East of the Mountains

by David Guterson

  Ben rested against a tree, watching the light seep away. The pines all stood in silhouette when Kelly Lastenpole sat down beside him and tilted back his helmet. The dark humor was gone from his eyes. He smoked with his hand cupped around his cigarette. "This is crap," he said.

  "Have you seen Bill?"

  "He's back that way."

  "He's supposed to be here."

  "Forget about that."

  "Come on, Kelly."

  "It's crap," said Lastenpole, and flicked his cigarette away. "I'm not going to put myself out there."

  In the night they took over foxhole positions from the men of the 85th. At dawn Lastenpole squeezed shut his eyes while mortars sailed overhead toward the German positions. When the order came to advance upslope, he vomited on his knees in the hole. Strands of it hung from his mouth.

  Ben heard the sound of his own breathing as he vaulted out of his foxhole, struggled into his field pack, and took up his Browning rifle. While he shrugged his pack higher into place, he heard the whine of a shell hurling by just to the left of his face. It came so close that he felt the wind from it.

  For a moment he stood behind a tree, Lastenpole on his knees beside him, and then he moved into the open, hurrying uphill with other men. Lastenpole stayed until Ben called, saying he needed the extra clips, and then Lastenpole, gathering himself, dashed up the hill.

  They stepped over bodies, some of them from the Second of the 85th, others in German uniforms, but there was no time to ponder the nature of the wounds or how the dead had met their ends, since more 88s were raining in. Some men clung to the shell-pocked ground, others scrabbled on their hands and knees to dig into the hillside. Ben moved unthinkingly, because other men were moving. He ascended a ridge but at its crest was met by machine-gun fire. A radioman sprawled beside Ben to report their position through his headset but received only static for his efforts and swore incessantly, the side of his face against the earth. More 88s slammed in at their left, canceling out all sound. Ben, in a pause, set up his BAR and began to fire at nothing in particular, simply forward of his position.

  P-47S came in low and sought to clear the way for them with fragmentation bombs. Men ran wildly down the slope while the planes passed closely overhead, and Ben, hauling his BAR along, followed them into a north-facing hay field still ankle-deep with snow. He moved into sheltering pines, advancing along the edge of the field—the snow hard in the shadows here—set up his BAR a second time, and fired into the trees. Again it was indiscriminate; he fired merely to fire. No one from his squad was near. The ammunition bearers had not shown up—Lastenpole or Stackhouse. There was no sign of Lieutenant Daniels.

  Sheltered by trees, he held his ground until a staff sergeant came along who was organizing the company for an assault on the German line. Spittle hung from the sergeant's mouth, and he'd lost his helmet and sidearm. Ben advanced behind other men, following a mule path etched into a side hill; and as he climbed it in a long traverse, an 88 blew two soldiers off the trail in a plume of smoke. Ben abandoned the mule path and scaled the ridge in a direct ascent, where he found Lastenpole and Stackhouse, stopped by a tangle of trip wires. They passed through it under fire and staggered down into beeches, where they lay breathing hard on the ground, struggling out of their packs.

  Ben heard only the ringing in his ears. Stackhouse, rolling onto his back, put his canteen to his lips; the water ran across his face and down into his shirt. He wiped his forehead a couple of times, twisted over onto his belly, and lay one cheek against the ground. "Goddamn," he breathed.

  "Where is everyone?" asked Lastenpole. "What the hell is going on?"

  He slid on his elbows between the trees as if to survey their position. With the first shot, a sprig of pine needles dropped on his back. With the next, he clutched his shoulder and twisted onto his side. The third entered behind his ear and passed through his skull below the eye. Lastenpole brought his hand to his cheek, turned on his back against the ground, and lay facing the tops of the trees, blood between his fingers. "Oh, Goddamn it," he said.

  He died quickly, shuddering. Blood ran out of his mouth.

  Stackhouse lay low, staring. Ben crawled to the cover of a tree, lodged himself between two roots, and stayed there for over an hour. Three Germans passed, one waving a white rag tied to a pine branch, the other helping a comrade whose intestines were falling out of his abdomen; he held them in as best he could, but purple loops slipped between his fingers and slithered against the snow. It occurred to Ben to shoot all three in return for the death of Lastenpole, but Stackhouse counseled strongly against it, and when one of the Germans looked at them, Stackhouse waved them toward their rear.

  Later there came another German, limping through the woods without a helmet, a bloody bandage around his forehead. A tall, gangly man in glasses, he appeared thoroughly dazed. Bringing his hand up to press against his head, he grimaced and closed his eyes wearily, then staggered forward ten more steps and stopped nearly in front of them. He wore fingerless gloves and a stained, tattered field jacket—a German in his middle thirties, perhaps forty, gray stubble on his chin. His field pants were tucked into his boots. The lenses of his glasses were misted by vapor, flecked by damp green needles. The canteen at his belt was missing its top, and beside it was a pistol in a muddy holster.

  Ben set his finger against the BAR's trigger, hoping that Stackhouse would decide matters. He felt frozen, unable to act. The German doubled over beside a tree, one hand against the bark. Head hung, he steadied himself, hawking spit on the ground. Then he turned to look to his left and squinted through the interstices of bramble—one end of his bandage coming loose—where Stackhouse lay fumbling with his rifle, trying to pull the safety back, the German noting this commotion in the brush and saying something in his language, at the same moment scrabbling for his muddy pistol, clawing to pull it free of its holster, with Stackhouse screaming at Ben to shoot the man—Shoot him! Shoot him! Goddamn it, shoot him!—and Ben still paralyzed while the German brought his pistol up and fired three rounds into the underbrush. Stackhouse groaned, and Ben shot, squeezing down hard on the BARs trigger. He severed the man at the waist.

  The German's legs pitched forward, but the rest of him toppled backward and lay twitching against the ground.

  Ben pulled his hands from the BAR and moved away from it. The German was still alive. The eyes behind the glasses met Bens. He lurched and shuddered, and a whistle came from his throat. His legs shivered; one foot trembled. "Christ," cried Bill Stackhouse. "I'm shot up. Christ."

  Ben pulled Stackhouse's field jacket up, ripped his trousers open at the hip, and found a gaping bullet wound flecked with splinters and shards of bone, dark blood spilling from it. "I'm sorry," Ben said. "Jesus."

  "Goddamn," said Stackhouse. He spoke wincingly, his teeth set. He grunted each time he exhaled. "My shoulder, too," he said.

  "We need litter bearers," Ben said.

  "The guy goddamn shot me."

  Ben pulled the first-aid kit from his pack, opened it, and hesitated. Eighty-eights sailed over the trees to crash on the slopes behind. He mopped the blood with a compress, then poked a sulfa pill into Stackhouse's mouth and tried to make him swallow it, but the water leaked between his lips, and the pill would not go down. "I'm sorry," Ben repeated. "Jesus."

  He put the compress over the hip wound and yelled, without hope, for a medic. He passed a roll of gauze around Bill's hip to hold the compress in place and watched it darken with blood. There was no point in merely watching. Watching didn't change things. Ben hurried out onto the open slope and yelled again for help.

  He saw himself from a distance now, or as if at some watery remove. A loud hum echoed inside his head he could not shake or stop. He was aware in some detached way of the trembling in his shoulders. He couldn't keep from trembling. A mortar sailed overhead, then another, and a third, and all the while he screamed for a medic, hearing his own strained, high-pitched voice, which seemed to come from elsewhere. The air smel
led of gunfire.

  In the end he carried Stackhouse toward the rear draped across his shoulder. Stackhouse grunted with each step as Ben labored through the pines, sweating hard beneath his load. Soldiers passed him in both directions. When he saw one with the Red Cross brassard, he lay Stackhouse at his feet.

  The medic cut holes in the arm of Stackhouse's jacket, shirt, and long underwear. Then he stuck him with a morphine styrette, poured sulfa powder into the wound, stuffed a compress tightly in, and bandaged it—coat and all—to stem the flow of blood. He tore open the gash in Stackhouse's field pants, tossed the blood-soaked gauze aside, and mopped the blood before pouring in sulfa powder and applying another compress.

  "Hey," he said. "Are you there?"

  "Nnn," Stackhouse answered, ashen. His face glistened with sweat.

  "You're all right," the medic told him. "We're getting you out of here."

  There were no litter bearers anywhere in sight, and they could not wait for any. The medic slipped a wound tag around Stackhouse's ankle. They knotted a blanket over either end of a pine pole and carried Stackhouse in the hammock it formed, the medic leading the way downhill, Stackhouse slung between him and Ben something like a ceremonial pig slaughtered and spitted for the fire.

  The battalion aid station was at a place called Carge, which was no more than a solitary farmhouse at the far end of a tree-studded meadow. The chestnuts beyond it were bare of leaves, and the whole area was strewn with shell crates, discarded K-ration boxes and cans, a muzzle snow-cover left behind, an infantryman's forgotten ammo bag, an empty first-aid dressing carton, a stack of litters, an entrenching tool, a pair of muddy tin cups. A netted helmet with a wet leather liner, the strap frayed off, top down in the snow. Beside it, a shooting mitten.

  Litter bearers sprawled near the aid station with their hobnailed soles propped on rocks, beside a trail of boot prints etched raggedly through the mud and bloodstained snow. Next to the farmhouse with its tile roof, a chestnut tree stood starkly outlined against a sky of cirrus clouds and against a lofty ridge to the south dusted with sparse new snow. There was hay put up in the animal pens, dark and dense as peat. The upper reaches of the farmhouse had been shelled, but its thick stone walls remained intact. Its windows were blacked with tar paper.

  Inside, the wounded slouched against the walls, some seated with their heads hung, others prone on the dirt floor. Medical technicians worked among them, carrying flashlights and kerosene lanterns, and none took note of Ben and the medic as they hauled Stackhouse inside and lowered him onto a vacant litter. While the medic caught his breath, Ben cut the blanket free with the scissors; then they hefted Stackhouse's litter and set it down on crates and bins arrayed beneath a gas lamp to serve as an operating table.

  The light here shone fierce and glaring, a hard, garish cone of light, and the battalion surgeon stood in it, a broad-faced man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, fresh blood on his hands. He was bent over a soldier's Adam's apple, and the soldier was coughing bright blood.

  The surgeon turned to look at Stackhouse; the medic exposed the wounded shoulder for him and ripped Bill's pants open. The pants and blankets were saturated, and the shoulder stained with blood. Stackhouse's eyes were open but glazed, and he didn't move at all. "I gave him morphine," the medic explained. "The guy's going fast."

  "Does he have a pulse?"

  "I think so."

  "Don't think, know," said the surgeon. "And get a blood-pressure cuff on him. You," he said, across the room. "Get some saline in this guy. Start him on an IV, quick. And get some plasma going."

  He looked at Ben, then turned away. He seemed both angry and tired. He went back to working on the throat of the other soldier, whose head was held down by a medical technician Ben recognized from Camp Hale. "Put some pressure on that hip for him," the surgeon said without turning. "Otherwise, get out of here. There's too many people around."

  "You mean me?" Ben asked.

  "Put some pressure on it for him, soldier. Go to it already."

  "Okay," said Ben. "All right."

  They cut Stackhouse free of his field jacket, combat shirt, and T-shirt. They cut away his pants, too, so that Stackhouse had on only his filthy underpants, muddy boots, and socks. The technician couldn't get the IV started, because Stackhouse's veins had collapsed: his blood wouldn't keep them open. The surgeon turned from his other work and with a scalpel cut through the skin and fat at the inside of Stackhouse's elbow. While the sergeant retracted the skin for him, he isolated the vein with a hemostat and passed a suture under it. Then he nicked the collapsed vein open, ran a large-bore needle in, and fixed it in place by tightening the suture. "There," he said. "Now tie off that vein. And put a stitch in when you get the chance." And abruptly he went back to the soldier with the wounded throat, taking a clamp in his hand.

  The surgeon pushed his glasses snugly against the bridge of his nose. "Listen," he said to a medical technician, in the same direct, emphatic tone he used for everyone in the room. "I've got to work on this new guy over here. He won't make it if I don't. So I want you to watch this clamp I've got until I can get back to it. Just make sure he doesn't work it loose."

  The technician took hold of the clamp. "I've got it," he said.

  The surgeon turned again to Stackhouse, and gave orders to all in the room. "Move," he said. "Let's get moving. Get that plasma I asked for brewed in the next two seconds or so."

  The sergeant technician ran saline through Stackhouse with the valve cock turned all the way open and started a new bag immediately. "It's going right through him," he said.

  "I'll do a second cut-down," said the surgeon. "Get his pulse again for me. And take a pressure reading."

  He cut through the flesh in Stackhouse's other arm and again isolated a vein with a hemostat, ran a needle into it, fixed it, and tied it off. "I don't have a pulse," the sergeant said. "I don't think he has one anymore. Not that I can find." But the surgeon continued with his work. Ben watched his hands move swiftly. He kept his own hand against Stackhouse's hip, which looked stark white in the light of the gas lantern hissing overhead. "Plasma," the surgeon called. "This needle's ready and waiting here. Fill the poor bastard with plasma."

  The sergeant technician hooked up the plasma, which had been reconstituted by a medic in the corner who was busy reconstituting more. The sergeant opened the valve fully. The surgeon placed two fingers against Stackhouse's neck. He moved them around, stopped, moved again. "I'm on the carotid now," he said. "Not a thing. Nothing."

  "Jesus," Ben said weakly.

  The surgeon made no reply to this. "You," he called to a second technician, "get into that crate and find the epinephrine." He paused over Stackhouse, whose chest and belly had turned a sallow blue. The face was empty, the eyes wide open, the pupils enormously dilated. "This guy's dead," said the surgeon.

  He hit Stackhouse in the chest with no small violence. Nothing happened, and he hit him again. He hit him a third time, harder still, and Stackhouse bounced a little. A medic handed him the epinephrine, and the surgeon filled a syringe with it. Aiming deliberately between two ribs, he plunged the needle through Stackhouse's chest, and with no hesitation drove it forcefully, using his arm and shoulder, into Stackhouse's heart.

  "Nothing at all," said the surgeon.

  The surgeon struck Stackhouse's chest twice more, as if it were made of wood. "Zero," he said, with his fingers at Stackhouse's neck. "I can't get anything."

  "No," said Ben. "Please."

  The surgeon ignored him. "Sergeant," he said. "You let Waterman man the IVs and ventilate this soldier for me. Can you do that for me, no matter what?"

  "Yes, sir," said the sergeant.

  "Just keep him ventilated," the surgeon ordered.

  The sergeant tilted Stackhouse's head back, pulling him by the chin. He slid an airway into the mouth to hold back the tongue. He laid an anesthesia mask over the lower half of the face, wrapped his lips around the blow tube, bent low, and went to work. He blew forcefull
y.

  The surgeon turned to Ben now. "There's a packet of sterile gloves behind you. Hand them over to me."

  "All right," answered Ben.

  "Hurry up," said the surgeon.

  Ben found and opened the packet. While the surgeon worked his hands into the gloves, he went on giving orders. He asked that the surgical retractors in the equipment chest be doused thoroughly with alcohol and brought to the operating table. He told Ben and the medic to stand by until he showed them what to do. He said he was going to cut the man open and would need them to manipulate the retractors.

  Ben felt a tremor in his shoulders. The idea of opening Stackhouse's chest as he lay before them dead on the litter with his eyes blank and his face blue was horrible to contemplate. But the medic brought the retractors, and the surgeon with his gloved fingers counted the gaps in Stackhouse's rib cage and plunged in his scalpel. He swept it gracefully along the shadow of a rib, cutting slightly longer than a hand's width two inches below the left nipple. Contrary to what Ben expected, there was no blood to speak of, only beads of it. The surgeon handed his scalpel to the medic. "Give me the retractors," he said.

  He inserted them into the lips of the cut, against the exposed ribs. Ben saw the pink of a lung. It deflated while he looked at it, and then it rose again, swelling and glistening, when the sergeant exhaled through the blow tube. The medic took one retractor in hand and Ben took the other. "Pull hard," said the surgeon. "Open him up."

  They pulled, and the surgeon turned to face Stackhouse's head. With his left hand he reached through the incised gap so that his palm and wrist disappeared. It seemed to Ben a kind of illusion, one man's forearm disappearing inside another man's chest. The surgeon rotated his arm to the left, until it slipped a little farther in, and then rotated it back again, wriggled, and bent even lower. "I'm there," he announced. "I've got it now. You keep that plasma coming fast, run plasma through both arms, take him off the saline. Sergeant, stay with that blow tube."