Prudence (20 page)

“Wow, Billy,” Frankie managed to say eventually. And then they’d started to wonder—what to do? What to clean up with? This distracted them from their embarrassment, and they used Billy’s socks, which they buried under the ashes in the stove.

Nights like this couldn’t have been given to them more than, what, three or four times at most. It was enough. Enough then. But now?

He’d do it differently now.

*   *   *

B
illy leaned over and took the jar from Prudence, uncapped it and took a sip. “What’s he make his booze out of anyway?”

Prudence stirred. “I don’t know. Potatoes, maybe. Corn? Who cares.” She sat up straighter and gathered her hair behind her head. The truck’s headlights shone out over the river.

“You go across much?” asked Billy.

“What do you think?”

“You ever see old Felix?”

“Not unless he comes to town.”

Prudence put her feet up on the dash and let her hair fall back around her shoulders.

The truck’s lights picked up the weeds and brush around the old camp. After the war, men from the village came and rolled up the fencing and removed the fence posts. The buildings were moved, one by one, over the ice on skids to a resort nearer the village. All that was left were the poured-cement pads where the bunkhouses and cookhouse and assembly building had been.

Billy turned off the lights. Across the river, the big house glowed faintly in the moonlight, like a bone tossed up on the shore. A single light shone from the boathouse.

“Old Felix has got the place to himself.”

“He can have it,” said Prudence. “He can have the whole goddamn thing.”

“He ain’t so bad, Prudy.”

“Isn’t he?”

“No. I don’t know.”

When Billy still worked at the mill, Felix had come in for this or that. He’d sort through the rough cut in that careful way of his, as if the boards had to be perfect, even though the Pines was falling into the ground and Emma and Jonathan weren’t ever coming back. But Felix kept the place up anyway. Maybe it was habit. Every fall he turned the rowboat over on a tamarack crib well above the river. The Chris-Craft he winched up into the boathouse, using a come-along. He closed the shutters of the main house and made sure the cabins were shuttered and locked, too. He raked the dead leaves away from the foundation of the big house and burned them in a pile in the fire pit. And every spring he did everything in reverse. Sometimes, in the summer, Billy saw him fishing from the rowboat in the mouth of the river. In the winter he lay on the ice and decoyed muskie under a blanket in the old fashion. Once in a while, if a chore was too big for him, he called Billy, and Billy came out to the Pines. The same trees sawing in the wind. The same dock. The same cattails along the riverbank where he once killed a duck with a rock and made Frankie fall in love with him. Everything the same. But everything different. Billy couldn’t look at him. Felix had killed men. He was a killer of men and so he knew too much.

He watched Prudence drink from the jar and wipe her mouth again. She wiggled her knees and brought one close to her face to inspect it. The imprint of her splayed toes was held in an outline of fog against the windshield for a minute before fading. She thought everything was as it seemed to her—Frankie’s necklace, this silver one with the heart, proof of his love—as much of a fact as Felix’s kindness.

Gephardt’s vodka was doing its work. Billy’s head was swimming.

“What makes you so sure about everything, Prudy?”

Billy reached out toward the necklace. “Let me see that,” he said.

Prudence leaned toward Billy obligingly. The necklace dangled toward him. He held it between his fingers.

“They sell necklaces like that at J. C. Penney, you know. I was just there.”

“Yeah? This one came from England,” she said, and as though just saying the words exhausted her, she leaned her head on Billy’s shoulder. It hurt but he didn’t say anything.

“If you say so. But they got them in Grand Rapids.”

“Not ones from him. Not necklaces from Frankie.”

But Frankie would never send a necklace like that—so tacky, so clear that it was. And not to someone like Prudence. Why couldn’t she see that? No one who sent books like the ones Frankie sent Billy, no one with that depth of feeling, could send something so tinny to someone like her. It was all so obvious. It was more like the version of Frankie who existed in Prudence’s mind who had sent it, not the real Frankie. Not the Frankie whom Billy knew better than anyone else did.

Billy let the necklace drop back into its nest on Prudence’s chest. He took her right hand with his left and pulled her up, mostly to relieve his shoulder. She knew all the moves, though, so there was nothing awkward about how she turned her hips and slid her right knee across his lap until she was sitting on his lap facing him, her head in his neck, her small breasts level with his chin, her arms around his shoulders. Her hip bumped the steering wheel and Billy slid the two of them over to the middle of the bench seat. He shifted his weight again and reached with his left hand and freed the packages from underneath him and pushed them over on the driver’s side of the seat. Her dress was still wet and the skin on her arms was clammy.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Okay,” she murmured, and then, as though conceding some point on the very far side of a long argument, “all right.” Prudence leaned back and reached over her shoulders and undid the clasp at the top of her zipper, then she dropped her arms and brought them behind her back to unzip it, the way boys did when they asked you to
guess what was in their hands. She crossed her arms in front of her, grasped the opposite sides of the dress, and pulled it up and over her head. Her white underthings glowed mutely against her skin; three moths, two perched over her tits, one over her pussy. She leaned forward and put her head on his shoulder. He shifted uncomfortably and she switched to the other shoulder. He looked down but didn’t like the look of her underwear; so unnatural, so rude and obvious against her dark skin. Not like a moth. More like a bandage, maybe. He looked away, over her shoulder, past the windshield and over the river to where the Pines stood as expectantly as ever.

That’s how it seemed. Waitful. It was waiting for him and Frankie—waiting for a time when Emma no longer came up and Jonathan had forgotten about it. Then it would be theirs. It belonged to them. It felt that way to Billy even though he’d never heard from Frankie after that day. No letters. No telegrams. No necklaces, that’s for shit sure. Nothing at all. From Felix, Billy had heard about Frankie getting shot down over Aachen, just before Christmas 1944. He might have died when the plane exploded or he might have been able to bail out. If he had bailed out, he hadn’t made it.

“Are we going to get this over with or what?” asked Prudence.

Having taken the first steps in the dull sequence, there seemed no reason not to finish the dance. Billy reached down and began to unbutton his pants.

“Here,” she said, not unkindly, and she lifted herself off him and lay back on the bench seat with her head by the door. She pulled her knees to her chest and slipped off her underwear and put them on the floor of the truck. She picked at her knee again before extending her legs and placing them on either side of his thighs. With the glaring underwear gone, so bright and crude, it was as though the lights had been turned off and the outer dark had finally crept inside the truck, where it belonged. Billy slid his own pants and underwear down around his ankles in one motion, as if he were skinning a rat.
He felt foolish, vulnerable, with just his shirt on, and he started to unbutton it, but Prudence reached for him blindly and pulled him on top of her before he could finish. He registered, dimly, that she didn’t want there to be too much distance between them—not so that he wouldn’t see her nakedness, but so she wouldn’t have to see his. Or maybe that was the only way she knew to do it.

He pressed himself into her and felt her hip bones grind against his, and he tried to raise himself up on his arms but couldn’t manage it with his shoulder. She didn’t notice. Her eyes were shut and she reached for him and stroked him a few times, to no effect.

He sat back up and Prudence sat up with him. That was better. He breathed deeply as she straddled him. She took him in her hand and, leaning forward, rubbed him back and forth a few times on her crease, as though buttering a cob of corn. With her eyes closed, she fit him inside her and flapped her hand in the air to dry it before draping both hands over his shoulders. Her parts felt swollen and a little shallow.

He wrapped his arms around her—her rib cage so narrow and her breasts so small—and moved when she moved. But he was far away, and drunk as she was, Prudence sensed it. She slowed her pace, the movement of her hips grew smaller, more disinterested. Billy took her face in his hands and she reared back in surprise. But gently he brought her face down toward his, parting her lips with his tongue. He kissed her neck, the way one dog nuzzled another, then raised his face and kissed her again. Prudence sucked in her breath, taking some of his with hers. His mouth suddenly felt cool. Her hips settled lower on his and he felt her knees squeeze tighter on either side of his buttocks. She pushed the tip of her tongue inside his mouth and he was surprised at how small it was.

It was his turn to pull back and study her face. All along he had thought of her as familiar. Not a friend, certainly. Not that. But wrapped up so closely with Frankie, so much a part of the same
thoughts over the past ten years, as to be familiar. But she was not. She was a stranger to him.

“Oh, Billy,” she said. “Oh, Billy, what are you doing?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he moved his lips down her neck and took her nipple in his mouth. It was as hard and brown and small as his. He felt the heart necklace cold against his cheek. After a moment he left the nipple alone and proceeded to the next. But the cold metal of the necklace left some trace, some mark, on his desire. He took the heart in his mouth and bent her face down toward his again, and this time, when their lips met, he passed the little piece of metal into her mouth.

“I’m just doing my part, Prudy.”

Prudence let the necklace drop and bent her head closer to his, and he could feel her hair falling around his face.

*   *   *

H
e’d done his part eventually, though it wasn’t the part he thought he was going to play. For one, he thought there’d be some sense to it, some logic. But from the moment the landing-craft door clanked down on D-Day+1, he’d felt he was a bit player in a drama of overwhelming scale. Nothing had prepared him for the constant, hollow thumping of the mortars, the ripping of German artillery, the planes constantly overhead, the rumble of armor on the narrow roads. Nothing had prepared him for the sight of those French towns, skeletonized by their own aircraft and artillery, or for the stench of rotting cattle and horses. Nothing had prepared him for the ceaseless, numbing thunder of the bombs that fell on Brest for thirty-nine days until the men took it.

By the time the 2nd Division crossed into Germany, he was convinced he had seen it all, had felt it all, and that he and the other infantrymen were a walking joke. His .30 carbine wasn’t even powerful enough to stop a deer. Thus far his role had been to walk and
dig and cower and run forward and dig and cower some more. When the 88s hit them, they dropped into their foxholes and fortifications and waited till it was over. But things changed in the Ardennes. After pushing them back into the Belgian forest, the Germans began timing their shells to burst at tree level. Whereas before they could count on luck in their foxholes, now the explosions shredded the trees and sent kindling-sized splinters of wood flying down at them. But the wood didn’t usually rain straight down. And so when they heard the shells coming, Billy and his squad jumped from their foxholes and ran to the nearest trees and hugged the boles, their eyes shut tight. They shut their eyes and waited, in the cold thunder, for luck and the trees to carry them through.

By Christmas 1944, fewer American planes were flying over Belgium. The air war had largely been won. There were no more German factories to bomb. Sometimes, though, a squadron of P-47s would dive out of the sky, or a box formation of B-17s and Liberators would pass high above them. He couldn’t help but wonder if Frankie was in one of them and could see him down there. But would Frankie even recognize him anymore?

Before his unit had pushed into Germany in December, they’d had a week of rest at Vielsalm, twenty miles from the border. It was September, and the weather had not yet turned cold. He and his unit had been moving and fighting steadily since June 7; 114 days they had crawled and walked and crouched across France and Belgium. But in Vielsalm, at last, they had a week of rest.

They bivouacked in the hunting château of some Belgian lord or count of whatever it was they had for rich people over there. The château had been occupied by the Germans, but they must have liked it, because the place was clean and well cared for when Billy’s company took it over. He unrolled his blanket in a room on the second story.

The village itself, unlike most of the villages Billy had fought in
and marched through, had as yet been spared bombing and artillery fire. It was not much bigger than Billy’s own village. The Church of Saint-Gengoux still rose next to the lakeshore. The village center, small as it was, stretched along the curved shore of the lake. The houses, made of dark local stone, stood shoulder to shoulder. But it was as if the village had been hollowed out like a pumpkin. There was nothing in it—no clothes in the shops, no coffee or tea in the cafés. No butter, bread, chocolate, chickens, horses, cows, hats, gasoline, cooking oil, rubber. Even with all the trees surrounding the village, there was a shortage of lumber, because the lumber mill had no fuel with which to run the saws, and the Germans had taken the blades away during the occupation. More strikingly, there were no young men except for the soldiers of the 2nd Division, whose shoulder patch—the Indian Head Star and motto “Second to None”—seemed to awe the villagers in a way that their gaunt bodies didn’t.