by Ed Ruggero
“Help you, Colonel?”
Boone jumped, turned around to see David Wilkins’ bear shape blocking the door. Wilkins, another surgeon, might have been close to Stephenson. Boone wasn’t sure.
“No. I, uh, no thanks, Captain Wilkins. I was just checking to make sure First Sergeant Drake had removed all of Captain Stephenson’s personal belongings.”
Wilkins didn’t answer, just stared without blinking.
“Shame what happened to him,” Boone said.
Wilkins grunted, noncommittal.
Boone had once come up behind Wilkins talking to some of the other docs, thought he heard the beefy captain say something about “Doctor Dirt Farmer.” The other men widened their eyes—they could see Boone and were probably warning Wilkins—but the big man was unfazed. He turned, saluted, and said, “We were just talking about you, sir. About how efficiently the hospital jumps when we have to.”
Snotty bastard, Boone thought.
“How were your patients today?” Boone asked.
“They’ll pull through,” Wilkins said without enthusiasm.
“Well, I better get moving,” Boone said, stepping closer to the door. Wilkins took his time getting out of the way and Boone had to squeeze by him. The captain made no move to salute, did not offer a greeting.
Boone knew this was one of the reasons they had no respect for him: he couldn’t bring himself to enforce standards, at least not equally across the entire hospital. Boone had no trouble intimidating privates, but nurses and his own doctors were another story.
Boone was several steps outside the tent when he turned back.
“Aren’t you forgetting something, Captain?” Boone asked.
Wilkins wrinkled his brow, as if thinking about the question hurt him.
“A salute?” Boone said.
Wilkins brought his right hand up, but instead of saluting, he pointed to the side of his head.
“Not wearing headgear, Colonel. Didn’t think we were supposed to salute without a hat or helmet.”
“Right, well,” Boone said, flustered. “Carry on, then.”
He turned again, wanted to look back, wanted to scream at Wilkins, at his goddamn smug look. Instead, he stepped back onto the perimeter road and walked away from doctors’ row.
Instead of calming him, his walk had upset him. Fucking disrespectful assholes.
Boone stepped through a gate that separated the compound from a few sad buildings that constituted a tiny village. Some of the buildings had been bombed, but Boone didn’t know if it had been the retreating Germans or the advancing Americans who inflicted the damage. Probably didn’t matter to the locals.
He saw the little storefront where some Sicilian women had set up a laundry. Patting his pockets to see that he had money, he ducked inside. It was too hot for a walk anyway.
“Hello,” he said when he entered. There was no front door, and Boone didn’t know if it was because of the heat or because some GI had stolen it to make a table in the hospital compound. He could see all the way through the tiny shop and out into a small courtyard in the back, where two iron kettles sat atop a three-sided brick stand. A smoky fire burned below one of the pots.
“Hello,” he called again.
Shelves lined the right-hand wall, clean laundry wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. He lifted the edges of the packages, found his name scrawled in crayon, pulled the bundle free. He looked out the back again; neither of the women seemed to be around.
“Anybody here?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few notes, invasion currency printed by the Allies to supplant the Fascist government currency. At first the locals had refused to take the money, but after the Americans got a couple of the banks open and the notes started circulating, the Sicilians came around.
“I’m going to leave the money on the counter here,” he called, though he knew that neither woman spoke English.
There was an ancient ledger book on the counter; he tucked a few bills under the edge, used the pencil stuck inside the book to put a small checkmark next to his name, indicating that he’d paid.
That’s when he saw Stephenson’s name. He looked on the shelves, found a bundle tied with string and marked “s-t-e-f.”
Such an ordinary thing. You drop off laundry and expect to be back in a couple of days to pick it up. But you might not get a couple of days.
He was a bit surprised the hyperefficient Drake or the nosy cop hadn’t thought to retrieve Stephenson’s laundry. They’d gone through everything else belonging to the man.
That’s when he thought of the letter.
Boone hurried outside and back to his own sleeping tent, trying to outpace his panic. When he arrived he closed the flap behind him. There was no sign of Whitaker, who sometimes doubled as an orderly. The man had no reason to go through Boone’s things; even so, perhaps Boone had not been careful enough.
Stephenson had expected to pick up his own laundry. He certainly didn’t anticipate someone—Drake, Harkins—pawing through his stuff, looking for secrets. Everything could change that quickly.
He unlocked his footlocker with a key he kept on his dog-tag chain, pulled out the top tray to reveal some folded clothes and a box of stationery. He’d brought the box with him from the States, but he had not written a single letter in the nine months since leaving New York Harbor. If the mail clerk or the junior officers who censored the outgoing mail ever noticed, they certainly didn’t say anything to him.
No outgoing mail, no incoming mail. Inside the box, just one extra envelope, his name and rank in a feminine script on the outside.
He tried to imagine Drake’s reaction if he’d found this. Or Harkins’. Surprise, perhaps.
Boone found a pack of C-ration matches in the footlocker tray.
And what, exactly, would have been so surprising? That he’d had a sweetheart? That he wasn’t always despised?
He lit a match, held the letter by a corner, and dangled it into the tiny flame.
He hated admitting it, even to himself, but he supposed they would have been surprised that someone once cared for him. Doctor Dirt Farmer.
“Fuck them.”
When the flames licked at his fingers, he dropped the letter to the dirt floor, ground the ashes under his boot heel.
6
2 August 1943
1300 hours
It took Harkins and Colianno over an hour to find his MP platoon, bivouacked in the courtyard of a big country house. Colianno drove, with Harkins in the passenger seat and an unhappy Bobby Ray Thomas in the back. Thomas didn’t like that he was being replaced.
“Couple of days’ rest,” Harkins told him. “Light duty. You’ll be good as new.”
At least half of Harkins’ men—the day shift—were out guarding convoys of supplies, which had become targets for bandits who supplied the black market. Harkins’ second-in-command, Platoon Sergeant Mike Desmond, was under a jeep when Harkins pulled up.
“Sergeant Desmond,” Harkins called.
Desmond crawled out, his hands and chest spotted with motor oil. “Hey, Lieutenant. We been wondering what happened to you.”
Harkins explained that he’d been detailed to a murder investigation, and that Thomas would be returning to the platoon for light duty and rest.
Desmond motioned to Colianno, who stood twenty yards away, filling his canteen from a fountain. “Who’s that?”
“My driver, for now. My brother convinced me to take him on. Kind of a special project.”
“Your brother the chaplain? He’s got you saving souls now, too?”
“Why, Sergeant Desmond, sounds like you doubt I can be a good influence on America’s fighting men.”
Desmond laughed, used a clear spot on one wrist to blot sweat from his chin.
Another jeep pulled into the courtyard; the battalion mail clerk jumped out with a canvas sack. “Got some mail for you, Lieutenant Harkins, Sergeant Desmond.”
Harkins did not look at his platoon
sergeant, who hadn’t had a letter from his wife in six months and had stopped lining up for mail call.
“Christmas in August, boys!” Harkins called out. “Mail’s here.”
A dozen of his men shuffled toward him, all filthy hands, grimy faces, and exhaustion.
He reached inside the bag, grabbed a bundle, and yanked off the rubber band. “Monroe!”
Monroe stepped up, hand out, a raccoon stripe across his eyes where his driver’s goggles had covered his face.
“Thomas!”
Thomas was still in the back of Harkins’ jeep, so the lieutenant went to him to hand over two letters, both envelopes typewritten.
“Thanks,” Thomas said.
Thomas had been Harkins’ driver for ten months, the two of them living side by side through the campaign in North Africa and now Sicily, and Harkins was pretty certain Thomas had never called him “sir.” Harkins sometimes wondered if he should care more about military courtesy.
“Pulauskus!”
Sometimes the mail caught up in bunches, and his men got stacks of letters. Sometimes they could go weeks without mail, cut off from family and evidence of some normal world back home.
“Hey, Lieutenant, thought you might like this.”
Harkins looked up to see a solider named Clendening holding out one of the Armed Services Editions paperbacks that were being shipped to GIs in the war zones. Printed on pulp stock, they were clearly not made to last long. GIs got them for free to help stave off the boredom that was every soldier’s lot.
“The guys say you read this kind of stuff.”
The book was Poems of Carl Sandburg; the smooth cover told Harkins it had not been opened.
“You don’t want to give it a try?”
“Nah. I was looking for something, you know, something maybe with some dames in it.”
“I know what you mean,” Harkins said. “I’ve been looking for a sleeping bag that came equipped with a woman.”
Clendening smiled, showing two broken teeth. Harkins took the book, tossed the volume into the back of his jeep. He had never tried to hide the fact that he read the occasional history and poetry books that came with their morale packages, but he’d never told any of the soldiers that he had a year of college. Figured it would ruin their impression of him, former amateur boxer and tough city cop.
“Thanks, Clendening. You get any more you don’t want, I’m happy to take them.”
Harkins put his hands back into the mail sack, pulled out the last few envelopes. There were four letters for him, but none for Sergeant Desmond. He walked to where the noncom sat in the passenger seat of his jeep, smoking and looking out over the hood.
Over the garden wall, the road out of town dropped as it headed northeast. Two lines of hills stretched to the horizon like outspread arms, framing a valley dotted with toylike houses and dense groves of fruit and olive trees. At the far end of the valley was Palermo, and beyond that, the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“Pretty,” Harkins said.
After a silent moment, Desmond said, “Appreciate you always checking on me, Lieutenant.”
Desmond’s marriage trouble started before they left the States. Harkins had arranged—had begged their commander for—an emergency leave for Desmond just before they embarked for Africa. Since that last, apparently failed effort, Harkins and Desmond had only spoken once about Desmond’s worries. His wife wound up leaving the two-room tar-paper shanty they rented in the scrub pine of Florida’s panhandle for a war-industry job and a better life up North someplace. No forwarding address.
“Right,” Harkins said, feeling worse than useless. “Well, you know where to find me if you need anything. If you want to talk.”
Harkins refilled his canteen at the courtyard’s small fountain, then sat under the stingy shade of a tree and spread his letters out in front of him. Usually he sorted them by postmark, reading the oldest ones first, but this time he sorted by writer.
Harkins was the second of six children. Patrick, his chaplain brother, was oldest. He wasn’t surprised to see that there was no letter from the priest. Maybe Patrick’s mail had caught up, too, and if they managed to get together again in the next day or so they could swap, share a few laughs together.
Nor was there a letter from Michael, the youngest, in the navy somewhere on the other side of the globe.
Michael had tried joining the navy the same day that Harkins enlisted in the army, but was turned down because he was only sixteen. The recruiting sergeant had been surprised at the date on his papers, since Michael looked like a grown man. Michael and Patrick favored their father’s side of the family, sharing the same thick, almost black hair and square-jawed good looks that garnered a lot of attention. Eddie was always amazed at how many women were not dissuaded by Patrick’s Roman collar or the fact that Michael was a kid.
One of Michael’s schoolmates had managed to fool the army recruiter by changing his birth certificate, which Michael pronounced a swell idea. Both Patrick and Eddie tried to convince their brother to wait until he turned seventeen, when he’d be able to enlist with a signature from one parent.
“Mom will never do that,” Michael had countered, “and I’ll have to wait until I’m eighteen.”
“Then you’ll have to wait,” Patrick said with oldest-brother finality. When Patrick left, Michael started working on Eddie, who felt for the kid.
Eddie reached out to a friend who worked in city records, and twenty bucks later Michael had an official birth certificate that added fifteen months to his age. Michael told his parents that he’d gotten the forgery on his own, though Eddie suspected that his parents knew the truth. His mother had been angry for months; it was still rare to get a letter from her.
Harkins’ three little sisters, on the other hand, were faithful correspondents. There was something from each of them, plus a thin envelope from Dad. He’d save that for last.
He got up and washed his hands at the fountain, savoring what was coming, and feeling, as he’d told his men, a bit like it was Christmas. For the first time in days, maybe weeks, he didn’t feel completely exhausted. He also knew that a batch of mail came with a built-in letdown. There was the elation of a connection, however tenuous and artificial, with home. But after he read the letters, the distance, the great void of time and space that separated him from those he loved, weighed on him.
He opened Aileen’s letter first. She was nineteen, strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, and apparently in love with Timothy Brady, the Philadelphia patrolman Harkins had introduced her to before he left.
I was going to just hand out punch, she wrote about a USO dance she attended, since Tim couldn’t come. But then I thought it would be more patriotic to dance with some of the soldiers and sailors. She’d underlined the word “patriotic” twice, added, Ha ha.
She told him about the women she worked with at the Frankford Arsenal, where she spent her days making mortar shells, and her breaks learning to smoke cigarettes. The older, married women are teaching me a great deal, she wrote. Harkins read the line twice, decided he did not want to think the women talked about sex, at least not with his kid sister.
Aileen closed with a list of boys from the neighborhood who’d joined the service, of the girls who’d gotten married right before their sweethearts shipped out. In the nineteen months she’d been writing to him, she had—out of concern for him, he supposed—never mentioned a single casualty.
“Looks like a big haul,” Thomas said as he sat down under the next tree.
“Pays to have a big Catholic family come mail call,” Harkins said.
He opened Saoirse’s letter, a single sheet of pink stationery, a short one for her.
My dear brother, it began. I’m so sorry you’ll be alone during this tough time.
Harkins scanned the rest of the short page quickly. The word “guilty” jumped out at him.
I know that as Catholics we feel guilty about everything, and as Irish Catholics we even feel guilty that maybe we don’t feel gu
ilty enough, but you know I’ve never thought much of that philosophy. Don’t beat yourself up too badly, big brother. You are a good man, and I love you dearly.
“Shit,” Harkins said. His sisters must have found out about Maureen Conner, the woman he’d fallen for the autumn before the war. Maureen was beautiful; Patrick said she turned heads while walking to Holy Communion. She was also married to a detective in Harkins’ precinct. They had flirted for a few months, and finally Harkins had kissed her after a Halloween party, both of them tipsy, both of them breathing hard and shying away from the cliff-edge of some disaster.
On the Monday before Pearl Harbor, Detective Conner walked up to Harkins in an otherwise deserted precinct locker room, showed him a photo of three children: two little girls in frilly dresses, a boy with a lazy eye.
“My kids” was all he said, didn’t even name them, just walked out, tucking the picture back into his coat pocket. Nine days later Harkins enlisted.
But all that was a year and a half ago. Had something happened to Maureen? If her marriage broke up, did she blame Harkins?
Jesus, he thought. And I only got to kiss her. Once.
Harkins looked at the date of Saoirse’s letter: May 29, 1943. He picked up Aileen’s letter, which was dated May 2. Then the postmarks of the remaining two: Dad’s was mailed after Aileen’s and before Saoirse’s. If the old man had found out about Maureen, that would be another strike against Eddie. Strike two, counting Michael’s forged birth certificate.
He started to open the letter from Dad, then decided to postpone the inevitable and distract himself with Mary’s letter.
Dear Bee, Mary began. The pet name came from his initials; his given name was Bernard Edward. I am so sorry and know that you must be heartbroken, as we all are.
Christ. Did Maureen kill herself? That can’t be right. He was pretty sure that once he left she’d just find another cop to flirt with.
I spent a couple of days with Mom—Mr. Hatter at work said take whatever time I need. Nice man. Bee, she is inconsolable, as I would be in her shoes.
