From the Indie Side (26 page)

Across the road, the snipers sat in their
bunkers, their guns unmoving: deadly black sticks poking over the
sandbags, waiting to strike with a near-silent
phht
. Behind
the stoop of Patrick Smith’s house—a single man with a penchant for
blondes with big hips—perched the machine gun battalion. Yes, those
bastards didn’t miss a trick, and neither did Patrick, from what
he’d shared—which I didn’t care to know, but still he shared.

Pinpoints of red flared from the stoop,
lighting up like a hundred angry eyes. The bullets smacked into the
garden wall, the front door, and the bushes near the mailbox. Dirt
flew up, exploding into the air in an arabesque of green and dark
brown, spraying grains of sand and soil upon my driveway.

Thanks for the aeration of the lawn, you
kraut devils.

I could feel the momentum of the assault
building, just as I had that 1944 June morning.

I was in the 2nd Ranger Battalion. They sent
us into Omaha Beach as a distraction, so that the Dog, Easy, and
Fox Companies could take them out from inland. They hadn’t told us
that before; we only learned of it later in the history books.

Old Dwight’s meteorologist gave the okay,
when the tides, the moon, and the weather would be our allies. It
was a good plan, except the weather just wouldn’t play ball. So you
lose a few men because overcast skies means the air support can’t
get through. Five thousand is a good number, isn’t it, folks?
That’s acceptable, unless you’re one of the five thousand. It’s
acceptable, unless you’re one of the forty-five thousand who lived,
but waded past the bodies, past your friends dying around you, past
the horror. It’s all very acceptable from a room with a map and
names that end in Company, Battalion and Squadron.

Often when the flashes visited me, I wondered
how Eisenhower made that choice: throwing us, and the 1st, and the
29th Division to those devils in order to claim that beach. Did he
put the numbers in a hat? And what was it for? Now we drive their
cars and visit their beer festivals.

A grenade landed just below my window. It
wouldn’t explode while I watched it. They never do. Too much
detail. I don’t get all the detail. These experiences: fugues, Dr.
Clarke tells me. My version of post-traumatic stress disorder
doesn’t supply the detail. And that’s normal for me. I don’t get
faces or direct explosions, just distant visions of gun flares,
flashes, and buzzing bullets, and an inescapable hell.

And I thank my brain for that small mercy. If
I’d had to watch my buddies die over and over, see the pain on
their faces, hear their cries, and look into their pleading eyes, I
couldn’t have taken it.

I looked down through the glass; the grenade
sat there, nestled just next to the rose bush, black and waiting.
Waiting for me to react, to run, to allow it to win, to allow it to
impact my life.

I stood still, watching it. It would
disappear in a moment, unable to withstand the assault of my
stare.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six...

It’ll be gone by three.

Five, four…

When the flash came, followed by an explosion
that pierced my ears like the smashing of a thick glass wall, it
was so unexpected that it threw me back across the room. I
staggered, reeling, both arms swirling in mad circles as I fought
to gain my balance. My hand caught the arm of the lounge chair and
immediately I grabbed for its solidness, falling backward to
half-land on it, my ass embedded in the cushion, my legs hanging
over the arm.

That was new.

I pushed my body back up, my heart solid and
thick in my chest as if the blood had pooled there, forcing the
muscle to work overtime to shunt it out.

My feet shuffled beneath me toward the
window.
Move faster, you bastards.

The flashes had dulled, though the sounds
were still there, cracking and banging. When I reached the window,
I pushed my nose to the glass and looked down.

The grenade was gone. As it should be. As I
knew it would be. The rose bush was alone in all its floral glory.
In the moonlight, the white petals shone as if kissed by the sun
and not its darker sister.

Across the way, the snipers were still
sending their zinging bullets toward me. From the top of the
street, I could hear the rumble of the trucks and the tanks.

It was almost over. The tanks only invaded
when this thing had worn its way down, when the hallucination had
run out of steam, as if they were the final resort of the
battle.

And that’s when I saw him. His face was clear
as day, as if he were here, now, instead of reaching across seven
decades of time and memories.

Young Charlie O’Shea stood near the elm tree
at the edge of the property. He held his gun before him, clenched
between hands shaking with the knowledge that he had only minutes
to live, or maybe one chance in ten of survival. His helmet hung
back over his head—it never fit him right. Even at this distance, I
could see the sweat slicked across his brow, the whites of his eyes
as he swung his head left to right, frantically looking for a way
through the melee.

Then he turned to me, and our gazes met.
That never happened before. I never saw the eyes. I never saw
the faces.

But our eyes met as if we were only feet
apart. He mouthed some words, really tried to send me a message,
but all that hit me was the surprise at seeing him there, and
curiosity at why.

Then the bullet struck. If his damn helmet
had fit him right, he might have been okay. Those helmets could
take a hit sometimes. But it was back on his head, with his
forehead standing out like a shining, white target.

In a slow second, during which I felt I could
see the bullet move through the air, his head disappeared in an
eruption of red and white matter, and his body collapsed like a rag
doll.

For the second time that night, I staggered
backward to the arm of the chair and fell into the welcoming
cushions. Charlie shouldn’t be there. I didn’t see faces,
especially his. My head felt heavy, as if filled to overflowing
with a thousand pounds of sand from that beach.

My breath came in short, sharp gasps, and I
grabbed at my chest. If I didn’t get myself under control, my heart
could give out. I didn’t want Charlie O’Shea’s exploding face to be
the last thing I ever saw on this earth.

As I stared down at the worn, intricate
design of coiled gold and brown vine carpet, from my periphery came
the realization that the flashes had stopped. All that remained was
a distant murmur of crackling and pops. I kept my head bowed until
I felt sure it was over.

When curiosity enticed me to look up, I was
again alone with the empty night. Pulling myself up, I moved back
to the window.

It was then that I saw it.

If I hadn’t run my hand over it, felt its
jaggedness against my palm, I wouldn’t have believed it. “Another
illusion,” I imagined Doctor Clarke saying. But this was no
illusion or mirage. This was real.

My fingers smoothed over the glass and
followed the trail of cracks. One stretched from the base of the
frame to the mid-section, and then fractured off into four lines of
pure white. They were strong and solid, as if to say: “This is our
window. We claim it as our territory.”

But it wasn’t that which caused my heart to
pound, it was the cracks in the wall, the jagged lines running up
from the window into the ceiling in splintering roadmaps of damage.
I hadn’t registered them when I saw Charlie, but now I had a vague
memory of seeing them there. But I’d thought they were part of it,
part of the craziness.

Now I remembered: they were there before
Charlie’s appearance, and after the grenade exploded. The grenade
that should have disappeared, the grenade that couldn’t be real.
And yet, somehow…

“Mr. Baker, what’s happened? Mr. Baker.”

Claire’s voice sounded distant, tinny, as if
captured in a box. It filtered through the thick darkness, pulling
me awake long before I was ready to face whatever awaited in the
world.

“You’ve hurt yourself? Are you all
right?”

Unwillingly, I opened my eyes to find
Claire’s round face and curly brown hair bobbing in and out of my
vision. Uninvited, her arms reached under me, pulling and pushing
my complaining body upright.

Her tutting and fussing sent my mood
spiraling further downward. A five-foot-nothing, thirty-something
woman having enough strength to maneuver a six-foot man so easily
bemused and annoyed me in equal measures. My weight, though, was
forty pounds less now than it was ten years ago—not skin and bone
yet, but certainly more bone. So I’d stiffen my body to ensure she
didn’t have an easy time of it.

After last night, today was not a good-mood
day. I grunted a reply. Once she’d propped me up sufficiently, as
if I were an oversized doll, with pillows tucked between the bed’s
headboard and my head, she stood back and examined my face.

“What have you done here?” Her hand reached
out and brushed across my forehead. “You’ve cut yourself?”

A sudden throb of dull pain brought back the
memory of the cracked window. I must have hit my head on something
when the grenade exploded. In the confusion, with everything going
on, it must not have registered.

I waved Claire’s hand away, none too gently.
Why did she keep coming here? I didn’t make her job easy. Over the
years, many health workers had come and gone, spending only their
allotted fifty minutes, but this one lingered.

And she talked. Constantly.

She prattled on about her children—two boys
in school, middle school or something. She talked about her
husband, her thoughts on the health system, her weather
predictions, her beliefs on manners, and a repetitive exposition on
the real reason for the fluctuating cost of gas. She shared her
views on anything and everything, whether I wanted to hear them or
not.

I didn’t try to be good company—had given up
on civil manners years ago. Didn’t share thoughts, and didn’t offer
her anything to suggest I cared a whit about her life. Yet every
day she came, and cleaned, and cooked. And of course, talked.

When I asked her once—more out of annoyance
than curiosity—why she bothered, she only replied with a smile. But
I knew why she really came: the goddamn government paid her to
check and see if I’d died yet. That was her real job. And one day
she would come and complete the task.

Now she stood there staring, hands on hips,
as I wiggled my feet off the side of the bed. They made a clopping
sound as they found the floor.

Claire leaned into me to offer assistance,
and received my best
don’t help me
look.
Still
she
swooped.

“I’m fine,” I said, waving her away, my voice
cracked and whisper-weak. Sleep offered so little benefits these
days, except a brief reprieve from thought.

“You are not fine. And I want to know how you
cut yourself.”

Ignoring her, I moved to the dresser, faster
than I would have had she not been there.

I stared into the mirror. The gash across my
right eye was two, maybe three inches, but shallow. Dried blood
trailed across my forehead in thin red smears. Ribbons of it had
run into my eyebrows, transforming them from snow white to
pink.

My unchanged clothes from the night before
hung on me like a sack of gray-blue rags. I shambled out the
bedroom door, leaving Claire staring after me. I needed to check
that window. And the wall.

It had to be a dream, part of the
hallucination. I expected to find nothing. But the thought pervaded
my mind. Perhaps the head injury was the answer. There I was seeing
Charlie and grenades and wilder things than I’d ever seen before,
when I was actually out cold, fallen on a chair or table.

My feet followed the treaded path from the
bedroom to the living room, and then to the window, my back
complaining as it always did upon first arising.

“Where are you going, Mr. Baker?” Claire
called from behind me.

The words bounced off, just like the shells
and flashes of memory that invaded my life. The window. I needed to
see the window.

It would be whole. It had to be. No cracks.
No damage. The faded yellow and green flower-patterned wallpaper
would be all that I would see. There would be no fissures sliding
upward scarring it. It would be perfect, smooth, and right, because
a seventy-year-old armament had not exploded in my flowerbed. And
Charlie hadn’t been there. He was dead, and he was gone, just like
all the rest. And what had happened on Omaha Beach that day… well,
it had died with him.

And yet… last night… the way he looked at me.
It was as real as that day. The words he’d mouthed… just like then,
I couldn’t hear them; would never hear them. Because he was dead.
And I was alive.

My fingers dragged across the wall’s surface.
What was real and what was not had merged. My tongue rolled around,
dry and desperate, in a mouth that felt as parched as a noonday
beach. A drone as loud as a dozen overhead planes filled my ears.
They were there.

In the daylight, the pattern of cracks in the
glass, feathered and fine, stood out in etched detail. Alongside
the window, a two-inch-thick breach ran up the wall from floor to
ceiling. Through it daylight streaked, leaving gold and silver
lines on the mottled carpet.

And in comparison to the night before, the
fissure in the window appeared to have enlarged. Maybe the coldness
of the air, the shrinking and expanding of the wooden frame, had
worked on it overnight. Or perhaps I simply hadn’t taken it all
in.

“What’s happened here?” said Claire, moving
alongside me. She, too, reached out to place her palm against the
wall, her skin light pink against the dirge-green floral pattern
Carmen had so loved.