Peace

by Richard Bausch

  “That’s tough.”

  “Yeah, Sarge.”

  “Cut it out, Asch.”

  “Yeah, trouble is, I got a big wide yellow streak right down the middle of it.”

  “Asch, I might have you court-martialed just for your mouth.”

  “Watch for those snipers, Sarge.”

  THREE

  THEY ALL HEADED OUT, still north, still on foot. The road was deep mud, turning to ice, grabbing at their feet, and the rain kept coming—straight down, relentless, pitiless, miserable. At some point during today’s march, Marson had developed a blister on his right heel. Some inconsistency or tear in the leather of the insole in his boot hurt him with each step, and each step made it worse, and the sickness was still with him.

  The pain went up to his ankle, shooting, like nerve pain. There wasn’t any way to favor it. Even limping seemed to give no relief. And each time the images of what happened on the road came to him—Walberg and Hopewell lying so still; the woman’s legs jutting from the grass; the green eyes of the soldier he had shot, reflecting light, the look of wonder in the white face—each time these things went through him, his gorge rose. But then, in the freezing minutes turning into hours that went on, and on, he found himself realizing that this shock, like all the others, was fading, too. And there was just the constant, hollow presence of the nausea, along with the searing pain in his heel. Everyone was suffering a kind of low-grade shock, aware of the badness of being here, out of all the places there were to be in the world.

  You marched into the tide of the war and arrived nowhere. Or you were among those who gave way to the lure of the war and rode off with a company of fools, looking for trouble. Asch trudged along next to him, muttering about the inadequacy of the army’s version of a field jacket to keep out the rain and the cold. But then he leaned toward Marson and said, “We gotta do something.”

  Marson looked over at him, but said nothing.

  “What are we, anyway?”

  “Are you asking me?” Marson said.

  Glick, a few yards ahead of them, turned and barked at a couple of the new troops: “Keep your distance, somebody’ll get you both with one shot.”

  Asch dropped back a pace or two and moved to the right. He said, “My uncle’s a police officer.”

  Marson glanced over at him.

  “Homicide detective.”

  “Really.”

  “Twenty years.”

  Marson tried to adjust his stride to accommodate the pain in his heel and ankle. It was only getting worse.

  “Do you ever wonder how somebody can do that all those years? One murder after another?”

  “Never gave it any thought,” Marson said.

  “I never did, either, I guess. Until now.”

  Marson looked at him. “I know,” he said. “It’s a thought.”

  “Lot of them unsolved, too. Used to be kind of frustrating to him. The one thing he really hated was the people who could’ve helped him and wouldn’t.”

  “Guess that would be hard.”

  “People who saw things and wouldn’t say what they saw.”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah,” Asch said. “Right.”

  “Did he ever figure what to do about it?”

  “No.”

  “He still on the force?”

  “Twenty years,” Asch said.

  Marson looked over at him. Asch was staring, his helmet pushed back, the rain splattering his face.

  “You know what I mean?”

  “That’s a lot of years,” Marson said.

  “A lot of murders,” said Asch.

  Marson did not answer him this time. He experienced the nausea and the cold, and ahead of him the others were mechanically going on, shoulders hunched, the rain beating down on them, thin, falling strands of ice.

  When they stopped to rest for a few minutes in the shell of a farmhouse, he worked to get his boot off to try doing something about the foot. But it was the shape of the heel itself, something pushing upward from the insole, a wrinkle. The foot looked whiter than could be healthy, except for the place where the blister bulged. He broke it with the point of his bayonet and let it run, and the flap of skin, about the size of a quarter, collapsed into the redness, the inflamed center of the abrasion. It hurt to touch it. He let the rain pelt it as long as he could, until the sting was too much, and then he put the sock back on—it was wet through, and heavy—and the boot, hurting, trying to offer up the pain, trying to think in terms of the prayer. All for thee. The foot throbbed, and there was the problem of the cold now, too, and the marching went on, and each time he put the weight of himself on the foot, the pain shot up to his ankle, a piercing white-hot flash. He winced at it and went on, and suffered it. A flatness had settled into his spirit, a dead feeling at the heart. It was as if the physical pain could have been happening to someone else. It did not reach into him, quite. There was something removed at the very center, and he could turn in his mind and look at the empty place.

  FOUR

  TOWARD SUNDOWN, they stopped where a fast-moving river came up to the edge of the road on the left and went on, veering off again into the trees. The road wound sharply to the right and out of sight beyond the rise of a steep hill. There were trees on that side, too. Through the trees to the left was the water, metal gray and solid looking, with little quick flags of white in it. Now and again a tree branch came gliding past, and then they saw boards and other debris, followed by the legs of a horse, the animal being pulled along in the swirling eddies, bobbing in and out of the folds of water, the legs frozen in an attitude of flight. The river churned and roared. They all moved to the right of the road and the base of the hill, where the wet black branches provided some meager shelter. All the trees were beginning to look as though they were made of glass. There were tank tracks in the mud and stones of the road. Glick had Troutman bring the radio to him and reported this, and they all waited. There wasn’t any sound but the rain coming down. The word came through to keep going.

  But Glick didn’t move. The others watched him. Little slivers of ice dropped down off his helmet. It took another moment for them to realize that he had seen something coming from the bend of the road. It was another farm cart, this one being pulled by a horse. A crooked shape in brown, a hooded man with dark thin hands, held the reins. Under the hood was only the suggestion of a gaunt face in shadow. The cart came abreast of them, and Glick rushed it, his carbine at the ready. The figure stopped the cart and stood in it, hands up. It was an old man. He looked at them wide eyed and spoke in a trembling reedy voice. “Sono italiano. Speaka English.” Then in Italian again: “Non sono tedesco! Amico, sono il vostro amico. Amico. Non uccidermi! Non spararmi! Per favore! No shoot.”

  “You capeesh English?” Glick said to him.

  “Poco,” the old man said through a wide grimace that showed broken and decayed teeth. “Sì, un po’. Little. Speaka the English. Little. Sì.”

  “Get down off the cart.”

  He hesitated, looking at them all, plainly unsure of what was being asked and fearing that any miscalculation would be the end of him. Then: “Cedo! Non spararmi! Surrender! No shoot, per favore.”

  “Down,” Glick said, gesturing. “Get the fuck down.”

  The rain on the old man’s lined, bony face made it look as though he was crying. His eyes were squeezed tight, the brows pinched. It was a look of great sorrow. Glick motioned with the end of the rifle. “Now,” he said. And with alacrity, evidently trying desperately to please, the old man climbed down.

  Glick got Lockhart to unhitch the horse and then ordered Joyner and Troutman to upset the cart while the others crouched, ready to fire. He instructed Marson to cover the old man, who stood there quietly with the rain beating down on him, the cowl-like hood obscuring much of his face. The cloak he wore was made of the same canvas material that was stretched over whatever was in the cart. He wore rope-soled shoes, and his pants were thick burlap, drooping past the ankles, mud stained
and wet to the knees. The look of him was of a kind of sad resignation—here was his cart, with all his belongings in it, being overturned in the road. The cart contained nothing but the possessions of somebody trying to ride with his little life away from a war. Marson thought of the old man’s humiliation: shoes and dishes and pictures of family members, clothes, books, cooking utensils. The old man turned away slightly, as if the sight of these things hurt him.

  “You know this country?” Glick asked him, “Capeesh?” He made a motion to include the trees and the tall hill, the sodden surroundings.

  “Sì, sì.”

  “Guide? Scout?” Glick turned and pointed up the hill into the trees.

  “Scout.” The man simply repeated the word.

  Glick pointed at the bend in the road. “German?”

  The old man nodded, but it was impossible to tell whether he meant that he understood or that there were Jerries up the road. He stood there with that look of resignation and watched the rain collect in the little folds of his thrown clothing and on his belongings lying in the mud.

  “Set the cart right,” Glick told the others. “Put his stuff back. Marson, keep your rifle on him.”

  The others did as they were told. For Marson, it felt for a moment all right, even with the general terror, the pain, and the shivering. It was a correction. The old man watched them.

  “You guide?” Glick said, pointing up into the trees.

  The man stared at him.

  “Go up over fucking hill,” Glick said with exaggerated slowness, pointing. “Christ sakes. See fucking road. Get it? Over the fucking hill, see the fucking road.”

  Marson indicated himself, and then the old man, and then the hill rising behind him. “Guide,” he said.

  “Oh, sì. Sì. Vi guiderò. Sì, yes.”

  “Guiderò. Guide,” Glick said.

  “Yes. Sì.”

  He turned to Marson. “Take Asch and Joyner.”

  The old man waited, turning slightly. The sergeant ordered the cart pulled off the road, into the trees by the river. The horse had been tied to one of the trees there, and it stood watching them all, blinking in the rain but apparently not even quite noticing it, tearing at the grass at the base of the tree and chewing, staring. The blanket over its haunches had gone black with soaking, and it gave off a stream of little silver turning-to-ice drops.

  “Now,” Glick said. “Goddamn. What’re you waiting for? Move it.”

  The old man nodded, then turned to Marson and motioned for him to follow. Marson thought he saw something of a smile on the wet, drawn, aged features. A look of relief, he realized.

  “Asch,” he said. “Joyner.”

  The two troops fell in line and they started up into the trees, the old man leading the way.

  FIVE

  IT WAS SLOW GOING. The hill became steadily steeper, and it was slippery. A thick bed of pine needles and mud and dead leaves covered the ground. They had to dig with the toes of their boots to make footholds in it. They hadn’t gone fifty yards before Asch fell and slipped back, and he made a sound like a yelp, an animal noise. He had hit the trunk of a tree on the way down. He had been stopped by it.

  Marson, Joyner, and the old man waited for him to get up. They were still in sight of the others on the road, who were now resting in the failing light, huddled in the torrent, the relentless emptying sky.

  “Christ, why us?” Joyner said, to no one in particular.

  They waited, and Asch fell again, cursing.

  “Shit sakes, Asch,” Joyner said.

  The old man had paused, one leg up, ready to keep on, and his face was impassive, merely interested in Asch’s progress climbing back to them. At one point, Asch went to his knees and stayed there, his face contorted with the effort and with the frustration of not being able to gain his footing. But then his expression changed. He sighed and leaned forward and rested his arms on the barrel of his carbine. He seemed almost content, kneeling there while they gazed down at him, perhaps twenty yards farther up.

  “Come on, asshole,” Joyner said.

  “Fuck you,” said Asch.

  Marson thought he heard Joyner say something under his breath. He believed he had heard the word Yid. He looked at Joyner, who had pulled a rag out of his field jacket and was wiping his face.

  “You’d best keep your opinions to yourself,” he said.

  Joyner folded the rag and put it away and then merely stared.

  “Got it?” Marson said.

  “I capeesh,” said Joyner. “What’re you gonna do, fire me?”

  Asch got to them and then dropped to his knees again, having slipped and stopped himself. He turned and looked back down at the road. “I’m shorter than you guys. It’s harder to climb. Don’t go so fast.”

  “We don’t have all night,” the corporal said.

  “You think they’re above us? Waiting up there?” Asch wanted to know.

  “How the fuck would we have that information,” said Joyner.

  “Just keep alert,” Marson told them.

  “Going down this fucker isn’t going to be much easier than going up if we have to move quick,” Asch said. “I really hit my back on that sapling going down. Can we take a minute? It really hurts.”

  “Maybe you should head on back down, darling,” Joyner said. “We wouldn’t want you to get a boo-boo.”

  “Fuck yourself,” Asch told him. “Better yet, why don’t you stand up real straight, and then fall through your asshole and hang yourself?”

  “Bright boy,” Joyner said. “All you New York guys are so bright.”

  “Shut up,” Marson said.

  “All of what guys, Joyner. You want to give me a more specific category? I happen to be from Boston.”

  “You know what category.”

  “I don’t have any idea, buddy. Why don’t you fill me in?”

  Joyner said nothing.

  The old man stood there watching them with that expression of calm interest. When he saw Corporal Marson looking at him, he straightened slightly and pulled his own cloak higher around his neck.

  “We’re going to make this walk to the top of this hill and see what we can see,” Marson said. “And then we’re going to turn around and come back down, and we are not going to waste any energy fighting with each other. Got it?”

  “I fell,” Asch said. “Jesus. Tell him to lay off.”

  “No, I’m not getting between you. I’m telling you both how it’s gonna be.”

  “You want to tell him to lay off the New York stuff? Because that’s not what he means.”

  Marson looked at Joyner, who had a challenge in his eyes. The rain was making him blink, but his eyes were cold and defiant. “You didn’t mean that like it sounded, right, Joyner?”

  “Could’ve been talking about any big city,” Joyner said.

  “Fuck you,” said Asch. “No matter what you were talking about.”

  The old man murmured something low.

  “No capeesh,” Joyner said to him. “Did you say you want us to die choking on our own blood?”

  The old man simply returned his gaze.

  “This is a fuck’n Fascist, I’m telling you,” Joyner said.

  “Non sono fascista,” said the old man, with an earnest shaking of his head. He began to wring his old hands. It looked like he was trying to bend the bones in them.

  “Now you’ve spooked him,” Marson said. “Keep your mouth shut, Joyner. Just don’t open it again.”

  Asch got to his feet. “I’m ready when you are,” he said to Marson.

  They turned and started up, following the path where the old man led them, still struggling with the steep angle of the hill and the slippery surface, with its little rushing trickles of water, the rain still beating down with the same windless fall.

  “Oh, Christ,” Joyner said. “Why does it have to be us?”

  SIX

  JOYNER WAS FROM MICHIGAN, a sheep farm there, where his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had l
ived; and his father had raised him to take over, in time. The war was his escape, as he had told anyone who would listen in the first days they all were together. He hated the farm—hated the idea of farming—and spent much of his time in high school following the good orchestras around the upper Midwest. He played clarinet, and his father thought of him as a bum, he said, and that was a tough thing to live with sometimes. He had once seen Benny Goodman at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, and he talked about the women he met that night and about walking along the lake in the summer dark with the city shining on the water. He could be expressive in that way, too, which made him all the more troublesome to Marson, who was himself expressive and liked what his mother always called picture speech, words and phrases that took you somewhere other than where you were. Joyner said that he liked Benny Goodman best because his own name was Benny, and then he went on to say that a coincidence of naming was no reason to like a man’s music, either. But there it was.

  And there Joyner was. He could talk about the moon shining on water, and yet obscenity flowed from him like the little beads of spit he kept throwing off. He would spray it out from between his teeth. This punctuated his talk, like a nerve-tic.

  In Palermo, in training, he would look up and see Marson coming, and, knowing of Marson’s reluctance to use bad language, he would spit and say, “Aw fuck-shit. I mean gosh.” Others found it funny, including Asch, but it made Marson feel singled out.

  “I got off the fuck’n farm and here I am in farm country, in fuck’n Italy,” Joyner would say. It was as though he were reciting it.

  “You should’ve brought your clarinet,” Marson told him once, trying not to show how awkward he felt. He had been a Benny Goodman fan, too, though he liked Glenn Miller better. He tried to shift the subject to music.

  But Joyner brought it back to Marson’s devoutness. “No atheists in the foxholes, right, Marson?”

  “I guess not,” Marson said.

  “Fuck a duck, huh?”

  And it was Asch who laughed. “Joyner, you should be on Broadway.”