Where was the music? Just as he asked himself that question, Monty felt a sharp pain at the back of his head and, as he fell to the ground, heard Juan whisper, “Maricón.”
* * *
At the Front near Sommedieue, where his division had been sent after training camp, Monty responded to Gunner Thomas Dinsmore, RFA, by asking, “Spare you a what?”
“Americans,” the gunner said under his breath. “A cigarette!”
They were standing near the fire bay, both covered in soot from their boots to their eyelids, except the gunner also had white dust on his hands, chest, and face. Monty figured he must have spent most of the afternoon covering bodies with lime. The Brits called them “wastage.”
He gave the gunner the cigarette he clearly deserved. “Know where I could find Lieutenant Harrington?” Monty asked, lighting the cigarette, not worried about drawing fire while it was still daytime.
“Who?”
“Nicholas Harrington. Should be around here somewhere.”
“Think I saw him earlier. Check by the gas hut.”
With a tap to the front of his helmet, Monty thanked the gunner and continued down the duckboards of the British trench, searching the faces for one he recognized. It was April 14, 1918. He had been at the Front for a month. Although his experience there had not been pleasant—once on patrol, he came across a dead body emitting a fart, nauseating but mellifluous, that lasted nearly twenty minutes, the time it took for the gas from decomposition to seep out the rectum—it also wasn’t the pure hell he’d been told to expect. He had not once touched the bar of soap he carried in his pocket in case he encountered mustard gas and had to scrub down quick. He worried if he would even remember how to shoot his pistol in the event of small-arms fire. Most of his days were spent digging trenches, playing cards, hanging laundry, and smoking cigarettes, all while wondering if, on the other side, they were doing just the same.
Montgomery spotted Nicholas. In front of a deflated observation balloon, his friend, squat copped, was speaking to a technician, pointing at the balloon and then up into the air. He looked so handsome with his Sam Browne belt cinched high around his waist. Monty cleared his throat when he was within earshot.
“Is that Corporal Forster I hear behaving like a civilian, making nonverbal appeals for my attention and not, as it were, showing that heralded American can-do?”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant. Apologies.”
Nicholas, after telling the technician he wanted the balloon in the air by noon tomorrow, stood and faced Monty. He squinted in the nonexistent glare. “Walk with me, Corporal.”
Along the back rim of the trench, they walked side by side, their knuckles, on occasion but not on accident, brushing against each other. Monty looked out onto the shell-pocked terrain. All of the holes, growing more deeply shadowed as evening approached, reminded him of carbonation in reverse, bubbles floating down. He would have taken the thought further if only Nicholas had not suddenly clutched one of his butt cheeks. They were at the end of the trench. Nobody was around to see them.
“I’ve missed you,” said Nicholas.
Monty smiled. “It’s been one day.”
The sun had almost gone down. Unlike the rest of the trench, which ran at a diagonal, southeast to northwest, the part in which they stood branched into a dogleg, running west to east for ten yards. A black-boxed field phone leaned against the southern wall. Shovels were piled in one corner, their blades caked in mud, handles rubbed smooth as ebony.
“I told the diggers to take the evening off,” Nicholas said. “Don’t want them reaching the Channel.”
He picked up a large tarp and laid it over a short ledge. He sat down on the ledge and patted the spot beside him. Monty did as requested. “So it’s just you and me, all alone out here?” he asked Nicholas.
“The cat’s away.”
On the ledge in the dark, cheek by jowl, the two of them kissed. The air filled with a sound like that of water lapping against the side of a bathtub. Even though they had kissed numerous times over the past month—next to the Mill bombs in the munitions shed, behind the CCS among the mounds of boots—Monty still felt, each time, not that he was doing something illicit but that, despite what the bombs could do to others and unlike the people to whom the boots belonged, he was being alive. Prior to joining the army it had never occurred to him that he would experience so much living in a place full of the opposite.
The first time he and Nicholas had kissed had been the first time Monty had kissed anybody. While growing up, though he’d understood the “rules” of romance the way a dropped stone understands gravity—men belong with women, never with other men—he hadn’t felt conflicted, hurt, or constrained by them. Monty always knew he was different, but he assumed the difference, what separated him from his classmates worried about who they would take to the dance, lay in his pedigree. He wasn’t normal; he was a Forster. Asking girls on dates and trying to sneak a kiss weren’t his concerns nearly as much as living up to his family name and making his father proud. In spite of the rare occasions when something he saw—Francis X. Bushman’s aquiline nose on the cover of Photoplay, Jimmy Fairhope nibbling on his thumbnail in geometry class—realigned his internal compass, Monty’s magnetic north pointed in one direction: leading the Forster family into the twentieth century. Then came Nicholas. On the Front, Monty’s internal compass whirled between north and south, east and west, and never more so than now, sitting on a ledge in a grimy trench, ecstatically directionless, kissing the man with whom he had not yet admitted he was in unexpected, intractable love.
Nicholas pulled back from Monty. A smile on his face but a tremor in his hand, Nicholas lit a cigarette, the process of it seeming to calm him. His smile waxed and his tremor waned. In measured steps, with eyes locked on Monty sitting by his side, Nicholas flicked the cigarette away, wrapped one end of the tarp over their waists, reached beneath it, and, while a parabola of sparks faded in the night air, snapped loose the fly buttons of Monty’s wool trousers.
Decades later, one great war ended and another on its way, Monty would wonder, as tears streamed down his cheeks, over his chin, and onto the barrel pressed to his neck, why Nicholas had flicked the cigarette instead of putting it out like soldiers, British and American, were taught to do in the trenches. That day on the Front, however, Monty hardly gave the issue mind, as the entirety of his attention was drawn to one thing, Nicholas’s hand, pumping at a gentle pace.
Neither of them knew that the sparks from the cigarette had been seen by a sniper fifty yards away, or that the angle of the trench provided him with adequate line of sight.
No sound accompanied the shot, but its tactile effects were apparent. The bullet severed the part of Nicholas’s spinal cord allowing for motor functions and plowed through the area of his brain in charge of higher cognition: his grip went slack before his face did.
Still reeling in the past moment, Monty turned to him and whispered, “Why are you stopping?” He sat forward when an answer did not come. There in the cold dark of the trench, Nicholas’s face slowly drew into focus, its expression one of dazed surprise. Blood leaked from his mouth. Sweat dripped from his nose. He blinked once, twice, and never again.
* * *
On that first day, waking up suddenly in Quito with his head throbbing, Monty was shocked most of all by the fact that the gang leader spoke with a southern accent. None of the three men who had kidnapped him bothered to wear masks. They didn’t even put a blindfold on him. So he knew exactly who was in charge. Nothing about the man seemed different from the other two—he was dark skinned and dark haired—except for the subtle drawl in how he pronounced his vowels.
That first day of the kidnapping, the leader, after noticing Monty had come to, slowly walked across the large, barren room, in the center of which Monty was hog-tied to a wooden chair. “Don’t you look the pitiful thing,” he said, his voice reverberating off the sun-dried brick walls.
“Who are you?” Monty asked.
/> “That don’t matter.”
The man wore a tan linen suit over a white shirt, no tie and no belt, with brown wing tips that had recently been shined. He held a blue coffee cup. “Here,” he said, holding the cup to Monty’s clenched mouth. “No? Okay.” The man slurped as he took a long sip of coffee.
“What do you want from me?”
“Now you’re asking the right sort of question, Mr. Forster.” Insouciant as a landed gentleman taking a constitutional, the man strolled around the room, running his finger through the dust on an empty mantel, pausing to appreciate the view from a curtained window. He pointed with his cup and said, “See that big hill yonder? That’s El Panecillo. Means ‘a small piece of bread.’ What we want from you, Mr. Forster, is a big piece of bread. Am I understood?”
“How big?”
“Fifteen thousand.”
Despite the fact Monty’s first impulse was to agree outright, something made him hesitate, as though he were back in the trenches, trying to decide if that smell was yellow cabbage weed or German mustard gas. How would he explain what happened to the money? His father would certainly notice a withdrawal that size. What guarantee did he have they would let him go?
He needed more time to think this situation through. With that in mind, Monty decided that of the two ways he’d been taught to stall a negotiation—either kiss the other guy’s ass or unabashedly shine your own—the latter seemed the most appropriate here.
“Where’d you get that accent, cornpone?”
Still wandering around the room, the man stopped of a sudden, dust angels trailing behind his feet. He stood motionless for a second. Then he turned to Monty, grinned, and said, “Same place you got yours.”
Harrison Oliveira, whose full name Monty would never know, was the grandchild of Otis and Pearl Ledbetter, two of the original Confederados, southerners from the United States who emigrated to São Paulo, Brazil, following the Civil War. The Ledbetters were originally from Mississippi. Ashamed of their defeat and fearful of Reconstruction, they, along with ten thousand other Confederate émigrés, accepted Emperor Dom Pedro II’s offer of tax breaks, cheap land, and subsidies on travel. The couple boarded a ship named Marmion on April 16, 1867, and made the 5,600-mile journey to Rio de Janeiro within a month. In New Vicksburg, where they eventually settled, the Ledbetters successfully cultivated sugarcane, King Cotton of the Deepest South. Their four children grew up bilingual. Fried chicken they called frango frito. Coleslaw they called salada repolho. Despite the family’s acclimation, its descendants, unvanquished and unreconstructed, exhibited not just the vocal mannerisms of their homeland but also the rebelliousness that had brought about their separation from it, to the extent that one of those descendants joined an organization specializing in theft, extortion, gambling, drugs, prostitution, and the blackmail of wealthy foreigners in town on business.
“You can call me Harrison,” he said to Monty. “Cornpone’s a bit too formal.”
In the open doorway across the room, Monty saw Juan, wearing the same clothes as the night before, look in to check on things. Clearly they were growing impatient. “If I pay you the fifteen thousand,” he asked Harrison, “how do I know you’ll let me go?”
Harrison laughed, coming forward. “You’re not paying us to let you go.” With the back of his fingers he grazed Monty’s cheek, the ring on his pinkie, just like Juan’s, a cold dot of metal that took the path of a tear. He said, “You’re paying us not to tell.”
Bells started to ring throughout the city, their concussive, overlapping peals creating, by design or by accident, a kind of melodic clarity. If he were going to give these men the money, Montgomery figured, he at least needed a third party present, somebody to keep them in line and, more important, do just what Harrison claimed they would—not tell. Who then? He looked out the window, trying to figure as best he could the time of day, not here but back at home. Ecuador was roughly on the same longitude as Mississippi. It must be eight or nine o’clock, judging by the light, which meant the household was either being served breakfast, eating it, or preparing for the rest of the day. None of his family would answer the phone themselves that early. So, when the house servant on duty picked up, Montgomery would, in a garbled voice, ask to speak with the one person whose discretion he could trust. With the slightest bit of luck Branchwater might even answer it himself.
“Is there a telephone in this place?” Monty asked Harrison.
“Think I’d let you use one if there were?”
Regarding human nature, Monty had learned, in his twenty-three years, a few elemental truths. He knew that people who used the word spiritual usually weren’t, for example, as well as that people who used the word reasonable tended to be taken as such. So he said to Harrison, “Let’s be reasonable. I don’t carry that much cash with me when I travel. All I have is a few hundred dollars in my hotel room. Now suppose I go to the bank. You think a withdrawal that size would go unnoticed? Uh-uh.”
“Who is it you want to call?”
“A business associate who’s been with my family since before I was born. Rest assured he will not do anything to endanger my life. He’ll have the money wired here from the company account. Sound reasonable?”
Harrison turned to the door and said something in Spanish. From his coat pocket he pulled a red bandanna. “Wire’s not long enough to reach,” he said while blindfolding Monty.
His view of the exterior world now a red blur, Montgomery, as he was untied from the chair and guided through a series of rooms, grew more aware of his inner state, registering not only the conditions present, anger and thirst and caution and hunger, but also the one distinctly absent. He wasn’t afraid. Monty thought of what Nicholas had once told him—I want you to know it’s okay to be afraid. What is it they say? A man without fear is a man who cannot love—but he was interrupted by the phone receiver pressed to his ear. “Hello,” he said, “operator?” Throughout the prompts for the connection, he considered what he would say, glad for the distraction from the fact that he felt so calm, so collected, so unafraid. The person who answered on the other end, however, was not the person he wanted to speak with.
“Forster residence,” said Annabelle Forster.
* * *
“Hello?” The marine waved his hand in front of Monty’s face. “You there?”
He was not. Ever since the night Nicholas died six weeks ago, Monty had been drifting in some liminal place, his body disconnected from his mind. He had not really been there when the Second Division received orders to help Marshal Pétain fend against a series of German attacks on a small hunting preserve to the north. He had not really been there as his regiment, driven in trucks by Annamites and Tonkinese up a dusty highway, passed crowds of refugees, their arms full of birdcages, lamps, feather beds, and clocks. He had not really been there when they reached Belleau Wood at eight in the morning on June 1, 1918, only to be told by the French that they should fall back because of overwhelming enemy forces. “Retreat? Hell,” said the same marine now asking Monty if he was okay. “We just got here.”
Through the haze in Monty’s mind, echoing as though shouted into a canyon, the marine’s question reached him. “I’m okay,” Monty answered.
“Name’s Randall Babb.”
“Forster. Montgomery.”
“What regiment?”
“Ninth.”
“Guess we’re both lost.”
The two of them were crouched behind a boulder on the eastern rim of the woods. Shaped like a kidney, roughly a thousand yards wide and three thousand yards long, the Bois de Belleau was a tactical nightmare, its full summertime foliage hiding German encampments, its deep ravines making replenishment of supplies—zinc ointment for chemical blisters, castor oil for blinded eyes, morphine doses for bullet wounds—next to impossible. Most of the troops fell into disarray when the fighting began. Eight days had passed since Monty had seen any of his regiment. During that time, he had survived as a free agent of sorts, a mercenary with no nee
d for payment, engaging in combat while avoiding gas barrages, only on occasion running into other soldiers.
“Got any food?” he asked the marine.
“Food, yes. Water, no.”
Randall pulled raw bacon and hard tack from his bag and handed them to Monty. “Beats monkey meat, am I right?” he said, referring to the canned Madagascar beef often found in AEF rations. Monty, his mouth full, grunted.
“So, listen, I’m thinking we head southwest. Gut tells me that’s where the stronghold of our forces are holed up. Should be dark soon. We can head out then.”
“I’m going north.”
“Negative. I just came from there. You’ve got Wilhelm all over. I was lucky to make it out not looking like a colander.”
“Thanks for the grub.”
Without looking at Randall, who continued to object by saying it was suicide to go north, Monty collected his gear, a .45 automatic and a Springfield rifle, plus a trench knife, black with blood. Spare ammo rattled in his pockets as he stood. Around the boulder he peeked his head, felt satisfied that it remained atop his neck, and cautiously began to walk due north.
“You’re one goddamn crazy son of a bitch,” said Randall, yelling in whisper. “The hell is it you think you’re going to do?”
“Punish Wilhelm.”
Montgomery loaded a clip into the Springfield. Toward a field of wheat, high as his waistband and studded with poppies, he walked, a man possessed in a land dispossessed. With each step forward his mental state regressed to where it had been the past eight days. The sunset became nothing but a smear of color, and the chirping birds devolved into a remote hum. On entering a dense boscage, where he came upon three Germans digging foxholes in the dark, Monty’s condition worsened, his present senses getting confused with his past ones, as though he suffered from a form of synesthesia. The cold steel gripped in his hand felt like a cheek softened by sandalwood oil. The bright blood spilled on the ground looked like brilliantine combed into hair. None of the three soldiers even managed to scream.
American Pop Page 8