"That isn't enough."
"I'm doing all right."
"But you don't get outdoors."
"Not like you."
"So what are you going to do about it?"
"You and me. Silver Peak."
"Cakewalk for you, Chris."
"You, too. A tune-up."
Ben sat rubbing his temples, eyes shut. "You ought to go without me, somewhere. The Stuarts, maybe. Mount Stuart."
"Why couldn't you go?"
"Too tough these days."
"So what?"
"I'm out of shape, Chris."
"Work on it."
"My legs aren't under me."
"Yes, they are."
"Do Stuart without me."
"I've been up Stuart."
"Do something else, then."
"We'll do Silver Peak together."
"All right."
That seemed a note to end on. He didn't want to end on small talk. "Is your mother around?" he asked.
"Mom's at a meeting."
"Tell her I called."
"You want to leave a message?"
"I'll call in the morning."
"Where are you anyway?"
"East of the mountains."
"Any birds out there?"
"Chukars. A few."
"You've got legs for that, Pop."
"It's not uphill."
"So what?" Chris asked. "You're fine."
Afterward, Ben sat in his long johns, perched on the edge of his motel bed. He wiped his good eye with a fingertip, but the bad one leaked water onto his cheek. He dried it with a corner of the bedsheet.
EIGHT
Ben switched off the bedside lamp and absently massaged his side, as if to knead away the cancer. There was the din of the heater but no other sound. A rim of light showed around the curtains. The heat and darkness were just what he yearned for, but the pain in his gut was sharp, severe, and despite his weariness he couldn't sleep. Acquiescing, he turned on the light and dug in his rucksack for the marijuana cigarettes the drifter had given him at the river crossing. Ben thought of the night before, of the dysfunction of his mind through it, and it seemed to him a mistake to risk again that kind of folly and befuddlement. Yet in his motel bed, what could go wrong? What use here for a clear, sober mind? He needed relief from pain.
He slid one of the cigarettes between his lips and sat back against the pillows, his lighter between his fingers. After the third deep inhalation, he recognized the feeling from the previous evening—a busy, relentless current of thought, a confusion about the meaning of things—and after the fifth, he felt paranoid. When he had smoked the entire cigarette, he worried that the room was thickly noxious with a sweet green pall that would seep outside to indict him as a criminal. Perhaps a guest in an adjoining room would catch a whiff of marijuana and call the Quincy police. There was no way to judge if this worry was valid—there was no way to know, now that he'd smoked—so he decided that, to cover himself, he should open the windows and run the bathroom fan. Then he remembered the carton of Himalayan incense the young people in the van had given him.
In his long johns, breathing roughly through his nose, he lit one of his parrafin fire starters, blew it out when the wax softened, set it beside the bathroom sink, and pierced it with a stick of lit incense. A fine line of smoke unfurled from the tip, rising in a fragrant helix. The smell of what he took to be saffron mingled with the marijuana, and he thought of the Himalaya Range, mountains he had never seen. It seemed profound that this incense had traveled from Tibetan monks on the Sikkimese border to a motel in sagebrush country. Its convoluted journey here seemed evidence of God's vast reach.
Ben crawled into bed, unhinged, dazed, and switched off the bedside lamp. The pain in his side felt bearable, but his mind traveled restlessly, and the fact of his death seemed pronounced and heightened, more real and more frightening. His limbs began to tremble. He felt neither awake nor asleep but, rather, in a curious limbo, a third form of consciousness. In this state of mind, ineluctably, he found himself thinking of his war. He tried to put it away, ward it off, but here it was again. For years he'd struggled with his memories of it, wishing they would go away, but here they were, unleashed by marijuana, welling up on the cusp of sleep.
At Camp Hale, in Colorado, he'd trained as an infantry rifleman. He'd arrived in a snowstorm on the Denver and Rio Grande Western line with six per diem dollars in his pocket and presented himself, his duffel bag on his shoulder, to the sergeant on duty at the train station at two-thirty in the morning. The sergeant passed him into the keeping of L Company, in the Third Battalion of the 86th Mountain Regiment, and Ben spent his first night sleepless in the barracks, fully dressed beneath two blankets, curled up with his hands in his armpits, thinking of Rachel Lake.
That first morning, the company assembled on the parade ground with the late fall wind driving down from the mountains, sodden snow underfoot. The cold seized Ben's face and hands and rose through his boots. The drill sergeant announced to the new recruits that in this place it was every man for himself, and then they began calisthenics. On the snow-covered drill field they stripped off their shirts to perform jumping jacks, knee bends, and push-ups at seven in the morning. They marched for three hours at 10,000 feet, on the Continental Divide, north of Leadville. They marched over Tennessee Pass in the coal smoke rising from the barracks stoves, and before noon it began to snow, a pelting snow, like rain. The new recruits buckled and wavered. Three went down and were left on the ground while L Company traveled on.
Ben suffered from a dull nausea, and his hands and feet grew numb. He marched in a stupor, short of breath; blood trickled from his nose. In the evening he was sent to the camp hospital. He could not get warm or stanch his nosebleed, and his temperature rose overnight to 103 degrees. In the hospital barracks he lay on his bunk and considered going to Denver, AWOL, as soon as he was sufficiently recovered, but for now he had cotton balls stuffed in his nostrils and a hacking, expectorating cough. A doctor assured him he would soon get better and explained that scores of men in the regiment had preceded Ben in altitude sickness—asthma, respiratory collapse, fever, nausea. "Things could be worse," the doctor said. "You could be fighting a war."
After three days his health improved, and Ben returned to training. He was a private first class and infantryman who served in L Company's Second Platoon, and as with everyone else at Camp Hale his lips were cracked, his eyes stung, and he wheezed with every breath. The camp air reeked of coal smoke, not only from the barracks stoves but from the locomotives in Tennessee Pass, striving up the basin's grade in great black plumes of exhaust. At taps the men sloshed water underfoot for the humidity it might provide. By dawn the floorboards were sheets of ice, and the men arose to reveille in the dark with the windowpanes frozen from their breath. Under stars they went in silence to the parade ground for shirtless calisthenics and close-drill marching, the wind blowing in their faces.
Ben was transferred to N Company for no apparent reason. They assigned him to a weapons platoon, perhaps because he'd scored high at firing the .30-caliber light machine gun. The sergeant placed him among the machine gunners, but then the company commander transferred Ben to a rifle platoon, where the lieutenant handed him a BAR to carry—the Browning automatic rifle—assigning him two ammunition bearers, Bill Stackhouse and Kelly Lastenpole, to haul the extra clips. Carrying this weapon in training, on top of his field pack and his own extra clips, Ben floundered in the snow.
After two months, the regiment embarked on winter field maneuvers. They started in the dark, shouldering ninety-pound packs, skins on their skis, steam chuffing from their mouths, and herringboned into Tennessee Pass, then toward Ptarmigan Peak. They traversed uphill in single file, the mortars lashed on toboggans, the mules hauling artillery. Ben carried a canvas mountain tent, white felt boots, camouflage gear, pile jacket, and double sleeping bag. At dark the company made rough camp in the lee of a ridge at twelve thousand feet and ate K rations from boxes:
cans of veal loaf warmed on gas stoves, bouillon, and powdered coffee. Ben passed the night with his socks, insoles, and canteens of water warming against his belly. Between the linings of his sleeping bag, he kept his boots and bindings.
In the morning it was twenty below. They ate a frozen biscuit each and broke camp wearing chamois masks, the air stabbing their lungs. No one could remember cold like this—it was cold on a mythic scale. A corporal removed his glasses from their case, and the frames shattered in his hand; another man's eyelashes froze solid and pulled free in white shards. The batteries in the field radios turned to ice. The Mi rifles wouldn't fire.
On the third day out, the temperature fell again, and those who felt too ill to push on were lashed to toboggans and hauled back to camp like so many frozen corpses. On bivouac that night, Ben heard around him the explosive frost-checking of the mountain birches; in the morning fresh snow had inundated the tents, whisked over them like sand. A radioman closed up his tent with two cookstoves going inside, and for a moment he had a working radio to call for tracked Snow Weasels. None came for them.
A blizzard was general to the mountains now, but no one of rank would call off the maneuvers, and the company fumbled toward Ptarmigan Peak on empty stomachs, sleepless. Ben's feet bled from the gusseting of his shoepacs. His fingers cracked open inside his gloves and the blood froze against his nails. Welts formed along his back from the pressure of his pack straps. Yet he slogged on through frozen trees, snow roiling under his skis, clouds of white suspended dust. That night, at Ptarmigan Peak, the hoarfrost grew like mold on the tent he shared with Bill Stackhouse. Their own breathing melted it.
They were ambushed that night—their guards having burrowed themselves into snow caves—and taken prisoner. Ben was lying in his sleeping bag with the drawstring pulled around his head when the hypothetical enemy attacked in the quiet hour before dawn. One of them tore open the tent door and knelt there pointing his Mi at Ben, telling him to sit up cautiously and do nothing to inspire an itchy trigger finger. Ben was in no mood for war games. His Browning rifle had frozen solid, and the pistol he normally kept between his thighs had been left, overnight, in his field pack.
The air warmed to 35 degrees that day, and Bens clothes grew wet with melting snow, but at dusk the temperature dropped again, and his pants and shirt froze against him. A heavy snow fell fast in the darkness, and there was nothing left to eat or drink but snow scooped up with a mitten, and no fuel left to melt it. In the morning they followed the order to dig out and with packs loaded marched through a pass, under an armed guard. Side-hilling on their sealskinned skis, they made a bitter ascent.
On the open slope, flailing in new snow, the wind tearing off the mountain summits so that he couldn't look any place but down to where his skis disappeared altogether, Ben came to understand what it meant to freeze to death. There was nothing to it but to wait in one place, and he saw that by doing nothing he could escape from all the suffering of the past interminable days. He paused to get the feel of it, this death by default, this seductive surrender, and then shrugged off his attraction to it and flailed grimly in the snow again, with a new and desperate resolve.
To live, Ben felt, was to be on fire, lest one turn to ice.
In the summer they left the mountains behind to inhabit the flatlands at Camp Swift, Texas, a land of chiggers and copperheads, poison ivy, cockroaches, dust, and scorpions. There was no explanation as to why mountain troops should be stationed in such an arid place, and they languished there unhappily. Ben wrote Rachel about army life, confessing that the imminence of war filled him with the fear of an awful death, or worse, of permanent wounds. She wrote back to say that in her training she had seen much that was terrible and disturbing. She had seen men legless, armless, and blind, their faces seared beyond recognition, their backs riddled with shrapnel, their feet blown off by land mines. She did not wish by describing these injuries to inspire in Ben a hindering fear, but on the other hand she thought it wise to tell painful truths. And she asked him bluntly to reconsider—couldn't he serve as a medic? Did he want to participate in killing? Ben replied that they'd made him a gunner, that from this there was no turning. On the issue of war they traded letters, Rachel insisting that the work of healing was better than the work of killing, Ben replying that his feelings compelled him to fight the war directly.
In the middle of June, Rachel finished classes and was sworn into the Army Nurse Corps. She volunteered for overseas service and despite her inexperience was accepted. She wrote Ben again from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where she'd been transferred for an eight-week orientation in the art of military nursing. Once she wrote from Waterville, where she'd gone on leave to visit her family, and once she sent a card from Manhattan, where her unit was on standby, awaiting orders to embark. By mid-August she was on a transport ship, headed for the coast of France.
In the fall Bens orders came, too, and in late November, after Thanksgiving, the Third Battalion of the 86th went by train across the South, living in Pullmans for three days, eating standing up in the kitchen cars, washing mess kits in cavalry cans in which the dishwater sloshed and churned as the steam engine negotiated bends. They passed through Arkansas and Mississippi, Ben staring vacantly at fields turned fallow and at bleak, drab pine forests.
They passed through Norfolk, Virginia. At Camp Patrick Henry, they slept in tar-papered barracks, played rounds of five-card draw, and read dog-eared novels borrowed from the camp's library. German prisoners manned the chow lines, and in the camp stockade, sequestered behind a high double fence, were draftees who had refused their orders to board ships for Europe.
Ben sailed aboard the SS Argentina, a converted luxury liner. It was part of a convoy of troop transport ships escorted by destroyers through Hampton Roads and out into the winter swells along the Virginia coast. The destroyers took gunnery practice with their aft-mounted antiaircraft guns, shooting at enormous gas-filled balloons ascending into winter skies—as deafening an exercise as Ben had been party to, setting up a ringing in his ears. Within a few hours men fell ill who had no stomach for rolling seas. That night they lay in bunks six deep, thousands of men in the hold of the ship, many of them retching, the floors slick with vomit. Ben could keep nothing down, either, and lined up in the gangways for seasickness pills that didn't solve his problem. At night he stood guard with a life vest on and leaned over the rail heaving, salt spray dashing his face. There were sudden, irrational submarine drills, and drills to determine if all knew their lifeboat stations, and at dawn more deafening gunnery practice while the convoy plowed through twenty-foot swells, over waves boiling with sea spume. It was a fogbound crossing, sunless. Soldiers played craps and blackjack in stairwells, in companionways deep in the hold of the ship, or lolled in their hammocks morosely, meditating on private omens.
Word was that they would land in Naples, and on the seventh day out they saw in the distance the green coast of Africa. They were detained briefly at the Strait of Gibraltar while an escort of four destroyers assembled, supported by a phalanx of PBYs, blister-gun ports aft of their wings, transparent gun turrets in their bows. Passing into the Mediterranean, they stood on deck in an African breeze, the water placid off their bow and blue in a lushly textured way that reminded Ben of the sky at home on certain midsummer afternoons. He leaned over the rail. Bill Stackhouse appeared beside him and said he'd won almost five hundred dollars playing craps in the hold.
"I'm spending it all," Stackhouse said, "as soon as we get into port.
"It's a lot of money," Ben said.
"I'm buying Italian women," said Stackhouse. "I might not get another chance."
"Yes, you will."
"I might not."
"You're not going to die."
"We might, Givens."
They passed close to the Isle of Capri, and on the ninth day, in dismal weather, entered the Bay of Naples. They were directed to anchor on the south side of the harbor to wait their turn to disembark, and from there they saw
sunken German ships resting on the harbor mud, their superstructures and upper decks breaking the surface like reefs. Some of the harbor buildings had been bombed and stood windowless with gaping walls, rubbish piled against them. Between rain squalls the air freshened; beyond the city sat Vesuvius. On the dockside street milled young women Stackhouse took to be prostitutes. Kelly Lastenpole explained to Bill how appropriate it was that here the sirens had lured wayfarers of antiquity to a death on distant shores.
The Empress of Australia anchored beside them, at such close quarters as to block their view; they saw only the curve of its hull. That night Ben tossed sleepless in his hammock, and in the morning felt weary as he packed his rucksack and hauled his duffel topside. No military band hailed them, like the band at embarkation in Virginia, playing "Over There." Instead there was rain and a throng of beggars, Red Cross girls in overcoats cheerily handing out stale doughnuts, and a line of army trucks waiting in the street to take them God knew where.
Ben made his way down the narrow gangplank and was disgorged into Italy. The day before Christmas, 1944. Bailey bridges spanned the pier's bomb gaps, a catwalk crawled over a capsized ship: the docks at Naples were a giant staging area choked with newly arrived soldiers. Ben deployed into a quartermaster truck that had been refitted to carry troops, and from it saw the wreckage of Naples with its streetcar tracks bombed loose and twisted, the facades of apartments dropped away. A girl squatted in the street to defecate, half-concealed by her coat. At the edge of town Stackhouse threw a small boy a chocolate bar, which landed at his feet.
Christmas Eve they staged at Bagnoli in the remains of a bombed-out orphanage the Germans had earlier occupied. Ben's company was assigned to its school, a cold building with no lights or furnishings, where the rain slanted through the broken windows and spattered against the stone floors. Ben wore his trench-coat and beneath it his field jacket, wrapped his blankets tightly around him, and tried to sleep sitting up in a corner, like fruit pickers he remembered who'd slept against tree trunks on nights the ground was too cold or damp for sleeping in the grass. Sleepless, bored, and shivering, he thought of home and Rachel Lake.
East of the Mountains Page 16