We Were Beautiful Once (8 page)

“You met the enemy, Mr. Sheer?”

Snapping back into the present, Harry spoke into the cavernous silence.  “I heard shots coming from the other side.”

Nick watched Harry's eyes.  They leveled somewhere beyond the spectators.  In a flicker, lasting tenths of seconds, Harry added, “Piercing whistles, bugles...  a huge force...  Chinese Reds.”

Then like that night when the saliva thickened, the words in Harry's throat stuck, words to describe the enemy officer running at right angles, away from the charge, following the impulse to escape death.  Another pop and a .30 caliber slug tunneled deep into the man's shoulder.  He staggered, his limb flopping aimlessly.  His band lost all semblance of order, scattering randomly, some hitting the ground.  The officer wobbled toward the wooded blackness that crumbled under the mass of retreating mortality.  Hector, a seventeen year old L.A. Pachuco who carried a picture of himself dressed in a zoot suit jitterbugging, tumbled forward, neck twisting, his heavy frame hurrying his descent into the frozen ground.  Slow-motion-like he fell and lifted like a half empty flour sack before resting.  Behind him, the enemy appeared; apparitions out of a smoky miasma.

Following the deafening carbine chatter, Harry ran toward the right of the line where the action boiled.  Enemy reinforcements populated front, rear, and center.  Corporal Franklin first trailing him, flew passed him.  He fired without direction, shooting Franklin in the back, but before hitting the ground, the man's face caught shrapnel and unwrapped from its skeleton  underpinning.  Blood, bone, gristle, a man with no face, the horror of twenty-five, fifty, a hundred or more Chinese charging across the paddy.

Reports from a machine gun syncopated whatever empty intervals weren't filled by small arms fire and bugles; men appeared and disappeared like cascading dreams, darkly magical, deadly real.  Two grenades exploded within tenths of seconds, and Harry felt warm blood flowing over his cold pubic bone, down his left inner thigh.  He ignored the sensation, turning toward a silhouetted mortar opening up on the left.  Arrow's booming charge ordered the men to retreat into the dense woods, a Tommy gun droned on in the roaring chatter, until the Browning automatic rifle opened up, stuttering, spraying staccato-like over the full terrain, crisscrossing back and forth, pounding out the rhythm of a tom-tom played to a frantic crowd of beboppers.  The sky sizzled with yellows and reds from the ever widening mountain fires.  Dillard, a guy who nobody had believed when he had claimed to be an Olympic athlete, ran by like a gazelle for no apparent reason, except to maybe knock out the mortar single handed. He folded, doubling over, hitting ground face first, tumbling, coming to rest, peaceful, imagining starry constellations over Lookout Mountain, just outside of Cheyenne. In the next instant, he closed his eyes to the stars and the ghoulish condensing cloud that emanated from the entrails exposed to the cold black air.

“Mr. Sheer are you okay, sir?” Lindquist asked.

Sheer stared beyond the well, to the open rear doors of the courtroom, standing room only, war voyeurs, vacant eyes staring back, heads upon necks stretched forward, suspended in poses of expectancy, one-hundred-fifty pairs of eyes, blue, gray, brown, rained in on him.  Eyes empty of the terror few men know, full of the starry visions of bloodthirsty citizens and generals, men in black suits who wallow in the glory of battle.

“Mr. Sheer are you all right?” Lindquist asked again.

“Yes, sir, guess the trip made me tired.  Lost my concentration.”

 

Harry remained quiet.  The courtroom remained still.  The afternoon sun shone through the windows, casting a beam of light in the center of the well.  Four to five seconds ticked off the clock above the jury box.  Lindquist uncharacteristically cut in, “Mr. Sheer, is there more you would like to tell us?”

Sheer's eyes opened wide.  “What's that?”

“Is there more you'd like to say?”

“Yeah, we were scattered to the four corners.  Some in the ravines.”

“Is there more, sir?”

“Yes.  Marched my men into a situation, that I not been...  had I not — .”

Lindquist motioned to the clerk, “Let's take five minutes.”

***

When Lindquist again assumed the bench Harry continued where he had left off— as if he started a tape recorder that had been paused.  “Somehow, I got separated.  Then the lights went out.  No idea where I was or what happened; hands were tied, pants were like cardboard, stiff frozen blood, crotch was numb.  I was later told... ”

Harris jumped up.  “Objection. The witness is about to offer hearsay testimony.”

“I will allow it.  Proceed, Mr. Sheer.”

“They told me copters came, scooped up the wounded.  Two days later, the copters returned, bagged the dead...  like cakes of ice.  That night, I guess the Chinese were pullin' us out of cricks, puttin' us in groups, marchin' us in circles, movin' us all night.  You could see the men against the snow, so travelin' in the daytime was dangerous.  At daybreak, they'd put us in another ravine, kept us there all day.”

“You reached a permanent destination, correct?” Nick asked.

“Yeah, came upon this camp, looked like a little city.”

“Did they tell you what camp you were in?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you ever see Roger Girardin after that?”

“No, sir.”

“It is possible he was captured like you, right?”

Harris jumped up again. “Objection.  Speculation.”

“Sustained.”

“Mr. Sheer when you were repatriated in August 1953, is it not true that you discovered you'd been listed MIA?”

“Yes, that's right.  My parents did not know I was a POW, even though it seemed I was on a Red Cross list.”

Nick turned and read the judge's unusually weary face.  “Your Honor, no further questions for Mr. Sheer.”

Lindquist rubbed a lump on his neck.  “Mr. Harris proceed.”

Harris stood up to cross-examine.  “Mr. Sheer you never laid eyes on Girardin again, did you?”

“No sir,” responded Sheer emphatically.

“It is your testimony, sir, that you never spoke to anyone who saw Roger Girardin after that skirmish?”

“Yes, sir.”  

“Tell me, sir, did you speak with the plaintiff's Counsel before you testified here today?”

“Yeah,” he said, feeling that somehow he'd violated the law.

“Isn't it true that Mr. Castalano discussed how you were going to testify, what you'd remember, how'd you say it?”

“Yes, for about an hour.”

“Isn't true that your speaking with Mr. Castalano is the reason you can so vividly recall what happened thirty years ago?”  

Someone in the crowd groaned.  Lindquist instantly raised his head.  The crowd drew back, warned.

“No, sir!”

“No further questions,” Harris sneered, turning from the lectern.

Lindquist adjusted his glasses and looked at Nick.

“No follow up, your Honor.”

The judge turned to Sheer.  “Sir, thank you, you are free t' go.”

When Sheer was halfway across the well, Nick rose from his chair.  “Your Honor, I'd like to call my next witness.”

Lindquist rubbed his cheek, the corner of his nostril, checked the clock on the wall above the jury box.  “Counsel, we have several motions scheduled, so let's adjourn for the day.  Marshal, see what they're doing to fix the air conditioning!”

***

That night, Julie could not sleep. Two floor fans droned on, sweeping side-to-side across a thick layer of humid air.  Tractor trailers fell noisily into potholes half-mile away, the couple on the fourth floor fought over infidelity, the cats scratched the already badly shredded chair in the corner.  She tossed in bed, soaked from stifling heat and the adrenaline that shot through her every time she imagined Roger dead and bagged like the cakes of ice Sheer described. The images now came to her in flashes and flickers like a frightful black and white movie playing to an insomniac who lives in profound solitude, obsessing over where it all began.

1940s

 

 

MARY, CHARLIE AND THEIR TWO KIDS— Jack and Julie— lived in a three room, cold-water flat with a community toilet from 1931— right after Julie was born— to the beginning of World War II, when overtime helped them move to a five room cottage with hot water.  When war broke out, Charlie had been working at a lipstick factory that seamlessly converted lipstick cases into brass cannon shells.  Scrawled on the mirror in the women's toilet in Max Factor Red was “make war, not love,” but for these warriors— “essential to the war effort”— the monotonous hum and occasional clang on the factory floor were the only war sounds they would ever hear.

When the war started, the company Mary worked for converted bedsprings into barbed wire.  She felt she did important work during the national emergency, and though it was not necessarily recognized by others, it was important to her.  Six days a week, precisely two minutes after the 6 a.m. whistle, she would flick a switch to send electricity into the controls of an extrusion device and pull a lever transferring molten steel into a die that formed filaments.  After waiting thirty seconds she would press her foot on a pedal to engage a five fingered, claw-like device that pulled, coiled and cut the steel into a long thin wire.  The barbs were added later.  If the machine jammed, she would gingerly push on one part or another to dislodge it from its fellow rotating members and concentrate on not entangling her fingers—certain amputation.  By the time the war ended, she had aged two years for every one — but she, at least, had all her fingers.

After the first few years of marriage most people learn the mechanics of a fair swing: occasionally striking out, occasionally getting on base.  But Mary and Charlie would never see the ball coming or see it too late and swing to exhaustion.  In place of managing life's changing pitches, they became neurotics waiting for a catastrophe— the next inevitable, life-altering event.  In anticipating the next bad thing, they sensed the slightest curve and overplayed it, flailing until the no-win, no-way-out inning passed.  And these eccentricities, as if caused by genetic defect, would eventually afflict Jack and Julie.

Charlie had a gloom and doom about himself.  He felt powerless and drank too much on payday, which probably conditioned his paranoia and extreme jealously.  He was also quick with the rod, especially when it came to Jack.  Sometimes several nights in succession,  for infractions major and minor, Charlie would charge into Jack's room, strap in hand.  Jack would clasp his hands around the back of his head and tuck his knees into his chest.  Crack across the skull!  A right arm moved forward.  He would shut his eyes.  Head slammed to the right.  He'd open his eyes.  Crack!  A fist would come from the left and he would close his eyes, sometimes traveling to a different world, one where the pounding was only a distant thunder.  A hail of assaults would rain down until Charlie no longer felt powerless and Jack again heard the sound of his own voice
mumbling numbers
—
adding, dividing, multiplying, and questioning the odd results
.

Jack did not intellectualize how he survived in an asylum that periodically went haywire. Years later, a VA-appointed psychiatrist told him that he stored the aftereffects of Charlie's brutality in damaged dendrites and synapses— crippling his psyche by leaving him unable to speak his mind and by ingratiating himself to overcompensate for feelings of worthlessness.  Well into adulthood, when the world sometimes caved in on Jack, he would curl himself in a fetal position, take quick, short breaths, blink rapidly and count backward—replaying that stroboscopic view of reality that got him through those long moments of suffering.

 

1945–1950

 

 

MARY LOOKED TO THE LORD TO MAKE HER son strong and her husband sober. In Charlie's case she would have settled for tolerable, within the margin that close friends and relatives will allow closet drunks.  She worked hard on both accounts until Charlie left Jack with a black eye.  She took one look at his shiner and declared, “The Lord leads us through signs that can't be ignored.”  When the war ended in 1945, she quit trying to fix Charlie's problem and moved in with her parents on Willa Street, two miles across town but nearer the schools were Julie and Jack attended.

The month after she left Charlie, she quit the factory and put her hands to work at Hilltop Hospital.  Her first assignment was the polio ward— kids in iron lungs.  She emptied bedpans, salved bedsores, helped the miserably sick in a factory town whose thrift paid for no more than one nurse per hundred patients.  Jack felt that the “fat cats,” as his grandfather called them, took advantage of his mother's empathy.  And he worried she would get sick if she worked long enough in the polio ward.  She told Jack, “I'd rather die in the fever than crushed in the gears of one of those presses.”  Jack knew there weren't any good options for his mother, but his own salvation could come if he could find another world.

Jack enrolled at Ridley University, a state-run school, where he signed up for ROTC and the promise of joining the Army Reserves as a second lieutenant at graduation.  Mary wanted this, but Charlie felt differently.  He told Mary, “Kid's tryin' to prove he's smarter than me.  Well he ain't. Never gonna be.”  When Jack asked his Mom why Charlie was cool when he got the acceptance letter, she told him that his Dad didn't want him to get too big for his britches.  His reply was, “Mom, all I ever want is for people to say, ‘There goes Jack O'Conner.  He's no freeloader; he's no draft dodger.'”  Jack's deeper drive, one he would not admit, was conquering the fear that he could not stand up to guys like Charlie— the ones who had made it hard for him to speak his mind.