Pasadena (29 page)

“But this particular private was having more than engine trouble, I’m afraid. Upon cutting the ignition the young man, who appeared rather orderly from our defensive position behind the water barrel, fell limply from the truck to the ground. We ran to help him and found him on his back, a bleeding hole in his side, and his eyes already glassy and
dead. This set off poor Willis, who broke into a fit of tears. He spent the day crying and cursing both me and the war, declaring nearly everything in his life unfair. It was a pitiable sight, but after a few hours of it, with the shelling continuing overhead, he became more annoying than pathetic, and I told him to shut up or leave the depot. I saw it then: the child’s panic flickering in his eye, that desperate look of hunting for a mother’s breast. I poured him some whiskey and brought the cup to his lips and made sure he got enough down to twist his tongue. I was tired of listening to Willis Poore.

“You must remember that we were alone in the forest, and that almost three days had passed since word had come about the war’s progress. We did not know if France was falling or if Germany was relinquishing territory. We did not know if the gray-clad soldiers would arrive to execute us or if a new truckload of doughboys would turn up to tell us it was time to return to California. We knew nothing other than the fact of the mounting shelling and the very real sense that the heavy guns had been turned our way. Great explosions erupted in the forest, and it was easy for me, and even easier for Willis, to imagine a shell cratering a tract of woodland the size of the depot’s clearing. Willis made the suggestion—rather bold it seemed at the time—that we abandon the depot and escape. We weren’t far from the Swiss border—two or three days by foot, as best we could tell—and he offered a plan of running from tree to tree all the way to the mountains. He went on to say that he knew a water spa in Montreux where we could rent rooms and sit out the rest of the war along the shores of Lac Léman. He was nearly delirious as he described the fresh perch served in lemon butter on the spa’s terrace. Needless to say, I told him that he would have to flee to Switzerland alone, a prospect I was certain he would find more frightening than dying in my arms.

“By nightfall it was clear there was nothing to do but wait. We hadn’t slept in more than two days, and we thought it best to lie down on the cots. I said to him that it might not be so bad to be executed in our sleep—which might sound cowardly to you now, as you sit here in the great comfort of peace, but in the reality of war a fast and painless death does offer its own enticements, even to a man like me. Under the bright stars of gunfire we went to sleep and I passed into a heavy dream, although even to this day I cannot recall what it was about. This has vexed me since that September night in 1918, for I am sure that I was
dreaming about something portentous and prescient. At some point in the middle of the night I found Willis’s cot empty. I still do not know whether it was in my dream that I pondered the empty cot—where had he gone?—or if in fact I was awake. But I lay there, both awake and not. From my pillow I could see through the barrack’s door into the yard, and a figure came slowly into focus. He was a silhouette and he was busy with a large tin can, haphazardly dumping water or some other liquid. Again, I did not rise, for I cannot tell you if I was awake or asleep, although I firmly believe I was both at the same time, which might sound unlikely but isn’t. I watched the figure, who I gradually realized was Willis, continue with his dumping, and I could hear a distinct sound of water spilling onto hard dirt or being thrown against the door of a truck. Willis moved about on his toes in a clumsy effort to maintain silence. He would pour the contents of the tin can upon the side of the garage and then refill the can inside and then continue with his dousing and refilling. It came to me like that, little by little, until at last my mind lit up and I was more awake than I had ever been in my life. I realized that Willis was splashing the depot with petroleum, and I leapt from the cot and ran into the yard. For a second or two I couldn’t find him. The shelling had stopped, leaving the night black. There was no moon, as if it too had been shot down, and I peered around. And just as I thought that perhaps I
had
been dreaming, I saw Willis crouching deep within the trees, lighting the kerosene lamp. He stood and swung his arm and was about to toss the lamp into the gasoline-drenched truck yard when he saw me. This caused him to hesitate, and as we both well know, you and I, a moment’s hesitation can change the course of events forever; for then something miraculous occurred before my eyes. Willis had performed his work sloppily, and petroleum must have soaked its way up his sleeve, and suddenly, with both his eyes and mine aghast, we watched a flame shoot up his hand and sleeve, across his shoulder and up the nape of his neck. Neither of us could believe it. His oily uniform and his greasy flesh were burning like pigskin over a flame. He stood motionless with shock, his arm extended and on fire.

“I ran to him, and there were several seconds—no more than three or four but they felt like an hour or an entire night—when Willis burned, his eyes watching me come to him. Only as I reached him did Willis realize that the lamp in his fist was the source of the fire, and he made a great gesture, one that I am sure he believed would be the last of
his life, and hurled the kerosene lamp in a long arc over my head to the depot. The lamp glass shattered, and then everything was silent until a great
whoosh!
swept the truck yard. I smothered Willis in my arms as the depot exploded with mushrooms of orange and black flame. I turned to see a fireball rising so high that I am sure they could spot it in Berlin.

“Willis’s fire transferred to my head—that is where this small scar at the temple came from, Mr. Blackwood. But I managed to extinguish him and then to drag him out of the scalding heat of the burning depot and into the beechwood forest. I pulled him several hundred yards, far enough from the breath of the fire but still within range of its fumes and smoke. I dragged him as far as I could, but he was wounded and I was too, although less so, and we lay on the hard forest floor as the sun rose and day broke. As we sit here right now, with the sun pressing through the blind and the hearth empty, I’m sure you can imagine for yourself the lulling qualities of a fire. Well, a large fire, even one shooting truck shrapnel into the trees, can be that much more soothing, especially if you are hurt and tired and desperately scared. I don’t hesitate to tell you that that is what I was: scared for my life, although without any sense of regret. But scared, as any man would be.

“Eventually the explosions stopped, but the fire continued. Willis and I were huddled against each other and soon we fell asleep. Later, the sunlight through the trees woke me up. I didn’t know what day it was, although it would turn out to be only an hour or so after the first explosion. The fire was still burning, consuming everything within it but for some reason not spreading into the forest beyond. I sat up and Willis stirred, moaning with pain. His arm was less burned than you might think, for the flame had consumed more of his sleeve than it had his flesh. But his neck was badly burned, the flesh open and weepy. He could not sit up. He was ashen in the face, and he kept clearing his throat with a terrible thirst. With his eyes he begged me to do something for him, but I didn’t know what I could do. He pressed together his lips and whispered, ‘Water.’

“I stood to survey what had happened, but as I did so, my own shirt fell away as if it had been woven of ash. For in smothering Willis’s fire, my clothes had burned too, and I was down to a pair of trousers dotted with holes and my diceboxes loosely laced and the little piece of coral around my throat.

“Again, Willis begged for water. Needless to say, the water barrel had
overturned, and the stream was on the far side of the depot, a quarter of a mile from where we were. I tried to lift Willis, but the pain overtook him, and as urgently as he had begged for water he now begged me to release him and leave him lying. I scoured the strewn debris for a tossed canteen, but there was nothing but bits of fender shredded to the size of tin-can openers. I told Willis, ‘I’ll go to the stream.’

“Due to the hot summer the stream ran low, but there was enough current and flow for me to sink my face into it. The water was a great relief to the patch of broiled flesh at my temple and to my own dry throat. I hadn’t realized how much oily smoke I had breathed until I washed out my mouth. But there was no way for me to bring water back to Willis. When I returned to him I said, ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t find a cup.’

“His eyes met mine and it was clear that he was disappointed, although not with me. No, it was as if, for the first time, he was disappointed with life. With fate. I told him that the explosion had been so great that it was unlikely we would have to wait much longer for a couple of soldiers to come along to investigate. Willis tried to take comfort in this, nodding as much as he could, but the fire had chewed the flesh so viciously from his nape that even a tilt of the neck hurt him more than a man, even a man like Willis Poore, should be asked to bear. I knelt by him and asked what I could do to make him more comfortable. He told me to help him adjust his head, and doing my best to ignore his horrible wincing and shrieking I rearranged him so that his cheek was resting against my thigh. And in that position we waited.

“The morning sun reached noon’s peak, and still no one arrived in the forest. In war, a lack of response can be a good sign or something more ominous, there’s no way to be sure, so I knelt patiently, and my leg fell painfully asleep.

“Willis was too uncomfortable to sleep, and eventually he gave up trying. His open eyes met mine, and there was a long intimate moment, his head in my lap, of us looking at each other, like two animals thrown together in a cave, one might say, or perhaps the way man and wife cautiously study each other across the conjugal bed on their wedding night. Willis and I shared a deep sense of not knowing what to expect from the other, and I believe that he both trusted and feared me at the same time.

“Willis lay wounded in my lap, which is where men dream of finding their enemies one day. Isn’t that the case? Wouldn’t you agree?”

Bruder stopped talking and stared at nothing for a long while. His face looked like that of a man in prayer.

“Now I’ve come to the final part of my story. As I was saying, Willis Poore was dying in my lap. Given my past encounters with him, to say nothing of his murderous arson attack, I’m sure you would think that I would relish this moment, that I would nudge him toward death, that I would search for a pinch of salt to throw onto his open pink wound. I might even have thought this myself. But in fact that wasn’t the case. I surprised myself by becoming concerned for Willis, and after we’d stared into each other’s eyes for some time, I said, ‘Willis? What can I do?’

“His lips parted and his tongue emerged and then he spoke slowly, like someone who must ponder the creation of each word. ‘I was going to pull you out of the fire,’ said Willis. ‘I planned on rescuing you.’ I told him to stop, he didn’t have to tell me anything, not now, but he persisted. ‘I had a plan,’ he said. ‘A plan to make it look like we’d been shelled. Then we could have fled.’ Here I insisted that he stop his explanation. It could change nothing now.

“I don’t know if I believed him. I don’t know even today. But I know my fortune forever changed at that moment.

“I told Willis to stop speaking, it would only exhaust him more and leave him in greater need of water. Several more hours had passed, and the burn on his neck seemed to be worsening, as if it were continuing to eat at his flesh and dig down to the knuckles of his spine. It was a terrible sight, as close as anything to seeing into a man’s soul, a hole so open and deep that I could have launched anything—a louse, a villainous thought—directly into his brain. The thirst was overcoming him, and he returned to begging me—in that California way—for water. I told him I didn’t know how to get him to the stream, and he said, ‘Please bring me some water, please, do anything.’

“The other thing that interests me about death is how clever it can make a man. As Willis struggled to maintain consciousness he pointed at my boots, the old diceboxes that had reshaped my feet into hard red blocks. ‘Bring me water in your boot.’

“In my boot? I had to admit it was a good idea on his part, and I told him so. I ran to the stream, removed my right boot, and filled it with water. Of course the boot leaked, but I believed it would suffice as a vessel and I ran carefully back through the forest. Needless to say, a
boot is not meant to transport water, and it spilled its contents as I returned to Willis. By the time I reached him the boot was wet but empty, its laces grimy and limp. Willis’s disappointment was apparent in his eyes. I said, ‘I’ll try again.’ But he was becoming desperate now and he said, ‘There’s no time.’ His chest rose and fell, and he said, ‘Bring me water in your mouth.’

“ ‘In my mouth?’ He began to nod, but the pain of it caused him to scream. He was right to ask for this, and I returned to the stream and knelt at its bank and pushed my face through its surface. I drank for a long time and then filled my cheeks and began to make my way back to Willis.

“Have you ever run with a mouthful of water? It isn’t as easy as it might seem. The water slips down the throat, especially if your throat remains greasy with smoke; it pushes its way out the nose. No, as we all know, God created no vessel more leaky than the mouth. My telling you this is a prime example. In any case, by the time I reached Willis, there was little water left behind the dam of my lips. But I knelt beside him, and he chose to bear the terrible pain of lifting his head to me, and with surprisingly little embarrassment we brought our lips together. And when I opened my mouth to his waiting tongue, only drops of spittle transferred. But Willis was so thirsty that he began to suck the moisture from my lips, and I had to push him off me or he might have slurped the flesh from my face.

“By now it was clear to me that Willis had stepped upon death’s threshold, and that if something did not happen he would leave me alone. And it was clear to him as well. He gripped my leg and said, ‘Go back to the stream. Bring me more.’ At first I resisted, thinking I had run a quarter of a mile there and a quarter of a mile back to carry a single drop of water. After all, what was the point? I am fatalistic that way. But Willis clawed at me, and his pleas filled the forest. ‘Go! Hurry!’ ‘But, Willis,’ I said. ‘I didn’t bring you any water. You were drinking the spit from my tongue.’