by Bill Mesce
“Why do you think that?”
“They had a radioman wi’ ‘em. I saw his antenna. I didn’ even know they were there at firs’, the guys from Item, or they had an officer or nothin’. Firs’ time I know… See, we get up there, we all flop inna firs’ hole we see. We was hardly up there a coupla minutes ‘n’ the l’tenan’ calls for the radio. Tha’s when I see the guys from Item. The l’tenan’ was callin’ over that way, I guess, ‘cause he seen the antenna and he t’ough that was Makris, tu sabe? Then Makris pipes up ‘n’ is a good thin’.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause that Item RTO, either him or the l’tenan’ gotta go over the top ‘n’ wan’ no way to do that wi’ ou’ gettin’ a kraut pill inna head. See, the kraut, he got positions awready dug here ‘n’ here.” He indicated the two overlooking crests. “We hit the top a the hill ‘n’ they come into these holes ‘n’ then they jus’ pourin shit on our heads. So, t’an’ God Makris pipes up ‘cause the l’tenan’ jus’ gotta crawl alon’ how all these holes make a trench. He musta scooted alon’ a bottom ‘cause I didn’ seem ‘im move but nex’ I hear him yellin’ onna radio.”
“Could you hear what he said?”
Bonilla gave me that same condescending grin Kasabian had. “Eh, hombre, there was a lotta fockin’ noise up there, tu sabe? You ever been inna thunderstorm? I mean a bad one? Imagine you’re stuck inna fockin’ cloud! BOOMBOOMBOOM, ok? Then the l’tenan’ is yellin’ to us, he blows his whistle, he say, Ok, we’re buggin’ out, everybody haul arse down a hill.”
“Where was Colonel Porter at this time?”
“I guess he was still back the other end alla way up here. I didn’ see him, but, ya know, that guy never did give many orders to us himself.”
“So. You start back down the hill.”
“Like I said, L’tenan’ Sisto blow his whistle and adios we haul arse. We get back out onna rock ‘n’ all that kraut mortar shit come back down. I didn’ stop runnin’ till we hit the trenches. Then I hear the l’tenan’, he’s goin, ‘Where’s Porter? Where is he? Where’s Porter?’ He say Porter was gonna cover our rear, he was s’pose’ to be righ’ behin’ the l’tenan’. So…” A dismissing shrug. “We figger he jus’ didn’ make it.”
“How many of you made it down?”
“I didn’t get no count then. No time till we got off a hill ‘n’ back ‘cross the firebreak ‘n’ we were takin’ shit that whole time. There was the guys at the hearin’ – “
“You mentioned Makris.”
“Yeah, ‘n’ some a the guys who were wi’ me, a coupla other guys from Item.”
I referred to my notes. “Makris, Byrd, Lauffer, a PFC Carl Silkie from Item Company.”
“Eleven. Three of ‘em inna hospital. Right here, this place.”
We were done. He saw me ready to dismiss him.
“Ya know, hombre, this pendajo Joyce, he try to make it soun’ like L’tenan’ Sisto wen’ yellow or somethin’. You put this down on your paper, huh? The l’tenan’ was one a the las’ guys off the top ‘n’ I know ‘cause I was the other one. ‘N’ when we got to the trenches, it wan’, ‘Pass the word! Everybody get your arse out!’ The l’tenan’, he say the kraut see us run, he come outta his hole ‘n’ chew us up. So, it was a fightin’ withdrawal, tu sabe? Slow, organize’, he got the squad leaders – whoever was lef’ – the l’tenan’ got ‘em checkin’ a groun’ for wounded. ‘We ain’ leavin’ nobody behin’,’ he say. The only time we ran was when we had to cross the clearin’, that firebreak, ‘cause tha’s the only way ‘cross wi’ all that kraut shit comin’ down. ‘N’ even out there, the l’tenan’, he loo’ back to see who ya need to pull back on his feet, get on somebody’s arse to make sure they get ‘cross. He come inna trees onna other side carryin’ a wounded man ‘n’ I know that for a fact ‘cause he had one arm ‘n’ I had the other. That sound like a guy who just broke ‘n’ ran?” The small eyes, usually lost in the wide face, now flashed in a way that brought them to the fore. The great hands flexed and I had a vision of an angry Juan Bonilla punching his way through the stone walls of Chateau d’Audran to free Dominick Sisto.
I shook my head in concurrence.
He seemed satisfied, grunted his bulk to his feet. “You tell the l’tenan’ I say hullo, ok?” He took the wooden cross from inside his shirt and gave it a quick kiss. “You tell ‘im Juan, he say a prayer.”
“Actually, Sergeant, if I may… As long as you’re quick to point out other men involved in the action who you feel are deserving of recognition, I thought you might appreciate hearing that your name has come up several times – ”
I had turned to my sheaf of notes to deliver a direct quote, but suddenly found the bulk of the sheet covered by the open hand of the sergeant.
“Compromiso, hombre, you don’ say nothin’ ‘bout that stuff. Some thin’s you do ‘cause you got the stripes so you got to do ‘em, tu sabe? They look at you, you gotta do ‘em.” But then the great jaw dropped just long enough to reveal broad teeth in a mischievious grin of epic proportions. “Course, you can get me three days in Paris, you say whatever you wan’! I’ll even help you make stuff up!”
*
“I’ve been hearing about this phantom radioman, too,” Peter Ricks reported.
We were, again, gathered in the hospital canteen in what had quickly become our evening ritual. It was rather posh, actually, the way we would lay on a platter of victuals from the canteen mess on one of the chateau’s mahogany coffee tables, gather round in our cushy lounges, and debrief each other of our day’s findings.
And, yet again, even by this only our second day, I was coming to dread the gathering and seeing how much greater the toll on Andy Thom had grown. One had to credit him with being a game lad for he never gave pause, never hesitated, did all that he was asked unreservedly. But one saw what he paid in the strain in his face, heard it as he tried to mask the cracks in his voice as clearings of the throat. This time round, Ricks and I were careful to address our remarks only to each other, sparing the boy as much as we could, letting him volunteer his participation only when he himself felt it was required.
“How do you mean, ‘phantom’?” I asked Ricks.
“Well, you were talking to Sisto’s doughs from Love Company. They all seem to think he was somebody from Item Company. The Item doughs I talked to today remember him, too, but they thought he was from Love! Curiouser and curiouser. Isn’t that what you English say?”
“A) I’m a Scot, and if one more of your ilk makes that same mistake I’ll thrash him! B) It was only one Englishman, and he were a little girl.”
“Oh.”
“I would like to resolve this business with our Lost Dutchman of the Airwaves.”
“You think he’s got somethin’ to say different from anybody else was up on that hill?” Andy Thom asked.
Ricks and I exchanged a grin.
“You obviously are not fully acquainted with the gentleman under whom you are now serving,” I remarked.
Thom squinted against the verbiage. “You mean Lieutenant Sisto?”
“He means Harry Voss,” Ricks replied.
“Harry – the colonel – is quite the thorough sort, laddie, and you’d be wise to keep that in mind.”
“If he could swing it, Harry’d have us talk to the krauts that were on that hill,” Ricks said. “Every one of them.”
“I think,” I continued, “ – and Peter will bear me out – that Harry’s view will be that one doesn’t know whether or not this spectral Sparks has anything of note to contribute – ”
Quick fellow that he was, Thom was already nodding. “Lessen we ask him.”
“Aye. It occurs to me, Peter, as I look down at those names left on our list, well, you and I should be able to easily finish the interviews tomorrow on our own. That would free up Andrew here to spend the day trying to locate and identify this fellow everybody on the hill seems to have seen, but no one seems to know.”
Ricks’ smile told me we were b
oth in communion. Not only was it good strategy, but it would spare Andy Thom yet another day of revisiting Hill 399. “Sounds like a good idea to me.”
“Agreeable to you, Andrew? Good. That will be the operational program for tomorrow. Och, Andrew, just what is that…display on that plate?”
It was Thom’s and Ricks’ turn to exchange a green. “An American delicacy we call SOS.”
I stirred a fork through the mire of chipped beef and thought of diarrhetic dogs. “Might I hazard a guess on what at least one ‘S’ stands for?”
*
“Once I got up there I didn’t see anything, I didn’t see anybody.” Spiro “Sketch” Makris (so–called because he was so skinny, in the showers he didn’t look like much more than a quickly–sketched stick figure) was leant forward in his chair, elbows on knees. The 19–year–old had a nervous tic of running his fingers through his curly black hair, making it even more unruly than seemed to be per usual. For one of the new men picked up by the battalion during its refit in England, the battle of the Huertgen – as it had been for so many in Dominick Sisto’s unit – had been his first exposure to combat.
Just fourteen months earlier, Makris had been standing on the production line of a shoe factory in Maine, working alongside his immigrant Greek father when his draft notice had come. “Ya know,” he had told me as our interview had begun, nodding wryly in the direction of his combat boots, “there’s a good chance my factory made these things. Maybe even by my poppa.” He picked up one toe, addressing it – only half–jokingly – “Hi, Poppa!”
“So you didn’t see this other Sparks?”
“Other what?”
“The other radio operator.”
“‘Other?’ Brother, I wasn’t any kinda radio operator! The lieutenant’s real operator took a pill the first day. I don’t even know I was the second guy to lug that thing around! The lieutenant needed a pack mule, he saw me, stuck this thing on my back, and suddenly I’m a radioman! He had to set all the dials and that stuff. My whole job was, like he said, stay close to him.”
“But you weren’t close to him on top of the hill.”
“On the run up, we got all strung out. It was a bitch and a half trying to make that run! That top part of the hill was like this – ” He rose out of his hunch, his arm canted at a thirty degree angle “ – and I’m lugging that goddamn radio. If Big Juan – ”
“Sergeant Bonilla?”
“ – yeah, if he hadn’t grabbed me by my belt and practically hauled me up, I never woulda made it. We got up there, Big Juan threw me in a hole, then went to herd some of the other guys up. Like I said: I got in that hole and I went right for the bottom and kissed dirt! I had my head so far down I was eyeball to eyeball with Chinamen! I couldn’t even tell you who else was in my hole! Then somebody’s kicking me in the arse telling me the lieutenant wanted me. See, there was a bunch of holes hooked up that led into where we were – ”
I showed him Bonilla’s sketch of the hilltop saddle.
“ – yeah, like that, that’s where I was.”
“And the lieutenant was here at the other end of this line of adjacent holes?”
“I guess. Like I said, I don’t know where anybody was.”
“Including Colonel Porter.”
“If he wasn’t down at the bottom of that hole with me, I don’t know shit from shinola about where he was.”
“So, obviously, you didn’t hear what orders – if any – Colonel Porter might have given Lieutenant Sisto.”
“The only thing I heard was a lot of shooting until I got that kick in the arse.”
“Then the lieutenant was there.”
“Well, somebody musta yelled out to him I was there because then he yells back for me not to move, he’ll come to me, which considering all the lead flying around I thought was awfully goddamn nice of him.”
“You would’ve been covered if you’d moved along the line of holes, wouldn’t you?”
“You’d like to think that, huh? See up here?” He turned to Bonilla’s drawing, pointing to where the Germans had dug in along the crests overlooking the low part of the saddle. “They had the high ground. They could get a lot of fire down inside a lot of those holes. That’s why I was getting as deep as I could go.”
“All right, then, we have the lieutenant coming back from this forward position to where you were.”
“Yeah, he grabs the handset and he’s yelling at somebody on the other end.”
“Do you remember what he said? Exact words?”
“You’re asking me like you think it was a whole conversation. All he said was, ‘We’re coming down,’ ‘We’re pulling out.’ Something like that. I got the idea whoever he was talking to didn’t agree, so then the lieutenant says that’s the colonel’s orders; for us to get the hell outta there. Then the other guy said something and the lieutenant said he could argue about it with the colonel when we got down. Then we bugged out.”
“How long did all this take? I mean from the time you reached the top of the hill until the time you withdrew?”
He drew himself erect in his chair, his dark, youthful face surprised that he’d never considered that particular aspect of the event. “Ya know, brother, I don’t think it coulda been more than a coupla minutes. If we were up there five minutes, I’d be surprised.”
“That’s all? Five minutes?”
He shook as if with a chill. “Maybe not even. And, brother, if it’d been just five seconds, that would’ve been five seconds too goddamn long!”
*
“Gents, I’m afraid I’m comin’ up dry,” Andy Thom declared at our nightly round table in the canteen. “I talked with Lieutenant DeCrane – he was Item’s acting CO that day – he says that on that day, there were only two workin’ sets left in the whole company. One was with him, and the other one he kept on his left wing as a kinda relay to the companies on the other slope. They always had problems transmittin’ ‘round the bend in the hill. ‘N’ I ran down both those operators. They’re accounted for.”
Thom shrugged helplessly. “I spent all afternoon with the battalion S–1. You fellas don’t know what a mess the personnel rosters are in! It was like that fella Makris said; hardly any of the original radiomen were still walkin’ by that third day. ‘N’ replacements had come into the battalion the night before but they never got a chance to check in formal–like. They came in ‘n’ got hustled up to the line ‘fore anybody even knew their names. The S–1 is still goin’ through all the paperwork tryin’ to figger ouit who was actually in the battalion that day, ‘n’ what happened to ‘em!”
Ricks sighed and shook his head. He turned to me. “You know Harry. The more we don’t know who this guy is, the more he’s going to want to talk to him.”
I nodded.
“Do you think we should leave Andy here when we go back tomorrow?”
“Nae. We should all go back together. Harry’ll prefer we all brief him to make sure no one forgets anything. And, perhaps, Dominick Sisto might be able to enlighten us on the matter, maybe point us in a direction we haven’t divined. Failing that – ” I turned to Thom “ – he may very well send you back here and set you to digging until you do find this bloke.”
We all sat back with a sense of finality. We’d interviewed nearly thirty men in the three days, exhausted a ream of foolscap, several boxes of pencils, and our writing arms. Though, at the time, I’d have been hard put to set a value on what we’d done, there was, nevertheless, a sense of accomplishment. But while Andy Thom and myself acknowledged we’d be happy to take our cramped writing limbs and tired eyes to bed, Peter Ricks pulled himself out of his chair with a grunt and headed for the canteen door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I ascribe to a regimen my father set for me when I was a little boy,” Ricks said. “When I was very good and did all my household chores, I was rewarded with a piece of candy.” And off he went.
*
A clatter and thump stirred me from a
shallow sleep which was all one could manage on those damnable cots. In a wedge of light through the partly open door to the corridor, I saw a figure sprawled across the floor where it had stumbled over our B–4 bags, packed and ready for our departure in the morning.
I knew it was Peter Ricks even before I turned and saw the gleam of his hook, before I heard the slurred oaths directed at the offending luggage.
“What the fuck…” He grumbled and kicked one of the nearest bags away.
Still half asleep, I rolled off the cot and was unpleasantly reminded I was not the whole creature of my dreams as I toppled off my one leg and found myself face down on the cold parquet floor. I got myself onto my elbows and saw that Ricks was now sitting on the floor. He had pulled over the milk crate Thom had cadged from the mess as a means of toting about the collective mass of our query notes. He sat with the crate between his legs and began to rifle through the papers, a silly grin on his face. He extracted a fistful of scribble–covered foolscap, held it down into the wedge of light, pressed his eyes close to see. He giggled; in amusement, in mockery. For a moment I thought he might reach into the crate with hand and hook and toss the entire lot into the air, chortling as it fluttered down about him.
I started to pull myself across the floor when I felt two hands – the large, strong hands of a rancher – take me by the shoulders and help me back on to my cot. “Don’t worry, Mr. Owen, I got ‘im.”
Andy Thom padded across the wood floor clad only in his long underwear and crouched down by Ricks. “What say we leave all that till tomorrow, Cap’n, huh? For now, let’s get you into bed.”
With a tired huff, Ricks let the papers drop back into the crate. Thom helped him to his feet and set him down on the cot where the captain’s head promptly dropped forward to his chest and issued a drunken snore. Thom stripped off Ricks’ boot and began to disrobe him.
I wobbled to my one foot and hopped across to Ricks’ cot, sitting alongside the slumped body as Thom stripped off the captain’s blouse. It was at that point the corporal was confronted with the straps and buckles of Ricks’ prosthetic.
“Ya think I need to take that off?” he said, uncomfortably.