Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“Listen to what I’m reading,” Pitko said. “Listen to the Word of God.” Without glancing at his Bible, he intoned quietly, “The sun was risen upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor.”

To Schmitzer, it seemed as if the sound of artillery had begun to rise on all the horizons... Well, he tried to reassure himself, Pitko couldn’t know... he’d hardly spoken to the boy in the last week... except he now remembered what had happened the night Docker had gone back to Battery headquarters with Larkin and Kohler, and the guilty thoughts created a furtive riot in his blood, the heat of it flaming his cheeks and starting a pulse of guilty pleasure throbbing in his spine... Schmitzer had no way to analyze his emotions, no guide to lead him from his shameful needs. He had grown up despising queers, fairies, fags, whatever you called them, encouraged by the priests to dump them on their soft asses if they ever tried anything funny. But there had been no money for dates and taking girls to the movies or anything like that, and the one time he had been to a whorehouse he had gotten drunk first and the big black woman had laughed at him and poked his limp sex organ with her finger and said in her soft, chortling voice, “Maybe it’ll grow up when you do, honey.”...

It had been a gray afternoon, the light diffused by the fogs, when Dormund and Linari had got into a noisy, good-humored wrestling match with Sonny Laurel, trying to pin him to the ground in the snowdrifts piled up between the section’s trucks.

Suddenly the playful mood of the game had changed and Laurel began squirming and shouting in genuine anger, his voice breaking in an adolescent tremor, because Linari had trapped his arms with a scissors hold and Dormund had pulled his trousers down and was stuffing lumps of snow into his underwear.

Schmitzer had come around the side of the truck at that moment, staring at the writhing figures on the ground, moved so strangely by the sight of Sonny Laurel’s exposed flesh that he was powerless to move or act or speak. Laurel’s skin, bare from his chest to his groin, seemed white and translucent as silk, his slim muscles trembling in spasmodic contractions against the melting snow. And below the boy’s thrusting hips, Schmitzer could see the arch of a golden crest, soft curls of fine hair glinting like a spray of new wheat.

It was an interval of emotion attenuated by a willing conspiracy of all his senses; he had stood motionless for how long he would never know, his nerves bared to pleasure that was like a sweet agony, and it wasn’t until he felt the shocking weight of desire, a shuddering contraction at the very center of himself, that the terrible awareness broke the instant of physical bondage and he had shouted hoarsely at them, “Goddamn it, cut it out... you don’t have work to do, I’ll find you some.”...

He gripped the steering wheel now as if he would splinter it in his powerful hands. “Why did you read that stuff to me?”

“I told you, a man does not choose the Word of the Lord.” Pitko began reading again, his voice running deeply under the sounds of battle. “And the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven.”

Feeling threatened in ways Pitko couldn’t really know — could he? — Schmitzer said between his teeth, “Fuck the damn Bible.”

“That defileth his neighbor’s wife, that grieveth the needy, that lifteth up his eyes to idols, that committeth abomination—”

“Stop it, for Christ’s sake,” Schmitzer said, a sound inside matching the swell of artillery in the mountains.

“Seeing he had done all these detestable things, he shall surely die, his blood shall be upon him.”

Schmitzer thought helplessly of the Lexington and his father’s footprint on the wall near the ceiling.

“Listen, listen for grace,” Pitko went on. “For the Lord asketh: ‘Is it My will that a sinner should die,’ saith the Lord God, ‘and not that he should be converted from his ways, and live?’ ”

And from the depths of his anguish, Schmitzer heard himself ask... “How did you know?”

“I have seen you look on the boy,” Pitko said, like a judgment. “From the tribe of Levi, the truth of Leviticus, I know the punishments for unlawful lusts. For if anyone lies with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination and their blood shall be upon them...”

Docker saw it the same instant as Larkin, an ME-109 crossing the valley on a flanking course with the section’s jeep and trucks. When it streaked away and disappeared into a bank of fog. Docker hit the brakes in pumping motions and stopped on the shoulder of the road. Sounding his horn twice, he listened tensely as the trucks braked and skidded on the slick ice behind him.

They couldn’t use the cannon or machine guns in this position; the richochet of their own fire from the trees could be as dangerous as an attacking aircraft. The sergeant told Larkin and Trankic to spread the men on both sides of the road, where they could use their rifles. Most of them had long since filed the sears off their M-is, making the weapons fully automatic — without sears to lock the operating rod spring after each shot, one trigger pull emptied the clip in a burst. But in spite of their deployment the plane flared around the mountainside and was over and past them before they could fire. And with its passage came the whistling roar of its props and crescendoing bursts of gunfire, the bullets stitching their way up the frozen ground of the white hills.

Above the noise Docker heard someone shouting, “Pitko, get up!” He ran along the road to the first truck and saw that its windshield had been smashed out by bullets. Shards of glass hung from its metal frame, trembling like cobwebs in the sweeping winds. Other bullet holes gaped in the canvas body of the truck.

Somebody shouted, “Christ, look at him!”

Pitko was lying on the ground beside the open door on the passenger side of the truck. A single bullet had pierced the front of his helmet and had come out the back, furrowing the surface of the road and leaving flecks of metal and bone and blood on the glistening white snow.

Docker’s hands were shaking; he tightened them on his rifle and looked around at the men. “Schmitzer, you and Laurel get a tarp and take him into the woods. You know what to do with his dog tag?”

Schmitzer barely nodded, a man walking in a daze.

Docker then told Dormund and Gelnick to remove the splinters of glass from the frame of the windshield and ordered the others to get back on the guns. He picked up Pitko’s rifle, pushed back the operating handle until it caught, tilted the rifle, put his thumb in the breech and looked down the barrel. His thumbnail gleamed in a faint light reflected from the falling snow. The lands and grooves were clean and shining; Pitko had taken good care of it. Docker let the bolt fly home, the sound a dry crack in the silence, then threw the rifle hard at Jackson Baird. To his surprise, Baird caught it competently, one hand above the balance, the other on the stock. “You got yourself a rifle now,” Docker said.

He walked to the jeep, feeling less that they had lost something than that they had wasted it.

The big dog was barking exuberantly, its head looming above the tailgate of the truck. Larkin offered Docker his canteen. Docker took a short pull of the black whiskey, then yelled to Tex Farrel to make the damned dog shut up.

The forest was quiet, the artillery distant. The snow fell through the willow and poplar trees and settled in layers on growth of heather and lichens and honeysuckle. Schmitzer and Sonny Laurel laid Pitko’s body in a natural hollow between two towering silver fir trees. Schmitzer wrapped the tarpaulin tightly about the body, securing the corners with the straps and eyelets spaced along the edges of the water-repellent fabric. When he slipped a fold of the tarpaulin under Pitko’s head. Sonny Laurel knelt and took off his helmet and thought that this wasn’t at all the way he’d imagined it would be back there on a green lawn in his hometown of Chicago when a neighbor’s beautiful wife read him those stirring letters from her husband in the Pacific...