John didn’t speak. He dug slowly and ceaselessly, his face stolid, unutterably tired.
“God Bless America,” snarled Erick, flinging a rock across the rilled ground.
When they were about two feet down, Erick sank the point of his pickaxe into the cold earth and left it there.
“I quit,” he said, “I’m damned if I’ll dig another goddamn inch.”
John looked up from his work, his thin chest laboring. His brow was covered with a dew of perspiration. He blinked tiredly behind his glasses.
“Shouldn’t it be a little deeper?” he asked, “They said…”
“Oh, come on, John!” Erick said irritably, “Where do you want to dig, to China?”
John put down his shovel with a sign. “All right,” he said, “I’m too tired.”
They crawled down into the trench and slumped back against opposite walls, knees touching, the tops of their helmets just below the surface of the ground.
“Jesus, am I tired,” Erick complained.
“I am too,” John said.
Erick slid his hands in to his jacket pockets. He felt something soft and dry and drew out the pieces of cheese. He offered them to John but John shook his head. So he flung them away, getting the odd sensation that he was throwing away pieces of Sergeant Jones. He didn’t look that way anymore because he could see the pieces lying on the ground, whitish and still.
Darkness crept over them soon and covered their heads.
They didn’t bother eating anything. They went to sleep immediately, motionless in their exhaustion. Only once in the night did Erick wake up. Then he didn’t even bother looking around. He reached around with a grunt and took his canteen from its canvas holder. He held the icy metal in his hands and took a sip of the freezing, chlorinated water. Then he slid the canteen back and went to sleep again.
* * * *
He woke up to the sound of machine gun fire.
He saw John start up and then sink down again, his face white and afraid.
Looking up, Erick saw bright streams of tracer bullets skimming over the ground. They were down so low he could have reached up his hand and touched them.
“I almost got up,” John said nervously.
“Good thing you didn’t.”
John swallowed, “You said it.”
Then, after a few moments, John said, “Do you think they’ll attack?”
“How should I know?” Erick said.
“If they attack, what will we do?”
“Run like hell,” Erick said, then, “I don’t know John.”
“You can’t run, can you?”
“I didn’t mean we’d run. Who’d let us run, anyway?”
“No, I mean, if they have… tanks.”
“Oh,” he said, feeling a tremor in his stomach as he visualized the great monsters rumbling over the field at him.
“You can’t run, can you?” John said.
He shook his head. “No.”
“You’re a… a pretty good shot, aren’t you?” John asked. He seemed to be trying to make a plan. Plan on something that was way over his head.
“Pretty good,” Erick said.
“Well. If they have tanks, maybe… maybe I can run out and drop a grenade on one.” He looked at Erick. “Huh?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
John swallowed. “You could cover me,” he said. The words sounded false as if he had been abysmally cast in the role of the alert soldier by some bungling producer.
“I suppose so,” Erick said, feeling miscast himself.
“What about the bazooka?” John asked.
Erick looked at it. It was lying beside the trench. He reached up cautiously and drew it down.
“My God,” he said.
“What?” John asked, worriedly.
“The sight broke off.”
“Oh no,” John said, “We… can’t aim it then.”
“It’s no good,” Erick said, pushing it away. Then he had a twinge of fear and looked at his rifle. He grimaced at the heavy rust on it. He checked to see if the clip was still in the chamber and if the hammer slid back and forth. Now he was sorry had hadn’t cleaned it. What a fool, he thought to have let it go.
“Maybe we can use the shells,” John said.
“What?”
“The shells.”
“What shells?”
“The bazooka shells.”
“What are we gonna do with them?”
John looked scared. “Throw them?” he half asked, half told.
Erick felt like laughing and crying at the same time. “You can’t throw them John,” he said.
John’s throat moved and he looked up gingerly at the tracers still flying over their heads like a mass migration of lightning bugs.
“This is like the movies, isn’t it?” he asked.
At first Erick almost snapped at John angrily. Then he sighed. “Yeah,” he said.
“You think it’s silly?” John said.
“Silly?”
“I mean… oh, I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” Erick said.
“Well,” John said, after a moment, “What else can we do? If there’s tanks, you’ll have to… cover me and I’ll…”
“Hey,” Erick said.
The machine guns had stopped abruptly.
The air was suddenly silent.
Someone screamed.
“Look out!”
A burst of shots rang out. Erick pushed up and looked over the plain, his heart hammering violently.
He saw men kneeling in other trenches, lying prone on the ground, pointing their rifles and firing toward the edge of the wood. He threw over his glance and almost lurched with shock.
A scattered flurry of German troopers were running from the woods, bayonets fastened to their rifle barrels.
“Germans!” muttered John, horrified.
Erick glanced at him hurriedly and saw how white John’s face had become.
Then, before his mind could realize it, he found himself grabbing up his rifle with shaking fingers and trying to aim at one of the running men. He heard whining sounds over his head, heard something tear up dirt behind him. His mind was clicking, it seemed to be working by itself. Track him, track him, came an impatient voice in his head. He squinted through the sight and, as his iris contracted, an overcoated German moved into his line of vision, heavy-footed and awkward, plodding forward.
Something twitched in Erick. He pushed the barrel over, caught the German again, lost him. He gasped, more in tight irritation that fear. He didn’t look anywhere else. The world had emptied itself of all people but himself and the attacking German.
He found his teeth clenched, breaths puffing from his dilated nostrils. Nobody could hit the German, all around his hurrying body puffs of dirty sprang up.
“Fools!” Erick snapped breathlessly.
He threw over the rifle again and aimed a little to the side of the running soldier. He pulled the trigger, felt the jolt against his shoulder.
Dirt sprang up at the German’s boots. He stopped, jumped clumsily to the side, almost tripping himself. Erick almost flung the rifle over, feeling his arms tremble excitedly. He fired once, twice, missed. His breath caught. He almost choked.
Then his eyes grew wide, his lips drew back from his teeth in an animal snarl. He held himself like a rock and fired straight at the turning German.
Something hot burst in his body as he saw the soldier lurch forward, heaving away his rifle with a spasmodic movement.
“Got him!” he heard himself cry and was only alarmed for a moment by the hoarse, unnatural jubilance in his voice. He forgot about John. He forgot about everybody. He was alone and someone had allowed him to shoot at men like targets.
He looked around anxiously.
Sudden fear jolted in him as he saw a German trooper rushing at him not more than fifteen yards away. He couldn’t see the man’s face, it was a white blur. He heard John firing. Then he saw the German throw up h
is rifle and, in angry offense more than fear, he raised his rifle quickly.
Before he could aim, the German threw up his arms and flailed forward onto the ground.
“Damn!” Erick blurted out the word in a fury.
His gaze snapped around, looking for more Germans. His heart throbbed with locomotive violence in his chest. His body shook with expanding, almost sensual, excitement.
Now the Germans were retreating. Their machine guns were opening up from the woods again, yammering hot death over the plain.
Erick paid no attention. He was veiled in armor. He took careful aim at a retreating trooper, feeling fear that someone would kill the German before he could aim.
The German weaved. Erick followed him, a thin, assured smile mounting into shape on his blood-drained face. Almost casually, he aimed to the side.
The German seemed to run right into the slug.
He stopped dead in his tracks, then pitched forward on his face like a felled tree. Erick looked for more. He saw one, pulled the trigger, cursed viciously because his rifle was empty. He fumbled hurriedly for another clip in one of the bandoliers that hung like deadly necklaces around his neck, sagging over his chest.
He happened to look at John.
It made him stiffen.
John was leaning back against the earth wall, motionless, staring at him unbelievingly. John’s rifle lay on the stiff rampart of the trench, deserted.
Erick tried to ignore the look but he couldn’t. The eyes were digging all the way in. His fingers slipped on the cold clip and it bounced off his leg into the trench.
“What are you…?” he started to yell over the noise and then threw himself down as the rushing sounds began in the air again.
“No!” he shouted.
He still felt John’s eyes on him. “I guess we should have dug in deeper,” Erick said quickly. John said nothing. Saliva ran from a corner of his mouth. His chest moved slowly.
The morning was burst asunder by the explosions.
The Germans were sending over anti-aircraft shells that exploded in the air and hit men in their trenches. Hot shrapnel came down buzzing and buried itself into the earth around them.
Erick cringed down as far as possible, drawing himself together, turtlelike. At first there was rage, irritation.
Then fear crept back again. The brief elation fled. And the magic phrase that didn’t seem so magic now filled his brain again. He felt it wasn’t worth anything now, not after what he did. But he began to murmur it under his breath, afraid to look at John, suddenly afraid he could never look John in the face again. He didn’t know why. He just felt a terrible shame.
The phrase didn’t help at all. Nothing helped. His heart began to hammer against the walls of his chest. His body started to shake, his breath catching, tearing loose from his throat in quick, choking bursts. His fingers trembled, he had to clutch at his ankles to give his fingers something to brace themselves on. He forgot everyone and everything but himself then—crouching there with death whizzing around him in fiery, metal chunks.
Something skidded off his helmet with a scraping shriek and he caught his breath suddenly. He felt his body shivering without control. He couldn’t swallow the rising saliva in his mouth. Some of it drooled out a corner of his mouth. His chattering teeth slipped and he bit open a segment of his lower lip.
“We should have dug…” he started and was drowned out by the rush and burst of shells. He felt John’s knees pressed against his and their shoes touching. It helped for a moment, in a lull. He started to straighten up. The shelling started again.
It seemed endless. Longer than any other time.
The explosions were deafening. His ears rang and his head began to ache dully, feeling as if it were expanding and contracting violently. He kept his eyes closed, his face pressed down with his chin digging into his chest. Where the hell is our artillery, he thought once belligerently, then lost everything except the phrase and the half-conscious shame he felt but could not understand.
* * * *
Only when the shelling had lifted completely did he catch his breath and lift his head saying, as if to clear the air,
“Jesus, let’s dig this hole a little…”
Later they found him still in the same position, sitting in his own excretion and staring fixedly at his friend John Foley whose pitiful eyes were looking at him and whose helmet and head had been cut in half.
15
The church bells rang eleven thirty.
A train rushed into the station sounding like a gale of wind, then like the cries from a slaughter house. Horns still blew in the street. Motors vibrated and hummed. Lights flickered on the ceiling and on the walls. Shadow and substance, he thought. The shadow of night and the substance of me.
If he didn’t try to squirm it was all right. If he lay still the soaking heaviness did not overcome him with nausea. The smell was easing too. Either that or his sense of smell was adapting to it. He was acclimated. And in this, his other mind commented, we see the salvation of the garbageman.
It was about over.
He couldn’t imagine what made him decide it. It just came as an appropriate acceptance. It was over for him. He’d eaten nothing and drunk nothing since early the night before, Tuesday. Now he was purged of the food and the water in him was being blotted up by the dry pawing hands of the room. Nothing more could happen to him.
Except death.
How strange it was that the concept which men most struggled against proved the easiest to accept at last. It was probably, he thought, because all the work of acceptance was done inside the brain where a man has shoved down all traces of these unacceptable concepts. Then when he allowed the slightest consciousness to return to the subject, he realized suddenly that the work of accepting was finished beneath and he could accept, consciously now. So that the greater the problem, the more inside work was done on the job of acclimation and, thus, the easier is the acceptance of it the second time around.
And the greatest of these was death.
He could accept it.
It was so dark, so lonely and deserted in his room that he felt wholly amenable to accepting it. It did not seem out of place here in the dense, pitiless ebony of night. Living was the unnatural thing. He was bound to a pendulum that swung in an arc between life and death. And it had caught fast to the walls on the darker side. It was a long, frightening swing back to life. Long for his body and longer for his mind. All desire to leave town, to get up and wash and leave the room had disappeared. The battle had been too great. He was giving it up now, not with petulance or throbbing rage, but calmly, with a modicum of dramatics.
He was simply going to die.
He believed it preferable to living. He didn’t realize at all that it was the darkness and the weakness of a hunger and thirst impaired body that made him feel as he did. He was weak and dizzy and the bed seemed to drift below him, rocking idly in some infinite swell. He believed that he had made the struggle the token effort to retain his hold on living.
And that now it was time to surrender.
Yet he was very much alive. He could not refute that. I am alive, he thought. Then—Am I alive?—he thought with equal emphasis.
He had to think about it for a moment but he could come to no other conclusion that that he was alive. I think, therefore I am, the words came into his mind while the second, baser portion chuckled out an abbreviated chorus of—Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive O!
I’m going to sleep now, he made up his mind. But there are a few things I must do before I die. Leo maybe, not likely, that was a memory he preferred to leave behind.
But Sally. I must remember Sally and everything we did. That was too good a part of life. Maybe it was the only nice thing that ever happened to him. He would not let himself die before he recalled those days.
I’ll wake up at five, he told himself. At five o’clock sharp my eyes will open and I’ll complete my recollections. Not now, I’m sleepy. At five. Then when I’m fi
nished I’ll be ready to…
He half wondered then if that was a concession to life.
If death was so imminent and acceptable why didn’t he recall Sally now and be ready to die within a few hours? Instead of trying, almost ordering himself to live through the night. Wasn’t that a rationalization and a clumsy one at that?
He closed his eyes.
Am I lying to myself? he wondered. At first it seemed almost an outrageous question to ask himself in the face of his seemingly calm and detached preparation for the end. It was the sort of question his inner alien mind would ask just to displease him.
But it stayed there, stuck fast to the walls of his attention.
He had to acknowledge it. And he thought himself very cool and wise to take a look at it without quailing.
He asked himself if he really knew what he was thinking about. He suggested to himself that life was not such an easy thing to let go of. And his second self hinted at coming pains to make the past ones seem like child’s play. It told him that, even unaided by the will to live, the body clung tenaciously to the breath and motion that birth had shaken into it.
He ignored it then. It was the only thing to do. Trial and error, he decided. We’ll see. What had he to lose? If he lived, he lived and would leave. If he died… okay.
He pretended not to see how ridiculous the thought was. Five o’clock, he left a studied call with his subconscious and went to sleep.
16
In his dream he couldn’t stop moving.
He bounced on the soles of his feet.
He ran around.
He did an excited gypsy dance.
He jumped up and down.
He was chuckling and laughing and singing. God, I can’t stop myself, he said. Wow! Am I full of pep! It was delightful as he jumped down the staircase. He jumped—way out! into the air and flew down, over the whole flight at one time. And hardly a bump at the landing.
Boom!
He scared the cat and it went scrabbling down the hall as if pursued by pussycat demons. But you live on the fourth floor, he analyzed, you live on the fourth floor with the old lady who has blue varicose veins in her legs but I jumped down a flight and if I jumped down to the fourth floor I must have come from the fifth floor but there isn’t any fifth floor…