by M. J. Cates
The boy smiled a sickly smile and pointed upward. “Dark now. We go and no one shoot us, yes?”
Quentin pulled the stock of his rifle tighter to his shoulder. The boy turned his head to one side and closed his eyes. “Gott. Bitte.”
“Hey,” Quentin said. He didn’t want to talk; they were too close to the German line.
The boy was shaking, eyes clenched tight.
“Hey.”
The boy opened his eyes.
Quentin held a finger to his lips.
It took the boy a moment, then he nodded.
Quentin pointed to his own chest, then back over his shoulder. I go this way. He pointed to the boy and then farther off toward the German lines. You go that way.
The boy nodded frantically.
“Wait.” Quentin looked up toward the moon. When the cloud thickened, he shouldered the German rifle and once more put a finger to his lips.
The boy nodded.
“Go.”
They turned away from each other and began the climb out of the crater. But with his back to his enemy, Quentin was gripped by a sudden terror. He yanked the sheath from his bayonet, turned around, and launched himself after the boy. He stabbed at his back and felt the blade glance off the entrenching tool before lodging in flesh and bone. It held there as the boy slithered back down the crater. He cried out but it was not loud—his lung was pierced—and sprawled face down snatching at his back for the blade.
Quentin pulled but the bayonet caught on something—bone? ligament?—and pulled the boy with it so that he fell on his back in a twisted posture, head lower than his feet. Quentin stood over him, bayonet poised and dripping.
The boy made horrible gurgling sounds.
Quentin took hold of his arm and righted him so that he was lying upright with his back against the crater wall. He coughed weakly. The moon came out, and black blood glistened where it covered his mouth and chin.
Quentin took out a field dressing. He pulled the boy forward by one arm, reached around, and pressed the field dressing against the wound. Hot blood soaked his hand. He must have opened an artery as well as the lung.
The boy was trying to speak.
“Don’t talk.”
Quentin looked up. The sky was black and freckled with stars. The moon was now entirely clear of cloud. He sat back against the crater wall facing the boy, his rifle across his knees.
The boy was crying now. The lung wound was too severe to allow much noise, but the tears slid from his eyes and shone on his cheeks.
“Try not to cry. Breathe slower, if you can.” He pointed to the sky. “I’ll take you back when it’s dark again.”
The boy lay looking at him, his breathing rapid and shallow. Aside from this only his eyes moved, their bright whites extinguished every now and then by a slow blink.
Quentin stared at the sky, urging it to cloud over again. Cumulus the colour of charcoal edged closer to the moon.
The boy moved—or rather, his right forearm moved. An index finger pointed to his bloody mouth. “Vasser. Bitte. Vasser.” He could only whisper. “Vasser. Bitte.”
Quentin shook his head.
“I have no canteen. No water. When it’s dark again I’ll take you back, see?” He pointed to the sky again but the boy’s half-hooded gaze did not change.
“Bitte. Please.”
“Soon. When it’s dark.”
“Ich…”
“Shh. Quiet now.”
“Bin…”
“Stop trying to talk.”
“…tod.”
“You’re fine. You’re not going to die.”
The tears overflowed the eyelids like a slow fountain. So much blood, so many tears, the boy’s thirst would be terrible.
The eyes closed. The lips, black and sticky with blood, kept moving. Quentin could no longer hear him, but it didn’t take a lip-reader to make out the silent syllables.
“Soon,” Quentin said. “You’ll see your mother soon.”
He had to sit and watch the tears drying on the dead boy’s face for another half-hour before it was dark enough to climb out of the crater. There was shooting as he made his way back, but not at him. He had learned not to flinch at rifle fire; you would never hear the one that got you.
A panicky sentry challenged him and he gave the code word and was allowed through. Mac and Gormley were waiting for him.
“Where were you?” Mac said. “We’ve been back nearly two hours.”
“Got stuck in a crater with a German.”
“You killed him, I hope.” This was Lieutenant Bagnal, who had just appeared behind Mac. “Your rum, man. You look as if you’ve earned it.”
Quentin took the metal cup of rum, spilling it with all his shaking.
“Steady, man. Easy does it.”
Quentin brought the cup to his lips and drank all the rum down. It was a bigger ration than usual and should have felt glorious.
Bagnal pointed to Quentin’s blood-soaked left arm. “Is that yours?”
Quentin shook his head. “Got him with the bayonet.”
“Well done, Goodchild. Well done, indeed. Bit hard on the nerves, though, right?”
Quentin nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Very well, your report?”
“I could hear transport, sir, but not huge transport, only field guns, I think. Did the others tell you about the work party?”
“They did. Damn lucky you all got back alive.”
“I followed them and saw where their own path through the wire is. I don’t know if the others saw it.”
“They did. It’s excellent intelligence, Goodchild. Bad luck for you three, of course, as you’ll be guiding us into the show. Anything else?”
“The wood, sir. Judging only by the sounds, I’d guess there are eight to ten machine-gun emplacements in the wood.”
“Hmm.”
“They have a clean sweep of the entire field. Every man of us will be mowed down.”
“That will certainly be my advice to HQ. Whether it has any effect is another question.”
Quentin reached into his pack and handed the lieutenant a six-inch piece of German wire. It was thicker than the British-made stuff, with longer barbs.
Bagnal smiled. “Course, we have no way of knowing if you boys are stockpiling these. It’s not like they’re date-stamped.”
“It’s from tonight, sir.”
“I know it is, Goodchild. I was joking. Now off with you and your colleagues. Try to get some sleep before zero.”
Mac had already scoped out a patch of ferns off to one side of the sunken road where they could stretch out and led the way. When they got there, all three of them lay down.
“Moon’s out again,” Gormley said. “But at least it’s not raining.”
“It’ll be raining steel soon enough,” Mac said.
Quentin sat up again. “I killed a boy. In a crater.”
Mac looked over at him. He was lying on his back with his hands behind his head, his elbows forming brackets for his face.
Quentin told them how the boy had fallen on him, the rest of it. He heard the panic rising in his voice as the miserable story spilled out of him like blood. Guilt squeezed his stomach.
“You did what you had to do,” Mac said.
“I bayoneted him in the back. I told him he could go and then I bayoneted him in the back.”
Mac reached over and grabbed his elbow, hard. “Listen to me. You think where that Hun’s at now he gives a damn whether you stuck him in the front or the back? We’re here to kill Germans. It’s our job. You did what you’re supposed to do.”
“I should have taken him prisoner.”
“Christ, man, listen to yourself. You were two guys scared shitless in the bottom of a crater. One of you ended up dead and I for one am delighted it wasn’t you.”
Quentin shook his head. “It was cowardly. Unfair. He was just a boy—maybe eighteen, more like sixteen.”
“It’s war, Goodchild. Not college football. Did Ba
gnal seem worried to you? Nobody gives a damn. It’s what war is.”
“He was crying like a little boy. He wanted his mother.”
“Shut up, Goodchild. I mean it now. No one wants to hear this shit.”
Some months earlier—it wasn’t even on the battlefield, it had happened back among the transport lines—the enemy had let fly with a barrage of high explosives. When the shriek of the shells finally stopped, the air was alive with the cries of the wounded. Some calling for help, some wailing in agony, and one man with his arms blown off begging for someone, anyone, to put a bullet through his head. But somehow worse than all of this were the high, inchoate shrieks of the animals. A donkey on fire ran from one side of the road to another until finally someone managed to shoot it. A horse with its belly ripped open staggered by, trailing intestines. And now Quentin added the boy to these images.
He turned over on his side and pressed his hands between his knees.
* * *
—
Their artillery opened up forty-five minutes before zero hour. Unfortunately they overshot the mark and did not take out the machine guns in the little wood. Quentin was stopped before he had gone twenty yards. He felt a thudding sensation and a searing pain in his side but didn’t realize the extent of his trouble until blood poured into his eyes. “I’m hit,” he said to the man next to him, and collapsed in the mud.
The machine-gun fire was so intense, the terrain so flat, that the stretcher-bearers had only one place they could carry the wounded. The company medic had them lined up on the ground behind the windmill. When a wounded man died, he was carried out of the safety zone and his spot was given to someone who was still breathing.
They must have administered morphia at some point because Quentin awoke lying on his back in a dreamy state. He was aware of pain but it wasn’t bothering him. His right leg was wrapped and splinted but he had no idea why. There was a bandage around his head, and another around his chest that showed a bright scarlet bloom. Must be a lung wound, he said to himself, and thought what a beautiful colour. The colour of flags.
The man next to him was muttering a continuous stream of words. Quentin assumed it was a rosary or some other form of prayer but when there was a lull in the shellfire he could just make out the multiplication table. He was on the nine times table when he stopped. Seconds later he was removed and another man was lowered onto his spot.
“Mac!”
Mac’s head lolled in his direction. His chest and stomach were covered with blood but he seemed unaware of it. “This is something, isn’t it, kid?”
“I’ll see you in London, Mac.”
“Naw. I’ve had it.”
“London. London.”
“Do me a favour, kid. Look after my novel.”
“You’ll look after your own novel. It’ll be a great novel.”
“No. You look after it for me.”
“Sure, Mac. But really…”
“Hell of a thing, eh?”
“Sure is.”
“Hell of a thing.”
Mac lost consciousness, and a few minutes later the stretcher-bearers took him away.
11
It was not long after Imogen’s discussion of her marriage plans with Dr. Ganz that Robert Taunton’s wife discovered his affair with Sara Sands, and demanded an immediate end to it under threat of divorce. The betting at the Phipps was that Taunton would drop his paramour, but he surprised everyone, including Imogen, by moving out of his house and into an apartment on Calvert Street, where the divorce papers were duly served.
As if that were not enough, the case turned into a scandal that made for sensational headlines, partly because of Taunton’s celebrity, and partly because Evelyn Taunton had somehow got hold of a dozen letters her husband had sent to his lover—letters that were noted to be remarkably passionate for a behaviourist.
Perhaps Taunton was counting on Dr. Ganz to save him—after all, he had brought much glory to the Phipps—but, mortified by the scandal and the relentless publicity, the president of Johns Hopkins demanded Taunton’s resignation, and the chief, recognizing an opportunity to rid himself of the thorn in his side, made not the slightest effort to intervene.
Taunton was no sooner out the Phipps door than Dr. Ganz appointed Carl head of the renamed Psychobiology Laboratory. It came as a complete surprise, but it was not unmerited; Carl had completed his Ph.D. in record time, and his prolific papers were getting a lot of attention in the psychology journals.
Imogen took no pleasure in Taunton’s fall; in fact, she felt sorry for him as well as his wife. But she could not help feeling that the tide of fortune had turned in her favour. Really for the first time since she was a child she could reflect on her life and know that she was lucky, she was happy, and the future seemed edged with gold.
Ganz eventually came through with a waiver allowing them to marry, and they decided on a simple ceremony—at city hall with a clerk from the local water department as sole witness. This elopement provoked Imogen’s father to write to her for the first time since she’d left Chicago. “Apparently you did not consider that a man wants to be present at the marriage of his own daughter.” Well, you have at least one supernumerary daughter to make up for it, she felt like replying, but did not. She also received a telegram from her uncle Mason offering to forgive the remainder of her unofficial student loan, but she would not hear of it. He shot a second telegram right back: STUBBORN AS YOUR PAPPY STOP.
A few weeks after their honeymoon (Cape May, all multicoloured gorgeousness in October) she realized that it had been several days since she had thought of Quentin. She allowed herself the pang of sorrow this realization brought, but it surfaced with a certain resignation, acceptance even, that she hoped might be the beginning of wisdom. Quentin had wanted to end his life and he had succeeded—or one of the mad architects of the war had succeeded for him—and she could acknowledge her role in his death, but would no longer blame herself for it.
Carl was a—well, “breath of fresh air” was far too anemic a phrase for Carl Kromer. He was all enthusiasm, all energy; he was optimism incarnate. No sooner did he have an idea than he wanted to test it in the lab. Boom: write the paper, send it off—next idea, please. Imogen was thankful that her own interests—despite Ganz’s restrictions on clinical treatment—were now turning toward psychoanalysis. She did not want to be in competition with her husband, especially when she had yet to publish her second paper. The work was done, but she had been waiting months for Dr. Ganz to approve it. Psychiatric residents could not submit anything for publication without clinic approval, and if they did, the journals would not print it.
Carl’s experiments on the endocrine system, behaviour patterns, and “biological clocks,” as he liked to call them, had profound implications for human psychology. Even small hormonal changes could wreak havoc on energy levels and mood. Menstrual upsets were the most obvious example, and postpartum depression a more frightening one. Carl’s discoveries offered hope for the development of medications but, much like theories of predestination, tended to undermine one’s confidence in human agency.
“Those medieval doctors were right,” he liked to say. “It’s all about the balance of humours. It just happens there are a lot more than four.”
If he was a blizzard in the intellectual realm, he was a force-10 gale in the physical. One thing Imogen Lang had been absolutely certain of never becoming: sex-mad. She was thoroughly aware of America’s current fixation on Ivor Novello, Rudolph Valentino, and Harry Houdini, but she did not share it. Smouldering gazes and oily hair seemed funny, even repellent, to her. Carl’s curly hair and humorous eyes were far more exciting to anyone with an ounce of discernment.
In high school she had experienced a crush or two, even three, but these were matters of idealization, not lust. She had been kissed several times, too, but she had remained a virgin and had never felt any compelling reason to be anything else, until she’d met Carl. Not only had she allowed Carl to touch her almost
anywhere he wanted, she couldn’t wait for him to do it. Nor could she keep her hands from roaming all over his body, with its perfect proportions and ropy muscles. Their kisses were breathless, panting collisions that left her feeling both ravished and ravisher.
It was amazing to her that she had managed to remain a virgin right up to their wedding night. It had not been easy. For some weeks she had drawn the line at touching each other outside their clothing. That line being crossed, her fallback position was no direct touching beneath the belt. Well, the belt line quickly collapsed and by then their erotic temperature had climbed many degrees.
No orgasms. That had become her next unspoken boundary, and it lasted little more than a week. Carl was, after all, good with his hands. He was also as avid for Imogen’s pleasure as for his own, perhaps even more so.
She had thought at first the sheer weirdness of it would prevent her from sinking any deeper into absolute harlotry—the alarming heat of his balls, for example, or the sensation of his penis in her hand. It was just too strange—harder than flesh had any right to be, the silky sleeve scorching to her fingers. One evening she burst out laughing, couldn’t stop herself, and Carl, perturbed and throbbing, wanted to know why.
“Nerves,” she replied weakly. Just nerves. But what she had actually been thinking was: Penis envy, what a mad conceit. She adored Freud by now, but no, Herr Professor, who could possibly envy the pompous little troll lurking in a man’s trousers?
And then one night she allowed Carl to smuggle her into his apartment. They worked themselves up on the couch until Carl was beside himself and she just could not abandon him on that ledge. Also a part of her just wanted to see the thing go off. What an experience that was: Carl’s ragged cries, semen roping and flying everywhere, coating her fingers with slippery heat that rapidly went sticky. Horrifying. And yet…captivating.