Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“How do you know?”

“Got to be.”

“Why?”

“... I checked everything else.”

It seemed like a funny answer, but I told the GI’s to rest, raised the hood, and went in there myself — in the dark, of course, as nothing like a flashlight was allowed. I felt at the head of the cylinders, the fuel pump, the carburetor, things like that, and the more I felt the funnier it got. Then I got to the distributor. Right away I found a loose wire. I lifted the top of the box that holds it and a screw was missing, the one that made the connection with the dangling wire. I ran my little finger around, and not only was it gone from the connection, but it wasn’t rolling around in the box. That didn’t make sense. It’s something that never happens, and if it had happened, the screw had to be in the box. I figured on it a minute or two before I said anything. I thought I knew the answer: that screw had been removed. But had it been thrown away? The more I thought the less like it seemed that a driver who had cooked up a trick to duck a trip to the front would leave himself on a limb so he couldn’t take a powder back. And nobody knew, at that time, what was waiting for us. Maybe it was a rear guard, and maybe it was the whole German army. “Driver, where’s that screw?”

“... What screw?”

“From the distributor.”

“Sir, I don’t know nothing about any screw. I... never saw no screw. I—”

It wasn’t a driver that was all crossed up because his truck wouldn’t go. It was a guardhouse cadet at his own court-martial who knew perfectly well what I was talking about, but thought I couldn’t prove it. Then it came to me what had hit me so funny before. It wasn’t cuss-hungry. Think of that, it had to be the starter, the night before a drive, and yet he hadn’t one goddam for it, or a kick, or even spit! I turned to the GI’s. “Men!”

“Yes, sir.”

“This driver has a setscrew in his pocket, a thing no bigger than a potato bug, that I need to make this truck go. Get it, before he throws it away, or swallows it, or—”

I turned my back. What they did to him I don’t know, but from the way he whimpered it wasn’t pretty. “Here it is, sir.”

“O.K. Any of you men drive?”

“I do, sir.”

“Take that wheel. I’ll be in the jeep. Follow me.”

When we got to the first courier, I turned the driver over to him, with orders to take him back and have him held for a court. The next courier, that we reached after another twenty minutes of bulling our way along, said: “Sir, my buddy and I have been out, looking things over in these fields. They’re rough, but they’re solid, with no heavy mud, or walls of any kind. We think they’d be better going, and get you there quicker than the road, with all this traffic.”

“Fine, thanks.”

I led the way into the field, and it was pretty bumpy, but we could move, with the four trucks jamming along behind. Each courier picked us up and passed us on to the next guy, and it wasn’t long before we came to a side road, and the last courier stood at attention. “Straight into your CP, sir, a little more than one kilometer.”

“O.K. — good work.”

We bore left, and in about two minutes, when I figured we’d gone about a kilometer, I stopped Hayden and got out. The sentry’s orders were to have all challenges answered on foot, and by one person only, so it looked like it would save time if I reached him that way. I walked about a hundred yards. Then I went maybe fifty more. Then it came to me it ought not to be that far. I stopped and tried to see. It was so still I could hear my heartbeat. That’s something they don’t tell you about in the books, though sometimes they get it in a song: the death hush of a battlefield, around two o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t hear a thing. I was about to start up again when I happened to look down, and my guts dropped through the seat of my pants. We had trouble coming out, as I’ve said, from loose stone. There was no loose stone here, nothing but Normandy mud. It flashed through my mind what had happened; the couriers, trying to help me out, in the dark picked the wrong road. Then, even while I was thinking, came something like an awful whisper from hell: “... Nocht nicht ... noch nicht... ”

I did a belly slide into the ditch, behind some kind of a hay wagon that had been overturned there, and looked through a crack. I could see a little stone house, maybe to cool cream in, that had been built over a little stream that crossed the road, in a culvert, a few steps further on. In a second I saw something above it that was round and dark like a kraut helmet. I kept staring and it went down. Then here it came back up. Then beside it was another, and then another. But how many more there were, whether this was just some outpost or a battalion, I couldn’t tell.

I had two grenades with me, and unhooked them and laid them on the bank. Then I slid down into the ditch. Then I let the first one go on a high lob, then heaved the other. In a second or two I heard them hit the mud. Then a kraut wailed: “Jesus Christus — zurück!”

But before they could hop zurück the grenades went off and Irish confetti began falling all around. I came out shooting and they did. Something hit my leg. Then I heard shots from behind me. Then came a yell, “Kamerad,” and then my ration detail was backing six krauts onto the road. One of them didn’t back fast enough and a GI snapped up his gun butt against his chin. He went down almost on top of me and his eyeballs rolled on the road. They helped me up, anyway to stand on one leg, and through a GI that could speak a little German I found it was an outfit that had been sent out to booby-trap sheep, and had been cut off. I sent them back to headquarters under guard of two GI’s, and counted up. There were three krauts lying there, besides the one with his face bashed in, and the boys said I had got them. There were two of my own men. That left me four. I had Hayden put me in the jeep and led on. We picked up the right road, a little way across country, but by the time we got to my CP, I knew I wasn’t leading any advance that day. My leg was soaked in blood, and when one of my captains had me carried in a stable, and cut my pants away, he took command and ordered me back. It was a bad ride, and not only on account of the truck bumping me. My two GI’s lay heavy on my heart. They kept on setting heavy, through the grand tour I made of the hospitals in France, England, and all over, and even after I hit Stark Hospital in Charleston. I think they would have stayed with me, if it hadn’t been for Captain Barnham, one of the doctors there. He took a shine to me and headed off my transfer, so he could talk to me and put a little common sense, as he called it, to work. Pretty soon he had me buy a little car and take trips around, to Savannah and Atlanta and Miami and around, to get my mind off myself. Savannah I liked. It had been built right, by old Oglethorpe nearly two hundred years ago, so the parking problem was all taken care of, by “neutral ground,” as they called it then and call it now, and the traffic problem, by a lot of little two-block parks, that scatter the bottlenecks, and the street-name problem by vertical posts, that you can see in your headlights, so you never have to stop and stare and wonder like you do in other places. The hotels had real food and real drinks and real service, and pretty soon I was slipping over there a lot.

All that time, in the Army, in the hospital, and driving around, I didn’t think about my life, but at the same time it was there. I don’t know if I was bitter about it, but I wasn’t any too sold on it either, because I felt it wasn’t all my fault. I had been a heel, but I hadn’t wanted to be a heel, and I thought if things had broken different, I might not have been. Somewhere along the line, though, in the late summer of 1945, when the weather was getting a little cooler and Dixie was a place to be, I began to feel differently. I don’t know what it was that woke me up, maybe seeing colored people in all the jobs that had once been held by whites, in the hotels, garages, and other places I’d be, even Cremo College, as they call it, where they make the cigars. Understand, if they could get away with it, I was all for it. It certainly showed they were as good mechanics as the next if they were allowed to be, and proved if they could get that kind of work they could do it. But it tipped me off it wasn’t the same world as the one I had left. Ever since I’d been a man, in the 1930’s, there’d been no work to do, and what had been human beings were let sink until they were worse than slaves, they were rats. And down under everything else, that was what had made me bitter, made me feel that being a heel was something I couldn’t help. But if even colored field hands in the Carolinas could get jobs grinding valves and fixing starter teeth, that made me wonder if things might not, from now on, be different.