From the Indie Side (29 page)

Now Charlie O’Shea, champion boxer and
soldier, was staring at me. He stood there, facing up the beach,
his rifle clutched in his hands. His face, though, turned in my
direction, revealing by just the lift of his eyebrow that he’d
recognized me for sure.

It dawned on me that if I’d kept going,
followed my orders, and made it to Colonel Ryan, Charlie O’Shea
wouldn’t be heading up to the bluff and facing the gunfire. Instead
he’d be on an assault boat, motoring back to safety.

I could tell by the way he stared that he’d
seen what I was doing. It was obvious. My story of my injury being
too serious, of passing out—well, it wouldn’t stand now. He saw me
for what I was: a coward, hiding under two brave men who’d given
their lives.

His face changed as he looked at me, as the
realization dawned. His eyebrows furrowed, his lips tightened, the
muscles in his neck stiffened and stood rigidly. He began to shake
his head.

I knew what he was thinking.

Suddenly I saw me through his eyes, and the
scalding shame burned through me and colored my cheeks. He started
to mouth something, but the whip of the wind and the explosions
carried away his words.

A thick ball of emotion filled my chest. In
my mind, I began a reply to his accusations. He would report me,
and I would be court-martialed or worse. Until then, I’d had an
exemplary record. Until then, I was a hero to my family.

I thought to get up, face him, and explain
that it was the fear, the death, the horrors. That I’d never
expected them. I’d even begun to push myself up, moving through the
bodies that, as the sun rose higher, had already begun to stink of
rot—when he was suddenly gone.

One moment he was there, mouthing, staring,
accusing me with his eyes, and in the next his head was gone.
Exploded. Thick, wet drops landed upon the exposed parts of my
body, my arms, my face. A piece of flesh hit me just above the eye,
along with splatters of blood. For a moment, it blinded me, and I
felt a wild panic erupt. My heart raced off again.
Thu-ump.
Thu-ump.

It was instinct that caused me to dive back
under the bodies again. I couldn’t help him; I could only help
me
. Hell, I could have
been
him, if I’d followed my
orders. That was my alternate fate, played out before me in all its
Technicolor horror.

With the gore thick in my hair and upper
body, I lay there praying, looking as much like a corpse as did the
bodies on top of me.

I lay there crying, not worrying if the sobs
caused my chest to rise, with the sand cradling me, the fallen men
protecting me, and the weight of what I had done forever frozen at
the moment when Charlie O’Shea shook his head and mouthed those
words. His words that I would never hear and never know would
forever haunt me.

Five thousand would die on the beach that
day. Every day after that I would wish I were one of them.

When I looked out the window again, they were
still there: the soldiers, the gunfire, and the hellish battle.
This couldn’t be real.

I shook my head, which made the world spin
like a slot machine. Cursed vertigo had set in ever since that day.
Always striking me at its convenience, never mine.

Even as the vertigo slowed, I saw nothing had
changed. They were still out there. Now advancing toward me. And
they never did that. It was always as if I had a side-window view
of the battle. Tonight’s vision seemed even realer than last
night’s. I slumped back down under the window, my breath coming in
short, sharp pants. I twisted around so my legs lay out straight
before me, my back pressed into the wall.

The room was a wreck, torn to shreds by the
bullets. The sofa stuffing floated in the air like clumps of snow.
Mavis would have been devastated. She loved that sofa. The desk
lamp across the room lay shattered on the floor. And all around me
was the glass from the room’s windows. It sparkled orange and red
from the flares outside, and it was almost beautiful.

At some point while my mind traveled back to
that beach, the lights had gone out. Of course, they’d
taken
them out. That would be protocol. Blind the enemy.

I needed to get away. If I could get through
the kitchen to the back door, there was a gate out the back to the
neighboring property. Surely, they wouldn’t dare follow us.

A moan came from beside me. Small like a
child’s.

Caught up in my memories, I had forgotten
Claire. I’d turned a blind eye to the human being right beside me.
The poor girl must be terrified.

I turned to her and leaned over, anxious to
reassure her that it would all soon end. The sight of her was as
shocking to me as the specter of Charlie O’Shea next to my mailbox
had been.

Claire sat only two feet away, and like me,
her back was against the wall. She looked, at first glance, as if
she were resting, as if the two of us were playing hide-and-seek
together.

Except for the blood.

Down the front of her lemon-yellow blouse,
near her collarbone, a patch of red expanded as I watched. Her face
was pale as a sheet, and her hand dabbed disjointedly at the
material. After a few jabs, she held it out before her, her eyes
saucer-wide at the sight of the blood. A bullet had ripped into
her. I thought it was my touch that had broken the window earlier,
but I saw now that it had been a bullet.

Her breath came in hiccups. As she pulled air
into her lungs, her stomach, beneath her skirt, sharply expanded
and contracted as if manipulated by a machine.

She rolled her head to look at me. My
immediate thought was to reassure her. “Don’t worry. It will go.
It’s just some serious guilt haunting me. You’ll be okay. It’s me
it wants.”

But, this wasn’t a mere vision or
manifestation of post-traumatic stress. This was us, somehow, in a
war that had already been fought. And Claire—with the two children
and the husband and the opinionated views—the health worker who
loved to talk, whose only mistake was to come back to check on me,
had become a casualty of that war.

I pushed myself to my knees and crawled the
few feet to the sofa. A ghastly multi-colored wool headrest,
crocheted by Mavis while watching
Mod Squad
in the
seventies, hung over the arm. Yanking it away, I clutched it in my
hand, carrying it back to Claire.

Bunching an end of it into a ball, I pushed
it into the wound. Claire cried out. It hurt me to hurt her, but I
had to stop the blood flow.

“Claire… here.” I held the cloth to her
chest. “Can you hold this? Push it in. It will help to stem the
bleeding. Pressure. You need pressure on it.”

She attempted to take the bunched cloth in
her hand. Due to either the shock or the loss of blood, she lacked
the strength to hold it. A pool of red formed on the floor. Tears
streamed down her face and slipped into her open mouth. She kept
repeating only one word. “How? How? How?”

“I don’t know how,” I said. “It’s in my
mind.”

I patted her hair as my own tears traveled
down my cheeks. What could I do? How could I prevent this thing
from happening to her? This had nothing to do with her.

She looked down again at her chest, then back
at me, and said, “What have you done? Not in your—mind.” Her eyes
looked lost and worn.

Her words tugged at me. She was right.

I had done something, and it had come to
claim me. All the guilt I couldn’t shake, the guilt that had piled
up—day after day, year after year—filling my heart, filling my
subconscious, until I couldn’t hold it anymore, and it spilled out
into this world.

One mistake under terrible circumstances. How
could I know that my one act of cowardice would never be forgiven?
How could I know that even though no one would ever know—except for
Charlie O’Shea—I would still be condemned? That my own conscience
would mete out a justice far greater than my superiors of the day?
I had become both judge and defendant; prisoner and jailer.

I leaned toward Claire, my hand outstretched.
She met my eyes, and I could see the same look I had seen on so
many dying men in that war. That look never left you. I couldn’t
take another person looking at me that way, dying in front of me,
dying
because
of me.

The cloth had fallen into her lap. I grabbed
at it and pushed it again into the wound. She winced, but she was
so weak now, she barely made a sound.

“Claire. Claire! Look at me. Hold this.” I
grabbed her wrist and forced her to take hold of the cloth. “You
must hold this to stop the bleeding. It will be over in a minute. I
promise. Do you hear me?”

She barely nodded, but her eyes, which had
been frantically moving between half-open lids, slowed. A whispered
“yes” escaped her lips.

I leaned forward and kissed her on the
forehead. “Claire, thank you for always caring about me. I didn’t
deserve you. I haven’t deserved anyone.”

Crawling backward a few feet, away from the
window and the line of fire, I stood up, far more quickly than I
could remember having done in the past decade. It was as if the
years had bled from my body. My muscles, no longer withered, had
now grown stronger.

It took only five strides to reach the front
door. I paused for a moment, gathering my thoughts, thinking back
over the years I’d enjoyed. Years I hadn’t deserved.

There was Mavis’s sweet face when she’d said
“I do,” quickly replaced by the guilt of knowing that all those men
would never hear these words from their sweethearts.

There were the children and the
grandchildren. How tall and proud they stood whenever I marched in
the remembrance parades, my purple heart and all the other awards
proudly displayed on my jacket. Awards I was sure I had never
earned.

These images filled my mind, the emotions
traveling through my body, fueling my resolve. My hand reached for
the doorknob, and with the flick of my wrist, it turned. In that
instant, it was as if I’d turned the off switch on a radio.
Suddenly the air was empty of sound; my mind was clear.

I flung open the door, expecting the vision
to be gone. I’d finally had the courage to face it, and, in return,
it would dissolve to nothing, and Claire would be fine.

But the scene that lay before me was exactly
as I remembered it from 1944. I quickly glanced back at Claire: she
hadn’t moved, still sat in a pool of her own blood, her tiny body
heaving with the exhaustion of each breath.

I turned back to the door, and stepped
outside.

As I walked down the steps, the odor of
gunpowder and death assaulted me. The gray cloying mist swirled
below my knees, and I heard the crunch and squelch of sand beneath
my feet.

Across the way, I noted the sniper’s sight
trained on me, as he awaited his order from God-knows-who. By
Mavis’s favorite elm—whose dropping autumn leaves I cursed every
year—the machine gun battlements spat out their stinging rounds.
Dirt and grass flew up around my feet, spraying my pants and
dressing gown. But still I walked. No zigzagging this time.

Just as before, I heard the bullet before I
felt it, in the millisecond before the bullet pulped my calf muscle
and shattered the bone. But still I kept walking, limping as I
went, and ignoring the pain, even glad for the pain.

Under my breath, I began to chant, “I
understand, sir. They’re counting on me.” The men. Poor Claire.

I dragged my injured leg behind, each step
now causing sharp, shooting pains to travel to my brain. This time
I missed nothing. My penance, no doubt.

And there he was, at the end of my path, just
where he had been the night before.

Charlie O’Shea was waiting for
me.

He’d always been waiting. As had all the men
who’d lost their lives pointlessly. Because of me.

His lips moved, as they had done that
terrible morning. He mouthed words. Seventy-year-old words I had
never heard. Words that had haunted me and destroyed any true
happiness I might have enjoyed in my life. My life always and
forever colored by those unheard words.

Now I was only feet from him. This time I was
standing. This time I faced him. Whatever he would say, I was ready
to hear it. So very ready, and so very, very tired of waiting.

He lowered his gun and held out his hand. I
didn’t expect that. In another time, I would have made a joke.
So, you want a dance, Charlie?
But he was saying the words
again, and now I was close enough to hear.

The pain in my forehead was sudden.

At first, I thought it was a rock kicked up
by the gunfire. But then blood dripped into my eyes. And in that
split second between life and death, I understood it all. This
bullet was the one that should have been mine. On that beach. On
that day.

As I lay on the ground, the sounds and lights
fading to a pale pink, then a gray, then a deep, beautiful black, I
felt Charlie lean over me, and whisper in my ear. His voice so
clear, so close, it was as if it was inside my head.

“Baker, we’re clearing the beach. Stay where
you are. Stay down. Stay alive.”

I was four when I decided I would be a
writer, packed a bag, and marched down the road looking for a
school. But for forty-six years, I suffered from
life-gets-in-the-way-osis. Setting a goal to write just one page a
day cured me in 2010. This discipline grew into an addictive habit
that has since borne several novels, and dozens of short stories
and novellas—many of which are published award-winners in
Australia, the US and the UK.

My childhood reading diet consisted of Edgar
Allen Poe, O’Henry, and
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, plus
horror comics like
Tales From the Crypt
.  Anything out
of this world like
The Twilight Zone
and
Outer Limits
had me glued to the television.