Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (24 page)

Peregrin said nothing. It hurt too much merely to breathe. His rib cage had been crushed. He lay against the house, listening, hearing what they had to say.

The others joined in, between sobs and rasps of breath. "Let them lynch him. Let them do it."

They knew who to see ... they knew the men with the ropes ... the men who would start to hit them when they appeared, but who would listen when they said they had come to give up Daniel White. They knew who to see.

They told Peregrin: "We'll be back. You rest there. We'll do it." And they moved off into the night, to make their vengeance.

Peregrin lay up against the building, and he began to cry. His voice was soft and deep as he said to the sky, "Oh God, they're doing it, but they're doing it for the wrong reasons. They're hating, and that isn't right. They'll give him up, and that's what we need, Lord, but why do they have to do it this way?"

Then after a while, when he had fainted several times, and had the visions of the men storming the jail, and striking the guards and dragging the snarling, defiant Daniel White from his cell, his thought became clearer.

It was worth it. It had to be worth it. What they did, what they allowed, it had to be worth something in the final analysis. For the greater good, he had said. It had to be that. Because if it wasn't, surely there could be no hell deep enough to receive him.

If it was worth it, the end had to be in sight.

And had this been a motion picture, with a happy ending desirable--instead of a grubby little story out of central Georgia--then the man called Peregrin would have considered the inscription they must carve on the statue of the martyr, Daniel White.

--Evanston, Illinois, 1961

BLIND BIRD, BLIND BIRD, GO AWAY FROM ME!

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

William Ernest Henley, Invictus

There is a sound in that darkness. A soft, mewling sound, far out in the black, a small creature in pain, crying; vapors of night and distance obscure it, but that sound is terrible; a child afraid of the dark; yes, that sound no other sound can approach for pain and terror. The child, lost in the forest of the night, blind, hands out before his face, afraid to move, afraid to remain still, trapped, trembling, help me, help me! But if you go toward that pitiful pleading, somehow the voice seems deeper, older, more strangled by a darkness from within than the darkness without.

There. Up there, look up that flight of basement stairs, barely dimly seen by the crack of light shining under the door. A child crouched against the wooden panels, scratching feebly at the locked door, looking back over his shoulder, down into the basement. Another sound, tinny rasping counterpoint to the child's pathetic sobbing; a scuttling, furry sound, little claws against concrete, fearful gray creatures with snake-tails twitching, wire-thin whiskers moving spastically, bullet bodies moving quickstart and stop in the basement, coming to feed. With each new wave of movement from below, the child plunging deeper into hysteria, the voice rising shrilly, pleading with the mother beyond the locked door...

"Mommy, pl-please Mommy, let me in, let me in, Mommy, b-be guh-good, beee gooood, Mommmee!" Chittering shriek from below in the absolute darkness, the child flinging himself against the unyielding door, "Mommmmmmee!"

But the door remains closed, the child flattened against it, a painting on wood, terror contorting the small features into a gargoyle's insane face, and the blind darkness filling his mind till it bubbles froths churns like molten lava, searing the inside of his skull, running over and destroying all reason, coherence; pathetic infant, condemned to horror in the darkness; capital punishment, living death, entombment in fear; crime now lost in the mist of childhood, forgotten, tiny sin whose punishment razor-slashes the delicate lining of memory. This child will sleep with the lights on for many years.

Listen. The voice is deeper, down more in the throat, softer, more controlled by time, and the face alters, melts, shifts, runs like hot wax, that face framed by darkness ... and comes to focus in time, another face.

MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US51403352, thirty-one years old, face pressed tightly against the rough plank door of a two-storey residence in the center of Bain-de-Bretagne, midway between Rennes and Nantes on the spearhead salient of General George S. Patton's 3rd Army. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US Infantry, July 1944, hurled forward from his own past to press his face against the splintery dun-colored wood of a door in a waystop town midway between somewhere and nowhere. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, "Arnie" to his friends, formerly of Willoughby, Iowa, now wishing he were taffy that could slip between the slats of the unyielding barrier to his safety, a middling-warm day in July, in the midwest of lovely France.

Softly: "Let me in, let me in, let me in ..." as a rattle of machine-gun fire preceded, by an instant, the bite of masonry across the back of his neck. The Kraut gunner in the bell-tower was still chipping for an angle at him, but a ricochet might accomplish his mission for him.

Across the narrow cobblestoned street Arnie Winslow heard a tinkle of breaking window glass, and the muzzle of an M-1 rifle poked out, firing down the passage at the German troops spaced out in alleys, doorways, upstairs windows, rooftops. The rest of the patrol was in that building, cut off from escape on three sides by thick stone walls, and on the fourth by a town full of Elite Corps killers intent on keeping Winslow's patrol from getting back. With the intelligence that Bain-de-Bretagne was not--as the quisling had reported--empty of the enemy, evacuated in panic two days before. Twelve men were in that warehouse. Twelve of the fifteen who had come out on the patrol. Winslow made thirteen. Fourteen and fifteen lay sprawled in the weak, failing light of a French sundown. He could just see the inward-turned feet of Pfc. Coopersmith around the edge of the doorway, felled without murmur by a burst from a Schmizer burp-gun, loosed from a courtyard down the street. 2nd Lt. Thomas G. Benbow, formerly intercollegiate high-diving champion from the University of Utah, sprawled idiotically half-across a milk cart parked near the side of the warehouse. Idiotically, for the same covey of shots that had taken out Pfc. Coopersmith had done corrective surgery on Benbow's infectious grin, widening it from ear to ear, from nose to chin, in a bloody mash, leaving him with a Pagliacci resemblance to a circus clown. From where he was flattened against the door, Arnie could not see the bone-shattered cavern that opened the rear of Benbow's skull to the fresh air.

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 doorway and against the slabbed 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 coalsack filled with dust; nothingness weighing down on his eyes, filming them with ink-shadows, flitting dimnesses ...

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.