They carried what they could carry. Most men carried two pairs of socks in their helmets, K-rations in their pockets, their letters and cigarettes in their vests. That queer little private, Stanley Polensky, also carried a book, and it was not the Bible.
“Polensky, throw that thing away.” With the nose of his carbine, Calvin Johnson, also a private, poked him in the small of his back, where a children’s book, Tom Swift and His Planet Stone, was tucked in his pants, under his shirt. “No wonder you can’t get any.”
“At least I can read.” Polensky flipped him the bird over his shoulder. They were in a line, two men across, stretching for miles from Cerami on their way to Troina. Stanley Polensky was a boy who, back in Ohio, Johnson would have given the full order to. He would have nailed him with a football where he sat in the bleachers, reading a book. He would have spitballed him from the back of class or given him a wedgie in the locker room after track. Polensky had cried in his bunk at night for their first week at Fort Benning, wrote long letters to his mother the way others wrote to their girls.
Now, Johnson stared at his slight, curved back all day, the sun hotter than fire. On narrow trails in the hills, they pulled themselves up with ropes and cleats through passes that only they and their mules—the dumbest, smelliest articles of military equipment ever used to transport supplies—could navigate, driving back enemy strongholds at Niscemi, Ponte Olivo Airport, Mazzarino, Barrafranca, Villarosa, Enna, Alimena, Bompietro, Petralia, Gangi, Sperlinga, Nicosia, Mistretta, Cerami, and Gagliano. It would seem so easy if not so many men died, if Johnson was not walking on an ankle he’d jammed on a hill that had swollen to the size of a softball. And yet their toughest fighting was still to come, at Troina, with Germans shooting at them from the mountains in every direction.
But not today. Today there was sky and food and the Germans to the east of them.
“You want these?” Polensky tossed the hard candies from his K rations over to Johnson. Every day, they had scrambled eggs and ham, biscuits, coffee, and four cigarettes for breakfast; cheese, biscuits, hard candy, and cigarettes for lunch; and a ham and veal loaf, biscuits, hard candies, and cigarettes for dinner.
“I thought a nancy boy like you liked a little candy now and then.” Johnson stuffed them in his mouth, pushing them into his cheeks like a squirrel.
“I haven’t brushed my teeth in months.” Stanley shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m going to lose them all.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what.” Johnson lit his cigarette. “If I come across a toothbrush in my travels, I’ll save it for you.”
“I think you’ll have better luck finding a Spanish galleon.” Stanley lit his own cigarette.
“What do you know about Spanish galleons?”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know.” Johnson closed his eyes. He had not done well in school. When he did not get a football scholarship to Ohio State, he thought he’d become a police officer, like his father. Knowing the war would help his chances, he’d enlisted the first opportunity he got. “What is it, like money or something?”
“No.” Stanley drawled, smiling. “It’s a ship.”
“Warship?”
“And commerce, too. They sailed mostly in the 16th to 18th centuries.”
“Is that what you learned in that Tom Swift book?” Johnson opened his eyes, studied Stanley lying on his back, knees swinging open and closed, smoke pluming upward between them.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Stanley stared at the sky. His eyes broke up smiling when he looked at you, happy or sad. They squished a little, the outsides wrinkling, along with his forehead, his cheeks dimpling. Polensky was the youngest of six. Johnson had always wanted siblings. His mother had him. Another had died in the womb.
He imagined Stanley as a little brother and grimaced. But you took what you got, not what you wanted.
They set the pup tent over an abandoned trench that they could roll into if any funny business found its way to the camp. They laid boot to head. Stanley was a kicker. It was easier if Johnson fell asleep first.
“Read me something from your book.” Johnson laid his arms across his stomach. When they’d first started the whole bloody business, in Africa, he’d seen a soldier trying to hold in his intestines after getting shot, a slippery pink worm pulsing out between his fingers.
“Read it yourself.”
“I’m tired. What’s it about?”
“Well, every book Tom invents something new. So this time, it’s the metalanthium lamp.”
“Metalanthium lamp? What the hell is that?”
“It’s a device that emits these rays that can heal the sick and bring people back from the dead.”
“Sounds interesting. How does it work?”
“I’m not telling you anymore. You want to find out, you have to read it yourself.”
“I don’t have time to read.” Johnson rolled over, away from Stanley’s feet. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s a war on. Why are you carrying a children’s book, anyway?”
“My mother bought it for me when I was a boy.”
“Couldn’t you have brought something more useful?”
But Stanley had fallen asleep, his snoring choked with hot, dusty mountain air. The sound reminded Johnson of the clogged carburetor on a motorcycle he’d fixed up one summer in Ohio. At night, his own mind churned. The war had been hard to swallow. He did not know what he had expected, but he had not expected this. The exhaustion. The hollow fear—fear so intense it burned a hole through you and left you hollow. The walking. They walked along ridges and through valleys for miles and miles, up and up on roads that lead to little towns full of rock and cement houses in which lived Italians with gaunt, piercing eyes who begged for candy or sugar and cigarettes and mostly had nothing because the Germans had taken everything.
The Italian women were attractive. Sometimes he would look at them as they took his chocolate rations, their long olive necks the soft fruits of their lips, and he wanted to lay with one on the ground. Not anything sexual, although he always thought of that. He wanted to lay on the ground with one to feel her heart through her chest with his fingers, the pulse of a vein on her neck, the soft skin on the underside of her arm, to remember what it felt like, the warmth of living skin, the soft quiet of humanity in measured breaths. The skin on the dead looked like rubber, and he did not understand the difference, the living, the dead. So many had died, men in little piles, only boys, really, their limbs thrown about like tire irons, hoses, their mouths open where something had taken flight. If they could all only go on living, with quiet pulses in their necks, wrists, little bird chirps. If no one had to die, except the very old.
Sometimes it got so bad, the need to touch, he wanted to hold Stanley. He thought of waking him up and asking for the book, to take his mind off things. But he was too tired to even open his mouth. He thought of Spanish galleons instead. For some reason he imagined that they were gold like coins and flew across the ocean. But for one to take you home, you would have to die.
Johnson guessed that was fair.