Souvenir (2 page)

Clay was at the rocks. Jake scuttled sideways until he was behind them, rolled over, shifted up and laid on the rock, helmet tilted back, mouth hung open gasping frigid air. Clay propped his rifle against the stone and tried to pull himself up, giving up halfway and collapsing on his side, his shoulder grinding against the sharp edge of a crevice. He didn’t move, except to push his scarf up over his mouth so he could create a little pocket of false hope as he exhaled the air warmed by his lungs.

“Fuck,” he finally said. Jake knew what he meant. He could feel the sweat dripping down his back, matting his damp hair, gathering on his stomach. The exertion had warmed him, but in a minute the sweat would soak into his clothes, chilling his skin as he lay, exposed to the wind and cold.

Clay took off his helmet and his wool cap, pulled off his right hand mitten and glove, scratched his scalp, shook the damp cap, and then jammed it back on his head. He pulled the glove back on and looked at Jake, who raised a finger as he brushed snow from his face with the other hand. Gimmie a sec. Clay nodded, minutely, a slight dip of the head as he closed his eyes, then opened them as he looked away. Okay, no problem, take your time buddy. Neither man knew it consciously, or thought about it, but they shared a secret language. Looks, gestures, nods, a raised eyebrow, everything had a meaning that was bound up in who they were, unintelligible to anyone outside their foxhole, outside of their experience of each other. Days and nights together, on marches or waiting by the side of the road, or in some nameless French village, sleeping in a hastily dug hole, huddled for warmth, or in a bombed out house or maybe a barn with clean hay if they were really lucky, had given them time to decipher each other, taking in moods, reading between the lines, learning from silences, until it was second nature to read the other man, know his thoughts from the set of his shoulders, the look in his eyes, a catch in the voice. The shorthand of men.

All this took time, of course, and ability, and the willingness to observe and listen. Infantrymen who came ashore in the spring and summer of 1944 without the skill of observation and a keen ear for listening, whether to their buddies or to the sounds coming across the fields and woods of northern France, didn’t need to worry about time. By the winter of 1945, in Belgium or Germany, maybe Luxembourg—nobody was really sure where the hell they were—they were already dead.

Clay took his other mitten off. Except for the extra trigger finger, they always made him think of being dressed for school and how he had hated wearing those mittens. It was a nice memory though, standing next to the woodpile in the kitchen, the stove radiating heat and cooking smells as his mother forced pale blue knit mittens over clenched fists, stubborn little fingers jammed into fuzzy warmth. He stuffed the olive drab mittens into his pockets, as he always had done with the blue mittens right after he turned the first corner down the dirt road and the farmhouse with the collapsed front porch disappeared from view.

Clay pushed himself up, one hand on Jake’s shoulder, the other steadying himself against the cold stone. Two large rocks, about five feet tall, leaned against each other and left a small cleft at the top. Clay flattened his face on the rock and peered sideways through the cleft. He looked down the edge of the tree line, waited, and watched. Nothing. Not a sound, no movement to catch the eye. He crouched and slowly moved his face to the bottom of the cleft, looking straight out across the field. He could feel the wind blowing on his face, could hear it swishing the pines and drifting up snow in front of the rocks. The wind lessened and he heard another sound. Scratching? What was that? The wind rose up and he heard it again, his ear tuned to it now and picking it up clearly.

Scritch. Scritttttttch.

He tapped Jake, a slow deliberate two-finger tap to the shoulder. Jake took off his helmet; neither man wanted to risk the telltale
clunk
of metal helmet against rock. He moved slowly, coming up to just below where Clay’s head was. Clay motioned with his hand, and Jake moved his head up as Clay leaned to the left. Their heads joined, one right eye and one left eye each with a clear view.

Scritch.

An oak leaf. A big one, from one of the giant oaks across the field. Brown and curled, its sharp lobes turned downward so it looked like a prehistoric insect, teetering on its pointed tips, stem straight out like a tail. The wind pushed it along the top of the crusted snow, its protesting sound unnaturally loud in the silence.

Then it was gone. Jake blinked, thinking he had lost sight of it. Clay raised his head just an inch, tilting it back to get a better angle on the field. Jake looked at him, saw his eyes widen. Then he saw it too. A line of footprints, almost obscured by the drifting snow, but still deep enough to capture the oak leaves blown across the field. They both raised their heads as high as they safely could, and from this added vantage they saw little clusters of brown leaves, partially covered in snow, caught in a clear trail of footprints that led along their edge of the woods, right in front of them, and curved right, heading across the field, to a spot where the woods jutted out onto a small rise. Perfect spot for a machine gun. Both men eased their heads back behind the cover of the rock. Jake shivered.

“Fuck,” whispered Clay as he drew out binoculars from his field jacket. They were German, taken off an SS officer Clay had dropped with a single shot from two hundred yards. The binoculars were the main reason Red had chosen them for this job, and now Clay blessed them with his curse. First chance he got, he’d sell them to some rear area slob who wouldn’t have to worry about taking them on a walk in the woods.

Observing the rise was going to be a problem. It was on their right, and slightly above them. So if he went to the right of the rock, he’d have a good view and so would any alert Jerry, or even a half-awake one with his own binoculars. If he went left, he’d have good cover from the rise, but be exposed to the rest of the tree line to his left. Fuck.

Clay wished he had his helmet on, and was sitting so he could hold his M1, butt to the ground, and tap it on his helmet two or three times. Three times would be good. But the helmet was on the ground, there was no reason to pick up the rifle, and nowhere to go but up. Fuck fuck fuck. Clay could hear his daddy say it clear as day. Fuck this tractor, ain’t worth shit. Fuck this engine, and fuck Henry Ford, too. Fuck that banker man.

Clay felt his stomach in a knot, like he always had when his daddy swore like that, at least when he was a little kid. Then there was a brief period of confusion when he learned what the word actually meant, and he wondered how a tractor could have that done to it, and who was supposed to do it to Mr. Blasdale down at the bank? But then he understood his daddy never, ever used it in that way. When he said it, it was to mean, I ain’t got nothing left but this awful, terrible swear word, and by god you ain’t taking that from me. And that’s just how Clay used it, never to mean something dirty, but to show his daddy, wherever he was, that he too still had something left when he stood at the end of the road.

Clay turned his wool cap around so the visor wouldn’t get in the way of the binoculars, pulling it down to his eyebrows so his skin wouldn’t show. He gave a curt nod to Jake, who gave it back. No expression. That meant, if I get my head blown off, it was good to know you, buddy. Didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye. He didn’t put the binoculars right on top of the rock, but below the top, so the bottom half of what he saw was a blur. The top half was enough. In the tree line, past where the sugar beet field turned to brush and pine seedlings, he could see logs, stacked up about three feet, with cut pine branches strewn around them to soften the straight lines, German helmets, bobbing up and down, rifle snouts sticking out, and two heavy machine guns, one oriented in the other direction, one straight towards him. The woods curved away to the right, beyond the rise. The Germans had a good spot there, good fields of fire in either direction. He scanned left. No more log emplacements. Maybe they were dug in, camouflaged? The rise was either a strong point on the MLR, or an outpost in front of it. He knew what that meant. Fuck. He slid down, head low.

“MG-42s, two of them, with plenty of Krauts, in that hunk of woods, on the right, up on the rise,” Clay said in a low voice.

“See anything else?” Jake asked.

“Nope. Can’t see a thing anywhere else.”

“Shit. I’ll go tell Red.”

Jake went flat, crawling back and staying in the tracks he had made coming out. No nods, winks or other gestures were necessary. Clay was safe behind a big rock, and Jake was headed the same way he had gone before. Such things were left for the obvious dangers, not the everyday routine of patrolling. A guy would be one big, constant, twitching nod if it were.

Red and the rest of the squad had moved up about twenty yards to the edge of the tree line. A sergeant should have been leading the patrol, but Marty Dorsch got his right leg ripped open in a mortar barrage when they advanced on Hoffelt a couple of weeks ago. Marty was probably in England right now, maybe with his leg, maybe not. It was a favorite debate in the squad as to whether that was a good trade. The optimists didn’t think so, but there weren’t many of them. Jake missed Marty, one-legged or whole. He had been with them since Basic, made corporal in Normandy and buck sergeant when the leaves were still on the trees. He watched out for his men and was a good sergeant, but not so great that his squad got all the dirty details, the perfect combination in his opinion. There was no corporal to take over since a sniper got Hartman outside of Dinant. No one missed him. Replacements were slim, and everyone worried about who they’d end up with. Meanwhile, Red—Lieutenant Christopher Monahan—except no one ever called him anything but Red, led them on patrols when he needed something done, like today. Red wasn’t a bad officer, and the men liked that his foxhole was right up with theirs, not as far back as he could get and still say he was at the front. Like some.

Jake scrambled around the base of the pine Red was behind. He put his arm over Red’s shoulder and pointed to the rise on the other side of the field.

“There, two MG-42s, camouflaged behind logs, buncha Krauts around ‘em.” Jake kept his fingers pointed until Red got out his binoculars, not as nice as Clay’s German pair, but that’s the kind of officer Red was. Their first lieutenant might’ve confiscated them as a military necessity, but Red knew that a two-hundred yard shot was something, and that the man who made it was due whatever loot he got off of it.

“Yeah,” Red said, “Got ‘em. Any more?”

“Can’t see on the right, and Clay couldn’t make out anything along the left side there. Could be dug in.”

Jake couldn’t put much certainty into that last statement. They could be, or not. He knew he might be back here with the whole Company, waiting out an artillery barrage on that line. If it wasn’t there, if this was nothing but a single machine-gun nest, then they’d have to do this all over again until they found the MLR. Or it found them.

“Let’s find out,” Red said. He looked at Jake and the others gathered around him. He wasn’t asking, not at all, but Red liked everybody on board. He liked everyone to understand, that it was important, not some chicken-shit order he didn’t like any more than they did. So he waited.

“OK,” said Jake. Five other heads bobbed up and down.

“Big Ned, Little Ned,” the lieutenant said. “Get the BAR set up over there, under that fallen pine. Here, check out the Kraut position first.” Red handed Big Ned the binoculars. Ned Warren and Ned Kelleher were a team, and it was obvious which was Big Ned and which was Little Ned. Big Ned handled the Browning Automatic Rifle, a 16 pound monster that looked like a BB gun in his big, beefy hands. Big Ned was the strongest guy in the platoon, a Michigan lumberjack who almost split the shoulder seams of his field jacket. A jagged scar ran from his left ear across his cheek, the result of either a faulty chainsaw or a knife fight with an Indian from Mackinac Island, depending on how much Big Ned had had to drink. When he drank too much he could be a mean drunk, and no one dared ask if the knife fight story was true or not. Little Ned was the ammo carrier for Big Ned. In addition to all his own gear, he had to carry an extra ammo pouch for the BAR, which could eat up rounds in no time flat. Little Ned was a small guy, but appearances weren’t everything. There was wiry muscle on every bone, and Little Ned could walk lighter than any man in the squad. His union card said he was a structural steel worker, used to climbing up I and H columns floating far above city streets and bolting steel beams with a spud wrench. Little Ned was great with tools, and could fix a jam in the BAR faster than Big Ned could get his trigger finger mitten off.

“OK,” Big Ned said.

“That fallen pine is a little exposed, Red,” said Little Ned, not arguing, just pointing out a fact.

“Yeah, but you can crawl down to it, dig out a little snow, and fire from underneath it. It’s good cover, don’t worry.”

“I ain’t worried about getting there, Red,” said Little Ned, looking out at the field and not bothering to say the obvious. He saw Red was right. They could crawl through some brush easy enough. The pine had toppled over from the edge of the tree line, and lay at an angle, facing away from the machine-gun nest. Broken branches held the tree up just off the ground, and they’d be able to fire through a narrow slit between the frozen ground and the trunk. But if all hell broke loose…

“I got two smoke grenades,” Red said, willing himself to speak slowly and calmly, as if explaining to a kid that a shot at the doctors wasn’t going to hurt. “When I throw them in front of you, haul ass out. Everybody gives covering fire. Understood?”