Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“Float a duck for me tonight,” Docker said, but his anger was almost gone and the residue of it left him disgusted with himself and what he had said. “Forget it, Korbick, just forget it,” he said.

Private Irving “Tubby” Gruber had been conditioned by his mother to believe that comic antics and clownish behavior were specifics against most problems in life. Sarah Gruber had told her son, “If you can make people laugh, they don’t expect so much.” Gruber could deflect her own infrequent exasperation by making crazy faces, or wailing and collapsing on the floor, and this dissolved her frowns into helpless giggles which she tried to smother behind her small hands.

Now in a freezing bedroom in a house on the outskirts of the village of Werpen, Tubby Gruber was goading Spinelli to similar laughter by prancing about with a pink and ruffled corset laced tightly about his stout waist, batting his eyes in a sexual travesty. The corset had been constructed for an ample lady; the lower metal stays were slack at Gruber’s hips and even his fleshy chest was more than comfortable in the huge cups of the garment.

Spinelli was laughing so hard that the sound of it seemed to bounce in demented splinters about the icy room. Private Pierce rubbed a windowpane and looked into the street, worried now because it had been fifteen or twenty minutes since Larkin had shouted at them to get back to the square.

“Hey, we better get going,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Spinelli said. “It’s time for chow.”

“Well, as long as I’m wearing” — Gruber paused and said with a giggling lisp — “the skirts in this house, I’m serving chow-chow right here.”

“Damn it, cut it out, Tubby,” Pierce said. “We’re gonna get our ass in a sling.”

Gruber wriggled his hips, which sent Spinelli into another spasm of laughter.

“You guys are asking for it,” Pierce said.

“Don’t argue with mother,” Gruber said, and with mincing steps started down the stairs to the kitchen.

Docker and Lieutenant Longworth stood together under the statue of the archer and studied the gray fog they could see rolling across the open fields and forming clusters like chill cotton candy around orchards of black fruit trees.

“It’s the town,” Docker said, in answer to the lieutenant’s question. “The look of it bothers me.”

He pointed to the empty streets, which stretched out from the square like the spokes of a wheel. “You begin to worry when you don’t see girls leaning out windows waving petticoats and American flags. Or the priest blessing the tanks and trucks. The food these people left behind gives me a pretty scary timetable.”

“Like what, sergeant?”

“About an hour or so. Some of the meals are only half-eaten and the ashes in the fireplaces are still warm. It could be that German troops aren’t far east of here.”

The lieutenant stared at the gray, storming horizons. “I’m wide open for suggestions.”

“I’d like permission to pull back a few thousand yards west of here, then send a patrol out to look around.”

Longworth dropped his cigarette on the ground and put it out with the tip of his boot. He nodded slowly. “All right. Docker. That makes sense. I’ll countermand Whitter’s orders. You get your section out of We-pen.”...

Ten minutes later, Docker watched the HQ command car go down the hill and disappear into the gray weather in the valley. He felt an acute loneliness, a peculiar diminishment of spirit he suspected was compounded of the fog and snow and his concern about their position, plus a worrisome notion that he didn’t belong on this hill in Belgium any more than he really belonged anywhere else in the world right now. And he wondered, as he had on other occasions, whether invisible parts of him might have been left behind in Tunisia and Sicily, or at Utah, or Avranches.

He knew other soldiers who were haunted by this feeling that something of themselves would always remain in the places the war had taken them, the towns and rivers and fields they would never see again...

Docker was familiar with these emotional swings because they usually came when the jeeps and trucks brought mail from home... “Kennett, the tan bitch, seems to regard my study as the ideal place to commit her...” And Hamlin... “Brutal as it may sound (from the uninvolved) I say hit the beaches of the sacred isles of Nippon with every damn soldier we’ve got... Ran into Amy at a party last week, says she hasn’t heard from you but—”

Trankic suddenly began shouting at him. “Bull, for Christ’s sake, ten o’clock behind the church.”

Everyone in the square turned to where Trankic was pointing, and they all saw them clearly for several seconds, glowing spheres of red light streaking across the horizon accompanied by a faint hissing sound that faded into silence when the lights disappeared behind the long hills and forests sloping off toward the German borders. Docker had seen that it was some kind of aircraft with rockets under the wings, but he couldn’t even guess at its power source because he had seen no conventional motors or propellers.

“That’s just what I saw before,” Sonny Laurel said.

Unexpectedly, Dormund now said, “I saw it, too.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you say so?” Docker said.

“Well...” Dormund’s lopsided features twisted in confusion. “I ain’t no wretched volunteer.”

Docker told Trankic, “Try to get Longworth on the radio, or the battery commander,” then turned to Larkin. “Where’s the rest of your detail?”

Larkin was drinking whiskey from the Mazola can, which he lowered, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I told them to get back here. Same as I tell them to button their flies or blow their noses. I can’t do everything for them. Bull.”

“All right, go get them,” Docker said. “But snap it, Larkin. We’re moving out.”

Larkin put his Mazola can into the jeep and went off down the street, his figure lost quickly in the slanting snow and settling darkness.

Still wearing the pink-ruffled corset. Tubby Gruber hammed it up, swishing around the kitchen of the Belgian home, opening drawers and cupboards until he found a crock of applesauce behind the mesh screen of a window icebox.

When Pierce and Spinelli returned from a hasty search of the root cellar and cowshed, they found Gruber seated on a table spooning thick gobs of the cold applesauce into his mouth with his fingers.

Spinelli said, “Hey, you out of your mind. Tubby?”

“Damn it, Docker told us not to touch anything,” Pierce added.

Gruber, however, was in too exuberant a mood to pay attention. He loved clowning like this, it reminded him of home and his mother and the smell of food in the kitchen. When he was little and didn’t want to eat his cereal or vegetables he could always get around his mother’s laments by crawling about on his hands and knees and pretending to gobble up the designs of cabbage roses on the linoleum.

His sister, Hilary, who was seven years older, wailed to her parents that she couldn’t bring friends home if Irving didn’t stop acting so crazy, but as long as Gruber could control his mother’s smiles he was able to control everyone else in the family.

And Gruber felt almost as if he were at home now, making comical faces and gulping down the sweet applesauce, flattered by Pierce and Spinelli’s anxious attention... “So we’ll start chow with some soup, all right?” he said. “Everybody likes soup, just give ’em a fork and let ’em go. Then we’ll have some lox and bagels and some blinny-tin-tins. You guys got any idea what blinny-tin-tins are?”

Pierce knew this was all wrong. Worse, it was dangerous horsing around like this in somebody’s home, with crucifixes and pictures of people in wedding clothes on the mantel and kids’ toys piled in a corner of the room — animals carved from wood with ears and tails made from tufts of braided rope. “I’m getting the hell out of here,” he said.