Prudence (19 page)

Junior was different. He was quiet but in a different way. Obsessive about his games or absorbed in whatever he was constructing out of sticks or bark or whatever was at hand in the yard. That’s how Frankie had been when they were boys. Billy understood that.

He hadn’t been sure what to get Margaret. But the school year was coming around, and her overalls were wearing out at the knees, so he circled back to the dresses. He was still out of sorts from his visit to the VA. Being around all the uniforms, even being around the other servicemen—the older ones and the ones coming back from Korea—made him edgy. He’d stopped at a bar in Royalton and they had served him without saying anything or acting funny about it. He had stopped again at the VFW in Grand Rapids—they’d serve him, even though he was Indian, and let him buy a pint. Then he moved on to the J. C. Penney. A dress would do, both for Margaret and for Stella. A dress for the new school year. And something for Stella to wear to church. Junior was six, so he got more overalls, big enough to last the year.

*   *   *

P
rudence had gotten out of the truck and was knocking on Gephardt’s door. Her dress was still wet and caked with dirt from when she’d fallen in the ditch, but she held herself as though she didn’t notice it. The one he had gotten for Stella was much nicer, he thought, a little longer. But Prudence looked good in hers. It was all about how you carried yourself.

The cripple, Mary, answered after a minute or two and then retreated into the house. God, she was a sight. How she made it around on that leg, Billy would never understand. A minute later Gephardt himself appeared at the door. He handed Prudence a mason jar with a zinc lid, filled with clear fluid. He said something—Billy could see his lips moving and his head nodding, all smiles—but Billy couldn’t hear him, which was just as well. Prudence handed him the money and he shook her hand and then closed the door, and Prudence turned and held up the jar in one hand and made the “V for Victory” sign with the other on the stage of Gephardt’s front steps.

*   *   *

B
illy had seen only one dead German before the war, and after three days in the water he didn’t look like much, didn’t look dangerous at all. Billy was there when Felix pulled him from under the dock. He came to the Pines every day after the shooting to check on Frankie. At first Frankie wouldn’t leave the house, and Emma spent her days flowing up and down the stairs with trays of food, bowls of soup, towels, tonic, even whiskey, which had been Jonathan’s idea, and when that didn’t work, he’d prescribed Veronal. Ernie said there was nothing to do except to go fishing, which he did. But Billy came and sat by Frankie’s bed on the first day. On the second, Frankie seemed a little better and Billy asked him if he’d like some books. Frankie said, “Sure,” so Billy went all the way back to
the village and got from under his bed some of the ones Frankie had sent him. By the time he got back, Frankie was asleep again, so Billy left them by his bed. On the third day, they remained unopened.

Late that afternoon, Felix finally got around to cleaning the dock, and that’s when he found the body. He said nothing about his discovery, in his usual dumb way. He’d used the rake to snag the German’s shirt and float him out from under the dock. Then he’d tied a rope under the corpse’s armpits and pulled it onto the riprapped bank.

It wasn’t long before Emma and Jonathan came out of the big house, and the kitchen girls stopped what they were doing and came and stood around the body as well, and then the news of the discovery carried over the water and the super from the prison camp rowed over. Within a couple hours, the sheriff and constables and members of the search party were there, too. No one moved the body. Billy was there, and he saw that the German was missing some of his fingers, chewed off by turtles, and that the parts of his skin that had been submerged were white, and strings of white tissue like the tentacles of a jellyfish trailed off his face, whereas the skin that had been exposed to air was black and stretched so tight from bloating that it had ruptured, leaking here and there what looked like jelly.

Everyone was so absorbed in the spectacle of the body that no one noticed Frankie until he spoke. He had gotten out of bed and come downstairs, and he couldn’t stop saying, “He was there? He was there all along? Right there? Right there?” He said this over and over until Billy and Emma led him back to bed.

Around sunset the sheriff and his deputies lifted the German into their boat and brought him back across the river. The other prisoners buried him outside the fence that night and when they were done, they stood around the grave and sang,
“So nimm denn meine Hände.”
The sound carried across the river and into Frankie’s room, where Billy sat watching him sleep. He wasn’t sure if he should reach out
and touch Frankie or not. When it got dark he lit the kerosene lantern on the table next to the bed. Frankie opened his eyes.

“Hey, Frankie,” said Billy softly.

Frankie turned his head away.

So nimm denn meine Hände

und führe mich

bis an mein selig Ende

und ewiglich.

Ich mag allein nicht gehen,

nicht einen Schritt:

wo du wirst gehn und stehen,

da nimm mich mit.

“You want me to read to you?”

“No.”

“Who knew, Frankie. I mean, who could have known?”

“Fucking Germans.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I leave tomorrow. Doctor’s orders.”

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. They were supposed to have two weeks. They were to go squirrel hunting and fishing. They were to have parties in the big house. Frankie was supposed to smile.

In dein Erbarmen hülle

mein schwaches Herz

und mach es gänzlich stille

in Freud und Schmerz.

Laß ruhn zu deinen Füßen

dein armes Kind:

es will die Augen schließen

Und glauben blind.

“Already?”

“When are you going to do your part in all this, Billy?”

Billy shrugged. Frankie looked away from the window open to the river, back to the woods to the north of the Pines. They went on and on. On toward Canada and north to where there were no more of them to be had.

“Are you sure I can’t read something to you? Or anything else?”

Wenn ich auch gleich nichts fühle

von deiner Macht,

du führst mich doch zum Ziele

auch durch die Nacht:

so nimm denn meine Hände

und führe mich

bis an mein selig Ende

und ewiglich!

The lamp flickered. Billy listened as the singing died out over the river. He heard Ernie down at the dock tying up the rowboat and singing some mocking version of the hymn in a wobbly falsetto. Emma was in the kitchen. Judging from the smell of smoke drifting through the window, Jonathan was on the front porch with his pipe. Billy reached out and took Frankie’s hand.

“Can I?” he whispered. It was the closest he’d ever come to naming whatever it was between them.

“It’s not ‘can I.’ it’s ‘may I.’”

Billy’s heart beat fast.

“May I?”

“We’re not kids anymore, Billy. We’re not children, after all.”

Billy let go of his hand.

“Will you look at me, Frankie?”

“No.”

“I was just trying to help. To help you. Look at me.”

“No.”

“Please, Frankie.”

Nothing.

Billy waited a moment and then stood up. He walked to the door and opened it. Then he turned. It was just like a movie. Frankie looked at him and then looked away. And that was the last time.

A cigarette glowed under the eaves of the boathouse. “Watch out for my fish there,” Ernie said without pointing. Billy looked down at his feet. There was a muskie—a big one, four, five feet—lying stiff in the grass where the German had lain. Its body glowed white in the lamplight.

“Where’s Felix?”

“Up the hill, burying that girl you shot.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Ernie continued to look at him.

“You did, right?”

“Did what?”

“You shot her. You were the one who shot her.”

“Yeah. Yeah it was me.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay you’re telling me it was you. So, ‘okay.’”

Billy didn’t know what else to say. His hands flapped at his sides a couple times and he half turned toward the house, then he got into the rowboat and pushed off, watching the Pines recede into little pinpoints of light and lamp glow.

*   *   *

T
wo years later, he had advanced, one ant in a division of ants, from Normandy on D+1 across the Aure and into Trévières, up Hill 192 and down into Saint-Lô and from there to Brest. After forty
days of watching bomb after bomb after bomb fall on Brest, they advanced through the streets and took the city, one building at a time. By the time Billy was done with Brest he had seen more dead Germans than he could count. In Normandy, they’d been swollen with flies in the ditches, fried black in their bunkers, but in Brest most of the dead looked fairly tame—a little blood from the mouth or nose and ears from the shock of the bombs.

By the time they pushed into Germany in October 1944, the weather had grown cold. A month later they were pushed all the way back through the snow and the cold to Elsenborn Ridge, where they held on without reinforcements against a superior German force for ten days before the Germans gave up their advance—ten days in a bunker he and Van Winckle from Arkansas had dug out of the frozen ground and covered with planks salvaged from an old barn. A week after Elsenborn they advanced into Germany near Aachen, and Van Winckle stepped on a mine. His legs disappeared in a mist of flesh and blood. Billy felt a pain in his shoulder and he sat down next to Van Winckle with a grunt. He looked and saw that his arm was hanging at a strange angle and his whole side was covered with blood.

None of it was quite real. None of it was very memorable. Not the clang of the landing-craft door opening, not the steady rolling boom of the shells overhead or the almost constant shaking of the ground. Not even killing his first German. He barely remembered that. Not the firestorms over Brest or the screaming of the horses near Saint-Lô. Not even the misery of Elsenborn or the surprise of having a piece of Van Winckle’s land mine blow through his shoulder. None of it, not one bit of it stood out as sharply as the smallest thing he remembered about the Pines.

Even the weather had seemed glorious back then. The days had gone on and on and on, as though stretching themselves out to make room for the games he and Frankie had played when they were boys, the long treks down the tote road with a .22 to shoot squirrels.
Sometimes moods would come over Ernie and he would go off by himself, and those times were the best. Then Frankie and Billy would go even farther. They didn’t shoot many squirrels, but sometimes Billy would say, “Watch this,” and he would raise his gun and take a shot at a squirrel high in the trees and it would fall, slowly, so slowly to the ground and he and Frankie would rush over and watch in that cold, cruel, curious way of boys as it died, and Frankie would bend so close that Billy could smell his hair and sometimes he’d put one hand on the squirrel’s body and the other on Frankie’s neck, as if to direct his attention to the animal, and he would feel the same warmth, the same animal aliveness there.

Sometimes clouds rolled in and night came on suddenly, much earlier than it usually did. Then the family would gather in the sitting room and, if the mood was right, the boys would play charades or Chinese checkers with Emma. On rare occasions when Emma had enough to drink, she would sing and Frankie would accompany her on the piano. Frankie, so shy, so tentative and thin, would come alive. His fingers became sure and strong as they pounded out the chords to “All the Things That You Are.” Emma gazed down at Frankie when she sang, not at Jonathan, who sat in his chair, reading while the music fell all around him. Later, when they were older, Frankie would sing, and Ernie always did something funny toward the end, like warbling in falsetto as he came down the stairs wearing something of Emma’s. Even Jonathan would laugh about it a little. And Billy would sit and watch, as immobile as Jonathan, wishing desperately that he had something to offer.

But Frankie was good at guessing his moods, and he would break into Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee,” which became a kind of code. Because later they would find a way past the minefield of the adults’ attention and Ernie’s pranks and steal some time in one of the empty cabins. And there, in the dark, with the smell of cold ashes from the Franklin stove and the feather pillows that still held the medicinal
scent of mothballs, and the wool blankets that smelled like the rain coming down outside, they would lie down side by side on a single bed. And Billy would wrap his arms around Frankie and breathe in the smell of his neck, the back of his head still damp with sweat. He’d lay his hand across Frankie’s chest and feel his heart. Frankie would push his hips back against Billy’s, and Billy would press back, his erection stiff against his pants. They’d keep moving this way until, slowly, hard, harder, excruciatingly, he’d come, his breath ragged, black and blowing, on Frankie’s neck.

The first time, he pretended nothing had happened.

“You okay?” Frankie asked.

“Ah. Yes. Yeah, I’m okay. You?” was all he managed to say.

The next time it was much the same. But after he came he said, “That felt good.”

“Yeah?” asked Frankie, his voice catching in his throat.

“Yes. Here, turn over. Turn over, okay?”

He helped Frankie lie on his back. Frankie didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he folded them on his chest like a corpse. He didn’t say anything, just breathed in and out excitedly while Billy unbuttoned his fly and pulled down Frankie’s pants and underwear. He was hard. Billy took him in his fist, his hand moving up and down slowly. He was surprised at how long and thin and pink Frankie’s was, but why was that a surprise? His dick more or less matched the rest of him. He looked on with wonder and a kind of pride in having made Frankie that hard, in making him suck in his breath and arch his back. After just a few strokes, no more than twenty, Frankie suddenly went rigid and said, “Watch out!” and he came in great looping spurts all over his own chest.