Some Luck (38 page)

Claire nodded and laid her head against the base of his neck. Rosanna said, “I’ll bake you a cake tomorrow, Walter.”

Walter didn’t care about that. But he felt Claire in his lap, pressed against his side, and he looked at the two dark heads and the two bright heads, and then at Rosanna. He sensed the knowledge pass between them that the years represented by these lost objects did not have to end as they had. If he’d fallen in the well, for example, Rosanna would have found the box, wondered what all of these things meant, and never known. A shiver passed over him, and then he saw the same shiver pass over Rosanna. They smiled to one another—a rare occurrence these days.

FRANK WAS SUPPOSED
to be in the Corps of Engineers—that’s what most of the other soldiers did at Fort Leonard Wood, which was in a forested, closed-in, hilly area that was not like Illinois and certainly not like Iowa. It was green and hot, and there was hardly ever a breeze. Frank’s drill sergeant, a man from Texas, had some different ideas from the others, and he got the recruits to play a little game. The game started simply—he took a mess kit, opened it up, and then threw a handful of coins into the dish. After giving the soldiers a minute to look at the coins, he closed the mess kit and asked what was in there. It was easy. Frank knew the first time—four pennies, a nickel, two dimes, and a quarter—and he knew the second time—six pennies, four dimes, two nickels, and two quarters. The second time, he had thirty seconds. After that, the sergeant used other bits and pieces, not coins: Six pebbles, four leaves, and three acorns. Eight kernels of corn, three dried beans, the two acorns again, and four maple seeds. Five .22 shells and three .30 shells. This was not something that Frank had to learn, it was something that he already knew how to do. From what? From counting cows and sheep? From scouting for rabbits? From shooting squirrels? From leaving a trail of corn kernels for the pheasants?

The next thing was that Frank and another kid—Lyman Hill,
from Oklahoma—were given better rifles, new semiautomatic MK 1s. Frank had heard of them, but never seen one. They were nice—well balanced, solid in the hand, with very long barrels. With the rifles, which belonged not to them but to the U.S. Army, they were given target practice. Frank was good—he hit the bull’s-eyes every time out to five hundred yards, so far that he could really only see the corners of the target, until they were given better sights, sights so finely ground that he could see the bull’s-eyes again. But Lyman was better. Lyman could estimate the wind speed and direction, and adjust his shot accordingly. He hit the bull’s-eye at seven hundred yards every time.

After a week of target practice, the sergeant was excited, and took them to the lieutenant. The lieutenant was new on the job—he had graduated early from West Point after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and he was just four months older than Frank (though Lyman was nineteen and looked sixteen—he had never in his whole life eaten as well as he ate in the army, and after two months, he had already grown an inch). The sergeant wanted to send Frank and Lyman to Ohio, to Camp Perry, for sniper training, and then ship them to Africa—the Seventh Army was headed for Africa, to fight Rommel, and snipers were going. The lieutenant wasn’t sure. But, then, the lieutenant wasn’t terribly sure of anything, except what the sergeant, who’d been in the army for nineteen years and would have retired if it hadn’t been for the declaration of war, told him to be sure of. They were standing in the lieutenant’s office, and the sergeant stepped up to Frank and spun him around so that he was facing out the window. Then he said, “Private Langdon. Did you get a look at Lieutenant Jorgenson’s desk?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Name the objects on the desk, Private.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Sergeant, three pencils, two short and one long. One fountain pen in a holder. One pad of army-issued writing paper. One holster and one Colt pistol. Two quarters and a half-dollar. One lamp. One
Basic Field Manual
. One piece of paper, wadded up. Two sets of ID tags.” He paused, then said, “One letter, address side up, and one letter, address side down. One cup of coffee, half full.”

“Private. Turn around.”

Frank turned around.

The sergeant said, “Private. Look at the desk. Anything you missed?”

Frank said, “Yes, Sergeant. The fly crawling around the rim of the lampshade.” He said this with a straight face. The fly dropped over the edge, toward the bulb, and the sergeant’s eyes twinkled.

Lieutenant Jorgenson said, “What does this prove to me, Sergeant?”

“Sir, it proves to you that if the army is going to have a few sharpshooters—or snipers, as our English cousins like to call them—we need to comb the ranks for men suitable to the job. Any man can learn to shoot, given enough time and ammunition, but not every man can learn to observe his surroundings.”

“I’m not sure, Sergeant, that the army has a use for these tactics.”

“Sir, you may be correct, but there is a group training at Camp Perry, and they are being sent to Africa, and we do hear that the marines are for it, sir. And so I don’t think we need to waste Private Langdon’s and Private Hill’s abilities on setting up latrines, sir. Private Hill is a somewhat better shot, but Private Langdon has a better eye for a likely target.”

“I’ll think about it, Sergeant. You and Private Langdon are dismissed.”

As they were walking back to the mess hall, Frank said, “What does a sniper do, Sergeant?”

“Hunts the enemy.” Frank’s face must have betrayed an interest in this, because the sergeant said, “You wouldn’t mind that, would you, Private Langdon? The Jerries do it, and the Japs do it, and the Limeys do it. Myself, I don’t see how these kids who are taught to stick to the rules are going to win this war, do you, Private?”

“No, Sergeant.”

Of course, the sergeant prevailed, and by the first of May, Frank found himself in Ohio.

AS SOON AS
Eloise got to the office, as soon as she heard about the raid on Dieppe, before she even knew that the Canadians had participated, she was filled with a peculiar sort of settled dread that she had never felt before. The previous night, at the time they would have landed, dawn in France, she had been sitting in bed, filing an edge off the nail of her right thumb. She had felt a surge of fear so strong
that she had looked out her bedroom window and, she thought, seen a face. Someone standing on the back porch! No one should be standing there, because it had no access to the ground, only to the roof. Eloise quickly reached for the light and switched it off, and as her eyes adjusted, she saw that there was no face in the window, and no head framed against the pale, cloudy sky. She stood up and went to the window. The porch was empty. But the sensation of having seen a face in the window remained with her, and when she heard the next morning that there had been a disastrous raid on Dieppe by the Canadian Second Division, along with some other units—all British, it seemed—that nine hundred had been killed, hundreds injured, and thousands taken prisoner, the two bits of knowledge clicked together. Eloise became silently convinced that Julius was one of those who had been killed—if he had not been, no face would have appeared in her window.

Julius, of course, pure materialist that he was, would have been the first to ridicule this idea, but she could not get it out of her head. A couple of the reporters who were following the war news and keeping track of all the battles were horrified and enraged at this one—the Brits, probably Mountbatten but Montgomery, too, had just funneled their infantry and their Churchill tanks into the German defenses and watched them get mowed down, and for no reason that anyone could see—there weren’t any troops waiting to follow on, there was nothing in France for them to do except get sucked into overwhelming forces. Even though a lot of German troops had been sent to Russia, France was well defended, and the Brits knew it. The reporters kept glancing at her across the newsroom (she was working on a piece about Oveta Culp Hobby and the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps). They knew Julius was with the Canadians. Finally, one of the reporters came over and laid the dispatches on her desk, but he didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

When she got home from work, Rosa was lounging on the sofa, reading a book. She looked so much like Julius—thin face, deep-set, prominent eyes, curly hair, full lips. She thought she was ugly, but Eloise thought she was going to grow up to look like Paulette Goddard. The perennial question of motherhood, Eloise thought, was how honest to be. I won’t buy you that doll because dolls train you to be ready to throw away your life in mindless reproduction? Your
father went to war because he hates Stalin more than Churchill, and now the running-dog imperialist Mountbatten has had your father put to death out of sheer incompetence? When your father left us, me, he was glad to be gone and might not have ever come back? It is not merely that your father’s relatives repudiated him when he joined the Party, they also have no interest in his communist goyishe German American wife, if indeed he ever married her?

Eloise decided not to say anything about her suspicions, only to ask, “What book is that?”

Rosa showed the cover. It was
Lad: A Dog
.

“I love you,” said Eloise.

“What’s wrong?” said Rosa, scowling.

“Nothing.” That was how honest she decided to be.

1943

F
ROM HIS VANTAGE POINT
in a rocky dip on the hillside above the pass, Frank could see most of the two-mile-wide breach in the ragged hills, the Atlas Mountains. He was one of the few—maybe a half-dozen—snipers who had been sent away from the main force. He quickly dug a little pocket into a foxhole, set up his tripod so that he could pivot his weapon about sixty degrees, then dug out a bit more with his spade, so that he could press back into it if he felt that he was being noticed from the air. He could see one of the others, but only one. There were three squads scattered through the hills. Frank took a sip from his canteen. The weather, though this was North Africa, was far from hot—it was actually rather pleasant.

Below him, where the mountains made way for the road, several units were digging slit trenches. Mines were being laid, but the ground was stony and dry, so the mines were not being dug in—they sat in the dust in casual piles. His sergeant had told him that Rommel and his army were so tired and so far from their supply depots that he would be a little surprised “if they even showed up for the party.” Once the party was over, Frank had been told, they would move forward to the village and take out the nests of German snipers waiting there. Frank thought that he would like that part. When the sun went down, it dropped. Light turned into darkness. There was so little moisture in the air that nothing sparkled or lingered. Everything was
or was not. They had been warned not to show light of any kind, and Frank ate his rations cold. The desert stars were so numerous and brilliant that it was occupation enough to try to make out a constellation or two. Frank liked everything about the army so far. How long had it been now, over a year? Longer than his father had spent in Europe, from the time he left until the time he got back. Frank had been to Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, then New York in October, where they’d had four days’ leave before getting on the ship and sailing to Casablanca. Three thousand men on the ship, in a convoy of thirty ships, and perfect sailing weather, with a stop in the Azores, a place unlike anything Frank had ever seen. But, then, every place he had been, including this very spot in the Atlas Mountains, was unlike anything he had ever seen.

Frank awoke with the first gust of wind, which was sharp and full of dust. It wasn’t yet light. He wrapped his scarf around his mouth and pulled his helmet down. Not hungry. He could both feel and hear armored divisions on the move, and he knelt up from where he had been lying and peered down toward the pass. There was movement there in the slit trenches, but it was too dark to see much.

At dawn, the ranks of panzers appeared, flat from this angle, much lower and maybe even wider than the Shermans the Americans were using. Frank thought they were ugly but frightening, and his job was to shoot them, which he did, with armor-penetrating shells. The American tanks, which had been supposed to engage them, were worthless—that was evident in the first ten minutes. Even Private Langdon could see that if the Sherman had to turn itself around to point its gun at the panzer, then the gun wasn’t going to be pointed in the proper direction very often. And it was frightening to watch what the German guns did to the American tanks—they set them on fire. All they had to do was aim at the gas tank and blow it up. The Sherman, and, Frank knew, the crew, were done for. But the Americans, perhaps by sheer luck, got a few hits, and when the German crews leapt from their hatches, Frank did his best to get them. Luckily, in the noise and smoke, the evidence of his presence was easily overlooked. He got two, though one of those was a wasted shot, since the fellow was burning already, and possibly a third—Frank couldn’t tell if he hit that one or not, because he had to duck back in his hole as soon as he fired.