Tide King (3 page)

“I'll shoot and you toss the grenade,” he said to Johnson over the fire. He may have screamed it, he may have thought it. Either way, no sound seemed to come from his mouth but Johnson understood, reaching toward his belt. The body flung backward at them like a flying log, taking fire. They braced against it. If the man had not been dead, he was now.

Johnson hurled the grenade. His long arm seemed to reach out and leave the grenade at the entrance to the bunker, like a gift. They ducked, felt the vibration rumble through the sand. The smoke from the grenade curled into the grey of the sky and the grey of the sky ate the smoke. It was impossible to see where anything began or ended.

Stanley felt a pull at his trousers. A tear in the side of his pants exposed flesh, blood. A bullet had grazed him, tearing a zig-zag down his leg. The Germans hidden in the cliffs around the bunkers were shooting at them. Johnson rolled to his left, stood up, and barreled for safety to a formation of rocks fifteen feet ahead. He waved Stanley on.

One of theirs, Green, was waiting there. Blood ran down his face, cleaning it of black soot on one side. Green jerked his head toward a rip in the fortified wire around the German embankments. The sand was slippery from the blood. Stanley spread his arms like a plane and continued running, his rifle flapping against his chest.

Beyond the barbed wire they waited, the men wearing the other helmets. They seemed surprised that Stanley, Johnson, and Green were there. Months of waiting at Omaha for the Allies to strike, and now they stood, unsure, like boys at a dance. Green pulled out his pistol and shot the first man he came to in the face. The man dropped, his body hitting the earth before his blood. Stanley shoved his bayonet low into a man's stomach, avoiding the ribs. Johnson held his rifle waist high and waved, spraying all those around him with bullets.

They did this for a long time. They killed men with helmets not like theirs. They stabbed them and they shot them and they lobbed grenades at them and they twisted their necks and they did this until the other men retreated. Then they smoked some of the cigarettes they'd taken earlier. Stanley knotted his handkerchiefs, wet and pink tinged from the bloodied channel water, and tied them around his leg. He watched the cloth drink up the blood until it was full, and then Johnson gave him his handkerchiefs while Green looked for the medic.

Some other men came over and smoked their own cigarettes. Everyone was dirty and smelled and shivered. Some cried. Some prayed, their mouths wide and moving. Some went through the pockets of the Germans and put watches, cigarettes, soft-edged pictures of girls into their boots and helmets. Stanley smoked his cigarette and wished he could tell his mother he was alive. Johnson stretched out his long legs as another man squatted, fanning a fire. Stanley laid his wet, torn cigarettes on the sand to dry. Most men were quiet, although some talked. Stanley wished they would shut up. It had been two years, two continents of this shit. The only way he could get through it was with silence, the air thin and yet full of salt, the beach full of dead men and yet life still lingering. His thoughts empty, body heavy.

“Come on.” Johnson stood up. “We can't leave them like that.”

That work, they did silently. They stacked the bodies of their men in rows like one would stack cordwood for the ships to take them to sea. Then they emptied their own backpacks, their bowels, and waited again for their orders.

They spent the summer moving inland toward Germany.
The war will be over soon
, Stanley wrote his mother. His twentieth letter.
The Germans are running like cowards
. He played poker with Johnson and Ennis, throwing pennies and cigarettes and girlie pictures into a German helmet they used as a pot.
I hope you are well and do not worry about me
. He spent one week at Netley Hospital for his leg wound.
Nothing much has happened to us in Europe, except we are getting fatter
. He lost twenty pounds since leaving the States.
Hopefully by the time you get this, I will be on the train home
. In September, they entered the Hürtgen forest.

“I would die for a ham,” Johnson let his cigarette dangle as he settled in the brush. It was a game they played sometimes, what they would die for, since they might die for much less.

“I would die for a turkey sandwich,” Stanley answered. Spruce and balsam trees cloaked their eyes, yielding little forest beyond a few feet. The tree limbs, low, grabbed, and the men walked with a semi-permanent stoop.

“I would die for a woman's hips. I would put myself between them and sleep like the dead.” Johnson grinned, his teeth white against the green cave. Water dripped constantly. The men could never find the source of it. Sometimes it confused Stanley, and when he slept for brief periods and woke, he thought he was at his parent's house, down the hall from the leaky faucet.

“Stay here.” Johnson's arm would grab for Stanley's ankle as Stanley began to push forward through the brush.

“The sink is fucking leaking,” Stanley waved him off, before Johnson yanked and Stanley fell down into the bed of pine needles that covered the forest floor.

“I would die to get out of this forest,” Stanley said as they ate the last of their bread and coffee. The supply lines inland were farther away, their rations fewer.

“I would die for dry socks.” The mud and fog lay on them like a film. In the dark undergrowth, the men rubbed against the trees and each other like ingredients in a stew. Where were the Germans? Surely not as stupid as the Americans, Stanley thought, burrowing through the forest, their tanks and artillery and Air Force stalled by the dense formations of trees and rough terrain. The Allies were all alone.

Stanley peed in the snow. The cold air crept into his open pants and ran down his legs. Before he could even finish the German shelling of the tree canopy began again, and Stanley crouched and hugged the spruce in front of him without even pulling up his zipper. Around him, splinters from the trees rained down like daggers, along with hot metal. Ennis had looked like a wooden porcupine when they pulled him back behind their lines a few days before. The shrapnel in Ennis' chest had been bad, and he and Johnson, trapped in front of a patch of machine guns, pressed themselves to the snow and needles and mud for hours, Ennis between them, moaning for his mother.

Three days earlier, the First Division had discovered the Germans, hidden and waiting for the Allies to amble past the river, when their eyes were tired of the undulation of snow and trees, when their bodies were cold because, in anticipation of quick victory, the Allied brass had not thought to ship winter clothes to the front. For weeks, as the Northern chill swept in, Stanley and Johnson and the others had measured their boots against dead men's, their inseams, their chest sizes, looking to replace their wet, worn clothes with ones slightly drier, slightly cleaner. Stanley wore two shirts other than his own, each caked and itchy with medals of blood.

Stanley crawled on his hands in the red and brown snow back to the slit trench he had dug with Johnson earlier that afternoon. They had covered the opening with tree limbs and hoped it would protect them from the shrapnel and wood. Inside, they were asshole buddies, sitting back to back, or asshole to asshole, chest high in the hole, branches and snow over them as they watched for movement beyond their line.

“You all right?” Johnson asked as Stanley shivered against him. After nightfall, it became frost. The dead men stuck to the earth.

“I think I'm going to have the runs something awful.”

“Well, go have them the hell out there.”

“You just want me shot at.”

“Just go behind that tree over there. I'll cover you.”

“Fuck you.”

“I'm
joking
. Just be quiet.” Johnson's hands felt frozen to his carbine. He would give his left hand, purple and granite under his glove, for a cigarette. He felt the pressure of Polenksy's back leave his, a creeping cold between his soldier blades, as Polensky turned around in the trench and squatted, helmet under his ass.

“You know, we should have a code word, a personal one, in case one of us leaves the hole.” Johnson tried to talk over Stanley's sounds. A cigarette would go a long way to blunt the smell. But smoke could be seen at night. Rot, shit, and death smelled day and night, as assessable as air.

“What's wrong with the company's password?”

“Nothing. I just thought it would be good if we had our own. So I always know it's a Kraut in the burned-out house I'm about to fire into and not you.”

“Jesus Lord Christ,” Stanley grunted from his side of the trench.

“That's not a good one, Polensky. Too many guys already know it.”

“Screw you. Christ…I ain't going to wear this again, that's for sure.”

“Just clean it out with some snow. You may not need to protect that empty head of yours, but where are you going to store your socks and corsage?”

“Up your ass.”

“Well, I know for sure that hasn't seen any action.” Johnson aimed his rifle toward a flutter by the trees on his right. Geese? Squirrels? “How about metalanthium lamp?”

“That's your word?”

“Pretty good, huh?”

Suddenly, movement rocketed upward from the same trees. Mine? Mortar? Geese, definitely geese. The feathers and pulp floated to earth, shot by two others in the company. In response, the Kraut line lit up like flashbulbs. Polensky fell into position next to Johnson, his helmet, an overturned latrine, unstrapped on his chin. Around them, the snow spit bullets, feathers from feather pillows. For a second, Johnson closed his eyes, thought he would let himself get hit. To feel the cool, light fabric of a pillow, a flat one, a hard one, a moldy one, it didn't matter. His head whipped to the right, and he thought he'd gotten his wish. But it was only Stanley, punching him with an open palm.

“Wake up, dummy,” he shouted at him above the soft explosions. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Johnson grunted, but he realized he was smiling. He liked this Stanley. He fired off a round. “Shithead.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Stanley answered, firing off his own. Johnson could see he was smiling, too.

The brass said the Hürtgen Forest was 50 square miles. It seemed to stretch to 100, then 200, then 300, as late October became early November and late November became early December. Stanley did not understand how they could not see the Germans and yet the Germans could see them.

“They know these forests. They're stuffed in bunkers while we walk right by them,” Johnson said, coughing. Johnson had developed a cough-snore-shiver in his sleep. Perhaps Stanley could boil the herb for tea, soothe Johnson's deathly rattle.
I still have the root
, Stanley wrote to his mother.
Although I suspect I will have no reason to use it. You never even told me how. Should I put it under my lip, in a wound, perhaps?
His right foot smelled. There was no time to unlace the boot and find out whether his toes had rotted.
We are warm and fat and happy. Save me some Chinina
.