The Last Town on Earth (28 page)

XII

T
he first time I saw the C.O. he was getting the hell beaten out of him by two Poles. I was leaving mess and was ready to collapse into my cot—we’d done extra drilling that day and had marched for hours through mud so thick you’d lose your boots after one step if you didn’t lace them up extra tight. But as I passed the door I heard the racket coming from outside, the shouting and the ruckus, and wondered what the hell was going on. Was there big news from the front? Or an armistice? Or had they reopened the brothels just outside of town?

I walked out and saw a circle of men standing in the mud. One of them was a guy I knew pretty well, a blond kid named Ollie, so I sidled up next to him. He was smiling. Everybody was smiling.

Except the C.O.—the conscientious objector. He was in the middle of the circle, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt; his stomach and chest were pockmarked with bruises, some dark blue and some a fresher shade of red. I didn’t know the C.O.’s name but I knew what he was, had seen him cleaning halls and carrying garbage like the others. I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but I knew better than to ask stupid questions.

“All right,” one of the Poles said, handing a broom handle to his buddy. “Your turn.”

The second guy smiled and held on to the broom handle the way we’d all been taught in bayonet drills. He stood in front of the C.O., who tried to back away, but one of the men in the circle stepped forward and gave him a push in the back, setting him up.

“Take out that Hun’s liver!” one of the guys in the circle yelled, perfectly mimicking our drill sergeant. Everybody laughed at the impersonation, even me. We’d all been hearing that voice in our dreams for days.

The Pole lunged forward—using not just his arms but his whole body, just as the drill sergeants preached—and jammed the end of the broom handle into the C.O.’s stomach. If it had been a bayonet, it would’ve taken out his liver, easy. In fact, if I knew my anatomy right, then judging from the red marks all over him he would have already lost his liver, stomach, and large intestines. He would have been put out of his misery.

“Twist it!” somebody else yelled, echoing the drill sergeant again. “You gotta twist it on its way out!”

That wasn’t possible, of course, because the handle didn’t break the skin. Not that this helped the C.O., whose knees had buckled under him. Everybody was laughing.

The C.O. tried to get back up, but the guy with the broom handle pressed it against his back, keeping him down there.

“You know the rules, son,” one of the others said. “You hit the ground, you do forty.”

The C.O. painfully assumed the push-up position. “Count ’em off, everyone!” the Pole with the broom handle shouted.

Everyone counted. I moved my mouth but didn’t really say anything. I was starting to feel sick.

The C.O. was too weak from the beating to do many push-ups. He barely made it to sixteen, then his right arm slipped out from under him, sliding in the mud. The laughter grew.

“You can’t give us forty, you miserable little slacker?” one of them said, and as the C.O. tried to steady himself and pick up where he left off, the guy stepped forward and lifted his other boot. He placed his boot—softly at first—on the back of the C.O.’s head and pressed it down, slowly but steadily. The C.O.’s face was in the thick mud, and the Pole leaned forward like he was curious to see how far into the mud he could press him. Pretty far, it turned out.

The C.O. tried to lift himself up and, failing at this, started to beat hell out of the mud with his arms, splashing it all over the legs of the guys closest to him. After another second or two the guy with the boot stepped back and let the C.O. come up for air.

The C.O. breathed, but first he coughed and choked and then he vomited.

I had done my best to avoid him, along with the other C.O.s. They were targets, and it didn’t make much sense to stand near a target. I had heard what happened to them sometimes, but this was the first I’d witnessed it.

The C.O. was wiry and about my height—he looked like he didn’t need to be such a pushover if he didn’t want to be. That I just didn’t understand. Maybe if he’d been a scrawny little nothing, I would have empathized more, but wasn’t he bringing it all on himself? He had dark hair that was longer than everyone else’s, as though the army barbers had decided to make him an easy mark. And he had a mean face. Seems a strange thing to comment on or even remember, but it was a mean face—the eyes were small and the brows hung low over them, his mouth a constant frown. It was impossible to imagine him ever smiling. Not that he had much reason to, I guess.

Everybody in the circle was a private, far as I knew. The Poles had acted like the leaders of this particular mission, and no one had seen fit to challenge them.

One of the Poles lifted the C.O. up by the armpits. He tried to let him go but it became clear that the C.O. couldn’t stand on his own anymore, so the Pole held on to him.

The other one walked up real close to the C.O. From where I was standing the Pole was in profile. He looked the C.O. in the eye, and the C.O. eventually looked back.

“You know you can stop this at any time, right?” It was the first thing the Pole had said that seemed intended just for the C.O. to hear, not some disingenuous comment that was really meant for the ears of the guys surrounding them, the motley chorus. The Pole’s eyes had softened somewhat, as had his tone. He was leveling with the guy. “All you have to do is give this up, Hunter. Just get in line with the rest of us.”

It was the first moment of the whole ordeal that seemed human. No, wait—what am I saying? The whole mess was human: the whole disgusting, violent circus had been human. Terrifyingly human. This new appeal to the C.O. was just another aspect of that humanity, another round in the chamber.

The C.O. looked down again and coughed. That appeared to be his answer.

The Pole stepped back and held up the broom handle. “Allrighty, boys, who needs more bayonet practice?”

I nodded goodbye to Ollie and headed back inside.

That was during my second month at the camp. By then I could march as well as any jackbooted Prussian warrior, like a true doughboy. I could reach into my pack and strap on a gas mask in under seven seconds. And though I had yet to hold a real bayonet, I could be as ruthless and exacting with a broom handle as those Poles could. Still hadn’t held an army firearm yet—they kept saying we’d get them soon enough—but I knew I was a good shot, from the hunting I’d always done with my old man. I tried to imagine taking aim at a human figure rather than a deer or buffalo, but it was hard to picture.

The camp was a crazy mess. It rained all the damn time—nothing like back home—and the ground was mud as far as the eye could see. We marched and drilled endlessly in the muck, and at night we were holed up in barracks that weren’t big enough to accommodate all the men they’d called in. Who the hell was running this war? we’d all wonder when we were sitting around jawing after supper. Why had they called us in if they didn’t have any guns or bayonets for us yet, let alone cots?

I hadn’t been called in for the first draft; I think the gentlemen on the enlistment board had passed me over for my old man’s sake. But by the time they held the third draft it was pretty much impossible to stay out unless you were missing an arm or something. It had been hard as hell to say goodbye to Michelle, and I knew in my heart that she didn’t believe me when I told her I’d marry her when I got out. All the boys were saying things like that, she said. She was right about a lot of the other guys. But I meant it.

The guys in the camp were a hell of a mix. Sometimes it seemed like I was in the minority for being born in America; there were guys from Sweden, Russia, Italy, Ireland, Serbia. There were even a handful from Germany, but they usually didn’t admit where they were from. You could tell, though, based on which jokes they didn’t laugh at. I was amazed at how many of the recruits couldn’t read or write, let alone the one who didn’t know right from left. Because I’m twenty-five as opposed to eighteen or nineteen, and educated, I had a lot of guys’ respect pretty quick. I even wrote out some love letters for guys who couldn’t write, in exchange for some smokes.

Every time I transcribed another guy’s letter, I’d think about how that guy’s sentiments sounded so similar to those I’d expressed to Michelle. So the next time I wrote to her, I’d concentrate on saying something unique. Every damned thing about the place seemed so two-faced to me, and I feared that Michelle would see it in my letters.

“You don’t like the way they’re always beating on the C.O.s, do you?”

Ollie had asked me that at supper the day after he and I had been smoking behind the barracks and had stumbled upon the same group of guys pushing around three C.O.s. This time they’d gotten themselves some water hoses and were blasting the naked C.O.s with cold water and making them sprint through the mud. Between sprints they flogged the C.O.s with the hoses, the metal ends leaving welts on the men’s backs and chests.

“I didn’t say that,” I said between bites of supper.

Ollie was a good kid, twenty-one and with the blond hair and clean looks that would surely win him a beautiful bride and the respect of his neighbors. The son of a Lutheran minister from Tacoma, he said that after the war he wanted to go over to the Philippines and help set up a mission.

“No, but I can tell you don’t like it,” Ollie said.

I wasn’t sure if Ollie’s question merited a response.

“The more C.O.s there are,” he added, “the more of
us
land on the front lines.”

“Look, I’m not happy about being sent to the trenches while those guys stay here.” I took a bite, washed it down. “I’m just saying it’s hard not to feel sorry for guys who are always getting teamed up on.”

“The C.O.s are rotten—they’re all on the kaiser’s side. I say we lock ’em all up.”

“Why lock ’em up when you can beat them to death instead?” I said sarcastically.

“Nobody’s getting beaten to death.”

“Damn close. Look, I’m not saying I agree with those yellow bastards. I’m just saying it’s a little rotten”—I arched my eyebrows as I echoed his word—“the way they let a few bullies beat the hell out of ’em every day.”

I’d heard somewhere that the C.O.s were supposed to be kept separate from the rest of us, as a way of preventing the beatings we were talking about. But apparently the corporal in charge of Fort Jenkins didn’t agree with those orders—he thought the best way to get the C.O.s to rethink their position was to thrust them up against the guys who soon would be shipped to the trenches.

“It works on some guys,” Ollie said. He pointed at a redheaded Irish kid on the other end of the mess hall. “Look at O’Higgins—he dropped the act.”

O’Higgins had been a C.O. because he said he couldn’t support Britain, which was oppressing his family back in Ireland. But after a few weeks of beatings, he’d changed his tune, as a lot of C.O.s tended to do. Now O’Higgins was marching with the rest of us, learning how to survive a mustard gas attack and wield a broomstick like a weapon of vengeance.

“So maybe I’m wrong.” I shrugged and swallowed some mashed potatoes. This wasn’t a wise argument to be having, I knew, so I let Ollie win, and I changed the subject.

I wasn’t against the war, but I didn’t like anything that kept me away from Michelle. I wasn’t alone—you could tell that a lot of the guys lacked the spirit that had oozed out of the fellows who’d reported with the first draft, about a year ago. The steady lists of war dead made us less excited to be there, but we had no choice, so we did our part.

The C.O.s acted like they had a choice, though, and that’s what made everyone hate them. You still got drafted if you were a C.O.; they sent you to the camp along with everyone else and made you dig ditches or do laundry or clean toilets until you saw the light. And Ollie was right: the C.O.s would still be here scrubbing urinals while the rest of us were sent out to France to have our heads blown off in some rat-infested trench. That thought made scrubbing a urinal sound almost inviting.

After supper, I stood at the urinal pissing and thinking about the C.O., thinking about trenches and grenades and getting beaten by a water hose every night. Fuck them, I decided. They were getting off easy.

We drilled endlessly. Someone had said we would only be there for two months before we were shipped off, but eventually I’d been there three months. The latest rumor was that we’d be getting real bayonets in a week, but no one really knew anything.

We also learned they had called off the next draft on account of the flu. Fort Jenkins was too sick—and so were all the other camps across the country, apparently—so they didn’t want to be sending any germs to the front lines. The formerly overcrowded barracks were becoming more comfortably populated as fellows kept disappearing into the infirmary.

The sick would soon be returning, we figured, but many were gone so long we started wondering. They never told us when a sick soldier died, but we knew it was happening. Word got around.

One night I was coming back from a game of cards at the YMCA and I saw someone sitting in the mess hall. It was late enough that we weren’t supposed to be in there, so I took an extra step forward to see who it was. It was the C.O., the one I’d seen being used as a bayonet target a few weeks back. He was eating a bowl of oatmeal in the huge, empty room, crisply dressed in the white shirt that made all the C.O.s stand out.

For some reason I walked into the mess hall. The C.O. looked up right away, reminding me of a squirrel when it first notices you coming toward it. A darting motion of the head, followed by a second or two of paralysis while it assesses the possibility of imminent danger.

“Evening,” I said with a curt nod, thinking I sounded harmless.

He nodded back and said the same, only more quietly. He had small eyes that hid beneath his brows, protected from the world by an angular face and a craggy jaw that looked like it’d cut your hand if you hit it.