Tide King (8 page)

He dug at the darkness, twisting his body in increments so small, it was a miracle there was oxygen to breathe. But he could not squirm without becoming tired. He felt himself doze off. When he awoke again, his left leg burned. His hands went to his phantom calf and grazed something firm, fleshy. His stump had grown again. He wriggled the toes on his left foot, all five, and the steely, curly hairs he remembered on them burned as the nerves beneath them fired their own internal gun battle. He breathed and choked on the acrid stink of flesh. Jesus. He had dreamed, or hallucinated, he was a below-knee amputee.

Where were the others? He wiggled, kicking his legs, his arms in little motions. He was buried in rocks, maybe. Had there been an explosion? And why was he not broken into so many sticks, marionette limbs?

His voice. It sounded so far away, like those other voices. Murmurs of men close by but far away. Was he hearing things? He inhaled, wondered whether his lungs were punctured. Once he inflated the branches of lung in his chest, a few deep breaths, he shouted over and over again in the rocks. Why would he wake up after such catastrophe, only to die in rubble? He had to be found. His parents had to know. Stanley Polensky had to know. He shouted but what sounded like a wounded gurgle came out. He gurgled until he was too tired to make a sound.

When he awoke again, he was so hungry. The rocks were softer; he wondered whether it had rained. He could see ribbons of blue sky above him, and he kicked and pushed and managed to move the rock above him slightly to the side. Something fell on his face, a bat, a mouse, he was not sure, and he closed his mouth and pressed his eyes shut but it did not move. He rocked his body back and forth, widening the space around him. The rocks oozed wet and stink on him and the squiggly feeling of maggots. The ribbons of blue sky widened, and occasionally a fly swarmed in, crawling on his face. He shook his head back and forth, back and forth, and the thing on his face fell to the side. Curiously, he touched it with his tongue. It tasted salty, sour. Rubbery. Fleshy.

“Oh Jesus, we got an animal down there or something,” Johnson heard someone say.

“Well, let's not sit around and let Sarge find out,” another answered. “Come on, let's scare it out of there.”

Suddenly the pile of rocks above Johnson was rolled away, one by one. The air grew fresher, the sky brighter, and Johnson could see that the rocks wore fatigue wool, canvas jackets, socks. He was buried in a pile of corpses. As soon as his arms were freed, he began to push against the bodies around him. The sourness in his stomach rocked against his cheeks.

“Oh, Jesus. Oh shit.” The men, fresh-scrubbed privates by the look of them, wiped their hands on their thighs. They squinted their eyes, grabbed him by the shoulders. They shook him. “Are you all right?”

At a clearing station of the Graves Registration Service, T/O 10-298, north of the Hürtgen Forest in Aachen, Germany, Johnson waited for a private to find him some clean clothes. He could not be picky. He was lucky that he had not been buried already, that his personal effects were not shipped to Depot Q-290 in Folembray, France, where they would be sorted and sent to the Army Effects Bureau at the Quartermaster Depot in Kansas City, Missouri, as one sergeant had painstakingly and eye-glazenly explained to him. He was given wool pants that were too short, a shirt that scratched at his chest. Still he'd had a shower, the first in presumably months, since D-Day at least. He'd used a whole bar of soap on his balls and ass.

“The form pinned to your body said you died of shock from an amputated leg.” The platoon leader looked over his makeshift desk at Johnson's full set of appendages. “Now how do you suppose those EMT tags got messed up?”

“I don't know, sir.” Johnson rubbed the leg in question. “I don't remember much of anything.”

He suddenly remembered the corsage. For some reason, Johnson thought maybe Stanley Polensky had been trying to stuff it into his mouth. He shook his head, licked the inside of his cheeks. He had imagined so many things—his leg all sizes of amputation, the changing of the seasons. He knew for certain he'd been left behind—whether by the Allies or Germans he wasn't sure—left for dead.

“Now you don't suppose you were faking it, were you?” The sergeant frowned, drumming his fingers on the desk.

“Fake an amputation, sir?” Johnson sat up. He'd heard about the deserters but had never thought he'd be assumed one of them. No one had mentioned that the right pant leg of his old fatigues was missing, that the torn cuff, up near his groin, had been tinged with blood. Why he had not kept the pants for proof he did not know. Shock, he supposed.

“Let's say for a minute the medic pinned the wrong tag on you, made a mistake.” The sergeant leaned back in his seat. There were lines on his face angled in every direction—at the corners of his mouth, across his forehead, vertically in the sunken parts of his cheeks—but Johnson didn't believe him to be any more than twenty-five. “And maybe you played dead for awhile on the ground. Tired of people shooting at you, maybe. Couldn't take it anymore.”

“No, sir.” He didn't tell him about the hallucinations. “I must have passed out somehow—the shelling, maybe. I remember a big explosion. And then I remember waking up in the ground.”

The sergeant sat with his index fingers in a triangle, touching his lips. Johnson was not sure what he debated—whether Johnson would make a stink about being left for dead in a pile of bodies, or whether the Army should prosecute him for full desertion. Whether he should be examined for fugue, or brain damage, before being sent back to the line. Whether he was so much human collateral to be worth the trouble.

“Sir, I wouldn't lie to you,” he offered. “I enlisted, and I'm prepared to stay through the end.”

The sergeant sighed. “What's your outfit?”

“First Division Infantry, sir.”

“I'm sending you to the hospital,” the sergeant said finally, lighting a cigarette. With this decision, his energy increased. His eyes burned like coals. “Those boys need every warm body they can get right now, but you've been sitting here like you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground, and, honestly, I don't think you're faking it. I mean, you haven't eaten for a couple of weeks, you've been transported in a truck with the other bodies…it just don't make sense. I'm not sure how I'm going to report this, but I would prefer you don't talk to anyone until we get it straightened out. We'll be in touch with your family, to redact our mistake.” The sergeant stood up, and Johnson followed.

He did not talk to anyone at the base about the mix-up, how so many human bodies were lumped into piles without sheets or bags to cover them and all the other things that Graves Registration was not supposed to do, but what he most wanted to talk about was what had happened to him, exactly—how he had been dead, maybe, or almost dead, and something had happened so that he was alive. Something had happened in the darkness that was not supposed to have happened. His religion could not explain what had happened and his parents could not explain what had happened and the Army sure as hell could not explain what had happened. It came down to Polensky, he reasoned, the last person who he saw in the forest. Stanley and thing he stuffed in Johnson's mouth.

Maybe Polensky was a witchdoctor; maybe he had gotten a formula from one of his Tom Swift books. Johnson would get back to the front and grab Polensky by the neck and he'd better start talking or he'd break it. Or maybe he would thank him for saving his life. Right now, he just wanted to not throw up, to break down in tears like a little girl, like Stanley. He bummed a cigarette from a soldier outside the mess tent and stretched in the grass, hoping the sun would bleach out the burn of memories that were seared in his limbs. He watched another truck arrive, full of bodies. He pushed himself up on his own two legs and felt his muscles expand and contract as he walked over, the air swimming down his throat. The sun warmed the top of his ears, the back of his neck. He saw the arms and legs, trunks of others piled one atop one another, and those men were dead. The sun warmed their bodies but when the night came, they would cool again, and nothing would make them move their mouths, laugh, open their eyes. They would not tunnel their way out of the pile. They were not so lucky. Why was he?

When he made it to the truck he was crying, tears like he hadn't cried since he was six and his father put down their bird dog, Shotzie.

“Hang in there, buddy.” A boy-soldier, the barest of fuzz on his chin, a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of his nose, knocked him on the shoulder. “The first few are weird, but then they're just bodies. Nothing to get upset about.”

“How long you been here?” Johnson asked, wiping his eyes. He felt the muscles in his arm simmer, his fist clench. How could he disrespect those men, men Johnson had played poker with, catch with, shared cigarettes? He imagined the small explosion of pain in his fist when it would meet the bone of the boy's jaw.

“A few months. It's gets old—you'll see.” The boy grinned, and before Johnson could react, he held the legs of a dead man in his arm, boots dry caked with mud and blood, the boy straining to square the man's head and shoulders against his chest. The boy jerked the man's shoulders upward as the face, placid white and set like wax, lobbed to the side. “You ready?”

The boy moved backward, and Johnson moved forward. And they took the men to a shed and collected their things from them, pocket watches and crucifixes and girlie pictures and foiled-wrapped chocolate. The bodies had only one dog tag—the other had been taken by the medic when he declared them dead in the field of combat. Johnson and the boy went through a box of tags brought in by the medics and matched them up to the bodies, making them men again briefly, before they were zipped into bags to be interred at the temporary military cemeteries all over Europe. When the boy wasn't looking, Johnson slipped one of the tags from the box up his sleeve and held it against his wrist, underneath his cuff. Before dinner he squatted behind the mess tent and retrieved the tag: CALVINE. JOHNSON. He slipped it on the chain on his neck, reuniting it with its partner. He rubbed them together against his thumb and forefinger, feeling his name and number and branch of service agitate the skin. But he felt not like man nor body. He pulled at the chain against his neck until it snapped, watching it slither with the tags through his fingers. Wherever they fell on the ground, in a jumbled dance, was where he left them.

The War Department wished to inform them, Johnson's parents, that the death of Private E-2 Calvin Ernest Johnson had been a mistake. While a telegram went out to Bowling Green, Ohio, to correct the Army's error, Johnson was loaded on a litter in a military ambulance, driven to a train station near Hampstead, England, and then, assuring them he could find his way just fine, he boarded the special hospital car of his own volition. The red tag that he had removed from his chest and attached to his wrist was correct this time as far as Johnson could tell. He was alive and headed for Camp Upton, Long Island, New York. It was mid-April, 1945.

The soldiers at Camp Upton Convalescent Hospital were not severely injured—broken bones, second- and third-degree burns, a pysch consult for “psychoneurotic disorders.” One tried to avoid the latter. Nobody wanted to go home branded as someone who couldn't cope, when so many others had. At least, if they hadn't, they weren't saying.

The days were long. He read detective paperbacks to a corporal who'd been burned at Cisterna. The man lay on his stomach sixteen hours a day before he was turned over to have his dressings changed. He bowled with a private who'd taken shrapnel in his eye at Salerno. He swam laps alone in the pool in the evening, the lights of the pool giving it an unearthly sheen, feeling his right leg, then his left, slice through the chlorinated water. He opened his eyes underneath because when he closed them for extended periods he saw men disemboweled, crushed, burnt like the turkey his mother had left too long in the oven a few Thanksgivings ago. He lay in bed, smoking cigarettes, watching the big hand, then the little hand, make its rotation on the ward clock. The cinderblock walls shone smooth with painted seafoam; sometimes after falling asleep from exhaustion, then waking up with the sweats, his hands clenching the bed sheets, he stood up and pressed his cheek against the cool wall. He wrote letters to his parents, commenting mostly on the food, some of the other soldiers on the ward, a pretty nurse or two.