Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  It had been a solemn sip from a disposable cup. The graduating class of North High School but two years back and their brief ceremony. The lemonade had been a mild taste; too watery. He had a few hours mostly free in adulthood before walking off to the yard, catching that grave and jittery train to the induction center. Most students had received a draft card. These bits of command were the same size as a high school diploma. One could cover the other. Emery had enlisted, however, on a delay through graduation. He had been told to wear his uniform to graduation, as it had been sent to him after enlisting. He had done so, and this uniform had caused him to be somewhat adamant about the war. A few conversations had resulted and soured him in the eyes of certain schoolmates, and at least one of his teachers. Emery had lost a few friends due to his overbearing decrees that draftees stop complaining. He said “buck up,” and Mr. Barnes had given him a look of strong reproach. Emery had become arrogant and terminal in thought, it seemed.

  He was short, 5’4”, and while he assumed he would grow a bit more through his senior year in high school, this did not seem to have occurred. His body had jerked and wobbled from the train’s slow movement down the tracks through town, his one-hundred and eighteen pounds keeping him from steadiness as the pride and fright of those boys around him chattered endlessly about their various, semi-informed plans, their tricks, ways to get at the nips and krauts, be heroic, or else stay smart and stay safe. Most were draftees. He knew the sort of job he wanted, if allowed to choose once at the induction center. The bold sort that would make him something of a daredevil. He wanted to box and he wanted to be a paratrooper. He could do those things. War changed everything. Not being chosen for the varsity team meant little once he stepped on that induction train. The true varsity team, the national one, was now ahead of him, and he would be on that team.

  Emery had sat there on the sleek train, waiting. More boys came. Some he knew, fellow Northers, but others were cross-town rivals from Central. Emery supposed that particular rivalry, one so common between schools in like districts, was of no meaning anymore but for children still in school and old men that romanticized place and belonging. To the boys on the train, there was only slight room for squabbles of neighborhood or who won which match against whom. A larger rivalry had erupted throughout Europe.

  They had served lemonade. Insignificant, bland lemonade in cups, set on the school’s best silver as some sort of basic congratulation, but this was to be tasted by boys soon off to places of volatile expiry. A girl had kissed him, after kissing two other boys. Just because. She had said “Congratulations! Be safe, Em.” He had never met her before. She didn’t even look familiar. Lemonade and a diploma. A kiss. Thirty minutes to ponder these things and then time was up. These were no congratulations, but failed and wholly unspoken attempts at consolation. His diploma felt like an apology. He was far west or east of that place now. From Cayuga. From his nation. He had been carried on the backs of flying oxen from his junior high presidency. From the scouts and his degree of servitude, from William and Paige, from his parents, house, from girls and horses and even lemonade.

  The train doors were closed in Binghamton. Parents and family waved goodbye, most distraught and a few shouting with worry, fewer with pride. When the train whistled its departure, military police stood tall in the aisles, watching over each car. These were not welcoming authorities, but as if great cats with lowered ears. Emery had watched with a sense of doubt as the doors to his train car, already closed and latched, were then padlocked from the outside. As the train slowly rode forward, taking him from home and into the military, he resigned himself to trying not to think about the padlocks, what they meant on the outside of the doors like that. Not an hour had passed since lemonade at graduation. His father and mother were driving home at that moment, no doubt with his mother holding the diploma. They were possibly talking about him, just as they had talked about William when he left town several years prior. Perhaps his mother was crying a little, like she had then.

  The train had continued for two years. The jostling floors and seats, the tense patrol of sentries and jabberers, and the always changing view. He had boxed, attempting to focus his mind on something remotely recreational, yet productive. He did well, though there were few in his weight class, slight as it was. There was little for him to do outside of his training and orders, and he had no interest in playing a musical instrument. Emery had slowly and carefully, over two years of occasional bouts in the lightweight, proven to himself that he was at least worthy of the role into which he had risen. He was a soldier and they called soldiers men. He did things he thought men should do. Some of these things were performed in a panic, while others occurred out of an inability to give in to other people. All of this new world, in uniform or with gloves, atop tracks or winds, with orders and parachutes... all had begun for him with graduation and Binghamton, a different world some 8,700 miles from the train on which he now shook. The train in the sky.

  He missed his home terribly. He had been too small, senior year, and was denied the position of quarterback for the varsity team, coach Hertz stating simply that a kid of Emery’s size had no place in a skirmish. Now, Emery had been tolerated to fight grown men, in the ring or to the death with a rifle. He was the same size as he had been in high school. There in the graduation ceremony, the voice of Coach Hertz had seemed to loom over his thoughts as if able to drown the oncoming rush of his recruiter’s ever-constant shout that he was off to war. Emery was too small. Too small. But not small enough to be left alone, to be disregarded. He was an adult in most of the expected ways. He was old enough and large enough to be snatched up and to take commands, to be given a weapon and taught a few survival skills. There were worse fates for a dreamer.

  Basic training and jump school had been grueling. He felt no longer to be a boy, of course, but had not made his way into manhood with a transcending manner, as some often spoke of it. He felt to be in disguise. Perhaps he was a late bloomer, and would develop more physically in the coming years, gain that sense of manhood that made his father responsible and his brother believable. Emery had not come of age in some ceremony or rite of passage. There was no metamorphosis by which he had shirked his boyhood and adopted a place among his fellow man. His was an un-housing by fire or flood, a tragedy of peoples that had dragged him into form. He felt robbed into being a man, not ushered, like a baby shaken hard to keep her from wailing her natural discomfort. It all felt a ruse. He was faking it, a boy in a man’s mask, and far sooner than later, he found himself duly terrified.

  “Scrape your neck, Asher,” Merrill said, his civil war Colt glinting in the holster from the single, dimmed, overhead light of the Skytrain. Emery reached his chest zipper and drew it up the final inch, to the throat. The pinch of cool steel against his apple and the sensation of permanence in a snug fit. He thought briefly of a horse coat, then a strait jacket.

  Over the next several minutes his mind uttered obscenities to itself, then braced for the unstoppable maneuver in which he was to take part. That he was one of many, with others beside him and a small, flight-lifted fraternity between these others, had the feel of security. One boy teaching another how to sharpen that Remington knife, others helping one to gain the quartermaster badge, all performing for the scout master, all in youthful, fantastic syncopation, kerchiefs about their small necks and fantasy at their beck and call. And then fantasy was lost. It was time. There was shouting. The blast of wind. The altitude at which the gods looked down on Thebes. The “GO!” and the jaunt and the “GO!” and the breath held and the tip of inertia into one’s tight, pounding heart.

  “GO!”

  The brash sound of a plane, the only real thing, being ripped away by night and drops of frigid water. Again, he was off the world for a time. No one. Cold and shoved to a focus by the thrashes of particle-heavy wind. The sound rushed against his ears as he fell beside droplets that stayed with him for a time as he plummeted down and down and down into the war of animals. He kept h
is arms wide and eyes drawn tight as their moisture trailed from the edges. A small and inconsequent man with a steel pot on his head, one part Don Quixote for two parts Wile. E. Coyote, having jumped with haphazard from sanity with reliance on orders and a cloth on his back, with a trench knife against his leg, with his body tethered to an M1 rifle, the whole of his pertinent life crammed in a Musette bag and strapped to his bruised, clenched belly as he tumbled toward Earth.

  The clothes drew tight so quick it seemed the parachute was designed, upon opening and swallowing the air, to yank the soul straight from the body and loose it to winds. A dramatic explosion of cloth and cord. Slower descent. His troop scattered in elevation about the sky, coming down near him, some not so near. Then the soil. Beloved and needed. The crack of his knees and his teeth smashing together. The boots meeting grass and dirt and then air for a moment as one rolled. He botched his roll and landed hard, but was uninjured after a moment of careful self-scrutiny. Loosing the cords, abandoning the chute, he readied the rifle and slowly moved into a run. He realized with horror that the plans had been off, that the fight had changed over previous minutes, that he had not dropped into the outskirts, near a battle, but directly into it. The thwips of bullets in his direction were all too sudden.

  FADE OUT

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  FADE IN:

  ECU: A young JAPANESE FACE, nervous and breathing heavily. We hold for several seconds before hearing an EXPLOSIVE NOISE and several SOLDIERS shouting in English. The FACE begins looking about quickly, in a panic. We FADE TO BLACK as one of the shouts becomes a SCREAM OF PAIN, LACED WITH PROFANITIES. We hear several words shouted in Japanese, as well.

  CUT TO:

  INT. MEDIC TENT, TEMP. BASE, LEYTE - EARLY MORNING

  The tent is busy and there are many moans, conversations, and occasional exclamations of pain. We see EMERY on a medical cot, one leg exposed and covered with bandages.

  PAN TO:

  Injury and debilitation. His leg ached; a vicious, sharp pain that bore its way through a fog of muscle cramps and contusions. This bruising had grown, over the hours, into his hip, a now yellow affair with a slow-to-blacken interior. The morphine’s reduction of his wits had left him in a state of constant remiss for certain fact. It had been night, but also day. Then most certainly day with the Sun’s rise, or it might have been setting. He wanted to ask someone but there were few people around, and when they drew near, he had not been able to speak well enough to ask. The compression against his knee could not be felt but for a numb sort of weight.

  The pain had reaved his persona in two. He had been brave yet screaming. Unafraid yet terrified. Well and yet injured. The shrapnel had been removed and the wounds and cuts sewn tight, but the space in which the metal had burrowed was swollen to the point that the burning, foreign steel still felt to be present, alive in him and nestling deep. Moving his leg tested impossible. After his first attempt to feel out the knee, the pain had been so strong that he was now frightened to try again.

  He had been given no warning. A sprint across the line of scrimmage. Rifle firing. Infantry that had come from the sky and then he was dizzy and spun aside. Chest to the floor. Closest one could get to the soil. Both pain and the sound of its cause registered in one moment. He could suddenly hear very little. An explosion. Through concussion and a needling ridge of panic through his mind, something outside of him had foraged into him. He was okay. Confused. Okay. Panic. Some regret. He was not okay. Something had happened. Something big. He was dying.

  Then he was not dying. A moment to realize. A muted shot nearby, then another. The squad scampering and flanking. All around the mastodon of men. His side was all around him. They were taking the area. A small group of enemies cloistered near the trees, isolated and cocksure. Then shot to death but one, taken for interrogation. Emery had watched from the ground, grinding his teeth and shouting with a closed mouth. Now that he was awake again, and surgically handled, Emery wondered what that man, that young, captured soldier was feeling at this moment. As Emery lay in the hospital with his nerves spiraling into and out of his thoughts, ever waking, was that captive in as much pain? This was likely. What had the world got its boys to do?

  “We’ll have transport at 0700. They’re on their way. Hang in there,” the medic said, passing as he often did through the rows of injured, addressing all of them still breathing. Most were minor atrocities. A few were more deathly. Other medics worked in the tent and attended various wounds, in the wave of occasional bellows from those most pained. One man near the tent’s entrance would not stop talking. He spoke mostly about his sister. His statements blended into one another, however. He was afraid to stop talking.

  The medics returned and administered Emery’s opiate. They moved quickly, checking all the fast, uneven work of repairs brought on with each sudden admittance of a man in a certain state. Splints and tourniquets, speedy attempts at transfusion and cutting. Two of them removed bullets and shrapnel solely. A third handled burns. The three medics often treated the same patient. Emery had been ushered here the early a.m., someone holding him beneath the shoulder on the injured side, helping him into the tent. He couldn’t remember who had dragged him out of the fight. He assumed someone had; he certainly hadn’t walked or crawled on his own, but a form of sleep had taken these memories from him, short and sudden as they likely were.

  “Could be worse,” a man said in the next bed over. Emery turned his head and viewed the fellow. The man was clutching his left arm, and had the wing badge of a paratrooper, like Emery, but the configuration was altered. Emery looked at it and tried to focus. The man’s body came into better view; the badge was a Chaplin variant. Both of the privates had glossy eyes painted in the effects of morphine. Emery attempted a smile, a sort of we’re-in-this-together expression. His cheeks and mouth didn’t feel right, however. Who knew what expression was coming out? The man had been right, of course. At that moment, things could be far worse. This was what bothered Emery most. For some, ‘could be’ had already been replaced by a sheet over the face.

  There was one such figure two beds to his right. Chance had intervened and rolled Emery’s day like dice, twisting him, but leaving him an eleven in the crapshoot. Who would let their life to such chance? The helter-skelter of living or perishing in this place… it was organized lunacy. Skills came into play, but were no insurance against the unpredictable nature of enemy fire or movements. The soldiers in this tent with him, alive or dead, were a furious, ongoing debate between powers that fueled the machinery of their argument with blood. He had lost some. Others had lost all of it.

  “Where you from?” the man asked. Emery moved his lips and breathed in the way speech needed, but had trouble with is tongue.

  “New York,” he finally muttered.

  “San Diego,” the Chaplin replied.

  Emery reached to the floor, cautious only to move his upper body, and not much. His hand touched the floor beside his makeshift bed and he searched beneath the frame’s edge, slowly dragging his Musette bag from beneath. Holding his breath, he pulled it onto the bed, toward his chest, but stopped for a moment; there was an instant prickle of awareness in his knee, a spikelet that quickly tipped into a vivid squeal of pain. This caused his eyes and jaw to clench tight. The squelch in his knee, the meaty swelling there having been disserviced by his movement, slowly abated into
the blanket of the drug. He quickly exhaled, inhaled, held it again as he pulled the bag, a mild, unavoidable noise escaping his throat. He gently set the pack on his chest and exhaled hard. With a slow caution, Emery drew from the bag’s hold several personal effects, one by one. These had earlier, under the guise of a deeper, opiated thought, seemed to him but trinkets. Artifacts from another place. Things from a past not far back and yet so distant as to be unreal. He was coming out of that, however.

  The military was not lonely. He had been surprised by this. There was much socializing and there were cliques. War, frightening and soul-burning at the outset, to his shock had proven an easy thing. This was in the moment, however. The moment was doing one’s job. On orders that kept one at function. Point A to point B, with a few tasks along the way. He had angered other soldiers, and was considered by one of his sergeants to be a liability. They had already threatened tossing him into a demolition squad if he didn’t shape up. He thought he had, but things kept happening. Occasionally, something unexpected would occur between points, and one fell back on various actions defined by context, but well-studied and memorized actions. You were afraid, but did the one thing next on the now altered list. The troublesome part was when you stopped moving, when you were removed from orders, for even a minute, and for whatever reason the evil of chance decided to use. One became aloof. Uncertain. Without order. Emery had reacted badly in these circumstances, it seemed. There had been complaints.

  “Who you with?” the man asked.

  “511th Parachute Infantry. You?”

  “Same game, different plane. Dropped in up the coast.”