A Midnight Clear: A Novel (8 page)

Gordon’s up close to another mirror, inspecting his teeth. Miller and Shutzer are laughing, posing; pointing at each other. Shutzer gives himself the finger. I don’t think we’ve been seeing ourselves the way we look in these mirrors; it’s hard to accept.
We
look like the enemy.

At the end of the hallway are two doors. One opens onto a gigantic bathroom with more mirrors along the walls. In the center of the room is a strange-looking copper bathtub shaped like a giant shoe. It looks something like the house for
the old lady who didn’t know what to do.
It also looks like the kind of bathtub Claudette Colbert would use to take a bath with lots of bubbles, steam and Clark Gable. She knew what to do.

Miller wants to make a bucket chain, haul water from the well and take a bath. But it’s so cold there’s frost on the insides of windows and the mirrors are steaming up with our breath and the heat of our bodies. There are closets behind the mirrors, all empty; and in one corner is a sink without water. There’s also something like a footbath, which I now know was a bidet.

We go out and open the other door in the hall. It leads onto a narrow turning staircase. We tromp up in a row. At top is a small door; Miller gets it third try.

The attic’s divided into small rooms and these rooms are stuffed full with furniture. Things are piled King Tut tombstyle, helter-skelter. It’s fantastic: musical instruments, rugs, satin-covered chairs, beds, paintings in big gilt frames. We poke our way around. Wilkins is going to go ape exploring all this. He’ll probably be cataloguing the whole shootin’ match before he’s finished.

But we have some needs right now. We carry down four mattresses and satin quilted covers. The second squad of the regimental I and R platoon, Umpty-eleventh Infantry, Eighty-tenth Division, will be living in luxury for a few days.

Downstairs, we square our mattresses around the fire and spread the quilts over them. We put fart sacks on top. We’ll always have at least two on guard so this should work fine. I spread out on one and enjoy the softness; it’s been a long time since I’ve slept in an honest-to-God bed.

Shutzer, our kosher gourmet, hungering for the smell of fish, opens a sardine can with his bayonet. Miller, the man who has everything, even a corkscrew, works the cork from a bottle of wine. This could well be the coup de grace for my stomach, perhaps my entire digestive system, top to bottom. We pass the wine and sardines around; wine’s sour but cold, sardines float in thick oil; some writing on the can’s in German. Maybe this is the German secret weapon; maybe we’ll all wind up in some nice American field hospital with a gaggle of Purple Hearts, victimized by the terrible Huns and their secret weapon, poisoned sardines.

 

I sit there trying to work out bridge hands for the maniacs. Soon as I’m on duty, it’ll be Gordon, Shutzer, Wilkins and Mundy locked in mortal combat. Concocting hands is more fun than playing. Sometimes I watch and count tricks. For me the game is guessing what the contract will be and if the hands will make. Each day, I’m getting better at playing this inside-out, bass-ackwards kind of bridge. The secret is making the hands as Machiavellian as possible.

Before that Saar patrol, the squad usually played ordinary duplicate bridge. Once a week at Shelby, we’d nominate a team to play against the first squad, Edwards’s squad. We always won. If you don’t count Wilkins, Morrie and Gordon were our best players. At Shelby, Wilkins would never play; now he only plays once in a while to make an emergency foursome. Morrie, Fred and Jim were regulars, too. Max Lewis would play sometimes. Now, when the maniacs want a really good game, they beg Wilkins to sit in; but poor Mundy’s stuck with it most of the time. He never played before he joined the squad and he’ll never be any good. He’s not devious at all, and doesn’t care enough about winning. It drives Shutzer mad.

When we lost half the squad, we also lost our only decks of cards. They were on Morrie, and he was back with the medics before he could pass them to any of us. We weren’t thinking much about bridge right then.

He died in the field hospital. With his right hand gone and his face the way it was, I don’t think he tried hard to stay on. I wouldn’t. Gordon and I wrapped him; it looked as if his eyes were empty; the side of his head was spongy soft.

 

We’re continually writing home for playing cards, candles, pencils and dictionaries but not one of us has gotten any. We get warm, hand-knit socks, too thick for our boots, or boxes of cookies mashed into crumbs. Corrollo used to get hot Italian peperone sausages and hard Italian cookies uncrushed. Corrollo also would steal sausage off dead Germans. He said it was good but not so good as he got from home.

Father Mundy’s mother packs each of her cookies in a separate wrapping of waxed paper, then stuffs shredded newspaper tight around them. She’s been sending packages to relatives in Ireland for years, so she knows how.

Father considers those cookies an act of love. They are. He’s the one guy we never hound for seconds but he passes them out anyway. It’s almost as if he’s giving communion; one at a time, carefully unwrapped and handed to you directly. They’re usually tollhouse, with lumps of real chocolate and deep in butter. One of Mundy’s mom’s cookies is something to be eaten slowly with much concentration, almost worth reconverting for.

Maybe the folks back home
are
actually sending us dictionaries, pencils, candles and cards. Maybe the military considers these subversive objects and confiscates them. It could be Love has a whole duffel bag filled with bridge decks, dictionaries, pencils, pens, thesauri and bundles of candles, even blessed ones for Mundy.

I work out four hands in standard bridge annotation on separate cards. I make these cards from the turned edges of my K ration boxes when I cut them off with my bayonet. We thought of making a deck with these pieces but Miller calculated fifty-two of them would be over three inches thick and they’d get battered in no time. I put the finished hands face down on top of the phone battery box; they’ll find them. It’ll be Gordon-Mundy versus Shutzer and an unwilling Wilkins, so I don’t have to think much; with that set of baroque minds, any distribution of cards becomes a drama. They can stretch out a single three no-trump bid to over half an hour.

We’ve been playing this new way three weeks now; sometimes it seems like three years. Gordon invented the game; it’s titled “compact, cardless, replay duplicate bridge.” They’ll each choose a chunk of K box and that’s their hand. I’ve asked to assign hands but they don’t trust my impartiality. As Shutzer put it:

“For Christ’s sake, Won’t, you’re already playing God; what else do you want!?”

When playing a hand, they draw a line under each card as it’s played. Mel insists they all go through the motions of placing the phantom cards empty-handed on the table, dirt, blanket, mud or wherever they’re playing, calling out which card is being played. Miller complains this is one more stupid atavism, but goes along. What else? If Mel doesn’t play; no bridge, everybody down. By the way, Miller is one reason we need a dictionary. He also creates crossword puzzles which make
The New York Times
Sunday puzzles seem simple as tic-tac-toe.

When a hand’s finally played out, the cards are given to me. At my discretion, I then, in the future (of which there sometimes doesn’t seem to be much), give back the cards with clockwise rotation for replay. My upper-left field jacket pocket is stuffed to bulging like Mae West on one side with these sets of bridge hands. Maybe someday a piece of shrapnel will bury itself in there and save my life the way Bibles always seem to save the lives of religious Protestants. I’ll be saved by bridge hands rather than the hand of God.

 

Pencils are pure gold in our squad. If one pencil has arrived for each pleading request, Love must have enough to start a stationery store after the war, no one duffel bag could possibly hold them all.

I cherish my trusty 2B and a 4B, wide lead, carpenter’s pencil. I bought the 4B in a hardware store at Shelby and have carried it all the way. It’s more than half worn down. It’s a race to see which ends first, my 4B, the war or me. Pencils like that are ruined if you drop them, because they break inside the wood; I keep it wrapped in toilet paper and tucked under the bandage in my aid kit. I use those pencils exclusively for drawing. That 4B might be the one thing that’s holding me together. I won’t lend either pencil to anybody for anything; some things are private even when you’ve just been kicked up to sergeant.

I don’t even use them to make up bridge hands; I use an ordinary 2HB for that. I’m the only one in the squad with three pencils. I’d rather leave off a bandolier than be without them.

Most times I draw on the inside of torn open K ration boxes; the whole squad saves these K boxes for me. I can’t carry the drawings with me, so I roll and bury them ten at a time. I have a list of burial places. It’s in my duffel bag on the kitchen truck. I also have ten or twenty of the best drawings in that bag.

I’m thinking then how maybe after the war I’ll come back, use my maps and dig the drawings up. I didn’t think they’d rot; I hoped not; K ration boxes are waxed on the outside.

I draw everything. I have good drawings I did of Morrie and Max, Jim and Fred, Whistle and Louis. I draw our equipment and different places we’ve been. I draw trees and pinecones, farmhouses, scenes, mess cups, bottles; anything. It makes things more real; at the same time, not so real.

 

Actually, my duffel bag with maps and drawings—everything I owned—got lost when I was wounded on the Moselle. Even so, twenty years later, I did go back with my wife and kids. I didn’t find anything; it’d all changed so much and I couldn’t remember any exact places.

 

It’s getting to be four o’clock. Miller and I are on from four to eight. I’m counting it a day guard with only one of us in each hole but most of it will be dark. I put myself up on the hill to have a good look at things. I’ll especially be watching for smoke or fires. Maybe I can catch them cooking dinner, figure out where they are; if there is somebody; there must be.

On the way out, I ask Bud to listen for any vehicle traffic while he’s down there. Hell, I should tell him. I crank up the phones to let Mundy and Wilkins know we’re coming. I have a horror of being shot by somebody on guard when I’m coming out as relief. It’s the way I’m liable to go, a friendly useless casualty.

Miller and I check rifles, hook grenades in our pockets. I’m hoping the damned hole is finished up there. With both Shutzer and Mundy digging over the past four hours, it should be. Digging at dusk through roots is miserable. You get yourself sweaty, then have to sit out in wet cold as the dark comes on.

Going uphill, I can feel the temperature dropping. The sky’s an even, low white; if it drops a few degrees more, we could have snow; that’s all we need. I go back for my shelter half. If it snows, I’ll need to work out a less visible path for climbing to this post.

 

Father’s about frozen. He’s standing up out of the hole stamping his feet. The hole’s finished but the dirt’s still in a pile. Shutzer and Mundy should know better.

“Wow, Wont, is it ever getting cold up here.”

“Yeah, well it’s warm inside. Bud put some hot water on the primus before we came out; there’s even a fire and comfortable beds, with quilted silk covers.”

“Aw, come on, Wont. Don’t kid me.”

“No kidding; you’ll see for yourself.”

He slings his rifle on his shoulder, takes off his helmet. I sit on the pile of dirt.

“By the way, Father, I forgot to give the password. Tell them it’s ‘cold—witch.’ Have Gordon phone it out to Miller.”

I’m wondering if Mundy will catch on. He was already in junior seminary at thirteen, so things like that can pass right over his head. Normally we get our password from division but they can’t give it on the radio so we’ll make up our own.

“Don’t forget, Father; ‘cold—witch.’”

He’s started down the hill.

“Yeah, I got it, ‘cold—witch.’ ”

I watch him pick his way downhill, his shoulders hunched, his woolknit cap on his head, his helmet hanging in the crook of his arm, rifle sliding off his other shoulder. Mundy hates wearing a helmet more than anybody I know. He might also be prime contender as squad’s sloppiest soldier.

 

Then I’m alone. I sit there on the pile of dirt; I’ll spread it in a few minutes. The scope’s on a bed of leaves beside the hole. I tuck it into my belt inside my field jacket; it’s best to keep a scope warm; then the lens doesn’t fog up next to your eye.

Father’s not careful enough; he isn’t as afraid of dying as the rest of us. If I could believe the same things he does, or says he does, I wouldn’t be afraid to die either; I’d walk around playing hero, bucking for paradise. It worries me he’ll make some dumb mistake from not thinking and get himself killed.

I shovel all the dirt back under pine trees and pile pine needles on top. I crank the phone and tell Shutzer I’ll phone on the hour; I’ve borrowed his watch. I can tell the game’s already started: Stan talks to me as if I’m interrupting; I’m only the war now, getting in the way.

It’s beginning to fall dark fast; the reddish parts of deciduous trees are drifting toward purple; shadows under the pines are almost blue black.

I pull out my scope and scan the opposite hill. Near the bottom I pick up a fast-running stream. There’s a flat, gray rock above, with water fanning lightly over it. Just below, between the rock and stream, I spot movement!

The light reduction in the glasses is tremendous and I’ve started shaking so it’s hard to hold still. I slide down into the hole and brace my elbows on the parapet.

There’re three small deer browsing on moss at the base of that overhanging rock. One looks straight at me, long ears twisting to pick up sound. It can’t possibly see this far and there’s not enough light to glint on the lens.