Between the Bridge and the River (22 page)

When they got outside the club, the two whiteboys tried to grab one of the minivan cabs that shuttle the punters around Vegas but four big, clean, drunken girls from Minnesota jumped in beside them. The girls were college age and desperate to be wild and dangerous. To them this meant flashing their breasts at anyone who crossed their path. Cadence and Rory were delighted at this little sexy windfall.

“Where we goin, ladies?” asked Cadence as the girls gate-crashed the back of the cab.

The girls wanted to go to Mr. Bambaloni’s, a karaoke bar just off the Strip. Cadence thought, Fuck it, why not. It was about as much fun as anything else in this shitty town. (He had already been in Vegas for two days, which is like being anywhere else for two years.)

They stumbled into the club just as Leon stepped up to the mike.

Within a few seconds Cadence was a believer.

Here was his destiny.

A great, big, fat fucking star.

“
WHIT’S GOIN OAN HERE
?” the Scottish soldier shouted down from the rim of the trench.

George had just landed on Fraser and they just had time to say hello before Corporal Adam McLachlan of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a movie-star-handsome twenty-eight-year-old battle-hardened veteran from Glasgow, found them in what looked like a cowardly little embrace.

“Getting cover, sir,” yelled Fraser over the noise of the shelling.

“Awright, but try no tae look like a couple o’ wee girls, will ye, ye’ll have the bloody Bosch laughing if they catch ye.”

“Yessir.”

“I’m goin over tae C company, ther sergeant jist bought it, ther runnin aboot lik heidless chickens. When you boys ur finished wi’ yer cuddle ye might do us aw a wee favor an shoot some fuckin Germans.”

He was one of those warriors on the battlefield who made you think you might get out of this alive. Relentlessly courageous and a survivor himself. He had been in the army since 1914 and was still alive three years later. An unbelievable run of luck for an infantryman in this war.

“Keep yer heids doon, boys.” He winked at them and then was gone, ducking under a hail of shrapnel and dirt that made his tin hat jingle like a faulty telephone.

George noticed that he and Fraser were both young again and were in damp and itchy army uniforms. He had never seen Fraser look so scared. He hadn’t really seen him at all, except for when he caught the TV show, since the last time they had both been wandering Clouston Street on a snowy Saturday night in February looking for a party.

“What is going on here?”

Fraser looked at him, terror in his eyes. “We’re in hell.”

George nodded. He didn’t believe Fraser. Somewhere in his psyche he knew he was dreaming, so the situation didn’t touch him the way it might otherwise.

He had, though, a dreadful feeling of unease.

Fraser continued, “I’m dead. You’re dead. We are the dead. I’ve been here for weeks, man. It’s fucking mental here. I’m scared.”

He was crying and George felt sorry for him. He hadn’t been friendly with the guy for years but he was in a terrible mess.

George vaguely wondered why he was dreaming about Fraser.

Fraser told him of Brinsley and H.P. Lovecraft and his journey with Virgil and his discussions with Jung. He told him how he had left Jung’s tower and must have taken a wrong turn, for within moments had found himself here in Ypres in 1917. He had given up the notion that he might escape.

George thought that the poor bastard was out of his mind.

“Relax. This is not real,” said George, trying to calm him down. “Look.” George climbed the little wooden ladder out of the trench to show Fraser that the bullets could not harm him.

Fraser screamed at him to get down but it was too late. A sniper bullet caught George in the right shoulder, bursting his collarbone to chips and spraying blood and bone over his face and neck.

George was conscious as he fell to the mud and dirt and shit and dead vermin on the trench floor. He was in agony, his face already paling from shock.

“What the fuck?” he whispered.

“Shut up,” barked Fraser, who grabbed a dirty blanket from his pack and pressed it against George’s wound, the filthy wool drinking up the blood like a greedy vampire.

George was crying now, the pain and the trauma turning him into an infant. “Jesus, I’m dying, I’m fucking dying, oh God I want my ma.”

“Shhh,” said Fraser. “I’ve seen this, you’ll last longer if you don’t speak. Save your strength. Just breathe, George, breathe as deeply as you can, keep breathing.”

George did as he was told. Like a lot of young men in this war, he could not understand how he had gone from the bed of a beautiful woman in Paris to dying like a rat in a stinkhole in such a short period of time.

“I don’t deserve this,” he cried.

Fraser smoothed George’s hair back with his shaking hand, trying not to be afraid for a moment in order to comfort the dying man.

“Nobody deserves this,” he said.

“Nobody.”

“Jesus, Ah telt ye tae keep yer heid doon.” Corporal McLachlan was clambering back into the trench. A professional soldier, he was already pulling a med kit from his pack. Fraser got out of the way and let the senior man in to look at the wound. McLachlan lifted the swabbing and looked at the damage, his expression all business, not allowing the wounded man to see him wince.

“Ye’ll be awright, son, ther noo, everythin’s gonnae be awright.”

George closed his eyes.

“Is he dead?” Fraser asked.

“Naw, Ah think he might make it if we kin get him tae the infir-mary. They could stitch this mess or tar it or whatever the hell it is that they dae. He hus tae stoap bleedin tho.”

“Where’s the infirmary?”

“Ither side o’ C company, aboot a hunner yerds away. Problem is, Ah’ve jist been tae C company, thur sarge was deid right enough, along wi’ the rest o’ them. Thur’s nae C company noo, it’s no-man’s-land.”

McLachlan ran across the trench and picked up a stretcher that was propped against the wooden-planked wall.

Fraser was aghast. “You’re not serious? We can’t carry him over no-man’s-land. We’ll all get killed.”

McLachlan looked Fraser dead in the eye. “Listen, son. Ah’ve lastit three years in this war an d’ye know why? Cuz ither sodjers wur brave enough tae help me. Ah git shot an ah wid huv bled tae death if ma comrades hudnae goat me tae safety. Ah cannae thank any o’ these boys cuz thir aw deid. Thur’s nae rules in this place ’cept the wans ye make yersel. Here’s ma rules. Help ither boys stay alive. Noo you help me get this lad oan this stretcher and grab an end or Ah swear tae God I will take oot ma gun and put a bullet in you masel. Yer nae guid here if ye wilnae help yer pals.”

There was no doubt that the corporal was serious.

Fraser helped get George, who was still moaning, onto the stretcher, and when he was strapped in he and McLachlan manhandled the bundle up the trench wall.

Bullets and dirt and noise exploded around them and Fraser froze but McLachlan was a man possessed. He yelled at Fraser, “MOVE! GO! GO! GO! NOW!”

The two men ran with their load across the mud that had once been a cattle-grazing field as it blew up into their faces and eyes like hell had lost its lid.

Fraser could see a red cross painted on a white board up ahead and he ran toward it. Suddenly he felt the other end of the stretcher go limp.

McLachlan had been shot in the head. He lay on the ground. Dead.

When his body was recovered he was buried with thousands of other soldiers in a graveyard in Arras. After the war, in the regimental memorial book that sits in Edinburgh Castle, it would read “Cpl. Adam McLachlan—God’s finger touched him and he slept,” which the military brass felt sounded more poetic than “He was shot in the head and he died.”

Fraser would have had a better chance of making it if he dropped the stretcher and ran the rest of the way alone but then George would die where he lay. So Fraser, the phony TV evangelist, the drunken,
selfish media prick, the whoremaster, gossip, and sot, dragged George by himself for the last fifty yards to the hospital as the bullets whistled and hissed by his head and as the mortars pounded around him.

Sacred . . . profane . . . sacred . . . profane.

The surgeon was able to close up George’s wound and luckily the bullet had passed through, he would live. For now.

Fraser was sitting by the side of his cot. He motioned to George to look at the next bed.

Lying there groaning incoherently in agony, a dark slowly growing bloodstain on the sheet covering his middle, was Willie Elmslie. The boy who had given Fraser cheap wine and who George had beaten with a fishing rod when they were thirteen.

George looked at him. “This is not hell,” he said decisively and turned back to meet Fraser’s eye. “In hell we couldn’t die, there would be no release. Death cannot happen or threaten us if we are already dead. This is a dream.”

“A nightmare,” said Fraser.

“A nightmare, then,” agreed George. “But we are alive. I am not staying here, Fraser, and I am not dying yet. I have some things to do and I need to get them done. Also, I love someone.”

“What does that mean?” said Fraser.

“It means I will cling to life to be with them as long as God will allow.”

Fraser did not remember his old schoolmate as someone who had such a prosaic line of chat. “What happened to you, George?” he asked.

“I got shot,” said George.

“Not now, I mean before. What brought you here?”

“I got shot,” said George.

And after a fashion, Fraser understood.

Fraser stood up. He walked over to the edge of the hospital trench and looked out over no-man’s-land. He saw the body of Corporal McLachlan tangled in the mud and the barbed wire. He wept for the bravest man he had ever met.

Across the filthy divide was a young German private named Helmut Maunn, who much later would write the novel
Die Pampelmuse
der Grausigkeit
about a poet who initially was attracted to the order and drama of the Nazis only to eventually become sickened with them and himself. The book would become a classic and eventually be made into a film starring the talented French actor Guillame Maupassant.

Helmut saw Fraser’s head off in the distance. He raised his rifle, took careful aim, and held his breath as he squeezed the trigger.

The bullet caught Fraser directly in the face, smashing through teeth and bone.

God’s finger touched him and he slept.

IN AN ANCIENT LANGUAGE
,
myo
is the word for muscle, and
clonus
means rapidly alternating contraction and relaxation. The sudden spasm of the major muscles as a person is falling asleep produces a little shock that wakes them up again; it is called a
myoclonic
jerk.

It is one of the thousands of little adventures that occur in the human body that are unsatisfactorily explained by contemporary medicine. Just about everyone experiences these tiny seizures at some point in their life and so they are considered normal, which of course doesn’t tell you much.

The effect, common in everyone from newborn babies to octogenarians, is that of a feeling of stumbling or falling over. The best guess, or hypothesis, to use the word that academics like, that modern science has come up with to explain this phenomenon is that as the heart rate and breathing slow in preparation for sleep, the brain sometimes interprets this as the person dying and sends a jolt, or electrical impulse, through the body in order to wake it up. Bring it back to life, as it were.

In George’s case, this was 100 percent accurate. His body was dying and his brain sent a thunderbolt through his system strong enough to jump-start a rusty truck.

Had Fraser and Corporal McLachlan not dragged him across no-man’s-land, George would not have received the lightning bolt and would have died quietly in the bed next to Claudette. A postmortem would have revealed his cancer but nothing else, and his sudden expiration would have been a bit of a head-scratcher for a couple of French doctors for a while until they got too busy to think about it anymore.

Claudette would have finally snapped and ended her own life with the massive dose of sleeping pills she kept in the bathroom cabinet just in case.

But the fortunate George was carried by his comrades to safety and so he sat up with a start and found himself looking at the sleeping Claudette, her cheeks mushed into the pillow. It was still dark outside.

He did not remember anything. Some vague feeling of unease, something about Fraser Darby, but as he gazed at the sleeping beauty next to him, all the anxiety bled from his body and was replaced by wonder and awe.

He sighed and lay back on the pillow, his face close enough to hers that he could share her breath. In gratitude, he finally slept.

FRASER SWAM THROUGH WARM LIGHT-BLUE MILK
. He was below the surface of something again but he could breathe. Breath filled him in a rush as if he’d had fifty extra-strong mints all at once, then went for a yodel on an Alp.

He couldn’t see more than two or three inches in front of his face, or maybe it was two or three miles, it was hard to tell with the milk. It was a texture he didn’t recognize, a sensation he only vaguely knew. Perhaps from the womb. He smiled a big, wide smile to himself. Carl would be very proud he was thinking like this.

Gradually he felt himself ascending until he broached the creamy surface and found he was about thirty feet from the shore of a tropical island. A small three-palm-tree job with a shiny white deserted sand beach. It was bright yellow daytime.

Up from the beach the three palm trees grew wildly, like Rastafarian bed-head. Fat bumblebees buzzed happily in the shade.

Fraser waded ashore and saw that he was naked. He looked around. No one about.

He suddenly felt a sadness that he had never experienced before, it hit him like a giant Georgia freight train. He fell to his knees and wept, his heart shattered, his soul broken in a billion pieces.

It was over.