Suddenly someone gripped Heck by the shoulder and spun him around. It was the thin little medical officer he had spoken to earlier, and Heck sloshed half a bucket of water over him. The officer yelled, “The hell are you doing?” He took the bucket from Heck's hands. “Let it burn. That's the last truck. Get out of here.”
In the dark in the back of the truck Heck could see little of his companions. A pair of men on stretchers were slung up along one side. Others sat on the floor or on a bench along the opposite side. Heck pressed himself into a place between two warm, stinking bodies on the floor. The truck lurched forward, back, then forward again. Cold notes of wind hissed through the seams of the canvas shell around them.
The remainder of the night passed in a discomfort of bumping and pitching. Groans surrounded him, but quieted over time. Eventually Heck sensed more light, and peering out the back of the truck he saw a red sun coming up behind them. How the others could doze and sleep through the violence of the ride Heck did not understand. They were a filthy, mangled lot, and Heck had to suppose he looked no better himself. But they were moving away from the fighting, and recalling this created an irrepressible, lifting relief.
3.
A PRETTY NURSE WITH BLOODSHOT EYES ESCORTED HECK INTO
a large brick warehouse. Its great open space had been converted into a hospital with rooms separated by curtains and crude wooden walls. In each room eight to a dozen men rested on narrow beds arranged with just enough passage between them for doctors and nurses to perform their duties. From where Heck was placed he could reach in either direction and touch the shoulder of a neighbor. The warehouse ceiling soared high over the makeshift walls of the hospital, so every sound echoed in that high open dim space and the disquiet of suffering resonated as if in a cathedral. Nonetheless, Heck had hardly slept in the past two nights and now he slept.
He was woken by a doctor with an enormous, block-shaped head. He gave Heck's leg a cursory inspection, talked through a drooping, unruly mustache. “Who sent you here? This should have been taken care of at the unit aid station. They should have put a few sutures in this and bandaged it and kicked you back toward the krauts. I don't want you here taking up a bed with a scrape like that.”
“Yes sir,” Heck said. “The station was on fire, sir.”
“Nothing else wrong with you? No trench foot? No pain in your kidneys? Headaches? No combat fatigue?”
“No sir.”
The doctor snorted, horselike, and made a note on his clipboard.
Again Heck slept. He was woken by an orderly peeling the bandage off his leg. Seeing him awake, the orderly said, “How'd you do this?”
“I don't know. I think I just fell down.”
The orderly laughed. “Well, you're a lucky one. Put a few stitches in there, watch you a little while to make sure there's no infection, and get you back into the Grand Tour. How's that sound?”
“All right,” Heck said, although he felt small desire to be in fighting shape again. The shots of anesthetic put in before the stitches turned out to be the most painful aspect of his wounding. The stitches were sewn in where he lay.
He remained for two nights in the hospital ward, and he observed that most surgeries were conducted in a separate, curtained room, and the sallow-eyed men around him who were carried there returned bearing long swaths of sutures across purpled flesh or returned without a part of themselves or returned not at all. Heck soon felt absurd and embarrassed to be lying on his bed with his meager, nearly painless injury while here and in the thinly walled spaces around him lay men who had lost limbs, whose several orifices would not stop bleeding, who ground their teeth as if eager to be rid of them, or who lay so still and pale that Heck would have thought they were dead if the nurses and doctors had not continued to come by and tend to them.
He contemplated his behavior in Elbeuf with unhappiness. Even now he could not allow himself to think directly of the time spent in that foxhole under the bombardment because the fear began to return over him and his muscles began to tremble. In angry moments he did not feel responsible for his own actions: he had hoped to do the right thing, but his efforts had been superseded by forces beyond his control. And yet he was often overwhelmed by a sense of shame at his cowardice, and he could only lie suffering beneath this feeling like piled stones.
It was a relief when he was ordered out of the hospital, into an arrangement of tents nearby holding those deemed ready for reassignment. The tents were drafty and set in ankle-deep mud that one traversed on wooden planks laid out in somewhat haphazard paths, but still Heck preferred this to the warehouse with its inventory of the dying and the maimed. Here at last he could see sunlight again. Here, although he shared his tent with seven others, he could at least sleep without the regular interruption of screams. He walked already with only a very slight limp and hardly any discomfort. And again he found himself with long openings of unsupervised hours.
Whenever someone asked how he had received the wound he said, “I don't know” and left it at that. He found that the other soldiers did not press him. He supposed they imagined some horrible, unspeakable experience, and he did not mind such a misunderstanding so long as it caused the questioning to end.
There really did not seem to be any reason why he could not go back to the front. His stitches had closed the wound and it had scabbed over and he had regained complete mobility, more or less. But he received no orders, and Heck was reluctant to seek an explanation or to remind anyone of his presence, although he felt he should and at times even decided he would but then put it off. Within him, the desire on the one hand to redeem his sense of honor conflicted with the still dense memory of his fear. Between these he was suspended in a state that looked like passivity. Also, his thoughts often returned to Claire and the events in the cave. He experienced the physical sensations again and ventured toward how it would have been if they had gone on to consummation. He created entanglements of memory and fantasy so vivid that an outside noise would startle him, breathless, from the reverie.
He considered scenarios by which he might meet Claire again one day. He might marry her, teach her English, move with her back to the States. He entertained the idea that he was in love with her. Then the tragic fact that he would likely never see again the girl that he was in love with consumed him and he imagined that once the war ended he might spend the rest of his days wandering up and down France, searching with only the faintest sense of hope, the loss of his great love heavy in him.
What came back most vividly and often was the feel of her skin under his fingers, that smooth warmth, but occasionally now that memory shifted terrifyingly, especially when he lay nearly asleep, to the feel of the dead man in Elbeuf. In the horrible moment of that shift he could believe he had found her wounded, that she was dead, that he had killed her.
Even more quiet than Heck was the boy on the cot beside him.
One of the others mentioned in passing that the boy's name was Quentin. Quentin could not have been more than eighteen years old, and if someone had told Heck that Quentin was fifteen, Heck would have believed it. Thin and small, with pale blond hair and smooth translucent skin that showed all the blue veins beneath, Quentin spent most of his time writing letters and nursing between his long thin fingers a cigarette, rarely drawing on it. Often the cigarette would burn all the way down before he inhaled once off the stub, then ground it out and lit another.
Heck was unsettled by Quentin's quiet, although in truth it merely hung in equipoise with his own. When he saw that Quentin had, at last, run out of cigarettes, he offered one of his own. Quentin hesitated, as if accepting it would signify the acceptance of a burden. Finally he reached and took it. “Thank you,” he said. He presented a meekness that was somehow not quite believable. He drew on the cigarette and positioned it carefully in his fingers. He looked round the tent before saying, “Thank you. What is your name?”
“George Tilson. But they called me Heck when I joined the army.” It occurred to Heck that he liked this name, that he carried it before himself and insisted on it. It seemed to distinguish this person he had become from his past, pre-army self.
Quentin weighed things a moment. He admitted, softly, “That's a funny nickname.”
“It's because I don't swear.”
Quentin laughed. “You won't say
fuck
?” He glanced around before adding, “Fuck, everyone fucking says
fuck
here.”
“I promised my mother, when I was little. And now she is dead.”
Quentin looked away and back, twice, dartingly. “I'm sorry.”
The conversation subsided. Across from them, two men played cards over a cot, using cigarettes for stakes and both smoking hard and fast enough to rapidly dwindle the stakes. One occasionally accused the other of cheating in a tone that meant he didn't mean it.
Quentin touched Heck on the shoulder. Blushing, he said, “I fell, getting off the truck, fell and hurt my ankle.” He spoke low and confessionally. “Getting off to pee.”
Heck told how he had fallen in the rubble of a building and Quentin nodded sympathetically. Outside, trucks could be heard moving and someone was elaborately cursing the mud and from the direction of the mess area came the metallic crashing of a dropped pile of steel dishes and pansâand the card player who had been accused of cheating fell heavily to the ground and slid under a cot and pawed at the ground and moaned.
Heck thought the man had heard shells or bombs coming, and he nearly rolled out of his cot and to the ground himself. But the other card player stared incredulously, and Heck realized that all the man had heard was the noise of the pans. The sound of the man's low, breathy simpering and the scrape of his fingers occupied the entire space of the tent. He was nearly invisible under his cot, but the cot itself lifted and fell like a large, heaving animal. His feet could be seen; he was barefoot.
Finally Quentin set his cigarette into the can he was using for an ashtray and walked over softly, almost on tiptoe, and bent to touch the man on the shoulder. “Hey, fella,” he said. “It's okay. It was just some pans.” Quentin tugged gently, and the man allowed himself to be drawn out. His hands were trembling but he smiled. He looked around smiling and sat on the end of his cot. “You all right?” Quentin asked. The man nodded. He gazed toward Heck, but Heck could see that the man did not see anything.
The other card player gathered up the cards. After a few minutes the barefoot man announced loudly, “I'd dropped something. I was looking for it.”
No one commented. He was still staring in that way of not-seeing.
Heck stood and pulled on his coat and left the tent. He had to walk a long time before he could think of things other than that stare.
The barefoot soldier was gone the next day. A slow but steady circulation of men were assigned to the tent, then on to their units, creating a routine in and out of bags and equipment, rounds of introductions and good-byes. There was a sense of pressure in the air, as if dramatic weather were always imminent. Some of the men drank outrageously in town and were to be seen lurching about. Most, in their anxious boredom, attempted patience and resignation. One of the men in Heck's tent had stolen a radio, and, when he could run a cable to a generator, they listened to the BBC and the news of the front. The news was very good, and some said Berlin could be taken by Christmas. Heck had trouble imagining Christmas. He smoked a lot. He went into town each day and strolled the streets. He was familiar with brick streets at home but cobblestones were a novelty to him, and they provided welcome relief from the mud. The houses seemed small. It was very pleasant to meander around and peer into the windows of the bakery and the sweets shop, to watch the women pin up their laundry, the children playing games, the men loading coal bins in preparation for winter. The war in its inscrutable mercy had bypassed this town, and most of the people here were pleasant toward the Americans. Heck avoided the raucous cafés where many of the soldiers passed time, and the nearby house where, it was generally known, a GI could find a certain kind of woman. Heck began to enjoy listening to the French talking; he did not understand any of it, but it sounded to him like a pretty language, such as might be exchanged between birds. The town's children had learned to ask, in English, “Any gum, chum?” He acquired a black rubber hooded poncho and walked even when it rained, and although his boots, socks, pant legs, and bandage became soaked he little minded. In the rain the streets were almost entirely abandoned to his possession. He purchased a pipe and experimented with it for a day, but he could not keep the bowl lit without drawing on it hard and often, so that the tobacco was quickly burned out and his tongue felt scorched, and he reverted to cigarettes.
Within days routines had developed. When he paused to examine the offerings in the bakery window the same heavy-set woman inside always smiled and waved. A particular quartet of children were always the first to find him in the morning and as such were daily assured of fresh gum. He paused to examine the fountain in the center of town and tried to imagine what it would have looked like before the war, when it was fed with water. He imagined that on sunny days rainbows would play around it. There were three old men who sat in a row on a bench in the town square and argued constantly, with gnashing of teeth and gesticulations of exasperation and tremendous sighs of indignity. From the far side of the square Heck watched how arguments flowed between the three of them, sometimes these two against that one, sometimes another of the possible pairings, sometimes all three declaiming simultaneously and so exaggeratedly that there appeared to be no agreement between any of them on any subject on the face of the earth. In the early evening, phonograph music drifted from certain houses. Music seemed a marvel. Heck experienced occasionally a simple, powerful exaltation over the fact of being still alive. To be alive seemed the only fact that could matter, that he was breathing and warm and retained his limbs and senses.
He wondered if possibly the army had forgotten him entirely. The men in Heck's tent came and went and still he remained and he did not object. He was again in some vague military limbo, and he was beginning to understand that the army had many different kinds and places of limbo.
Quentin too remained, rarely leaving the tent except to eat. He tended to the tent's coal stove and to his letter writing. When Heck asked, Quentin said he was writing to his fiancée. He wrote on a steel clipboard that he had somehow begged or bartered out of the hospital, and whenever someone loomed near enough to read what he was writing, Quentin hunched over the clipboard and shielded the page with his hands. When someone tried to tease him about writing dirty to his girl, Quentin ignored it. He had a way of greeting people by looking away while smiling tentatively that reminded Heck of his own father.
Quentin seemed to have decided to regard Heck as a sort of fellow conspirator. Heck had taken the music box out to look at it for a moment before going to sleep when Quentin leaned over and asked, “Is it your mother's?” Heck shook his head. Quentin wavered, then leaned nearer. “There is a girl? You're in love?” Heck started. Quentin grinned. “Yeah?”