Down Jersey Driveshaft

by William J. Jackson

  Benny's body begins to soften. Morphine shoots down the nagging airplanes, fills in the trenches. Big Bertha melts into Munch's the Scream. The war is over, and Haskins loses by a knockout.

  The nurses tie up the gown and turn Benny on his big back.

  "I flew...I flew over a castle...they had things in it...strange..." the Brown Bear begins hibernation.

  "Sleep tight kid," says Vera. "When you wake up, do not get out of bed. Believe me, you'll be better off."

  The nurses check on the other boys before leaving the infirmary.

  Benjamin Haskins flies sky high. He doesn't hear a word the nurse says.

  The ceiling is blackness. In slow turns, it changes as sunrise from dark to weak amber light. Benjamin Haskins has two thoughts at odds.

  "Water?" and, "Gotta pee."

  His right hand drifts up, scanning the area. Sense of touch finds a small table, light fingers feel for a glass and find one. Seconds or minutes recede as he tries to remember how to get up, how he ever got in a bed with a foreign ceiling.

  The hand softly picks up the glass. It moves to Benny's mouth in a ponderous slide, more from drug haze than any form of caution. The water parts dry lips, enters his mouth as a blessing. Trouble swallowing makes him attempt to raise his head. Dizziness follows. But he manages and continues on, eating water wholesale.

  Naturally, the second thought begins to dominate. Every body part hums a cello solo of apathy, but his private roars as if Niagara Falls is locked up behind the scrotum.

  "Gotta...get up." A year seems to pass just to get his fingers wrapped around the mattress to provide a push. Another year moves by sitting upright. Benny's elderly in the time it takes to reach the side of the bed. The floor seems to move in and out. At the end of the infirmary electric light shines. His own breathing echoes like cannon fire.

  "Hey buddy, use the bedpan. Whatever you do, don't get up."

  Benny looks around, but sees only guys lying motionless in this wood and cotton crypt. "Who's that?" He hears his own voice. Slurry, raspy.

  "Salvador Terillo, Hundred and Fourth Engineers, guy. Over here, with the useless eyes."

  Benny manages to find the voice, over to his left. He finds a man dead still, half his head wrapped up.

  "Use the bedpan, guy. Stay in bed."

  Haskins looks at the little table. Sure enough, there's a round metal pan, tiny and shiny to waking eyes, minding its own business.

  "Nah. I gotta go a lot. I need the water closet." He stands, falls on the bed. Smiles. Stands again. Blood plummets from his head to the toes. Now they have feeling while the room spins! He takes a wobbly, infantile step. The floor creaks. Down the way, the rectangular shape of a door beckons. "That's it, right?"

  Legs held tight, hand over his private as if it will stop Nature, Benny wobbles down the aisle between the beds for the door. A few more dissenting voices whisper protests.

  "Don't!"

  "You'll get in trouble!"

  He proceeds. Fuzzy fingers grapple with the doorknob. It opens, and he stumbles in. Without lifting the lid, he shoves the gown to the side, and releases. All of life's dramas fall away. He has no other awareness but this one.

  Finished after eternity's end, he turns to find the door. Click!

  A swinging electric light activates before his face, offering a hard illumination. The brilliance of relief surrenders to the awe of surprise, the burn of blindness. A feminine hand wearing a white glove waves in Benny's face.

  "Haskins, isn't it? Benjamin Haskins?" The voice is domineering, old but authoritative.

  "Yeah...who...?" For a hair's breadth of time, he's glad vision is normal.

  The woman moves forward. Personal space is gone. "Did you miss the bedpan my nurses set out for you, Mister Haskins?" Benny sees she's a nurse, a middle-aged one with tightly wrapped blond hair (a pinch of gray) and a pair of black metal spectacles. Her nose is hooked some, a fair looking woman, better if the face wasn't so stern. She has a straight shape that blossoms out to square hips. She seems to be all right angles. Maybe it's the medication.

  Benny feels uncomfortable. This lady sounds like his mother when she's angry. "No ma'am. I saw it. But I had more to offer...than that pan would've held so..."

  "My patients use the bedpans provided."

  "But..."

  "My patients. Use. The bedpans. Provided."

  He suddenly feels inadequate for no reason. "Ah, yes ma'am."

  She smiles. Her eyes stare into his soul and tear it to shreds but the corners of the lips do curve upward. "Very well. I'm Nurse Lyle, I run the infirmary during the late hours. I practically control the whole hospital at night, to be fair. Are you fit?"

  "Yes...I mean...no. I crashed..."

  The smile falls flat. "Well then. Back to bed with you."

  Lyle doesn't budge, so Benny has to sidestep her. It's a tough move, what with his drug addled body and the puny gap between her shoulder and the door frame. No matter the struggle, she never flinches. He grinds along the frame, back and arm swelling from the return of the pain. The aisle stretches out as he walks. Reaching the bed takes more years off his life.

  In the instant he lays on his back, Nurse Lyle sits next to his left arm. She studies the bandages, his head, the gown. From her right pocket she produces a syringe. "Has the pain returned?" Her tone offers loving smoothness while she maintains the cold observation.

  Benny nods his head, firing up the pain in the neck. He winces.

  "It's okay. Soon you won't feel a thing, and sleep will be, inevitable."

  The needle goes in with more emphasis in the hands of Lyle. Benny vaguely recalls another lady with better bedside manner, but there's too much fog to remember her. The blood burns, an inline engine up the vein to his heart and head.

  He's going down to absence of being again. Nurse Lyle fades out. As she goes, Benny accosts one final sensation.

  Sickness, followed by pain. A deep rooted hurt that makes him want to hack, but the morphine sings a louder harmony. He feels fingers, warm fingers gripping his testicles, squeezing them. But, no nurse would do that. The pressure reaches fever pitch, then subsides as he whelps before drifting away.

  "Don't get out of bed again. I run a tight ship."

  A tight ship...

  "Nobody does it like Nurse Janice Lyle," says Vera. Her pretty features are the first thing Benny sees each morning. The second is daylight, resplendent rays of promise through the windows of the hospital. Three days in Salem have gone by in medicated blurs.

  "No dust."

  "What's that, honey?" Vera seems a bit more passive today.

  "You ever...look at sunlight and...how it shows how much dust is in the air? There's none here."

  "We keep things sterile around here, honey. Do you need anything."

  Benny shakes his head. "Bandages are nice and fit perfect this time."

  Vera loses her passivity for a second. "Like I said, Nurse Lyle does it right. She redressed everything last night while you slept."

  Sure enough, pain is practically gone. The left wrist and fingers are splinted well. Benny even waves the arm a bit to test it out. No loose movement, not a twinge of spasm. Benny's big head only throbs a minor drum solo this morning. There's but one problem.

  "I'm hurtin' downstairs."

  "Weren't messing with any of those French dames overseas, were we?" Vera removes herself from Benny's area, skips over to the other boys.

  He reaches behind him to lift up the pillow and angle his upper body into a lazy man's excuse for sitting up. Grace and Vera rove soft as butterflies to the flowery beds of each veteran. They give them the man-made nectar of pharmaceuticals, tender touches and whispered nothings. Home front wisdom says pretend the war never happened. it was all a bad dream. Benny realizes he doesn't seem to warrant the butterfly care. Sure, it's only been three days, but...

  Why are these ladies so cold to me?

  He watches them practically avoid Salvador. Vera changes the dressing over the eng
ineer's eyes, but says not a word to him. Hundred and Fourth Engineers...

  "Hey, Salvador."

  "Mister Haskins!" Vera whispers like a cobra. "Mister Terillo needs his sleep.

  "I'm awake," says Terillo. "Whaddaya know, Haskins?"

  "I seem to remember you and your guys were on the same job as me recently."

  Terillo swallows. "You don't say?"

  "You guys went to Neuffen a few weeks ago. I was told on my two flights my only allies were the Hundred and Fourth, trying to enter Hohenneuffen Castle from the--"

  "Sir!" Vera snaps. "This infirmary demand quiet. There will be plenty of time for talk when we help you gentlemen outside later for a cigarette. You do smoke, yes?"

  Benny nods. He blinks a lot, trying to figure out what Vera's problem is.

  "Okay nurse. When's smoking time?

  Aided by soft hands, Benny is guided out to the rear of the hospital, a tranquil world of bushes with an iron table and chairs from the age of Victoria. Benny slams himself into one. It's a mistake, for the hard landing reminds him of the discomfort in his lower region, shakes up his pained physique. He's offered a Lucky Strike, not his favorite (Camel), but it does the trick after days without.

  "You don't look as relieved as the other fellas when they get their drags," says Vera. Her observations are beginning to drag Benny into a foul mood.

  "Ad says 'it's toasted'. Most accurate ad ever, 'cuz it tastes like Corn Flakes. Hot Corn Flakes. But what are you gonna do?" He inhales deeper. Deeper makes the cigarette taste less like breakfast cereal, so he downs the first cigarette in less than a minute and demands a second.

  "Pushy, aren't we?"

  He ignores Vera while sticking out his hand for the next stick. Grace comes walking out back, pushing Salvador in a slim wheelchair with a wicker seat. Salvador has his head up on high, feeling the sun he can't see.

  Benny starts using his brain again. "Nobody else in the infirmary smokes?" Such a realization seems more fantastic than Martians invading the Earth.

  "Just you two. We'll let you boys enjoy the day on your own. We'll be back in twenty minutes."

  Her emphasis of the time gives him goosebumps. The nurses depart for the interior.

  Silence wastes four minutes, but not because Benny stays quiet. His first set of questions receive no answers from Salvador.

  "So, did you guys make it inside? Boy, did I see some stuff behind the walls. Black metal boxes, but unlike, you know, regular boxes. The opened in a lot of, I don't know, fingers I guess. Bunch of Krauts and other guys watching it plain as day, like it was natural. maybe they found some unused weapon? You see any of that?"

  Salvador sunbathes.

  "Not one of them Germans opened fire. Sure, the war was over for a long time. But I saw Krauts dressed for war and armed. I mean, no big guns, but they had Mausers."

  Silence.

  "Took me two flights to get there. The first was a directive. I had to land in some clearing outside of Neuffen and meet a man named Schernberg. Nice enough guy. Had the worst breath, like he ate rotten deli meats in between words. I'm fuzzy on why I had to meet him, other than a waste of my time. He didn't say anything of value, said he was from Committee on Public Information. I admit, that was the oddest bit of the whole setup. But anyway, he pointed to a castle I'd already seen from the air, told me you guys were trying a ground approach--"

  "Benjamin."

  "Call me Benny." Benny sees Salvador twitching in the fingers, first the thumbs before all ten quake like San Francisco. He finds it silly, a grown man with shaky hands. What's the worst an engineer could have gotten into, especially here, where the sun is vivid and the town casts a pretty shade of the home front on a man's face?

  Salvador gives it a go, sort of. "These nurses, all but Lyle..." He gulps a lot after Lyle's name. "They came over here with me. The other nurses who are regulars were moved away, to Bridgeton or Camden or wherever." Just those few comments make Salvador shiver.

  Benny's a bright bulb, but one usually slow to fully illuminate. "So? Military trained to take care of military wounds. Makes sense to me. They've seen it all."

  "All the boys here...are from the Neuffen assignment."

  "You mean the mission? Heck, what was the mission? 'Haskins, fly over the castle, see what you can see'?" Were the Krauts making a comeback? Was the Armistice gonna be ruined over what happened inside those old walls? Black boxes don't make much of a threat, no matter how they open and close."

  "We can't talk about it."

  Benny's taken aback. "Why not? And if they're here to watch us because of some quack assignment that led to nothing, how did Lyle sneak in?" Saying her name makes his lower abdomen heave. Queasy. He's unsure why.

  "We got inside..."

  "And?" Benny's on the edge of his seat, muscles bulging, bruises flaming.

  "..."

  "C'mon Salvador! If you got a close visual, that makes whatever we did worthwhile. What'd you see?"

  "Government keeps things from us for their own reasons, Benny. Best not to ask. Lyle, she requested to come here, knows all the top Army doctors."

  "It's who you know, huh? Who cares about her anyway? What about--"

  "It's more than she knows them. She and they ah...well, you're young."

  Salvador has eyes in the back and sides of his head. He can feel the youth oozing out of Haskins, the limp facial muscles as Benny tries to fathom what he means but the mind grasps at air.

  "You, never spent time with any of the ladies in France?"

  Benny covers half his face, fakes it as taking an even bigger drag off the dead cigarette. "Well uh, see...I blush ah, easy. Don't get me wrong. I love the attention, but on the intimate stuff I get kinda nervous and...girls got to ah, laughing. I'd get sore and leave."

  "Then we should discuss things you can understand, my friend. Neuffen was, is, no longer our concern. Keep quiet. Stay in your bed. Obey. You'll be fine."

  Vera and Grace wander out. Their idea of twenty minutes is much shorter than the men's.

  "Mister Terillo, you've had too much sun. Let's get you in bed." Vera takes the handles of the wheelchair, offers Benny a stern smile, and turns Salvador away from the light.

  Grace offers her shoulders for Benny. He waves her away. "Can I enjoy the day a little longer?"

  "Sure, Honey." Grace departs.

  "Hey Salvador!" Benny yells, "What was in the boxes? One word'll do." His asking gets the evil eye from Vera. She makes to turn around and begin a good round of verbal abuse when--

  "Arms." Salvador whispers it loudly enough to be heard, and enough to hear the terror. As soon as the words hit Benny's ears, the engineer is out of sight.

  Benny rubs his gut. Slow to process, he finds the answer more confusing than helpful.

  Arms? What's so bad about that? It was a war, after all.

  Two more days of dope. Men from the CPI stop by to say hello, shake Benny's hand, and depart.

  He's in and out. Out and in.

  Morphine subsides in the blood. Benjamin wipes drool from his lips and returns to the waking world. The infirmary is dark. Medication kills the pain, but dulls the reflexes.

  Benny sits up. All the boys are still, except one.

  "Where's ah..." C'mon--wake up! "Where's Terillo?"

  "Discharged while you snored us to death," one of the boys whispers. "Be quiet!"

  "Discharged? He's still blind. Who got him?"

  The infirmary plays deaf.

  Well, Nature calls in a hurry. Benny forgets the strangeness of his stay here when Niagara calls. He sits up and stares at the metal bedpan. Okay. Fine!

  He moves in the bed like a lopsided penguin, completely unsure of how this is supposed to work. Sit on it? Stand and release into it?

  He opts for getting up on his knees, the pan between the thighs. Gapping the legs open is more painful than he remembers. Man! Bruised everything in the crash, or the fall, whatever! He's halfway into that thought when the dam bursts. The relief is so wonder
ful, he almost doesn't notice the fallout.

  "Why's the bed so warm?" he mumbles aloud.

  Weary eyes see a full bedpan, and the Brown Bear still going strong. He's never urinated so much, even as a kid holding it in in Miss Johnson's schoolhouse. The white sheets bare golden puddles. His knees are wet. Furious, Benny storms up off the bed, snatches the bedpan (then remembering what he has, forces a more genteel approach), and stumbles for the water closet.

  "Benny!" The boys whisper shout as Haskins marches on.

  Images of Lyle's militant gaze come to his mind, but this is a crisis he can easily clean up. Would she want me to lay in dirty sheets?

  The door is opened. The light flicks on. Benny dumps the bedpan, rinses it clean in the sink. He finds he has to pee some more, does his duty, and departs. On the way back, he grabs some clean sheets from the shelf by the water closet door. Hobbling and hurting, he nonetheless makes the bed. Old sheets are tossed into the laundry cart. The pain makes every inch of movement seem to extend time, but he gets it done and lays back down.

  Nurse Lyle enters two minutes later, making a beeline for an armless doughboy named Sulley. She strokes his ginger hair. He lays like a mannequin, never looking at her. He appears tense to Benny, who lies still, faking sleep. He can't think of anything except any second, Lyle will smell urine in the air like a bloodhound and give him the mommy stare.

  But no. She continues whispering into Sulley's ear while he eyes the black ceiling waiting for God to strike him. Benny realizes that's his look. Fear. She's saying all the right things. you could hear a flea eat oxygen in the infirmary right then. Benny hears her.

  "Only you have been a calm in my storm, little Johnny. Every word I said, you took to heart. Are you stressed?"

  Johnny Sulley doesn't answer.

  "Are you?"

  Sulley maintains his crypt composure.

  "Are you?" Her voice gets the tone, the one from the previous evening. Benny feels a slight chill. Sulley stiffens more than a petrified tree.