Losing Julia (22 page)

“We’re all quietly going crazy. Or some not so quietly.”

“Like you.”

“Like me. And to deal with it, with all the stress, everybody goes overboard on something: food or drugs or work or relationships or religion or what have you. Everybody needs to worship something. I’ve never met an exception.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Damn straight I am. What matters is how destructive your particular obsession is. Can you live with it or are you going to weigh three hundred pounds by Christmas? That’s the question.”

She smiled. “I don’t mean to bitch so much. I’m just having a bad day.”

“You can bitch to me anytime.”

She put her hand on my knee and rubbed it softly. The rest of my body began contracting toward the point of contact.

“You’re so sweet,” she said, standing up. As she reached the door she turned, blew me a kiss and whispered, “Thanks.”

I nearly passed out.

WE WATCHED
A dogfight this afternoon. Two Fokkers were lazily dancing high over our lines like big black gnats when two Spads appeared from the southwest. The Fokkers disappeared into a cloud and the Spads went in after them. Moments later all four planes came out the other side, only this time one of the Spads was in the lead and a Fokker dropped down behind him and starting shooting. The machine-gun fire sounded tinny from the distance and was nearly drowned out by the approving roar of Germans in their trenches. Then the Spad started to smoke and it dropped down steeply, whining louder and louder as it sped toward the ground.

“He’s trying to put out the fire,” said Daniel. “He’s got to put it out before he gets too low.”

“Come on, come on.”

How many men were watching this one man’s struggle? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Odd, but his fate seemed so much more important than ours. So much more heroic.

“He’s pulling up.”

“No he’s not.”

“Oh shit.”

The Spad slammed into the ground just behind the German lines, which erupted in applause.

Above, the remaining Spad and the second Fokker disappeared again in a big, lone cloud that hung high above no- man’s-land. Then both planes suddenly emerged and headed toward us, one just above the other. They swerved left and right then left again and we could see the heads of the pilots.

“Come on, get behind him!” I yelled.

“Keep your heads down,” said Page.

“Jesus, I don’t think I could stomach that,” said Giles, as the planes abruptly looped upward until climbing almost vertically. Then the Spad broke off to the west, dropped low and headed over our lines toward home.

We fired a few potshots at the German plane, which broke off the pursuit and banked sharply south and then east, dipping its wings as it passed over the German lines.

I’VE BEEN
taking my sketchbook everywhere with me. It’s not very big and I like to have it handy in case I feel the urge to draw. I try watercolors and charcoal and pencil and ink and pastels. Some days I wake up certain that this will be the day that I get it right, though I never do. But I am getting better.

This afternoon I was sitting out back on a bench painting with watercolors when it started to rain. My picture actually improved as the first drops hit it. Julia’s hair streaked down her shoulders and ran across her cheeks and her lips fattened before merging with her cheeks. I made no effort to cover her up. Instead I enjoyed watching the droplets bounce off of her as the colors gradually began to swim.

After I got back to my room I carefully laid the picture out to dry on my dresser. When I came back from dinner and looked at it again, I was struck by how much the swirling reds and browns and oranges and blacks reminded me of the night sky in France during a bombardment.

I MAY BE
no artist, but at least I’m not hard of hearing. I may be the only inmate at Great Oaks—we are inmates, all of us, on death row—who can still hear the owl that lives in one of the trees out back. Yet everyone yells at me nonetheless, conditioned by the sight of white hair.

“GOOD MORNING MR. DELANEY!”

“HOW ARE YOU TODAY MR. DELANEY?”

“DID YOU ENJOY THE SOUP TODAY MR. DELANEY?”

If I go deaf, it won’t be because of my age.

And then there are the things I am not supposed to hear, conversations that take place within my range as though I am deaf, dumb and blind, as oblivious as a suckling.

“I don’t know. I think he’s looking worse. He’s so thin.”

“Stomach cancer is the
worst,
poor dear.”

“I feel sad for him. Not a single visitor at Christmas.”

The hard of hearing are easy to spot because they miss so many cues. Their heads are always slightly cocked, not sure if they should be smiling or frowning or even listening at all. At mealtimes someone’s hearing aid is always buzzing or whistling or humming, while the changing of the batteries goes on day and night; ridiculously old people hunched over ridiculously tiny little devices trying to remove and then install shiny little silver objects that they can neither see nor feel, and certainly not comprehend.

“How in the world do they put E—LEC—TRICITY into something so small?” asks Helen, looking even older than usual.

“Oh damn, I dropped the battery again!” howls Oscar, issuing the second battery alert of the day. I once counted five battery alerts in one afternoon, though I’m sure that’s not the record. We all stare at the ground helplessly, as if we were gathered around a pool where a child had fallen in and none of us could swim.

JANET LOOKED
through me today. I’m sure she didn’t mean to. But she did. Right through me. As though I wasn’t there.

That happens a lot now. In old age we are all Invisible Men.

WE SPENT THE
day hiding beneath trees to avoid detection by German fliers. We were somewhere outside the town of Villers-Cotterêts near the rail line to Soissons. At noon a large truck passed by pulling a balloon on a long wire. A few hours later the balloon was shot down. We watched the observer fall.

Up until dusk no one was allowed to step beyond the protective canopy of trees without permission from an officer, which wouldn’t be forthcoming anyway. I slept on the ground, then wrote a letter, then slept again. In my letter I tried to explain how we careen from intense fear to intense boredom, but I couldn’t get it right.

We got mail today but most of the letters were unreadable. They had gotten wet somewhere between there and here and the ink had run, diluting entire paragraphs with blots of blue and black. I’ll never forget the look on men’s faces as they struggled to decipher page after page of blurry ink, which had dried like watercolors painted by a child. Some of those watercolors had announced births and deaths; others were responses to marriage proposals. Now all the men had were sheaves of crinkled paper, paper that they kept nonetheless on the off chance that it might one day reveal its secrets.

At dinner Daniel sat next to me and pulled out a small muslin sack of beet sugar. “Here, liven it up a little,” he said. I sprinkled some on my trench doughnut of bread fried in bacon fat.

Daniel had just returned from a three-day leave to visit a badly wounded cousin at the hospital at Toul.

“How is he?”

“Won’t walk again.”

“I’m sorry.”

Daniel shrugged, then continued to eat. After a moment he paused and said, “Would you believe that some of the orderlies are German prisoners?”

“No shit. They make you nervous?”

“Actually I liked a few of them.” He put down his bread, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and sat back.

“So what happened to your—”

“Bullet in the foot. Got infected. They had to cut off his leg, just above the knee.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“To stop the gangrene. Looks like he’ll live.” He leaned forward over his plate again, picked up his bread and used it to sop up the remaining bacon grease. “They keep the worst gangrene cases in a corner behind a curtain. But you can hear them. And you can smell them. Once the flesh starts to putrefy, it just runs up the body until it hits the vital organs. You can watch the line rise day after day right up a man’s leg or arm.”

“Can’t they do anything?”

“Just amputate. But if it goes too far up the limb…”

“Christ, I couldn’t stand that.”

“There was a bucket I saw.”

“A bucket?”

“Full of arms and legs.”

“Shit.”

We finished our meal in silence.

After we ate we joined Giles and Page in a game of poker, until Giles had cleaned our pockets of cash and was now asking for rations. Then Daniel stretched out and took a nap, snoring heavily within minutes. I envied the relaxed expression on his face and wondered whether he ever had nightmares. I did, and whenever I awoke I rarely felt much relief.

I was glad that Daniel was back. I couldn’t tell him how much I’d missed him. He’d become like an older brother to me, superior in almost every way but not so that it bothered me. He knew I looked up to him. I guess maybe it flattered him or reminded him of his younger brothers back home. I felt safer around him too, as though he were too good to be touched by the madness. I knew he felt protective of me. Maybe my innocence somehow appealed to him. But more than anything I think it was that he felt I understood him; his sensitivity and his love for Julia and how that gave him strength.