Flanders (25 page)

“I knows Captain give you an alibi, Stanhope, but I takes that for what it’s worth. I figure you done that girl in. Figure ’e knows it, too. But you’re a pretty boy, vain as a cock and a bit of a pet, I figures. Too, you got them bleeding sharpshooting totals. For whatever reason, ’e thinks you’re a valuable piece of muck. But for now, I owns you. So tomorrow before sunup, Stanhope, I want your arse out through the wire, and you’re to take a spotter along.”

“A spotter? I’ve done without till now.”

“You’ll sharpshoot by the book. Besides, I don’t trust you out there alone.”

“I’ll take Pickering.” Then I changed my mind. “No, sir. I’ll take Marrs. We work good together.”

“LeBlanc.”

The eerie cold that possesses LeBlanc found its way down the traverse and entered me. I swallowed hard. “Sir,” I began, but he didn’t let me finish.

“Should like that—partnering with LeBlanc—seeing as how he’s a sneaky devil just like you.”

I tried to protest again, but he wouldn’t listen.

“Wouldn’t give you who you chose, any case. Might get out there and start your mischief. Slap and tickle. Dropping your bloody pants. Maybe you already ’as, you sharing a dugout with Marrs and all. Is that it? Is that why you wants Marrs out there with you?”

My face went hot. My fists clenched. “Goddamn it.”

He moved fast, Bobby. One heartbeat he was sitting, sneering at me, the next he was on his feet. There was a trenching tool in his hand.

I took a deep breath, counted real slow to ten. “I ain’t no goddamned queer, sir.”

He was clutching the trenching tool so tight that his knuckles were pale. Not from fear of me, neither. From absolute killing hate.

“That girl had a tree branch rammed up inside ’er. I figures only a poof would go buggering a woman with sommit other than what ’e was born with. It’s unnatural. Well, degenerates can’t ’elps themselves, I suppose. See? I knows you, Stanhope. Didn’t I tell you once? Now go find LeBlanc. Tell ’im to get his arse ’ere on the double.” When I hesitated, he took a step forward. I didn’t back up. For a disturbing time we were too close.

His breath bathed my face; and it was so heavy with rot that it made me sick. He growled, “Get out of me sight.”

LeBlanc took the news the way he does everything: a few cusses, then sulky resignation. But I saw something else in him, too. A deadly joy. Part of him wants to go under the wire, Bobby, and that scares me bad.

Travis Lee

* * *

SEPTEMBER 4, THE FRONT LINES

ONE TO HANG ONTO FOR A WHILE

Dear Bobby,

The night before LeBlanc and me crawled out to No Man’s Land, Marrs and me and Calvert had ourselves a little goodbye party. Marrs made tea. We put some of my rum stash and some of Pickering’s jam in it. It tasted like chlorinated puke; but even Calvert, who likes his tea and rum plain, drank it down. In war, you do what you got to, I guess.

Marrs tried to make me feel better. He kept patting me on the back. And every damned time he did, I thought about what Blackhall had imagined us doing.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, and shrugged him off.

But he kept hovering. “It’ll be all right, Stanhope. Won’t be so bad. You’ll see.”

Always patting on me. “Yeah, Marrs. Okay. Fine.”

“Lucky it’s not Marrs who’s going,” Pickering said. “Lie down out there, and his bum would rise to the breeze. Only soldier I know who ever got shot in the arse, our Marrs. Did you know that, Calvert? Poor Fritz. Considering the size of his target, he couldn’t bloody miss.”

Get enough of Pickering’s shit, anyone would sour. “Fuck you, Pickering. Can’t you leave him the hell alone for once?” The sun was already low in the sky. Soon night would come. And sleep, if I could manage any. Then waking up before the sun came up and crawling into the dark with LeBlanc. I took another drink. “Needs lemon peel,” I said.

“And fuck you back.” Pleasant old Pickering. Not a feather ruffled.

“Don’t like them eff words like you uses.” This from Calvert. “Wif the bof of you, it’s effing this and effing that. You talk like that wif ladies about?”

“With the ladies? I’ve never had complaint.” Pickering clapped his hand down on Marrs’s knee, stared deeply into his eyes, pursed him a kiss. “Isn’t that true, my sweet?”

Marrs snorted so with laughter that tea ran out his nose.

I don’t know whether it was Pickering’s bad joke or the helplessness of Marr’s laughter, but right then, Bobby, right that very minute, I loved those boys so much. They were my chums. The originals. They were all I had.

After we had climbed into our cubbyholes that night and the candle had burned down to nothing, long after the others had started to snore, I reached down and prodded Pickering.

In the cubbyhole below me, he stirred. The sky was clear, the dugout cavern-dark. Across the way, moonlight flowed down the sandbags like cascades of milky water.

His throat sounded clogged; his voice was sleepy. “What?”

Outside, misty light coated everything—even a pozzy pot left illegally on the firestep. The night was fragile, like you could take a deep breath and blow the dusty moonlight away.

“What?” Pickering was irritated.

“You see anything funny about me?”

Cloth rustled. There were sounds of a heavy body moving. Pickering had evidently turned over on his back and pulled the sleeping bag aright. “Har-har. I’d like to laugh more at you, Stanhope, but it’s so bloody late. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s so effing
dark,
you see.”

“No. Really. You ever see anything different about me?”

“Yes.” Very sober now. “It comes as a surprise, Stanhope, but I must tell you in all honesty—and in this light it’s quite plain—you’re black as the ace of spades.”

“Blackhall thinks I’m ...” I couldn’t just jump in and tell him, Bobby. I mean, our cubbyholes were on top of each other; well within groping distance. “You know.”

More shifting sounds. The noise of Pickering clearing his throat. “I know what?”

“How some fellows are. Funny.”

“I’ve never thought you particularly funny, Stanhope.”

Pickering was the clown of the platoon. He didn’t care much for competition.

“Blackhall doesn’t think I like the ladies.”

I could hear him breathing.

I filled my lungs with the dank trench air and then just let all my worries go. “Hell, he accused me of being a poof, is what he did. I don’t think I am.”

I thought of the way I loved the platoon. How I loved Miller. But that’s different, Bobby, isn’t it? Pickering was awful damned quiet, so I went on. “I used to think you could tell, like you can tell a high yellow by looking at the palms of their hands. I mean, queers’d walk a certain way or stand kind of funny. Something in the way they said things, maybe. Not a lisp, particularly, but somehow, someway, you could pick ’em out. Then I come here and there’s two men who figure I light-step; and now I got to thinking—what if I really am queer, and I just can’t see it yet? You been around, right? You’re married and all. Hell, Pickering. You think I’m like that?”

Cloth rustled. His voice came muffled. He’d turned toward the wall again. “Go to sleep.”

Outside, moonlight sat atop sandbags like a pale dusting of snow.

“Oh, and Stanhope?”

A rat, cloaked in magic, crawled along the firestep.

“Don’t play with my bum,” he said.

I shut my eyes and went from peace into peace: the sundrenched, peeling steps; angels with downturned, shadowed faces. I kept walking, past the mausoleum, past glass-topped graves with soldiers sleeping under. Through a landscape still green with the remains of summer.

A cool wind struck my cheek. Autumn coming.

I turned and saw that I was dangerously near the cypress, so close that I could fall in. The cold breeze came at me from the dark. It ruffled my hair. It teased my collar. It sucked me to it.

Faster now. Racing toward my already written future. Past the last grave, an angel desperately but uselessly reaching. Past the birdsong and sunlight and into humming silence. I stopped, teetering, at the edge. In the pitch black beyond, someone called—not man, not woman. Not eager, but not indifferent, either. A cool wind and a tepid sort of voice.

And then it was LeBlanc calling from the trench’s shadows. The moon had set. The air was damp and chill, the world quiet in the way it can only be when night has made its slow swing toward morning. I crawled out of my cubbyhole and jumped to the ground.

“Come on. I got our breakfast and lunch in my haversack,” LeBlanc whispered. “Your turn tomorrow.”

A surprise. He sounded sleepy, and because of it, vulnerable.

In a firebay of the early morning trench a candle was burning, the sentry, Harold Martin, beside it. He had set a ladder up, and he was waiting for us on the firestep, half-asleep.

“Luck,” he mumbled as we started our way up the parapet. I looked down and caught one final glimpse: Martin weary and nodding in the warm light of his candle.

I crawled through the hole LeBlanc made in the wire. I wormed after him into the raw, churned earth of No Man’s Land. We found us a shell hole and waited for the sun to rise.

LeBlanc must have picked up on my mood. “It won’t be so bad, Stanhope. You needed out of that crappy trench, anyway. Needed some air.”

The sun came up in pastel shades of pink, our briar patch of wire black sutures on the tender cheek of dawn. In the faint rosy light, rats slunk back toward the trenches and home. Birds stirred. Across the way, the Boche army stretched and yawned.

LeBlanc popped up, quick as a squirrel, and down again. He grinned at me. “Clear. I make it one hundred and thirty yards.”

“I don’t need anybody computing distance for me.”

“Sure. There’s a break in the parapet about thirty yards to the left.”

“I don’t need anybody wiping my ass for me, neither.”

I popped up for a look-see. A little slower than LeBlanc, but still plenty safe. Nothing was happening.

“Don’t get mad at me, Stanhope,” LeBlanc said. “It’s that cocksucker Blackhall who’s your problem. You know what he wants, eh? Eh? He sends us out here hoping both our asses’ll get blown to hell, that’s what. Bang, Stanhope. Bang, LeBlanc. Two less headaches.”

That scared me. “We’ll snap a few quick ones and then change position,” I said. “I don’t want no mortar rounds tossed my way.”

“Sitting fucking ducks.” LeBlanc’s scope was hooded with brown paper, so as not to reflect the light. He fiddled with it. I thought he was about to go spotting, but he sighed and twisted belly-up to watch the sunrise.

After the pink light came the gold, like a visitation from God. Grandeur shone through LeBlanc’s lifted fingers and striped my sleeves with grace. It wasn’t a morning to go killing.

“Or,” I said, “we could just pretend to shoot and not really do it.”

LeBlanc balled up the camouflage tarp. Out of rage, I thought at first. His voice, though, was calm. “We could.”

Abruptly he threw the tarp upward. It left the blue shadows of our hole and for a magic instant caught the dawn. Two quick snaps across No Man’s Land, no louder than the pop of a finger. The tarp jerked twice as it billowed down—the Boche sniper had shot it. The Maxim went off then, too. Bullets started smacking the dirt.

LeBlanc held his sides and laughed. “Hey. You mad enough now, Stanhope? Ready to shoot some Boche?”

“You crazy damned peckerwood.”

LeBlanc started screaming.

The helpless, stunned agony in his voice made me go cold. Despite memories of Smoot, I reached out to help him. LeBlanc was rolling around in the shell hole. For the life of me, I couldn’t see where he was shot.

He twitched out of my one-handed grasp and slid down the incline, right into the mud. His screams were weaker now, more grunts of pain.

I slid down after him. “Where’s it, LeBlanc? Where you hurt?”

When I got closer, I saw that he was grinning. Above us, the bullets stopped. “They think they got us,” he said, and winked.

“You crazy bastard.” Said with such venom that he stopped smiling. My hand tightened on my gun.

He didn’t apologize. I didn’t bother to warn him not to pull a stunt like that again. We stayed where we were for a while, and when the sun had risen high and the day was warming, we crawled out of that shell hole and found us a spot where the turf had been lifted up by an explosion. We had us some breakfast. Eventually, we both forgot our mad and got to joking around again. I watched the spot where the Boche parapet was falling down and weak; and when the crew showed up to resandbag it, I got me a kill. After that, LeBlanc and me, under cover of that gouge, moved on.