Want Not (39 page)

This was the first scene, which he saw in his mind as fragments, as a broken montage, the images as jostled and disordered as the inmates who’d swarmed the Jeep. The second scene was from hours later. C Company had corralled a dozen German civilians from a nearby village to collect and bury the hundreds of bodies littering the camp and surrounding woods. Assigned a guard detail, Pfc. Cross was stationed atop a berm overlooking an earthen pit where the corpses were being piled. The pit was massive, at least sixty feet long, and reminded him of photos of meteor craters he’d seen in his science textbooks. For six hours he watched the Germans haul the bodies to the pit’s edge—the corpses were so light that the Germans carrying them on their shoulders walked unperturbed and unhunched—where another contingent of German civilians slid them down and stacked them into long neat rows, like stacks of creosote ties down at the Brooklyn railyard. Pfc. Cross held a rag to his face to ward off the stench, an odor so thick and sticky you felt you could take it in your hands and mold it like putty. The Germans, by order of the lieutenant, were not allowed any such buffers. “Let ’em smell it,” said Pfc. Cross’s sergeant.

At first Pfc. Cross had tried to be hard, gristly, Sarge-like, fixing his stare upon the live Germans rather than the dead Hungarian Jews, whose blank open eyes and papery skin were too much for him to bear; more than anything else, at first, he feared his own tears. With a wave of his rifle barrel he’d shout “Shuddup!” whenever the Germans spoke to one another, even whispered or grunted or coughed from the odor. For most of the afternoon they obeyed him without acknowledgment, which Pfc. Cross preferred. These were old men, primarily, and Pfc. Cross was aware of how choked and boyish his commands must have sounded. Nothing had prepared him for this. On the long passage to Europe, standing at the ship’s bow tossing cigarette butt after cigarette butt into the moon-colored wake, his great worry had been the standard-issue one: whether he’d be brave enough for combat, steady in the face of peril. Here there was no peril—just an open pit, unarmed old men, all those bodies—yet he could feel himself warping all the same, crushed by the unfathomability of it all.

Then one of the old Germans looked at him. The man—short and wiry, with a felt flat cap the same gray shade as his beard scruff—stood straight up from his digging and leveled a blank stare at Pfc. Cross. The look wasn’t in response to anything Pfc. Cross had said or done, nor as far as he could tell was it a prelude to something. The old man just paused to look at Pfc. Cross without any expression whatsoever. Pfc. Cross returned the same glazed stare to the man, their eyes locking, the old man chewing his flattened lips while the young man held the rag tight beneath his watery eyes, until Pfc. Cross realized that, no, the rag was gone, he’d dropped it, and glancing down for it he realized too that he’d raised his rifle so that the barrel was aimed directly at the old man’s chest. He didn’t know what was happening. His body seemed to be acting independently of his mind, and while that should have reasonably sparked panic within him, it didn’t; instead he felt a warm and almost pleasant absolution, the relief of surrender. He could feel his finger locked on the trigger, not moving so much as
growing:
thickening, as though his body—perhaps his soul—was redirecting all the blood in his body into that one outer point in order to force the trigger through arterial pressure alone, to swell it into action.

Astonished, he glanced down at the finger, feeling powerless to stop its distention even had he wanted to—and he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to fire the gun—not all his reason had been eclipsed, not yet—but he did want the gun to fire. Into his mind came a sudden but fully formed fantasy, then, in which he not only shot the German now staring at him with narrowed eyes—he saw the holes opening in the old man’s shirt, his arms windmilling backwards as he fell—but
all of them,
the old Germans lurching downward as the bullets perforated them, the dying plunging atop the dead, the smell of fresh blood braided into the odor of rotted flesh, justice come at last.

This was not his body or soul mutinying against his mind now, this was his mind itself, the irrational overriding the rational, and the desire that flooded him felt as true and pure as any desire he’d ever had. It coursed through him like a sexual tremble, and he could see the rifle barrel shaking, could feel his finger twitching against the trigger. He had never wanted anything so badly in his life than to massacre these Kraut sonsofbitches, to not merely kill them but
hurt
them, to shoot them in the crotch, in the eyes, to rip them apart in jagged red pieces, to shoot them with such might that the bullets would pass through them to their children and through their children to their grandchildren, the bullets stained and then re-stained, unstoppable in their righteousness. The rifle was swaying in his hands now, every last ounce of his own blood pooled in his tumid fingertip, as he awaited the signal from the old man—the signal to open fire.

For years and years thereafter Pfc. Cross—later Staff Sergeant Cross and later still Dr. Cross—would wonder what would have happened had the old German given the signal: had he smirked at the quivering rifle, spoken a single guttural word, made a single tiny gesture: done anything at all, moved even an inch. Long after he’d returned from overseas, married Alice, fathered children, taken up golf, learned to semi-enjoy the taste of scotch, this question would shake him out of sleep, and often out of bed, sometimes screaming but more often gaping his mouth to scream but producing no sound, his long rangy arms flailing, Alice lying beside him on the shag carpet stroking his cheek and hair, lifting her head to shoo their roused and frightened children from the room, whispering
Hush now
into his ear,
whatever it is it’s over.
It haunted his daylit hours as well, at first shadowing his historical studies—casting new and darker shades to his interpretation of ancient events—and then overtaking them. He’d pioneered the nascent field of genocide studies not because he’d witnessed genocide, as some of his closer colleagues presumed, but instead because he’d come inch-fragments away from
enacting
it—because in the course of a single April day he’d absorbed not only its horrors but its temptations, had not only witnessed the monster but for a short time become it.

Or rather
almost
become it: because the old man didn’t smirk, didn’t speak, didn’t make any gesture at all. He just stared inscrutably at Pfc. Cross’s trembling rifle and then lowered his gaze earthward and with the same vacant expression on his face resumed his digging without any sign whatsoever that he sensed how close he’d just come to joining the corpses stacked beside him. From atop the berm Pfc. Cross heard the
scritch scritch
of the shovels as he collapsed to his knees and vomited down the side of the pit before losing consciousness altogether.

“You all right?”

Whose voice was that? It was Sarge. Sarge had been there when he’d come to in the medic truck; they’d driven it a half mile from the camp to escape the smell. When he opened his eyes the white light was blinding. “Yessir,” he whispered, and shut his eyes again.

“Yo, Dr. Cross.” The voice was nearer now, and it didn’t belong to Sarge. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, sir,” he said, opening his eyes again, a bed taking blurred shape in his vision, a file cabinet, books, then a hulking, frowning Negro medic—

“You’re crying,” Boolah said, plucking a tissue from a box atop the dresser.

“I’m not,” said Dr. Cross, waving away the tissue.

“Why don’t we try a nap, man?”

“Get away,” Dr. Cross said.

“Now look—”

“Get the hell away from me.”

Boolah raised his hands, walked backwards. “We’re good, man.”

“Just get out of my house,” Dr. Cross said.

“I’m going, don’t need to tell me twice, I was just passing by and saw you—”

A shrill cry went up. Boolah had stepped backwards onto the cat. With a low curse Boolah lifted his foot and the cat scurried sideways to a spot beneath the steel chair in Dr. Cross’s room. Boolah looked at the cat, which was licking its mashed paw beneath the safe shade of the chair, and then at Dr. Cross, who was trying to fish something that wasn’t there out of his right eye. Boolah spread wide his arms to denote his position between rock and hard place.

“Just go,” Dr. Cross told him, and with one last sidelong glance at the cat Boolah obeyed.

The VA envelope and its contents had spilled to the floor, where Dr. Cross’s memories of the war had followed them. He surveyed the room, incrementally remembering that it was his, though as usual not
why
it was his. He was more acutely confused, however, by the residual despair gripping him—perhaps Boolah had been right about the crying, he thought, rubbing the glossy evidence of his own tears between his thumb and index finger. Something had just happened to him, he knew, though he couldn’t say what, but since heartache was what he was feeling he drew his hand to his chest. He found his heart racing violently. So that was it. He groaned. His goddamn feeble heart. And here Boolah had almost caught it in the act of timorous thrashing, flopping like a banked fish. That sure could’ve torpedoed his workday. Yet beneath his palm he could feel his heart beginning to calm, resuming its old elegant cha-cha rhythm, and fetching his eyeglasses from atop the pile of envelopes on his lap he said to his heart and to himself, for the dozenth time that day,
enough.
Because there on the bedside table was his work, his masterwork, possibly his life’s final stitch. “The only thing that we can really make is our work,” he remembered Edmund Wilson writing in a letter, because he’d quoted this to his colleague Peter Humes when Humes was stalled on his Benjamin Harrison biography, “and deliberate work of the mind, imagination, and hand, done, as Nietzsche said, ‘notwithstanding,’ in the long run remakes the world.”

Yes, he thought. That was it. He had a world to remake. But first this mail, lingering on his lap. Even Edmund Wilson had to open his mail. Nietzsche, too, notwithstanding.

He opened the topmost envelope and glowered at what it contained: his credit card statement, with a total balance of—could that be?—$3,918.24. This was preposterous. He drew the statement to his face for a closer look, but no, there it was: larger and clearer, but bearing the same absurd amount. He’d avoided credit balances all his life, going so far as to channel the meager advance funds for his second book toward prepayment on their mortgage, rather than using it for a vacation (Alice’s idea) or a pony (Jane’s). But then wait, he thought—Jane. Why was he recalling or imagining some connection between Jane and his credit card account? Perhaps he’d allowed her to use his card? She
was
still in college, wasn’t she? He re-adjusted his glasses, then ran a fingertip down the table of charges. $85.16 at someplace called Shoe Mania: well, surely
that’d
been Jane, a shoe maniac since toddlerhood. $50 to the Metropolitan Transit Authority/MetroCard: Jane zooming beneath the city, no doubt. $312.86 at the Longboard Loft Skate Shop in New York City: a total mystery, that one. $23.43 at Pipolo’s Pizza, $16.39 at Famous Ray’s Pizza, and many more like these: could’ve been a hungry Jane, he supposed, by now growing furious at her because clearly she’d embarked on what appeared to be a carbohydrate-fueled spending spree. (No doubt abetted by her mother, who’d be hearing about this in just a moment. Together those damn women tossed money like confetti.)

But then—look here, he thought, his fingertip gliding downward: a $275.00 charge from Yankee Stadium, followed by a $7.75 Yankee Stadium charge, and then another $7.75. He grunted blackly. Not Jane, no. Jane hated baseball. All his children hated sports, in fact, unless you counted David’s long-distance-running habit which’d always struck his father as more neurotic than sporting, or Elwin’s hunting, same diagnosis. Certainly there weren’t any baseball fans in the family. In the Cross household, the sports section went into the trash in the same pristine folded condition in which it’d landed on the doorstep.

No, Dr. Cross knew, with a deepening sense of alarm, the statement trembling in his hand. Those charges were his own.

Not that he was a baseball fan either. Had he been, moreover, he would’ve never rooted for the Yankees. The Dodgers’ abandonment of Brooklyn in ’57 hadn’t wounded him personally—not the way it’d crushed his older brother Tom, who’d traded in his prized ’56 Dodge Coronet hardtop for a Chevrolet to avoid the partial if still painful evocation of seeing “Dodge” tattooed on his dashboard—but it had implanted a borough-loyal disdain for the Yankees that overrode his indifference to the game. But then these charges weren’t about baseball, as he knew. They were about Katherine Bluestein.

Katherine was the Yankees fan. God, was she ever. And no casual fan at that: She knew Tony Kubek threw right and batted left, that by the 1960 season Yogi Berra was
bupkes
as a catcher but still valuable as a clutch hitter, that Elston Howard could loosen the cover from a baseball just by squeezing it, that Whitey Ford was prone to throwing “lollipops,” that the Pittsburgh Pirates had a difficult time winning outside their home turf. (General Robert E. Lee, he’d told her, had a similar problem.)

Katherine worked as a part-time research librarian at Montclair State. Aside from aiding him with his infinite research requests (Dr. Cross was thirty-three that year, already a father of three, and at work on his first book), all he ever saw her do, however, was ogle the sports pages. He mentioned this to her once. “I’ve got to keep up with my boys,” she protested, confounded when Dr. Cross asked who those boys might be. “You don’t follow baseball?” she asked him, mouth agape when he admitted the game was “an utter mystery” to him. Katherine was a striking woman—in her late twenties (though she never divulged her precise age), with olive skin and an abundance of hair (lustrously unplucked black eyebrows, downy forearms, a gossamer fringe of vellus hair spilling down toward her jaw) hinting at an interior fecundity or wildness, a lavishness within—and when she replied, with a wink, “Well, I’ve got a lot to teach you then, don’t I?” he felt something powerful go surging through his entire body, something fizzy and inebriating and dangerous and swashbuckling and altogether new. “Yes,” he replied, “I think I’d like that,” entranced by the serious way she looked up at him then, as though a pact had been brokered, a treaty settled, a journey commenced. For the remainder of the day he walked taller and straighter, slapped colleagues’ backs, wrestled with his surprised young sons in the front yard. The next morning Alice noted that he might’ve overdone it with the cologne.