Those Across the River

CHAPTER EIGHT

NO MORE STONES followed me out of the forest. I backed away from the stone-thrower, who did not pursue me. I did not have time to decide what I had seen; I could think about that later. I simply backed away from it and it stood there, and, when I had put some distance between us, I turned around and moved down the trail at something less than a run but more than a walk.

I calmed down when I got to the river, although the sun had westered so that it was nearly twilight. I would just make it home if I kept my pace up and did not wander.

But I did not go straight home.

The frogs and crickets were singing in the darkening woods when I got to Cranmer’s cabin. It was only ten minutes from the trail, past a series of little cairns he had left for moonshine buyers to follow. I wanted very badly to talk to someone about the stone-thrower. This was not a confidence I would share with Eudora, and I would never be able to close my eyes if I had to take this quietly to bed with me.

I walked past the odds and ends of Cranmer’s yard; an axe buried in a tree stump, a loose circle of stones describing a fire pit, an old boiler pitted with rust, a dry-rotten saddle and the still Martin had mentioned. It was a great mystery to me how anyone could make liquor out of such an improvised mess; a copper tub, a series of barrels, copper tubing everywhere. Mason jars lay around in disarray. Flies swarmed over a heap of innards and discarded skins set off from the main house.

The windows of Martin’s cabin had makeshift bars across them, bars of scavenged iron through which nothing was getting in or out. As I approached the door I saw a peephole open in it, and then heard the sound of heavy bolts being drawn.

The door opened, and Martin Cranmer came outside, half shutting it behind him. His flannel work shirt was sopped with sweat, and the whole of Cranmer smelled like an old glove.

“What are you doing here?” he said, and when his mouth opened I smelled stale tobacco on top of everything else.

“Taking you up on your invitation.”

“Invitation doesn’t apply tonight. Go the hell home.”

I said nothing.

“Don’t just flap your gills at me, there’s no time. Go home and stay there. And I mean run, don’t walk. Shit.”

“What goes on around here, Martin?”

Cranmer disappeared into his cabin and came out with his rickety bicycle. He took the camera from me, put the handlebars in my hands and said, “Bring it back tomorrow or the next day. Now, if I have to order you off my property one more time I’m going to stuff you and send you back to your wife with a glass asshole.”

The door shut hard.

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.

The pigs are dying.

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!

Every man in the trench, move, MOVE!

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.

Where are your pants, my friend?

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.

A man. A man goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and uses a cane at night.

“You’re okay, Frankie. You’re home.”

She kissed my fingers.

I jerked my hand away.