Flanders

by Patricia Anthony

  “Lucky it’s not Marrs who’s going,” Pickering said. “Lie down out there, and his bum would rise to the breeze. Only soldier I know who ever got shot in the arse, our Marrs. Did you know that, Calvert? Poor Fritz. Considering the size of his target, he couldn’t bloody miss.”

  Get enough of Pickering’s shit, anyone would sour. “Fuck you, Pickering. Can’t you leave him the hell alone for once?” The sun was already low in the sky. Soon night would come. And sleep, if I could manage any. Then waking up before the sun came up and crawling into the dark with LeBlanc. I took another drink. “Needs lemon peel,” I said.

  “And fuck you back.” Pleasant old Pickering. Not a feather ruffled.

  “Don’t like them eff words like you uses.” This from Calvert. “Wif the bof of you, it’s effing this and effing that. You talk like that wif ladies about?”

  “With the ladies? I’ve never had complaint.” Pickering clapped his hand down on Marrs’s knee, stared deeply into his eyes, pursed him a kiss. “Isn’t that true, my sweet?”

  Marrs snorted so with laughter that tea ran out his nose.

  I don’t know whether it was Pickering’s bad joke or the helplessness of Marrs’s laughter, but right then, Bobby, right that very minute, I loved those boys so much. They were my chums. The originals. They were all I had.

  After we had climbed into our cubbyholes that night and the candle had burned down to nothing, long after the others had started to snore, I reached down and prodded Pickering.

  In the cubbyhole below me, he stirred. The sky was clear, the dugout cavern-dark. Across the way, moonlight flowed down the sandbags like cascades of milky water.

  His throat sounded clogged; his voice was sleepy. “What?”

  Outside, misty light coated everything—even a pozzy pot left illegally on the firestep. The night was fragile, like you could take a deep breath and blow the dusty moonlight away.

  “What?” Pickering was irritated.

  “You see anything funny about me?”

  Cloth rustled. There were sounds of a heavy body moving. Pickering had evidently turned over on his back and pulled the sleeping bag aright. “Har-har. I’d like to laugh more at you, Stanhope, but it’s so bloody late. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s so effing dark, you see.”

  “No. Really. You ever see anything different about me?”

  “Yes.” Very sober now. “It comes as a surprise, Stanhope, but I must tell you in all honesty—and in this light it’s quite plain—you’re black as the ace of spades.”

  “Blackhall thinks I’m . . .” I couldn’t just jump in and tell him, Bobby. I mean, our cubbyholes were on top of each other; well within groping distance. “You know.”

  More shifting sounds. The noise of Pickering clearing his throat. “I know what?”

  “How some fellows are. Funny.”

  “I’ve never thought you particularly funny, Stanhope.”

  Pickering was the clown of the platoon. He didn’t care much for competition.

  “Blackhall doesn’t think I like the ladies.”

  I could hear him breathing.

  I filled my lungs with the dank trench air and then just let all my worries go. “Hell, he accused me of being a poof, is what he did. I don’t think I am.”

  I thought of the way I loved the platoon. How I loved Miller. But that’s different, Bobby, isn’t it? Pickering was awful damned quiet, so I went on. “I used to think you could tell, like you can tell a high yellow by looking at the palms of their hands. I mean, queers’d walk a certain way or stand kind of funny. Something in the way they said things, maybe. Not a lisp, particularly, but somehow, someway, you could pick ’em out. Then I come here and there’s two men who figure I light-step; and now I got to thinking—what if I really am queer, and I just can’t see it yet? You been around, right? You’re married and all. Hell, Pickering. You think I’m like that?”

  Cloth rustled. His voice came muffled. He’d turned toward the wall again. “Go to sleep.”

  Outside, moonlight sat atop sandbags like a pale dusting of snow.

  “Oh, and Stanhope?”

  A rat, cloaked in magic, crawled along the firestep.

  “Don’t play with my bum,” he said.

  I shut my eyes and went from peace into peace: the sun-drenched, peeling steps; angels with downturned, shadowed faces. I kept walking, past the mausoleum, past glass-topped graves with soldiers sleeping under. Through a landscape still green with the remains of summer.

  A cool wind struck my cheek. Autumn coming.

  I turned and saw that I was dangerously near the cypress, so close that I could fall in. The cold breeze came at me from the dark. It ruffled my hair. It teased my collar. It sucked me to it.

  Faster now. Racing toward my already written future. Past the last grave, an angel desperately but uselessly reaching. Past the birdsong and sunlight and into humming silence. I stopped, teetering, at the edge. In the pitch black beyond, someone called—not man, not woman. Not eager, but not indifferent, either. A cool wind and a tepid sort of voice.

  And then it was LeBlanc calling from the trench’s shadows. The moon had set. The air was damp and chill, the world quiet in the way it can only be when night has made its slow swing toward morning. I crawled out of my cubbyhole and jumped to the ground.

  “Come on. I got our breakfast and lunch in my haversack,” LeBlanc whispered. “Your turn tomorrow.”

  A surprise. He sounded sleepy, and because of it, vulnerable.

  In a firebay of the early morning trench a candle was burning, the sentry, Harold Martin, beside it. He had set a ladder up, and he was waiting for us on the firestep, half-asleep.

  “Luck,” he mumbled as we started our way up the parapet. I looked down and caught one final glimpse: Martin weary and nodding in the warm light of his candle.

  I crawled through the hole LeBlanc made in the wire. I wormed after him into the raw, churned earth of No Man’s Land. We found us a shell hole and waited for the sun to rise.

  LeBlanc must have picked up on my mood. “It won’t be so bad, Stanhope. You needed out of that crappy trench, anyway. Needed some air.”

  The sun came up in pastel shades of pink, our briar patch of wire black sutures on the tender cheek of dawn. In the faint rosy light, rats slunk back toward the trenches and home. Birds stirred. Across the way, the Boche army stretched and yawned.

  LeBlanc popped up, quick as a squirrel, and down again. He grinned at me. “Clear. I make it one hundred and thirty yards.”

  “I don’t need anybody computing distance for me.”

  “Sure. There’s a break in the parapet about thirty yards to the left.”

  “I don’t need anybody wiping my ass for me, neither.”

  I popped up for a look-see. A little slower than LeBlanc, but still plenty safe. Nothing was happening.

  “Don’t get mad at me, Stanhope,” LeBlanc said. “It’s that cocksucker Blackhall who’s your problem. You know what he wants, eh? Eh? He sends us out here hoping both our asses’ll get blown to hell, that’s what. Bang, Stanhope. Bang, LeBlanc. Two less headaches.”

  That scared me. “We’ll snap a few quick ones and then change position,” I said. “I don’t want no mortar rounds tossed my way.”

  “Sitting fucking ducks.” LeBlanc’s scope was hooded with brown paper, so as not to reflect the light. He fiddled with it. I thought he was about to go spotting, but he sighed and twisted belly-up to watch the sunrise.

  After the pink light came the gold, like a visitation from God. Grandeur shone through LeBlanc’s lifted fingers and striped my sleeves with grace. It wasn’t a morning to go killing.

  “Or,” I said, “we could just pretend to shoot and not really do it.”

  LeBlanc balled up the camouflage tarp. Out of rage, I thought at first. His voice, though, was calm. “We could.”

  Abruptly he threw the tarp upward. It left the blue shadows of our hole and for a magic instant caught the dawn. Two quick snaps across
No Man’s Land, no louder than the pop of a finger. The tarp jerked twice as it billowed down—the Boche sniper had shot it. The Maxim went off then, too. Bullets started smacking the dirt.

  LeBlanc held his sides and laughed. “Hey. You mad enough now, Stanhope? Ready to shoot some Boche?”

  “You crazy damned peckerwood.”

  LeBlanc started screaming.

  The helpless, stunned agony in his voice made me go cold. Despite memories of Smoot, I reached out to help him. LeBlanc was rolling around in the shell hole. For the life of me, I couldn’t see where he was shot.

  He twitched out of my one-handed grasp and slid down the incline, right into the mud. His screams were weaker now, more grunts of pain.

  I slid down after him. “Where’s it, LeBlanc? Where you hurt?”

  When I got closer, I saw that he was grinning. Above us, the bullets stopped. “They think they got us,” he said, and winked.

  “You crazy bastard.” Said with such venom that he stopped smiling. My hand tightened on my gun.

  He didn’t apologize. I didn’t bother to warn him not to pull a stunt like that again. We stayed where we were for a while, and when the sun had risen high and the day was warming, we crawled out of that shell hole and found us a spot where the turf had been lifted up by an explosion. We had us some breakfast. Eventually, we both forgot our mad and got to joking around again. I watched the spot where the Boche parapet was falling down and weak; and when the crew showed up to resandbag it, I got me a kill. After that, LeBlanc and me, under cover of that gouge, moved on.

  We ate lunch. The Boche never did get a fix on us—the Maxim was shooting way right of the mark. When the day got hot, we hunkered down in a hole and took us a little nap. I didn’t dream. I don’t know, Bobby. Maybe dreams come harder here.

  Late afternoon, we moved around a little more. I snapped myself off a few more shots, didn’t hit anything. When night started to come on, LeBlanc and me risked the moonlight to get ourselves home.

  We crawled over the parapet and jumped down from the bags. Marrs and Pickering were waiting for us, wide-eyed.

  “Who was shot, then?” Marrs asked. “We heard a terrible screaming, and we thought someone was shot.”

  Poor, solicitous Marrs. LeBlanc and me laughed ourselves silly. I threw the camouflage tarp over Marrs’s head and stuck my finger into one of the bullet holes. I tickled his ribs. He tried to whip the tarp off, but I wouldn’t let him. We wrestled around in the twilight-filled trench. He crashed into the sandbags. Maybe he hurt himself, I don’t know. Anyway, he got to whining, the way Marrs does sometimes. I let him go.

  “Not fair,” Marrs pouted when I lifted the tarp off him. He started touching his nose ginger-like, as if it hurt him. “I thought you was dead, Stanhope. First Foy, then you. Felt all blue, I did.”

  “Blue? For me?” I laughed, but he still looked woeful. “That was just LeBlanc throwing off the Boche. Got ’em to stop firing. It was just a joke.”

  Then I saw Pickering standing in the wash of light from the dugout door, his droll face solemn. “Not funny, Stanhope,” he said.

  How would he know? He has to be the comedian; nobody else has the right. And that Brit humor, Bobby. Their goddamned puns and all. Shaggy dog stories without any point. Maybe it’s better that I didn’t get one of them out in No Man’s Land with me. They’d fall apart out there. One thing I can be sure of: LeBlanc never will.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 6, A POSTCARD FROM THE FRONT LINE

  Dear Bobby,

  It rained yesterday. LeBlanc and me found a little bit of shelter under the lip of an odd shell hole. Just when I get comfortable, LeBlanc drops his pants and squats to take a shit. Bastard’s laughing, too. Shit stank like something’d crawled up his ass and died. Well—bullets and rain or no—we had to move on. Goddamned Canuck’s got a weird sense of humor.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 9, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  The rotation’s slow now. They keep us too long at the front. Still playing cards with Gordon, the rum wallah, and I’m still winning. I take a full canteen to No Man’s Land now, just to while away the hours. Not that there’s much free time. Damned LeBlanc was born with a fierce need to go stirring things up.

  I try to get him distracted by conversation—not the easiest thing to do.

  “You ever notice how the army’s kind of like high school, except with bullets. You ever notice that, LeBlanc, huh? I mean you got the same asshole teachers, the same brat kids. You got your friends. Everybody’s got a group they belong to. Folks got a tendency to herd, you know?”

  All but for LeBlanc. The herd and the predator.

  “Like goddamned sheep.” He has a nasty kind of laugh that makes me want to wash my hands after. He flopped belly-down and lifted his scope. “Twelve yards left, by that gap in the bags.”

  By the time I took aim, the gap between the bags was empty. I lay back down and took me a drink. “I liked school,” I said.

  “I hated it. Hated every Jesus and Joseph fucking thing about it.” He’d gone pale at the corners of his lips. “Nuns all the time after you. ‘Settle down, boy, settle down.’ Things don’t go their way, and they knock your knuckles bloody. You’re not doing anything, eh? Maybe just sneaking a little smoke. And all of a sudden you look around and there she is: one of them waddling bitch penguins, with a ruler in her hand.”

  I laughed so loud that the Boche popped a couple of shots our way. “Your sister’s a nun, right?”

  He took my canteen away, treated himself to a drink.

  “Aw, hell, LeBlanc. My teacher had her a bois d’arc plank paddle with, holes in it. You sneak a smoke at my school, and you’d have to drop your pants and bend over. Strong damned woman, too. Arms big around as your thigh. Raised big old welts.” I took back the canteen.

  He peered at the sky as if he was looking for a sign. The day was cool, with gray cotton roller clouds to the horizon. “It was always ‘Yes, Sister’ and ‘no, Sister’ and ‘thank you so much, Sister.’ Made me want to puke. The whole building smelled like dust and Church and women. There were crosses plastered on the walls, saints waiting around every goddamned corner. And everybody moved so slow. Have patience, Pierre. Don’t go so fast, Pierre. Wait for Johnny. Wait for George. And that old mick priest sided with the nuns all the time. He had a metal ruler, too, only he’d heat it up in the grate, and he’d slap me on the arm to show me what perdition was like. When I got home, Papa beat me more, eh? Said Father wouldn’t have burned me if I hadn’t needed a lesson. When I was a kid I was scared I was going to Hell.”

  “Baptists worry some over Hell, too, LeBlanc.”

  He wasn’t even listening. “I thought I was going crazy, eh? Every week I’d go into confession hoping that old mick’d help me. But all he’d say was, ‘Stop having those thoughts. Just stop it,’ he’d say. Sure. Like it was easy as turning off a spigot. I figured there was something wrong with me, eh? I was possessed by a devil or something. Then, when I was in eighth grade, a kid moved to our school from Montreal. He said he knew boys who had got felt up by their priest. Altar boys. And right there in the rectory, too. That’s when I saw that priests were no goddamned better than we are, and I stopped worrying so much about Hell. Still, you know? My mama always said I acted like Satan was nipping at my heels. But I think that’s only because I liked to go fast. Ran everyplace I went. Ran my horse, too. Hey. You like that, Stanhope? Climbing on the back of a horse—just jumping up, no saddle or bridle—and kicking him into a run?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I knew you did. That’s what I like best—going fast, climbing high and diving off into the river. Stepping right on the train tracks while the train’s coming, eh?”

  I knew I was looking inside him for the first time, like I’d found a key that unlocked a vacant house. The furniture there surprised me.

  “There’s plenty of time to slow down when you’re dead,” he said.


  A fine drizzle started falling. He covered himself with the tarp. I rolled around in the hole until I was comfortable and closed my eyes for a little nap. When I woke up, the clouds had lowered, the day was darker. All I could see of LeBlanc was the glint of his eyes—a snake under a rock. It scared me so bad, I sat up fast. A Boche sniper took a wild, fast shot at me. I hugged the ground, my heart hammering.

  He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask what had startled me into sitting up, nothing like that. I didn’t speak, either. I took a steadying sip from my canteen.

  I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me like LeBlanc lives fast, Bobby. That stillness, like a scorpion’s. Like a spider’s. The glint of his eyes under the shadow of that tarp. But when he moves, he moves so quick you can hardly see him. I don’t have to watch him kill to know that.

  He was ready to move again. “Come on, Stanhope,” he said. “Get up. Let’s go shoot some Boche. Don’t be so goddamned slow.”

  Does he kill the stragglers? Was murder part of those thoughts that used to scare him? When he moved to the next shell hole I moved too, not daring to stay behind. A hundred or so yards from me, Emma Gee played her deadly rataplan.

  I swear, Bobby, nobody loves adventure like LeBlanc.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 12, THE RESERVE TRENCHES ONE FOR ME

  Dear Bobby,

  Life narrows in the trenches. You spend your time nearsighted. The sky’s small. The horizon’s the next wall of sandbags. Worse, your world of people shrinks till it seems like there aren’t any folks outside your own platoon. Sometimes when it’s quiet you wonder if the rest of the trench is empty, and the war got over, and everybody went home.

  I saw Miller today. It was a foggy, dim afternoon, the clouds hanging low. He was moving down a communication trench to visit the troops, I guess. I was headed up to the med dugout for an aspirin. I made the next zigzag and there he was, taking up my horizon. We both stopped dead. His eyes went darting away from mine.

  “Afternoon, sir,” I said.

  His face was already turning pink. “Good to see you again, Stanhope.”