Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"You ever know of anybody who actually fucked his mother?" I asked Biddy.

"Had a friend in high school who fucked one of my buddy's mothers. I heard of that."

"Well, that's not the same thing."

"No sir, not at all." We fell silent for a while. "Biddy, where in the world did you go to high school, anyway?" He'd told me before that he hadn't quite made it to graduation. His family needed money.

No place you'd know, sir."

"Don't bet on that. I think I swam against every school in Kindle County."

"You didn't never hear of Thomas More, sir. Wasn't no swimmers there."

"Thomas More? In the North End? Wasn't that all colored? I didn't know there were any white men in that school."

"Wasn't," he said. "Two white girls. No white men.

I had been looking at the sky, just realizing that blue was starting to edge past the dirty gray masses. That meant the planes would be flying. When I finally processed Gideon's words, I was sure I'd misunderstood. He had removed his helmet and, big as he was, I found him staring down at me, unconsciously drumming one finger on the MP stenciled in white on the front.

"You heard me, Captain."

"What the heck are you telling me, soldier?" "I'm trusting you is what I'm doing. Against my better judgment.

A hundred things fell into place. After the artillery barrage, I was too drained to feel shock, but I was lost in some fundamental way.

"Now what're you thinking?" he asked me. "Truthfully? I don't think I believe you."

"You better. Because this here's no off-time jive." He was sullen and probably more astonished with himself than I was. His choice of words, however, went to make his point.

Now that he'd said it, of course, now that I was actually looking, appraising his nose, his hair, I suppose I could see how he might have been colored. But there were men in the next hole, Rapazzalli and Gomez-not to mention me-who were probably darker complected, and none of us with eyes as light as Biddy's green peepers.

"I got my draft notice," he said. "I went down there. I didn't never say one way or the other. They just looked at me and. Put me in. You know, I'd always had that, folks saying as how I could pass. When I was a kid in Georgia, and we was away from home, I always knew I could go strolling free as a bird into places my brothers couldn't. It didn't seem to matter all that much once we got North. But there I was now. I come home and told my folks.

"Did you lie?' my daddy asked me.

"Not a solitary word.'

"My mom and he really got going. She wanted me to head straight down there and tell the truth. If the Army didn't want me doin no fighting, she was in no mind to quarrel. But Daddy wudn't hear none of that. 'What truth is that? That even though he looks every bit as good as any other man, even though he is every bit as good as any other man, he ought not get treated like it 'cause he's actually colored. Is that the truth? The day ain't dawned yet where I'll let a child of mine say that. Not yet.' I'm not sure the two of them have patched it up completely even now.

"But how it was really, Captain, I went along with it mainly because I was just like you. I wanted to fight. I wanted to be like Jesse Owens and rub old Adolf Hitler's face in the dirt so hard that that damn mustache come off his face. And I knew they wouldn't see hide of many colored troops near the front.

"Once I got in the middle of Omaha Beach, I gave that another think, all right. I'd'a been just as happy to set 'em straight and go back to England. It's full crazy, what I got myself into. Ain't a day that passes I don't think once or twice I should have listened harder to my mom. Times I feel like I'm not being true to my own, even though I never said a false word to nobody. And I'm always tellin myself I gotta get home alive, just so ain't nobody there sayin how it's a mistake for a colored man to think he can do the same things as white folks. It's just all one hell of a mess."

He peeked over at me again and reached onto the ledge for my toothbrush, which he'd pulled from his mouth and thrown in there as the shelling began.

You want this back?"

The word 'yes' was halfway to my lips, but I retrieved it without a flicker.

"Yeah, damn it, I want it back," I said then and snatched it from him, jamming it into my mouth. The toothpowder had frozen hard on the bristles. "I didn't get a chance to use it this morning. And tomorrow I'm first. You can be first the day after that."

He looked at me for a while.

"Yes, sir," he said.

Late in the day, American C-47s passed overhead. Looking back toward Savy, we could actually see the chutes and supplies drifting down out of the big Gooney Birds, and the glowing trails of the German antiaircraft fire darting at them like malign June bugs. The parachutes, red, yellow, and blue, resembled blossoms, a lovely sight in the clean sky, but not one we enjoyed for long. Nazi bombers and fighters appeared from the other direction, and the fierceness of the AA soon cleared the skies. Once our planes were gone, the Germans repositioned their guns and another artillery barrage began. They clearly feared that with their AA occupied, the Americans might have moved out ground forces, and the new volleys seemed to go on twice as long as they had in the morning. As we huddled in the hole, I felt my teeth smash against each other so hard I thought I might have broken one of my molars.

Once it was over, the field telephone pealed. It was Algar, who'd chosen the code name Lebanon.

"What's the condition out there, Lawyer?"

We'd sustained two more wounded from the last barrage, both relatively minor injuries. One man would need to be moved back to town, along with the young fellow with the leg wound. Algar promised that the ambulances would be there after dark.

"I'm hearing that your Army commander has broken through to the south," Algar said. "Punched a hole, they're saying. We should start seeing reinforcements. Make sure your men know. We had a hundred sixty supply drops here, now Not enough. But there's some ammo. Medicine."

"Yes, sir." The news about Patton was welcome, but my men would believe only what they saw. Everything was rumor until then.

"How's the mood?"

The mood, I said, was good, considering. The men realized there was nothing to do about the cold, but they were complaining often about not being allowed out of the holes in daylight, especially to relieve themselves. Orders were to shit in your hat if you had to, but since nobody was going to abandon his helmet with two tree bursts every day, the directive put the troops to a ridiculous choice.

Sunset came shortly after that, a moment of great solemnity, as it signaled a lessening of the dangers. The Panzers wouldn't come at night in these conditions when they could get stuck so easily if they veered off the roads. And the Germans, after the huge push that drove us back from the Ardennes, were too short supplied to engage in the harassing artillery fire they normally would have ordered up in darkness. We had to be alert for Kraut scout teams, who could sneak across the field in an effort to assay our position, but we all knew we had survived and would soon be able to move around. The sun, which had edged in and out for hours, knifed through in the distance, breaching the clouds with an intense coppery shaft blazing on the forest across the field. Biddy grabbed his camera, somehow seeing a blackand-white picture in all that color.

Meadows called and we made night assignments. Bill also had a request. The men wanted to make a fire in the pump house. There would be no light. The issue was the smoke, which might betray our position. But the wind was still coming from the north, which would carry the odor back toward town. It was a calculated risk, but we decided it was worth it. I doubted that even if the wind shifted the Germans would be able to tell our smoke from their own. Each squad would be allowed in the pump house for half an hour to eat their rations, as well as fifteen minutes before and after night guard. The gunners who'd been out on the strongpoints all day without communication would get stretches twice as long and go first.