Dodging and Burning

by John Copenhaver

  “That’s Darren,” Jay said, pointing out the man staring at the camera. “We crossed paths eventually. It was good to see him—and lucky too. This photo was taken after the first few days in the Bulge.”

  Jay continued to show me his photos, placing them in front of me one at a time, checking for a reaction but saying little. He was anxious about letting me see them, but I didn’t understand why. I had already seen similar images in magazines and film reels.

  But one shot made him smile. Bright streaks of white blazed across the sky over GIs’ heads. They were huddled in a ditch beside a river, and in the background, a geyser of water, like a fountain in one of those Las Vegas water shows, exploded midstream.

  “I got a Bronze Star for that one,” he said. “To get it, I had to keep standing during an onslaught of machine gun fire. I was lucky that day. Not a scratch.”

  As we went on, he began to talk more about his experience, sharing mostly lighter anecdotes. Eventually we came to a photo—the last he would show me—and he hesitated.

  “This one,” he said in a dry whisper, “is a lie in service to the truth.” The ice in his voice had returned.

  The photo itself, considering many of its counterparts, wasn’t out of the ordinary. In the foreground, a soldier sat in a jeep. He was in silhouette, and his head was cocked to the right. Behind him, a village was on fire, and the thick sooty smoke billowed up to the sky, mingling in with the storm clouds. After a moment, Jay cleared his throat and explained what he meant.

  On a quiet day, after the siege of Bastogne was over and before the first of the year, Jay struck up a conversation with Sam Bossi and Reed Daniels, two “buddies” from the same regiment.

  After a bit of small talk—mostly bitching about the lack of decent rations and the bitter cold—Jay said, “I don’t have a single shot of the town that’s worth a damn.” Weather conditions, smoke, and enemy fire had made it nearly impossible to take well-composed photos.

  “Why don’t you set up a shot?” Sam said.

  Sam Bossi was a short, feisty Italian guy from Chicago with a body like a steamroller. Thick veins in his neck pulsed when he spoke, and his jaw muscles flexed and rippled when he listened. He frightened Jay a little. But Jay was skittish of the men who didn’t know who—or what—he really was. He knew other boys, the ones who didn’t pass as well as he did, were hazed and beaten. At Camp Croft he had heard stories of a swish named Linus Reynolds. Dandy Linus, they called him. The poor kid, after being whipped with a belt and kicked in the head, was stripped to the buck and tied to a barracks’ window frame with “Faggot” scrawled across his chest in red paint. After all the fuss died down, the boy received his blue papers and went home in disgrace.

  “If you set up a shot,” Bossi went on, “then you can take your time.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Jay said.

  “I’ve seen other members of your CPU do it. It’s not like you’re tellin’ lies, just making the truth more visible. I even know a soldier who’s willing to pose for you.”

  “Yep, he likes the spotlight. He sure does,” Daniels said with a smirk, playing the sidekick. He was a lean, top-heavy man with tobacco-stained teeth and a head of matted red curls. He followed Bossi everywhere like a puppy dog.

  “Our guy,” Bossi said. “He’s kind of a cad.”

  “I just want a shot of the town, something dramatic.”

  “Let’s make an introduction.”

  Bossi led the two across camp to a line of jeeps. After winding through the mud-splattered vehicles, they approached Daniels’s jeep. In the back, draped with a tarp, was a large form. Daniels stepped forward, snickering a little, and yanked the cover off. Propped against the machine gun mount like a broken puppet was a dead German soldier no older than eighteen, who, Bossi explained, had been shot in his chest during a skirmish a few days ago. He had been well preserved by the sub-zero temperatures. His frostbitten face was clean of blood and dirt. His skin was the blue white of cold marble, and his red-tinted lips were slightly parted, like he had been killed mid-whisper. His eyes were open, glazed and empty, but not pained.

  Bossi smacked him on his back and said, “Hans, meet Jay. Jay, Hans.”

  Daniels tried to lift the dead soldier’s arm for a handshake, but rigor had set in. He said, “Krauts are so damn rude.”

  Jay was surprised but not shocked. Dead bodies were a part of their everyday life. Bossi and Daniels were good-natured about it, and he didn’t want to challenge them on it. Hans was the enemy, after all. But another voice was also in his head. Darren, you see, refused to take photographs of the dead. He told Jay he thought it was disrespectful; a photo of a corpse diminishes the dead soldier. Jay saw his point, but he also wanted the world to know what they were going through. That meant shooting everything, even the dead.

  “Everyone thinks war is constant action,” Jay said, leaning toward me, “that there’s no time to think about things, but that’s not true. So much of what we went through was waiting for the next burst of activity. Waiting and waiting. When I saw a body, I thought, Is that how it’s going to end for me? I had to take photos. It was a defense.”

  Jay gathered his equipment, and the three men piled into the jeep, throwing the tarp back over Hans. It was not something they wanted their commanding officers to see. But before they pulled out, Darren saw them and asked Jay where they were going.

  “To get some better shots of Bastogne,” Jay said.

  Darren gave him a doubtful look and said, “New friends?”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “Those guys aren’t your friends.”

  “They’re helping.”

  “Let me help.”

  “Fuck off, West,” Bossi said, lurching forward aggressively.

  “Look, I’ve got to go,” Jay said, putting the jeep in gear.

  “Suit yourself,” Darren said. The three men drove off.

  They parked the jeep near the woods at the edge of Bastogne. After pacing back and forth, and looking and looking, Jay chose an angle that captured the jeep in the foreground and the town as a backdrop. As polite as he could be, he asked Bossi and Daniels if they wouldn’t mind carrying Hans to the driver’s seat. They groaned, but they yanked the tarp off the body and, after a litany of curse words, lifted him. Bossi gripped Hans’s armpits and Daniels took his ankles, and they hoisted the stiff out of the back and walked him around to the side. As they were approaching the driver’s seat, Bossi lost his grip, and Hans slammed against the side of the jeep and fell into the snow. Daniels still had the legs.

  “Shit,” Bossi said. “Hans looks pissed!”

  Daniels leaned in for a look. “The hell! You’re right.” They both began laughing. “He’s giving us a look.”

  “Come on! Let’s get this over with,” Jay said. Bossi picked Hans up again, and the two men forced him behind the wheel.

  Jay set up his Speed Graphic under a tall pine tree, fastened it to a tripod, focused and cleaned the lens, set the exposure, and found his angle. He took a couple of shots of Hans. The cloudy sunlight was behind him, and his helmet was tipped forward, just a fraction, covering his face with a shadow. And just like that, the dead German became a living, breathing American hero, surveying the destruction from his jeep, snow and ash drifting all around him, a scene majestic enough for the cover of Life.

  After changing the film and shoving several exposures in his fatigues, Jay decided Hans needed to be adjusted. He thought about asking Bossi and Daniels to do it—they were under a tree smoking—but he figured it would be faster if he did it. Anyway, he didn’t have to move the body, just lean it forward a little. As he started across the snow toward the jeep, he heard his name loud and clear. He looked back, and Darren was there, at the edge of the woods. He had followed them from base camp. He came toward him, furious.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he said.

  “I set up a shot.”

  “This isn’t right.”

  “C’mo
n. Who’s it hurting?”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Oh, leave him alone,” Daniels crowed. He and Bossi were approaching from behind.

  “He’s not harmin’ a thing,” Bossi said. “He might just be helpin’.”

  They were exposed in the center of a field, Jay’s camera yards away, sheltered by the tree.

  “How’s that?” Darren said. “Who’s it helping?”

  “If it’s the right sort of photo,” Daniels said, “it can tell people the—”

  A spray of bullets tore through the group.

  Bossi went down, and Daniels disappeared into the woods. Darren stumbled forward, braced himself against the jeep, blinked, and fell to his knees. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, and the side of his head was split open, a flap of skin loose from his scalp. He swatted at the air in front of him, stirring a few stray snowflakes. His lips drooped and his eyes quieted, and he was gone before he hit the snow.

  Another shower of bullets pelted the ground and the jeep, brighter and louder than the last, hitting Hans in the chest, in the head, in the face. He tipped over and fell from the driver’s seat like a doll from a kid’s toy shelf.

  Jay hit the ground. His right leg was wounded and bleeding. He rolled under the jeep for cover, biting his lip and pressing his leg into the snow, hoping the cold would numb the pain. He just lay there, listening to the German machine guns as they went bbrrppp, bbrrppp for several minutes. From under the jeep, he couldn’t see the Germans or, for that matter, anyone except Darren, whose face was turned toward him, eyes open and blank, blood melting the snow around his head.

  Across the clearing, the camera was still perched on its tripod, observing everything.

  Once the machine guns died down, Jay pushed himself out from under the jeep with his good leg. He pulled himself up using Darren’s rifle and began hobbling toward the woods. He heard several pops of rifle fire, and a bullet grazed his arm. He kept moving. He passed by his camera and viciously swiped the tripod with Darren’s rifle. It crashed against an overturned tree.

  More pops, followed by the bbrrppp of machine guns.

  Jay was in terrible pain, but his adrenaline was up. He kept moving west, toward the general direction of camp, blazing through undergrowth and over uneven ground. As the noise of gunfire faded, his fear eased into exhaustion, and he collapsed against a tree. He slid down the trunk, wedged his body in a crook in the roots, and looked up. Fat snowflakes floated toward him, dissolving on his cheeks and on the warm blood soaking through his fatigues.

  “They were like little white hands reaching through the branches, beckoning to me,” Jay said. “I thought I should say something to God—to prepare myself somehow, you know, but then I saw Robbie—the way he looked when his attention was somewhere else, peering out at something or caught in a daydream—and I got angry. I was going to see him again. This wasn’t going to be the end.”

  Using the rough knobs in the bark, Jay forced himself to roll over and pulled himself up. Pain seized his leg, and he let out a sharp cry. But he found his feet and studied what seemed to be an endless scatter of trees. He decided which direction to go based on the angle of the shadows on the snow. He walked a few feet and fell against another tree, but this time he didn’t stall out. He howled and gritted his teeth like an angry dog, found his legs again, and stumbled on for nearly a quarter mile, until he saw another American soldier a few yards ahead. Daniels, thank God Almighty. Daniels helped him back to camp and from there, he was transported to Verviers, where he learned his lower femur had been shattered by a bullet.

  Jay stopped talking and shushed me. Then I heard it, too—footsteps several rooms away, coming closer. He hopped up.

  “Quick,” he said in a high whisper. “Hide under the cot.” He shoved the photos into the folder and stashed them under his pillow.

  I didn’t move at first, but Jay started gesturing violently toward the bed. I snapped out of it and leapt into action, throwing myself under his cot and burying myself behind shoes and books and discarded scraps of paper.

  Like the Wicked Witch of the West in a puff of smoke, Letitia Greenwood appeared in the room. All I could see were her feet, a pair of liver-spotted ankles planted in purple slippers.

  “What’s going on in here?” Her speech was slurred. “I heard your, uh, voices.”

  “I’m reading. Out loud.”

  “Was someone with you? That Prescott girl?”

  “No. Just me.”

  “She was here this morning, you know. She was looking for you.”

  “You need to go to bed.”

  “She wants to know about the shoes. Are you going to tell her about the shoes?”

  “Not now.”

  “Are you?”

  “No. Go to bed, Grandma. Please.”

  “No more disgrace, Jay. No more,” she said wearily. “This family can’t take it. I can’t take it.”

  “Good night.”

  “Give me a hug, Jay. Hug your ol’ grandma.”

  He went to her, and I heard her mumble, “I love you, dear.”

  He led her out of the room and I was left alone, curled up in the dust and trash under his bed. His experience in the Ardennes flashed through my head in bright bloody snapshots, but it still seemed unreal. I thought that if I could understand what he’d gone through, then maybe, just maybe, I could understand what had happened to you, Robbie. But it was beyond me, will always be beyond me, I suppose—those men, you, him, all just actors in front of a flimsy backdrop, just cardboard cutouts of the Truth. That’s all we ever get of other people’s lives, it seems. But I was young and expected more.

  9

  A DATE WITH

  DEATH

  A Knock on the Door

  Sheila was at home again in her apartment in New York. Morning sunlight poured through the kitchen windows, pink eyelet curtains billowed in a soft breeze, and the smell of coffee and freshly cooked bacon hung in the air. In the distance, she could hear the familiar bleat of car horns. Everything in her apartment was just so: her small velveteen sofa, her lampshade with a forest scene painted on it, her coffee table, which she’d covered with a doily to hide the scratches. None of it was fancy, certainly not glamorous, but aspiring to something. She wasn’t ashamed of it.

  There was a knock at the door. She moved swiftly to it, unchained the latch, and swung it wide.

  “Ken!” she shouted, and threw her arms around him. He kissed her and pulled her close to him. She loved the strength of his arms. “I love you, dear!” she said. “I love you! I’m so glad you came back to me!”

  He released her, and she stepped back from him. He was not Kenneth! How could she have called him that? It was Thomas Finn, her handsome stranger.

  “Hello there, Fiery Fury,” he said. “You ready for our date?” His face was tan and lean, but his eyes were dark, shifty, even. He crossed the threshold, seeming to tower over her, and held out flowers. Dried roses.

  She said, “It’s early in the morning.”

  “We have to go. It’s time.”

  “Not until I’m ready.”

  She was in her dressing gown and slippers, and her scalp was tight with curlers.

  “I’m not waiting any longer.”

  “I need time to put on makeup and dress and do my hair—”

  “You called me,” he said. She didn’t like his tone. He sounded like Kenneth.

  “What?”

  “You called me at work.”

  He was looming over her, his jaw set cruelly, a smirk on his face.

  “You called me!” he said again. That’s when she noticed his front teeth were missing. Then he gave her an ear-to-ear smile. He had no teeth at all! His bare gums were black and rotten and bloody. “Your number’s up, She!” he said, slurring his words. Before she could scream, he grabbed her by her neck and forced her into a suffocating kiss, thick blood oozing from her chin.

  She was awake and on her feet, her chest heaving, Aunt Majestica’s
parlor spinning around her as she gasped for air. She steadied herself against the wall.

  When she’d come home from the bar, she’d dropped into a wingback chair, still daydreaming about her kiss from Thomas, hoping they could meet up once they were back in the city. He’d been such a gentleman. She had intended to pack as soon as she returned and head home, but the plush of the chair and the dark wallpaper and dim light of the room lulled her to sleep.

  She couldn’t believe she had delayed this long. She had to leave now!

  16

  BUNNY

  I shook Georgiana’s hand, registering that this must have been the George mentioned in Lily’s letter, and let them in. She found the chair at the writing desk, turned it around, and sat purposefully. Lily positioned herself on the edge of one of the twin beds, folding her hands in her lap. I stood over Lily for a moment, still drunk with exhaustion, trying to figure out how this could be. The woman who had lain dead in front of me, so meticulously photographed, now sat upright before me.

  But I didn’t find it shocking. Perhaps it was because I was tired, or because I was already desensitized by the events of the evening, or—and this is what I think now—because I had always known it wasn’t Lily in Jay’s photographs. I might have believed Jay at first, but once I held her shoes—those scuffed, bloodied pumps—my instinct had told me something wasn’t right, even if I couldn’t articulate what that was.

  I sat on the other twin bed and faced both women. Lily smiled gently, her eyes alert, blinking, but heavy with emotion. She broke the tension with a laugh; a sort of nervous habit, I imagined. She was attractive and much younger than she seemed to be in her newspaper photo, but it was a serious sort of beauty, a beauty with a few marks, a few scars. I wanted to like her, but under the circumstances, such charity was difficult to muster.