A Midnight Clear: A Novel

by William Wharton

  “What’d you see, Father, a little grotto with a mysterious light coming out of it and this lady dressed all in shining blue and white who talked to you? Come on, tell us!”

  Mundy gives Shutzer one of his “forgive them, Father” looks.

  “OK, wise guy, what would you think of a German and an American soldier dancing together in the woods there; without music yet?”

  Shutzer’s climbing up to take Wilkins’s place behind the fifty caliber. He should really be squad leader. That’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to think of. He slips into place while Mother Wilkins lets himself slide off the side of the jeep. He must be frozen. Gordon shakes some snow out of his glove.

  “What’s this? Father Mundy bucking for Section Eight? Well, fan my jawbone. A little counseling might help, Father; my office hours are two till five. I think I can squeeze you in.”

  It’s time to play sergeant.

  “OK, Mundy, let’s see whatever it is. Shutzer, you stay here and cover. Miller, you give us cross fire from behind the other jeep.”

  I figure Miller can get his smoke in up there while we’re gone.

  We start into the woods, rifles at the ready. We get to the spot; Mundy picks up his helmet and points to the left.

  I’m almost ready to believe anything; but I have a hard time with this. They look like a statue. They’ve been standing long enough so the last snows have sprinkled helmets and shoulders like powdered sugar. We advance slowly, Gordon in the lead.

  Somebody’s propped an American and a German soldier against each other in the final of final embraces. Their arms and legs are cocked so they look like waltzers, or ice skaters about to move off into some intricate figure. I stop; I don’t want to look. Mundy and Gordon go on, with Mother behind them; then Mother turns around and comes back.

  “I don’t understand, Wont. What’s going on? Who’s standing up these corpses? It’s crazy! This whole war’s gone off the track somehow!”

  I shake my head. I’m afraid if I talk I’ll start bawling. It’s not so much I’m scared; more confused, disgusted, discouraged. I stand there, rifle at the ready, pretending I’m doing something military, while Mundy and Gordon untangle the bodies and lower them to the ground. Mundy does his ersatz Extreme Unction thing, Gordon hovering over the bodies.

  I have time to pull myself together. Gordon and Mundy come back and we move toward the jeeps without saying anything. Even for a bunch of self-proclaimed smart asses with a wisecrack for almost anything, there isn’t much to say.

  Shutzer and Miller won’t believe it when we tell them. They’ve got to go in and see for themselves. We tell them they aren’t “dancing” anymore, how Mundy and Gordon let them down, but they want to check. Faith is going out of style, even in our squad, despite Mundy’s heroic last-ditch efforts.

  We get the rations, grenades, camouflage suits and other junk, including twelve mini chess sets, packed tight in the jeep; Mother climbs in with me behind the fifty. Gordon starts the other jeep and rolls close behind ours.

  When Shutzer and Miller come back, Shutzer’s like a lunatic.

  “Those filthy, Nazi, Kraut-headed, super-Aryan, mother-fucking bastards. Only pigs would even think of a thing like that. That whole Goddamned country doesn’t deserve to live with human beings. We should shove them in their gas ovens and wipe them all out. I personally would be glad to supervise the entire operation.

  “And don’t give me any crap, Mundy! You tell me why anybody’d do something like that to anybody else! What kind of God lets things like that happen?”

  Mundy’s sitting in the other jeep. He’s quiet. Then he looks at Shutzer climbing in beside him.

  “Yes, it’s a terrible thing, Stan, a horrible way to treat the temple of the Holy Ghost, even if the immortal soul has departed. But we don’t know for sure the Germans did that.”

  Miller turns over our jeep and guns the motor so I just pick up what Shutzer says.

  “For Chrissake; who else, Mundy, gremlins?”

  We go along slowly, twisting, turning; up and down hills, around cuts in mountains, under snow-covered trees. I stay behind the fifty, head ducked tight into my shoulders, trying to follow on the map where we’re going. It’s a small sector map of the one Love had, a contour job, an inch to a thousand feet, so it should be reasonably accurate. But we’re making more twists and turns than are shown.

  “What’s the mileage, Bud?”

  He looks down at the odometer.

  “We’ve come about six and two-tenths so far, since K Company.”

  We go through a narrow defile and suddenly there’s a bridge over a small stream, the bridge I’ve been looking for, the one we’re supposed to watch.

  Up a steep road from this bridge is the château. I mean it’s really a château, not just a fancy house. It isn’t all that big, but this is something from a French fairy tale.

  Miller glides to a stop; I hand-signal back to Gordon. We turn off both motors and listen. It’s quiet except for winter birds, running water and the sound of wind through pines. Slopes of forest come down behind, close to the château. Looking at the bridge, I can see there’s no vehicle or foot traffic marks. It appears the place really might be deserted.

  We scramble out of our jeeps. Gordon takes the scope and inches forward to a tree nearest the château with a good view and some cover. He leans the scope against this tree and scans everything for maybe five minutes.

  Nobody’s saying anything. All of us are staring at that château. It’s built in pinkish-gray stone with a blue-gray slate roof and white shutters. All the shutters are closed. It’s three stories tall and has a mansard roof. It doesn’t look real.

  Gordon comes back.

  “I don’t see anything, Wont: no smoke, no movement, no tracks. The windows and doors are all closed; there are no vehicles and no smells.”

  “What do you think, Mel? Send in a two-man patrol or just charge up that hill with the jeeps?”

  “I thought Shutzer and I could ford the creek downstream a ways and approach from that side. We can look around back, then come on down the road in front to the bridge and check for mines. How’s that sound?”

  “We’ll spread out and cover for you.”

  If Mel hadn’t gotten trench foot in the mud at Metz, he’d sure as hell be squad leader and that’s the way it should be. Or maybe he’d be dead.

  He and Shutzer start down through the trees. I pass the word for everybody to spread out and be ready to give covering fire if they need it. I slide down to Gordon’s tree, where there’s a good field of fire.

  I watch as they ford the narrow stream on some rocks. Shutzer slips and dunks one foot up over his boot top. They clamber uphill on the château’s left, keeping the hill between themselves and the windows.

  It’s like watching a war or cowboy movie, actually more a cowboy movie with the good guys sneaking up on the shack where the cavalry colonel’s beautiful blonde daughter, in total décolletage, is being held by a bunch of wild-eyed bandits who sweat a lot, wear black hats and two-day beards.

  Then they disappear. I figure they’re behind the chateau. I wait. Waiting is 99 percent of soldiering. Sometimes it’s only waiting for chow, sometimes it’s waiting like this; but definitely too much waiting.

  Then Shutzer comes around the other side of the château. He leans forward and peers through one of the shutters. Gordon slinks along behind him and is swinging his head back and forth like some bird dog trying to pick up a scent.

  Gordon and Fred Brandt both claimed they had the best schnozzolas in the world. They insisted they could pick up smells other people don’t even dream about. Once at Shelby, out on the firing range, we had a smelling contest using a pair of Jim Freize’s socks as bait. Freize could stink up a pair of socks in two days so they stood by themselves. His feet were like a dog’s tongue; it was the only part of him that sweated. And some sweat.

  It was a treasure hunt. I went into the woods and hid a pair of Jim’s socks; then Gordon and Br
andt had to search them out by scent alone. Both of them were remarkable. They’d find those socks faster than it took me to hide them. Fred won in a best of ten series but it was close. I think the difference was mostly a matter of luck with the wind.

  Now Mel has it to himself. We called him Mel the Smell for a while there, but he objected to the double meaning. Actually, Mel’s on the neat side, not in a class with Wilkins, but way ahead of me or most of the squad, even Morrie.

  Gordon and Shutzer start down the hill. They both take a side and are peering carefully at the steep road. Once Shutzer leans and carefully scratches at a spot with the tip of his bayonet. They cross the bridge, then the road on our side of the bridge, and come up toward us. I step out from behind my tree.

  “How’d it go?”

  Shutzer sits on the ground beside me.

  “Nobody home. Looks like nobody’s been there for a while, either.”

  Gordon hands me back the scope. I should’ve asked for it before they left. Chalk off another two points.

  “Can’t see what’s inside. There are curtains or drapes inside the shutters. I checked the doors and there’re no signs of boobytraps. It looks as if we’ve got ourselves a chateau.”

  Of course everybody’s dribbled in from the spots I put them and are gathered around. Shutzer’s pulled off his boot and is wringing out his sock.

  “Well, it isn’t the good old University of Florida with fifteen hundred acres of orange trees growing under Spanishmoss-covered oaks around an Olympic-size swimming pool, but it’s a step in the right direction, I’ll say that.”

  When Shutzer gets his boot back on, we climb into the jeeps and roll uphill to the chateau; no mines, no machine-gun bursts, no snipers, nothing.

  We force a front shutter and window with a bayonet. It’s a French window-door and, as Gordon predicted, no boobytrap. We sidle in the door and stand just inside, letting our eyes get used to the dark after all the glare outside.

  My God! What a room. It looks like a ballroom or a very fancy small gym. There are parquet floors and on one end is a gigantic fireplace, big enough to walk into. Long golden damask curtains go from floor to ceiling over the windows. The windows must be fifteen feet high.

  Everybody files in so we’re all standing there staring. None of us has ever seen anything like this before. And what makes it so eerie is there isn’t one piece of furniture in the room.

  I know it’s time to play sergeant again; somebody has to. We need to unload all the rations and crap from the jeeps and set ourselves up. But we only stand there, overwhelmed.

  I’m definitely feeling like Cinderella who was not invited to the prince’s ball. I feel very disinvited. Shutzer’s the first one who moves; he sashays out to the center of the floor. Shutzer’s about five six, round but not fat. He’s loaded down with all the military furbelows: bulging field jacket, two bandoliers around his neck, ammo belt filled with M1 cartridges, bayonet, aid kit and canteen. He wears camouflage netting over his helmet, the only one in the squad. Gordon says it makes Shutzer look like an escapee from the South Pacific. Shutzer claims he wears it so he’ll recognize his hat; helmets are too much all alike.

  Shutzer’s OD pants are stiff with greasy dirt; we’re all the same, even Wilkins; there’s no way to wash them and no others to change into. The wool soaks up grease and gets darker until the fronts are stiff and almost black.

  Shutzer steps out onto the floor and gazes around; then he starts singing, grunting, humming “The Jersey Bounce,” and breaks into a jitterbug routine by himself in the middle of that huge room.

  They call it the Jersey bounce,

  The rhythm that really counts,

  The temperature always mounts

  Whenever they play ...

  “Come on, Mel, let’s show ’em how we did it at the old USO.”

  Gordon comes out, rifle slung on his shoulder. He starts dancing with Shutzer. The two of them, bayonets clanking, canteens bouncing, bandoliers swinging, try some of the classic hand-over-head jitterbug maneuvers but their rifles get in the way. I watch those crazies, working it out in the middle of the Ardennes, and I remember Shelby.

  In those last days, when we finally believed they really were going to ship the Eighty-tenth Division overseas, we went into a mild state of panic. Shutzer insisted this was proof that, despite all the propaganda, we were losing the war. Sending this outfit to fight anybody must be a desperate last resort.

  But the thing bothering us most is that in our squad, with the exception of Wilkins, we’re all virgins, eleven unwilling, unready to die, virgins. I don’t know if all this virginity was only a normal factor of the times or if there is some negative correlation between sexual precocity and what we call intelligence. Maybe it was only an accident of space and time. Who knows.

  We’d spend evenings trying to coax details out of Wilkins. His wife was in town and he’d do anything to make sure he got his weekend pass. If his KP or guard duty happened to fall on a Saturday or Sunday, we were all willing to jump in and sub for him, a vicarious pleasure. None of us ever met Linda, but we all knew her. In a sick, sex-hungry, Biblical-sense, we all knew her.

  Of course, Mother was very reluctant. He wasn’t about to satisfy our puerile salaciousness. To all our entreaties, questions about how often and how much, his only reply was a sly smile and bashful “Oh, it isn’t like that at all,” or “You guys are sex maniacs.”

  So, it got to be less than three weeks before shipping out. I think it was Morrie who came up with the idea, or maybe it was Shutzer. Four of us managed a weekend pass and headed into town to hunt a nice, complaisant whore who could put us out of our misery, initiate us into the rites of manhood, emancipate us from the lonely compassion of our five-fingered widows.

  All together we had fifty dollars. Ten was for a room at the Jefferson Hotel. This was for two but we knew a back way to sneak in the others. It was Gordon, Shutzer, Morrie and I. We figured any more would be some kind of gang bang and we had more romantic aspirations. The rest of our money was to go into the “investment” and a bottle of bourbon. Forty dollars was a lot of money in those days.

  There was much speculation and discussion on the kind of woman. I think each of us was scared we’d get involved with a real woman and wouldn’t be able to manage it. We agreed pure chance, not game skills, would decide the “pecker order,” so we matched coins. Morrie won, Shutzer second, me for sloppy thirds and Gordon on the tail end. (Think of that, a quadruple pun!)

  We settled into the hotel. Gordon and Shutzer had been nominated for the search, the recon part. We knew better than to hustle girls at the USO. We’d all tried that at one time or another, but the forces of morality were greater than our tactical skills. The B-girls in the bars were generally too much for us. None of us could make the grade with a genuine soldier-town whore, and none of us was willing to get a case of clap or syph. We were well-conditioned by the U.S. Army VD films. These films of festering mouth and cock sores were usually shown just before chow. Thank God they were in black and white. Morrie was convinced they showed them when the quartermasters were running short on chow allotment. Jim Freize insisted it was only a priori population control. The war was, by common consent, ex post facto birth control.

  Probably what we wanted was some girl who would resemble the girl we took, or wished we’d taken, to our highschool prom. Morrie and I knew we could never make any kind of approach under any conditions. I personally had decided to sacrifice my contribution to the cause if it looked impossible. I don’t know what I actually thought could bring together my absurd romantic notions with, what seemed then, my pressing physical demand.

  Gordon and Shutzer left the hotel all slicked up. They were wearing fresh underwear, had rubbed in enough Mum to make a smeary mess in their armpit hairs, splashed themselves with after-shave lotion. It was early summer, and muggy hot in Mississippi.

  Morrie and I had decided to enjoy the privacy of the room. We each had a book from the post library. We stripped
to our skivvies and jumped into the beds. We luxuriated in the quiet; it was accented by the sound of a huge long-bladed wooden fan hung from the ceiling rotating slowly. In turn, and on schedule, we took baths, timing ourselves as the water heater recuperated. It was a fine evening and great contrast to the streets outside roiling with other soldiers, MPs on the prowl and glaring townspeople. The feeling of civilians in Shelby seemed to be “What the hell are you doing here when you should be out there fighting Nazis and Japs?”

  It’s past midnight when Shutzer and Gordon come back. I’m asleep; I’m sure Morrie is, too. After the baths and the quiet reading, I’m not even nervous anymore. I’m convinced Shutzer and Gordon aren’t going to find anybody, anyway.

  But they have; they sneak into the room and a young girl comes in with them. I can’t believe it. I sit up in bed and look over at Morrie. He’s sitting up, too, his OD undershirt dark olive drab against the sheets.

  This girl fulfills my wildest dreams. She can’t be much more than twenty and she’s beautiful. Shutzer and Gordon are giggling nervously. It must have been some fun smuggling this girl through town and up these hotel back stairs at this time of night. After the last bus has gone back to camp, the whole area swarms with MPs.

  The girl’s standing just inside the door, smiling at us. I know right then I won’t be able to go through with it. I’m glad I’m third down the line.

  It doesn’t seem possible it’s happening but it is. It’s about here I realize Shutzer and Gordon have been drinking, probably trying to boost their flagging nerve. Gordon has a bottle in a paper bag; it turns out our bottle of bourbon is almost a third down already. None of us is much at drinking; in fact, we class drinking, along with cussing, as army pseudo heroics, to be avoided.

  With nothing said, I slip from my bed. I’m embarrassed wearing only GI underwear, large unbuttoned slit in front, like the back of a hospital gown. I scurry into the bathroom. Gordon and Shutzer come in after me. Shutzer’s picked up the pillows from one bed on his way in; he locks the door behind him.