The Pacific and Other Stories (16 page)

Preparation for firing would take at least half an hour and perhaps much more. His signal had to be translated into map coordinates for the gunners, they had to ready and aim, and the firing had to be timed for the assault. It might begin as soon as technically possible, or not until nightfall.

The morphine had begun its work but with less effect than the first dose. Semifloating, nauseated, he made his way back to his resting place, hoping the nausea would not increase. For someone to whom each breath seemed an agony, the prospect of prolonged retching was a serious threat. He imagined that it might kill him with much pain and no glory, and after dropping to his knees he lay once again where he had lain.

I
N THE MORNING
the guns went silent. The heat and quiet, the morphine, and the wind-carried sound of the waves put him in another world. He saw his life as if in stained glass, the streaming light through each section of glass providing an ignition of color. Though not every scene came to him it was as if every moment had a delegate in one vivid image or another. The panels were silver and gold, as blue and purple as grape, as warm as rose, as white and clean as a chalk cliff, or azure, or emerald, or gray, and they deepened with every stroke of his heart. He rode through black air above the earth in immense machines that Milton might have imagined, and flew from them to descend, under benevolent stars, to a world consumed in war.

Morphine and fever pulled him toward the bounds of life. Content to have drifted off without ever again knowing the sober feel of gravity, he was brought back by a great blast of naval gunfire rolling unobstructed over the sea. Then came the secondary thunder of high-explosive shell finding its mark after sailing many miles and plowing deep before it burst. Everything shook in half a dozen different kinds of bass vibration. His fingertips jumped. His lungs felt like drums. His eardrums popped in and out with the concussions as if he were rapidly changing altitudes.

At the parapet it was difficult to peer into the blast areas, not because of
ballistic debris, which did not reach him, but because of the shock waves, which did, and which were as unnerving as sea flowing over the deck of a ship. His face was distorted by these blast waves as if by g-forces, and when he tried to direct fire more precisely he found it difficult to move the telescope, change position, or read the map.

Like a pilot who struggles against gravity and disorientation, he struggled against the detonations to make his best determination of where they were and how far off target. Then he dropped below the sheltering parapet and called in corrections. When they were made and his reports of damage given, he told Glorious that he would try again, but that he wasn’t sure how long he could last. “Wounded,” he said.

The radioman to whom he was speaking replied, “Well done. Keep at it as long as you can.”

L
YING HALF PROPPED UP
against the wall, without the strength to crawl back to his place, he heard a vehicle stop on the road. Looking at the door to the stairs, he realized that even if it meant aggravating his wound until it would kill him, he had to get across the roof, climb the ladder to the water tank, and drop in. Although he only assumed it, soldiers had begun to search the house.

Remembering that no incoming fire had hit near, he lifted himself, looked over the north parapet, and saw that the tanks were moving to the top of the hill. The allied assault had begun, and they were driving to their firing positions.

“Glorious,” he said through the radio, his energy gone. “This is Furious.”

“Go ahead, Furious.”

“What about number nine? You haven’t hit number nine. It’s moved west two hundred yards.”

“Sorry, Furious. Busy. Will do, I’m sure. Over.”

“That’s all,” said the soldier on the roof.

“Thank you, Furious. Glorious out.”

To cross the roof, he had to crawl. Holding the submachine gun by its web strap, he dragged it as he went. His passage was loud, and the gun
pulled up whitewash, leaving a trail that would give him away. With neither the strength nor the time to deal with it, he abandoned it where it lay.

War was like a series of windows, each narrower than the one preceding it, until in the end nothing was left of light or choice. How wide the world had been in the last days of civilian life before he had had any notion of enlisting. As soon as military service became a possibility, the passage began to narrow, and with each step it grew tighter and tighter. A hundred choices and a hundred chances later, he was crawling across a whitewashed roof as fast as he could, hoping to drop himself into a water tank.

Concealing himself inside the tank, as unpromising as it may have been, was better than simply lying in plain sight and dying in a single volley of automatic-weapons fire. Still, he was moving so slowly that when they would burst onto the roof he might be right in front of them, and he regretted that he was leaving a trail of blood.

At the foot of the tank, from his position flat on the roof, the ladder looked amazingly long and narrow. The wood was solid enough, but the twenty rungs or so seemed to call for a base more than just a foot across. Nor was it secured at the top, although on either side of the rectangular opening that gave access to the interior were long iron handles that, should the ladder move from side to side, would confine it.

He used the ladder itself to help him get up enough so he could start to climb. Every movement of his arms or legs was agony. His ribs opened the wound and cut into him from within. In a few minutes he was at the top, grasping the iron rails. Each step up had been a betrayal of his body, he thought he was going to bleed to death just from the climb, and not only was his position impossible, it was at the end of a trail of blood.

The water was four feet below him, and on the interior wall was a ladder of iron rungs that led into it. In the best of times, bending through the opening and positioning oneself on the ladder would have been a feat of acrobatics, especially since it was so high in the air, but in his condition it seemed impossible. He took another step up, until his waist was level with the bottom of the opening.

Using his arms to lift himself as he twisted and entered was out of the question. As precariously as he was positioned—and he might have fallen
not just onto the roof but over the side of the building—his arms hung down limply at his sides. He hoped that something would happen that would allow him not to enter in the only way he thought possible, which was to pitch himself forward.

He was not going to do that unless and until the door to the roof opened. Even then he would wait for an instant, hoping to hear English. What he heard was not English, nor indeed any language, but the sound of naval gunfire and the transit of huge shells closing in from miles away. In groups of two and three only seconds apart they began to explode against the hill, along the top of the ridge, and amid the tanks he had targeted. Though the blasts almost threw him from the ladder, which rocked and twisted, he held fast to the iron rails.

One shot against the building and it would all go down, one shot nearby and the shock might blow the water tank from its spindly perch. How in the midst of deafening explosions would he hear the door open? He wouldn’t. So he decided to go back down. But after taking two steps, he saw that the door already was open. With their backs to him, weapons extended, three Germans were going through the drill of assaulting a roof. They had seen no one at the base of the ladder, and now, just a few feet from him, were about to discover his abandoned equipment. Then they would turn, and there he would be.

He climbed up. When he reached the opening, amid the explosions, he pitched himself in. Hitting his head against one of the iron rungs, he landed on the water flat on his back, which pushed him toward the wall, where he hit his head again. “Fuck,” he said, before he went under. It was as if the three blows he suffered had been delivered by a sentient being. The water was freezing, black, and, at the bottom, where beams of sunlight ended a short transit from cracks above the waterline, were waving patterns of gold and green. As soon as he broke the surface and breathed he tried to mute all sound. The echoes inside were extremely loud, but the sound was contained, and in the midst of the barrage even had it not been contained it would not have been heard.

The water was cold enough to banish some of his pain, but he knew that it would encourage the bleeding. In forty-five minutes, he thought, he
would be dead. Being naturally fastidious, he was horrified at the thought that if he died there the residents of the building might not know it and would drink the water for months. The window of war seemed very narrow indeed.

He was now close enough to the end to sense the all-forgiving grace in which enemies no longer exist. In the eternal quiet that lay perhaps minutes away, the noise, exertion, and passions of the moment—all hatred, ambition, and the divisions among men—would be left behind as if from a fast express rocketing from a crowded station into the open countryside. In whatever might lay ahead, the fact that he died in an elevated water tank, high on a ridge, during a battle by the sea, would be something just to note, yet another of the sadnesses of the human heart, all of which, somehow, he would know.

Growing more and more content, he felt himself—and all else—slipping, but he felt something new and great, a comforting presence. How was it that, bleeding and cold, with perhaps only minutes of life left, he was painless, calm, and enfolded in an all-embracing love?

And yet he did not want to die. Half unconsciously, he pulled himself to the iron rungs that went below the water, and tilted his head up. At the first blockage of the light as a man appeared in the hatch, the first disappearance of blue from the rectangle above, he would push himself under and hold his breath, hoping that whoever looked in would need time for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and would neither notice the unavoidable ripples on the surface of the water nor look for too long. He expected this position, with his head turned up and his eyes filled with a rectangle of pure blue light, to be his last.

T
HEN THE BARRAGE STOPPED
, and it was quiet except for a few tanks speeding off the ridge. Soon they were gone. The field artillery had ceased. Nor could he hear small-arms fire. He was light-headed and thought that perhaps he could no longer hear. He looked at his watch. He had been in the water for more than an hour, and hadn’t bled enough to die. He wondered if he would have the strength to climb the ladder and get out without falling. He tasted the water, which didn’t taste like blood, and began to climb.

Sometimes he would black out on the way up, but he locked his arms around the rungs, and when he came back there he would be, folded against the iron, ready to take another agonizing step. There were only four steps to the opening, and he managed them all. The air outside, heated by the sun even as the battle had tried to scramble the physics of existence, was warm, sweet, and full of October light.

Through the quiet he heard the rumble of armor once again, and looked to his left along the ridge. A column of tanks and half-tracks drove toward him. And at the top of their long flexible masts that rose ten feet in the air were Union Jacks stretched out by the wind from the sea.

A
YEAR OR TWO BEFORE
M
ELISSA LEFT
, Vandevere had fallen into the rhythm of making the house better, day by day. At first it had seemed that merely buying such a house would have been sufficient, splendid as it was in itself, but little things called out. The mailbox needed relettering, relocation, and to be set in a limestone plinth. The Bar Harbor juniper had to be thickened, trimmed, and fertilized. The stones of the long drive were neither round enough nor of the proper sandy color not to match but rather to suggest the sunlit glow of the beach beyond the dunes. The list he made in regard to things like this had more than four hundred entries, in a hand so small and precise that they might have been written-in by a mouse. The house loomed enormously large.

Apart from its unassailable beauty and the fifty-six acres of carefully tended farmland, lawns, and trees that rose to a rampart of heather-covered dunes and then swept to a wide beach unsurpassed by any in the world, what provided inimitable satisfaction to the owner and excited envy in others was that for at least a mile in three directions, and without limit in the direction of the sea, it was protected. Each of the few estates around it was of high station, indivisible, sacrosanct, and serene. Each was watered by fonts of money that sprang from banks and brokerages in Manhattan in such strength as to
employ armies of immigrant maids and gardeners, pay taxes, and replace roofs … forever. Unlike things that were fleet, the value of these houses would hold, in perpetuity, ’til work be done, ’til kingdom come.

Twenty million had been too much to pay, but then again it had not, for even if the value of the house were to decline for a year or two or a decade, something inherent in it, like a mysterious engine that patiently worked through difficult times and good times equally, would keep and build its worth in an upward spiral. Vandevere had been able to buy this. He owned it. And it was worthy of its absurd excess valuation. Whereas most properties were certain to decay, this one had the spark of life in it, and seemed, somehow, to regenerate itself and all who came to it. It was the spark of life that he had bought, and for which he had paid. Money was a thing that could never come to life, despite the many illusions invested in it. No one ever thought a nickel was alive, and though some believed otherwise, even the breathtaking mass of twenty million was dead. It had been a good trade. As the nineties rolled off their middle, saturated in optimism and deals, he had thought this was the best he had done.

He had then put fifty million away in a fund that with only conservative growth would be more than enough to provide the wherewithal to maintain the house and pay its taxes ad infinitum. And after that he still had a hundred and thirty million left to live on, though he would be melancholy for the rest of his life because the partners in the most lucrative IPO of his career had conspired with the lead investment bank to insert a clause, in minuscule writing that even he had not read and that his lawyers could not properly interpret for lack of factual knowledge about the business, which clause, by its effect and irrevocably, notwithstanding any other clause to the contrary, and according to the laws of the State of Delaware and the State of New York, screwed him out of seven hundred million.