Hunger and Thirst (17 page)

Erick said, “Take this log.” John took the narrow log.

“Hey!”

They heard a call from up the hill. Erick turned and saw the squad leader outlined against the sky at the crest of the hill. What a target, he thought, the jerk.

“Get the hell up here!” roared the sergeant.

Erick’s hands twitched. “He would come back now,” he said, trying to sound unconcerned, “Cheap shit.”

He snapped off the last wire on the second log and lifted it up from the ground. “Never mind that!” yelled the sergeant. John and he started up the hill carrying the logs.

“We should leave them,” John said quietly.

“
No
!” whispered Erick, angrily.

As they came up to the sergeant he grabbed the log from Erick’s hand and threw it down on the ground. It rolled a little way down the hill.

“Where do you think you are, on a picnic!” he snapped.

Erick felt himself flushing. “Getting some logs for the hole,” he said his heart beating quickly.

“Jesus Christ!” moaned the sergeant, “Ain’t there enough ways to get killed around here?”

Aren’t
there, amended Erick in his mind. “It’s cold,” he said. He didn’t know why he said it. But he felt he had to have the feeling of resistance even if it was only token.

The sergeant gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. Then, abruptly, he threw an angry thumb over his shoulder and commanded, “Get the hell back in your trench and stay there!”

“Why can’t I have the log?” asked Erick, “I risked my…”

“Did you hear me
?” The sergeant’s cheeks quivered with anger. His voice was taut.

Erick turned away sullenly and walked heavily back to the trench. John put down the log by the hole and they climbed down. Erick sat there in angry silence, trying to pretend he didn’t notice the sergeant watching him and muttering highly audible curses at his stupidity. His fists clenched into blood-drained lumps of flesh.

“Bastard,” he muttered, “Stupid bastard.” John didn’t speak.

When the sergeant went away, Erick got up from the hole resolutely and went down the hill to get the other log. He brought it back. John didn’t say anything. He helped Erick put the two logs over the hole and then they put John’s blanket over them. They climbed down into the dark hut that smelled of cold wet earth.

“This is better,” Erick said, trying to sound unconcerned although his hands shook and his stomach felt strange and queasy.

“We shouldn’t have gone down there I guess,” John said.

“Why not?
Nothing happened, did it?”

“No, but…”

“Shit,” he said, “He’s a fathead.”

“Foley,” came a voice outside. Erick jumped suddenly and his helmet clanked against the logs.

John drew back the blanket at his end.

It was the squad leader again. Erick slumped down painfully at the sound of his voice.

“Go draw some rations from the lieutenant’s trench,” he said.

“All right,” said John. He climbed out of the trench and started off. Erick waited. Then he pulled back the blanket and saw the squad leader looking down coldly at him.

“What about me?” he said, half afraid.

The sergeant didn’t speak. Then he turned toward John who had stopped when he saw Erick wasn’t walking with him.

“Get Linstrom’s,” the sergeant told him. John nodded and turned away. Erick looked down glumly as the sergeant turned back.

“Got the log, didn’t you?” he said.

Erick swallowed. “Yes,” he said, his voice faint.

The squad leader stared at Erick until he grew nervous. Finally, he said,

“Wait’ll they send up replacement before you kill yourself off, will you?”

Erick’s throat contracted. He turned away. “Very funny,” he said faintly.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“What!”

“Nothing!”

“You better not. You better watch your step boy. You’re gonna get killed off right quick!”

Erick closed his eyes and shuddered in rage. It ran through him like a shaking muscle contraction, making him feel tight and sick. He stayed that way until the sergeant went back to his trench. He had to dig right behind
him
, he thought. Then hoped there’d be an attack so he got a chance to shoot the sergeant. You poor fools, he thought, who think that fear outranks respect.

In the silence he sat staring at the ground. He didn’t pull the blanket over his head. He took out his bayonet and started to scrape at the mud on the backs of his hands. He scraped angrily as if the hands offended him.

When he’d scraped them so hard that the backs of his hands began to ooze blood, he began spitting on the skin to soften the mud.

When that didn’t work, he laboriously unscrewed the cap of his canteen and poured water on the backs of his hands, one by one, and kept on scraping.

Abruptly, he stopped. To
hell
with it! he thought, the back of his head thudding against the foxhole wall. Pulling the blanket over his head, he let his eyelids fall.

He sank into a restless doze, neither sleeping nor awake. Would he ever be able to move again? he wondered. He felt as if he couldn’t rise to save his life. His blood flowed sluggishly and his limbs felt as though they had melted one by one. His eyes wouldn’t open. Every time he tried, the accumulation of crust would pull them shut or the complete weariness would drag him down again. It was like being swallowed by a patient snake. He felt, half consciously, that he could spend the rest of his life in the hole.

* * * *

The blanket was thrown back. He felt a breeze on his face and tried to open his eyes.

“Moving out,” said the squad leader in a flat voice tossing the blanket over the log.

“What?” he muttered drowsily. But the sergeant was gone. His words clung like glue to Erick’s mind and repeated themselves. Moving out.

It hit him slowly. Suddenly then a complete rage jerked up his arm and he drove his fist into the ground, ignoring the flaring pain.

“Shit!” he snapped, “God damn it!” His mind kept looking for the right curse words to express his rage.

“What is it?” John asked in the dimness.

“We’re moving out,” Erick said slowly, bitterly as though angry with John. “How do you like that? Just when we get this place comfortable they… oh
Jesus!
It’s a plot. By Christ, it’s a
plot!.”

John sat up with a rustle of clothing and Erick saw his weary, drawn face as he drew back the blanket at his end of the trench.

“Here we go again,” John said.

Erick had the feeling he got so often. A desire to throw it all off, to end it all, to throw up his hands and say—the hell with everything! The feeling that Lynn caught so perfectly years and years later when he cried—Stop the world, I’m getting off!

“Oh… to hell with the army,” he said, “To
hell
with it.” He started to jerk together his equipment.

“Anyway,” John said, “They didn’t call me back.”

“Yeah,” Erick said, disinterestedly. He threw C ration cans, mess kit, into the pack. He slid the disassembled pick into its holder. He grabbed his rifle. He sneered at it.

“Jesus,
look
at this thing!”

He looked at it with hate. “Go ahead,” he said fiercely, “Fall apart! See if I give a good shit!”

He pulled himself up and stood swaying in the trench, his limbs cracking, feeling stiff and aching. “
Oh
!” he moaned as he climbed out with the jerky, attenuated motions of an old man. “I’m so happy,” he muttered.

John came out and they threw the packs over their shoulders, loaded up with all their equipment. It seemed incredibly heavy to Erick. He began to wonder if something had drained him of strength during the night, then shoved it away, too tired for whimsy. “Get out o’ here, will ya?” he muttered to himself.

As they trudged along the crest of the hill, he limped and grimaced at the feeling of deadness in his feet. “Oh Christ,” he muttered, “They feel like wood.”

Half consciously he wished he’d stop cursing. It didn’t seem right. Death was still around. He might need to call suddenly on his convenient aegis. But the child in him was angry, it wanted to violate trusts, burn spiritual bridges behind him. He wanted to outrage everything because he had been outraged.

“Want me to carry your bazooka?” John asked.

Wordlessly, Erick slung it over. He moved forward, shoulders slumped, breaths exhuding wearily from his lungs. He wondered if he could ask John to take the bazooka shells too.

They walked about a mile to the left of their original position. Erick making noises of exhaustion all the way and twisting his shoulders irritably. “Jesus,” he said three times, “What do they think we are, animals?”

Finally they stopped. Another deserted plain, with night creeping over it, looking for a place to rest.

“Dig in!” called out non-coms.

“Oh no!”

He said it over and over, shaking his head as if someone had asked him for a loan of a thousand dollars and he was a pauper.

“I’m not digging myself another goddamn hole! Not on your fucking life! Blow me to shit!
Who
cares?”

He flung down his equipment and slumped into a sitting position on the ground. He closed his eyes and shook his head dizzily. “Oh, God, I’m beat,” he groaned.

John carefully took off his pack and began to dig.

“What the hell are
you
doing?” Erick asked, feeling guilty.

John looked at him. His voice was so patient it nearly made Erick scream with rage.

“We have to dig one,” John said, “What if they start to shell us again?”

Erick didn’t answer. He shook his head. “You’re a ball breaker, John,” he said and sat watching John spade out the dirt in slow, weary motions.

Then, after innumerable head shakings and mutterings he reached out with a loud groan and jerked the pick from its holder. He held himself tight for a moment, eyes slitted, face bitter and murderous.

“
Oh. God. Damn
.” he said loudly and clearly for all the heavens to hear.

Then, pushing down onto one knee, he drove the pick savagely into the earth.

“This is the sergeant’s head,” he snarled, “Here you are, sarge, have another one!”

He tore up the jagged chunks of earth and flung them aside.

“Walk, walk, walk,” he chanted furiously under his breath, “Dig, dig, dig, Sit, sit, sit, Walk, walk, walk, Dig, dig…
Shit!”

John didn’t speak. He dug slowly and ceaselessly, his face stolid, unutterably tired.

“God Bless America,” snarled Erick, flinging a rock across the rilled ground.

When they were about two feet down, Erick sank the point of his pickaxe into the cold earth and left it there.

“I quit,” he said, “I’m damned if I’ll dig another goddamn inch.”

John looked up from his work, his thin chest laboring. His brow was covered with a dew of perspiration. He blinked tiredly behind his glasses.

“Shouldn’t it be a little deeper?” he asked, “They said…”

“Oh,
come
on, John!” Erick said irritably, “Where do you want to dig, to China?”

John put down his shovel with a sign. “All right,” he said, “I’m too tired.”

They crawled down into the trench and slumped back against opposite walls, knees touching, the tops of their helmets just below the surface of the ground.

“Jesus, am I tired,” Erick complained.

“I am too,” John said.

Erick slid his hands in to his jacket pockets. He felt something soft and dry and drew out the pieces of cheese. He offered them to John but John shook his head. So he flung them away, getting the odd sensation that he was throwing away pieces of Sergeant Jones. He didn’t look that way anymore because he could see the pieces lying on the ground, whitish and still.

Darkness crept over them soon and covered their heads.

They didn’t bother eating anything. They went to sleep immediately, motionless in their exhaustion. Only once in the night did Erick wake up. Then he didn’t even bother looking around. He reached around with a grunt and took his canteen from its canvas holder. He held the icy metal in his hands and took a sip of the freezing, chlorinated water. Then he slid the canteen back and went to sleep again.

* * * *

He woke up to the sound of machine gun fire.

He saw John start up and then sink down again, his face white and afraid.

Looking up, Erick saw bright streams of tracer bullets skimming over the ground. They were down so low he could have reached up his hand and touched them.

“I almost got up,” John said nervously.

“Good thing you didn’t.”

John swallowed, “You said it.”

Then, after a few moments, John said, “Do you think they’ll attack?”

“How should I know?” Erick said.

“If they attack, what will we do?”

“Run like hell,” Erick said, then, “I don’t know John.”

“You can’t run, can you?”

“I didn’t mean we’d run. Who’d let us run, anyway?”

“No, I mean, if they have… tanks.”

“Oh,” he said, feeling a tremor in his stomach as he visualized the great monsters rumbling over the field at him.

“You can’t run, can you?” John said.

He shook his head. “No.”

“You’re a… a pretty good shot, aren’t you?” John asked. He seemed to be trying to make a plan. Plan on something that was way over his head.

“Pretty good,” Erick said.

“Well. If they have tanks, maybe… maybe I can run out and drop a grenade on one.” He looked at Erick. “Huh?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

John swallowed. “You could cover me,” he said. The words sounded false as if he had been abysmally cast in the role of the alert soldier by some bungling producer.

“I suppose so,” Erick said, feeling miscast himself.

“What about the bazooka?” John asked.

Erick looked at it. It was lying beside the trench. He reached up cautiously and drew it down.

“My God,” he said.

“What?” John asked, worriedly.

“The sight broke off.”

“Oh no,” John said, “We… can’t aim it then.”

“It’s no good,” Erick said, pushing it away. Then he had a twinge of fear and looked at his rifle. He grimaced at the heavy rust on it. He checked to see if the clip was still in the chamber and if the hammer slid back and forth. Now he was sorry had hadn’t cleaned it. What a fool, he thought to have let it go.