Those Across the River (8 page)

 

 

 

THE SKY TOOK on a chalky pink color and the moon rose fat and golden past the tree line as I pedaled home. My ass was sore from the hard ride, and the palms of my hands were skinned from a low-velocity spill I had taken about five minutes before. Dora was waiting on the porch, letting her feet dangle off the edge. She was opening and closing a parasol, one that had belonged to my mother when she used to stroll around downtown Chicago thirty-five years ago, so full of beauty it seemed the century would have to ask her permission to draw to a close.

 

 

 

I KNEW IT would come and it did.

I lay awake next to Eudora, who had already drifted into sleep still lying on her belly, the hand she had pleasured herself with supinated next to her hip. I had been unwilling to make love to her, unwilling also to discuss why, so she had done what she needed to get to sleep. I watched her back rise and fall with her breathing, watched also a lock of hair that fluttered ever so delicately near where her lips bunched on the pillow. I loved that she never turned her face away from me in sleep, even when we fought. Not that this had been a fight; just a closing-off on my part and a gracious retreat on hers.

Oh, it was coming.

The dream.

When sleep finally admitted me to its parlor, it would show me something naughty.

I lay staring up now, listening to what must have been every dog in town baying at the rich moon shining china-white past the lace curtains. They admitted light generously; the room glowed. I tried lying motionless but became aware of the arm nearest Dora, and I began to alternate hooking it behind my head and crowding it into the space between our two bodies. I remembered the one-armed man at Harvey’s Drug Emporium, and thought,
Well, I suppose there really is a bright side to everything.

That damned baying.

Even with my fluid-filled, muffled ears I heard it.

Yes, it was a very long time before I got to sleep.

The dream began with the steam machine that came to burn the lice out of our clothes just before the offensive started that September. I was part of a line of white-shouldered, white-haunched men standing in the rain, all of us holding our uniforms in our hands. In the dream the line was apocalyptically long. I noticed one louse crawling off my folded-up coat and onto my arm. The dream-louse was slightly larger than the real ones, only slightly, and, like its corporeal cousins, off-white and translucent, holding the blood it had consumed in its cross-shaped guts so one could see the dark emblem within it. Like the German cross. Like the Germans had dropped them in cans to devil us.

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven. Mud and craters. Rats and gas. Barbed wire and the walking dead. Even in the rain there always seemed to be a fire somewhere. The Book of Revelations read like fairy-tale poetry next to this harsh prose. The steaming of the clothes was just another bureaucratic flourish as far as any of us could see. All it took was sitting on a cot or brushing against another doughboy in the earthworks to reinfest a man, yet someone deemed it necessary. The same someone who was now blowing whistles, scattering the men from line.

An attack!

I was about to be maimed. I always knew that. I also knew that something was faintly wrong with the chronology; that we should be attacking the Germans, that I should have my clothes on, that my actual injury had happened in one of their trenches as we overcame their defenses. It was as if the nightmare-weavers wanted to show off their artistry by stripping me, making me face the attack again, completely unprepared, humiliated, cold.

I was the first one in, leaping down into the trench with no clothes on—
where are your pants, my friend ?
—gripping a pistol in one hand and a trench-knife in the other. My bare feet sunk nauseatingly into the puddles. For this dream, the artist had a simple palette, mostly grey and ochre. Milky brown water. White arms. Bright grey sky above. Dark grey helmets. The whites of German eyes. Oh, this would be intimate.

And these would be true Germans, scarred and skinny and full of fight, not the green conscripts from Alsace-Lorraine we had frightened off so easily at Bois de Forge weeks before.

The dream-trench was even more labyrinthine than the real one, unspooling itself in hairpin turns like the intestines of some cannibal giant, and I heard the Germans for a long time before I encountered them. My ears were good then, as were my dreamears. I could hear their watches ticking, the sounds of their pipes and coins joggling in their coat pockets.

It was so slow.

The Germans came around the elbow of the trench at me in their blue-grey coats all grimed with mud. So slow. In life they had been surprised, but in this dream-trench they knew I was there, and I moved so slowly it seemed they waited for me to shoot them. I only had four shots before my pistol would jam, and I used these on the first two men. A thick brown mustache arched over the O of a mouth. A kicked fence of bad teeth. Oh, they watched me do it, and they watched me on their way down.

The pistol quit then.

I threw it at a third man, who ducked, unbalancing himself. I leapt as slowly as a cloud crossing a lake to close with this man, stabbing him so hard it numbed my thumb, stabbing him with his permission, his dimming eyes looking kindly into mine as if to say,
This is really alright, Mr. Nichols; I would rather fold up and sit in this brown water than to take one more step in the world, unfair as it is. No harm done, and I will see you again quite soon. The next time anything in waking life gets under your skin, in fact. Or perhaps just the next time I’m lonely. You see, nobody living remembers my face as well as you do.

The next German pointed his pistol directly at my face, then turned it and shot behind me, hitting another American boy instead, who shrieked womanishly, unforgettably. I never understood why I was spared then, or why I didn’t cut the German as he ducked under my arm, as if we had a small, secret truce, agreeing to engage the men behind one another. I ran past him with a yell, ducking right to avoid the blade-edge of the next man’s shovel, which missed me so nearly I could see individual dirt clots on its surface.

Then, as in the actual fight, I grabbed the shovel with my free hand and drove my knife for my enemy’s middle. It caught the belt buckle at the wrong angle and torqued out of my hand, spinning into the muck beneath us. I grappled with the German, a boy my age with a simple white face and eyes rimmed red as if he had been fighting fever, bulling him up against the loose trench wall. I was stronger.

I pried the shovel out of the boy’s grip and it fell, too, and then we fell, bracing our hands against each other’s faces. My little finger slipped inside the boy’s mouth and the boy bit down hard.

In the real event I had wrestled myself on top of the boy and held his face underwater while the rest of my company rushed past and over us to get at the other Germans, one of whom must have tossed the grenade, a potato-masher. The sound it made was the clanging of St. Michael’s sword on the brain-pan, so loud its noise was an absence of noise.

The war was over for me, and for several others caught nearby. The doctors said the only reason the shrapnel that entered my back didn’t kill me was because it had to pass through other matter first. I never learned which of my dead friends comprised that other matter. Nor did I learn the fate of the boy beneath me. Had my body saved him from the grenade, or did the weight of it finish drowning him? I knew prisoners had been taken. I liked to imagine the boy was one of them. That he was released after the war. I liked to imagine the boy surviving to robust manhood; my favorite daydream placed him on a farm in Bavaria, teaching a healthy blond son the game of locking middle fingers with an opponent and pulling to see whose grip was stronger.

The dream was different.

The boy and I sat up like children playing in the mud.

The boy clamped my wrist in an unbreakable grip and bit off the little finger at the knuckle, but he did not stop there.

He ate every finger I had.

Dora woke me, kneeling above me, shaking me.

“Darling, darling, Frankie, Orville Francis,” she was saying.

I opened my eyes wide.

“GET OFF ME, STOP, STOP!! FUCK! Fuck. God. Oh God.”

“You’re alright, it’s me, it’s me, my love, you’re fine.”

We looked at each other, she kneeling above me in the moonlight, not crying as she used to when this happened.

How like a Sphinx in her nightgown.

“You’re okay, Frankie. You’re home.”

She kissed my fingers.

I jerked my hand away.

T
HE MORNING LIGHT coming in through the lace curtains did much to restore my constitution. It was a grey light, threatening rain, and the wind was beginning to move in the boughs and under the eaves, but, as I watched Dora comb out her bob of blond hair in the mirror, I felt the unease slipping from me. It was a new day. There was nothing simpler or more healing. France and all its horrors had receded, taking that penny dreadful in the forest with it. Maybe I hadn’t seen the boy at all. My exhaustion and the poor light had made my eyes play tricks on me. The bruises and welts weren’t from stones, but from the little spill I took off Martin’s bicycle. I nearly believed all this revisionism.

I looked at Dora in the mirror and her reflected eyes met mine, asking,
Is it alright now? Have you come back to me?
Then her gaze shifted slightly off mine as she noticed the firmness I was developing under the sheet.
Yes, I suppose we are fine and well this morning.
A smile broadened across her face, taking its time. I got out of bed, holding the sheet before me like a torero’s cape. She liked this game. She backed up, displaying the hairbrush before her in the
en garde
position, but I moved in on her quickly, wrapping the sheet around her head and shoulders. I threw her down on the bed while she squealed protestations that turned to softer noises when I set my mouth to the middle of her, her own mouth a damp indentation in the sheet.

At length, we breakfasted and took coffee. Dora cleaned up and put on a summer dress, as well as the hat with the dried rose, while I selected a tawny vest and my favorite sky-blue tie.

“I hope the old sawbones knows what he’s doing. It would be a shame to bleed on this fine summer outfit,” I said.

“Bleed all you want, as long as you pass,” she said, adjusting a garter.

“Me? What about as long as
you
pass?”

“Oh, I’ll do just fine.”

“Of course. I forgot that you took one of these before.”

“That was unkind, sir,” she said, smiling, then reapplying lipstick. “I will remind you that one of us was rolling around Paris and London in the most undesirable company while the other was still drawing hopscotch squares on the sidewalk.”

“Yes, and one of us put down her hopscotch chalk and marched straight for the altar.”

“A frightful mistake. I insist on a civil ceremony this time.”

“A pity you weren’t a Catholic. You could have gotten it annulled. You could have said you showed up in your confirmation dress and this mean priest changed all the words around.”

“My point, sir. You used that one before.”

“No, I didn’t! When?”

“On a whiskey roar at your brother’s in May. The same evening in which you told everyone what a good teacher I would make because the perfection of my bottom would stun the class into silence when I turned my back to write on the blackboard.”

“Forty-love,” I conceded. “Now, if your face is sufficiently painted, I suggest we get that blood test before my syphilis finds my forwarding address.”

 

 

 

WE TOOK THE measly and petty dirt roads that surrounded Whitbrow until they joined up with the highway that led to the mill town. Fat splats of rain hit the windshield about halfway there, but the sky withheld the deluge that farmers across six counties had been concocting strange prayers and even writing letters to the president to bring. One dispossessed family walking down the road was glad the rain had not come yet. The father carried a mattress on his back and looked only where he was going, but the wife and the older children watched our car pass them as if we might have the deed to their new house rolled up in the glove box.

By two o’clock the blood was sitting in vials at the clinic waiting to be sniffed for corruption. Eudora found a telephone and rang her lawyer in Michigan, who confirmed that her divorce was settled and the papers would be in her hands within days, provided the post office did its job.

We decided to celebrate, so we went to a little family joint called the Victoria Café. Our roast beef, rich and fatty, would have tasted better without the image of the starving family marching down the road.

“I wonder if they have a soup kitchen here,” she said.

“I suppose. Why?”

“I should like to work in it.”

I said nothing, just looked at her and kept chewing.

She continued.

“I know it’s not practical, or perhaps even possible, it’s just that it’s so damned dismal here, and it’s hard to eat roast beef.”

“You want to work in a soup kitchen so you’ll feel better about eating roast beef?”

“Do you think things are worse here than in Whitbrow?”

“A mill town with two out of three mills boarded up is a hard place to scratch up a nickel. I suppose it is worse. At least in Whitbrow they can grow enough to eat. I mean, nobody there is starving, but they haven’t got
things
.”