The Coldest Night (19 page)

Henry caught his reflection in a broken mirror-glass and saw his head was shaved and his eyebrows were burned away. He lacked the cup of his ear to its in-curve rim and missing was a tiny chip in his front tooth and the third finger on his left hand. He tried to remember when he lost it, but he could not.

They took with them stew meat wrapped in waxed paper and a sack of hard-boiled eggs. There was candy the old man had scavenged from the ice and condensed milk and as much ammunition as they could carry.

They passed through the penned and tethered and stalled and caged animals and for the first time he could smell the ammoniacal stench of their waste, the sour of the mangers. They stepped into a pitch black ice-cold night. He looked about the lacquered world seeing nothing before him.

They followed the pathway’s dip and rise and ascended to a place where broken-down tractors stood in a yard.

“It’s time to turn for home,” Henry said.

“Which way do you think?” Lew said.

Henry looked up to the sky. He sought the Polaris star and found it and was warmed and heartened by its constancy.

“Which one do you think is Earth?” Lew said, looking at the stars over his shoulder.

Soon the sky would gunmetal and tarnish like brass and go silver and inflame and be a coppery sky. When that happened, they’d be in the hell of it again.

Chapter 27

T
HEY STRUCK DOWN THE
eastern shore of the reservoir past burned-out tanks and abandoned trucks waiting to be stripped and reconstituted. The husks reeked of diesel fuel and incinerated human. Inside were the melted, frozen remains of ammo, weaponry, and men. Lew crawled about on hands and knees inside a wrecked mail truck, digging through the letters and supplies while Henry turned in place to watch the road coming and going and both sides across the stony ditches.

“Let me know if you find something for me,” Henry said over his shoulder. The flesh of his back felt dry as parchment and knotted and pulled with every movement he made.

“I don’t get it,” Lew said. “She told me she’d write every day.”

“You find a Mr. Goodbar, I’ll have one,” Henry said.

Lew stood from the wrecked truck, a Mr. Goodbar and ammo clips in one hand, a holstered .38 in the other, and they tramped on. They followed an earthen dike bordering a cultivated field. The air grumbled and they crouched low and ran for cover, a lumber pile in a field. A blue fin could be seen running the ridgeline, scouring the canyon walls with its bawling noise, its weapons armed and hunting the land below. Henry put two cigarettes between his blistered lips and struck a match inside his cupped hand while they waited.

“We need a fire tonight,” Henry said.

“I hear that.”

The road before them was a column of shattered and burned vehicles, a jeep tipped over, the barrels of its Quad .50s twisted, burned out, and screwed into the ground. There was an overturned truck, its wheels in the air and naked legs extending from underneath, the boots taken.

They climbed into a culvert and found a harness of .30 caliber. In a sack were frozen cans of pork and beans, frozen hamburger patties, Tootsie Rolls. The wind blowing overhead. They busted open the cans with rifle butts and broke up the contents into small chunks and started a fire.

“It’s a nice way to break up the day,” Lew said, holding up a charred hamburger patty.

At twilight they moved on a small village. The sky was a muzzle of wet gray, a wind tearing at the air. A woman sat in her kitchen garden against a stonewall for the heat that seeped through its mass from a fire raging on the other side. Her face was soot streaked and she held a newborn infant coated with grease to ward off the flaying wind. Henry found a tin of raspberry jam and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. They killed an ox, skinned what strips of meat they could, and hung them from their web belts.

At the southern end they came upon a patrol of enemy soldiers bivouacked in a warehouse. Cooking smells were coming from a darkened interior. Pack mules stood by quietly, their coats bristled and frozen.

“Wait until they get the chicken plucked,” Lew whispered.

They watched while the soldiers plucked a scrawny chicken and tipped it into a helmet full of garlic and boiling water. Night was falling quickly and the wet snow had yet to slacken.

“It’s been plucked,” Henry said.

“Let them boil it,” Lew whispered, and they waited as the soldiers split boards and fed sticks of wood into the fire. From time to time they’d prod the chicken with a bayonet until finally one spoke and they all leaned in.

“For chrissakes, it’s boiled,” Henry hissed.

One man lit a cigarette. He inhaled the smoke and let it curl from his lips to inhale through his nostrils. He stood in the open doorway and lit another cigarette. He then unbuttoned his trousers and pissed in the mud.

Henry pointed to the man and drew a finger across his throat. When next the man exhaled he stepped forward and slashed with his knife, cutting open his mouth cheek to cheek. He plunged the knife into the man’s neck and twisted and when the man fell he pulled free from the knife.

They stepped into the firelight where the soldiers’ attended the chicken. Henry carried a BAR on his hip while Lew clutched an ax in one hand and a .38 in the other. Lew closed in on the nearest man and stove in his head.

The first round of bullets killed two and a third man Henry shot off his arm. He fired until the BAR jammed. He was knocked down and lost his grip on the weapon. He groped the floor and found a horse leg, pastern and hoof, and crawled to his feet and kept beating the last man long after he was dead. He found the BAR and cleared it.

“I have a situation here,” Lew called out. He was crouched on the floor, the last man standing before him.

“Looks like he wants to call it off,” Henry said.

“I’m not sure it’s his call to make,” Lew said.

The man’s glasses were broken and taped together. He coughed, covering his mouth. He bowed his head. He lowered his eyes and received the last bullets from the BAR.

“Are you all right?” Henry said.

“Do I look all right?”

“No, I suppose you don’t.”

Lew unfolded to reveal the hilt of a knife protruding from his ribs. Henry took hold of the hilt and Lew groaned when the knife slid from his ribs. The wound closed, but blood continued to dribble in a slow incessant exudation, spotting the floor with terrible wafers. Henry dusted it with sulfa powder and wrapped it with the last compress they had.

The warmest place to sit while they ate the chicken was the backs of the dead. Heat rose from their padded jackets, their uniforms stuffed with crumpled pages from comic books for insulation.

“Do you think we’ll win, Lew?”

Lew turned to straddle the chair he’d fashioned. He gnawed at the half-cooked chicken, thinking seriously about Henry’s question. Then he switched to the handful of sour balls he’d found in a man’s pocket.

“I think I need to sleep,” Lew said, holding his side.

Henry fashioned a pallet on the floor and made sure Lew was comfortable and well blanketed. He watched over him until finally he could stay awake no longer and crawled in next to him.

In the morning there was a strange zodiacal light haloing the sun. When he awoke it was to the sound of Lew’s dice rattling on the beaten and frozen floor.

“Are you awake?” Lew said.

“Yes,” Henry said.

“Am I going to die here?”

“You will never die.”

Lew made a gesture and Henry looked to his right. In the depths of the warehouse, hanging from girders, were men of the division, backlit by the rising sun. They were mostly naked and hanging by their feet. Their arms were tied back with wire strung on their elbows. This caused their backs to arch and their bodies to hang in curved suspension. One had no head. Another, his eyes were gouged out, and he’d been bayoneted with bamboo spears.

“I can see not taking prisoners,” Lew said, “but that is a special effort.”

“We ought to cut them down,” Henry said.

“Leave them,” Lew said.

“We should at least cut them down.”

After they cut down the men they rested. And then they were walking again and they could see a yellow glow clasped in the gray sky, the light sent up nightly over the distant port city to guide the way to the perimeter.

The snow had turned to rain. They walked the slick trail, their feet slipping in the rising mud. They were soaked and sweating inside their sodden parkas, but neither wanted to part with them, until finally Henry stopped and rid himself of his parka and quilted pants and dragged his poncho on over his field jacket and dungarees.

Refugees were taking to the roads, following the division to the sea. They too were guiding on the light. The warmer it got, the smell of the earth became offensive, even poisonous.

“Does it hurt?” Henry said.

“Sure it hurts.”

Henry looked to the sky unusually bright.

“I have seen that before,” he said, squinting into the sun, “but I cannot remember what you call it.”

“The sun?”

“That’s it.”

Lew lay back on a rock, the sun glazing his skin. He sat up abruptly, a pain coursing his face, a hand to the place of his wound.

“I think I sat in the sun too long.”

“Could be,” Henry said, cupping the coal of his cigarette inside his hand.

“We’ll sit here a while a bit.”

“You’ve got to hold on.”

“Don’t tell me what I have to do,” Lew said.

The wound had begun to run anew. Henry dusted it again and wrapped it with whatever material he had for a compress. He looked to the sky again. The sun had disappeared and the sky was cold and seemed so far away.

Chapter 28

T
HEY SLOGGED ON THROUGH
the wet snow and fog, and when one stopped the other one punched and kicked him to stay awake and keep moving. The one would chivvy the other, keep moving, keep moving. They came off the ridges and onto the road where they traveled a little while and then moved back into the country. The narrow gravel road with its sharp twists and turns was a site of unnatural desolation.

What end of the world had they come to? What smell of burning sulfur and rubbish dumps? What load of bearing death? Henry picked up a stone and hurled it into the darkness. The earth’s surface was a grave. The pain of the world condensed, the war burned into his back and knifed into Lew’s side.

Lew made a sound of surprise. He was tottering on his legs. His face was dry and burned. His lips were cracked. His eyes were lively but held a strange haunted look.

“How you doin,’ Lew?”

“In the pink. Fresh air. Stimulating atmosphere. What could be better?” he said dreamily.

But lips were quite blue and he seemed to be losing touch. His stare was heavy and murky and he’d stare at nothing, not speaking or answering.

They rested and then they were walking again and could see the fantastic yellow glow clasped in the pearl gray sky.

“There she is,” Lew said, his spirits nearly played out. “Follow the light home.”

That night began a thunderous barrage of shells and rockets being sent into the outskirts of the city. Their path was so sure and traceable, it was as if they were guyed on arcing steel cables to their exploding destinations beyond the docks and breakwater. All night long they shrieked and boomed and unleashed from the mouths of the guns with an ear-thumping crack. They entered the darkness and disappeared and ran through the black sky with a terrible willfulness.

Henry tried to close his eyes, but the light penetrated his lids, and when he covered his eyes with his fingers phantoms of light continued to strobe from his brain.

They trudged on through this ferrous rain and all that day they could hear the distant rumbling of the port city and by the next day they were well inside the raining steel net of the navy’s sixteen-inch guns. As the weather warmed, the stench of rotting corpses and burning oil overtook the air.

Lew was humming, “Goodnight Irene,” the sounds coming from deep in the column of his neck. The last few hours had been rough on him. He seemed ancient in how he walked bent at the waist with one hand clasped to his side and the other seeming to dangle at the end of his arm. He’d lost his gloves somewhere and hadn’t seemed to notice. His face was without color and spotted white and he mentioned strange cramps in his legs. There was now a leakage and a wound puddle had begun to form in the chest of his blouse as if he’d taken into himself a little bit of each death he’d committed.

“We’re getting close. How are you doing, Lew?”

“I have been better.”

“You stay here,” Henry said, “and I’ll go up and have a look-see.”

“I just need a minute to recover myself,” Lew said.

Lew tried to sit down but ended up falling over for the attempt and they both laughed. Henry helped him set his back against a rock and wrap his arms around his legs.

“Turn for home,” he said. “Henry, don’t let them leave me here.”