Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (74 page)

Adam Nichols did not think so, either, and he had been watching Sister Katherine’s face so he thought she did not think so as well.

Sister Katherine said rather loudly, “Oh, yes, Sergeant Rinelli. I have talked with the doctors. Yes, I have. Soon you will begin to be better. It will be a gradual thing, you will see. Your strength will come back. Then you can be invalided home.”

With his head turned, Adam Nichols saw Rinelli smile.

“Good,” Rinelli said. “That is very fine. So, Sister Katherine, as soon as I am better and my strength comes back to me, but before I am sent home, I have a favor to ask of you.”

“What is that, Sergeant Rinelli?”

“I want you to dance with me.”

Sister Katherine looked youngest when she was trying to be deeply serious. “No, no,” she said, emphatically. “No, it is not permitted. Nuns cannot dance.”

* * *

What Adam Nichols liked about morphine was that it was better than getting drunk because you could slip from what was real to what was not real and not know and not care one way or the other. Right now in his mind, he was up in Michigan. He was walking through the woods, following the trail. Ahead, it came into sight, the trout pool, and his eyes took it all in, and he was seeking the words so he could write this moment truly.

Beyond this trail

a stream lies

faintly marked by rising mist.

Twisting and tumbling

around barriers,

it flows

into a shimmering pool,

black with beauty

and

full of fighting trout.

Adam Nichols had not told many people about this writing thing, how he believed he would discover a way to make words present reality so it was not just reality but more real than reality. He wanted writing to jump into what he called the fifth dimension. But until he learned to do it, and for now, writing was a secret for him.

The war was over. Sometimes he tried to write about it but he usually could not. Too often when he would try to write about it, he would find himself writing about what other men had seen and done and not what he himself had seen and done and had to give it up as a bad job.

Adam Nichols put down his tackle and rod and sat down by the pool and lit a cigarette. It tasted good. There is a clean, clear and sharp smell when you light a cigarette outdoors. He was not surprised to find Rinelli sitting alongside him even though Rinelli was dead. Rinelli was smoking, too.

“
Isn’t this fine? Isn’t this everything I said it would be?” Adam Nichols asked.

“
It’s grand, it sure is. It’s just swell,” Rinelli answered.

“
Tonight, we’ll drink some whiskey with really cold water. And we’ll have one hell of a meal,” Adam Nichols said. “Trout. I’ve got my old man’s recipe.” He drew reflectively on his cigarette. “My old man, he was the one who taught me to hunt and fish. He was the one taught me to cook outdoors.”

“
You haven’t introduced me to your father,” Rinelli said.

“
Well, he’s dead, you see. He was a doctor and he killed himself. He put his gun to his head and he killed himself.”

“
What do you figure, then? Figure he’s in hell now?”

“
I don’t know. Tell you, Rinelli, I don’t really think there’s anything like that. Hell. Not really.”

Rinelli looked sad and that’s when Adam Nichols saw how dead Rinelli’s eyes were and remembered all over again that Rinelli was dead.

“
Well, Adam, you know me, I don’t like to argue, but I tell you, there is, too, a hell. And I sure as hell wish I were there right now.”

Rinelli snapped the last half inch of his cigarette into the trout pool. A small fish bubbled at it as the trout pool turned into blood.

* * *

A few days later Rinelli was pretty bad off. Sometimes he tried to joke with Adam but he didn’t make any sense and sometimes he talked in Italian to people who weren’t there. He looked gray, like a dirty sheet. When he fell asleep, there was a heavy, wet rattle in his throat and his mouth stayed open.

Adam Nichols wasn’t feeling any too swell himself. It was funny, how when you were getting better, you hurt lots worse. Sister Katherine jabbed a lot of morphine into him. It helped, but he still hurt and he knew he wasn’t always thinking straight.

There were times he thought he was probably crazy because of the pain and the morphine. That didn’t bother him really. It was just that he couldn’t trust anything he saw.

At dusk, Adam Nichols opened his eyes. He saw Sister Katherine by Rinelli’s bed. She had her crucifix and she was praying hard and quiet with her lips moving prettily and her eyes almost closed.

“We will not be able to move him for a while. We do not have enough people, and there’s no room…” Sister Katherine looked like she had something unpleasant in her mouth. “There is no room in the room we’re using for the morgue.”

Sister Katherine gave him the injection, and later there was another, and then, he thought, perhaps another one or even two. He knew he had had a lot of morphine because what he saw later was really crazy and couldn’t have actually happened.

It was dark and Sister Katherine came in with her little light. Rinelli sat up in bed then. That had to be the morphine, Adam Nichols told himself. Rinelli was dead as a post. But there he was, sitting up in bed, with dead eyes, and he was stretching out his arms and then it all happened quick just like in a dream but Rinelli was out of bed and he was hugging Sister Katherine like he was drunk and silly.

He’s dancing with her, that’s what he’s doing, Adam Nichols thought, and he figured he was thinking that because of all the morphine. Sure, he said he was going to dance with Sister Katherine before he went home. “Hey, Rinelli,” Adam Nichols said. “Quit fooling around, why don’t you?”

Sister Katherine was yelling pretty loud and then she wasn’t yelling all that loud because it looked like Rinelli was kissing her, but then you saw that wasn’t it. Rinelli was biting her nose real hard, not like kidding around, and she was bleeding pretty much and she twisted and pushed real hard on Rinelli.

Rinelli staggered back. With blood on his dead lips. With something white and red and pulpy getting chewed by his white teeth. With a thin bit of pink gristle by the corner of his mouth.

Sister Katherine was up against the wall. The middle of her face was a black and red gushing hole. Her eyes were real big and popping. She was yelling without making a sound. She kind of looked like a comic strip.

It was a bad dream and the morphine, Adam Nichols thought, a real bad dream, and he wished he’d wake up.

Then Sister Anne came running in. Then she ran out. Then she ran back in. Now she had a Colt .45. She knocked back the slide like she really meant business. Rinelli went for her. She held her arm straight out. The gun was just a few inches from Rinelli’s forehead when Sister Anne let him have it. Rinelli’s head blew up wetly in a lot of noise. A lot of the noise was shattering bone. It went all over the place.

That was all Adam Nichols could remember the next morning. It wasn’t like something real you remember. It was a lot more like a dream. He told himself it had to be the morphine. He told himself that a number of times. The windows were open and the breeze was nice but the small room smelled of strong disinfectant. There was no one in the other bed.

“It’s better you don’t think about it,” Sister Anne said. “It’s war and everybody sees a lot of awful things. Just don’t think about it.”

VI

“Maybe I deserve a medal. I’ve pissed in the face of death.” The old man winked then. That and what he had just said made him look ridiculous. It made him look ancient and crazy. “I have killed, after all.”

“I know. You are a very famous killer. You have antlers and tusks and rhino horns. You’ve shot cape buffalo and geese and bears and wild goats. That makes you extremely brave. You deserve medals.”

“Who are you to deride me?” The old man was furious. He looked threatening and silly. “Who are you to hold me in contempt? I have killed men!”

VII

The time is a drunken blur in his memory. It is the “rat race” summer and fall of 1944, and he is intensely alive. A “war correspondent,” that is what he is supposed to be, but that is not all he can allow himself to be.

He has to go up against Death every time. With what he knows, oh, yes, he has to meet the flat gaze of Mr. Death, has to breathe Mr. Death’s hyena breath, he has to.

That is part of it.

He calls himself a soldier. He wouldn’t have it any other way. This is a war. He appoints himself an intelligence officer. He carries a weapon, a .32 caliber Colt revolver.

And don’t the kids love him, though? God, he sure loves them. They are just so goddamned beautiful, the doomed ones and the fortunate, the reluctant warriors and those who’ve come to know they love it. They are beautiful men as only men can be beautiful.

You see, women, well, women are women, and it is the biological thing, the trap by which we are snared, the old peg and awl, the old bellyrub and sigh and there you have it, and so a real man does need a woman, must have a woman so he does not do heinous things, but it is in the company of men that men find themselves and each other.

These kid warriors, these glorious snotnoses like he used to be, they know he is tough. He is the legit goods. He can outshoot them, rifle or pistol, even the Two Gun Pecos Pete from Arizona. Want to play cards, he’ll stay up the night, drinking and joking. He puts on the gloves and boxes with them. He’ll take one to give one and he always gives as good as he gets.

He has a windup phonograph and good records: Harry James and the Boswells and Hot Lips Paige. He has Fletcher Henderson and Basie and Ellington. The Andrews Sisters, they can swing it, and Russ Colombo. Sinatra, he’ll be fine once they let him stop doing the sappy stuff. There are nights of music and drinking, and in the following days there are the moments burned into his mind, the moments that become the stories. Old man?

Well, he can drink the kids blindeyed and to hell and gone. He stays with them, drink for drink. The hell with most of the kissass officers. They don’t know how foolish they are. They don’t know they are clichés. The enlisted men, John Q. Public, Mr. O. K. Joe American, Johnny Gone for a Soldier, it’s the enlisted man who’s going to save the world from that Nazi bastard. It’s the enlisted men he honest to God loves.

The enlisted men call him “Papa.”

How do you like it now, Gentlemen?

The kraut prisoner was no enlisted man. He was an officer. Stiff necked son of a bitch.
Deutschland uber alles.
Arrogant pup.
Ubermensch
.

No, the German will not reveal anything. He will answer none of their questions. They can all go to hell. That’s what the German officer says. They can all get f_____.

Papa shakes a fist in the kraut’s face. Papa says, “You’re going to talk and tell us every damned thing we want to know or I’ll kill you, you Nazi son of a bitch.”

The German officer does not change expression. He looks bored. What he says is: “You are not going to kill me, old man. You do not have the courage. You are hindered by a decadent morality and ethical code. You come from a race of mongrelized degenerates and cowards. You abide by the foolishness of the Geneva Convention. I am an unarmed prisoner of war. You will do nothing to me.”