The Coldest Night (13 page)

They turned to stand with their backs pressed tight against each other. The wind was getting up again, chasing away the footprints and all around them the environing cold and snow and darkness.

“What kind of pie do you like best?” Lew said.

“Apple.”

“I like berry pies.”

“Any particular kind?” Henry said, the darkness so close to his face he could feel it. He watched down the road for sight of the man who trailed him.

“I like all berries and rhubarb too.”

“Rhubarb’s good.”

Henry allowed himself a glance over the precipice. There were jagged rocks thirty feet below and beyond them a steep drop down a cliff and below that was only darkness. He could not understand how anyone came up that side, let alone hundreds of men.

“I do not like this moment,” Lew said.

“What was it like in the Pacific?” Henry said.

“You do not want to know.”

“Something’s going to happen.”

“Nothing happens until it happens.”

The wind crossing their open position made all talk seem as if it were a constant chant. He let more of his weight against Lew’s back and felt a propping weight returned.

“What are you thinking now,” Lew said, the words the need to keep talking.

“I never thought hell would be so cold.”

They stood aslant as the canalized wind blew about them, sharp as hunger. From the peaks and into the valleys the wind whooped and roared.

“You want to know what it’s like?” Lew said.

“I do.”

“You save the last bullet for yourself. I know one thing,” Lew said.

“What?”

“When I get home I am going to eat a berry pie as big as a woman’s ass.”

The wind blew and was like a blade to their bodies. Henry caught sight of the man trailing him. He turned and Lew stood erect and together they kept north, crossing the plateau.

In the morning they’d report they’d seen nothing except hundreds of footprints in the snow. They’d breakfast on hamburger patties, fruit cocktail, and jelly beans and he’d be shocked how restorative a little food and water. One of them would not unfasten his brass roller belt buckle fast enough and he’d half piss himself and be ridiculed for it. Then they’d climb into a truck to get some sleep as it lumbered up the road. His body would shake with its rewarming and it’d be a nice way to end the day, the emptiness in his heart.

As he walked he again saw his mother in her vegetable garden among the husking corn and frosted tomatoes, that time of the brittle and the dying. He wondered if he’d ever live to be a remembering man like his grandfather and his uncles, the kind of man who when old and tired sat in the dim light of fire and let his mind span the years and well up with the water of memory.

Chapter 18

O
N THOSE BLACK NIGHTS,
strung along the frozen road, there were two stories in his mind, the story of then and the story of the unfolding now.

In his mind he wrote to her.
Dear Mercy, all the tears in the world cannot cry enough for how much I miss you. Our days together were like a dream inside a dream inside a dream . . .
And his mind papered with an account of the sadness and confusion and the deep mysterious event that they’d been.

There were whole days when he could not now remember what she looked like, but he remembered her hair, chestnut and fine and straight and sometimes she wore it knotted at the back of her head, how her long bangs strayed across her forehead, masking her ivory face and eyes so bright. It was as though he dreamed that season. He fought for the memory of her. It was coming to him from far away. He stretched out his hand to touch the image as if it was not in his mind but standing before him. The image remained.

“Am I really touching you,” he whispered. He stopped walking and touched his cold mittened hand to his own forehead. He tried to remember the tilt of her hips, her warm kisses, her trailing fingers. He knew you can only understand things after they’ve happened, but try as he might, he could not understand what happened and that told him it must still be happening and suddenly he was crushed by her memory.

After the image faded it was again okay if he got killed. He would not have minded.

He climbed to where the road bottlenecked in a steep narrow pass forty-seven hundred feet high. At that elevation there were no forks in the road, just one steep side and the other steeper side, the winds slicing down from the north.

Lew came from the rocks, came up behind him before he knew it. He’d managed to light a cigarette inside the cover of his fur-lined hood.

“We will have to hold this pass,” he said.

Henry squinted and nodded his head. What Lew meant was they would have to hold this pass or they would be trapped and every man of them killed. Already their advance was way beyond any thought for the future.

“Maybe she wasn’t the one for you,” Lew said, finishing his cigarette and letting the wind strip it away.

“Who?”

“Whoever it is those letters remind you of.”

Henry knew there was nothing there to hold on to with Mercy, nothing that had lasted more than a hot season and yet he wanted that day to return when they were together. He knew she held some unknown part of him.

“When you fall in love with a woman,” Lew said, “it’s over for you and you might’s well die.”

Lew told him he was engaged to three women: Bernadette, Viv, and Kitty. All three of them were lovelies and were waiting for him. He then said in no uncertain terms that Henry needed to get his head out of his ass.

On the twisting road behind them was the division and on the other side of the pass was a descent into the five-fingered valley of Yudam-ni, a little village tucked in the foothills of the high peaks of the Taebeks, the frozen Yalu River, Manchuria.

“This is about the last place I can think of I’d like to get hurt bad,” Lew said.

“Which way?” Henry said.

“It don’t matter,” Lew said. “There’s no right way to do a wrong thing.” He paused. “That way,” he finally said with a chop of his hand.

The next night they rigged out and slipped into the darkness again, leaving behind the shallow scraped-out foxholes. Each man on line in snow and ice was looking across a field at a mountain, intent on some inner world as he listened to the eerie sounds the wind blew.

They took up a forward position on the flank of a high rugged spur on a ridge to the north. Gunny told them if there was an attack it would be at night to avoid the airships. He told them the enemy, who were not confirmed to be in country, moved and fought at night. They wore thick padded green or white uniforms, caps with a red star, carried a personal weapon, eighty rounds of ammunition, a few stick grenades, spare foot rags, sewing kit and a week’s ration of fish, rice, and tea. Their day began at 7 p.m. They marched until 3 a.m. and then prepared camouflaged positions for the day. Only scouts moved in daylight. It would be close and mixed up. They’d get inside the mortars. They would rush past, trying to get as deep into their position as possible, and attack the command posts. They would probe the weaknesses, swarm and divide and isolate and then kill one by one. It was their way of fighting. They cut off the head, he told them, and the body died. It was the way they’d won the Chinese war. Gunny knew because he’d been there and he admired them for how willing they were to die.

They tried to scrape the ground, digging to bury their profiles, but the earth underneath them was frozen over a foot deep and so finally they stretched out on a high shelf of earth, hunkered inside the green hoods of their parkas where they could watch and listen. On the mountain ridges there were four rifle battalions lying in darkness and behind them were battalions of artillery. To the northeast was a frozen reservoir.

The cold felt like a thousand needles cutting into his face and not a star was showing in the slatelike sky. As the hours of darkness passed, the cold sky cleared and blued and a ghostly moon appeared.

In his mind he traveled back to the city. He was supposed to be in school. He knew that he’d lived there but now could not remember having done so. He’d lied about his age at the recruitment office and they did not seem to care.

He recalled Lew’s advice. He was changed since last night and it was as if a gift conferred.

A sound, what was it? He cocked his head and listened. There were no sounds unknown. All sounds had source and were signature. It came again, the crunch of snow.

Someone was approaching, silent as a pulse beat. The sound stopped and slowly the sound back traced its path.

“I think we are in for a very uncertain future,” Lew said. He lay beside him, a walkie-talkie inside his parka to keep it warm.

“They talk about you,” Henry whispered.

“What do they say?”

“There is no one meaner or tougher than Lew Devine.”

“Shit,” Lew said, and spit.

“Do you think we’ll ever get back home?”

“Not tonight.”

“You know, Lew, they got names.”

“I don’t know their names,” Lew said.

“It’s easy enough to find out.”

“I don’t know their names because I don’t want to know their names.”

“You know mine.”

“My cross to bear.”

There was a stillness in the sky, the deep blue light resting on the land down to the shadowed blackness of the dry streambed and back up again and turning black as it silhouetted the parallel ridge. After a while Lew fell asleep, the black stubble of his frozen beard wreathed with ice, while Henry kept watch and it was some time later a deer materialized, stepping tenderly among the heaped boulders in the dry streambed. The deer was white and was not stepping as much as it was simply moving, as if passing in a world of private ether. It only seemed aware of the great antlers it wore on its head. This he concluded for how tilted its head, as if threading the air, as if weaving its tines into the sky.

He scanned the black silhouette of the parallel ridge and when he cut his eyes back to the streambed, the white deer had disappeared and he was changed back and his heart was filled with longing and fear. He stood watch the next hour on a parapet, a stone ledge in their tiny redoubt. He let Lew sleep on as the lonely light of a blue-gray mist was giving way and steely night was falling and the world becoming a deeper and deeper gloom. He blew on his curled red fingers and wiped snot from his nose. The cold and fatigue made him gloomy and simpleminded. This night is awful, he thought, but it is still a night in my life. He felt pain and bitterness but also a strange sweetness so complete as his worlds began to merge. He just wanted to lie down and be still.

With the toe of his boot he nudged at Lew who came from sleep instantly and in full possession of himself, his weapons and his ability to use them. With his gloved hand he muffled a cough and a gurgle and silently cleared his throat onto the ice.

“Another crummy night in old Korea,” he finally said.

“Great view,” Henry said.

“That’s why you woke me up?”

“Watch,” Henry said, and for only an instant the earth seemed to move, to take and hold a breath.

“Rest your eyes,” Lew said, but he did not rest his eyes.

“I think we’re outnumbered,” he said.

When the morning light rose behind them, the mountain shadows lifted and in the grim dawn the terrain before them was as if a vast and turbulent sea, successive ridge after successive ridge.

At daybreak there was a rumble in the east and suddenly the bombers were on station high overhead. Marine Corsairs ripped through the near atmosphere. Their fins were like steel knives cutting cold and in their wake they left invisible moils of air.

At breakfast there were rumors they were moving west again and linking up with Walker’s Eighth Army. The word went out to mount up. The rumor confirmed, they were pushed west on the only road cutting through the great ridges of the looming mountains, but not for long. A spotter plane messaged there were road blocks in their path. The engineers moved up with flamethrowers and then diesel bulldozers and with their wide blades they shoved the charred debris aside and sent the stone and logs plummeting into the valley below.

They moved on again and came to a frozen stream and a stone bridge, the bottom a gorge of scouring creek boulder. They waited again for the engineers to blow more road blocks and the bulldozers to clear them away.

“The Reds are out there,” Lew said. “I’d bet money on it and I’m not a gambling man.” And then, “If you get killed by an enemy who is not there,” Lew said, “are you then not dead?”

Henry suggested Lew take it up with the padre who wore a purple stole and carried a .38 in a shoulder holster. Lew said he just might do that and when he returned he said the padre suggested he quit his horseshit, do his job, and stop wasting the padre’s time.

“He said that?” Henry asked.

“Not in so many words,” Lew said, “but there was a lot of emotion behind them. I think the padre’s gone a little mental.”

“You’d have to start out a little mental to be him,” Henry said. “Tell me again why we came up here and what we are looking for.”