by C. P. Boyko
This statement was so ignorant and so offensive in so many ways that it overloaded Two Words’s capacity for indignation; she subsided, deflated. “Let’s just hope for your own sake that you get scared too, fuck-knuckle, and soon.”
A few days later, Nebel volunteered for a reconnaissance patrol—and Two Words saw an opportunity to teach the new fuck a lesson. She recruited Winky and Pschaw to assist, and brought her idea to the other three members of the patrol fireteam. Only Sawed-Off was hesitant; she asked, “Shouldn’t we ask the Corp’s permission first?” —“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Longpork. “You know exactly what she would say.” —Corporal Cobweb had three stock phrases: “The wherewithal and the inclination,” “Drumhead,” and “Waste of ammo.” Sawed-Off conceded that the corporal would probably adjudge the mock firefight a waste of ammo.
They discussed practicalities. “Should we use blanks?” —“Fuck that,” said Upsize. “I’m not going out on any recon without fucking live rounds.” —“The area’s been dead for weeks,” Two Words reminded her. “Anyway, we’ll never get hold of enough blank rounds. Don’t worry. We’ll shoot over your heads, and you’ll shoot into the ground.” —“What about Nebel?” —“She’ll never see us.” —“And grenades?” —“Don’t use them.” —“But what about her?” —Two Words made an impatient gesture. “She’ll be too shit-scared to do anything. Trust me.”
They studied a map of the patrol’s proposed route. “We’ll wait for you here, where the road curves.” —“Sure, where the burned-out tank is.” —“No, that’s farther on.” —“Oh, is it? Never mind.” —Eventually everyone believed that they knew which spot Two Words was referring to. —“Winky and Pschaw will take the hill here, and I’ll be here, beyond the ditch. Any questions?” —There was a long silence, but no questions.
That night in the mess dugout, everyone got into the spirit of the practical joke, even those who had not been coached by Two Words. They gave Nebel solemn and contradictory advice, told exaggerated or apocryphal tales of their own first patrols, and throughout feigned a struggle to restrain their feelings of pity and foreboding.
“Last time I was out that way, the whole fucking area was swarming with invaders.” —“There’s about ten fucking classroom fucking ambush points on that route they got you walking.” —“Who’s the sorry saggy-tit on point?” —Upsize, Longpork, and Sawed-Off declined the lead position. —“I guess that leaves me,” laughed Nebel, but there was a catch in her voice.
“I just can’t shake this bad fucking feeling,” muttered Sawed-Off. “Last time I had a bad feeling like this, Doc Throb and Chop Top came back dead.” —In the end, they managed to spook not just Nebel, but themselves as well.
Nebel’s nervousness mounted throughout the briefing, which she scarcely absorbed, and continued to crescendo in the hours preceding the departure time, till by midnight she was certain that those around her could sense the anguish radiating from her like a stink. Her bowels were clamorous but she could not shit; her breathing seemed shallow and rapid, but any correction she imposed left her dizzy and gasping. Not until they were moving out through the camouflaged chicanes in the razor wire did her anxiety diminish, or rather find an outlet. For the first time she discovered the difference between useful and useless, active and inactive fear; and she understood why, under an artillery barrage a few nights earlier, her partner on watch had scrambled about for hours making superficial improvements to their bunker. Now, creeping daintily across the darkened landscape, her every muscle strained, her every sense afire with perceptions, she was still terrified, but at last she was doing something: moving to meet, and perhaps to shape, her fate. She seemed to have all the oxygen she needed; the air was brimming almost visibly with it; she could sip it like wine for pleasure or gulp it like water for strength. The terrain she navigated seemed familiar to her from childhood, when in imagination and in dreams she had skulked and slid and tumbled and sneaked across fields, over hills, and through shadows and forests like these.
Their progress was slow, for Nebel tested each patch of ground before giving it her weight, insisted on crawling up any rise, and frequently motioned for a stop and drop so that she could investigate a suspicious-looking twig, or stone, or signpost, or furrow. Sometimes she left the others for ten or fifteen minutes—an eternity of lying on the frozen ground, listening to the rustling of grass and trees and the miscellany of tiny stirring noises that loomed in the silence like the sounds of a soldier being stifled, subdued, and garroted. Each time Nebel returned, often from a different direction than that in which she had set out, Sawed-Off was half convinced that she was an enemy, and had to consciously refrain from shooting her.
Shortly after checkpoint two, Nebel dropped to the ground and lay motionless for a long time. Eventually, Longpork slithered forward to join her. Nebel pointed first subtly, then with increasing emphasis, at a thicket fifty meters distant. Longpork saw only the thin black silhouettes of trees standing in a pool of their own shadow. In truth, anything could have been in there. She made a questioning gesture; Nebel replied with a gesture of irate incredulity, and pointed again. Longpork looked harder, with fixed gaze, till the whole countryside seemed to be dancing with sinister motion; she was staring into a damp, pulsating tunnel teeming with glistening gremlins, then into a kaleidoscopically shifting hallway being built and dismantled by scaly self-replicating machines. She blinked and shook her head. There was a reason new fucks were not usually permitted to take point. “You’re seeing things,” she said.
Nebel’s whisper was slow and adamant. “I saw their helmets.”
Longpork did not know what to do. She did not really think anyone was there; and if anyone were, it could not likely be Winky and Pschaw, who were supposed to be waiting past checkpoint three, and not in any trees but behind a hill. Nevertheless, Two Words might have moved the site of her ambush forward due to impatience, disorientation, or other reasons she’d been unable to communicate to the patrol. Longpork switched her rifle’s safety off, and, to let whoever might be there know they had been spotted, she fired a burst over the thicket.
Nebel started and nearly screamed. Her finger was on her trigger; indeed, the only thing that had prevented her from firing already was the warning she’d received earlier that night: namely, that the muzzle flash suppressors they’d been issued were useless, and that the only sure way to avoid revealing your location at night was by tossing a grenade. Now she squeezed the trigger, emptying an entire magazine into the thicket, with the desperate conviction that it would probably be the last thing she ever did. She intended to go on firing until she died; when the rifle emitted a hollow click, she cried, “I’m empty!” as if she had been shot.
“What the fuck?” said Upsize, coming forward.
Silence. No return fire. Nebel peered into the trees. The helmets hadn’t moved. Either they were extraordinarily disciplined soldiers, or . . .
She loaded another magazine, set her rifle to semi-automatic, got to her feet, and loped, crouching, in the direction of the thicket, firing a round every few steps. The helmets did not flinch. Finally, from ten meters away, she saw that they were not helmets, but burls. She returned to the group without a word, and with a gesture resumed the patrol.
Winky and Pschaw, meanwhile, were growing jumpy. The patrol was far behind schedule; had something happened? The gunfire in the distance unsettled them further, and Winky crossed the road to consult with Two Words. —“Get the fuck back to your position. They’re probably just doing some rape fucker.” This was code, in Fourth Company’s informal phonetic alphabet, for reconnaissance by fire—shooting at something to see if it shot back. “Stick to the plan. Everything’s fine.”
But Two Words was also unsettled. Several times she was on the verge of canceling the ambush and returning to camp; and when at last she saw figures approaching from the wrong direction, and in an untactically tight group, she panicked and tossed a concussion
grenade into the road.
This frightened not only Nebel, but the rest of the patrol and Winky and Pschaw too, who had not been expecting grenades. Everyone got low and began firing at once, not bothering to aim, let alone to aim over anyone’s head or into the ground. No one was hit; but later, comparing stories, each of them swore that bullets had passed within centimeters of them; and this led to counter-boasts of having sharpshot rings around one another. Back at camp, some wags said that it was a miracle nobody got killed; but in fact, as the carelessness of fright was soon succeeded by the carelessness of exultation, it probably would have been more miraculous if any bullet had met, in all that black space, a body. The only real danger came from Nebel, who, believing herself surrounded, lobbed grenades in every direction.
The firefight drew the attention of two infrapodean infanteers lying in a nearby listening post. They radioed their commander, who decided, after studying the map and communicating with other platoon leaders, that it must be an enemy field exercise. He ordered an artillery barrage, which, even before correction, landed close enough to the mock ambush to bring it to a halt. —“That’s enemy incoming!” screamed Two Words, and initiated the retreat.
Not until they were halfway back to camp did Nebel realize that there were now seven of them. To Sawed-Off, who was running alongside her, she said, “Shit, were you all in that ambush too?” —“Uh, yeah,” said Sawed-Off. —“Fuck; anybody hurt?” She wanted to hear that others had been hurt, even killed, for it would make the ecstasy she felt at still being alive even more acute. But she could not wait for a reply, and she prattled on: “I killed one of those fuckers for sure, maybe two. I saw an arm flying, and a boot. It could’ve been two. That was some extremely intense shit, huh? You ever seen shit like that before? I think it was two. It must’ve been two. Did you see? It was something else.”
Back at camp, her excitement rendered her oblivious for a long time to her comrades’ laughter and ridicule. Only gradually did she realize that the whole thing had been a joke, and that no enemy had been present. Her face crumpled and fell; she looked ready to weep. “Shit,” she groaned, “then who’d I kill?”
This question was relished, and cherished, and repeated, and soon became the platoon’s latest all-purpose catchphrase. It was used as an expression of bewilderment, of braggadocio, and of hangdog complaint. And when, a month later, Albene Nebel drowned in a collapsed trench, it was as Old Fuck Who’d-I-Kill that she was affectionately remembered. Striking this name from her secret ledger with regret, Two Words added a succinct obituary: “Mud”—the cause of death.
Mail Call. —A bag of mail caught up with Forty-Third Company in the village of Apillnol, where for several days they had huddled in the shattered cellars awaiting orders, munitions, and food. In the bombed-out skeleton of a cathedral, C Platoon gathered around a few smoky, nauseating heat tablets, and shared the last of Florze’s illicit goat jerky. The mood, which had been dismal for days, became almost convivial. The letters were a welcome distraction from the damp and the inaction, and were savored even by those who feared, with or without reason, bad news from home—a death in the family, a debt incurred by a spouse, or a jilting by a lover. The procedure in these cases was the same as with a wound: you stared at the ceiling while someone else surveyed the damage first; then a glance at their face told you the worst.
Only Boorq truly dreaded the mail call, for each letter received from her brother was another she would not answer. It was months—she dared not reckon how many—since she had last been able to write. What could she write about? The noise, the scarcity, the filth? The dismemberment of her friends? The farmer she’d murdered? To answer Bibb’s perky chatty domestic reports with a grim litany of objectives taken and lost, casualties abandoned, provisions scavenged, and landscapes and livelihoods smashed to rubble by unceasing storms of high explosives, would be obscene. Finally, she had found it no less obscene to conceal these facts behind a veil of stoic or phatic circumlocution; and so she had stopped writing altogether. Now her brother’s letters, which formerly she had warmed herself by, served only to sharpen her guilt—with the result that she felt attacked by them. Of course, feeling attacked helped lessen the guilt, so she scoured his lines for reproaches, and found them even in his avoidance of any tone of reproach. The saintly way he continued to write letters exactly as if his sister continued to reply to them was surely meant to be shaming.
Today’s note was no different. Two devilishly inane pages about the weather, the neighbors, the cost of yams, and another trivial milestone achieved by her toddler niece, Milu; then a perfunctory paragraph of optimism; and finally the fatuous, hurried close: “I must stop here if I am to get this off by today’s post”—as if it mattered when he got it off. Why not spend a week crafting something of value, of interest? Because, of course, it was a chore, one that must be completed in a single burst of willpower. Here, too, in his exemplary performance of an unpleasant duty, she detected an indictment.
Hiding her disgust, she allowed the letter to be passed around the circle, so that those who had received no mail could project their own fantasies of home onto the screen of her brother’s prose. When the letter came back to her with compliments, she scanned it once more with affected objectivity. She thought she now perceived a crack in Bibb’s sanctimony; surely here, in his defense of his daughter’s temper tantrums, was an overt expression of resentment: “After all, one must be patient, for the girl struggles, as we all do, with your absence.” Boorq almost laughed aloud with vindicated spite. And yet the feebleness of this jab was quite pathetic. Did he really imagine she might feel responsible for the child’s burgeoning psychopathy? Besides, nothing could be easier than to turn that argument to her own use. If Milu’s “struggle” gave her permission to behave badly, then how much more exonerating was Boorq’s own greater struggle. Indeed, in the context of this slaughterhouse, her misdeeds were trifling. If Milu was not to blame for her tantrums, her aunt was not to blame for anything she might do while a soldier in this war, fighting, at the risk of her life, for her country against the aggressors. She had just enough strength to be a good warrior; she need not also be a good aunt, or sister, or citizen, or soul. She could steal food from the poor, destroy property, and kill with impunity. She would support her fellow soldiers; she would not run away. That was enough.
She felt a knot loosening within her, and a welling of freedom and power. Excusing herself with a grunt, she went out into the street and picked her way through the debris, humming and chewing meat, a feral animal flexing its thews.
One parcel remained unclaimed. It was addressed to Private Popatisu, a puke who’d been crushed the week before by one of their own tanks. Raof had been nearby, and had seen the body, a flatulent, quivering slab of flesh trussed up in tattered khakis. After staring at it for a minute, she had waved another tank forward, so as to mash the horrific sight more completely into the earth. When after the skirmish she reported Popatisu’s death to the lieutenant, she was vague about the location, so that the graves people would not have to rummage in the carnage for her dog tags.
Raof was against opening the parcel, but she was in the minority. —“What if there’s food?” —“What if there’s a sexy note?” —“Or a sexy photo?” —“If she were here,” said Osini, “she’d want us to have it. She’d want us to at least look.” No one could convincingly deny this, for Popatisu had not been well known. When the lieutenant excused himself, he seemed to say that the army had no ruling on the matter. Osini opened the package.
What they found inside was better than food or pornography: seven pairs of thick, dry, clean, hand-knitted woolen socks. Everyone stared agape at them, each basking in her own private image of the soft, warm, sheltering human being who had made and mailed them. Then Pannak broke the spell by trying to start an auction. There were jeers: “Yeah, and who’ll the money go to, orphans?” Tolb thought the socks should go to Culverson or Sergeant Costitch or the machine
-gun team, who carried the heaviest gear. Burnok, untying her boots’ laces, said they should go to whoever had the worst case of foot rot. Osini pointed out that the parcel had only been opened thanks to her. Finally Kellek leapt up. “We’ll draw high card for them, you fartholes.” —“Wait,” said Pannak, “for all of them?” —“That’s right. Winner takes all.” —“I think we should have seven winners. Seven pairs of socks, seven winners.” —“Aw, swallow it. If you win, you can give six away.” —“Well, whatever we do, let’s hurry up and draw before the other two get back.”
To her embarrassment and everyone else’s annoyance, Tolb won the socks. She tried to give a few pairs away, but no one but Burnok would publicly accept them. Within a few days, however, four of the remaining six pairs had gone missing from Tolb’s pack.
After this prize was awarded, Laskantan plucked from the parcel the neglected letter to Popatisu, and began to recite from it. There were words she did not recognize, however, and the subject matter, when not outright inscrutable, did not lend itself well to declamation. “Here, on the matter of which particular manifestation a decision would take, I am afraid we stand divided . . . Whether circumstances will continue as they have heretofore, or whether, on the contrary, an about-face is to be expected, is not for me to speculate . . . Leaving to the side for the time being the question of responsibility, I will go so far as to say that your involvement, if pursued freely, would not be unwelcome to any party here.” Laskantan groaned and let the pages drop.