The Long Vendetta

by Clifton Adams

  But they could shoot, and don't let anybody tell you different. With an 88 mm depressed for ground fire, they could shoot the buttons off your uniform. Ask Beauchamp, our platoon leader. They took Beau-champ's head right off his shoulders, neat as you please, when he stood up in the turret to direct his own fire. On top of everything else, the Krauts pulled in a regiment of Tigers and Panthers, Mark Vs and Mark IVs, with their high muzzle velocity guns, and several towed 75 mm antitank pieces as well. Then it began to rain.

  We had an interesting time of it for a day or so. In that kind of soup the P-47S could give us no help. We four had to take it along with all the others. We had to sweat and stew in our own mud and filth, and eat our “C” rations cold because the gasoline trucks couldn't reach us, so we couldn't start up the engines except for a little at a time to keep the radio going— not long enough to heat our chow on the exhaust manifolds. The doughfeet got a kick out of that. The way the Infantry lived, they figured eating hot chow was a sign of weakness.

  The dream comes in four distinct parts. The first part of the dream establishes the time and the place. The setting is always surprising and unfamiliar and strange, no matter how many times I have dreamed the dream before. The three men in my crew are also strangers, and in every dream, I have to get to know them all over again. That is the second part of the dream—our own little hell somehow isolates itself from the bedlam that surrounds us, and for a little while we study each other and wonder vacantly which of us will be the first to die, or crack up, or—if this is to be a very lucky day—catch a piece of iron, but not too big a piece, in the leg or possibly the arm, and wake up on the Purple Heart Express headed back for the States. For a little while—in the dream, at least—we become invulnerable. With the war crashing harmlessly around us, we hunker in the mud and grimly size each other up.

  There is Harry Deegan, Technician, 5th grade, the driver of the tank. The thing about Harry is his eyes. Harry has eyes that can see in the dark. In the daylight he's just another tank jockey, but after the sun goes down he's worth his weight in Scotch. In the dark of the moon Harry spots roadblocks two hundred yards away. With eyes like that, you'd think he'd make a hell of a gunner, but it's a sad fact that Harry Deegan couldn't hit a slag pile with a load of canister shot. A tall, husky fellow in his middle twenties, he has pale-blue eyes and straw-colored hair, and would be almost handsome except for big yellow-speckled front teeth that hang over his lower lip and ruin the shape of his face. He comes from a farm in Vermont and he was going to some sort of college when the draft got him; he never said what he was studying to be, and I never asked.

  There was Orlan Koesler, also a T/5, assistant driver and bow gunner. Koesler was from the Middle-west somewhere—Ohio, I think. He was a long, raw-boned galoot who hated to ride buttoned up because he had to fold up like an accordion, and even then his head kept banging against the hatch. Koesler was a good tough hand to have along on a mission, but he was one of those fellows that came out of the war an entirely different man from the one that went in. I knew him from our basic training days at Knox— then he was shy, awkward, an all-round lousy soldier. I remember the exact moment that he started to change; it was on the beach at San, French Morocco, when he killed his first man. He was never anything but a lousy soldier, but he was an expert killer. He was never quite as happy as when we drew a job of flushing infantry out of timber. You could see it in the way his eyes glistened when he turned loose with that machine gun and cut them down. A good man to have on a mission, but when it was over, most of us left him to himself.

  And there was Charlie Roach, Private, first class; a brash, punk kid from Dallas, Texas, who either didn't have a brain in his brick-colored head or he was the only one-hundred-per-cent brave man I ever met. Charlie was the tank's 37 mm gunner, radio operator and general hell-raiser. He figured this was being staged for his personal benefit, and he meant to enjoy it as much as possible. Every outfit has one of them, the bully boy who gets decorated for staging a one-man attack on an impossible position, and the next day gets court-martialed for stealing the colonel's liquor. In our company his name was Charlie Roach.

  Rounding out the crew was myself, a three-stripe sergeant and commander of the tank, dispenser of latrine details, part-time slave-driver, and little tin god. I had tried a lot of jobs, but the dirt tracks and racing cars were the only things that ever really interested me. Then the war came along. Gasoline and rubber shortages closed the tracks. So I enlisted.

  In the dream, everything is very clear. I can see the gleam of anticipation in Koesler's eyes. And the taut, grim lines at the corners of Deegan's toothy mouth. And Charlie Roach, still cocky in the face of deadly odds.

  And myself—in the dream I can stand a bit to one side and see myself squatting in the black mud, cold and miserable and sick with fear. All of us, with the possible exception of Roach, look at each other and see fear looking back at us.

  Now the dream, in quick transition, shifts to its third part, where violence begins.

  It begins with silence. We first notice it in the silence of the guns, the absence of noise rings in our ears. Then the rain stops. The sun slices cold and clean through the slate-colored clouds. And we hear the beautiful snarling of our P-47S swarming like infuriated hornets over the lumbering Tigers and Panthers. The first bomb cuts a clean diagonal toward the earth. We, the four of us, stand up in the mud, watching the first brilliant flash of orange and the boiling mushroom of black smoke.

  I look at Koesler and he's grinning. I look at Deegan and Roach, and they are grinning. In the dream I can even see myself grinning.

  At first, we are almost sick with relief. We know the waiting is over, that our engineers and infantry are preparing to attack, that our own tanks will soon be moving in. Now we begin to recover from the shock. We recover from our first nausea of relief and we are no longer grateful for merely being alive. We have been frightened and we are ashamed of sniveling and shaking and squatting in our own filth like animals. Suddenly we want to strike back, to destroy, to kill. Not just Koesler, but all of us.

  Now the dream shifts without warning to its fourth and final act.

  We, the four of us, are in a place of naked trees. I am standing in the turret of the tank, looking for something, but at first I am not sure what it is. Charlie Roach is crouched down with his thirty-seven, hunting the desolate countryside through the crosshair gunsight. Deegan and Koesler ride up front unbuttoned, with only their heads showing through the open hatches.

  The tank crawls on until at last we reach the edge of the shell-potted woods. And we see the house directly ahead of us.

  It is a small stone farmhouse with a queer-looking roof, probably thatched, and there is a stone shed leaning hard against the house, and there are two or three little outbuildings for tools and the like, and everything is gathered together at the very crest of a long rise. Why anyone would build a house in such a place I didn't know, even in the dream.

  I signaled for Deegan to stop the tank and back it up so that we could get a better look. So we backed again into that skeleton forest and I studied the house through the glasses. Koesler looked up from his perch behind the bow gun.

  “Well, Sarge?”

  “Something moved,” I said. “I saw it through a window.”

  “This is it, all right,” Koesler said. He noticed me watching his eyes. He turned and checked the loading on his machine gun.

  Roach said, “I don't see a thing. Not a cow, not a chicken, not a Kraut artillery observer. Not a thing.”

  “This is it,” Koesler said again. “I've got a feeling.”

  Again I looked through the glasses and again I saw something move. “I think Koesler's right,” I said. “This is it.”

  Deegan said, “It's a farmhouse. Maybe you saw the farmer or some of his family.”

  “All the farmers are in the Kraut army,” Koesler said. “And no civilian is going to be in that house, unless he's downright crazy.”

  I looked at
Roach and he shrugged. “Koesler's got a point. Church steeples, slag piles, and houses on hilltops, those are three places that most Germans have learned to stay away from.”

  I was now convinced that what I had seen was a Kraut artillery observer. That house, especially with the forest gone, commanded a clear view of the western country where our troops would soon be assembling for attack. One good spotter with glasses and radio could easily direct more death than I wanted to think about.

  I said, “Move it up, Deegan, nice and easy on the side of the shed. And keep your eyes open. If they've got an antitank piece up there, we're dead.”

  Deegan opened the throttle. We started lumbering across the stubbled wheat field that stood between us and the house. I yelled through the throat mike, “Get the lead out, Deegan, before he calls a stonk on top of us!”

  Now we were in position to fire. Roach looked up at me and nodded. I fed the 37 a yellow-nosed round of high explosive, gave Roach the range and ordered the fire.

  Roach's first shot went high but still blasted away part of the house's roof. Deegan took an abrupt zigzag course up the hill, running, stopping, firing. Running, stopping, firing.

  There was no return fire from the house.

  Soon we were in machine-gun range. Koesler opened up with the bow gun. Roach used his own .30 caliber and zeroed in with tracers. The 37 mm bellowed. We ripped the place to pieces.

  I gave the order to cease firing and advance toward the rubble.

  Then, in the mysterious way of dreams, all of us knew what had happened. No one said a word, but we knew. Deegan turned and looked up at me with hurt-filled eyes. Koesler stared straight ahead. Roach sank back down into the turret and rested his head on the smoking breech of his gun.

  Once more, I gave Deegan the order to advance, and still he didn't move.

  “Deegan...”

  No one said anything.

  “All of you,” I said, “Look at me.”

  Roach came slowly up from the turret. Koesler and Deegan looked around. I drew my .45 from my shoulder holster and said, “We're going to have an understanding. You're the crew and I'm the commander of this tank. That's the way the Table of Operations is set up and that's the way it's going to be. Or somebody is going to get his brains splattered all over this lousy Kraut landscape.”

  They looked at me. Then Koesler turned. Deegan turned. Roach sighed and shrugged and grinned a little. We move toward the house.

  That is where the dream ends. At that exact point, every time, I wake up, sick and sweating.

  The dream ends, but a worse kind of wide-awake nightmare—reality—takes its place. For just a little while, on awaking, my memory of the thing is vivid.

  I can see the woman, or what was left of her, lying there in the smoking rubble. And there is blood on the floor and on the thatched roof and on the crumbling walls, and from one of the rafters there hangs an obscene bit of dripping flesh.

  There was no way of knowing what she had looked like, and we could only guess her age from the size of the little girl who must have been the woman's daughter. The little girl was about six years old and hardly marked at all except for two .30-caliber holes in her stomach. We found her body under a heavy wooden beam and a small mountain of shattered stone. In a kind of grim desperation we turned the place inside out looking for that artillery spotter.

  But there was no spotter. No radio, no glasses, no man at all. Just a few bloody odds and ends of what had been a woman, and the frail, white body of a little girl.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The doctor came in the next morning and reminded me again how lucky I was to have survived a hit-and-run with only a few scratches and bruises. He said I could leave any time. A nurse laid out my clothes and I returned my backless gown to the hospital. I called Bert Lawson, my shop foreman, and told him that I was all right but not to expect me at the garage for a while, and to have one of the boys leave my M.G. at the hospital. When that was taken care of, I called Jeanie Kelly.

  There was concern in her voice. “Buck, are you sure the doctors think it's all right for you to leave?”

  “They can't get me out of here fast enough. I think they're getting shaky about the bill; somebody must have told them the Bentley wasn't mine.”

  She laughed, but it sounded forced. “Have you talked to Lieutenant Garnett any more?”

  “I don't know that we have anything to talk about. If they catch that driver, he'll be charged with hit-and-run. If they don't catch him—well, I guess there's nothing to be done.”

  “Buck, you'll call me later, won't you?”

  “I told you we'd have a coming-out party tonight. Around seven. All right?”

  I got dressed, then used the hospital phone to call Garnett.

  “Yesterday you wanted to know if I'd received any unusual mail,” I said. “Exactly what did you have in mind?”

  He hesitated, and the humming of the wires had a suspicious sound to it. “What makes you ask?”

  I told him about the penciled note. He listened as I read it over the phone. “... What kind of shape are you in?” he asked.

  “They just gave me my walking papers.”

  “Coyle, you'd better come down to Headquarters; it's time we had some straight talk.”

  After a while, I left the room, made a brief but expensive call at the business office, picked up the key to my M.G. and caught an elevator down to street level. I was still stiff and getting sore in places that I hadn't even noticed in the hospital.

  The sight of my red M.G. made me feel better; slipping into the form-fitting red leather seat was like coming home again. It was nothing very special as sports cars go, a stock model T.F. with added dual exhausts and a hot ignition, but it was paid for and it was mine. I backed it out of the hospital parking lot and headed toward the center of town.

  There's nothing very different or unusual about Plains City. Our politicians are only moderately crooked, the climate is so-so, it's a rail and air freight center so we've got enough industry to keep things going. We're not immaculate, but most of our crime is small time. The syndicate never got a start here, one of the main reasons being a force of good tough cops like Garnett.

  The lieutenant's “office” was a scarred oak desk, crowded in among twenty others just like it, in a single high-ceilinged barn of a room, and on the desk was a wooden board with plastic letters on it which read:Lt. Woodrow N. Garnett.

  Garnett had his coat off, his sleeves rolled up, and his collar unbuttoned. He was already wilted and wrinkled, and the day had hardly started.

  I handed him the note and sat, uninvited, in one of those hard, slat-backed oak chairs that makers of office furniture used to be so fond of. Garnett read the note; he studied the envelope, the paper, the penmanship.

  “Well,” he said, “there can't be more than ten or twenty thousand places that sell this kind of writing material, but I'll give it to the lab boys and see what they can do with it. Yesterday I got a blank when I asked about mail of this kind; what made you decide to turn it in?”

  “It was brought to me, with my other mail, after we had our talk. And there's something else. Yesterday you threw a couple of names at me, Koesler and Roach. I told you I didn't know them, but I remembered later that there was a Koesler in my outfit during the war. Orlan Koesler was one of my tank crew. So was Charlie Roach. He was my gunner.”

  Garnett looked interested, but not surprised. “Just like that,” he said dryly, “it all comes back. But yesterday you couldn't remember. You and Koesler and Roach and a driver named Harry Deegan, all of you together in the same armored outfit, in the same tank, for almost two years, and yesterday you couldn't even remember their names. Why?”

  I stared at him. “How did you know we were together? And how did you know about Harry Deegan? I never mentioned Deegan.”

  “Everything in good time, Mr. Coyle. Right now, I want to know what it was that jarred your memory.”

  It had to come sooner or later, so I sighed and said, “
I was telling the truth yesterday. I didn't remember because I've spent all these years since the war teaching myselfnot to remember. But that note brought it back.”

  As briefly as possible, I told him about the nightmare—the one that actually happened. I heard myself telling about the woman and the little girl, and it all sounded remote and impersonal, like something that I'd read about somewhere that had happened to somebody else.

  Garnett sat for several seconds, his eyes empty. Finally he said, “Go on.”

  “That's about all. The next day, our division piled into the Siegfried Line. We took a hit from a pillbox, and that was the end of the war for me and Koesler and Roach. The end of everything for Deegan; he was killed.”

  “And then what?”

  “That's all there is. When the tank was hit, Roach and I dumped out of the turret. Koesler got out through the escape hatch. There was nothing we could do for Deegan. The next thing I remember was waking up in a field hospital, with my ribs caved in.”

  “After the war, did you keep in touch with Roach or Koesler?”

  “No. Those years in the Army were another time, another world—the people I knew there had nothing to do with the people I knew before or since the war. That's the way service friendships are.”

  Garnett stared at some spot over my left ear. “Then you don't know that Roach and Koesler are dead?”

  I remember Roach, brash and loud and very much alive. And Koesler... it was easy to think of Koesler as a killer, but somehow I couldn't picture him dead. “No, I hadn't heard.”

  “Koesler got it first,” Garnett said bluntly. “Three weeks ago, in Cleveland. Hit-and-run, stolen car. The cops figured it for an accident and were all set to enter it as manslaughter by some punk joy rider, until they found the note on Koesler's body. A note like yours, Mr. Coyle. It didn't make sense. They began to think maybe it was a gang killing. Koesler was on the shady side; they'd pulled him in a couple of times for assault...”