Flanders (26 page)

We ate lunch. The Boche never did get a fix on us—the Maxim was shooting way right of the mark. When the day got hot, we hunkered down in a hole and took us a little nap. I didn’t dream. I don’t know, Bobby. Maybe dreams come harder here.

Late afternoon, we moved around a little more. I snapped myself off a few more shots, didn’t hit anything. When night started to come on, LeBlanc and me risked the moonlight to get ourselves home.

We crawled over the parapet and jumped down from the bags. Marrs and Pickering were waiting for us, wide-eyed.

“Who was shot, then?” Marrs asked. “We heard a terrible screaming, and we thought someone was shot.”

Poor, solicitous Marrs. LeBlanc and me laughed ourselves silly. I threw the camouflage tarp over Marr’s head and stuck my finger into one of the bullet holes. I tickled his ribs. He tried to whip the tarp off, but I wouldn’t let him. We wrestled around in the twilight-filled trench. He crashed into the sandbags. Maybe he hurt himself, I don’t know. Anyway, he got to whining, the way Marrs does sometimes. I let him go.

“Not fair,” Marrs pouted when I lifted the tarp off him. He started touching his nose ginger-like, as if it hurt him. “I thought you was dead, Stanhope. First Foy, then you. Felt all blue, I did.”

“Blue? For me?” I laughed, but he still looked woeful. “That was just LeBlanc throwing off the Boche. Got ’em to stop firing. It was just a joke.”

Then I saw Pickering standing in the wash of light from the dugout door, his droll face solemn. “Not funny, Stanhope,” he said.

How would he know? He has to be the comedian; nobody else has the right. And that Brit humor, Bobby. Their goddamned puns and all. Shaggy dog stories without any point. Maybe it’s better that I didn’t get one of them out in No Man’s Land with me. They’d fall apart out there. One thing I can be sure of: LeBlanc never will.

Travis Lee

* * *

SEPTEMBER 6, A POSTCARD FROM THE FRONT LINE

Dear Bobby,

It rained yesterday. LeBlanc and me found a little bit of shelter under the lip of an odd shell hole. Just when I get comfortable, LeBlanc drops his pants and squats to take a shit. Bastard’s laughing, too. Shit stank like something’d crawled up his ass and died. Well—bullets and rain or no—we had to move on. Goddamned Canuck’s got a weird sense of humor.

Travis Lee

* * *

SEPTEMBER 9, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

The rotation’s slow now. They keep us too long at the front. Still playing cards with Gordon, the rum wallah, and I’m still winning. I take a full canteen to No Man’s Land now, just to while away the hours. Not that there’s much free time. Damned LeBlanc was born with a fierce need to go stirring things up.

I try to get him distracted by conversation—not the easiest thing to do.

“You ever notice how the army’s kind of like high school, except with bullets. You ever notice that, LeBlanc, huh? I mean you got the same asshole teachers, the same brat kids. You got your friends. Everybody’s got a group they belong to. Folks got a tendency to herd, you know?”

All but for LeBlanc. The herd and the predator.

“Like goddamned sheep.” He has a nasty kind of laugh that makes me want to wash my hands after. He flopped belly-down and lifted his scope. “Twelve yards left, by that gap in the bags.”

By the time I took aim, the gap between the bags was empty. I lay back down and took me a drink. “I liked school,” I said.

“I hated it. Hated every Jesus and Joseph fucking thing about it.” He’d gone pale at the corners of his lips. “Nuns all the time after you. ‘Settle down, boy, settle down.’ Things don’t go their way, and they knock your knuckles bloody. You’re not doing anything, eh? Maybe just sneaking a little smoke. And all of a sudden you look around and there she is: one of them waddling bitch penguins, with a ruler in her hand.”

I laughed so loud that the Boche popped a couple of shots our way. “Your sister’s a nun, right?”

He took my canteen away, treated himself to a drink.

“Aw, hell, LeBlanc. My teacher had her a bois d’arc plank paddle with holes in it. You sneak a smoke at my school, and you’d have to drop your pants and bend over. Strong damned woman, too. Arms big around as your thigh. Raised big old welts.” I took back the canteen.

He peered at the sky as if he was looking for a sign. The day was cool, with gray cotton roller clouds to the horizon. “It was always ‘Yes, Sister’ and ‘no, Sister’ and ‘thank you so much, Sister.’ Made me want to puke. The whole building smelled like dust and Church and women. There were crosses plastered on the walls, saints waiting around every goddamned corner. And everybody moved so
slow.
Have patience, Pierre. Don’t go so fast, Pierre. Wait for Johnny. Wait for George. And that old mick priest sided with the nuns all the time. He had a metal ruler, too, only he’d heat it up in the grate, and he’d slap me on the arm to show me what perdition was like. When I got home, Papa beat me more, eh? Said Father wouldn’t have burned me if I hadn’t needed a lesson. When I was a kid I was scared I was going to Hell.”

“Baptists worry some over Hell, too, LeBlanc.”

He wasn’t even listening. “I thought I was going crazy, eh? Every week I’d go into confession hoping that old mick’d help me. But all he’d say was, ‘Stop having those thoughts. Just stop it,’ he’d say. Sure. Like it was easy as turning off a spigot. I figured there was something wrong with me, eh? I was possessed by a devil or something. Then, when I was in eighth grade, a kid moved to our school from Montreal. He said he knew boys who had got felt up by their priest. Altar boys. And right there in the rectory, too. That’s when I saw that priests were no goddamned better than we are, and I stopped worrying so much about Hell. Still, you know? My mama always said I acted like Satan was nipping at my heels. But I think that’s only because I liked to go fast. Ran everyplace I went. Ran my horse, too. Hey. You like that, Stanhope? Climbing on the back of a horse—just jumping up, no saddle or bridle—and kicking him into a run?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I knew you did. That’s what I like best—going fast, climbing high and diving off into the river. Stepping right on the train tracks while the train’s coming, eh?”

I knew I was looking inside him for the first time, like I’d found a key that unlocked a vacant house. The furniture there surprised me.

“There’s plenty of time to slow down when you’re dead,” he said.

A fine drizzle started falling. He covered himself with the tarp. I rolled around in the hole until I was comfortable and closed my eyes for a little nap. When I woke up, the clouds had lowered, the day was darker. All I could see of LeBlanc was the glint of his eyes—a snake under a rock. It scared me so bad, I sat up fast. A Boche sniper took a wild, fast shot at me. I hugged the ground, my heart hammering.

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask what had startled me into sitting up, nothing like that. I didn’t speak, either. I took a steadying sip from my canteen.

I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me like LeBlanc lives fast, Bobby. That stillness, like a scorpion’s. Like a spider’s. The glint of his eyes under the shadow of that tarp. But when he moves, he moves so quick you can hardly see him. I don’t have to watch him kill to know that.

He was ready to move again. “Come on, Stanhope,” he said. “Get up. Let’s go shoot some Boche. Don’t be so goddamned slow.”

Does he kill the stragglers? Was murder part of those thoughts that used to scare him? When he moved to the next shell hole I moved too, not daring to stay behind. A hundred or so yards from me, Emma Gee played her deadly rataplan.

I swear, Bobby, nobody loves adventure like LeBlanc.

Travis Lee

* * *

SEPTEMBER 12, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

ONE FOR ME

Dear Bobby,

Life narrows in the trenches. You spend your time nearsighted. The sky’s small. The horizon’s the next wall of sandbags. Worse, your world of people shrinks till it seems like there aren’t any folks outside your own platoon. Sometimes when it’s quiet you wonder if the rest of the trench is empty, and the war got over, and everybody went home.

I saw Miller today. It was a foggy, dim afternoon, the clouds hanging low. He was moving down a communications trench to visit the troops, I guess. I was headed up to the med dugout for an aspirin. I made the next zigzag and there he was, taking up my horizon. We both stopped dead. His eyes went darting away from mine.

“Afternoon, sir,” I said.

His face was already turning pink. “Good to see you again, Stanhope.”

“Good to see you, too, sir.” And I meant it.

He must have heard the welcome in my tone, for his gaze snapped to mine.

“Sorry, sir. You can’t pass without the password.”

His eyebrows rose. Cautious now, like a horse the first time in snow, not sure which way to step. “Ah?”

It was cool. Right in that spot, the air smelled fresh, like there hadn’t been any death around to spoil it. “Yes, sir. Sorry about that, sir. New regs and everything.”

So damned serious. It broke my heart. He’d caught the upper-class stuffiness of Dunston-Smith.

I said, “I’ll start it for you, sir. ‘Thou, that to human thought art nourishment.’ ”

He frowned.

I prodded him with another line. “ ‘Like darkness to a dying flame.’ ” Daylight was dying, too. And my smile along with it. He had to know
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
Hell, it was one of Shelley’s better-known works, not like
The Masque of Anarchy
or something. To be truthful, I always thought of it as Miller’s and my private anthem. I went on slow. “ ‘Depart not ...’ ”

A smile broke out all over him. It was like, for that instant, that the sun had pierced the clouds. “ ‘As thy shadow came!’ ”

“Doing good, sir. Just the couplet to go. “ ‘Depart not, lest the grave should be ...’ ”

“Password’s too bloody easy, Stanhope. ‘Like life and fear, a dark reality.’ ”

We stood in the mist grinning like a pair of fools. “Good to see you, Stanhope,” he said again, and this time he meant it. “You’re well, I take it?”

“You bet, sir.”

“And the sharpshooting from No Man’s Land suits you? Lieutenant Blackhall and I had quite a discussion about that. He’s a stickler for rules, you know. Sometimes it’s best to let subalterns have their head, if they don’t abuse the privilege.”

“I understand, sir. Everything’s fine.”

“Well.” He cleared his throat. His eyes went wandering the gray afternoon again. “Excellent totals, at any rate. Must buy you a dinner when we’re on leave. Perhaps a run at one of your tarts.” He was smiling when he said that, too; but there was a hint of condescension, too.

It put me in my place. And it hurt, too, Bobby, if you want to know the truth. I’ve seen coloreds get that smile to them when they’re together and a white boy like me’s around—it’s like they share all kinds of secrets, or like suffering makes them better. Maybe it does.

About then Fritz decided to lob a few shells our way. A Jack Johnson landed toward the rear. Black smoke rose into the cool pewter day.

“Take you up sometime on that dinner, sir.”

We shook hands on it.

A whizzbang landed next—so close that we both ducked, and then we laughed. “Best find shelter, what?” He sounded sorry to be leaving.

We had an awkward time of it, squeezing past each other. The trench was tight. We went chest to chest, but he kept his hips best he could away from me. He’s a gentleman like that.

And when we were past each other and I had started away, I heard him call my name. I looked over my shoulder to see him smiling, there in the misty gloom, in the constriction of that trench.

“ ‘While yet a boy I sought for ghosts,’ isn’t it?”

The next line of verse. I’d forgotten. Jesus. How could I have? It sent a shudder through me. “Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.”

He nodded, tapped his cap with his stick. “Must have us a real challenge some day. A witness each to mark our shots and wipe our brows when we’re sweated. The English Romantic poets and fifty paces. Well. Ta-ta, Stanhope.”