Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

I stopped. The other took up a hurtful-looking flat stone. I backed up to the trail and the other kept distance with me. He threw. I sidestepped it, put the camera down and selected a rock of my own. I did not have the aim the boy had, however, and my missile whacked heavily into a tree that was closer to me than to him. The boy’s fresh throw tumbled, another flat stone, and mercifully smacked my thigh broadside rather than digging in edge-first. It stung, though, and I yelped.

When I looked up, I noticed that the boy had the beginnings of an erection. I stared. Just when I decided that the stone-thrower was a lunatic, the boy did something that disturbed me more than anything thus far.

Though he had no trousers, he mimicked the gesture of a man reaching for something in his pocket. A watch. He opened the pretend pocket watch, looked at it and then looked up at the sky.

It will be dark soon.

The boy smiled fully then.

His teeth had been filed sharp.

NO MORE STONES followed me out of the forest. I backed away from the stone-thrower, who did not pursue me. I did not have time to decide what I had seen; I could think about that later. I simply backed away from it and it stood there, and, when I had put some distance between us, I turned around and moved down the trail at something less than a run but more than a walk.

I calmed down when I got to the river, although the sun had westered so that it was nearly twilight. I would just make it home if I kept my pace up and did not wander.

But I did not go straight home.

The frogs and crickets were singing in the darkening woods when I got to Cranmer’s cabin. It was only ten minutes from the trail, past a series of little cairns he had left for moonshine buyers to follow. I wanted very badly to talk to someone about the stone-thrower. This was not a confidence I would share with Eudora, and I would never be able to close my eyes if I had to take this quietly to bed with me.

I walked past the odds and ends of Cranmer’s yard; an axe buried in a tree stump, a loose circle of stones describing a fire pit, an old boiler pitted with rust, a dry-rotten saddle and the still Martin had mentioned. It was a great mystery to me how anyone could make liquor out of such an improvised mess; a copper tub, a series of barrels, copper tubing everywhere. Mason jars lay around in disarray. Flies swarmed over a heap of innards and discarded skins set off from the main house.

The windows of Martin’s cabin had makeshift bars across them, bars of scavenged iron through which nothing was getting in or out. As I approached the door I saw a peephole open in it, and then heard the sound of heavy bolts being drawn.

The door opened, and Martin Cranmer came outside, half shutting it behind him. His flannel work shirt was sopped with sweat, and the whole of Cranmer smelled like an old glove.

“What are you doing here?” he said, and when his mouth opened I smelled stale tobacco on top of everything else.

“Taking you up on your invitation.”

“Invitation doesn’t apply tonight. Go the hell home.”

I said nothing.

“Don’t just flap your gills at me, there’s no time. Go home and stay there. And I mean run, don’t walk. Shit.”

“What goes on around here, Martin?”

Cranmer disappeared into his cabin and came out with his rickety bicycle. He took the camera from me, put the handlebars in my hands and said, “Bring it back tomorrow or the next day. Now, if I have to order you off my property one more time I’m going to stuff you and send you back to your wife with a glass asshole.”

The door shut hard.

THE SKY TOOK on a chalky pink color and the moon rose fat and golden past the tree line as I pedaled home. My ass was sore from the hard ride, and the palms of my hands were skinned from a low-velocity spill I had taken about five minutes before. Dora was waiting on the porch, letting her feet dangle off the edge. She was opening and closing a parasol, one that had belonged to my mother when she used to stroll around downtown Chicago thirty-five years ago, so full of beauty it seemed the century would have to ask her permission to draw to a close.

I KNEW IT would come and it did.

I lay awake next to Eudora, who had already drifted into sleep still lying on her belly, the hand she had pleasured herself with supinated next to her hip. I had been unwilling to make love to her, unwilling also to discuss why, so she had done what she needed to get to sleep. I watched her back rise and fall with her breathing, watched also a lock of hair that fluttered ever so delicately near where her lips bunched on the pillow. I loved that she never turned her face away from me in sleep, even when we fought. Not that this had been a fight; just a closing-off on my part and a gracious retreat on hers.

Oh, it was coming.

The dream.

When sleep finally admitted me to its parlor, it would show me something naughty.

I lay staring up now, listening to what must have been every dog in town baying at the rich moon shining china-white past the lace curtains. They admitted light generously; the room glowed. I tried lying motionless but became aware of the arm nearest Dora, and I began to alternate hooking it behind my head and crowding it into the space between our two bodies. I remembered the one-armed man at Harvey’s Drug Emporium, and thought, Well, I suppose there really is a bright side to everything.

That damned baying.

Even with my fluid-filled, muffled ears I heard it.

The pigs are dying.

Yes, it was a very long time before I got to sleep.

The dream began with the steam machine that came to burn the lice out of our clothes just before the offensive started that September. I was part of a line of white-shouldered, white-haunched men standing in the rain, all of us holding our uniforms in our hands. In the dream the line was apocalyptically long. I noticed one louse crawling off my folded-up coat and onto my arm. The dream-louse was slightly larger than the real ones, only slightly, and, like its corporeal cousins, off-white and translucent, holding the blood it had consumed in its cross-shaped guts so one could see the dark emblem within it. Like the German cross. Like the Germans had dropped them in cans to devil us.

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven. Mud and craters. Rats and gas. Barbed wire and the walking dead. Even in the rain there always seemed to be a fire somewhere. The Book of Revelations read like fairy-tale poetry next to this harsh prose. The steaming of the clothes was just another bureaucratic flourish as far as any of us could see. All it took was sitting on a cot or brushing against another doughboy in the earthworks to reinfest a man, yet someone deemed it necessary. The same someone who was now blowing whistles, scattering the men from line.

An attack!

Every man in the trench, move, MOVE!

I was about to be maimed. I always knew that. I also knew that something was faintly wrong with the chronology; that we should be attacking the Germans, that I should have my clothes on, that my actual injury had happened in one of their trenches as we overcame their defenses. It was as if the nightmare-weavers wanted to show off their artistry by stripping me, making me face the attack again, completely unprepared, humiliated, cold.

I was the first one in, leaping down into the trench with no clothes on— where are your pants, my friend ? —gripping a pistol in one hand and a trench-knife in the other. My bare feet sunk nauseatingly into the puddles. For this dream, the artist had a simple palette, mostly grey and ochre. Milky brown water. White arms. Bright grey sky above. Dark grey helmets. The whites of German eyes. Oh, this would be intimate.