Before Their Time: A Memoir (14 page)

“Why doesn’t somebody shoot the son of a bitch?” I asked him, buckling up. Of course there was no answer. I
really couldn’t get over that. My buddies, where were they? What were they thinking?

Anyway, I began to laugh. I had to. To save my foolish face, to acknowledge that I was still alive. The game was over. I believe the son of a bitch deliberately chose to miss me with his two shots. I believe that he just wanted a little late afternoon sport, to relieve the general tedium, and I happened to be it. Maybe I wanted the same thing.

I still think of that bareheaded Kraut from time to time, laughing like that. I wonder whether he survived the war, and, if he did, what his life was like afterward. I would be curious to know about that. I also wonder if he ever thinks of me and in what terms. Is he still laughing?

THAT night, the second outpost venture for Johnson and me, there was another game, a new one. This game consisted of the Germans shouting provocative remarks at us—through bullhorns—at regular intervals for a period of about two hours, while Johnson and I sat sole-to-sole in our slit trench. Some of these remarks were obscene, others were subversive. At least that seemed to be the intention. All, however, were crazed, in what was for the moment the German way—crazed and curiously half-hearted.

“Your beloved leader, Mrs. Rosenfeldt, is a Chew.” Repeated many times, in heavily accented English, with simpleminded variations. Each time I heard it, I touched my dog tags.

“Your sweethearts at home, your darlings, are being fucked by
schwarze
-blacks, yes?” Did that “yes” express a doubt or merely a weird politeness?

“While you eat shit from tin cans, your family at home eats steak.” Bull’s-eye.

“Babe Ruth is a
schwarz
-black Chew. Did you know that?”

“New York was wiped out by Cherman bombers. The Statue of Liberty is no more.
Kaputt. Alles kaputt.”

I guess all this was supposed to keep the men on the line in an edgy state. But it also had to keep the Germans just as edgy. To what end? Could they be serious about us? About the Yankee Division? About the softness of our morale? About Babe Ruth, Mrs. Rosenfeldt, the Statue of Liberty?

To the credit of the 104th regiment, little, to my knowledge, was ever made of the hectoring by the German Army that night, or any other night. It was treated as though it was beneath contempt, a sub-human aberration, a joke in bad taste. Motherfucking Krauts, was the general and silent attitude; they must be at the end of their motherfucking rope. Beyond the pale, not like us.

THE NEXT morning, Rocky was gone. He had disappeared overnight, at some indeterminate hour before the Germans had launched their hopeless episode of psychological warfare. Barney Barnato himself brought the news, appearing on his stomach at the edge of our hole, while Johnson and I were still drinking our morning coffee, recovering from outpost duty. Barney had crawled the ten-yard patch between us breathing hard from excitement, with an I-knew-it-all-the-time look on his face, to ask us if we had seen our squad leader.

Johnson’s eyes opened wide at the question. I saw a tremor go through him. As I’ve said before and still say,
nobody was more essential to the first squad than Rocky Hubbell.

“The last I saw of him,” I said, refusing to show Barney any emotion, “was last night when Fedderman and Keaton brought rations up.”

“You’re sure, now?”

“That’s when I last saw him.” Setting my jaw and looking away.

It was true. Around eight or so the previous evening, Fedderman and Keaton were approaching our lines with a load of K rations they had picked up in the rear—regulation duty—when they were caught in a surprise 88 ladder barrage. They began to run toward us when they realized what was happening—whump, whump, whump—and in another moment the concussion of an exploding shell had blown them both off their feet and scattered the load of rations. That’s all it took, a moment. Fedderman and Keaton flew into the air—in slow motion, it seemed—and came down hard. I saw the look of amazement on Fedderman’s face when this happened, just like my own, a stop-frame of shock and fear that lasted hardly a second. In another moment, dozens of K ration boxes littered the ground around us and when the 88 quieted down a minute later, we all rushed out of our holes, like scavengers, to gather in the stuff. Put simply, we were looting. Brewster and Natale, too, crawled around like the rest of us—“B and N,” as we had come to call them. By then, Bern had picked himself up and was reverently touching his body, as though looking for a consoling wound somewhere.

“You all right?” I shouted.

He nodded his head yes and kept poking at his body. Meanwhile, as the rest of us raced around picking up
boxes, Rocky was comforting Fedderman, who was sitting on the ground, looking bleary-eyed—looking, in fact, drunk.

“Give me a hand,” Rocky said, in his benign way, and I stopped what I was doing and tried to help him lift Fedderman by the armpits, then by the waist, feeling the flab, the stomach roll, the oily fleshiness that he had somehow managed to hold on to through all the months of our training.

“You’ve got to help me,” I said to Fedderman. “I can’t do it by myself.” I suddenly seemed to be alone with my old pal.

As I spoke, his eyes rolled up into his head, his head fell forward, and his body went slack. “Somebody!” I called, feeling panic for the first time.

“What?” It was Willis, looking down at me, carrying a dozen K ration boxes.

“I don’t know whether Fedderman’s alive.”

Willis put down his boxes and knelt on the ground alongside me, taking his time. He lifted Fedderman’s left eyelid and peered at his eyeball.

“He fainted,” Willis said. “Probably concussed. Hold him up.”

While I bent over behind Fedderman and held him under the armpits, Willis slapped him hard on each cheek with the flat of his hand. He made quite a sound doing it, as though he was delivering an important message that must be heard. I winced at each blow. “Don’t make such a face,” Willis said to me. “I know what I’m doing.”

But so, of course, did the Germans who, sighting this inviting little cluster that the first squad had made, against all rules, began to lob in a mortar shell here and there—
not, however, with much accuracy. But it instantly re-established a sense of reality. While the Germans tried to find the range, we made for our holes, Willis and Bern between them dragging Fedderman, who was just opening his eyes.

None of us realized that Rocky had disappeared while we were trying to revive Fedderman, just when dusk was dissolving into night, just at the moment when Paul Willis assumed such authority. None of us gave Rocky a thought that night. He was the squad leader. We rarely questioned him and rarely doubted. Rocky did pretty much what he wanted, and we had learned to hope for the best. We assumed that he was in his foxhole; I don’t know what Willis and Barney were thinking.

And so Barney Barnato showed up the next morning on his belly, slithering toward us like a snake, to spread the news. Somehow the story made Barney happy.

“I knew he’d pull something like this sooner or later,” Barney said, unable to keep from grinning, although the tone of his voice was serious enough, and remembering the sound of Willis’s flat palm on Fedderman’s cheeks, I wanted to slap Barney in exactly the same way.

“Pull what?” I asked, setting my jaw again.

“A trick like this,” Barney said, trying to stare me down.

“Maybe he’s on special duty,” I said. That sounded stupidly loyal, even to me. But I didn’t know what to think. What should I have thought? That Rocky had deserted to the enemy? My imagination had blocked; I could think of nothing. But Barney was already crawling away, uninterested in any other opinions from me, to spread the news to Bern and Fedderman, who had apparently slept off his
“concussion” while the Germans were assaulting us through the night with their obscenities.

Later in the morning, we had a quick visit from Lieutenant Gallagher, accompanied by Arch, who looked unhappy.

“What do you guys know?” Gallagher asked, dropping into our hole with us. (Arch lay on his stomach alongside, listening.) This put us at close quarters with an officer, face-to-face; a rare occurrence. It made me shy. Gallagher, too, I thought. We both seemed to be feeling powerfully the difference in rank between us at that moment. I hadn’t realized how pointy Gallagher’s teeth were until he was directly in front of me; his face, too, was like a tamed ferret’s. I could see each pore around his nostrils, each tiny aerated depression. Quick brown eyes, a zit on the side of his neck. Don’t come any closer, I thought. Keep your distance. Sir. Up close like that, he kept showing us his sharp little incisors when he smiled. I tried to concentrate on them, but Gallagher didn’t smile often that morning. I didn’t think he had slept much the night before, like Johnson and me. I wasn’t happy with this visit.

I’ll say it again: I really liked Gallagher. We all did. I can’t say that enough. I had the feeling that he never lied, especially to himself. (I wanted to be like that.) Also, I knew that he treated everybody in exactly the same way—I mean everybody. And, far more rare than you might think, he didn’t compete with his men in the third platoon, did not compete with them, malign them, laugh at them, or condescend, as we saw all around us all the time in other platoons, in other companies. Rocky had once said, “Don’t worry your asses about F. J. Gallagher. He’s not a
man who will leave his wounded on the battlefield.” Starchy words, maybe, but as soon as Rocky spoke them, I felt the truth of what he had just said. I also thought they might serve just as well for Rocky. I hoped so. I wanted both of them to be great.

So there we were in the hole, maybe six inches from each other, one officer and two PFCs, while Arch listened in, resting uncomfortably on his belly. “Well?” Gallagher asked. He was pretending to fool with his carbine so we wouldn’t have to look each other in the eye. PFCs never looked officers in the eye; they only stared. “You know,” Gallagher said, “Antonovich is really pissed off.” Not Captain Antonovich, just Antonovich, as though he was anybody. “It’s one thing in the States, Rocky’s little escapades, but up here … ” As though we were on the moon.

“You got me,” I said, stupid again. Oh, how I wanted to sound intelligent, to speak all-knowing words to the lieutenant that would solve the mystery of Rocky Hubbell’s disappearance.

“Pissed off is only the half of it,” Arch put in, from his peculiar position.

Gallagher turned to him wearily. “Rest, sergeant,” he said, with an irony you could heft in the palm of your hand. “Now,” Gallagher went on, but only to Johnson and me, “no clues? Nothing he said? Nothing strange in the way he acted? Think, fellows, because if he’s deserted …”

At his words, I was swept away by deep gloom. Desertion. The barrenness of the word, its heavy sobriety, its endlessness: it was one of those words that seemed to go on forever. But Rocky Hubbell a deserter? There was a missed connection somewhere. That’s all it was, a missed connection.

“There’s no way Rocky would desert,” I said.

“Swear on it,” Gallagher answered, as unexpectedly sarcastic as Fedderman could be. This reply pulled me up a bit. I could feel his seriousness and his doubts; and of course he was right. Part of his job was to be serious and skeptical. By then, Gallagher had settled into our hole and I began to suspect that he didn’t want to leave. “How well do you know him?” he asked.

I hesitated. “Well enough,” I said.

Gallagher nodded approvingly. “And the rest of the squad?”

“You mean how well do I know them?”

“Yes.”

Again I hesitated. “Well enough, too, I guess.” I didn’t know what he was getting at.

“Got anything to say, Johnson?”

Johnson shook his head.

Lieutenant Gallagher kept twitching the corners of his mouth back, as though he was doing an exercise. Those incisors looked like dog’s teeth from six inches away. I wanted him to leave. I wasn’t used to having conversations like this. How well did I know Rocky Hubbell and the rest of the first squad? Or anybody else in C Company, for that matter. I didn’t know Roger Johnson; I recognized that a long time ago. But I knew Bern Keaton (so I flattered myself). I knew that Bern Keaton had a girlfriend named Sheila who lived in Passaic, New Jersey, near his hometown of Hackensack, and that Bern had grown up in a wood-shingle house, much like my own in Baltimore. I also knew about the religious thing. And maybe I knew a thing or two about Ira Fedderman. Ira Fedderman had a sister named Naomi. He had let that slip once, but never
talked about it again. His father, whose name was Julius, was a housepainter in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And yes, there was more. I knew that Paul Willis stole his buddies’ underwear and Barney Barnato always saw the worst in everyone, as though he was all too familiar with the worst. And George Brewster, amazing us with his candor, had once remarked that given a choice between sexual intercourse and a really satisfying bowel movement, he was not at all sure that he would take sexual intercourse. He actually said that; and he didn’t say “fucking,” he said “sexual intercourse.”

But Arch and Antonovich and Gallagher and the rest? We were a company of strangers, still unknown to each other. Maybe it was enough to admire Gallagher, as I did.

“Antonovich wants Rockys ass, and for once I don’t blame him,” Gallagher said, sounding sad. Those were his last words to us. “Let’s go, sergeant,” he said to Arch. And they were off.

TRUE to his nature and all his past behavior, Rocky showed up late in the afternoon, just before our second 88 barrage of the day was due to begin. (The Germans’ regularity helped to regulate us.) He sauntered toward us looking seven feet tall from where we sat in our hole. He was unshaved, but he was often unshaved. He had a self-satisfied smile on his face, as though he knew a few things we didn’t know; we were familiar with that smile. When he got to Bern and Fedderman’s hole, he pulled out a handgun and pointed it at them as though it was a street holdup or a bank robbery. Fedderman’s eyes bulged when
he saw the gun. Then he began to laugh dutifully, along with Bern. They knew what to do. When Rocky turned away and headed for us, hunched over a little (the first 88 shell had landed a couple of hundred yards behind us), Bern began to frantically tap his temple with his forefinger. Nuts, was the message. Rocky Hubbell was nuts.