The Secret of Raven Point (30 page)

The next day he made his bed and dressed himself in his khakis. His boots were shined and his laces tied; he sat on the edge of his bed expectantly, and she wondered where he thought he was going.

These improvements seemed to her further proof of the injustice of the universe. Was Barnaby recovering only in time to understand his looming punishment? Witnessing Barnaby’s daily feats, the staff shook their heads with heartbroken bewilderment.
Major Decker stopped by to commend Barnaby on his recovery, but as he turned to leave, his eyes glazed over with defeat. Each morning Juliet restrained her enthusiasm as she reported Barnaby’s progress to Dr. Willard. Together they tested Barnaby’s reflexes and made notes. Willard had been consumed with the paperwork surrounding Barnaby’s appeal, but now he wanted to arrange an immediate Sodium Pentothal interview. He felt that only a statement from Barnaby, cognizant and articulate, could change the army’s mind. If Barnaby had come this far out of his coma, he might be on the cusp of conscious speech.

“One more door,” Willard told her. “Let’s try to open one more door.”

Juliet guided Barnaby up the wide stone staircase; in the hallway they followed the wavering light from one of the rooms.

She found Willard seated on a queen-sized sleigh bed gleaming with lacquer. The mattress was bare. A small kerosene lamp sat on the stone floor, and near it Juliet saw an oblong stain of blood. The size of an arm or of a lower leg. The rooms on the upper level had been the site of a firefight; her eyes traced the wallpaper until she spotted three bullet holes in a near-perfect triangular arrangement. An ornately framed mirror hung above a wide wooden dresser; the sole jagged remnant of glass now flashed in the half dark. The white sheet covering the broken window blew in on a gust, and she saw that the room had a spectacular view of the moonlit mountains.

“Shall we start?” Willard dragged a green armchair beside the bed and gestured for Barnaby to sit. Barnaby stroked the armrests and surveyed the room until he happened on the bullet holes.

Juliet crouched before him, rolling up the thick sleeve of his winter shirt. “Don’t worry about that. We’re going to go away from here for a little while,” she said, sliding the needle into his arm.

She watched the familiar flutter of Barnaby’s eye, the slackening of his mouth, the dip and rise and dip of his chin as he keeled, like a boat, toward semislumber. They waited nearly a minute until his eye opened fully and he stared straight ahead.

“Christopher, it’s Dr. Willard.” Willard, seated on the edge of the bed, leaned toward Barnaby. “We’ve talked before, and we’ve talked a lot about you not feeling right, and it’s important to me that we find a way to get you better. So I want to find out exactly when you started having trouble. I’d like you to tell us about the time you were shot in the shoulder. When you first came to the hospital, months back. Okay?”

Barnaby’s long figure sank into the chair. He nodded slowly, as though part of a perfectly normal conversation. “Well, we were somewhere near the Volturno. We’d been walking for days. My helmet weighed a hundred pounds. My pack straps were eating into my shoulders; I was bleeding through my shirt. The platoon got orders to clear out some town. Make sure Germans weren’t hiding in the buildings. Clearing a town is leapfrog business, and my squad had to go in first over this old wall with deep ditches on either side. It wasn’t an easy climb, and I kept losing my foothold. Three of us were over when Geronimo, right beside me, pumping his fist for us to move in—boom, collapsed. I saw the black dot on his forehead before he started bleeding. Sniper fire.

“The rest of us made it over the wall, Sergeant McKnight shouting for us to spread out. Spread out—they tell you that all the time in training but all you wanna do when you’re out there is bunch up, stick together. Three of us made a dash from the wall to the house where the sniper was firing from. He must have been alone, ’cause as we got close, he hung a white rag out the window. McKnight shouted something in German and the sniper dropped his gun out the window. Pretty soon he came out, hands over his head. He was the very first German I’d ever seen. He looked small and fairly normal.
I remember thinking, if he were wearing a different uniform, you’d never know he was German.

“The rest of the squad was coming around the back of the house. Pretty soon, McKnight and Rakowski began shouting at the German. They’d been fighting alongside Geronimo well over a year, since Africa, so they were frothing at the mouth. . . . ‘You fuckin’ Jerry devil . . . Geronimo was a good man.’ The German puts his hands behind his head, biting at his lower lip, and gets down on his knees. He’s looking at the ground, and his helmet tilts forward over his eyes, but he’s too scared to move it. ‘
Nicht schießen,
’ he says. ‘
Nicht schießen
.’ He keeps repeating that in these short, stabbing whispers, like he’s talking to himself, talking to God. Sergeant McKnight’s watching him, kicking at the dirt, that vein in his forehead getting fat. He orders Rakowski and Dufresne to take the Jerry to the rear, so they each grab an elbow and haul the German off the ground and start heading back toward the wall.”

At the name “Dufresne,” Juliet’s neck tensed. Her hands went cold. She looked to her lap, staring at the thick weave of her khaki pants, the brown stitching along her zipper, trying to tune out everything in the room, listening carefully to Barnaby’s words, holding each detail in her mind like a pebble plucked from a riverbed.

“McKnight’s looking at me. ‘Stop batting your fucking eyelashes at every Jerry,’ he says. Just as Rakowski and Dufresne get close to the wall, McKnight signals them to let go of the sniper. So the German’s standing there all alone, his helmet still tilted, and McKnight trains his rifle on him. McKnight’s just waiting, waiting for him to start moving, and finally the Jerry takes one step, then another, and soon he’s walking, walking faster, staring at the ground, breaking into a run, and I hear a gun go
pop
. Dufresne ran right over to the sniper, crouching to see if he was alive.

“As he walked back to the rest of us, he shook his head.

‘I’m getting tired of that shit,’ Dufresne shouted, throwing his gun down. He hadn’t slept in days. McKnight said it wasn’t a committee and ordered us to move out.”

Juliet heard Willard lift the lantern. He held it close to Barnaby’s face, then shifted it toward Juliet. He studied her expression, which she was rapidly losing the power to compose. Her cheeks felt hot, her eyes moist. Her desperation must have shown. For months Tuck’s voice had been fading from her memory; she’d had trouble even picturing his face. But here he was, vivid and alive, in the half light of a ruined hotel suite. She nodded pleadingly for Willard to continue.

Willard slowly turned back to Barnaby: “So you knew Tucker Dufresne?”

Barnaby worked his thumbs nervously over the green velvet of the armrests. “I owe Tucker.”

“What for?”

Barnaby shook his head, sharply. “It wasn’t what they said.”

“What did
they
say?”

“Lies. Nothing but lies about what he did.”

Willard looked down for a moment, evidently disturbed, then returned his stare to Barnaby. “Okay, explain to me what happened next, Christopher.”

“McKnight ordered me and Dufresne to check this field past the town. We had to stay low, crouching in the grass. I followed Dufresne; those were the orders. He’d been with the squad longer and always knew what he was doing, never got in harm’s way. He told me not to get trigger-happy—one pop from my rifle, and Jerry would know right where we were. But pretty soon there was gunfire, and out of nowhere the whole field started shaking, the ground spraying dirt. Dufresne started crawling faster, and I was just trying to stay still, but he said to keep moving, he could see a dugout ahead. I wanted to hide under my helmet, but Dufresne was shouting,
‘Move your ass, Barnaby,’ so I started moving and the next thing I knew, I felt this awful heat in my shoulder. It felt like I was pinned to the ground. ‘I’m hit,’ I called. ‘You gotta keep moving,’ he yelled. But the ache in my shoulder was coming on strong, so I set my head in the grass and closed my eyes. I was getting ready to say a prayer when Dufresne yanked me by my legs, pulling me along the grass. Musta been forty yards. Bullets kept flying over us—you could hear them when they came close—but pretty soon we did a roll-tuck into the dugout.

“‘Jesus, you shouldn’t have done that,’ I told him.

“‘Probably not.’ He was tired, I could see. Afraid, too. I think we’d both wet our pants from fear.

“He poured sulfonamide on my wound, then tore the sleeve off his shirt and tourniqueted my arm. I couldn’t move much, and I asked him how long he thought they’d keep shooting. ‘Days,’ he said. ‘Minutes. Doesn’t matter. Anyone crosses that field, I shoot.’

“Dufresne was like that. Tough as nails.

“But the firing continued all around us, and we had no idea where the rest of the squad had gone. There was no one to cover us. So we sat there, talking low. . . . It was the first we’d really talked but we had to fill the hours—we talked about comics, cars, family stuff. He kept his eye on the field. That whole day went by, then the night. Dufresne was right. We were pinned there for two days, grenades getting lobbed just a few feet from our dugout. I was getting weaker, feverish. We were down to the last of our canteens. We kept thinking the squad would come looking for us—we were exactly where they’d sent us—but nothing. Dufresne was getting mad at McKnight. Had they left us for dead? We ate what we had, only taking small sips of water here and there so we could stay alert. We talked ourselves awake, talked about everything that ever happened to us. On the second night, I woke in the dark and realized the shooting had stopped. I was feeling so weak, I grabbed our last
ration bar, took a bite, then whispered Dufresne’s name to give him some. But he was gone. You can’t imagine what that feels like. You come over here belonging to something, you’re a part of something: your squad, your battalion, your army, your country. You can do all these things you’d never wanna do because there are others there with you. You’re in this shit together. Then suddenly you wake up, alone, in some dark, human
nowhere
. You don’t belong to anything but the earth beneath you. You hope with everything in you that God above is watching, but Brilling always said God would think I was an abomination. I thought I’d been forsaken. I sat there crying in the dark, preparing to die alone, but as the sun came up, I saw Dufresne’s white glove sitting in my lap. It was like seeing a cactus in the desert. No one ever touched Dufresne’s white glove. It never left his jacket pocket. But I knew he set it there for me, a sign that he’d gone to get help. That’s the only thing that kept me alive, knowing I hadn’t just been left there. Knowing Dufresne was coming back for me.

“My shoulder was aching and I was still losing blood, so I closed my eyes. Soon I heard voices. Footsteps came toward me, and I felt my heart hammering. I got my breathing real still. I felt my body being turned about—I kept my eyes closed and stayed silent, thinking it was the Germans. Hands patted down my jacket; someone took off my watch, my dog tags; then everything went still. I don’t know how much time passed. My shoulder went numb. My head felt light. I passed out.

“Next thing I knew, I heard a thump and felt something heavy pressing against me. Then there was dirt on my face, falling in my nostrils, my mouth, and I started coughing. I felt hands on my face, brushing off the dirt.

“‘Shit, he ain’t dead!’ he laughs. It was Kirkland from the platoon.

“I could barely talk, I was so weak, but I asked about Dufresne. They said they hadn’t seen anyone else. I said he’d be headed back
there to find me, that he’d gone to get help. They said no way in hell. They said the Germans had retreated in the night and the area was clear and he’d show up soon enough.

“At the field hospital they stitched me up. The company commander was there. Brilling. I showed him the glove, explained Tuck had left me with it and that I knew it meant he was coming back. I said they had to go look for him. Brilling got the wrong idea.”

“Wrong idea?”

“It made him crazy, that glove. He said I’d taken it from Dufresne. It made him crazy that Dufresne had saved me. Brilling had lost so many men it was starting to eat away at his mind. It was like he blamed himself for every death. He started saying maybe Dufresne had deserted, Dufresne was insubordinate, and I said I knew he’d never do a thing like that. And he asked me how I knew Dufresne’s mind so well. Dufresne left me that glove, I knew that. Someone else in the squad said they’d heard Dufresne’s voice in the night, shouting in the field. I thought about the possibility that Dufresne had been killed trying to get me help and I started to cry. I was still stretched thin from living alone in that dugout. The crying made Captain even angrier.”

“What exactly did the captain say to you?”

Barnaby invoked a haunting baritone that filled the darkened room: “‘Quit crying, you fucking pansy ass.’”

Willard removed his glasses and rubbed the corners of his eyes. “Did you talk to anyone about what happened in the dugout? About their trying to bury you? Did you see a psychiatrist?”