“Filthy. Better not to describe the trenches.”
“Then what?”
“The dugout.” A weight dropped through him. “That’s more important.”
Her nails traced circles around his navel, in increasing circumferences. “What’s the dugout?”
“Where we slept. It was also a bomb shelter. But it was difficult to imagine a bombing then. We hadn’t been in one yet.”
“There was a single dugout for all the men?”
There were four. Dugout One, the largest, was in the most repulsive condition. It was like an underground cave. A sewer. You descended a rickety stair into a pit forty feet deep in the earth. Triple-decker bunks and small tables with candles. The candles often flickered out because there was never enough oxygen.
“Why not sleep in the trench?”
“Trenches have no roofs. The bombs can fall on your head.”
“How did it smell in the dugout?”
“Like rotting meat.”
“You had meat?”
“We were the meat.”
“Billy.”
“There were other smells. Shit, for instance.”
“Where were the … latrines?”
“Really, Maze?”
“Don’t answer if you’re embarrassed.”
“You dug a hole and covered it. When I called it a sewer I wasn’t being poetic.”
Maze nodded sagely.
“When the bombs dropped, some of the men shit their pants. But that was later.”
“We can move on.”
“I told you we didn’t see the enemy. That was the problem. That and the bed sacks.”
“Does that feel nice?”
“Sleeping on a bed sack?”
“My nails.” They scraped tracks from his stomach to the trim of his drawers. “What’s a bed sack?”
“A thin mat, stuffed with straw. Those stunk too.” Her nails did feel nice, like little biting insects. But pleasantly biting.
“Sweat,” said Maze.
“Old sweat. There’s a difference. The smell of sweat sharpens as it ages. Like malt vinegar. When we got there the mats were vinegary with the sweat of the men who had slept there the ten previous nights. We thought we should air them out.”
“You were spotted. They were watching you all along.”
Her fingers drifted lower, curling like fishhooks, snagging on the hem.
“I don’t know if the Germans had seen us before. But when we went outside with the mats—they must have seen us then.”
A lieutenant yelled at the men and they crawled back into their hole but it was too late. They just didn’t know it yet.
“Who was with you?”
The faces weren’t vivid anymore. Time had caricatured them: isolated features were all he could make out.
“William Drain,” he said. “One of those bearded guys with more fuzz showing than skin. Alf Helmer, the Norwegian, with white hair like an electrocution victim. Philip Finn. His father was a judge in New York. One eye bigger than the other. Most of the men were from New York. Elwood Rayburn: black teeth. John Legall, Jr.: forehead as broad as a bench. Art Hegney: more than six feet tall.” And a vile little pickpocket from Brooklyn named Leonard Perl.
Late on the second afternoon, the French bombarded the Germans, firing across no-man’s-land, and the sound of artillery was so loud that the men underground couldn’t hear themselves speak. The volume increased threefold when the Germans responded, launching mortars, shrapnel, explosives, and other weapons that Bill couldn’t identify. For all the chaos and noise, the whole thing seemed like a performance. At that distance, with the target hidden behind dense forest, the exercise seemed futile. It was as if both sides had too much artillery and had to get rid of some of it.
“I wish I could’ve seen you with the other men.” Maze’s fingers played in the hair below his stomach. “I bet they loved you.”
The Americans were driven to childlike ecstasies by the sounds and the explosions and finally it was too much: they leaped from their dugout so they could see the bright lights. Elwood surfaced first, then Legall and Finn, and after that anybody who stayed underground would’ve seemed soft, for no shrapnel had landed anywhere near their dugout. Besides, wasn’t this exactly the kind of experience they were meant to accrue?
Maze’s hand disappeared under his drawers. Her fingers closed around him, squeezing experimentally.
“Don’t stop,” she said, her grip going slack. “For heaven’s sake.”
He wouldn’t stop. Not just yet.
They weren’t outside long. A French lieutenant, seeing the Americans illuminated by the fire in the sky, began shouting and the Americans slouched back into their cave. They sat in darkness for what seemed like days as the fireworks continued overhead. At first the mood was light, festive even. They were schoolboys stuck inside a classroom on a sunny day. Legall organized a betting pool: Who would be the first to kill a Boche, the first to piss his pants, the first to shoot himself in the foot? Dawkers, a small giddy man with a high-pitched laugh, made a game of hiding below a bunk and tying soldiers’ bootlaces together. Elwood insisted on speaking in French even though he did not know a word of French.
With time, however, an eeriness filled the dugout, diffused by the dampness of the earth, the guttering candles that were their only source of light, and the clamor—the pounding that made the dugout’s walls and ceiling tremble, so it felt like being inside the chamber of an irregularly beating heart. After one particularly close explosion, sawdust showered from the rotten timbers. It was a kind of insanity not to acknowledge any of this, with the dust and soil falling like snow, but nobody did. Soon a single candle remained, flickering in the center of the room. Drain made a skittish joke about the eternal flame. Then a clod from the ceiling fell on it, splashing wax on Bill’s leg, and they were submerged in total darkness.
And Perl was standing beside him. Their skins touched.
“You must have been scared.” Maze tugged on his pants.
“Not really.” Bill lifted himself from the mattress so that she could pull the drawers free. It had been a long time—but he wasn’t going to draw attention to it, lest she stop. “We were anxious,” he said. “We wanted to fight. We were sick of hiding.”
He had been terrified. Never had he come so close to oblivion. He had imagined facing death on the battlefield, often before going to sleep, except on the nights when he drank himself into a stupor—which he did increasingly after arriving in Europe, the rising anxiety meeting halfway the preponderance of cheap wine. But he was not prepared for the reality of the fear. It was like an old friend surprising you from behind at a party, his hands over your eyes. Guess who? He refused to sit there dumbly like the others. But there was no escape and nowhere to escape to. He slipped beneath a bunk in the corner of the dugout, a child hiding under his bed, afraid of nightmares.
“I thought that if the ceiling fell, that’s where I’d be safest,” he lied. “I’ll tell you the rest later.” He bent toward her. She moved her mouth away and his lips landed on the wing of her nose.
“I’ll slow down,” she said, loosening her grip. “And you can speed up.”
He accelerated through the rest:
Some hours later, after a particularly long lull, the ceiling fell. There must have been a loud noise but Bill didn’t remember it. Perhaps it was so loud that he went temporarily deaf. He’d heard of such things happening. Or perhaps something hit his head because he had no visual memory of the explosion either.
“It’s true,” he said, to Maze’s curled eyebrow. “I don’t.”
It was true. He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious; it might have been seconds. He was alerted by the sound of a boy weeping. The mattress that had been inches above his face was gone. Turning, he saw that the bunk had tipped sideways and was partially buried by earth and rock. There, pinned like a beetle by the bed’s metal bracing, was Drain. He was making the whimpering noises. His leg was bent the wrong
way at the knee. It would have to be amputated. That was the optimistic scenario. Drain asked Bill, in a weepy falsetto, to tell his mother something. Bill nodded.
“Did you?” asked Maze, working smoothly now.
“Sure I did.”
“Those men must have loved you. And admired you. Like I do.”
He forgot the message for Drain’s mother almost instantly. He had no room in his brain for messages. Every cell worked to ensure his survival. The dust kicked up by the explosion settled at the bottom of the dugout and he choked. He tested his limbs and found that they functioned. He had only a few scratches and a layer of dirt had crusted over his face like a scab. An adjacent triple-decker bed frame, not five feet away, remained upright. It served as a scaffold, preventing a small rectangular section of the ceiling from collapsing. Between the frame and the ceiling was visible a shard of purple sky. He hoisted himself onto the first bed sack and found it felt good to exert himself, good to be aware of his body, his muscles and his joints. He climbed from one bunk to the next as if scaling a ladder.
Perl was beside him. Climbing as he climbed. Only Perl was not as quick.
“I was able to push up a ceiling board enough to wriggle out,” he told Maze. “As soon as I was aboveground, the board slammed shut. The ground caved in. Nobody else got out.”
Maze paused. He closed his eyes. He was near. “That’s it?” she said. “That’s the whole thing?”
Perl’s screams, Perl’s grasping fingers, Perl disappearing.
“A few other men escaped. From a different section of the dugout, one blocked to me by the collapsed dirt and rock. Helmer, Yourdon, and Axelrod. That’s it.”
“Why didn’t other men try to climb out like you did?”
“Do you have to stop?”
“… Is that better?”
“That’s better.”
“Not too much better?”
“The perfect amount of better.”
“Go on.”
“Most of the men—ah.”
“Sorry.”
“Most of them were unconscious or too injured to move. We tried to rescue them. We used our helmets as shovels. But the ground kept giving way.”
“Giving way?”
“Dirt filled the hole as soon as we dug it. The shooting began again and we were ordered to return to Camp New York.”
“Is that what you’re running from?” Her hand relaxed again.
“I’m not running from anything.”
“Since you’ve been home, you’ve acted like something was chasing you. But you did escape. You’re safe now.”
He felt himself deflate. “I know I’m safe. I know it in my head at least. I just don’t always feel it.”
“You’re safe with me,” she said, squeezing him, but it was too late. He was out of bed, running the sink.
Maze sat up. “Maybe you feel bad about the men who died.”
If man could build land by draining swamp, as New Orleans had done for a decade, if he could create a new river and uproot ancient forests, as the city was now doing—if he could rearrange the earth to his own satisfaction, why couldn’t Bill reconfigure his inner life? He had tried for months, digging and burying, and still the inner terrain was unchanged. He could not drain the watery marsh of his brain into dry land. It remained soaked, like a bloody uniform, with shame, guilt, horror.
“Where’s the strop?” he said.
“It’s not your fault. You did your best, just like they did. They would have done the same in your place.”
He didn’t need to shave, really; he just needed to feel cold water on his face. He hastily applied the cream—a gift from Maze, a concoction derived from Mexican orchids that was supposed to be easier on the skin than Colgate’s—and realized that he didn’t have his razor either.
“Cher? You can shave later. Won’t you let me finish? I was just getting started.”
There came a violent knocking.
“The strop’s hanging from the hook in the closet,” she called, as Bill flew out of the bedroom. “Next to your razor.”
At the door Charlie Breaux, hat in hand, wobbled from one giant foot to the other. “Sorry, partner. Realize it’s early. See I caught you eating pie.” He stuck a fat finger into the cream on Bill’s cheek and put it in his mouth.
“I was shaving.” Bill became aware of an aching in his groin.
“Tastes like vanilla custard.”
“That why you’re here? Because you’re hungry?”
“Grocer and his wife got hacked in the head by a madman with an ax. The victims are at Charity. It’s an ugly one. They ain dead yet.”
“Bill?” called Maze.
He poked his head outside and scanned the block. This had become a compulsion with him, each time he left the house. And what was there today? Not much—Tchoupitoulas Street was suspended in a velveteen silence. A lethargic nag dragged an ice wagon across the intersection at Suzette. Two sleepy-eyed boys in suspenders, boots, and grimy gray caps sauntered toward the river, headed to work at the cotton press. He couldn’t see the blackberry woman but her rising song disrupted the silence:
Blackberr-ies, blackberr-ies! Fresh and fine.
I got blackberr-ies, lady! Fresh from the vine.
Blackberries, ma’am. Five cents a can.
Get ’em while you can!
Blackberr-ieeeeeees!
“Give me a minute.” Bill tilted his head in the direction of Maze’s voice.
Charlie winked. “You don’t have to draw a map, boss. Just meet me at Charity.”
Bill took a final glimpse of the street and saw, incredibly, that a one-eyed figure in a green greatcoat had appeared at the corner of Benjamin. The man slipped around the corner, but not before Bill glimpsed a flash of silver from beneath the greatcoat.
“They’re going to be dead directly, though, so grouille ton casaquin.” Charlie followed Bill’s glance. “Billy? What is it, partner?”
Bill burst by him, breaking into a sprint, his bare feet smacking on the broken cobblestones. “Perl!” he yelled. “Perl!”
As he passed the back door of Di Lello’s Grocery a sharp pain seized his foot and he stumbled. He saw blood. A few paces behind him gleamed the metallic edge of an open sardine tin; the delivery boys were always throwing them out the window. He made a mental note to reprimand them, perhaps with his thunderstick, but a sardine tin would not stop him. Maze, unwittingly, was right. There was no use trying to escape. If Perl was alive—which was impossible—and if he had come to New Orleans to find Bill—equally impossible—then Bill wanted to get the reunion over with.
He wheeled around the corner and found the one-eyed figure sitting there, two stoops down. But the pistol, he could see now, was the handle of a cane. The robe was a moth-eaten blanket. The man was an old woman.
Charlie caught up, huffing loudly, gun raised. When he saw the rag lady, her cane clutched under one arm, he burst into laughter. “A killer’s loose,” he said, laughing harder when she made the sign of a hex, “but I don’t think that’s her.”
Charlie clapped Bill on the back, too hard. Then he stuck his finger into Bill’s face and treated himself to another dollop of cream.
JUNE 28, 1918—THE GARDEN DISTRICT
“Giorgio!” shouted Beatrice. “You’re killing me!”
The telephone rang, a hysterical peal like a madman playing a musical triangle, and it was nearly enough to ruin the entire session. Not just because it exploded the silence of the darkened library—a tranquil atmosphere was essential to the success of any osteopathic treatment—but because the sound narcotized Giorgio just as his elbow plunged deeper into her flesh.
Giorgio, mumbling apologetically, eased his weight off her.
“Per l’amore di Santa Rosalia.” She reached her hand back to rub the sore spot. The flesh was hot. There would be a bruise. “Unplug that phone.”
With a bit more force than necessary, Giorgio yanked the cord out of the wall. His lips formed the kind of interroga
tive pout an infant makes shortly before exploding into sobs. She tried, as she had hundreds of times before, to locate in his face some trace of his father. Sal’s features were there, she decided, only they had been grossly inflated: the ears heavier, the eyelids fuller, the forehead broader. The eyes larger.
“It’s my fault,” said Beatrice, eager to dispel the momentary thunderclap of shame that rebounded to her whenever she reprimanded him. “I forgot to disconnect the wire. I’m sorry to shout. But sometimes, caro, you just don’t know your own strength.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
Beatrice knew her son’s strength. It was the kind of strength that qualified as a superpower. It could be used for noble purposes or for ill. Applied in limited doses, it might assist Hercules’s daily operations, but Giorgio could not be relied upon even to handle a basic collection route. For the serious delinquencies, Beatrice relied on sulky Elba and vicious Efigenia (or was it sulky Efigenia and vicious Elba?). Sal had hoped his son might develop administrative skills but Beatrice knew Giorgio better. He was adept at lifting heavy objects but showed no interest in managing men. She had long ago concluded that he needed another trade, something that made use of his strength, only in a more honorable application than manual labor. She had bought him osteopathic lessons for his twentieth birthday in the hope that the practice, with its flexible hours, would allow him to transact the family’s real business—the shadow business—on his own schedule, while developing in him a sense of professionalism (and in the hope that he might be able to treat her chronic head pains and subluxations). But the most professional thing about his practice was the massage couch that she had bought him, a beautiful object, stuffed with horsehair and upholstered in carmine velvet, that did not look out of place in the vast Vizzini library with its curule chairs, dark bookshelves, and boulle table. She bought the couch after Sal’s death, when her pains migrated downward, to the base of her spine. The pains were sharp but Giugi knew how to relieve them.
A faint mechanical ringing came from some other quadrant of the house, barely penetrating the oak door, thickly upholstered in maroon leather and insulated with batting. Giorgio applied his palms to the base of Beatrice’s back, his thumbs meeting at her spine. They glided up her back, feeling for warmth—an indication of bone displacement, muscular agony, or deranged blood.
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