The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (31 page)

XIII.

N
EVER AGAIN DID THE DOCTOR'S
oxygen-smothered voice ring inside my skull. Four days later we were back at war and within the half hour a lieutenant brought the bad word that I was to appear before Major Horstmeier. The sun had not yet shown itself and many a disgruntled grunt grunted as I jostled their dozing bodies on my way through the trenches. I ducked into the officer's hutch, an underground bunker complete with tables, chairs, lamps, bookshelves, radio equipment, a liquor cabinet, and a bowl of goldfish.

I saluted.

The Skipper glanced up from a map on which rested pawns similar to the Hazard sisters' chess pieces. He looked, as usual, as if he'd been eating a two-by-four that did not agree with him.

“Private Prefer-Not-To, it has reached my hairy old ears that on the tenth of June you rescued several of my boys pinned down by machine gun. I find this pretty hard to believe. So I'm asking you man to man: is it true?”

“It's true, sir.”

But it was not me who responded. The Skipper and I turned to discover Church standing at the entryway. Four days now he had proved muttlike in devotion, but this was a bolder maneuver. 'Twas a good thing indeed that being Burt Churchwell came with certain privileges; Horstmeier did not bother to chew him out.

“All right, Prefer-Not-To. You've got a pair of legs and a talent for dodging bullets. So happens that's just what I'm in the market for. A couple of runner positions have opened up and I'd like you to consider the job.”

“Opened up, sir?”

“One boy got bit in half by a bear trap in the woods, and the other caught fire when his signal flares ignited. Neither got shot in battle, if that makes you feel any better.”

“Not really, sir.”

“Position's voluntary. Command won't force this on anyone.”

“May I have a few days to think about it, sir?”

“A few . . . ? Hell, no, you can't have a few days! We're at war here! I need your answer now!”

Let me summarize all that I knew about being a runner. Better known as “suicide detail,” our squad was comprised of six crazy-eyed, punch-drunk renegades who were our best method of communication between Allied positions. It was a primitive age, Reader; common was the use of signal lamps and carrier pigeons. A runner worth his salt, however, could ford smoke, fog, mud, and razor wire to deliver attack orders or casualty reports from captain to captain, to lug food and water to soldiers dying of hunger and thirst. Runners were the veins and vessels that tied units into a single body.

They also got blown up a lot.

“He'll take it, sir,” said Church.

“Good,” said Horstmeier.

I, of course, opened my mouth, just to, perhaps, get in a word or two regarding this brisk sealing of my fate. But before I spoke I considered Church's Theory of 17, which was not so far-fetched after all, was it? Being a runner might provide me a non-killing role in this
War to End All Wars—a position of appreciable irony, seeing how I'd once gorged upon three square meals of violence a day.

“And I'll take it, too, sir,” said Church.

So surprised was the Skipper that he dropped the proper salutation.

“Church, I didn't ask you.”

“I accept anyway, sir. You said you were down two runners.”

“But your leg.”

“Good as new, sir. You saw me march this morning.”

Church's grin was more persuasive than a howitzer. The Skipper looked lost before staring back down at his map.

“Report to Captain Rockwell, both of you,” muttered he. “Dismissed.”

Once we had surfaced amid a peach dawn, Church clapped me where, some years ago, I'd taken two slugs in a duel. He looked giddy. It was the fourth quarter and he wanted the ball.

“You and me, little buddy. The Game begins anew, eh?”

The truth was that whatever sport my friend chose, I was willing to play it. From June 22 to June 26, we did just that, though one would need to untangle the bodies to tally the precise score. French command, slap-happy, reasserted that we were to drive from the forest every last stinking Kraut, and thus the Americans continued to shoot and slash while Church and I sped about, vital messages poised upon our tongues or folded into our pockets.

Other runners—mere humans!—were subject to the sonic confusion of battle. My advantage was a silent, still body; I had space to listen, to gauge each danger, and to proceed in kind. I was a
runner
, and so I
ran
, away from cowardice, from intimidation, from fear. The path I forged on June 24 was my finest; it twisted through smoky
ravines, across fetid streams, and beneath fiery barricades all the way from Vaux to Torcy. Dozens of times that day I zigzagged it, saluting each of the three dead GIs who served as my signposts. Their faces, melted off, supplied me with whatever I needed: approval, encouragement, or pardon.

Uniquely adapted though I was, it goes without saying that Church was the finest runner the Marine Corps had ever produced. In late June, soldiers fell in such abundance that two hundred ambulances were called in for evacuation. What minor breakthroughs there were became critical, and most came courtesy of the touchdown speed of the valiant Iowan.

You could feel it, how a single man began to tip the scale in our favor.

We reached the northmost end of the forest on June 26. There, Belleau Wood was officially declared captured at the bargain price of two thousand dead, eight thousand injured, and sixteen hundred captured. As surrendered Germans filed past, I searched for the boy I had spared in battle but did not find him. Most likely he had been killed. Still, he counted toward the Theory of 17, didn't he? Even if his eventual death had been an extended torture involving slugs in his stomach and crows at his face? I tried not to dwell upon it; it was cold calculus indeed.

While men wrote letters home about a victory that would, with alarming speed, be forgotten by history, I toured an emptied German trench. Compared to our slop-holes, it was the Taj Mahal. These charming environs were well-stocked with comfortable seating and small tables on which lay unfinished games of cards and dominoes. I took a seat and toyed with an ivory six/six as well as a treasonous thought: if
Der Vaterland
was anything like this trench, it could not be so bad.

A boot connected with the table and the dominoes sprang into the air like shrapnel. I leapt to a fighting stance before recognizing
the leer of Piano. He wiped the remaining dominoes from the table and dropped into the very seat I'd vacated. He was fatter than the rest of us, fed for too long on my extra rations. In one hand, naturally, he clutched a roll of his maps, while with the other he tapped ragged fingernails across the scarred table surface. It was a tetchy sound.

“You get an earful of that wallop a while back? It was one of those pile-o'shite Jerrys who done it. Had a grenade stashed up his arse, threw it right into a tent of officers.”

I could have shot him for his glibness.

“How many dead?” asked I.

Piano looked bewildered. His left cheek clenched, unclenched, clenched.

“Who bleedin' cares who and how many. It's the
maps
, Prefer-Not-To. Those chinwagging cans of piss were carrying every last map we had. Now we're walking blind.”

“We can acquire more maps.”

“Can we really now? From who, the French? Ye thick as a brick, boy-o. You ever laid eyes on a French map? Here, let me show you something.”

For the first time in our short military history, there was no superior around to tell us to report for muster, stand guard, et cetera. I sighed to communicate that I would grant him a brief moment, nothing more, and sidled up to the table. Piano, in caricature of a saboteur, shifted his eyes about to verify that we went unobserved before unrolling ten inches of the topmost map.

Could this be what he'd been laboring over for so long? Instead of a legible background of white or pale green, his map was a patchwork of bright reds and yellows and oranges, each delineating a geographic or political feature beyond my understanding. While some iconography, such as rivers, hills, and towns, were recognizable, others
were alien: dotted hexagons, slanted crosses, triangular flags, and rainbow-colored bridges that spanned the entire Wood, a fantasyland of easy access. Atop good old Hill 142 was an obelisk with a lidless eye.

I backed away.

Piano's eager smile, in one second, curdled.

“Now don't you be getting ideas, boy-o. Don't you go nattering about this.”

Whether he feared theft of his proprietary brilliance or tattling of his madness I did not know.

“Whatever could I say,” spoke I, “that would do it justice?”

His frantic hands crumpled the paper, and he rocketed upward, knocking over the table with a knee and jabbing the rolled maps at me like a bayonet.

“Bleedin' hell, I shouldn't have showed you a thing! I knew I couldn't trust you, you daft molly!”

He elbowed me aside and made for the nearest ladder. Halfway up it, he swung to the side and shook his fist.

“I won't be eating
your
rations ever again!”

As threats went, it was a weak one, but still it gave me pause. Piano's body might have emerged from Belleau Wood untouched, but you could not say the same about his mind. My Dearest Reader has no doubt made her or his diagnosis: J.T. “Piano” O'Hannigan, with his crippling anxiety, clockwork diarrhea, facial convulsions, and rampant paranoia, suffered from a paradigmatic case of shell shock and needed to be hospitalized before he hurt someone. Sadly, this was a number of years ago—1918 to be precise—when the most dangerous issue related to this perilous disorder was that very few people believed it to exist.

XIV.

T
AKE ONE CORKSCREWED, CLIFFBOUND MEUSE
RIVER,
add to it an impenetrable, underbrushed Argonne Forest, sprinkle within its ruined ravines a few thousand folk willing to bomb one another to kingdom come, and you have the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the Great War's final battle. The luck of the Seventh Marine Regiment, Third Battalion—always in, always bad—brought our battered leftovers to the front just as it was getting good.

Over the latter half of 1918 we had contributed to offensives stretching ever northward toward the waffle-sugar air of Belgium, from Soissons to Saint-Mihiel to the Blanc Mont Ridge. Along our way, we waded through stinking rivers of fleeing refugees, picked paths through entire towns of torpedoed châteaus, suffered weeding by snipers through monsoons of rain until the overhead zipping of bullets had us marching with permanent hunches. We lost boots in the mud and were too tired to care, then picked up other boots as we found them, praying each time that they did not contain feet. Never did our objectives become more than arbitrary geographical quirks. Take that crest, that hill, that rail station. We did, dying all the while, if not by lead than by typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery, malaria, measles, smallpox, or influenza. One way or the other, Death found us.

Our boys had arrived at a town called Verdun exhausted past
reason and complaining of high fevers, empty stomachs, and blistered feet. I, meanwhile, felt not a single one of these hardships, and so was quite awake when, at the cockcrow hour, my foxhole position became surrounded. At first it was but a single figure materializing from the fog. I patted around for my rifle. My pledge to not kill anyone did not mean I was unable to deliver a bayonet poke. Then my hand stayed, for it was Church, my friend, the one person in this historic mess I was invariably glad to see.

Before I could raise a hand in greeting, other wracked figures emerged from the brume and fanned out to Church's sides: the Professor, Jason Stavros, the other four runners, a dozen more faces I'd come to know as well as my own. Steam rose from their unsmiling mouths. For the first time, I felt the November chill. These men looked to be a vigilante firing squad hoping to break their curse by sacrificing the company's monster. No, they were too clever for that; they would hang me, something quiet. I held my tongue. I would not beg for mercy.

Church squatted and spoke, voice low so as not to disrupt the fitful sleep of nightmaring soldiers.

“This battle smells bad, Finch. Squareheads been dug in here for years. It's a fortress. Heck, I figure we'll take the Hindenburg Line, but it ain't coming cheap. Guys are going to get shot up, no two ways about it. That's why we're here.”

“You wish me to draw their fire. I accept.”

“What? No, me and the boys, we talked it out. We don't want you in this hash at all.”

“Because of inglorious conduct. You wish me court-martialed. I shan't protest.”

“Would you shut up? It's like this. Lots of guys, they take wounds,
they get sent home. There's no shame in it. I heard about these three doughboys who mailed each other a bandage with gangrene on it so they could all catch it. Probably lost their legs, the nitwits. Fact is, Private, you been wounded worse than any of us. But you just keep on fighting.”

I looked from face to grubby face.

“They know?” whispered I. “About me?”

“Marines ain't dumb. They've seen you take bullets, take gas.”

“And they don't want to . . . destroy me?”

Church chuckled.

“Merry Christmas, no. We want to
protect
you, Private.”

The lips of one of the soldiers began to fluctuate in a manner so erratic that I blamed it on my disequilibrium. This same symptom infected the man to his right, and then another, and another, and soon I was surrounded by the strangest sight yet seen in a very strange war: a detail of quiet, grinning soldiers.

Church fired me a signature wink and swiveled on his boot heels to face his men. Gray dawn made an opalescent backdrop of treetops as he stood before them and began to speak. That morning there was no doubt of Church's greatness; it felt to the assembled as if he'd spent all twenty-two of his years preparing for this moment.

“Listen up, Marines. You heard the Skipper last night. You know what we're in for. It's going to be hard. And guess what? I'm here to make it harder. I'm here to give us a second mission. It's one we don't do for the brass hats, one we don't do for country. We seen a lot of things in this war, you and me, things we'd never have believed. So what's one more? See, there ain't any real difference between us and Finch. Maybe he don't bleed, but what is our blood now, exactly? I say our blood is mud. I say our blood is smoke. It's lead, it's fire, it's
mustard gas. That's what makes us brothers. Boys, one of our own is injured. He doesn't say it, he doesn't act it, but he's injured all the same. And what do we do for a fallen brother? Heck, I don't have to tell you. You're Marines. You know what we do. We rise up. We are unafraid. We laugh in the face of enemy fire. Private Finch will not exit this war in pieces. He has saved too many of us already, and now, Marines, we're gonna save him. Are you with me?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Now
we
save
him
!”

“YES, SIR!”

Neighboring gyrenes were jolted from slumber by the shouts but I heard not one grumble or curse. Cries of camaraderie so late in so grueling a campaign moved their emotions by instinct and summoned quick tears to their addled eyes. My own dry eyes could not respond in kind; too bad, for I longed to express this brand-new, unexpected, and unbelievable sensation of true belonging.

Wilma Sue, Johnny, Merle—they might be gone but I was no longer alone.

At that moment came a hollered report that the Browning rifles of lore had at last arrived. No, not enough for every man, but who cared? Optimism bounded back to us like lost dogs. Hoots of joy rose up. Sunlight cleaved the ashen clouds and we gasped at the sight before us: hoarfrost blanketing a rolling valley yet unsullied by boots, or craters, or flame. Even German barriers of razor wire shimmered as if bejeweled.

This was how the world looked before war.

Don't you remember it?