Bagombo Snuff Box (13 page)

“Must be a woman up front, tryin’ to read a road map,” said
Buzzer.

From far down the road came an exchange of shouts like a distant
surf. Restless, anxious moments later, the cause of the trouble was clear: The
column had met another, fleeing in terror from the opposite direction. The
Russians had the area surrounded. Now the two columns merged to form an aimless
whirlpool in the heart of a small village, flooding out into side lanes and up
the slopes on either side.

“Don’t know nobody in Prague, anyhow,” said Buzzer, and he
wandered off the road and sat by the gate of a walled farmyard.

Eddie followed his example. “By God,” he said, “maybe we
oughta stay right here and open us up a gun shop, Buzzer.” He included in a
sweep of his hand the discarded rifles and pistols that were strewn over the
grass. “Bullets and all.”

“Swell place to open a gun shop, Europe is,” said Buzzer. “They’re
just crazy about guns around here.”

Despite the growing panic of the persons milling about them,
Buzzer dropped off into a brandy-induced nap. Eddie had trouble keeping his
eyes open.

“Aha!” said a voice from the road. “Here our American
friends are.”

Eddie looked up to see the two Germans, the husky young man
and the irascible older one, grinning down at them.

“Hello,” said Eddie. The cheering edge of the brandy was
wearing off, and queasiness was taking its place.

The young German pushed open the gate to the farmyard. “Come
in here, would you?” he told Eddie. “We have something important to say to you.”

“Say it here,” said Eddie.

The blond leaned down. “We’ve come to surrender to you.”

“You’ve come to what?”

“We surrender,” said the blond. “We are your prisoners—prisoners
of the United States Army.”

Eddie laughed.

“Seriously!”

“Buzzer!” Eddie nudged his buddy with the toe of his boot. “Hey,
Buzzer—you gotta hear this.”

“Hmmmm?”

“We just captured some people.”

Buzzer opened his eyes and squinted at the pair. “You’re
drunker’n I am, by God, Eddie, goin’ out capturin’ people,” he said at last. “You
damn fool—the war’s over.” He waved his hand magnanimously. “Turn ‘em loose.”

“Take us through the Russian lines to Prague as American
prisoners, and you’ll be heroes,” said the blond. He lowered his voice. “This
is a famous German general. Think of it—you two can bring him in as your prisoner!”

“He really a general?” said Buzzer. “Heil Hitler, Pop.”

The older man raised his arm in an abbreviated salute.

“Got a little pepper left in him, at that,” said Buzzer.

“From what I heard,” said Eddie, “me and Buzzer’ll be heroes
if we get just us through the Russian lines, let alone a German general.”

The noise of a tank column of the Red Army grew louder.

“All right, all right,” said the blond, “sell us your
uniforms, then. You’ll still have your dog tags, and you can take our clothes.”

“I’d rather be poor than dead,” said Eddie. “Wouldn’t you,
Buzzer?”

“Just a minute, Eddie,” said Buzzer, “just hold on. What’ll
you give us?”

“Come in the farmyard. We can’t show you here,” said the
blond.

“I even heard there was some Nazis in the neighborhood,”
said Buzzer. “Come on, give us a little peek here.”

“Now who’s a damn fool?” said Eddie.

“Just want to be able to tell my grandchildren what I passed
up,” said Buzzer.

The blond was going through his pockets. He pulled out a fat
roll of German currency.

“Confederate money!” said Buzzer. “What else you got?”

It was then that the old man showed them his pocketwatch,
four diamonds, a ruby, and gold. And there, in the midst of a mob of every
imaginable sort of refugee, the blond told Buzzer and Eddie that they could
have the watch if they would go behind a wall and exchange their ragged
American uniforms for the Germans’ civilian clothes. They thought Americans
were so dumb!

This was all so funny and crazy! Eddie and Buzzer were so
drunk! What a story they would have to tell when they got home! They didn’t
want the watch. They wanted to get home alive. There, in the midst of a mob of every
imaginable sort of refugee, the blond was showing them a small pistol, as
though they could have that, too, along with the watch.

But it was now impossible for anybody to say any more funny
stuff and still be heard. The earth shook, and the air was ripped to shreds as
armored vehicles from the victorious Soviet Union, thundering and backfiring,
came up the road. Everybody who could got out of the way of the juggernaut.
Some were not so lucky. They were mangled. They were squashed.

Eddie and Buzzer and the old man and the blond found themselves
behind the wall where the blond had said the Americans could swap their uniforms
for the watch and civilian clothes. In the uproar, during which anybody could
do anything, and nobody cared what anybody else did, the blond shot Buzzer in
the head. He aimed his pistol at Eddie. He fired. He missed.

That had evidently been the plan all along, to kill Eddie
and Buzzer. But what chance did the old man, who spoke no English, have to pass
himself off to his captors as an American? None. It was the blond who was
going to do that. And they were both about to be captured. All the old man could
do was commit suicide.

Eddie went back over the wall, putting it between himself
and the blond. But the blond didn’t care what had become of him. Everything the
blond needed was on Buzzer’s body. When Eddie peered over the wall to see if
Buzzer was still alive, the blond was stripping the body. The old man now had
the pistol. He put its muzzle in his mouth and blew his brains out.

The blond walked off with Buzzer’s clothes and dog tags.
Buzzer was in his GI underwear and dead, without ID. On the ground between the
old man and Buzzer, Eddie found the watch. It was running. It told the right
time. Eddie picked it up and put it in his pocket.

The rainstorm outside Joe Bane’s pawnshop had stopped. “When
I got home,” said Eddie, “I wrote Buzzer’s folks. I told ‘em he’d been killed
in a fight with a German, even though the war was over. I told the Army the
same thing. I didn’t know the name of the place where he’d died, so there was
no way they could look for his body and give him a decent funeral. I had to leave
him there. Whoever buried him, unless they could recognize GI underwear, wouldn’t
have known he was American. He could have been a German. He could have been
anything.”

Eddie snatched the watch from under the pawnbroker’s nose. “Thanks
for letting me know what it’s worth,” he said. “Makes more sense to keep it for
a souvenir.”

“Five hundred,” said Bane, but Eddie was already on his way
out the door.

Ten minutes later, the shoeshine boy returned with a
translation of the inscription inside the watch. This was it:

“To General Heinz Guderian, Chief of the Army General Staff,
who cannot rest until the last enemy soldier is driven from the sacred soil of
the Third German Reich. ADOLF HITLER.”

During the Great Depression, Nathan Durant was homeless until
he found a home in the United States Army. He spent seventeen years in the
Army, thinking of the earth as terrain, of the hills and valleys as enfilade
and defilade, of the horizon as something a man should never silhouette himself
against, of the houses and woods and thickets as cover. It was a good life, and
when he got tired of thinking about war, he got himself a girl and a bottle,
and the next morning he was ready to think about war some more.

When he was thirty-six, an enemy projectile dropped into a
command post under thick green cover in defilade in the terrain of Korea, and
blew Major Durant, his maps, and his career through the wall of his tent.

He had always assumed that he was going to die young and
gallantly.

But he didn’t die. Death was far, far away, and Durant faced
unfamiliar and frightening battalions of peaceful years.

In the hospital, the man in the next bed talked constantly
of the boat he was going to own when he was whole again. For want of exciting
peacetime dreams of his own, for want of a home or family or civilian friends,
Durant borrowed his neighbor’s dream.

With a deep scar across his cheek, with the lobe of his
right ear gone, with a stiff leg, he limped into a boatyard in New London, the
port nearest the hospital, and bought a secondhand cabin cruiser. He learned to
run it in the harbor there, christened the boat The Jolly Roger at the
suggestion of some children who haunted the boatyard, and set out arbitrarily
for Martha’s Vineyard.

He stayed on the island but a day, depressed by the
tranquility and permanence, by the feeling of deep, still lakes of time, by
men and women so at one with the peace of the place as to have nothing to
exchange with an old soldier but a few words about the weather.

Durant fled to Chatham, at the elbow of Cape Cod, and found
himself beside a beautiful woman at the foot of a lighthouse there. Had he been
in his old uniform, seeming as he’d liked to seem in the old days, about to
leave on a dangerous mission, he and the woman might have strolled off
together. Women had once treated him like a small boy with special permission
to eat icing off cakes. But the woman looked away without interest. He was
nobody and nothing. The spark was gone.

His former swashbuckling spirits returned for an hour or two
during a brief blow off the dunes of Cape Cod’s east coast, but there was no
one aboard to notice. When he reached the sheltered harbor at Provincetown and
went ashore, he was a hollow man again, who didn’t have to be anywhere at any
time, whose life was all behind him.

“Look up, please,” commanded a gaudily dressed young man
with a camera in his hands and a girl on his arm.

Surprised, Durant did look up, and the camera shutter
clicked. “Thank you,” said the young man brightly.

“Are you a painter?” asked his girl.

“Painter?” said Durant. “No—retired Army officer.”

The couple did a poor job of covering their disappointment. “Sorry,”
said Durant, and he felt dull and annoyed.

“Oh!” said the girl. “There’s some real painters over there.”
Durant glanced at the artists, three men and one woman, probably in their late
twenties, who sat on the wharf, their backs to a silvered splintering pile,
sketching. The woman, a tanned brunette, was looking right at Durant.

“Do you mind being sketched?” she said.

“No—no, I guess not,” said Durant bearishly. Freezing in his
pose, he wondered what it was he’d been thinking about that had made him interesting
enough to draw. He realized that he’d been thinking about lunch, about the tiny
galley aboard The Jolly Roger, about the four wrinkled wieners, the half-pound
of cheese, and the flat remains of a quart of beer that awaited him there.

“There,” said the woman, “you see?” She held out the sketch.
What Durant saw was a big, scarred, hungry man, hunched over and desolate as a
lost child. “Do I really look that bad?” he said, managing to laugh.

“Do you really feel that awful?”

“I was thinking of lunch. Lunch can be pretty terrible.”

“Not where we eat it,” she said. “Why not come with us?” Major
Durant went with them, with the three men, Ed, Teddy, and Lou, who danced
through a life that seemed full of funny secrets, and with the girl, Marion. He
found he was relieved to be with others again, even with these others, and his
step down the walk was jaunty.

At lunch, the four spoke of painting, ballet, and drama.
Durant grew tired of counterfeiting interest, but he kept at it.

“Isn’t the food good here?” said Marion, in a casual and
polite aside. “Um,” said Durant. “But the shrimp sauce is flat. Needs—” He gave
up. The four were off again in their merry whirlwind of talk.

“Did you just drive here?” said Teddy, when he saw Durant
staring at him disapprovingly.

“No,” said Durant. “I came in my boat.” ‘A boat!” they
echoed, excited, and Durant found himself center stage.

“What kind?” said Marion.

“Cabin cruiser,” said Durant.

Their faces fell. “Oh,” said Marion, “one of those floating
tourist cabins with a motor.”

“Well,” said Durant, tempted to tell them about the blow he’d
weathered, “it’s certainly no picnic when—”

“What’s its name?” said Lou.

“The Jolly Roger,” said Durant.

The four exchanged glances, and then burst into laughter, repeating
the boat’s name, to Durant’s consternation and bafflement.

“If you had a dog,” said Marion, “I’ll bet you’d call it
Spot.”

“Seems like a perfectly good name for a dog,” said Durant,
reddening.

Marion reached across the table and patted his hand. “Aaaaaah,
you lamb, you musn’t mind us.” She was an irresponsibly affectionate woman, and
appeared to have no idea how profoundly her touch was moving the lonely Durant,
in spite of his resentment. “Here we’ve been talking away and not letting you
say a word,” she said. “What is it you do in the Army?”

Durant was startled. He hadn’t mentioned the Army, and there
were no insignia on his faded khakis. “Well, I was in Korea for a little while,”
he said, “and I’m out of the Army now because of wounds.”

The four were impressed and respectful. “Do you mind talking
about it?” said Ed.

Durant sighed. He did mind talking about it to Ed, Teddy,
and Lou. but he wanted very much for Marion to hear about it—wanted to show her
that while he couldn’t speak her language, he could speak one of his own that
had life to it. “No,” he said, “there are some things that would just as well
stay unsaid, but for the most part, why not talk about it?” He sat back; and
lit a cigarette, and squinted into the past as though through a thin screen of
shrubs in a forward observation post.

“Well,” he said, “we were over on the east coast, and . . .”
He had never tried to tell the tale before, and now, in his eagerness to be
glib and urbane, he found himself including details, large and small, as they
occurred to him, until his tale was no tale at all, but a formless, unwieldy
description of I war as it had really seemed: a senseless, complicated mess
that in the telling was first-rate realism but miserable entertainment.