The Secret of Raven Point (20 page)

Instead she looked out the window at the pulverized stumps of trees along the road. The air was gray and cool and there wasn’t a person in sight. They eased the ambulance across the noisy planks of a makeshift bridge. Below them, the piles and splintered wood of the original bridge bobbed in the current.

At the command post a sentry directed Juliet and Lovelace to a small stone building used as the battalion aid station. Juliet was
happy to finally stretch her legs, happy to be away from the confines of the hospital.

But as they stepped inside, she clutched the door frame to orient herself. On a cold stone floor, a dozen men lay side by side, writhing and whimpering, their cries pouring into one another. It sounded like a swamp of screams. Against the far wall, two men had been propped up on a metal table, staring mutely at their bloodied legs. A pair of medics crouched over a patient in the corner, tossing forceps and gauze between them. Nearby, a man with a Red Cross helmet furiously pumped at the chest of the patient beneath him, intermittently blowing into his mouth. Without looking up, he called to them, “Colonel Muskegee’s against the right wall.”

The colonel was tall and broad shouldered and stared calmly up. At first glance, Juliet couldn’t see what was wrong with him. His lips were thin and dry. His eyes moved from Lovelace to Juliet. “I want to live,” he whispered.

Dr. Lovelace gently lifted his head off the stretcher, revealing, behind the left ear, a mess of gray pulp. The smell of burned brain tissue nearly made Juliet gag; she quickly dug through the surgical bag to find the Novocain and scalpel. Lovelace’s hands snipped and sutured, quick as wings, while Juliet kept her hand on Muskegee’s wrist. “His pulse is dropping,” she warned.

“Okay, double-vein him. Adrenaline. Then plasma.” Dr. Lovelace moved quickly but calmly, bandaging the man’s skull.

Juliet noticed the patient beside the colonel, watching the surgery, nervously fingering the back of his own skull. From litters surrounding them came the words
doctor
and
help
. Juliet glanced around the room at the blank and weary faces, men staring at giant hooks hanging from the ceiling—she had not noticed them before. Christ, were they in a butcher shop?

“Thank bloody God!” the battalion surgeon exclaimed. The man whose heart he’d been pumping finally doubled
over, coughing.

Then Juliet felt a hand on her shoulder: Dr. Lovelace was shaking his head. He began wiping down his surgical instruments, setting them back in the bag. He stood, quietly moving to another patient.

“How’m I doing, nurse?” the colonel asked. A silver star was pinned to his jacket.

“Good,” she whispered.

Then he died.

At 1600 hours, they began heading back to the hospital. Dr. Lovelace drove and Juliet sat quietly, her head resting against the window. Three patients had died in an hour, and she was numb, out of emotion as if out of breath. When Lovelace said, “Roadblock ahead,” Juliet barely raised her head.

A line of troops, hunched beneath swollen packs, stood across the gray road, motioning them to stop.

“A bit late for sightseeing,” said one of the soldiers.

Dr. Lovelace began to explain where they had been, but the soldier cut him off: “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Orphan?”

“Annie,” Juliet answered flatly.

The soldier’s demeanor suddenly changed; he grinningly tapped the hood of the ambulance. “Camp with us and make your way back in the daylight. This forest is crawling with Krauts. They’ve been snatching up uniforms from dead GIs and moving around like they’re one of us. You sure as hell don’t want them to get their hands on you.”

Climbing into the back of the ambulance, Juliet and Lovelace tried to determine which supplies they needed for the night. Juliet stuffed some blankets and ration bars into her bag and stepped down onto the road. She didn’t care where she slept, so long as she didn’t have to hold the hands of any more dying men for the night.

“Sure as shit, is that Juliet Dufresne?”

Juliet almost didn’t recognize the hulking man covered with mud. “
Beau Conroy?
”

The cold, the fatigue, the months away from home, Tuck’s disappearance—it all came rushing powerfully at Juliet, a wave of longing and exhaustion, and she tumbled into Beau, her arms outstretched, pressing her cheek against his chest.

He patted her back. “Hey, there. Hey. It’s gonna be all right.”

Juliet wiped her eyes and looked up. “I never . . . I just never expected to see someone from home.”

Beau stared at her; tears were pooling in his deep green eyes. “Come on,” he whispered, throwing his arm around her. “Before these guys call me a pussy.”

As they followed the troops through the pine forest, Beau walked beside her, occasionally stepping ahead to take her hand. The moon cast a silver light over the towering trees. The air was cold, stinging Juliet’s cheeks, crawling through the fabric of her shirt. They clambered across the crackling limbs of fallen trees, sloshed knee-deep through chilly puddles, hiked along a rise of limestone, the soft white rock crumbling beneath their boots, until finally, at the entrance to a small cave, the soldiers all loosened their packs.

“Home sweet home,” Beau announced.

The men drew sticks for guard duty, and Beau snapped his disbelievingly in two. “I’m the tallest guy here, and somehow I always pull the short stick.” He yawned, and Juliet saw that he had lost a molar. As if suddenly recalling the gap in his teeth, he quickly closed his mouth.

“Want company?” she asked.

“Sure you don’t want some rest?”

“It’s not every night I get to see someone from home.”

The soldiers dragged their packs inside, laid down their bedrolls, and wiggled themselves, fully dressed, into sleeping bags; they used their helmets as pillows. Lovelace settled in beside them.

At the mouth of the cave, Juliet and Beau arranged a bedroll and sat on it side by side, staring out at the night. He set his rifle on his shoulder and shook his canteen, the last few sips of water sloshing around.

“All yours,” he said.

“I can do better.” She dug in her bag and found the medical brandy.

“God, I love you.”

Beau took a long sip and rubbed the back of his hand across his wet lips. Juliet sipped a pinch and leaned against the rock wall. She unlaced her boots.

Slowly, and with great effort, Beau tugged off his own boots. He peeled back layers of what appeared to be newspaper, unleashing a rank smell of mold. Blistered toes, purple and blue, poked through his damp frayed socks.

“Beau, that’s trench foot.”

“I can walk all right; I just can’t seem to wiggle those damn little piggies. You’d think the army’d give us decent boots.” He blew into his palms and rubbed his toes.

“Here, let me.”

“I can’t ask that of you.”

“I’m a nurse, Beau.”

He shook his head, dazzled. “You’re a nurse now. Unbelievable. Jesus, Juliet, yesterday you were just Tuck’s little tagalong sister. I still can’t believe it’s
you
.”

She worked her thumbs gently along the darkened flesh, massaging the edges of the blisters, trying to get the circulation going.

“So how is Tuck, anyway?” Beau asked. “Last I heard, he’d gotten into some scuffle at a rest hotel.”

Juliet paused and carefully set one foot down and lifted the other. “He’s missing. That’s all the telegram said. Missing. Since last November.”

“Crap, Juliet, I’m sorry. Where?”

“Here in Italy. I think somewhere near the Volturno.”

“They say the Volturno was bad.” Beau nodded solemnly into the night. His expression made her sad, and she set down his foot.

“What kind of scuffle?” she asked, wiping her hands.

“The drunk kind, I’d assume. The blow-off-steam kind. I just heard a story, that’s all, and recognized the name.” Beau dug through his pack for a K ration tin. “Labels wore off these things, so this could be breakfast, lunch, or dinner. But let’s call it dinner, ’cause I’d like to buy you dinner.”

Juliet watched his fingers, red and blistered, fumble with the lid. The tin kept slipping from his hands, and she could see his frustration. After several more tries, air hissed into the can and he pulled back the lid. He dumped half the contents into a bowl for Juliet and kept the rest for himself. “GI caviar,” he said, plunging in his spoon. He shoved the beans into his mouth. Juliet examined her beans and thought of mentioning Private Barnaby, explaining that he had Pearl’s white glove, that he might soon come to consciousness and be able to tell her something about Tuck. She considered confessing that she’d come all this way looking for her brother. She was tired of carrying the burden of it all.

“So what do you hear from Myrna?” Beau asked.

“Zilch.”

“Well, if you ask me”—he thumbed a bean from his chin into his mouth—“they were never very serious.”

“I think she’s pretty much in mourning. Everyone back home thinks Tuck is dead.”

Beau stopped eating and considered this. “You know what? No way. Tuck’s a survivor. He’d want us to keep a positive attitude. He never got flustered before a game like the other players. He won because he was determined to win.”

A vision of Tuck and Beau came to her: sitting together on a bench after a long practice, staring into their upturned helmets, deep in concentration, discussing strategies. They might have
been there now, a few years out of high school, home from college, tossing the ball across the field for old times’ sake. This vision lay so close to the surface, this alternate version of their lives, that it startled Juliet. Would they ever get back to that? Or would they always have the feeling of a life glimpsed, hoped for, and somehow lost?

Beau was watching the workings of her face.

“How’s your cheerleader?” asked Juliet.

“Oh, do not get me started on the whoring, duplicitous ways of Patty Sinclair. The guys said if I mention her name one more time, they’ll hand my balls to the Jerries. I’m one hundred percent done with that witch.”

Juliet shrugged. “Women.”

“You’re one yourself, you know,” he marveled. “A real grown woman.”

Juliet blushed; she liked that he thought of her that way.

As they finished their beans, thick snores echoed from the cave. One of the soldiers noisily tossed and turned. “You sure you don’t wanna sleep?” asked Beau.

“With that orchestra playing?”

He smiled and blew on his hands and tucked them beneath his armpits. “Then lemme teach you how we pass the hours. The game is called Lives. You tell me where you see yourself ten years from now, then I do the same. Usually there’s a few of us, so we can vote on who told the best life. I’ll go first, so you see how it’s played.”

“Let me guess. Three girlfriends?”

“I could barely handle one! Hear me out. They say there’s gonna be loans for GIs after the war and I’m gonna take that money to start my own garage. Anyone can fix a car, right? But I’d be giving something extra. You come in for an oil change, but we give the car a wax job, too. New brake pads? You get some windshield wipers.
You gotta have an angle, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“So where are
you
gonna be? Teaching in a nursing college somewhere?”

Juliet was stumped; she had not imagined a life beyond the war, beyond finding Tuck, for quite some time. “I think I’d like to live in a city,” she said, “a big city. A place like New York or . . . Chicago.” Her stomach fluttered at the word.

“No, no, no. Too cold. Too far. Up there, they think Southerners speak a foreign language. I’m gonna have to forbid that.”

“I thought this was my fantasy!”

“Within reason! What about Atlanta?”

“Chicago it is,” she said. “And I’d like to be a professor. In a scientific field. Maybe chemistry.”

“Oh, boy, we’ll never work out,” he laughed.

“Beau, I think we’re butchering this game.”

“Not at all. We’re adding exciting new dimensions. Now, where’s that brandy?” Beau took two long swigs. “So, there will undoubtedly be a husband. But the important question is: Is he going to be a dull doctor? A boring lawyer? Another professor of,
gag
”—he jabbed his forefinger at his open mouth—“
chemistry
? Because some of those thinker types, they don’t know how to make women happy, not in the important way. A man who works with his hands, he knows a thing or two.”

“You haven’t changed,” said Juliet, smiling.

“Just a little frostbitten around the edges. Anyway, you still have to pick a husband.”

“Frankly, I never used to think anyone would want to marry me.”

“Maybe not when you were thirteen. But don’t be crazy. You’re a lady now. A smart, classy army nurse. You’ll have guys lined up to propose.”

“We’ll see.”

“So”—he took another swig—“let’s review: the extent of Juliet’s wild and adventurous life fantasy is . . . a chemistry lab in a cold
northern city. Correct?”

“I guess.”

“Good, ’cause that means you win! And you know what the winner gets?” He leaned over and kissed her. His lips were cold and moved over hers with an oily, curious intensity. She could taste the beans and the brandy.