Tide King (4 page)

“Duck blood soup,” Johnson laughed later, when Stanley described Christmas dinner at home. “You eat everything, don't you, Pole? Makes me want to come to your house to dinner after the war.”

“Right now, I would eat anything,” Stanley shivered. He shivered when he was awake and he shivered when he was dreaming. His breath was staccatoed with shivers. He shivered when he peed and he shivered when he shat and he shivered when he shivered. Stanley would eat his shivers, if he could, but they would probably give him diarrhea, he thought, like everything else.

They were still in the Hürtgen Forest, pissed as hell about it. Stanley and Johnson had taken turns moving out ahead, little by little, looking for mines and trying to clear brush for a path out. The visibility was ten feet, at best, and the soldier, with his back to Stanley, appeared from the foliage like a mirage. It had to be one of their men, so close by. Stanley tapped him on the shoulder just as he realized the man looked wrong, the uniform, the helmet. As the man turned, Stanley pulled out his revolver and plugged him in the right cheek. The man fell, the wound cratering inward in his face like a black hole before bubbling up, blood oozing on the smooth, unshaven skin.

He was a boy. Stanley wondered if he was lost. His eyelids flickered, and Stanley wondered whether he should touch them, hold his hand. He kicked away the boy's rifle. The boy's fingers opened like petals. Stanley touched the boy's forehead with his left hand, his right cocked on his pistol, near his hip.

“Mutter,” the boy said, a whisper wet with blood. When he reached up toward Stanley, Stanley shot him. The arm fell back toward the body. Stanley shivered. He shivered in his heart and his throat and the tears from his eyes warmed his face until it grew cold and sticky and he shivered again. He thought to eat his mother's herb, to protect himself. It could not hurt. When one no longer believed in anything, he considered, all things could possess equal power.

“You all right?” Johnson appeared from the brush, as Stanley groped in his helmet, feeling for the crumbled flowers. He put a hand on Stanley's shoulder. His grip was gentle, as if handling crystal, unlike his usual vice of fingers that dug right into Stanley's collarbone.

“Yeah.” Stanley put his helmet back on quickly without retrieving it and rolled the boy over, face down, in the snow.

They walked in a diamond formation: Stanley walked in the back, Johnson in the front, one man, red-haired, was to their left, another, blond-haired, to their right. Stanley didn't know their names. It seemed a waste to learn them. Wood and shrapnel fell from the sky, mixed with snow, hitting the ground in hisses. The trees burned standing still. Stanley listened to the fire eating the wood, the snap of twigs and branches as they broke free of the parent trunks and fell down to the forest. Smoke poured from the nooks and crannies of the burning bark, and men were forced to crawl. On the ground, the red-haired man, in front, would tap the top of his helmet and point in the direction of movement, and they all would crouch and fill that direction with fire, grenades. But then the blond man on the right threw a grenade that hit a tree and bounced back toward them, and they dove leftward and rolled down a small hill.

“I would die for a stick of gum.” Johnson entangled himself from Stanley. The smoke cleared, briefly, and the hard marble of sun blinked through the treetops.

“This might be your lucky day.” Stanley nodded. Before them, a formation of rock appeared in the trees with a low opening, two by eight feet. A bunker. The red-haired man stood off to the side of it. He tossed in a grenade as they turned, covered their ears. Then they waited for the smoke to clear before joining him at the hole.

Stanley was the shortest, so he got on his knees and crawled in. He imagined a speckling of dead pale boys, boys with smooth faces and darting eyes, but it was empty with black. He tapped the inner mouth of the cave to make sure it was still secure. Then he pointed his thumb up, and the others joined him.

“Now this is living,” red hair said in the darkness. He lit a cigarette and stretched. “We stay here until the war ends, okay?”

“At least for a nap,” Stanley agreed, pulling his blanket out of his backpack. “We'll take turns on watch.”

They slept on ground that wasn't wet and in corners that weren't windy. They slept with their helmets off, their boots unlaced, oblivious to the shelling outside. When they woke, their stomachs were relaxed, growling. They wondered how to get back behind the line for rations, wondered where they were.

“I say we stay in the hole,” the red-haired man said.

“Yeah, and when one of our own boys throws another grenade in here, then what?” the blond said, tightening his laces. They were broken and did not go all the way up the boot.

“That's why we take turns on watch.” The red-haired man shook his head.

“And when our whole company leaves us behind?” Johnson loaded his rifle. “We'll starve to death in the woods.”

“Moving thirty feet a day?” red-haired man sneered. “Not fucking likely we get left behind.”

“My orders were to take the forest,” Johnson craned his head out of the hole. “I don't know about yours.”

Their mood was sour. They decided to follow the ravine that led from the bunker.

“All aboard the Kraut trail,” Johnson laughed. “Think they'll shell us here?”

“I say we're mighty close to something.” Stanley lit a cigarette. “Think we're near the West Wall?”

“By God, we should be so lucky,” the blond man said. “Then we can shoot the hell out of them and go home.”

Stanley could not picture home. His mother's face appeared vaguely, the smell of her, the sound of her. The hardware store where he worked on Eastern Avenue. His school, Baltimore Polytechnic. He could not be sure whether any of those things had happened or whether they were a dream. Whether he had always been at war and would always be. They walked along the ravine for hours. Sometimes they would come across a body of a German, always picked clean. One body was missing its fillings, the mouth open and exposing bloody stumps of gumline.

“We need to find some Krauts so we can take their braut,” the blond man said.

“I'd even eat the fucking Krauts,” the red-haired man said. “Maybe we should go back and find our men.”

“Maybe you're right,” Stanley said. “Even if we find the Germans, they'll probably outnumber us.”

“Our men are probably ahead of us,” Johnson said, his head nodding forward. “That's why we're seeing so many dead. I told you we got left behind.”

“Not likely,” the red-haired man said. “I'm going back. The whole month, I ain't seen nobody get ahead of me. If there's somebody ahead of us, it's a different division. Which I'm more than happy for. Let them take some shots.”

“I'm with him.” The blond turned in the slit trench.

“Come on, safety in numbers.” Red gripped his rifle. “Let's go back.”

“What say you?” Johnson looked at Stanley. Johnson was the leader, but Stanley wanted to find their squadron, food.

“Let's go back.” Stanley didn't look at Johnson.

“The Pole has decided,” Johnson said, spitting in the trench, kicking at the snow-dirt with his shoe. “Let's go.”

They turned around and followed the slit trench back to the bunker. Then they climbed up the slope they had fallen down earlier.

“Let's sweep out and move forward,” Stanley said. Stanley moved in front, Johnson in the back. The shelling shook and shredded the tree canopy above them, branches falling like swooping vultures, pelting their shoulders and arms, leaving welts. The raining wood and shells filled the air with the sound of sanding metal, and Stanley could not hear anyone, only see their jaws moving, their eyes flicking back and forth as they scanned the area for mines, for Germans, for secure ground in front of them. Stanley wished they had stayed in the bunker. He glimpsed a man running through the trees, white and red cross armband. A medic. They knew how to get back to the line. All they needed to do was follow him. Stanley motioned to the men and ran toward the figure.

He had not gotten far when the ground swelled behind him like a wave, sweeping him off his feet. A shell. His body hit the dirt at angles—elbow, knees, ankles—before rolling. When he stopped, he felt for his legs, moved them, and stood up, crouched over.

“Johnson?” he called back. The area from where he had been thrown was peppered with wood and metal. Blackened bark. Gray and red snow. Johnson's helmet.

He followed the trail to Johnson, what was left of him. Blood spread from the left side of Johnson's groin, his left leg scattered around him, bone broken and carved like scrimshaw and strewn with strips of muscle and skin. Johnson shivered, coughed, and looked lazily up at Stanley, drunk with shock. Stanley called for the medic. The blond man staggered up and then off, shouting for help. Stanley tore a strip of cloth from Johnson's backpack and made a tourniquet. Johnson's big long face caved in from his cheeks to his chin. His eyes fluttered.

“Johnson.” Stanley shook him. But Johnson was going. Stanley took off his helmet and scooped the herb out of the lining. He opened Johnson's mouth and pushed it in.

But Johnson didn't chew. Stanley opened Johnson's mouth and pulled a third of it between Johnson's gums and teeth. He picked off another piece and put in the red, beating hole that was once Johnson's hip, leg. Then he moved Johnson's jaw with his own hands, pushing Johnson's tongue aside, grinding the herb with Johnson's teeth. Johnson's mouth was dry as cotton, and the herb coated the soft pink insides. Stanley stuck his finger in Johnson's mouth and pushed the flakes, the unchewed pieces, into Johnson's throat. Johnson gagged, sitting up and coughing, hands at his neck. The green-brown flakes flew out, covering Stanley's face and shirt. Stanley wrapped his arms under Johnson's chest and jerked upward. Stanley jerked and Johnson coughed and the herb chunk flew into the snow.

“Medic.” The man dropped his kit beside Stanley. Stanley moved back and caught sight of the spat-out herb. It glowed in the detritus, unearthly. Stanley's heart jumped. He reached for the glowing orange saxifrage. The medic turned, shook his head, frowned.

Johnson was dead. The medic tagged him, took one of his dog tags, and scrambled back in the forest. It seemed wrong to leave Johnson like this, any of them like this. Maybe Stanley wouldn't fight anymore, stay here with Johnson, work the herb into his wounds, down his throat. He could stick his knife into Johnson's chest and massage it into his heart.

The trees shook around him. Men shouted in the distance, the trill of bullets, explosions. Small fires baked in pockets of black trees. When another shell landed to the left of Stanley, he could feel the warmth of it on his leg. He did what he later imagined any other person would do. He ran.

They traveled in the highlands west of Reszel, Poland, Ela Zdunk and her mother, Barbara, like they always did, looking for rare species of flowers and roots. They walked miles in the mossy, swampy darkness, digging around the bases of beeches, spruces, and sycamores, bending under brushes, getting scraped by thorns and stickers and bitten by bugs. For as long as Ela could remember, the villagers visited their one-room shack outside of Reszel, the bone house, as it was called, to buy tinctures for their ailments. They had probably visited her mother for longer than the nine years she had been alive, for her grandmother had served the villagers in this capacity as well.