“No, he always comes back to me. And if he doesn’t, I just take him away.”
She sat beside me and put the gun on the table. “You need to sleep, Neal. We can talk about this later.”
I sunk into the pillow and the ceiling spun. “My mother waited.”
“I’m sorry about that. I’m sure she was a fine dame.”
“She killed herself, you know?”
“Yes.”
“No one knows that but me and my uncle. Not even Tillie. We didn’t want to tell her and—”
“It’s fine, Neal. Go to sleep.”
A car pulled up and cut its engine and Mattie went outside. For some reason, I expected gunfire and screams, but it was just a soft, sad conversation. The last thing I remember before I passed out was a man putting a hand on my forehead. “Good night, Cowboy.”
—23—
When I woke up, it was still dark, but I could see the outline of a woman in a chair across from me. I sat up and waited for the dizziness, but none came.
The woman was thicker than Alma, with shorter hair and worse posture. I reached over to the side table, and turned on the lamp.
Gertie held a knife. She peeled the skin from an apple and looked at me like I was some sort of lost dog, frightened and searching for my way home.
“You want some?” She asked. “They’re delicious. You can just pick them off the tree.”
I didn’t want any food, or, strangely, any booze. I just wanted to settle myself. The knife glimmered in the lamplight, but she didn’t seem all that interested in me.
“It’s quiet outside,” she said. “Almost spooky.”
“I’m not good company, right now.”
“I’m not looking for love. Just came to say goodbye.”
“You getting sentimental?”
“I’m running, Neal. I’m running as fast as I can from this town, this entire mess. You know why? Because I’ve been through this before, and you know when the big bad happens it’s the Pinkerton who does the time, not some rich fools like you or your uncle. I’ve got no love for the noose.”
She bit a slice of her apple. I wondered if she was really nervous or if this was another ruse. I asked her.
“I do get scared, Neal. I have feelings. I get sad, angry, even jealous. I’m human.”
I reached up to my shoulder; it felt tender, burnt.
“You think I’m evil, don’t you? You think I’m some bogeyman who wakes you in the dark, but you’re just as mean as me and twice as sad.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Maybe I’m in love with you.” She laughed. “I’m sorry. When I’m nervous I joke. It’s the only way I keep from cutting my own throat.”
She kissed my forehead. “Run,” she said. “Run back to France. Go find your wife if she’s still alive. Your family is awful screwy, Neal.”
“She’s dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“I can’t leave Tillie.”
“Get her in the morning. They’ll let her go. Then get as far away as you can. Listen to me on this. Take the next train out of here.”
After she left, I tried sleeping, but, in the early morning’s stillness, I got nostalgic. I went to the bookcase and pulled out a photo album, one from my youth. Looking at your first pictures is a lot like revisiting old love letters: you can remember composing them, but they seem like they came from another’s mind. And they’re embarrassing. I cringed at my ideas of art, but I could see hope in those snapshots, the ambition and passion I no longer had. My father was in a few of them, my mother and sister too. Seamus showed up once in a while, steady in his suit, his face still like granite. Even by then they were historical remnants, artifacts of a forgotten age.
The truth was that the photos narrated an incomplete history because I had none of Lorraine: the pictures I’d taken of my wife lost, like so much, to the war. Sometimes, when her face comes to me at night, I wonder if I’m remembering her right. If she really looked as I imagine. I’ve spent so much of my life compiling and cataloguing images, seeking the right light, the proper angles to capture the truth of a man, but my most important pictures are gone, their material returned to the soil, and all I was left with was a note she’d written begging me to run away with her. And not even that lasted. Now all I’ve got left are memories and I don’t trust them, not entirely.
This is the last of them.
Meaux
Unlike most men on the Western Front, I was freelance and could leave as I pleased. I owed no one, but I was at the time bent on self-discipline, and I didn’t like leaving the war in case we had a breakthrough and found our way marching toward Berlin and then I’d be the unluckiest photographer in the world. Even in late 1915, I still had faith that the war could be done any day now. The British had named Haig their new commander, and I thought that push, that sort of foresight boded well for our side. Word was Haig wanted to wage a major offensive that would break the German lines. It seemed like the right tactic.
Yet this freedom to leave whenever I wanted, paired with my reluctance to do so, was a constant source of strife with Lorraine. She wanted me to treat the front like a factory job: on at seven, off at five, half-days on Saturdays. She knew it didn’t work that way, but she couldn’t let the idea go, and I wouldn’t compromise. Not about this. So to mend our marital fences, I promised her Christmas.
I hitchhiked down to Meaux, a couple of miles outside Paris, where Lorraine had rented a small house for the holiday. The town sat on the Seine and had been the spot of an epic battle during the Hundred Year’s War. The defense of Meaux was led by the aptly named Bastard of Vaurus, who managed to hold out for months, but eventually was overrun by Henry V’s forces. Afterwards, the Bastard was decapitated. Not such a bad end. Henry died of dysentery soon after, and let me say, after watching a dozen men die like that, I’ll take an axe to the neck anytime.
The reason I’m bringing this up is simple: it started a fight with Lorraine.
“I scrounge together enough dough for a Christmas duck,” she started. “I cook it all day long and set a table and hell, I even put on make-up and I don’t have a whole lot left and you sit down at my table and talk of dysentery? You’re making me sound like my mother.”
“I thought it was interesting.”
“What the hell makes you think I’d care?”
The spread was nice, as was the house. I told her so.
“Shit, dear, thank you, but how do I look?”
She looked gaunt, tired. The makeup seemed to be hiding her exhaustion.
“You look beautiful, darling,” I said. “You always look beautiful.”
“You’re the bastard of Colorado. How do you like that title?”
The night disintegrated from there. In fact, we were having a hard time speaking at all. I didn’t want to tell her about the front and she didn’t want to talk about the hospital. We hadn’t seen any theater, heard any music, or read any books worth bringing up. A lot of the time we sat silent or we talked about Paris.
“Do you remember that café Rene Philippe ran in the Seventh?” she asked. “Well, I hear his wife burned it down.”
“She finally caught him?”
“You knew?”
I took a drink of wine. “I thought everyone did.”
She went to the sink and did the dishes. Occasionally she grunted or sighed, but mostly she splashed water and cursed under her breath. I smoked. After a while, I went to my bag and pulled out a gift and gave it to her.
She bit her lip. “I didn’t get you anything.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m a terrible wife.”
“You’re a doll. Open it.”
It was a photo album that I’d scrounged from some old lady near Brussels on a day off. Inside, I pasted a single photo: our wedding portrait.
We stood, stone-still, smiling at the camera, trying not to shake or twitch during the long-exposure for that hackneyed photographer. I remember her looking royal, angelic, while I looked roguish and debonair. But maybe I’m remembering it wrong and we looked scared or tired or sad. I can’t remember. Seamus burned it before I ever saw it again.
She turned away, drawing her hand to her eyes.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I love you, Snowball.”
That night, undressed, Lorraine first saw my missing toe. She sat up in bed and grabbed my foot. She circled her finger around the scar. I hadn’t told her I’d lost it.
“What else you been keeping from me?”
“It’s not even a necessary toe,” I told her, remembering something my sister once told me. “It’s vestigial, something we’ve outgrown. I’m just more evolved now.”
“Every part of you is necessary,” she said. “I was married to that toe. I loved it.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shut off the light and turned away from me, slapping her pillow. “Did it hurt?”
Yes, it had. “Not much,” I said. “Felt a bit like a paper cut.”
After a while, as the wind whirled across the window and we both could hear in the uneven pace of our breath the other’s awakeness, she turned to me and touched my face. “Last week, I sat with a boy who asked me to massage his missing leg. I sat there for near two hours and rubbed the air. How is this right?”
By the time I woke up, she was already out of the house. It was like her to leave early, to go buy food or take walks along the river. I remained in bed for a long while as the cold sun trickled between the shades. It had been a long time since I’d had a proper bed and I was intent on enjoying it, but after a while, my back felt sore because of the soft mattress. I rolled over and felt her indentation in the pillow. I could smell her hair.
I made coffee and waited, reading yesterday’s newspapers, cleaning Miss Constance, smoking. By the time noon rolled around, I’d gotten worried, so I went searching for her. I figured she’d gone into town to find more food and had gotten lost because of her awful sense of direction. It wouldn’t take much time to find her; the town was crowded with the old and the infirm and a black woman stuck out like you could imagine. Yet she wasn’t there. I went to the baker, the fishmonger, and the fromagier and still nothing. I couldn’t ask anyone if they’d seen her: I had never learned more than a dozen words of French.
Eventually, I followed the river back to the house and there I found her standing outside our place, speaking French to some old couple who had a small white dog with a gray face. It was a skinny little thing, attached to the old woman’s leg like a tumor. The dog looked at me with mild indifference.
“Where’d you go?” I asked. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“For a walk.”
“It’s noon.”
She shrugged and said something in French to the old couple. All of them laughed.
“What did you say?”
“My husband worries after me like a stray dog.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Just when I’m around, that is.” She kneeled and the dog licked her hand then tried to jump on her. “I want to take her home.”
“I hate dogs.”
“You would.”
That afternoon we sat around by the fire, reading the newspaper. She brought me the Paris Herald while she read Le Monde. She traced her finger along the lines and furrowed her eyes like she was imagining the inner lives of the story’s subjects.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If you want a dog, we can have a dog. I can get used to a dog.”
I kissed her cheek, then started rubbing her shoulders. She shrugged.
“What is it?” I asked. “I was just worried about you. You get lost so easy.”
“No, it’s not that.”
She put the paper in front of me.
“You know I can’t read it.”
She pointed at a headline. I didn’t recognize the other words, just the name—Jesse Stephens. I asked her what my father had done now.
“Destroyed a bank in London.”
“Figures.”
“His girl was killed in the process. A woman named Madeline Longstreet.”
“He probably got bored of her.”
“Neal, please. He killed her on accident. It’s got to be awful for him.”
“He did it to himself.”
“How can you say that?”
I didn’t want to fight. We only had a day and I wanted to enjoy our time and that meant not talking about my father and his mistress. I drifted toward the icebox.
“Do you want a drink?”
The next morning a knock woke us just after sunrise and I sat up and thought I was being shelled again. Lorraine grabbed my shoulder and tried to relax me.
“You’re having a dream,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
Another knock startled her.
“Stay here.” I dressed and opened the door to find three British soldiers, their topcoats unbuttoned, their eyes reddened, and their breath smelling like wine. The closest one had bright blond hair and red cheeks. He held a rifle fixed with a bayonet, as did the others.
“We’re here to commandeer your supplies,” the blond soldier said. The other two hung back. Across the street, the old couple stood in their robes, while soldiers ransacked their house.
“Don’t you speak English? Vous faire parle l’anglais?”
“We haven’t got any supplies for you. Go away.”
Lorraine came up behind me.
The soldier stepped back, eyes widened.
“I’ll commandeer the Zulu or are you paid through the day?”
I stepped on to the porch and tried closing the door behind me, but Lorraine held it open.
“She’s no whore and you need to leave now.”
“Is that so? Then what is she?”
“I’m an American photographer with credentials. You take another step and I’ll talk to your lieutenant and you’ll be the first over the top come next week.”
“Neal,” Lorraine said.
I waved her away. “And another thing,” I said. “If you don’t leave that couple alone and stop rousting civilians, I’ll call the RMP’s and have you dragged out for court martial, Private. You’ve got no authority.”
“Neal.”
She was pointing at the old couple weeping as they watched a soldier holding up his rifle, the little dog impaled on the bayonet.
“Christ,” I said. I fetched Miss Constance. When I came back, the soldier was twirling the dead dog like a flag. I slipped passed Lorraine and raised Miss Constance and snapped a picture.
“Run away, Private,” I said.
When I got back to the house, Lorraine sat on the sofa. She poured wine.
“Did you get a good picture?”
“Stop it,” I said. “I wanted to scare them off.”
“How much will you sell it for?”
“I’m going back to bed.”
Lorraine stayed in the kitchen. I looked over at my bag: she’d gone through it.
“What were you looking for?”
“A gun,” she called out.
We didn’t say much that day. There seemed to be a fog in the house and we mostly stayed in separate corners, reading books, newspapers, anything we could get our hands on. For dinner, she cracked a couple of eggs, fried them quickly, and then put them on the table.
“Eat.”
I figured the soldiers upset her. They’d frightened her, ruining our last afternoon together. I didn’t want the evening broken as well.
“I can’t believe those kids waking us like that.”
She chewed.
“You’d think British soldiers would be be
tter disciplined, more behaved.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Why would they be better behaved? They kill people all day long. They kill and kill and kill and what’s a dog to them? What’s a woman to them?”
“You’re acting crazy.”
She flung her plate across the room and it crashed into the wall and you could see how shocked she was, and regretful.
“A woman dies and you act like it doesn’t matter.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t go back tomorrow.”
“Stop it.”
“Neal, please.”
She went to the kitchen and came back with a broom. I grabbed her and pulled her to me. “It’s almost over,” I said. “Just a little while longer. Just give me a little more time. I promise.”
“You make a lot of promises.”
In the morning, I dressed silently. I had bread and cold coffee and drank a little wine and put my bag on the stoop. I’d found a ride north where I’d follow a battalion entrenched by the Somme River. I wanted to get a picture of Haig at the front and I’d heard he’d be nearby, surveying the men.
I went back to our room. She lay asleep, quiet as a graveyard. Her hair covered the body of her pillow and the blanket was up to her chin. I sat on the floor and wrote her a note and left it on the nightstand. I told her I’d see her soon.
I stood above her for a beat or two, trying to memorize her face, before I shouldered my pack and walked out the door.
Part Three
When Will These Masses End, Garatuza?
—24—
By the time I got out to the jailhouse, Forest was already dead. They’d hung him at sunrise and when I pulled up they were cutting him down from the oak. There were four or five other bodies nearby, a pyramid of flesh, and I saw Tobias among them, along with Ruth’s husband, who was better off dead. I could tell you what Forest looked like: his distended eyes and stretched neck and flailing tongue, but you can imagine it just fine. After the Pinkertons cut him down, they dragged him over to the other bodies and left him there and then went to find a can of gasoline.
The Trench Angel Page 15