Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  “You poor thing.” Reginald Smithers, twenty-six and on his first commission as a ship’s chaplain, and in the middle of his first war, stared down at the disheveled animal. Then he gingerly picked it up with one hand. The furry creature stirred into life, one questioning eye cocked up at the clean-shaven cleric.

  “He’s dead is old Father Murphy. Killed in action administering the last rites. Rotten bad luck,” the priest told the bat as he carried it to the perch. Carefully stretching out a claw, the bat grasped the wood and swung itself back into position. It swayed slightly, as if rocking itself in mourning, all the while staring at the empty bunk.

  “No need to grieve too hard—he lived a full life and went down like a soldier. He’s bound to get a DCM posthumously,” the chaplain continued with forced cheerfulness while filling the food dish with pieces of chopped apple and orange from the ship’s cook.

  “So it’s just me and you from now on,” he finished, wondering what kind of affection he would get from a bat. Still, it was better than no companionship and Father Smithers, afflicted with acne and an unfortunate effeminate manner, had been having trouble developing any camaraderie at all with the seasoned paratroopers eager for combat.

  Resolutely he swung his kit onto the bunk and sniffed. They had removed Father Murphy’s clothes several days before but had left a rusting chest of possessions beneath the bed, assuming that the church would claim responsibility for them. The bed had been stripped but still held the musky smell of the dead cleric: mothballs and an old-fashioned sweetish aftershave.

  Reginald knew that the night air was freezing but he also knew it was icy fresh and full of sea salt. He wrenched the porthole open and retired to the en suite bathroom—a luxury afforded only to the clergy. Stooping to step through the low metal doorway, Reginald sighed deeply then shut the door.

  The bat cocked its head and gazed at the porthole. Beyond, the black sky was alight with the dramatic phosphorus trails of missiles and the smoldering lights of the starlight shells as they floated toward the ground with a deceptively benign beauty. The spectacle stirred something in the very depths of the bat’s primordial psyche. This was its domain, the kaleidoscopic burning landscape a trigger that ignited all of its instincts.

  The creature edged its way to the far end of the perch then opened its wings fully. Flapping wildly it made a straight path for the open porthole and, after hovering for a second, was swallowed by the night.

  The paratrooper hunkered in a ditch contemplating the vividness of everything around him. Fear had heightened his senses; he had seen action in Northern Ireland and knew the difference between the exhilaration of adrenaline and the nauseating sweep of fear—the feeling that your eyelids were pinned to your head, all senses pulled tense, as open as they could be, drinking in every second, every slight flutter in the gray panorama as you waited for death to spring out at you. The deadly jack-in-the-box, the one second element you hadn’t calculated on that got you every time. This was war, the butting up of the pig’s head of Life and its convulsing end, the pounding minute in which all your memories collided violently into a dangerous clarity where limbs moved before thought or morality.

  A fighter jet screamed overhead. Five seconds later a nearby explosion turned the sky a bright white-yellow and they were showered with dirt. Crouching, Lieutenant Clive Scarsgard checked himself. Fine, all in one piece, amazing. The luck of the Irish, you might say, except he wasn’t Irish.

  As his ears stopped ringing he realized his feet were starting to freeze. The icy water that filled the bottom of the trench was seeping into the shitty puttees he had been forced to wrap around his ankles because the second-rate DM boots they’d been issued were too short. Fucking crappy English design, Clive thought for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours, wondering whether the Argies crouching in their tents on the other side of no-man’s-land had better boots. Probably. Next kill he made he was going to take the boots he promised himself.

  Bullets whistled overhead and the dull thud of distant explosions peppered the air. He leaned back against the frozen mud and stared up at the sky. It was fucking amazing, he reflected, marveling at the iridescent streaks of phosphorus hanging like rips in a canvas, seeming to promise a luminous heaven behind the velvet skin of the night. The absurd thought that the army might include in their recruitment campaigns the idea of war as scenic occurred to him. He wanted to laugh out loud. Gallows humor; the hysteria of the man awaiting execution.

  Since arriving by landing craft near Port San Carlos a day ago his life had veered between the strange tedium of waiting in very uncomfortable places and rushing into combat—a flurry of flying bullets, screaming commands, and plunging bayonets. It had been nothing like they had described at training camp; then again, what was the point of trying to convey a realistic picture, he thought dreamily, it would be like recounting the loss of virginity—an entirely different experience for each individual.

  He had discovered several interesting things when pushed to extremes: firstly, that he found killing exhilarating; and secondly, it was far more difficult to shoot a man dead than he had assumed. Even riddled with bullets they still kept running at you stupidly, as if they hadn’t yet realized it was all over. The third thing was the indescribable stench of hand-to-hand combat. The smell of terror mixed in with shit, piss, blood, and steaming entrails combined with the smell of damp, dirty clothing. It was so foul Clive was forced to breathe through his mouth to exorcise the taste that clung to his nostrils.

  He touched the kukri—the eighteen-inch curved Gurkha fighting knife—on his belt. He’d had to use it to finish off a soldier at the last Argentine bunker after plunging his bayonet into the sleeping teenager. He touched the blade for good luck. It was a bad habit he’d got into. His officer in command—an irritating public schoolboy who was barely older than himself and already a proven coward in combat—glared at him for making a noise. The enemy—an Argentine machine-gun post—was barely a hundred meters away. But despite radioed commands to advance, the platoon had done nothing but crouch in the ditch for the last two hours.

  It is not death

  Without hereafter

  To one in dearth

  Of life and its laughter,

  Nor the sweet murder

  Dealt slow and even

  Unto the martyr

  Smiling at heaven:

  It is the smile

  Faint as a (waning) myth,

  Faint, and exceeding small

  On a boy’s murdered mouth.

  Wilfred Owen’s poem rattled around Clive’s brain. He had remembered it suddenly on coming across his first corpse—a young guardsman, not more than nineteen, stretched out as if in sleep, his face wax-white, his lips pulled back as if in dream. Only the open mouth of his wound, obscene against the stained snow, gave him away—the back half of his head was missing. Clive had stared at the body, marveling at how empty it looked. Was that death—the skin discarded by the soul? The squadron had pushed on before he had time to think about it. But the kid’s face kept floating back to him at odd moments. He looked like someone Clive might have picked up if they had met in civvies at some bar in a back street of Soho. In another time, in another kind of struggle.

  The boy might have been a younger version of himself: closet poetry reader, overt narcissist, likes to live a little dangerously, fucks men but falls in love with women. Would that be his epitaph? Don’t think too much, Clive, don’t. Too much thought and you’re a goner.

  Not that he didn’t expect to survive. He’d known since he was a kid that he was lucky—touched by the angels, his mother used to say—shimmering with a kind of handsome ease that made others instantly jealous. Fate kept him safe. Maybe that was why he sought out risk—to test the gods. He liked to push his luck. When he was ten he’d had a sledding accident; his best friend had broken a leg but Clive had got away with barely a scratch. At twenty, a car accident—the driver was killed, the passenger behind him paralyzed for life, but Clive
had emerged from the wreck with a bruised cheek and whiplash. In Northern Ireland he’d been driving behind a car that was ambushed, avoiding death by a matter of seconds. The luck of a fallen angel walking unscathed through a collapsing world.

  He shifted his weight now, feeling around with one frozen foot for a ledge to lift himself out of the slush. Apart from the commanding officer three other soldiers squatted in the ditch with him: Cedric, a heavy Welshman in his thirties with a wicked sense of humor, who shared Clive’s dislike for their officer; a young cockney who appeared to have stumbled into the army without much understanding of how he’d got there; and a seasoned sergeant who’d seen operations both in the Middle East and West Africa—a man of few words and much action. Clive had followed him through several advances already, trusting his aptitude far more than that of the bristling CO.

  Cedric was busy checking his weapons over and over, the young cockney kept untying and retying his bootlaces—a reaction to shock, Clive guessed—while the sergeant glared at the commanding officer as if he was thinking of saving the Argentines the effort of killing him and was about to do it himself. It promised to be a long night.

  The bat flew quickly, propelled by the glacial wind that came off the choppy waters of the South Atlantic and rushed inland. It was flying over San Carlos water, known as “bomb alley.” Impervious to the icy temperatures the animal was in its element, dipping low as it glided over the mountainous waves and through their spray. Its fur stood on end over every part of its body, the wings of skin stretched out to scoop up each gush of air.

  A Harrier jet zoomed past. The vortices trailing off each wing momentarily knocked the bat off course, transforming its path into a crazy zigzag.

  It flew over HMS Antelope. Below, the crew ran across the deck like crazy ants, scrabbling to fire antiaircraft missiles at the Argentine fighters that were screeching down like angry wasps. One missile hit the water and exploded prematurely, sending a spray of shrapnel and sea up like a sudden tornado. Indifferent, the bat soared through it.

  The animal was excited now; for the first time in thirty-seven years the reason for its existence had been reignited, and the calling that had played through the creature for centuries drummed wildly in its blood. It existed for one destination only—the battlefield.

  It hovered in midair above a discarded buoy covered by several sea lions huddling together for warmth. The bat shook off the sea spray that had stuck to its hair and wings. Sensing the creature’s presence, the sea lions took fright and dived off the buoy like panicked shipwreck survivors. Drawn by the streaks of light and the roar of distant guns the bat flew on toward the island, hazy memories of other battles, the thunder of fire and flame, pulsing through its brain.

  Juan Martinez pushed his night-sight goggles up to his forehead, swore then spat. He hadn’t seen a British soldier for over an hour and yet the tracer bullets continued. He couldn’t tell whether they had spotted the machine-gun post dug into the side of the mountain or not. What was this crazy war for anyway, he wondered, a fucking PR operation for a dictator. A bogey man whose thugs came in the middle of the night to steal people. Was he now one of Galtieri’s hooligans?

  Although he didn’t agree with the regime, he wanted order, but when they had dragged away the long-haired primary schoolteacher in his village he had begun to have doubts. The newspapers were screaming that inflation was over 600 percent and many of the farmers were suffering, really suffering. Still he’d got out. To here. This shitty piece of nothing. Three weeks he’d been on the island—two weeks occupying the territory and putting up with the resentful English residents, and one week of fierce fighting—and he was beginning to think that maybe the Brits should have this miserable piece of land after all. It was too cold, and too far away to serve Argentina. What had General Galtieri been thinking? That it would make some great holiday destination, the next Club Med perhaps? Fucking stupid. Almost as ridiculous as squatting in a tent for four days wrapped in state-of-the-art U.S.-issued parkas. It was a travesty; they were better prepared for the weather than combat. He felt like some extra in a B-grade war movie waiting for the director to yell Action! He was eighteen years old and only joined up because his older brother was already in the army and had boasted of all the opportunities—the good uniform, opportunities for promotion, travel, women—everything Juan had dreamed of back in Cordoba. He knew that if he didn’t get out he would end up just a cattle hand like his father.

  But there was another reason why he couldn’t stay in the village. He was a lover of men. At least he thought he was a lover of men. He didn’t know for sure; he just knew that when he looked at women he didn’t feel the way he should. They didn’t get him hard, not like men did.

  Sweet Mary, Mother of Christ, he prayed, protect me now and I promise I will be a transformed man when I get home. He only knew of one man in the village who was like that. The unhappy goat herder had been so ridiculed and persecuted that one day after church they found him hanging from a beam in his hut, his body already a week old. That wasn’t going to happen to him, that wasn’t going to happen to Juan Martinez.

  Juan unzipped his parka and, with fingers that were trembling with the cold despite woollen gloves, he rolled himself a cigarette and lit up. No, he was going to get himself some help, he was going to change. He’d find some girl he could at least talk to and pretend. Maybe he’d even marry. He was going to change, for Jesus and God.

  But being in the army, now that was different. Back at the base, Juan had loved the packed-in bunks, the proximity of all those bodies, the maleness, the camaraderie and joking around, the way the young soldiers would walk around naked, showing off but never admitting it, almost as if they knew. They’d even made jokes about sucking each other off it was so fucking lonely. The comment had made Juan instantly hard just imagining it. It was dangerous. He had to watch himself all the time, play tougher than the rest, be more macho. But he was good, the best actor he knew.

  He touched the seeping scratch that ran across one cheekbone—his first war wound from a bayonet five days ago in hand-to-hand combat. He’d killed a Scots Guard with his own bayonet one night. The fight had made him a hero and had instantly secured his reputation as un hombre con huevos. Homosexual, Juan Martinez? Not him.

  So where were the pale-skinned ingéles hiding now? Peering out again at the bleak horizon dotted with the gnarled skeletons of burned-out shrubs, he wondered how long it would be before the next wave of soldiers wielding bayonets, their backs crisscrossed with ammunition, swooped out of the dark, their faces smeared with camouflage cream. At first Juan had thought they were Gurkhas because they were so fucking short. But after seeing the blue eyes rolling back on the soldier he’d killed, he knew they were gringos. Boys like themselves, just better trained.

  Behind him, the lights of Stanley still burned like some floating fairy satellite. For a moment Juan wished he was back home in the village, at his mother’s, a mug of strong chocolate warming his hands while the women muttered their endless mantra of births, marriages, infidelities and deaths. Remember my son Juan, killed in battle like a true hero, God rest his soul. The premonition of his mother, dressed in black, whispering into the ear of Julietta, the oldest widow of the village, made him shiver. Butting out his cigarette he promptly dismissed it from his mind. Stupid superstition. He was going to live. He was going to go home, help with the calving for one more season, then he would hitch a ride to Buenos Aires and make some money in the nightclubs as a bouncer like his cousin Enrico.

  “Get down, you idiot,” one of his companions hissed as an RAF army helicopter flew over, its search-beam traveling across the battlefield like a great white eye. The soldiers fired off a couple of rounds of ammunition before it flew off, swaying dramatically like an overburdened bumblebee.

  “Adios, gringos. May you rot in hell.”

  “Hey, Dario, when are we gonna get out of this shit-hole?”

  “When I get orders. Until then you have my permission to conti
nue to compose love letters to that sweet-arsed mother of yours.”

  “Fuck you,” Juan responded affectionately.

  “Fuck you too. And send my love to Cordoba.”

  It was a programmed knowledge that drew the animal to its prey. A sensibility wired into it thousands of moons before. Was it vulnerability, a certain doubting nature, that the bat craved? Or perhaps its motivation was more incidental than that—an unusually high temperature, a racing heart, a certain plasma type. Whatever the characteristic, it had existed in mankind from the moment the first homo sapiens had drawn breath in an African cave and a small bat, nesting above the primitive family, had opened its hooded eyes, disturbed by the bawling infant. War and blood, pounding fear and sheer terror—they all had a smell.

  The bat swooped low over the moon-drenched beach, a bluish pebbled strip against which the ocean beat endlessly as it had for millennia, oblivious to the burned-out landing craft lying like an upturned beetle in the surf.

  The animal flew over the curve of the harbor, then, using its sonar, hugged the cliff face as it swept down toward battle.

  “Jimmy five over to base, request permission to advance, over, request permission to advance.”

  “Permission granted, suggest three degrees north to join left flank.”

  The radio operator pulled off his headphones and gestured to the commanding officer. Finally some action, Clive thought, and not a moment too soon—his toes felt as if frostbite had set in and his numbed brain couldn’t imagine anything worse than staying there a minute longer, not even hand-to-hand combat.

  “Prepare bayonets,” the CO whispered. Grimly the four men reached for the scabbards fastened neatly to their belts, each praying the enemy wouldn’t hear the telltale click as they fixed the blades to the rifles. Clive swung the weapon up to hip height, ready to spring over the ridge. He loosened his chin straps in case he received a head injury and braced himself for the command that would send them running over the lip of the trench and straight toward the line of battle.