The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (60 page)

And Kavic stopped in the road and waited, livid, for Miller to come abreast of him. “Goddamn it, Miller, can't you hold on to anything?”

“I'm sorry, Kavic, I thought I had it.”

“Goddamn right you're sorry. Next time it rains you're gonna be sorrier ‘n hell. You know goddamn well what the supply situation is—now why can't you hold on to anything?”

And there was nothing to do but walk, shamefaced, with a face grown used to shame. That was the worst part of the afternoon, to tell the truth.

“What the hell happened to that maid?” Tom Brace said. “Do you see her, honey?”

“I think she's in the kitchen,” his wife said. “I'll go root her out,” and she strode away, hips twitching prettily in an expensive cocktail dress.

“Tell her we're all dying of thirst,” Brace called after her. Then he turned back to Miller. “So what happened, Lew? This is really interesting to me, finding out what went on up in your sector that night. Did your company make the assault, or what?”

“No, one of the other companies was the first to cross,” Miller said, “but it amounted to the same thing for my squad, I mean the squad I was in, because we were farmed out to work for the battalion wire section that night carrying spools of communications wire across the canal, and we followed right after the first company.”

“I see,” Brace said.

“But actually it was a good deal, because all we had to worry about was getting the wire over and staying out of trouble, and then after the crossing we got to hang around while the battalion CP was set up. We goofed off all the next day before we joined our own company again.”

“Wait a minute now, you're getting ahead of the story,” Brace said. “I want to hear about the crossing itself. You said you had artillery on you when you crossed?”

“Started before we crossed,” Miller said. There was no avoiding it now. “As I remember it, the artillery started coming in when we were still a couple hundred yards from the canal, on the road.”

“Was this at night?” Betty asked.

“That's right.”

“Eighty-eights, were they?” Brace said.

“That's right.” And now it was all there. The seven years dissolved and it was all there—the dark gray road lined with black trees, the shuffling columns of men on either side. The familiar pain of bandoliers and straps of webbing gripped his shoulders and neck, and there was a new pain cutting the flesh of his hand: a looped and knotted strand of communications wire from which hung, heavily, a big steel spool. Some of the spools had handles, but Miller had drawn one that didn't, and there was no way to carry it without cutting his hand. “Stay together now,” Wilson urged in a hoarse whisper, “everybody stay together.” The only way to stay together in the dark, five paces apart, was to concentrate on the dim blur of the next man's back, Shane's. Shane's back was short and square, the helmet rode low on its shoulders. Whenever it grew too dim Miller hurried a few steps to catch up; when it seemed too close he held back, trying always to keep the five paces. There was a quick fluttering rush of air and a—
Slam
!—somewhere on the other side of the road. Like great collapsing centipedes both columns of men rolled into the ditches. Miller fell flat on his belly—it was a good, deep ditch—and the spool banged into his kidneys. Then there was another fluttering rush and another—
Slam!
—closer this time, and in the shocked silence before the next one there were the inevitable voices: “Eighty-eights” and “Keep moving, men, keep moving.” Miller had raised his head just enough to see Shane's boots sprawled in the dirt ahead of him, and to touch them with his fingers. When the boots moved, he would move too. The next one was much louder—
Slam!
—and Miller felt something clink on his helmet and spatter across his back. From across the road there was a tremulous, almost apologetic voice: “Medic? Medic?”

“Where? Where are ya?”

“Over here, here he is.”

“Keep moving, men.”

Shane's boots moved and Miller followed, scrambling to his feet and running crouched over, rifle in one hand and spool in the other. At the next fluttering rush Shane and Miller both hit the dirt in time—
Slam!
—and then they got up quickly and ran again. Everybody was running now. Across the road a new voice broke from baritone to wild falsetto: “Oh-oh-oh! Oh! Oh! The blood's coming out it's coming out it's coming out
it's coming out!
”

“Quiet!”

“Shut that bastard up!”

“
S'coming out! S'coming
OUT!”

“Where? Where
are
ya?”

“Keep moving, men. Keep moving.”

Shane's back ran on in the darkness, swerved to the right, up onto the bald surface of the road again, and then went straight ahead, faster. Miller lost it, ran faster and found it. But was it the same back? Wasn't this one too tall? There was another fluttering rush, the back sprawled out on the road and Miller fell beside it—
Slam!
—and then he grabbed its shoulder. “Shane?”

“Wrong man, Mac.”

Miller started to run again. At the next rush of air he ducked convulsively without changing his stride—
Slam!
—and went on running. “Shane? Shane?” He slowed down to keep in step with a short figure—a lieutenant, he saw by the white smear on the helmet—who was jogging along calling, “Keep moving, men,” over his shoulder. With absurd politeness he said, “Pardon me, sir, can you tell me where the wire crew is?” “I'm afraid not, soldier. Sorry.” At least the lieutenant, too, was rattled enough to be absurdly polite. “Keep moving, men.”

Miller pulled ahead of him, then cut out across the road. At the top of the road's crown there was another fluttering rush, and he dove for the other side like a ballplayer sliding home, just in time—
Slam!
A figure lay prone in the ditch. “Hey Mac, you seen the wire squad?” There was no answer. “Hey Mac—” Still no answer; dead, maybe, or maybe just scared half to death. Miller ran again, and it wasn't until much later that he thought:—or maybe wounded. My God, I should have stopped and felt his heart—called a medic. But he ran, back across the road again, only ducking for the shells now—
Slam!
—and sometimes not even ducking, thinking: my God, I'm brave—look at me, I'm on my feet and everybody else is falling down. He was sure he had never run so fast in his life. The road ended—turned right or something—and he ran with the crowd straight ahead, down a wide slope of muddy earth. The barrage was mostly behind him now, or seemed to be. Then there was the bridge, with men jostling and crowding—“Take it easy, you guys . . . take it
easy
”—and then the sudden cold shock of water up his legs. Just ahead of him a man fell headlong with a heavy splash and two or three others stopped to help him up. The shore was like the other shore at first, sloping mud, but then came a retaining wall, stone or concrete, fifteen or twenty feet high in the darkness. Somebody muttered, “Ladders . . . ladders,” and Miller, groping, found the dark wooden rungs against the wall. He slung his rifle and clumsily thrust the other arm through the spool's carrying wire, to free both hands, and then he began to climb, vaguely aware of other ladders on either side of him and other men climbing them. A boot stepped on his fingers and he felt the squirm of other fingers under his own boot. The rungs ended short of the top and there was an instant of wild teetering without a handhold until a pair of arms reached down to help him up. “Thanks,” he said, kneeling on the edge of the embankment, and the man ran off. Miller turned back and reached down to grab the next man's hands, and the next man said, “Thanks.” All along the top of the embankment there was a babble of voices, excited, out of breath: “. . . this way . . .” “. . . which way? . . .” “. . . over here . . .” “. . . where the hell do we go now? . . .” They were in a plowed field; the uneven earth gave like soft sponge under Miller's boots. He followed the sounds and shadows into the field, running again, while the shells rushed over his head to explode well behind him—
Slam
 . . .
Slam
 . . .
Slam
 . . .—back on the other side of the canal. And it was there in the field that Wilson's voice said, “Miller? That you?”

“Wilson? Jesus, thank God!”

“Where the hellya been?”

“Where've
I
been—my God, I've been looking all over hell for
you
!”

“Keep your voice down. Got your spool?”

“Sure I've got it.”

“Hang on to it. And for Christ's sake stay with us this time. Come on.”

“So what happened,” Tom Brace said, “after you got to the other side?”

Miller closed his eyes and passed his hand over them. “Well,” he said, “after we climbed the retaining wall we were in a plowed field.”

“Retaining wall? You mean you had a goddamn
wall
to climb? We didn't have anything like that down where we were.”

“Well it wasn't bad,” Miller said, “because there were these ladders running up the face of it.”

Brace frowned, picturing it. “Ladders? Seems funny the Jerries wouldn't've knocked them down, though, doesn't it?” he said. “Couldn't they have been something your own people put up?”

“Well I guess they could have been, at that, now that I think of it,” Miller said. “I'm afraid I just don't remember.” Uncertain about the bridge; uncertain about the ladders—this was quite a night for uncertainties. “Anyway,” he went on, “we went across this big plowed field, and as I remember it we didn't run into any more trouble until we got to this little town that was our objective for the night, on the other side of the field. There was some small-arms fire there, more or less of a rearguard action, I guess.”

“I see,” Brace said.

“But as I said, all my squad had to worry about was those spools of wire; after that we had nothing to do but find a place to goof off.”

In the first thin blue of daylight they were crouched in the shelter of a wall, listening to the stutter of machine guns down the street and waiting to be dismissed from the wire detail. That was when Wilson said, “Kavic wants to see you, Miller,” and Miller scuttled up to the place where Kavic sat waiting against the wall, his face gaunt with fatigue, his helmet cocked rakishly on his thin skull.

“Miller, what the hell happened to you back there on the canal?”

“I lost sight of Shane during the shelling.”

“Well why'n the name of Christ can't you keep up?”

“It wasn't a question of keeping
up,
Kavic, I—”

“All right, never mind all that, Miller. I'll put it this way: you give me more goddamn trouble than all the rest of the men in this squad put together. You're more goddamn trouble than you're worth. You got an answer for that?”

“As I remember it,” he told Tom Brace, “we found an empty house and went to sleep in it. Slept for about twenty-four straight hours, except for taking turns standing guard, and when we woke up the town was all cleared. It was the Battalion CP and our own company was a couple miles up the road.”

“I see,” Brace said.

“Here you are, gentlemen,” Nancy Brace called. “On the house.” She was bringing a tray with four martinis on it.

“Good deal,” Brace said. “Thanks a lot, honey.”

Miller drank greedily, hoping to put the image of Kavic back where it belonged.

“Did I miss the best part of the story?” Nancy asked.

“Oh, there wasn't any story, as usual,” Betty said. “It seems my husband went to sleep for twenty-four straight hours.” She put her pretty lips to the glass and took a sip. Then she said brightly, “But what happened to
you
on that canal, Tom? The last we heard from you was where you were bobbing around in a boat, getting shot at. Don't tell me
you
went to sleep.”

“Well,” Brace said, “not for a little while, anyway. That was a bad night. We didn't have any artillery on us, we were luckier than you there, Lew, and we didn't have any walls to climb either, but as I said there were these two Jerry machine guns up on the bank, and that seemed plenty bad enough at the time. How we ever made it to the other side I'll never know. One thing, I had this damn good B.A.R. man. He got that old B.A.R. into action in about one second flat, right from the boat. That way nobody got panicky, even though two—no, three of the kids were hit, two of them killed. In the boat behind ours they all panicked and went over the side, all their damn equipment strapped to their backs and everything. Some of them drowned and the rest weren't fit for anything when they did get ashore. The third boat had it a little easier, because by that time our own people back on shore had a couple machine guns firing and they were able to provide some cover. But let me tell you, when we finally did get to the other side it was a lonely damn place to be.”

“What on earth did you
do
?” Betty asked.

“Had to get those damn guns some way,” Brace said. “What we needed was mortar fire, but I couldn't call for any because our goddamn radio was on the blink, either that or the radio man was too scared to operate it right. ‘Course, I figured the people back there had sense enough to start putting down some mortar fire anyway, without being asked, but where we were, exposed and all, we didn't feel much like waiting around for them to make up their minds.” Brace paused and put his empty glass on the low table behind him. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one loose and stuck it in his lips, leaning forward to accept a light from his wife. “It was one of those moments,” he said, “when you have to do some damn-fool thing before you even think about it, just to keep your men from losing their heads completely. Thing is, you have to
act
like you're in command of the situation. So what I did was this: we were right close to one of the Jerry guns, and I could see from the tracers it was pretty busy defending itself against the fire from the other side, so I had that B.A.R. man I told you about keep laying it on the other gun, further down the line—he didn't need much coaxing; he was a damn good man—and I crawled up to within about fifty feet of the near gun and started pitching grenades. Luck? I want to tell you, I've never been so lucky in my life. The gun quit after the second grenade, and we found these two Jerries deader'n hell. Then about that time our mortars started in on the other gun, and all we had to do was he low and sweat it out till the rest of our people got across.”