In the Wolf's Mouth (7 page)

One grey exhausted evening, George said to Ray, ‘You know what this is like?’

‘No.’

‘You ever look after a baby? Ever been out on the street with a stroller with a baby in it?’

‘I didn’t know you got kids.’

‘I don’t. My sister has a baby. You’re out there and this tiny thing is right there and you’re totally focused on it, totally preoccupied.’

‘I wanna eat something.’

‘So the whole world is a danger around you. Everything.’

‘I understand.’

‘Yeah, but it’s bigger than that, the feeling. I don’t know. The whole world and the little baby, little fingers, little eyes, you know?’

‘I think so, George. We should … I think we should find out if we can sleep.’

‘It’s everything. That’s what I’m saying.’

Mostly the infantry couldn’t do much, running
among the machines. It kept them warm was one good thing. At night, cold space pressed down on them in the desert. The air was full of freezing stars. Heat came from the machines, from the fires, from their bodies. Ray ran past a burning tank once that pushed a furnace heat against him. It was hotter than a stove, so hot that red rivets were weeping out of the metal and sparks fizzed above the turret. Ray pictured white bones inside, luminescent, soldiers heated until they became ghosts. A good way to go, maybe. At least there’d be nothing left. They had passed tanks in the daytime that were loud with flies. They had passed bodies and parts of bodies. The artillery hacked into the distance. Tanks whirred forwards. They jogged after, looking for people loose on the other side. The landscape changed around them. Once they trotted through masses of paper that fluttered and blew around them, a silent storm. Some of the pages were scorched and black. They raced in spirals on the wind. They were letters. An enemy vehicle full of mail, presumably thinking the front line further forward, had been hit. It was a smoking hulk with exploded tyres, flapping shreds of canvas. The driver was still at the wheel, a harrowed figure of red and black. The way his teeth were exposed in his burned face made him look like a rat trying to gnaw at something. The squad was making good progress, covering ground. Ray was getting closer to his death.

4

Battle forms had broken up now. It was pure chasing at all hours. Through glassy morning air Ray and the boys set off in their quiet hunting party. Their uniforms were stiff with sweat and excrement but they’d been promised they were almost out of the desert and anyway they loosened as they moved. Ray felt thin and sinewy, light-headed, lucid, dumb. They were on some sort of rock shelf, the ground beneath them hard, rippled, glittering with tiny crystals. It lasted for hours. Ahead of them they could see mountains now, a greener world rearing up, toppling and fracturing in hard peaks and facets. Ray was looking up at them, dreaming them, when they were suddenly fired on from the right and all dived down. Dunphy let go with a wide swinging arc of automatic fire. Ray, ignoring the pain in his arms from throwing himself onto the rock, squirmed around to see what was what. Floyd was to his right and he was lying there moaning, in trouble, his legs obviously too relaxed like he couldn’t move them. Randall was crawling forwards as shots came chipping across. He pulled a grenade from his belt and threw it. Ray heard it skittering across the rock before it exploded.

‘Got ’em,’ Randall shouted. ‘They’re down in a hole.’

‘Floyd’s bad,’ George shouted.

Sergeant Carlson ordered them forwards. Ray had to get past Floyd who looked across at him with wild eyes. His head was jerking. ‘Please,’ he said.

Ray shot into the oncoming fire. Another grenade was thrown which disappeared down into the enemy hole and sent up handfuls of rock and gravel and maybe some human stuff. Afterwards, a strange sight – hands rising up out of the ground. Small and simple human hands wavered at the tops of arms, empty.

‘They’re surrendering,’ Ray said it to himself then shouted, his voice hoarse and cracking. ‘They’re surrendering!’

Sergeant Carlson shouted, ‘Stay careful! We don’t know. I’m … Randall!’

Randall was up on his feet walking towards the hands that were persisting in the air. He walked until he was standing over them. ‘They are!’ he shouted back. ‘Fuckers are just giving up.’

The others, all but Floyd, ran forward to see. There were four Germans standing in a cleft in the rock with three dead bodies at their feet. There must have been more of them to start with but in a part of the trench hit by a grenade it was hard to work out from the remains.

‘What do we do, sarge?’

Ray stared down at the shaven head of one of them, at the fingerprint pattern of growth visible in the little sparks of hair. The German looked back up at Ray. The whites of his eyes were red. There was a gum of white spit in the corners of his mouth that jerked as he babbled in German. Ray’s bayonet was swinging in front of them. One little stab.

A shot. Then another. Randall was shooting them, point-blank shots bursting down into them. He shot the one at Ray’s feet then Carlson grabbed Randall round the arms and fell with him to the ground. ‘For God’s sake, Randall.’

The last living German was shaking, dancing on the spot, his hands at either side of his head, fingers paralysed into claws. He was trying to lift his feet out of the wetness around him.

‘Ray, watch Randall,’ Carlson said. ‘No fucking choice now.’

Sergeant Carlson stepped forward and shot the last one.

From behind them George called out, ‘Floyd’s dead.’

5

What was he remembering? He had the picture in his mind but couldn’t locate it – paint running in a gutter, white paint very clean against the pasted greys of the street. Ray could only have been four or five. It was Mitchell’s. That was it. The storefront was being painted. Men were washing out the cans and emptying them into the drains. A smooth clean chemical smell. Looking up, a man in overalls smiling. Ray’s brain relaxed with pleasure as the memory came back whole. They were running past a burned-out fighter plane that had crashed onto its face, its tail in the air. Wosniak had been replaced now by a boy they called Red. Floyd had been replaced also: a boy called Alex who insisted on his own name. They called him Alice instead.

Almost there, almost into the colourful upheaval of the mountains. This might be it, the last day. They kept moving under Carlson’s command, his hair now white from the sun. Aircraft, their aircraft, growled overhead on raids. They saw men, prisoners, sitting on the ground with their hands in the air, weaponless, unburdened and exempt. Bodies they kept running past. Some were blackened and swollen, bursting their skin, others neat on a dry stain of red blood. Sometimes their clothes had been blown off and they were
randomly naked from the waist down or across the back. Ray was still alive which didn’t make sense. Several times Stukas had spilled down towards them and let out their bombs and the earth had jumped, towering upward for a second, roaring. Men died all around him and he was fine. Once he felt himself inflating, growing larger and larger, filling the deadly space around him and still nothing, no bullet or bomb or shrapnel pierced him.

Such were his thoughts now, big and weird. His mind no longer raced as it had at first. Instead single images, memories, kept catching as in a malfunctioning projector, the actors slowing down nonsensically and stopping, the images blistering and burning through as his mind gave way to exhaustion.

And it was over. The tanks were leaguered. All the surviving soldiers were together. They dropped down to sleep on the ground without pitching tents. They woke up to find themselves in an actual place with facilities being built and a town nearby. Here they’d be rested, refreshed, let loose for a night before the next push.

6

After a shave, Ray’s cheeks felt numb and glassy under his fingertips. After a shower, blasted clean, he felt very small and bare. He looked down at his unhurt body, his white stomach shrunken hard around cubes of muscle, his meekly hanging genitals, his long thighs and bony feet. The only signs of war on him were a few notches in the skin of his hands and arms and the fact that he was slimmer, more sinewy, healthier. He dried himself fiercely, scrubbing at his surface with the thin army towel and dressed for town.

Soldiers in clean uniforms were everywhere. The streets thronged with them, their voices caught and echoing between stone walls. There were so many of them, all loudly alive. Ray looked around at them and saw repetition, like a natural phenomenon with lots of the same thing coming at once, like birds or rain. Around him George, Coyne and Randall were wearing the same uniforms, were talking in the same way, smiling and gesturing. It was a good thing to get lost in. It was safe. A prod in his back startled him. Beside him a small boy stood with cupped palms saying, ‘Joe, Joe, you have cigarette for me?’

‘Sure. Why not?’ Ray tapped one out of his pack and handed it over.

The boy took the gift without thanks and pocketed
it, absorbing it quickly into his possession the way the ground absorbs water. ‘Joe, you want fuck?’

‘Not now, kid. Scram.’

‘Hey, you made a friend,’ George said.

‘Not really, I haven’t.’

‘Hey, mister, you want fuck?’

‘Now, son …’ George began and Randall interrupted.

‘Tell him we’ll see his sister later. Right now we want drink.’

The boy circled around them as they walked until Coyne shoved him with his boot. After that he moved on to another group ahead of them, catching the hand of a Negro soldier and examining it.

It seemed there was a bar ahead but already it was too full with a great still crowd formed around it. They couldn’t get close so turned to try another direction. On the top of a wall, looking down at him, Ray noticed a cat. Its large eyes catching the sun were lit a startling green. Its striped velvet face, with wide whiskers and pink fastidious nose, rested just above its forepaws. It shifted as they strode past, holding Ray’s gaze, its shoulder blades undulating under its loose skin. Just a cat living its cat’s life in silence, half out of sight, doing its thing. Ray felt his throat tighten against the threat of tears.

‘Here’s a place,’ Coyne announced.

Excepting one occasion as a child when he and his brother had got sick on their father’s grappa, Ray had never really drunk. A little red wine at weddings and that was that. But tonight he would drink as a man and as a soldier, battle-hardened and deserving.

With the first glass they toasted victory, then Wosniak and Floyd, and after that to dispel the quickly enclosing gloom George offered ‘Wild nights!’ The wine was cool with a pleasant innocuous fruit flavour. Ray knocked it back as he would any other drink to quench the thirst he now noticed he had. As the wine washed through him, he felt a fibrous stiffness in his face and scalp start to loosen. The tension in his body drifted outside of him as he drank, surrounding him, buzzing pleasantly. Later glasses of wine tasted less and less wholesome, growing acrid with the residue each one left in his throat and the many cigarettes Ray smoked.

With a soft steady fire the sun set along the narrow street, enriching the texture of the bricks, lighting the men, their blue smoke, the red wine, glasses sparkling, everything haloed. Ray was on a chair now, leaning back on its rear legs with his head resting on the rough wall.

‘Would you look at that,’ he said.

George answered. ‘At what?’

‘Just look at it all. At the look of it.’

‘Oh, indeed.’ From his nostrils, George exhaled smoke down around his collar.

‘Man, if I had a camera, a movie camera …’

‘Or you could draw a picture.’

‘You know how sometimes in a movie you can really see what the air’s like, like it’s soft or how much breeze there is? Right now would be perfect for that.’

You wanna get into the movie business?’

‘Sure.’ Ray swigged from his glass. ‘But whoever heard of a person …’

‘Seems all I ever hear about is people. People in Hollywood gotta come from someplace. I can see it now.’ George shaped a banner across the air in front of him. ‘Decorated military hero and movie director …’

‘Hey, what the fuck. Why’s Randall always gotta be making trouble? Christ.’

Coming towards them held under the arm of another man, Randall’s head was a strangled bloody red with thick veins in his brow and temples. Rocking and heaving, reaching up, Randall was trying to throw him.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen.’ George stood with his hands a loud hailer at the sides of his mouth. ‘Save it for Fritz and the Eyeties.’

In the darkness Ray said, ‘Sun’s down.’

‘Planet’s turned,’ George said.

‘Big light gone,’ Coyne said. ‘Big light in hole.’ They were very much drunk now, all four of them. Coyne had in his hand a bottle of wine he’d swiped from a table. He blew across the top of it. ‘Listen up, men,’ he said. ‘And listen good. Good men.’ He swayed. ‘That’s what you are.’ He jerked to his full height, wine sloshing in the bottle. ‘To fallen fucking heroes!’

‘To fallen heroes!’

The bottle was passed around. It kept arriving in Ray’s hand after new toasts were made, grand, sentimental, patriotic toasts. A part of Ray cringed from them and didn’t want to have to say them with the others. He couldn’t have said what but there was something in them defiling of his feelings. At the same time, he couldn’t stop; another part of Ray did want
to roar them out with the others and he did so, although each time he registered inside a small violation of his soul.

Randall was spanking his own forehead incredibly hard. ‘Dang,’ he said. ‘Dang.’ He stopped hitting himself. ‘Y’all know what? Battle, fellers, you know. True as Christ Jesus, I used to be dirty, all dirty and torn up. Clean now. Clean ole motherfucker. Fire. Fire coming at you, all around.’ He laughed. ‘It’s a job is what it is. I needed a job and I sure as shit got one now. It’s a thing you gotta do. I’m doing it.’

‘That’s nice,’ Coyne said. ‘I like listening to your pretty talk but really I’d like to fuck a lady.’

Randall reared up, eyes wide. ‘That’s a good idea. We should get one of them kids running around selling the whores. Gotta take your chances when fortune presents itself.’