The Hunter From the Woods (26 page)

Gantt started to give him the Colt and then suddenly paused.

The German flier had both pistols. He was weak and unsteady, but he was still in control of his senses. Michael knew what he was thinking.

“You’ll have to kill me,” Michael said, and he meant it.

The dice clicked…clicked…clicked. The boy opened his hand and stared at the pips.

“A fine pistol,” Gantt said, with a brief nod. “But not of German quality.” He put the Colt into Michael’s outstretched hand. Gantt’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve been cut up a little. We might find a medical kit somewhere.”

“Later. First…the water.”

The three of them walked through the village toward the waterhole. A few either very brave or very stupid dogs skulked around. The flames were still burning high, and every so often there was a
boom
and more shrapnel flew up.

“I suppose I won’t ask,” said Gantt as they walked.

“Ask what?”

“What you really did to frighten everyone out of here. I suppose I won’t ask. And I suppose…I really don’t want to know.” He gave Michael a sidelong glance, and Michael wondered if one of his fingers had not entirely been changed back when he’d first offered his hand to take the Colt. No, no; of course not. But…he
was
so very tired.

No, of course not.

They were almost to the waterhole when a figure on crutches emerged from between two tents and aimed the pistol he had somehow gotten hold of. Maybe it had fallen to the ground in the flight of the Dahlasiffa. Maybe he’d taken it from his father’s tent. In any case, Nuri’s son Hasid was armed and dangerous. First he aimed the gun at Michael but something on the boy’s firelit face and in the eyes that glittered with such venomous hate said it was useless to shoot the Devil, so he altered his hand toward Gantt. Two bullets were fired even as Michael shoved the flier aside.

Hasid fired once more as Gantt fell to his knees. Then Michael shot twice at Nuri’s son, and he didn’t know if the bullets had hit or not because Hasid was already hobbling on his crutches into the shadows, his cloven hoof tossing up a spray of sand.

In another few seconds, the Fireman’s son was gone.

“Ah,” said Gantt, in a weary voice. “Ah,
verdammen Sie alles dieses
.”

Michael knelt beside him. Gantt had both hands pressed to his midsection. The blood was rising on the front of his shirt. Shot twice in the stomach, Michael saw. “Move your hands,” he said, but Gantt would not. “Come on, let me see!”

“
Jeder moglicher Dummkopf kann sehen, dass ich sterben werde
,” Gantt answered, with a crooked smile. He’d said: Any fool can see I’m going to die.

“Not if I can find a medical kit.” Michael started to stand up.

Gantt grasped his wrist with bloody fingers. “Save your strength. Are you a surgeon? No. As they say…
ich bin
kaput
.” He winced. A thin thread of blood broke over his lower lip. “Would you help me…get my back against something?”

Michael helped him up but couldn’t get him too far because Gantt began shuddering with pain. Michael eased him down so his back was supported against the side of a tent away from the danger of catching fire.

“Better,” Gantt said. “Thank you.” He was not sweating, but his eyes were wet. His hands pressed to his stomach as if to keep his insides from oozing out.

The boy knelt to the ground a distance away and began throwing his dice.

“Must he…
do
that?” Gantt asked. He waved a gory hand to dismiss his own question. “Ah, let him alone. I suppose it’s the only pleasure he has. Eh?” Moving with painful slowness, he withdrew the Walther from his waistband. Michael offered no help, thinking Gantt was still capable of his own actions. “German quality,” Gantt said, as he placed the pistol at his side. “Cannot be bested.”

A movement to the right caught Michael’s attention. Two Dahlasiffa men with rifles were coming their way. Maybe they were part of the trio who’d gone out hunting.

Michael fired a shot at them and they were gone like desert hares.

“Can you protect yourself while I get you some water?” Michael asked.

“I can. But…it’s very interesting, Michael. I am no longer thirsty. Please…go ahead…for both of you.”

Stay here
, Michael told the boy. In the second tent he entered he found a suitable water vessel, a German canteen stamped with the palm tree and Nazi symbol seal of the Afrika Korps. He went into several others in search of a medical kit, but had no luck. He walked on to the waterhole. He got on his knees, cupped his hand and drank a few swallows that went down like the sweetest wine ever pressed from the most luscious grape. Then he filled the canteen full, and while he was doing this he had to interrupt the task to shoot at a man who was coming across the oasis from the opposite direction. The intruder turned his robed tail and ran. It seemed that without their ‘shade’ the Dahlasiffa fled from their own shadows. Which was fine with Michael. He spent a few more seconds to splash water into his face, and then he took the canteen and walked back the route he’d come. He knew he couldn’t give Gantt any water; the stomach cramps would only add to the man’s agony, and without professional medical attention Gantt was, as he’d said,
kaput
.

So, all he could do now was make Gantt as comfortable as possible and keep him company. He’d known stomach wounds like this to kill a man within an hour or so, and on the other end of that a man might linger for a day or more. It was, after all, up to Fate.

The dice were still being rolled, back and forth. Gantt picked up the Walther at Michael’s approach and then set it aside again. Michael gave the boy the canteen, and at last the dice were still while the boy drank.

Too fast
, Michael cautioned.
Too much
. He took the canteen away. He sat on the ground a few feet away from the flier, at an angle so he could watch for more Dahlasiffas creeping back in. If they dared.

It seemed they did not. No more returned, as first one hour and then a second passed. The boy slept curled up with the dice in his hand. Gantt’s eyes grew heavy-lidded and closed, but Michael Gallatin remained vigilant. After a while Michael got up and went searching through the nearby tents for a medical kit. He found a box of British bandages and a box of Italian condoms, but not an ampule of morphine. He took the bandages and was able to pack Gantt’s wounds while the man slept. The front of Gantt’s shirt was a bloody mess. The two bullet holes were spaced about four inches apart and the slugs were still in his intestines.

At last, the sky began to lighten to the east. It was the beginning of another day.

Red shards of sunlight burst from behind a mountain range. The shadows shrank. The heat began to grow.

The boy awakened. Michael gave him a little more water. He sat cross-legged, staring at the sleeping Gantt. The dice were quiet in his fist. Michael leaned forward to check Gantt’s pulse and the man’s eyes opened. “I’m not dead,” said Gantt, but his face seemed to have taken on a certain gaunt and toothy quality Michael had seen before. It was amazing, how quickly that happened.

Gantt felt the bandages. “Nice work,” he commented. He looked at the sky. “Oh…it’s getting light.”

“Hot day coming,” said Michael.

“Is there any other…in the
desert
?” Gantt smiled at him, and then pain made the smile crimp and vanish. “
Scheisse, die verletzt
! Ah…I’m all right now.” He breathed shallowly, taking sips of air. “Michael,” he said after another moment.

“Yes?”

“I want to…apologize. For the…destruction…of your aircraft. I would not have wished…to have shot down…an unarmed plane. It was not…
chivalrous
.”

“I think chivalry has nothing to do with war.”

“True…but…there is…the
ideal
.” He had to stop speaking for awhile, to deal with the pain. Michael wondered if he should knock Gantt out…but what would be the point?

The boy’s dice were rolling once more. “In any case…sir…I apologize.”

“It was your duty,” Michael said.

“Yes. That.” Gantt winced and closed his eyes. For an instant he resembled a mummy, the cracks in his gray face full of dust, his mouth a grim pain-drawn line.

His eyes opened again, but Michael saw that they had dimmed. Their color was no longer amber, but a pale sun-bleached yellow. “I have always…loved…the dawn,” Gantt said, with an effort. “The cleanest air, you see. The aircraft performs…best…at the dawn. Oh, Michael!” He gave another tight smile. “You should have been with me…up there.”

“With you or against you?”

“With me. Oh…you wouldn’t have lasted…an instant…
against
me. Did I tell you…my count is now…” He was silent, figuring the numbers. “Forty-six. No. That’s not right.
Fifty
. I think. Yes, fifty.”

“An impressive number,” said Michael, who saw the boy leaning over the freshly-thrown dice to read the pips.

“Did we ever find…water?” Gantt asked, his eyes narrowed against the rising sun.

“Yes, we did.”

“
Sehr gut
.”

Gantt’s eyes slid shut again. Michael and the boy waited.

Perhaps ten minutes later, Gantt looked into Michael’s face and said, “You
English
. Playing at war. With your…tea breaks. Your…what was that? Aftershave lotion? Oh, my! Well…you…shall go down to defeat…smelling like gentlemen. For that…I salute you.”

“Many thanks,” said Michael, who didn’t think he could look into Gantt’s face much longer, for the man was fading away minute by minute.

And as time was of the essence, suddenly the essence became time.

Gantt held up his arm and began to remove his wristwatch.

“What are you doing?” Michael asked.

“This.” Gantt got the Breitling off. He regarded not the timepiece itself, but the plain leather band. “I want…you…to have it,” he said, and he offered it to Michael.

“I can’t take that.”

“If you don’t…
they
will.”

True enough. Eventually the Dahlasiffa would come back, Devil or not.

Michael accepted the watch. “I will take care of—”

“You’d better,” Gantt interrupted. “It’s come…such a long way.”

The dice were rolling, back and forth.

The sun was coming up. A hot, clear dawn. Flying weather, Gantt might have said.

“Michael?” Gantt whispered, his voice nearly gone.

“Yes?”

“We…men…of action,” he said, and then he smiled. “Must never…stop…
trying
. Eh?”

“Never,” Michael agreed.

“Good man,” said Gantt, and then he watched the sun as it rose higher.

Sometime during the next few minutes, he left this world.

Michael felt it, and saw the empty stare in the man’s eyes, and when he checked the pulse and heartbeat he verified what he already knew. The boy stopped rolling his dice and he sat looking at the body of Rolfe Gantt, the famous Messerschmitt ace, the shining example to German youth, the celebrity, the great lover, the man of action, the hero.

After a while the boy crawled forward. He put the pair of dice in Gantt’s right hand, possibly for luck in the afterlife, and then he closed the fingers and he stood up and stretched as if awakening from a long sleep.

Michael put the Breitling in his pocket. There was no need to bury Gantt; the Dahlasiffa would just dig up the body. But it was only a suit of flesh, and the bird had flown.

It was time to find another two or three canteens, fill them up and find a way back home.

The boy motioned him to the camel corral.

Michael had no idea how to handle one of those creatures. How to saddle them up and get the bridles set. But fortunately the boy did, and he was very efficient about it.

They wet cloths and wrapped them around their heads and faces. They hung the canteens by leather cords from the saddles. They headed off in the direction they’d come, the boy leading the way on his camel and Michael just along for the ride. His camel seemed to hate him, and spat and fumed like a vindictive old man. Probably something in the way he smelled, Michael thought. But the camel moved onward, and so did the day.

On the second morning, with a hard hot wind blowing from the southwest, the two riders came across a platoon of soldiers escorted by a pair of tanks. The soldiers wore British khaki, and the tanks were Matildas. When Michael had made the platoon’s lieutenant understand who he was and where he’d come from, he and the boy were placed on one of the tanks and driven to a small air base called Al Massir, about twenty kilometers to the east.

The base had a hospital. It wasn’t much, but they had soft beds and cooling palm-frond fans that turned at the ceiling. Michael’s broken shoulder was set and put into a cast and his cuts swabbed with iodine. He decided not to look into any mirrors for a while, because he’d seen the expression on the face of the young and attractive brunette nurse. Then Michael and the boy both slept more than twelve hours, and when they awakened they were given glasses of orange juice and plates of scrambled eggs, figs, and olives. An apple-cheeked, serious red-haired captain named Findley-Hughes came in with a clipboard to ask Michael questions and take notes, and this went on interminably until Michael asked the young man if he’d had his eighteenth birthday yet.

After that they were pretty much left on their own.

Except for the attractive brunette nurse. She came in quite often to see him, and to fuss over him, and to smooth his hair and once even to sit by his bed and sing to him.

She just couldn’t seem to leave that boy alone.

She brought him some jacks and a ball. Michael watched him shaking the jacks in his hand, and he saw the boy cast them on the floor and bounce the ball. And as he scooped up the jacks in the hand that used to hold a pair of dead man’s dice the boy smiled, and from then on the brunette nurse had him running errands around the hospital and the base. The doctor gave him a nickname: Jacky. Then one afternoon Michael heard the brunette nurse call him
Jack
, and the boy looked at her as if all his life he’d been waiting to hear that name spoken by a voice just like hers.