Now he was dead.
Erick tried to believe it. To understand it. Sergeant Jones. Dead. Not even dead in one piece.
That was when the cheese choked in his throat.
“How… did you…?” he started, holding up the cheese.
“The first sergeant gave it to me,” John said, “He told me I was dumb if I didn’t take it. He said there was nothing wrong with it.”
“God,” Erick muttered.
He put the cheese in his pocket. John gave him the other piece and he put that in his pocket too. They looked at each other.
“C-can you stay?” Erick asked.
“I don’t know,” John said, “The captain said he’d send for me when he needed me.”
“Why don’t you take a nap?” Erick suggested. He thought that maybe if John was asleep underneath his coat, nobody could find him and he could stay with him. He didn’t want to be alone. The worst thing was being alone.
“I guess I will,” John said quietly. He closed his eyes. He leaned his helmet against the side of the trench. He was asleep in a moment.
Erick sat looking into his face.
In repose it became once more the face of a boy. A dirty-faced boy placed by some strange and callous power in a place where even men could not survive.
He sat there a while. Then the first sergeant came over to the trench and stopped. He was walking from trench to trench finding out how the men were.
“How’s it going, Linstrom?” he asked.
“All right.”
“Who’s that?”
Erick swallowed. “Foley,” he said, reluctantly.
“He all right?”
“He’s tired.”
“We all are.”
“Say, sarge, you don’t happen to know where I could get some medicinal jelly, do you?” Erick asked then, knowing before he finished it that it was a silly question.
“What for?” the sergeant asked.
Erick held up his hands. They were caked over with hard mud. The skin was cracking and blood oozed out.
“If I could get some jelly,” he went on, “Maybe I could soften them up. I tried to get it off with a bayonet but I couldn’t.”
The first sergeant shook his head. “I haven’t got any, Linstrom,” he said. Then he took a paper out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, “A copy of Stars and Stripes.”
Erick took it. “Thanks.”
“Take it easy,” said the sergeant and left. Erick watched him trudge over the crest of the hill. He wondered if the sergeant thought he was a cry baby for asking if he had any medicinal jelly.
No, why should he? he defended, Christ, look at my hands. They do need something.
He glanced at John. John hadn’t stirred once. Erick leaned over to where John slept exhaustedly against the barrel of his rifle. He made sure the safety catch was on. Then he sat back and opened the paper.
When John woke up, Erick said, “Good news John.”
“What?”
“Here’s a story in the Stars and Stripes where a congressman promises that no eighteen-year olds will be sent overseas.”
“I’m eighteen,” John said sleepily, half conscious of what Erick was saying.
“Well, then,” Erick said, “Aren’t you glad you’re not going to be sent overseas?”
John looked blank. Then he rubbed a hand over his cheek and smiled weakly.
“I’m glad,” he said.
* * * *
The day was an endless grey passage of sky and earth and time blending together into one dull flat pattern. Everything was bare and dead. They sat in the hole and shivered once in a while from the cold wind that was blowing over the ground.
During the afternoon Erick took off his soggy shoes and socks and looked at his feet.
“Good God,” he said.
“They’re all white,” John said.
They looked like the bellies of dead fish. They looked as if the flesh could be scraped away with the nails. He poked a finger into them gingerly. He couldn’t feel them. He wrapped his hands around them and tried to press back warmth. It didn’t work. He rubbed them. He could feel a prickling sensation in his insteps and into his ankles. But nothing in the feet themselves. The felt dead, numb, as if they had been cut off from his system and then carelessly glued back into place.
He took a candle from his combat pack, lit it and held it under one of his feet.
“Don’t, you’ll burn yourself,” John said.
Erick grimaced and stared incredulously at his feet.
“I can’t feel them John,” he said, “I can’t feel the flame. I can’t feel it at all.”
In a rush of outraged horror, he felt tempted to press the flame against his feet until he did feel it, even if it had to be the feet going up in flames. Then, quickly, with a shudder, he blew out the flame and shoved the candle back into his jacket.
He rubbed his feet a little more but nothing happened. He took out a pair of dry socks and put them on. Ten minutes after he put on his shoes, the socks were damp.
“How are your feet?” he asked John.
“They feel all right.”
Erick didn’t answer. But a look of dissatisfaction crossed his face. If he was a friend, his mind conceived the perverse notion, then he’d get his feet frozen too just to keep a pal company.
He closed his eyes and repelled the notion. In a little while.
* * * *
Hours and hours passing.
“Let’s build a house,” he said to John.
“How?”
Erick climbed out of the trench with a crackling of stiff bones. He straightened up with a groan and stamped his feet on the ground without feeling the impact except in his ankles and legs.
“Come on John,” he said.
John got out of the hole. Erick walked over to the squad leader’s trench. It was empty. He saw the sergeant’s pack in the hole and took a pair of wire cutters from it.
“Let’s go,” he said and started down the hill toward a length of barbed wire.
“What if there’s snipers?” John asked.
“There aren’t any around here,” Erick said, “Come on. We need a roof on the damn hole. If it rains again we’ll both end up with pneumonia. We’ll just put those logs over the top and stretch your blanket over them. Then we’ll have ourselves a house.”
“I don’t think we…”
“Come on, John. What are you afraid of?”
John didn’t answer but Erick thought of Sergeant Jones suddenly. He didn’t say anymore. He just kept walking down the hill. If John didn’t want to come, he didn’t have to. He was going to get those logs. He glanced back once and saw John edging down the hill, looking around worriedly.
Erick reached the barbed wire. The thought of anyone taking a shot at him seemed absurd. It was a cold winter’s day and he was out to get logs that was all. No one had ever shot at him in his life. Why should it start now?
He began to cut the wire at the log edge. It was brittle. The sound of it breaking was a sharp snap in the cold air. He went down the log, now crouching, putting the cutters over the wire and snapping the handles together.
Ping!—went the wire in the cold.
He was conscious of John a few paces from him. John wasn’t standing still. He was moving about slightly as though presenting an imperfect target to some sniper in a tree.
“We’d better hurry,” John said.
Erick said, “Take this log.” John took the narrow log.
“Hey!”
They heard a call from up the hill. Erick turned and saw the squad leader outlined against the sky at the crest of the hill. What a target, he thought, the jerk.
“Get the hell up here!” roared the sergeant.
Erick’s hands twitched. “He would come back now,” he said, trying to sound unconcerned, “Cheap shit.”
He snapped off the last wire on the second log and lifted it up from the ground. “Never mind that!” yelled the sergeant. John and he started up th
e hill carrying the logs.
“We should leave them,” John said quietly.
“No!” whispered Erick, angrily.
As they came up to the sergeant he grabbed the log from Erick’s hand and threw it down on the ground. It rolled a little way down the hill.
“Where do you think you are, on a picnic!” he snapped.
Erick felt himself flushing. “Getting some logs for the hole,” he said his heart beating quickly.
“Jesus Christ!” moaned the sergeant, “Ain’t there enough ways to get killed around here?”
Aren’t there, amended Erick in his mind. “It’s cold,” he said. He didn’t know why he said it. But he felt he had to have the feeling of resistance even if it was only token.
The sergeant gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. Then, abruptly, he threw an angry thumb over his shoulder and commanded, “Get the hell back in your trench and stay there!”
“Why can’t I have the log?” asked Erick, “I risked my…”
“Did you hear me?” The sergeant’s cheeks quivered with anger. His voice was taut.
Erick turned away sullenly and walked heavily back to the trench. John put down the log by the hole and they climbed down. Erick sat there in angry silence, trying to pretend he didn’t notice the sergeant watching him and muttering highly audible curses at his stupidity. His fists clenched into blood-drained lumps of flesh.
“Bastard,” he muttered, “Stupid bastard.” John didn’t speak.
When the sergeant went away, Erick got up from the hole resolutely and went down the hill to get the other log. He brought it back. John didn’t say anything. He helped Erick put the two logs over the hole and then they put John’s blanket over them. They climbed down into the dark hut that smelled of cold wet earth.
“This is better,” Erick said, trying to sound unconcerned although his hands shook and his stomach felt strange and queasy.
“We shouldn’t have gone down there I guess,” John said.
“Why not? Nothing happened, did it?”
“No, but…”
“Shit,” he said, “He’s a fathead.”
“Foley,” came a voice outside. Erick jumped suddenly and his helmet clanked against the logs.
John drew back the blanket at his end.
It was the squad leader again. Erick slumped down painfully at the sound of his voice.
“Go draw some rations from the lieutenant’s trench,” he said.
“All right,” said John. He climbed out of the trench and started off. Erick waited. Then he pulled back the blanket and saw the squad leader looking down coldly at him.
“What about me?” he said, half afraid.
The sergeant didn’t speak. Then he turned toward John who had stopped when he saw Erick wasn’t walking with him.
“Get Linstrom’s,” the sergeant told him. John nodded and turned away. Erick looked down glumly as the sergeant turned back.
“Got the log, didn’t you?” he said.
Erick swallowed. “Yes,” he said, his voice faint.
The squad leader stared at Erick until he grew nervous. Finally, he said,
“Wait’ll they send up replacement before you kill yourself off, will you?”
Erick’s throat contracted. He turned away. “Very funny,” he said faintly.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“What!”
“Nothing!”
“You better not. You better watch your step boy. You’re gonna get killed off right quick!”
Erick closed his eyes and shuddered in rage. It ran through him like a shaking muscle contraction, making him feel tight and sick. He stayed that way until the sergeant went back to his trench. He had to dig right behind him, he thought. Then hoped there’d be an attack so he got a chance to shoot the sergeant. You poor fools, he thought, who think that fear outranks respect.
In the silence he sat staring at the ground. He didn’t pull the blanket over his head. He took out his bayonet and started to scrape at the mud on the backs of his hands. He scraped angrily as if the hands offended him.
When he’d scraped them so hard that the backs of his hands began to ooze blood, he began spitting on the skin to soften the mud.
When that didn’t work, he laboriously unscrewed the cap of his canteen and poured water on the backs of his hands, one by one, and kept on scraping.
Abruptly, he stopped. To hell with it! he thought, the back of his head thudding against the foxhole wall. Pulling the blanket over his head, he let his eyelids fall.
He sank into a restless doze, neither sleeping nor awake. Would he ever be able to move again? he wondered. He felt as if he couldn’t rise to save his life. His blood flowed sluggishly and his limbs felt as though they had melted one by one. His eyes wouldn’t open. Every time he tried, the accumulation of crust would pull them shut or the complete weariness would drag him down again. It was like being swallowed by a patient snake. He felt, half consciously, that he could spend the rest of his life in the hole.
* * * *
The blanket was thrown back. He felt a breeze on his face and tried to open his eyes.
“Moving out,” said the squad leader in a flat voice tossing the blanket over the log.
“What?” he muttered drowsily. But the sergeant was gone. His words clung like glue to Erick’s mind and repeated themselves. Moving out.
It hit him slowly. Suddenly then a complete rage jerked up his arm and he drove his fist into the ground, ignoring the flaring pain.
“Shit!” he snapped, “God damn it!” His mind kept looking for the right curse words to express his rage.
“What is it?” John asked in the dimness.
“We’re moving out,” Erick said slowly, bitterly as though angry with John. “How do you like that? Just when we get this place comfortable they… oh Jesus! It’s a plot. By Christ, it’s a plot!.”
John sat up with a rustle of clothing and Erick saw his weary, drawn face as he drew back the blanket at his end of the trench.
“Here we go again,” John said.
Erick had the feeling he got so often. A desire to throw it all off, to end it all, to throw up his hands and say—the hell with everything! The feeling that Lynn caught so perfectly years and years later when he cried—Stop the world, I’m getting off!
“Oh… to hell with the army,” he said, “To hell with it.” He started to jerk together his equipment.
“Anyway,” John said, “They didn’t call me back.”
“Yeah,” Erick said, disinterestedly. He threw C ration cans, mess kit, into the pack. He slid the disassembled pick into its holder. He grabbed his rifle. He sneered at it.
“Jesus, look at this thing!”
He looked at it with hate. “Go ahead,” he said fiercely, “Fall apart! See if I give a good shit!”
He pulled himself up and stood swaying in the trench, his limbs cracking, feeling stiff and aching. “Oh!” he moaned as he climbed out with the jerky, attenuated motions of an old man. “I’m so happy,” he muttered.
John came out and they threw the packs over their shoulders, loaded up with all their equipment. It seemed incredibly heavy to Erick. He began to wonder if something had drained him of strength during the night, then shoved it away, too tired for whimsy. “Get out o’ here, will ya?” he muttered to himself.
As they trudged along the crest of the hill, he limped and grimaced at the feeling of deadness in his feet. “Oh Christ,” he muttered, “They feel like wood.”
Half consciously he wished he’d stop cursing. It didn’t seem right. Death was still around. He might need to call suddenly on his convenient aegis. But the child in him was angry, it wanted to violate trusts, burn spiritual bridges behind him. He wanted to outrage everything because he had been outraged.
“Want me to carry your bazooka?” John asked.
Wordlessly, Erick slung it over. He moved forward, shoulders slumped, breaths exhuding wearily from his lungs. He wondered if
he could ask John to take the bazooka shells too.
They walked about a mile to the left of their original position. Erick making noises of exhaustion all the way and twisting his shoulders irritably. “Jesus,” he said three times, “What do they think we are, animals?”
Finally they stopped. Another deserted plain, with night creeping over it, looking for a place to rest.
“Dig in!” called out non-coms.
“Oh no!”
He said it over and over, shaking his head as if someone had asked him for a loan of a thousand dollars and he was a pauper.
“I’m not digging myself another goddamn hole! Not on your fucking life! Blow me to shit! Who cares?”
He flung down his equipment and slumped into a sitting position on the ground. He closed his eyes and shook his head dizzily. “Oh, God, I’m beat,” he groaned.
John carefully took off his pack and began to dig.
“What the hell are you doing?” Erick asked, feeling guilty.
John looked at him. His voice was so patient it nearly made Erick scream with rage.
“We have to dig one,” John said, “What if they start to shell us again?”
Erick didn’t answer. He shook his head. “You’re a ball breaker, John,” he said and sat watching John spade out the dirt in slow, weary motions.
Then, after innumerable head shakings and mutterings he reached out with a loud groan and jerked the pick from its holder. He held himself tight for a moment, eyes slitted, face bitter and murderous.
“Oh. God. Damn.” he said loudly and clearly for all the heavens to hear.
Then, pushing down onto one knee, he drove the pick savagely into the earth.
“This is the sergeant’s head,” he snarled, “Here you are, sarge, have another one!”
He tore up the jagged chunks of earth and flung them aside.
“Walk, walk, walk,” he chanted furiously under his breath, “Dig, dig, dig, Sit, sit, sit, Walk, walk, walk, Dig, dig… Shit!”