When they had cautiously slipped into the town, moved in two lines of skirmishers down the streets, it had seemed precisely as the little Vichy traitor had reported it: empty of all save the infirm and aged, left behind by not only the Germans, but by the collaborationist French who had fled from some inexplicable fear of the retribution Yanks were supposed to inflict on them. It had seemed a shoo-in. And then they had entered the passage between buildings; the first burst had dropped Pfc. Coopersmith and hurled Benbow like a Raggedy Andy doll against the warehouse, dumping him bloodily on the milk cart…and the patrol had dived—almost as one man—through the half-open door of the warehouse.
All but Winslow. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US51403352, whose reflexes had hurled him in the opposite direction; brought him up short against the locked door of a house facing across the narrow street to the warehouse where his buddies now sporadically returned fire on the hordes of Nazi troops fly-specked through the town. They were ambushed. Trapped. Boxed in. But they were at least safe behind stone, while Arnie Winslow trembled flat against a locked door, murmuring softly to be let in, out of the light and out of the death.
“Arnie! You out there, Arnie!”
It was Truck. The push-faced Polack from Hoboken who had soldiered as corporal beside Winslow, all the way in from the spiked beach at Normandy. The voice was Truck, but the tone was Fear. Rabbit-warren Fear. Truck was inside the warehouse, and his shouts brought a cascade of hard-fire from a dozen concealed Kraut positions. Winslow could not afford to answer. The machine-gunner in the bell-tower of the church at the end of the passage knew where he was, but it was doubtful any of the others had him pegged. Otherwise he would have by now joined Coopersmith and Benbow. He remained silent.
He had to get inside that house. It was only a matter of time till the bell-tower assassin dusted that doorway effectively enough to pick him off. But the door was locked. He could not step back to blast the bolt through the door, for that would put him in plain sight from the street. He bumped his weight heavily against the door twice, three times. It bowed, but did not give.
There was only one way. If there were more ways, they weren’t registering, and he had been in the doorway for almost two minutes now. He had to take the chance.
He hop-jumped half a dozen paces out into the street, a timorous creature, and then hurled himself like a battering ram back into the entranceway, smashing against the wooden door. The machine-gunner was a moment too slow. By the time he had tracked the big .30 caliber J-34 to the new target, Arnie was on his return trip. The bigbeast rattle of spraying shots overrode the thwack! of Arnie’s shoulder hitting the door, and puffs of dirt, chips of cobblestone exploded harmlessly as he slammed full against the bolted door. The door gave and splintered inward off its bolt as a fresh shower of shots ripped into the edge of the building, chasing him, seeking him, but not locating him.
Then, as the big air-cooled machine gun went berserk, firing hysterically at the empty doorway, he fell inside; with a fluid, almost instinctive movement, he slammed the door closed again, and fumbled for the bolt. It was half-torn from its screws, but it held, rattling into place as he palmed it home. Then he turned—
Into darkness.
That suddenly, that abruptly. The electricity of what had filled the past few moments had held light within his eyes, but now that he was momentarily safe, tension and fear and preoccupation were used up and the mind—magician master of misdirection—came fully to bear on what was inside that house. What was inside that house:
Darkness.
Nothingness.
Black chilled pressing-in heavy midnight blindness, a coal sack filled with dust; nothingness weighing down on his eyes, filming them with ink-shadows, flitting dim images…
Slowly his legs collapsed under him. Standing in quicksand, he began to sink with exaggerated slowness to the dirty floorboards of the anonymous hovel. A puppet whose usefulness has passed, his unseen manipulator snipped his strings and he fluttered into a heap, bundled in dark shrouds of fear, and a vagrant vision he had had for many years (and never remembered upon awakening) crawled back to him:
Thick winds, like ropes of sand, tore at him, the sound like tortured metal shrieking as it was rent. Arms flung up to the nightmare sky, whipped into cloud-and-dark froth, he stood on a barren plain. He was a scarecrow, or something very much like a scarecrow; an imbecile relation to a scarecrow. In the middleground of an empty plain, beaten by sound and hurricane winds, he was crucified on a shaft of night, under a gibbering sky. And as he stood unmoving, from out of that sky—riding a trough of shouting black wind—the blind bird plummeted toward him. It was an ink bird, a domino bird, a soot bird; blind and small and very frightened out in its storm; but he could not help it, could not bring it peace or security or comfort, and he had nothing to say to that blind bird, save to tell it to go away, to fly back up into the darkness. Blind bird, blind bird, go away from me! But it was a shivering, frightened little bird, and over his head it circled, all through that night, until at last he admitted he was afraid, too. The vision came with extraordinary clarity, for the first time in his life while he was awake, and he suddenly realized how many nights he had trembled in his bed, shivering with that pathetic, circling blind bird. And the question came to him unbidden, there in the pitch-darkness of that house, Why do I remember it now?
Why, indeed? Again, an answer leapt unbidden.
Less than a month before, the offensive had struck south from Normandy, leaving the flesh and the metal piled high in the fields, on the beaches, in the sea. He had been trotting along behind a deuce-and-a-half stacked high with cartridge cases, using the truck for cover across a two-mile open stretch currently in favor with the German mortar batteries. He had slung his M-1 over his shoulder and was folded down in upon himself, lighting the roach of his last cigarette, when the truck rolled its right front wheel across the exact center of an antitank mine. He had been a few paces farther behind (having ceased to dogtrot, trying to get the butt lit) and only that had saved him. All he knew was that the truck rose up in majestic fury, like a featherweight prop, sprouted blossoms of metal and flame, and exploded like a thousand fire-lilies. The concussion rather rudely hoisted him by the ass and shot-put him three hundred feet across the field and into a drainage ditch, without his once complaining. He was unconscious before he hit turf. He came to rest upside-down, legs twisted under his body (but, miraculously, unbroken), his back lofted in an aesthetic arch by his pack and the rifle which had whirled along with him. When the medics found him, he was sleeping as peacefully as any classic example of shock and shrapnel and whiplash and concussion and blast-burn could sleep. He was trundled back to the evacuation hospital and when the slight burns and flesh wounds had been treated, they had waited patiently for him to come out of the coma, hoping APCs would do the job and he could be trundled back into the line, because there was still much trouble out front. Every man was needed.
Arnie came out of it nicely, and sat up one morning as though refreshed from an extended snooze. Stretching his arms over his head and grunting with pleasure, he had heard the doctor ask, “Well, how do you feel?” and had gotten off the classic line, “What time is it?” The doctor had said, “About ten-thirty,” and Arnie had said, “Blackout?” and the doctor had looked heavenward, because it was ten-thirty in the morning, not the evening, and Arnie’s eyes were wide open.
They had bandaged his eyes, and he had lain there for close to a week, trapped in stifling darkness, and the soreness had passed, but the pools of thought had bubbled.
Memory within a memory:
Stealing dimes from his mother’s purse. His father had gone to work, and she lay in bed, catching an extra hour before starting the housework. Silent Willoughby, Iowa morning. He knew at just what level of weariness her mind floated, and like a soldier in a movie he had stealthily opened the bedroom door just enough to slip through, had gone to his stomach on the rug, and pull-crawled himself across the room. Her big brown handbag st
ood on the dressing table bench, and smoothly he had lifted it down, dragged it noiselessly across the floor to the foot of the bed. (If she wakes up and looks out of the bedclothes, I’ll be hidden by the foot of the bed and quiet; she’ll go back to sleep.) Seven years old. Already accomplished. He had stolen forty cents in dimes. (She never inspects her change, never knows how much she has.) Always “she,” seldom by name, why?
He had replaced the purse and turned to start the crawl back to the door, downstairs, outside to his bike, to Woolworth’s for things worth forty cents he didn’t really need. He had turned.
His mother was staring at him.
Breath clogged like the vacuum cleaner when it’s full. Dust in his mouth, a haze through his brain, unbelievable fear. Her face was a mixture of fury and pity, sorrow and revenge.
Before he could move, she was out of the bed, the heels of her feet bed-red and horny, hitting the floor, and her soft hand sliced air and caught him across the cheek. “Why do you do it!” she moaned. He had hurt her, he knew it. That made it all the worse. He didn’t know why! And she wasn’t really asking. Then dragged by the collar to Daddy’s clothes closet, poised on the lip of the mothball-smelling cavern, and the pit of his stomach turned to ice. “No, please, Mommy, nonono—”
Whipped inside, garbage hidden from view, door slammed and you’ll stay in there till I find out what your father wants me to do with you I can’t control you I don’t know what to do with you, door slammed. Lock clicked as the skeleton key—maintained in that never-needed-to-be-locked door for just this purpose—turned turned quickly turned.
Back in there. Darkness. Oppressive, stuffed like a wad of cotton inside the toe of a sock. Ceiling invisible up there, pressing down, ready to flatten him. His little fist went into his mouth, cries floated to the surface of his mind but were never loosed; he was busy listening to someone else in the closet moaning piteously, whelp-cries for help, to be let out. He knew it was himself, but he could not feel himself making the muscular contractions needed for the sounds.
What fear in the Pit, in the darkness. Sounds of sightlessness, of terror at being closed in, unable to see. Indescribable. One memory melded to a thousand others, of basements (primarily! the most terrible of all!), of the trunk of the Plymouth once, of eyes open yet unseeing…memories…of other closets, of tiny hotel rooms where he slept better because the great neon OTE flashed on OTE and off OTE at regular intervals, metronomically, soothing him…memories…of beds with women in them, sometimes laughing, sometimes surly, sometimes uneasy, because he made love in the light, not in the faceless darkness they had come to trust, when their bodies and their egos were stripped naked for pleasure.
All of these memories, swirling: a paperweight globe of a pristine town that never existed, ankle-deep in snow, turned upside-down, shaken: thoughts swirling, memories like snow, cold, chilling, swirling.
Back from a memory within a memory, to merely a memory:
As Arnie had lain in that bed, the floodgates of his fears had been pried open. After years of having troweled the mud of forgetfulness over the scars, after years of subconsciously sinking the traumas in the silt of other experiences, maturity, pleasures, more pertinent fears…now freed, they thundered forth, and locked inside the bandages, he knew terror once more. He was blind!
The darkness that was deeper than darkness engulfed him, swallowed him whole, destroyed his senses and his reason, left him trembling and moaning like the child who had begged to be let out of the closet, who had pleaded to be taken out of that basement where the rats chittered below him.
And then one day, after a week in the evacuation hospital, the blindness had passed. That simply. They had removed the bandages when he had said he felt a prickling, and without any refocusing or salty tears, his eyesight had come back. It had been some sort of minor miracle. The doctor, less prone to muddy semantics, felt it was more temporary shock and psychosomatic than miraculous. But either way, he was pleased: with Arnie repple-deppled back into the line, it left the bed open for some new pile of human hamburger.
Arnie had been returned to his company and, so minor were the visible reminders of his wounds, within a few days he had almost totally forgotten the madness he had known while lying helpless without his eyes. Almost forgotten. Not quite, but almost.
Then the assault had consumed his attentions, and the simple business of remaining alive became vastly more menacing than any bolts of darkness from the past. The assault, the capture of the collaborationist, the order to dust out the town, the ambush, a burst of hacking fire from a Schmizer…
Another burst of hacking fire from the Schmizer down the street hauled him back to this moment in which he sat on his knees, legs collapsed under him like the segments of a carpenter’s folding ruler, on the floor of the little French maison de ville. Back to this instant of absolute sightlessness, utter darkness, no-sight so much like the memories he had just flashed through.
And fear was reborn.
Consuming fear. Paralyzing fear. Stomach-numbing fear that left him crouched on the floor a mass of putty and milk. Whimpering. Soft tissue-paper whorls of sound from his chest. They came regularly, incapable of being captured in true fidelity by any human mechanism. They were the vocalizations of petrifying terror.
A floorboard creaked.
His whimpering halted, momentarily. A floorboard had creaked, but he had been stone-immobile. He listened, the blood pounding in his ears. A slight rasp, as of shoe sole against bare floor. It came from over his head.
He was not alone in the house.
(And why should he have thought he was? Every other building in this town seemed to be stinking with Nazi troops; why should he think this one was a sanctuary for lost Iowans?)
He could not move. The paralysis he felt at being trapped in the dark. It left him unable to function. He was shaking. Shivering. And the sound came again from above him. One man…two…a patrol…a barracks-full…he wanted to run…
The footsteps came again, gently. He sat in the middle of the room, looking up, the weight of the M-1 unfelt in his hands, and he could not protect himself. If there had been a sliver of light, a gleam, anything, he might have been able to pull himself together…but there was nothing. If there were windows in that room, they were boarded or bricked up. If there had been a smoldering sun dying on the horizon, it might have cast rays through the slats of the door, but (how long had he been there, remembering?) the sun had vanished and taken with it the day. Now it was night. Outside. Inside. Within his mind. He was alone with that other. Up there, in the dark.
Sound. Again. The other was coming for him. One? Two? How many? It had to be only one—he wrenched his mind forcibly from his terror to consider the logistics of the situation—and he was coming downstairs.
The one upstairs had to know he was here. The noise Arnie had made coming through the locked door would have given him all the warning he’d needed. But time had elapsed, and Arnie had made no sound, until he had begun whimpering, and the one (two, nine, nine hundred?) upstairs had waited, trying to ascertain how many had come through that door. Now the waiting was over, it was ended, and the stalking had begun.
The footsteps (yes, now he could tell, it was only one moving; perhaps there were more up there, but only one was moving toward him) reached the head of the stairs, lost to Arnie’s right in the darkness. They began moving down, and there was the clank of metal on wood. The weapon striking the banister. Arnie tried to move his fingers, found them cold and unresponsive. He had to get under cover, not just sit there like a child in the middle of a playpen. He was sure meat, a lamb staked out for some hungry beast.
The footsteps descended, and Arnie could not even tell if the man was in sight. It was that dark. Or was most of the darkness behind his eyes, not really in the room? Had he gone blind again? Could the German see everything? He sat there waiting, and the steps came nearer, nearer, stopped.
A snap-bolt was thrown. It made a hard, unyielding sound in the room. Then t
here was a chuckle.
The burp-gun opened up at waist-level and slugs marched across the room in a straight line. Back and forth. The spray was a thorough one. It bit chunks out of the wooden walls, thundered into the door, sent flakes of wallpaper and debris cascading through the air. The German turned left and right in stately maneuver, cutting the room in half at the height any normal man would be standing. The fusillade seemed to go on indefinitely, and the crimson-flash of the muzzle brought a glare that revealed who was firing. Arnie stared across the room as the bullets snarled over his head. He did not move. He could not move. And as the trooper brought his burp-gun back and forth methodically, the muzzle flash showed Arnie a thickheaded, saturnine man with the top of his skull crammed tightly into a steel helmet, the pot down almost to the thick, unattractive eyebrows. The Nazi was grinning impishly. Chuckling. While the slugs thrummed and screamed overhead harmlessly.