Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (25 page)

They had bandaged his eyes, and he had lain there for close to a week, trapped in stifling darkness, and the soreness had passed, but the pools of thought had bubbled.

Memory within a memory:

Stealing dimes from his mother's purse. His father had gone to work, and she lay in bed, catching an extra hour before starting the housework. Silent Willoughby, Iowa morning. He knew at just what level of weariness her mind floated, and like a soldier in a movie he had stealthily opened the bedroom door just enough to slip through, had gone to his stomach on the rug, and pull-crawled himself across the room. Her big brown handbag stood on the dressing table bench, and smoothly he had lifted it down, dragged it noiselessly across the floor to the foot of the bed. (If she wakes up and looks out of the bedclothes, I'll be hidden by the foot of the bed and quiet; she'll go back to sleep.) Seven years old. Already accomplished. He had stolen forty cents in dimes. (She never inspects her change, never knows how much she has.) Always "she," seldom by name, why?

He had replaced the purse and turned to start the crawl back to the door, downstairs, outside to his bike, to Woolworth's for things worth forty cents he didn't really need. He had turned.

His mother was staring at him.

Breath clogged like the vacuum cleaner when it's full. Dust in his mouth, a haze through his brain, unbelievable fear. Her face was a mixture of fury and pity, sorrow and revenge.

Before he could move, she was out of the bed, the heels of her feet bed-red and horny, hitting the floor, and her soft hand sliced air and caught him across the cheek. "Why do you do it!" she moaned. He had hurt her, he knew it. That made it all the worse. He didn't know why! And she wasn't really asking. Then dragged by the collar to Daddy's clothes closet, poised on the lip of the mothball-smelling cavern, and the pit of his stomach turned to ice. "No, please, Mommy. nonono--"

Whipped inside, garbage hidden from view, door slammed and you'll stay in there till I find out what your father wants me to do with you I can't control you I don't know what to do with you, door slammed. Lock clicked as the skeleton key--maintained in that never-needed-to-be-locked door for just this purpose--turned turned quickly turned.

Back in there. Darkness. Oppressive, stuffed like a wad of cotton inside the toe of a sock. Ceiling invisible up there, pressing down, ready to flatten him. His little fist went into his mouth, cries floated to the surface of his mind but were never loosed; he was busy listening to someone else in the closet moaning piteously, whelp-cries for help, to be let out. He knew it was himself, but he could not feel himself making the muscular contractions needed for the sounds.

What fear in the Pit, in the darkness. Sounds of sightlessness, of terror at being closed in, unable to see. Indescribable. One memory melded to a thousand others, of basements (primarily! the most terrible of all!), of the trunk of the Plymouth once, of eyes open yet unseeing ... memories ... of other closets, of tiny hotel rooms where he slept better because the great neon OTE flashed on OTE and off OTE at regular intervals, metronomically, soothing him ... memories ... of beds with women in them, sometimes laughing, sometimes surly, sometimes uneasy, because he made love in the light, not in the faceless darkness they had come to trust, when their bodies and their egos were stripped naked for pleasure.

All of these memories, swirling: a paperweight globe of a pristine town that never existed. ankle-deep in snow, turned upside-down. shaken: thoughts swirling, memories like snow, cold, chilling, swirling.

Back from a memory within a memory, to merely a memory:

As Arnie had lain in that bed, the floodgates of his fears had been pried open. After years of having troweled the mud of forgetfulness over the scars, after years of subconsciously sinking the traumas in the silt of other experiences, maturity, pleasures, more pertinent fears ... now freed, they thundered forth, and locked inside the bandages, he knew terror once more. He was blind!

The darkness that was deeper than darkness engulfed him, swallowed him whole, destroyed his senses and his reason, left him trembling and moaning like the child who had begged to be let out of the closet, who had pleaded to be taken out of that basement where the rats chittered below him.

And then one day, after a week in the evacuation hospital, the blindness had passed. That simply. They had removed the bandages when he had said he felt a prickling, and without any refocusing or salty tears, his eyesight had come back. It had been some sort of minor miracle. The doctor, less prone to muddy semantics, felt it was more temporary shock and psychosomatic than miraculous. But either way, he was pleased: with Arnie repple-deppled back into the line, it left the bed open for some new pile of human hamburger.

Arnie had been returned to his company and, so minor were the visible reminders of his wounds, within a few days he had almost totally forgotten the madness he had known while lying helpless without his eyes. Almost forgotten. Not quite, but almost.

Then the assault had consumed his attentions, and the simple business of remaining alive became vastly more menacing than any bolts of darkness from the past. The assault, the capture of the collaborationist, the order to dust out the town, the ambush, a burst of hacking fire from a Schmizer ...

Another burst of hacking fire from the Schmizer down the street hauled him back to this moment in which he sat on his knees, legs collapsed under him like the segments of a carpenter's folding ruler, on the floor of the little French maison de ville. Back to this instant of absolute sightlessness, utter darkness, no-sight so much like the memories he had just flashed through.

And fear was reborn.

Consuming fear. Paralyzing fear. Stomach-numbing fear that left him crouched on the floor a mass of putty and milk. Whimpering. Soft tissue-paper whorls of sound from his chest. They came regularly, incapable of being captured in true fidelity by any human mechanism. They were the vocalizations of petrifying terror.

A floorboard creaked.

His whimpering halted, momentarily. A floorboard had creaked, but he had been stone-immobile. He listened, the blood pounding in his ears. A slight rasp, as of shoe sole against bare floor. It came from over his head.

He was not alone in the house.

(And why should he have thought he was? Every other building in this town seemed to be stinking with Nazi troops; why should he think this one was a sanctuary for lost Iowans?)

He could not move. The paralysis he felt at being trapped in the dark. It left him unable to function. He was shaking. Shivering. And the sound came again from above him. One man ... two ... a patrol ... a barracks-full ... he wanted to run ...

The footsteps came again, gently. He sat in the middle of the room, looking up, the weight of the M-1 unfelt in his hands, and he could not protect himself. If there had been a sliver of light, a gleam, anything, he might have been able to pull himself together ... but there was nothing. If there were windows in that room, they were boarded or bricked up. If there had been a smoldering sun dying on the horizon, it might have cast rays through the slats of the door, but (how long had he been there, remembering?) the sun had vanished and taken with it the day. Now it was night. Outside. Inside. Within his mind. He was alone with that other, Up there, in the dark.

Sound. Again. The other was coming for him. One? Two? How many? It had to be only one--he wrenched his mind forcibly from his terror to consider the logistics of the situation--and he was coming downstairs.

The one upstairs had to know he was here. The noise Arnie had made coming through the locked door would have given him all the warning he'd needed. But time had elapsed, and Arnie had made no sound, until he had begun whimpering, and the one (two, nine, nine hundred?) upstairs had waited, trying to ascertain how many had come through that door. Now the waiting was over, it was ended, and the stalking had begun.

The footsteps (yes, now he could tell, it was only one moving; perhaps there were more up there, but only one was moving toward him) reached the head of the stairs, lost to Arnie's right in the darkness. They began moving down, and there was the clank of metal on wood. The weapon striking the banister. Arnie tried to move his fingers, found them cold and unresponsive. He had to get under cover, not just sit there like a child in the middle of a playpen. He was sure meat, a lamb staked out for some hungry beast.

The footsteps descended, and Arnie could not even tell if the man was in sight. It was that dark. Or was most of the darkness behind his eyes, not really in the room? Had he gone blind again? Could the German see everything? He sat there waiting, and the steps came nearer, nearer, stopped.

A snap-bolt was thrown. It made a hard, unyielding sound in the room. Then there was a chuckle.

The burp-gun opened up at waist-level and slugs marched across the room in a straight line. Back and forth. The spray was a thorough one. It bit chunks out of the wooden walls, thundered into the door, sent flakes of wallpaper and debris cascading through the air. The German turned left and right in stately maneuver, cutting the room in half at the height any normal man would be standing. The fusillade seemed to go on indefinitely, and the crimson-flash of the muzzle brought a glare that revealed who was firing. Arnie stared across the room as the bullets snarled over his head. He did not move. He could not move. And as the trooper brought his burp-gun back and forth methodically, the muzzle flash showed Arnie a thickheaded, saturnine man with the top of his skull crammed tightly into a steel helmet, the pot down almost to the thick, unattractive eyebrows. The Nazi was grinning impishly. Chuckling. While the slugs thrummed and screamed overhead harmlessly.

Abruptly, the last slug tore through the wall of the house, and the last casing hit the bottom step on which the Nazi stood, and the room went silent. A sprinkle of plaster-dust made a fine, sifting noise. But it was silent. And dark again.

The rifle shot was a million times louder than anything ever heard in the world before. It had been silent, then the silence had been torn to shreds with a burp-gun's depredations, then silence again. And now the rifle shot.

The Nazi choked once; there was a watery gurgle as if someone had forgotten to turn a faucet off tightly, and with a metallic clatter of equipment and body, he fell forward, caught the edge of the banister and was whirled sidewise, tumbled the one step to the floor, and fell flat on his stomach.

Arnie suddenly realized he could feel the bucking of the M-1 in his hands, moments after the recoil had faded. He had killed the Nazi. Somehow. Without trying. Instinct, perhaps. Maybe it was someone else entirely. A reflex.

"Jeezus," he murmured, gently. The body at the foot of the stairs moved softly. Arnie got to his feet and blindly stumbled toward the sound. His right boot met an obstacle, and he reached down into that pit of shadow to touch the body. His hand encountered the face. His fingertip lay in one of the open eyes. It was dry. The man was dead.

Click! Just that exactly, a switch of thought was turned off in Arnie Winslow's mind, and all his mouth-gagging fear came to asphyxiating proportions; the darkness built into a massive wave that swept over him; the wide-eyed shivering he had done as the hundreds of burp-gun slugs thundered just over his head; the death of this stranger; all built into an electrical current that turned off the switch; and the hammer that had been poised in his mind--suddenly struck!

Arnie Winslow fell forward across the body of the dead Nazi, unconscious. Blissfully, thankgod unconscious. His teeth were so tightly clenched, the enamel of one incisor chipped.

When he came up from the depths, breast-stroking with all his strength, he came awake in pieces. First his hands that held the rifle--under him, resting on something soft--and he tried to move them. They were under him. They would not move. But the soft something moved, it gave with the pressure. Then his legs, which bent at the knees, and he slid off the Nazi to the floor. Then his heart and his lungs and his chest, all went pumping back into action. Then his head. But his eyes remained dead. It was still dark all around him. But the fear had become a new creature, with new attributes; it had metamorphosed, and the paralysis was gone. He could move well enough--which he proved by standing up, supporting himself on the rifle and the banister which brushed him, which he grabbed--but he was trembling uncontrollably. He was locked in the hideous embrace of a twitching that threatened to shake his body apart. His head ached terribly. His mouth was dry, and it hurt.

The sound of rifle-fire from outside brought him to sudden awareness that nothing had changed. Truck and the others were still pinned down in that goddam warehouse, and the Krauts were intent on filling the building with corpses.

He knew there was nothing he could do, personally, to take the heat off them. Too many Germans. His only thought was of getting back to the lines, letting the main force know Bain-de-Bretagne was a deathtrap, and trying to send back a larger force to pry the patrol out of their bind. He thought of all this haphazardly, with stops and starts in his processes for the fear that gnawed at him. And all of it was afterthought. His first thought was: It'll be lighter outside.

Of such stuff are heroes made.

But when he had found his way back to the front door, and stuck his head out, a sense of impending doom had warned him and he had ducked back in just as a burst of automatic fire whined across the doorway. His friend in the bell-tower had taken no coffee breaks. He slammed the door. And was alone in the hole of black. The fear slammed him once more. Visions dark and terrible came and went. He was in the dark. The blind bird, the blind blind bird!

In a gesture he had long since stopped using, his fist went to his mouth. The child habit, back again. The man a child once more. Help me ...

He began searching the house for other exits. There were no other doors. It was a town house, backed on three sides by the rear walls of other homes. The windows were bricked up. There was no skylight. The street was a cemetery waiting to receive his bones.