BELGIUM, 1944
Ordinarily they would have had a driver, but the one assigned to their mobile lab had fallen ill at the last minute and been hospitalized with a gall bladder attack, so Charlie was at the wheel. He was thankful that Tommy was a talker. As the convoy headed out and they drove to the eastern front, Charlie was happy to drive and let Tommy talk. Talking had never been his favorite part of dentistry, though it was something you had to do to pass the time while the patient couldn’t say a word. Tommy was far from skilled in drilling, fashioning a filling, or creating a denture but he could keep the chatter going. In that respect, he reminded Charlie of Hannah, and for that matter, of his mother Ilsa.
“Hey, Charlie, you know something?”
“Mmmm.”
“You know what I was thinking?”
“Mmmm?”
“It’s nuts.”
Charlie waited. Not long. Never long.
“We bust our asses out here in this godforsaken place to fix a guy’s teeth so he can go out and maybe get his whole damn face shot off. And if we’re lucky, or maybe I should say if he’s lucky, he goes out there and shoots some other kid’s face off, maybe some kid just got his own teeth fixed by a Kraut dentist. What are we doing? It’s fuckin’ nuts. I mean it isn’t really nuts. I mean, I know we gotta stop Hitler and Tojo or we’re gonna have to stop ’em back home. But it just feels nuts sometimes to patch up a guy’s mouth so’s he can get his whole damn head blown off. Or even his arm or leg. What if he gets his arms blown off? How’s he gonna brush his teeth after that, you know?”
“Well, they say the Krauts are on the ropes now. It’s just a matter of time.”
“You believe that?”
“Might as well.”
* * *
The third night out their rations and sundries packets were waiting for them. Four cans of baked beans, a small can of peaches, a couple of cookies, a bar of waxy chocolate, a bit of hard candy, five small, round biscuits, three cigarettes, a pencil, a pad of ten pages, and two envelopes. Charlie ate the chocolate, and the cookies, before turning his attention to the dollop of butterscotch, a small dab on a not-much-larger square of grayish-brown thin cardboard. He sucked on the hard candy with an infantile satisfaction. The sweetness made him wild with longing for everything this place didn’t have: warmth, safety, the company of like-minded friends. When the candy itself was gone, he licked the cardboard, and when it began to disintegrate he chewed it, looking for one more molecule of taste, one more tiny memory of sweetness, one last vestige of a different life. Tommy came back from the latrine and Charlie nodded at his package. It had taken a massive effort simply to not rip Tommy’s open and eat a second piece of butterscotch.
Tommy was a smoker.
“Care to trade?”
“What for what?”
“The cigs for the candy.”
Tommy took Charlie’s three Lucky Strikes and tucked them with two of his own into the inside pocket of the thick flannel sleeveless vest he’d found in the hallway of a school they’d bunked in two days before and layered under his jacket.
Charlie tore the candy off the paper and resisted the temptation to crunch it in his teeth. Instead, he tucked it into his cheek to let it dissolve slowly.
“You going to write to Emily?”
“I might.”
“She’ll want to hear from you.”
“I dunno, Charlie. I never know what to say. Sometimes I’m afraid I won’t know how to be with her when I get back. You know what I mean?”
“Not sure I do.”
“I mean she’s never left Keokuk, never wanted to leave it. Never seen guys get their arms and legs and heads blown off. Never wondered if she’s gonna live past Tuesday, never wondered if she’s gonna freeze to death before morning. I seen so much ugliness out here. I sure as hell don’t want to put it on her. I don’t know if I can ever wipe it out of my mind.”
“You will, Tommy. Sure you will.”
“What if she wants kids? Hell, I know she wants kids. I don’t know if I want to bring kids into this fucked-up world. You know what they always say. You can’t go home again.”
“You’ll pick up where you left off, Tommy.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Izzat what you’re gonna do? Pick up where you left off?”
“I expect so.”
“Where did you leave off?”
Where indeed? A routine life of loneliness and deception. At the time, Charlie had thought he enjoyed it. In retrospect, it just seemed empty and sad to him. “Nowhere in particular.”
“See what I’m saying? You don’t know. I don’t know.”
“No, you did leave somewhere in particular. You’ll go back. You’ll go back to Keokuk.”
Charlie thought of warm places. Here in the mobile unit in the frozen forest, where he practiced as refined a dentistry as he could with his stiff fingers, foot-pedaled drill of the kind he hadn’t had to use for decades, and inadequate supplies, he never thought of Chicago winters, but searing Texas summers entertained him. The thoughts came to him unbidden. They whispered to him of the burbling creek in Kirbyville, of tadpoles and Jesus bugs and dragonflies, and sun-dappled water. They murmured of fox fur in warm, dark, clothing-lined closets. They reminded him of blazing, baking days so hot you really could fry eggs on the sidewalk, if you lived in a part of town that had sidewalks and could afford to waste eggs.
* * *
“Hey listen, do me a favor, will you?” Driving through the impenetrable frozen fog, Charlie and Tommy had gotten separated from their company when the engine broke down. Now they were hopelessly lost, setting up camp somewhere in the vicinity of St. Vith in an abandoned country house that had been stripped of all but a couple of benches, a broken table, and one frozen-solid head of cabbage on the floor in the kitchen lying near the door. Charlie was getting a fire started in the fireplace with the few dry sticks of wood they’d found. Tommy was rolling out their bedrolls. “If I don’t make it out of here and you do, will you go to my folks’ house? There’s a sycamore tree in the front yard that has my initials carved in it and my birth year, 1918. Could you carve 1945 under that? And then on the other side, finish the dates for the heart I carved and let Emily know. Tommy and Emily, April 4, 1941, to … whatever. Just if I don’t make it, you know? I used to live in the damn tree. I ran away from home once and you know what I did? I climbed that tree, sat up in the branches, and my mom and dad came out on the porch, must’ve known right off I’d be up there. They just stood on the porch and talked about what my mom was going to make for dinner.”
Charlie struck a match and lit the kindling. Tommy held his hands as close to the fire as he dared.
“Then they went inside.”
“Yeah? What’d you do?” That would keep Tommy going for another chunk of time. Charlie would use that time to remember the hard candies his mother used to hide in her pockets and dispense during church and the way he sweated in the summertime, sandwiched between his parents in the pew.
“I got stuck up in the tree. Couldn’t get down. They must have figured that out because my dad came back out, went out to the garage, and my mom followed him to ask what he was doing. ‘There’s a branch up in that tree needs trimming,’ he said, ‘so I aim to do just that first thing tomorrow. I’m just gonna set the ladder up tonight to be ready for it. And maybe while I’m at it I might nail some little boards up to make climbing steps, in case Tommy comes back, you know. I think he might like a tree house. You know, just in case he comes back.’
“And he nailed steps up the trunk of the tree and left the big fruit picker there too. So I had two ways to get down. Then they went back into the house again and I had my way back without losing face, you know. I went back in the house and there were my mom and dad at the dinner table and my mom looked up and said, ‘Are you hungry? I can put a plate out for you.’ And I just nodded and sat down at my place.”
“So you can go home again.”
“Maybe. Maybe. I sure as hell hope so.”
In the jagged black cold of midnight, Charlie pulled his wool blanket closer around him while they waited for the fire to temper the room’s frigidity enough to allow them to sleep. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Maybe I will someday, too. Maybe.”
“Back to Chicago?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I used to love it there, but now I think I’d like someplace quieter. More peaceful. Maybe I still haven’t found where home really is. Maybe it doesn’t really exist.”
“Sure it does, Charlie. You just said so yourself.”
By three in the morning the fire had died down to a few pale embers.
“Charlie, you awake? I’m shivering too hard to sleep.”
Charlie mumbled agreement.
“Wish I was back in Keokuk. It gets cold there but I never felt cold like this before.”
“Burn the table.” Charlie could barely say the words, his teeth chattering like castanets.
Tommy pulled the table to him. He slammed it against the hearth, splintering the wood, layered the smallest pieces on the fading memory of fire, and lit his last cigarette on the kindled bits.
“I was just thinking …”
“About what?”
“I had a grandmom grew up somewhere around here.”
“Yeah? Where?”
Tommy placed the rest of the table pieces on the fire and watched the flames reach up, lick, then seize them. “Somewhere in France near the Belgium border. She met my granddad in the last war and came back to Iowa with him. Died before I was born.”
“My mom was born in Bremen.”
“Where’s that?”
“Germany.”
“No kidding. Your folks were Krauts?”
“Just my mom. I don’t know as I ever heard what my dad was. He was born in Texas.”
“And that doesn’t bother you, that your mom was a Kraut?”
“She got her citizenship.”
“Did your dad fight in the Great War?”
“He was too old by the time it broke out. And he had a bad arm. Got smashed by a tree branch during a hurricane. He tried, but they wouldn’t take him. He died, though, same as if he’d gone. Died in the flu epidemic. Both my mom and dad.”
“That’s rough.”
“Mmmm.”
Tommy pinched the burning top off his vanishing cigarette and tucked the butt away for one last drag in the morning. “My dad was in the war, before I was born. I don’t remember much about him till I was about three. There was a big Armistice Day parade, and they had all the guys who’d fought marching in it together, or in wheelchairs or whatever. Anyways, they had a float with girls on it and the high school marching band and a cannon at the head of it, then a convertible with my dad and the one other guy who got decorated for something or other, I don’t know what, and they let me ride in the convertible next to my dad and I was scared out of my fuckin’ wits.”
“Of being in a parade?”
“Hell, no. I loved that part. What was terrifying was the way my dad acted. His name was John. They played ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ and everybody along the parade route sang along. Okay so far. But at the end of the song they shot off the cannon and my dad went a little crazy. Tried to push me down off the seat and cover me with his body. Like he thought the Krauts were back, gunning for us. The mayor was riding in the front seat and he had been in the Mexican-American War with Teddy Roosevelt. That’s the story he told anyway. And he whipped around and yelled, ‘Ten hut!’ and saluted my dad and that snapped him out of it. He saluted back and the crowd went wild and I wet my pants. He looked, well, he didn’t look real to me. He didn’t look like my dad. But there was something real powerful in having everybody yelling for us like that. And I never forgot the way he just snapped to attention. But yeah, that scared the crap out of me, seeing him like that.”
“We better burn the benches.”
“Cold as a witch’s tit, innit?”
“Yep.”
“Ever see one?”
“A witch’s tit?”
“I saw one once.”
“How’d you know it wasn’t just some ordinary tit?”
“I thought everyone knew. A witch’s got three tits. Two just like any babe has and an extra one down below the others.”
“And you saw one? How’d you come to do that?”
“My brother took me to the carnival once and they had a dancing girl in it was a witch. She had a little whaddya call them things they stir their frogs and blood and stuff in?”
“Cauldrons?”
“That’s it. She had a cauldron and she kept taking off stuff she was wearing and dropping it into the cauldron. First she took off her robe. And she had some black nightgown kind of thing on under it, and then she took that off, and she had a kind of sash around her middle and her underwear was black. Then she took the brassiere off and she had pasties and tassels and she shimmied while she stirred the cauldron, and then she took the sash off and there was another goddamn tit with a pasty on it, and she shimmied that one too. It was the damnedest thing I ever seen.”
“Was it the same size as the others?”
“Was a little smaller, and over to the middle, not exact middle, but closer than not. Then she took the hat off and held it in front of her snatch while she took her panties off and flung them into the cauldron, and she danced around a little and showed us her butt. Then she danced behind the cauldron so it hid her snatch and tossed the hat in, and there was a big poof of smoke come out of the cauldron and when it cleared, she was gone, tits and all. In’t that something?”
“Yes, it sure is.”
“You ever see anything like that?”
“Never did.”
“Sure would like to see some tits again. That Monique had a nice set. In Paris. Did your girl have good ones?”
“They were all right.”
“Remember the first time you saw tits? I mean real ones, not in a carny act.”
“It’s not something you forget.” Charlie conjured up the warm summer afternoon of that long-ago time, and a barefoot woman with a ready laugh in a house full of herbs.
“No, that’s for sure. What was her name?”
“They called her Crazy May. She wasn’t really crazy, but she did some crazy things.”
“Like?”
“Just things. Things teenaged fellas loved to learn about.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s get some sleep, Tommy.”
“Charlie, do you think we’re going to get home? Are we ever going to see home again?” Tommy’s voice cracked. Charlie felt that look Jarvis used to give him cross his own face: the men-don’t-cry look. He was glad Tommy couldn’t see him in the dark.
“Right about now, I’d settle for another good wool blanket.”
“You ever in the Boy Scouts?”
“They didn’t have Scouts where I grew up. They had 4-H.”
“You know it’s tricky when you’re this cold,” Tommy warned. “First sign of freezing to death is you get sleepy.”
“I’d go to sleep if I could.”
“You know what they say in the Survival Manual.”
“No, I wasn’t a Boy Scout.”
“Oh, right. You just said that. I think my brain’s froze solid.”
“I know whatcha mean.”
“They say you should buddy up, get next to someone else, conserve body heat.”
“Yeah?”
“We should probably do that, so’s we don’t freeze our nuts off.”
“Come over here if you want. I don’t mind.”
“Okay, here’s what we gotta do.” Tommy pulled himself along the floor and positioned himself parallel to Charlie. “We need one blanket under us and the other one on top. It’ll work better if we take our clothes off.”
“You nuts?”
“No, really. We just use ’em like extra blankets but we need skin to skin to save our body heat.”
“How ’bout we leave our shorts on.”
“Sure. Just hurry.”
They fumbled their way into as awkward a position as Charlie had ever experienced.
Tommy couldn’t stop shivering. “Jesus, I think my hand is froze.”
“Here, let me rub it.”
“Sure never thought I’d end up like this. Freezing my ass off, hugging a guy twenty years older’n me.”
“Fifteen.”
“Twenty, fifteen. The point is I was working in construction, making decent-enough dough and getting ready to settle down with my sweetheart. No offense, but I’d sure rather be cozying up with her.”
“No offense taken. Give me your other hand. Put this one between your legs. Keep it warm.”
“Jesus! Damn, it’s cold.” Suddenly, Tommy was bawling like a baby. “Shit, Charlie, what if we die here? What if we just freeze solid in this godforsaken place? Will they even find us? Or will the Krauts just grind us up for dog food?”
“Christ, Tommy, I dunno. Let’s not think about that now. Pull yourself together.” Charlie was remembering rubbing Hannah’s arms, the day Miss Willick had accused her of pretending weakness. Hannah had cried, in frustration at not being believed, in fear at not understanding what was happening to her body.
“I don’t want to die, Charlie.”
“No one does, Tommy. No one does. Tuck this hand in. Let’s just go to sleep. We don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. We gotta be ready.”
“Shit, yeah, Charlie. You’re a good friend. I hope you get outta here alive.”
“You too, Tommy.”
Charlie thought of the hornbeam tree. Of sitting under it, rubbing mud from the creek bank over his arms and legs, letting it dry in the oven of Texas summer heat, then wading into the creek to let the water dissolve the dirt again. He thought of casting his fishhook into the river and pulling out sunnies for dinner. He thought of May, and the way she led him inside her mint-scented hut to initiate him into the wonders of sex, laughing and teasing and making him feel like a child and a man all at the same time. He thought of Hannah, her chatter and somersaults, and Ilsa heating the iron over the fireplace coals and Jarvis teaching him how to drive a nail straight and true on the scorching day they built the chicken coop.
“Charlie?”
“Mmmm?”
“Do you pray?”
“Mmmm?”
“I do.”
“D’you remember the Lord’s Prayer?”
“Yeah.”
“How does it go?”
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.”
“You say trespasses.”
“Huh?”
“You say trespasses. That was the only difference between the way I remember it and the way you said it.”
“I thought you didn’t remember it.”
“Yeah, but when you said it I did. As soon as you started to say it I remembered it. ’Cept we said debts and debtors. ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’”
Somehow they made it through the night. In the morning, they hacked at the woodwork to kindle the fire again, burned the benches, melted snow to drink, and ate the cabbage, thawing its leaves one by one, chewing them slowly, like communion wafers. The sun made an effort to penetrate the fog, then gave up on it.
“Hell’s gone and done it,” Tommy said, feeding bandages from the first aid kit to the diminishing flames. “Hell’s gone and froze over and here we are in the fuckin’ middle of it. Fuckin’ froze and fuckin’ lost.” Then he stopped talking and stared. They had a visitor.
He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, this fellow who stood in the doorway of the house aiming a Mauser and screaming at them. A good-looking kid. Nice, straight teeth. The sallow complexion of someone who’d had too little sun, the frame of a fellow who’d eaten too few meals, and military ones at that. Charlie and Tommy held their hands high, in the universal signal of surrender, and tried to figure out what they were being ordered to do. The German boy pointed the gun at Charlie’s neck and jerked his chin.
“I think he wants the dog tags.” Charlie pointed to his tag, keeping his hand held high. The boy nodded.
“Fuck him.”
“I’d rather give him my dog tags.”
Charlie slowly, deliberately lowered one hand, grabbed the chain, and pulled it over his head. He tossed the tags across the room to the boy, who barked another order. Something in Charlie’s long-ago memories stirred, and he remembered a few words from the bedtime routine of his childhood, when his mother would tell him it was time to get into his nightshirt. The boy wanted his uniform. He unbuttoned his coat.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“He wants my clothes.”
“And you’re going to give them to him?”
“Don’t think I have a lot of choice in that matter right now.”
The German boy shouted at them.
“He wants us to shut up,” Charlie explained.
“How do you know?”
“I remember my mother saying something like that to my father when she got mad.”
The German boy crouched to pick up the tags, keeping the rifle aimed as he slipped them on, then stepped into the room. He shouted again.
Charlie nodded, and kept stepping out of his clothes. His body shook till he thought his bones would shatter.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Tommy said.
“Shut up, Tommy. Don’t make him mad.”
The boy loosed a screaming torrent in German and Tommy snapped. “Crazy fucking Kraut! Why you want to look like an American? You’re fuckin’ crazy!”
The word hung briefly, then froze and shattered in the arctic air. Could have been meant for the whole world out there. The whole crazy world that sent its youngest, strongest, most promising young men to shoot at each other until they died or went home maimed, physically or mentally, or too often both. The whole crazy setup. The whole crazy deal where people thought they had to murder other people by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands. The tens of thousands. The millions. Forgive us our trespasses. Our debts. Forgive us, Father, we know not what we do. The first shot went a little wild. Tommy spun from the force, staggered, then lunged at their captor, who dodged to the side. Tommy lurched past, through the door to the outside. The next shot pinned him. He sagged and fell, his hot blood seeping out to melt the snow for a second before it hardened again in an icy red halo, Tommy silent and still at the center of a ghastly bloom.
The third shot, near Charlie’s head, forced him into action. He tossed the crumpled olive drabs. The boy struggled out of his own uniform and into Charlie’s. Charlie was beginning to understand. It meant the Americans were nearby. He watched the boy run off into the woods, pulled the enemy uniform on, wrapped the blankets around himself to stave off freezing and to keep from being misidentified, and prayed to be rescued. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Deliver me from evil. Deliver me.