The Bells of Times Square

by Amy Lane

  They lay there, still and quiet as mice for the next few hours, but that didn’t mean they didn’t communicate. Nate lifted his hands over his head to stretch after a moment, raising his face to the sun streaming in the high loft window, closing his eyes against the hay-colored dust. Walter passed his hand over the plane of Nate’s stomach, slowly, so slowly Nate could feel every callus on the pads of Walter’s fingers and his palm. It was not a sexual touch, per se, but it was . . . sensual.

  Nate kept his hands under his head, allowing his stomach to rise and fall with the warmth of Walter’s hand against his ribs. He cocked his head and grinned, and Walter smiled shyly in return.

  Breath, breath, breath, the weight of Walter’s palm steady on his body. Nate blinked and nodded, and that was the signal. Walter rolled to his back fully and stretched, and Nate did the same thing. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling that silky skin and the stringy muscles. Walter breathed out sharply through his nose, and Nate moved his hand softly up, framing Walter’s throat just to feel his pulse.

  Walter closed his eyes and put his hand on top of Nate’s. Nate lost track of the moments they continued this way, silently touching each other, not to arouse but just to feel the other’s pulse, breath, and skin.

  But the arousal was always there, intention or not, simmering just underneath the surface.

  At nightfall, when the shadows crept down, dimming the single window, they heard the farmer stomping away, muttering one last curse at the cows. It was Walter’s turn to lay with his hand along Nate’s stomach, and as soon as the door closed, he met Nate’s eyes and smiled that shy smile that Nate had become used to with their tenderness in bed.

  Without a word—because they were unused to speaking by now, their mouths gummy, throats dusty with only a few gulps of water to sustain them throughout the day—he undid Nate’s belt and his trousers and slid his hand underneath the waistband.

  His hand on Nate’s cock was enormous, the fist of doom, shaking the earth. It engulfed all of Nate’s body, strong and hard, warm and safe; it became all of Nate’s world. He closed his eyes against the splintered boards of the loft, against the bales upon bales of hay, and breathed in warm animal, the spring-verdant earth outside, the musk and unapologetic sweat of the man who held Nate’s life in his palm.

  Walter stroked without finesse, but then, none was needed. The burn of their desire had been in every quiet touch, every indrawn breath, every moment when their eyes had met and they’d tried desperately to read each other’s mind. A few dozen harsh breaths, strokes of Nate’s cock being both caressed and abused, and he gasped, the lights behind his eyes an acidic red and green, and climax swept his body with naked claws.

  At his side, Walter fumbled and then covered the head with a rough cloth, and Nate had no help for it but to spurt, spilling semen into Walter’s hand and the dirty linen he’d apparently wadded in his pocket during their hasty exit from the summer cabin.

  For the next few minutes, Nate held his hand to his chest to keep his heart from leaping out, and Walter cleaned him roughly. When he was done, he tucked Nate’s manhood back behind the placket of his trousers, did his belt, and met Nate’s eyes in the fallen darkness.

  “We should go to the stream,” he said softly.

  Nate nodded and palmed the back of Walter’s head, pulling him to his sweaty chest. “Yes,” he agreed, because it was time. “But tomorrow, it’s your turn.”

  “I wouldn’t object to that.” One corner of Walter’s mouth was twisted up in a smirk Nate found truly endearing. He ran his finger over that corner of his mouth.

  I had never dreamed of being in love. I did not know the mechanics, the nuts and bolts, the quirk of lips, the texture of skin, the dimension of another’s hands upon my body. Forgive me, Father. I did not know you made this thing as vast as the sky, so that we may see the sky and not tremble.

  “Good,” Nate whispered. “I shall enjoy it.”

  Walter scrambled to the hay ladder, and the moment ended, became one of the pocketful of them that Nate would finger smooth like river pebbles in the years to come.

  There was no one at the stream that night to greet them with food or news, so they had no choice. They relieved themselves and drank copiously, then relieved themselves again. Reluctantly, as dawn approached, they refilled the canteen and ventured back to the barn. Nate spotted some carrots hanging by the door of the one horse stall and snagged them on his way up the ladder. He got to the top of the loft and realized Walter was missing.

  “Wal—” He choked off his words at the distant sound of voices—the old man and someone else—and searched wildly around the barn. He spotted that bright-orange head, low and practically hidden by the largest, most fertile of the bovines, and felt his bowels loosen, as empty as they were.

  “Walter!” he hissed furiously, and Walter glared up at him, holding what appeared to be a half-filled milk bucket.

  “That’s wonderful. Get your scrawny body up the fucking ladder!”

  Walter’s eyes opened widely—surprised by the blasphemy probably—and he stood up and slid between cow bodies to get out of the stall. He was halfway to the ladder when he heard the old man’s voice rise querulously, and Nate draped himself over the edge of the hayloft to take the bucket so Walter could climb faster.

  For his entire life, Nate would wonder how he hadn’t simply died of terror in those moments. They heard the voices, they heard the old man: he was coming and someone else with him, someone with a sharp, snarly voice speaking French with a German accent.

  In fear and desperation, Nate threw his flight jacket on top of the milk bucket and then scattered straw over it. Walter had scrambled up, and together they lay on their stomachs on the wool blanket and covered themselves with hay. Nate had just pulled what felt like half a bale over their heads and was wondering if either one of them could breathe when they heard the muffled sound of the door opening, and the argument that had been outside snarled its way in.

  “I’m telling you, there is no resistance in these parts,” the old man said. “You can search my barn all you want, but all you’ll find is cows and shit. Feel free to take some of the shit with you.”

  There was the click of a Beretta, and the old man’s high-pitched voice tinged bright with fear.

  “Now listen to me, old man. We are missing the one officer in my barracks who could find his cock in the dark. I don’t care which of you maggots is responsible—be they resistance, puling cattle, it makes no difference to me. But if I find out that you or anybody concealed the whereabouts of the fucker who made him disappear, I shall watch your brains spatter across the barn, do you hear me?”

  There was a sharp report then, loud enough to frighten the cows into lowing, and the old man cried out despairingly. “Gertrude! She was my best milker; without her I cannot feed my family!”

  “You should do what civilized people do,” the officer snarled. “Eat steak.” The gun sounded again, several times, but since the cows continued their terrified lowing and the old man’s wailing was still loud and pitiful, Nate had to contain his panic. It was cruel, meant to terrorize, nothing more. In the fury of the firing, Walter’s hand crept into his, and he felt water slide along his nose, saturating the wool blanket beneath his face.

  Terrorizing tactics. Well, yes, they were working.

  There was a pause then, and Nate had to force himself to breathe, slowly and with great restraint. The sound of booted feet echoed hollowly on the floorboards of the barn, even muffled by the straw, and the cows, apparently, were frightened into silence. For a moment, there was nothing, no sound but the petty god who held their life and death in his hands.

  There was another moment, and then the creaking sound of the ladder straining under the weight of a body. Some grunts, some prodding of the straw—Nate could hear these things but he was too busy holding his breath to worry that his own pile of straw was moving. Underneath his hip and his stomach, he felt a seeping wetness, and his heart stalled. Oh God. Wh
at if Walter had been hit? What if after all of this, Walter had been randomly killed by fire meant to do nothing but frighten an old man?

  The wetness continued to seep, and then the smell of ammonia made the space under the straw even closer and more strangling.

  Walter’s hand squeezed his, and he let more tears slip by.

  We are both frightened, Walter. I’ll never mention it. If we survive to live side by side, it will be as though you never dropped your water and I never cried.

  He remembered Walter saying once that he’d fallen asleep while the Nazis were searching the house because if they were going to find him, he could have missed that part without worry. He was not sure how long they lay, faces pressed against the wool, Walter’s urine seeping through their clothes, but he did feel a moment of slipping away, of almost peace, exhaustion slowing his heart, relaxing his muscles. He didn’t tense when that heavy, jackbooted body thumped down the ladder, and he barely blinked when the barn door slammed, leaving only the weeping old man, the restless livestock, and the visceral blood and shit smell of the murdered cow.

  They lay there quiet for the rest of the day, and Nate simply drifted. Below them, the farmer’s family and friends engaged in a flurry of activity, hauling out the murdered cow to butcher so that they might at least have the meat, and cleaning the blood out of the stall. It took many people, all of them bemoaning the Nazis and railing against the rebels who were trying to get them killed.

  On the one hand, he felt a lingering guilt: he had been—no matter how inadvertently—a part of the instrument to bring vengeance on these people. On the other hand, he felt a simmering anger. There were so many brave men and women facing death, making sacrifices—what was worse? To lose the cow to a senseless murder, or to sacrifice a cow knowing that what you were doing was saving the lives of two men who were part of the effort to help?

  But then, even Nate couldn’t put anything more specific than “war effort” to the tenuous connection between the film in his pocket and the life of the farmer’s cow.

  It was a tangle, and the best thing that could be said about it was that it kept him hypnotized and in his own head for the better part of the day. Finally, as darkfall began to tinge the inside of the barn, the last of the family and friends cleared out.

  Nate and Walter waited until full dark, until they heard nothing but the lowing of cattle and chirping of crickets, before they squeezed each other’s hands and struggled to a sitting position as though they’d worn a stack of bricks on their bodies instead of straw.

  Nate rustled in the straw and came back with Walter’s change of clothes. Walter did the same and returned with the carrots and the milk. He sniffed experimentally and then let Nate sniff.

  “I . . .” Nate’s tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth, and he realized he hadn’t been able to swallow for hours. He took a swig from the canteen and passed the water to Walter. “I don’t think it turned,” Nate said after a moment of swishing the water around his mouth. “I think the jacket and the straw must have kept it insulated.”

  Walter nodded and sipped experimentally, then gulped, as though he couldn’t help it. Nate tapped him on the shoulder, not so much because he was craving milk for his own but because he was pretty sure Walter would make himself sick. Walter put the bucket down and went for the carrots next, and Nate took his turn with the milk bucket. After a few moments, they were no longer light-headed, but their hearts were still as heavy as they had been.

  “I have got to fuckin’ wash and change,” Walter said after a pause.

  “I’ll bring the blanket too,” Nate murmured. “It’s as though you read my mind.”

  They were silent on the trek to the creek, both of them mindful that it was much earlier this evening than it had been the last. They found a quiet, deep place in the stream—but one with moving water—and undressed, washing and wringing their soiled clothes first and their bodies second. When they were done, they sat naked on a flat rock and met each other’s eyes.

  “If the fucking Nazis find us now, I’ll drown myself,” Walter said after a moment, and for no logical reason whatsoever, that struck Nate as high comedy. He snickered, choking the sound against his hand, and it wasn’t enough. He ended up laughing silently against his upper arm, shoulders shaking, eyes streaming with tears.

  Walter held his cupped hands up to his face, trying to keep himself from letting the noise out. One heel beat a fruitless tattoo against the side of the rock.

  Nate wasn’t sure either one of them could stop. With a gasp, he jumped back into the water and watched, relieved, as Walter did the same. After a deep breath, he submerged himself fully and came back up for air, and when Walter emerged from his own dunking, Nate held out his arms.

  “I need to hold you,” he said, completely sober.

  Walter nodded, and that’s all there was for a moment: Walter’s body in his arms, their bare skin touching in the cool water.

  They separated after a moment—so much danger, even in a stream in the middle of the night. After that, there was nothing to do but to hang their clothes and blanket up for a cursory drying and to crouch in the shadows, waiting for someone who may or may not come.

  “If someone comes,” Nate whispered, “let me talk to him. Stay in hiding.”

  “I’m not a coward,” Walter snarled.

  Nate grunted in irritation. “I’m an officer, damn it. Me, they’ll capture. You, they’ll execute.”

  Walter’s sigh was eloquent and defeated. “I’d rather die than hide like this anymore.”

  “Don’t say that!” Nate’s voice rose sharply, and Walter rapped him equally sharply on the arm. “Don’t say that,” Nate hissed, not willing to give up.

  “I need you to live,” Walter murmured, and he sounded done in, too done in to have an emotion-fraught conversation in the dark. “But that’s about the only thing I’ve got the strength to need.”

  They were sitting in the shadows of the underbrush, waiting for the night to pass. Nate shoved himself back against the tree a little more firmly and took Walter’s hand.

  “Sleep, Walter,” he said softly. He looked up at the full moon and wondered what day it was. He’d crashed in early March—surely Passover had come and gone. Had his parents given away all of their unwanted food the day before, to the non-Jews they knew? Would they give that food to Walter and expect him to be grateful? Had they opened the doors on the third glass of wine? Had they told the story of the four brothers—the Wise, the Wicked, the Simple, and the Young?

  Walter’s breathing fell into an exhausted rhythm next to him, and Nate wondered almost despairingly which brother he would be. Once, he’d thought he was the Wise. He knew the traditions, he respected them, but he was practical too, knew when to blend in.

  But this thing with Walter . . . it had become all of his being. Was he Wicked, turning his back on this part of his faith? Was he Simple, believing that the one section of Leviticus had no meaning? Or was he merely Young, naive to believe that love could be so important that God would love it in all its forms?

  He didn’t know. He knew he missed the Seder feast—never again would he take for granted a full plate or a cup of wine. Never again would he take for granted his family—repressive father, vain mother. Who was he to judge? They had toasted his health with wine in a time when wine and all things were hard to come by. The world around him had been getting their hands dirty for food, and somehow his parents had reminded him that every hard-earned scrap of it had been a blessing.

  The Seder feast was a reminder of the things his people had been deprived of, and of how to remember that a home and plenty were not to take as a given.

  Nate had taken his home and his plenty for granted. But then, men like him and Walter were always destined to be cast out at the feast, weren’t they?

  My people painted lamb’s blood on our doors so God would not take out his wrath on our sons. Walter would have been left out in the cold. Or his was the blood that would have been painted
on the doors. He is innocent, oh God. He is the Young. He is the Young, and he needs our protection, and Wise, Wicked, or Simple, I am all he has.

  Around dawn, he heard the crackle of branches and the sibilance of a French accent. “American! American, are you here? My sister, Ouida, sent me.”

  Nate had been covered in fear and sweating in urine all day—the instinct to stay hidden and say nothing was almost stronger than his hunger.

  “American, I helped clean up François’s cow this afternoon. You were brave to stay silent, but now that I have some of that cow cooked, it would be foolish not to show yourself.”

  Nate’s stomach, which had sat silently all day, eating its own lining in the acid of fear, suddenly spoke up, and the voice gave a gentle chuckle.

  “Ouida said you were cagey. But we missed you last night, and your schedule has moved up. Please . . . this could be the only food you get until the plane lands.”

  “It would be a shame to miss that,” Nate said quietly, leaving his hiding place. “Poor Gertrude.” As far as Nate could tell, Walter stayed fast asleep.

  “Ah, you are here.” At last, Nate could put a face to the voice, and, yes, he looked very like his sister—dark curling hair, full lips, soft brown eyes, and delicate features.

  “It would seem,” Nate said, smiling as best he could. Standing, he could actually smell the cooked meat, and his body was remembering that mostly unspoiled milk and carrots did not really sustain it for that much fear.

  “My sister said there was another one. He’s not—”

  “No!” Nate muttered quickly. “No. He is fine, but I am letting him sleep. It has not been . . .”

  “Yes,” the young man murmured. “I understand. I’m Everard. Pleased to meet you.”

  Nate met the young man’s hand and remembered who he was. For the first time in over a month, he introduced himself as, “Lieutenant Nathan Meyer, US Air Force. Pleased to meet you.”