco. Men glanced up briefly from conversations and card games and paperbacks. Everyone was here; all the cots were full. Quentin nodded at him. Heck arranged his things to dry as best he could and lay down. Later, while the rain still beat on the canvas of the tent as if in an infantile rage, two men asked him to join a cribbage game. As they played the two men debated, in startling detail, the relative physical merits of various pinup girls. That evening, when the cribbage had broken up and everyone else in the tent seemed to be writing letters, Heck lay worrying that whoever had addressed the note to him would do something as he slept. But he fell asleep anyway, and he dreamed of pinup girls on tractors in the fields of Iowa in summer. For some reason he was unable to go to them, or perhaps he only knew that they needed to work while the sun was up, but anyway it was pleasant to watch them. Eventually they began to maneuver the tractors through the patterns of a waltz. But then he saw Claire on one of the tractors, and she seemed to be looking for someone. Lust and fear and guilt and wonder arose and exiled him from sleep. By the time reveille sounded he had been lying awake for a couple of hours. He fully expected he would be put on a truck and sent back to the front this morning.

He was not. But Quentin's number was called. Quentin accepted the arrival of fate with bowed shoulders.

Heck sat on his cot watching Quentin gather his things. Quentin said, “I'm scared.”

“You'll be all right. You'll take Berlin, then you'll go home and meet a pretty girl and get married. She'll be just like you knew she would be, and one day you'll show her all your letters, and she'll be amazed that you knew her before you had even met her.”

“I have a bad feeling.”

“I know.” Heck could think of no further, truthful reassurance.

Quentin thrust the weight of his letters into his backpack.

“I'll probably be sent out tomorrow,” Heck said, “and we'll meet up again in Berlin.” He was straining desperately for words. “Hitler's living room. I'll see you there.”

Quentin shouldered his pack and took up his rifle and looked at it like a thing he knew not how to dispose of.

Heck said, “I'm looking for her, Quentin. I'm trying to find her.”

Quentin nodded. “That makes me glad. I knew you were in love.” He offered a shy smile.

Heck walked with him to the truck. Quentin climbed in and they exchanged brief waves. Heck walked on toward town, wondering how many more people he would meet for a couple of days, then never see again.

The day was of such beauty that it seemed a mistake had been made. The air had warmed, and only one or two tiny, cottony clouds floated overhead.

The streets of town, to Heck's wonder, were a spectacle of color and movement, of voices and music. Beckoned by the weather, everyone was outside and the town square was full. There was a six-piece band, including accordion and dented tuba. The three old men on their bench argued spectacularly. The doors of the bakery were thrown open, and a yeasty aroma wafted out. Heck was still thinking of Quentin, however, and angrily resolved to himself that he would go back to the front and will himself forward. He knew now what to expect. He only needed to be disciplined enough to set aside reluctant instincts. Children careened in all directions, and soldiers of the various Allied armies strolled about gripping the necks of bottles and cussing merrily. Heck wandered out of the square and around a corner into one of the town's back alleys.

The buildings around the square were two and three stories tall, with steeply pitched roofs, built of brick or half-timbered and set tightly shoulder to shoulder. Some sagged or leaned with great age, and many needed paint. Nonetheless, they were evidently cared for and gathered to themselves a certain dignity. In the alley, however, they displayed their shabby side—stained and unpainted walls, boarded windows, scattered broken brick, black burn markings. Heck stopped to look through an empty window into a large open space where the floorboards had been ripped up. Farther down the alley, a door opened and a woman set out a container full of garbage.

Immediately several fast-moving figures appeared—out of corners or from under stairwells. Some seemed to rise up out of the earth. All of them converged, shambling or loping, on the garbage can. They gathered in a small, gaunt, elbowing swarm, adults and children. Heck watched the little frenzied crowd from a distance. He started forward, then stopped. Among them was the boy, Ives—Claire's brother. He was struggling with two others for a bit of cloth that had fallen to the ground. He was the smallest of those involved, and he lost; a tall rangy old woman with the bearing of aristocracy won the little piece of cloth and skittered away. Ives turned to the garbage can again, but evidently the items of possible use had already been scavenged—the crowd was drifting apart. The boy peered into the garbage and sifted with his hand. Heck stepped into a shadowed doorway. The boy gave up and looked around. Heck could not see any disappointment in his expression, only a hardness of determination strange on a boy so young.

Ives trudged with his head bowed, pausing mechanically to look into other bins of already picked-over garbage. Heck hesitated, then followed. The alley ended against a creek of muddy water between steep embankments, and Ives put out his arms and ran toward it. He slowed slightly at the embankment's edge, then plunged down, out of sight. A moment later he popped up the other side. He turned right. Heck broke into a run. He reached the edge of the embankment and stopped. He glanced upstream and down, but the nearest bridge was a couple hundred yards away. The creek was swelled with rainwater and surprisingly wide. But Ives had made it across. The boy was now turning left into another street. Heck dropped with heavy steps down the embankment, looking at the churning waters, thinking it was too wide, that he could not possibly make it across. As he was planting his foot to make the leap he saw in the center of the waters a stone, dark and wet and nearly submerged, and he understood that this was how the boy had made it across. He twisted midstep to alter the direction of his movement and put his foot to the stone and skipped over. As he continued forward, upward, he found he had lost his momentum and he had to lean forward and grab at the soil with his hands for traction. After a short, muddy struggle he stood upright again, on flat ground, and sprinted to the right, then turned into the street where the boy had gone, beating his hands together to clean them and furious with himself and already aching with the anticipation of despair because there seemed little hope now that he could catch Ives. He should have approached the boy immediately, or called out to him before he vanished. And indeed the narrow street, which lay all in shadow despite the day's uncovered sun, was empty.