The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  “Isn’t this stupid? Isn’t this awful?” she finally said. “Oh, I hate to be sick!”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “That’s kind,” she said, still hanging over. “You’re kind.” She put her hands—they were cold from the shock of nausea—over his as they covered her breasts.

  “What do you expect a gentleman to do?” he said.

  She laughed and retched. “This is hilarious. Oh, God!” Her chest heaved, and the tearing, choking sound was muted, absorbed by the dark trees.

  “You’re just sick,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody gets sick. You’re not used to whisky, that’s all. Can you stand up?”

  She still held his hands, and after the last fit of nausea stood up and leaned back against him, her shoulders just above his belt. “I’ve never let myself go against a man,” she said. “I mean even leaned like this, even with Shim. And look where you have your hands,” she said wonderingly. He started to take them away, but she held them against her. “My God! Look what I’m doing! I feel like I’m going to melt.” She threw his hands away and ran unsteadily to the house. He heard the front door close softly.

  “Oh, oh,” he whispered. “Oh, oh. Now what?” He was shaking. “Bad, Grimald. Bad, bad, bad.” He stretched, and walked slowly toward the house. He felt pity, and he felt love for this unhappy little woman; but he felt curiosity, too, and much fear. Dammit, Rachel! he thought, you left me. Where are you? With your psychiatrist? Are you getting therapy? Rachel, where are you? He was jealous and excited and cautious; he felt like a kid.

  In the entry hall, half hidden against the wall, there was a gleam of yellow, and his excited pulse thumped in his ears.

  “You’ve got my glasses,” she whispered, and her cool hand came out and touched his. He gave them to her and she put them on as she came out into the light. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry and I didn’t mean to tell you anything or involve you at all.” Her face was wet.

  “That’s all right, Opal,” he said.

  “No, you don’t have to be kind. I’ve got my quills up and working again.”

  “Well, you’ve been crying here in the corner,” he said. He reached to pat her, to be gentle with her, but she slipped past him and hurried up the front stairs. At the top she turned once to look down at him, her dark eyes half hidden by glints of light, then disappeared.

  Richard sat in front of the fire for a while, intending to go to bed soon. He and Murray were going to take an old trail in the morning to a long-abandoned farm where there were supposed to be many partridge among the surviving apple trees. They would start early and take their lunch with them. Now, as he watched the last of the fire, getting up occasionally to poke the severed, diminishing logs together, he thought of Opal and Rachel, recognizing in himself emotions he hadn’t had for many years.

  First exhilaration, power: himself as a man, a stud of a man, and the idea of seducing Opal in this context seemed right, and the plurality of women highly exciting. Rachel, Opal, then another lovely, needful woman, and then another in whom he should deftly plant his seed. And after that idea came fear, the desire for neatness, predictability, lack of complication in his life. And after that, the ebbing of the wave, an odd, guilty, moral awareness of his long habit of faithfulness to his wife. And then sad anger at Rachel: she left him, didn’t she? Perhaps even now—he looked at his new wrist watch—at eleven o’clock, a man he did not know, or a man he did know? arched his alien self over his, Richard Grimald’s, loving, lubricous, soft-mouthed Rachel. She had a little brown mole with three silky hairs on it high up on the inside of her left thigh, and this subman would heat it with his goatish jerks. Jealousy made him ache, and at the same time sexual excitement made the ache terrible, insupportable.

  And then back to Opal: he must. Then Shim: toward Shim he felt only (at this moment) the careless pity one feels toward a cuckold. Opal: he would. He would gentle her until he could go all the way, and she would then truly melt. Rachel: again he saw her. He thought, the beast with two backs. But what man could have the back to cover her? No man was worthy of her after him. No man, God damn it! Perhaps it was irrational, but he thought of her psychiatrist, Dr. Goldman. A burnished, plumply muscular man of Richard’s age, with a sun-lamped face and neat little feet—could it be him? Was it anybody? Did she need, somehow—or was she told she needed—a good, well-fed, circumsized Jewish go? Her Semitic id needed reaming? Her ego rejuvenated by a ten-thousand-year-old seminal connection?

  And then he thought: I do not know her because I love her. Because I love her I could not see her. She is a woman, and I am a man, not a believer of crazy myths and prejudices. Maybe Goldman is a better man. That bastard! That dirty bastard!

  He found the pretty novel in his hands, raised it, squeezed it, and almost threw it against the fire. No. And good that he didn’t, for Shim had come up behind him and stood there dripping wet and grinning.

  “Rained. Caught me smack dab in the middle of the woods. Where’s Murray?”

  “Raining?”

  “Quick’s a wink, but it’s over now. Where’s Murray?”

  “Out driving my car.”

  “Hell! Wanted to show him something. You want to come see? Ten-minute walk.”

  Shim was excited. He looked as if he were going hunting. “It’s rich! Oh, it’ll be rich! Come on.”

  He could not say no to Shim now. At first he wondered if Shim had seen him with Opal, and even though he knew Shim to be a deadly man he was not frightened at the thought. He knew how silly and rather primitive it was, but he had always found it difficult to be frightened of any man who was smaller than he, as if guns did not exist, or hadn’t yet been invented. A strange thing—it had been true even in the army, when everyone was armed. But he could not say no to Shim, and some guilt, probably, was the reason for it.

  It would evidently be a stalk; Shim had him put on his light leather boots and soft pants; then, before they left the house, went to his arms locker and got out a huge Very pistol—a souvenir of the war—its short barrel as big as a water pipe. “Rich!” he kept saying, “Rich!” He put two G.I. magnesium flares in his jacket pocket. “Come on!”

  They went around the barn and immediately entered the woods. The ground was wet and relatively silent; the stars were out again, but the moon had gone down. Both of them instinctively crouched as they felt their way through the trees, Shim leading, both quickly feeling their way with all their exposed skin and with the soles of their feet. They stayed in the softwood, where the quiet, acid needles had smothered out much of the underbrush.

  Whenever he walked with another man in the woods, Richard thought of the war, and of the constant patrols that were his most indelible memories. Not so different now, either, because he didn’t know where he was going or what he would find when he got there. He guessed it had something to do with young Spooner, the game warden, but he would wait and see.

  Shim stopped and whispered, “You’re pretty quiet in the woods.”

  “So are you.”

  “Ought to be,” Shim said, and that was true. Like most of his kind, he had grown up in the woods and in the war had joined the Tenth Mountain Division. “We got to cross some hardwoods now,” Shim whispered, “so we got to be real dainty. He just might have moved. Even if he does hear us, providing we sound right, he’ll think we’re deer. So do like me.” Shim moved off in the blackness that was just a little less dense here in the starlight below the bare hardwoods. In spite of the rain the fallen leaves were loud underfoot. Shim took several quick steps, since it was impossible to be silent, then stopped. Richard waited for a moment and then followed, keeping the rhythm of his steps broken, one following quickly upon the other, then a slight pause before he continued: a man in the woods could always be told by the steady tramp, tramp of his feet. This way they crossed the leaves and reached another band of spruce. They seemed to be circling the lower open slope in order to come upon it from the south, but Richard knew better than to trus
t such an idea implicitly—that was a good way to get absolutely confused and then to crash, under the tyranny of any inflexibly civilized idea, into the patternless trees. He knew he must never, never decide, but feel and look. He could just see part of the Big Dipper and so found north, but in the enforced detours made of blowdown and woods tangle and ravine the Dipper might swing like a crazy top before he glimpsed it again.

  Even though they were woodsmen they were loud and clumsy, of course, but they stalked a mere man, as insensitive as they, not a native of the dark trees. He remembered an instructor at Benning saying, “Unless you are fighting an animal, fight in the dark.” There were no men who were at home with the woods and the animals of the night. When even the most skillful and knowledgeable hunter entered the woods, he was there as an intruder: noisy, clumsy, observed. This he knew, and at the same time, following Shim by Shim’s delicate and deliberate sounds, he knew that man not only began in such an alien place, but prevailed in it and upon it. A man could feel its hollows and traps, hear its rhythms in his own heart, and know that though he was not the cleverest animal in the woods, where intelligence might not count as much as sense, he was the fiercest of all the animals: so fierce, so insatiably full of lust that he must even rend himself, fight for fighting, kill for killing. For a second Richard missed the stubby comfort of an M1 carbine, and the insurance of dark grenades. Then he followed Shim more closely. They crawled, now, beneath the low, dead spruce branches which tapped their heads and touched their backs like skeleton fingers. The dry needles, crushed and ruffled, slid aromatically beneath their chins.

  He heard the field rather than saw it. Starlight again, but an openness of the ears more than the eyes. Shim edged close and breathed into his ear, then whispered, “You ’call that pasture pine out there? Big one, trunk wide as a man’s shoulders? He’s sitting against it, I think. Was, anyway.” Shim peered into the blackness, and whispered again: “He thinks I don’t think he’s there, because of the rain, so he figures I might be out jacking deer. Now, he also figures I’d be coming along with a light, so he ain’t really tensed up. He’s looking this way, if he’s there, thinking we might be deer. Only thing is, Spooner’s what you call a butt fiend. He’s just got to smoke a cigarette about every fifteen minutes, so we got to wait until he can’t hold off. O.K.?”

  “O.K.”

  “What I’ d like to do,” Shim whispered, “is leave him set and go take a whack at his wife. Yow! would I like a hunk of that. Built? Stacked? He got her over in Texas he was there in the Air Force. Man, she just draw-wuls slow an’ eeeasy. Give me a blue-steeler to look at her.”

  They waited for five minutes, and Shim said: “We either got here when he just indulged, or he’s moved. I think he’s still there, but I’m going to move on up a ways and see if he’s around the other side. You stay here and watch the fun.” Very quietly now on the slippery needles, Shim moved off.

  Richard propped his chin on his fists, and waited. He could not really watch, for there was not enough light to stimulate the optic nerves, but his eyes were open, unfocused, blind in the night, waiting for the flare of a match. He remembered many such vigils in the war, when the eyes, like shutterless cameras, waited to let a flash expose them. He did not think much any more about the war; he had served well enough so that the grand words upon his discharge evoked no irony. He might be caused to remember a scene, a sudden flare of action, the way a man once died before him with a sleepy sigh, the pluck pluck pluck of his carbine, softened by the after-silence of a gigantic blast into whose fumes and dust he had jumped to fire. But that war had been over for thirteen, fourteen years. What an unbelievably long time that was! Half as long as it had been then since the First World War, and once he had, with a sense of somber, imponderable history, killed three men on an ancient battlefield. There had been an echo then, too, of hunting, and he remembered a sign riddled with playful bullet holes:

  ZONE DES BATAILLES

  DANGER DE MORT!

  riddled just as the stop sign on the Cascom River road had been riddled by frustrated hunters. It had been on a hill above Verdun at a place called Fort de Vaux, a battered mound, half cave, whose outlines had nearly merged with the chipped slate and the dead earth plowed and killed by artillery in that dull, stationary war when a round million men had butchered one another in one small valley above the drab little town.

  It was night, cold, half freezing, and he was a first lieutenant leading a three-man patrol through scrubby, poisonous-looking brush. The Germans were supposed to have left. Rather carelessly they followed the mounded old trenchworks by flashlight; once he examined a curious object his foot dislodged from the clay. It was a jackboot, shrunken and green, and out of it protruded a rain-whitened shinbone thirty years dead. He was thirty-one years old, and he carried a carbine in order to shoot young men who might now wear jackboots of the same design.

  They came out of the brush onto the fort itself, and were surprised to find a light in a small window next to a white door. After elaborate scouting to see if the light were not a trap, enfiladed and waiting to light a curious face, they looked in to see a plump man in blue, obviously French, eating bread and drinking le gros rouge out of a tall green bottle. He let them in at their knock and proceeded to sell them picture postcards of the place. He was the concessionaire, he told them, and congratulations, they were the first American tourists since 1939. They all had a drink out of the bottle. Richard couldn’t now recall the names of the men who were with him, but they were good men, pretty good men, he remembered. One was named Smith. Smith, yes, because they looked at the wall and saw, written in pencil, the names he always would remember. Not the names of the three young Germans he soon killed, of course, but in his mind the three dead men were struck forever with names, and because of the names, humanity. Unfortunately, in this case, they were not the Jew baiters, the Jew killers he so coolly hunted for Saul—without Saul’s permission:

  Willy Rosor 1942

  Hans Pietsch 1942

  Werner Schmidt 1942

  —tourists from earlier days of German victory in France. The last was remarked upon by Corporal Smith: “That’s kraut for my name!” Smith was later killed in a jeep accident at Metz.

  They heard the shots as they examined the Spartan room of the hero, Commandant Reynard, his sagging wooden wire-covered pallet and his ramrod military photograph, everything stained by damp rot. And the concessionaire screamed, “Bosches! Bosches!” then added, strangely, in German, “In der Kaserne!” and then, “L’infirmerie!” He screamed all this down the dripping, whitewashed hall they ran through, and they found him, his black goatee quivering with indignation, just able to point to a black square hole of a door in the wall before he vomited blood, bread, wine, a little smoke from his Gauloise bleu, and died in a puddle. At least he was dead when they got back to him and found little machinepistol bullet holes like extra buttonholes in his shirt.

  What they did instinctively, out of much patrolling in alleys and among walls, was to duck away from the black hole. Weak light bulbs with jiggling, nervous filaments like little nooses in them were strung up and down the corridor, and they could just read by these the diagram of the fort one of them had bought. There was no other way out of the room the Germans had so unfortunately entered, but in it were defilading walls that would make grenades doubtful. They needed something like tear gas, which of course they didn’t have.

  “Kommen sie hier!” Richard yelled at the hole.

  “Screw you, Jack,” said one of the Germans, and that was not so startling as frightening, because it told them that the Germans were veterans like themselves, and the odds changed a little. Veterans, the Germans would also be making plans. So Richard climbed up and tore out the electric wire, and they were all suddenly in that underground blackness that is thick, almost like velvet against the eyeballs. The cistern, cellar smell of the fort became denser in that darkness, and they heard the Germans searching for a way out of their room, and the drip of sweat from
the stone ceiling. He knew he must act while the Germans still had hope of finding another way out, so he grabbed his two men, brought their helmets with a clank against his, and whispered directions. They remembered the diagram all right: like rats in a maze they had learned swiftly, cleverly, almost instantly, a diagram of such importance to their lives. They must go in fast, and find the right walls immediately, and not hit a wall with their grenades. First they placed the Germans as well as possible by the furtive scratching of their hobnails, then said, “OK?” and slipped inside. The grenades popped, hissed, bounced, and echoed stonily just before the simultaneous blast: Richard had missed his ears with fingers that had become entangled in his hanging helmet straps, and then it was, partly deafened, that his carbine made the soft pluck pluck sound. The Germans were nicely caught in the flashlights as he stepped toward them. All three were still standing, but one was bright red all over his face and arm, the rest of them white from the pulverized whitewash stirred into the air by the blast. Pluck pluck pluck went the carbine, and the three stunned, black-mouthed faces, two white, one red, began to fall. One of the soldiers—the one on the left—fired a burst of three shots (softer, even, than the sound of the carbine; for some acoustical reason Richard heard the metallic ring of the Schmeisser’s bolt more clearly than the explosions themselves) and the soldier fell out from under his face. Or so it seemed: the body took the slow carbine bullets, each raising a little puff of dust on the belly, and began to keel, but the face, like a weird balloon, kept hanging there before his eyes, cheeks white, mouth black, eyes white and blind as though they were laced with cataracts. The face seemed naked as genitalia.

  Finally they all ended their unjointing and thumping and were drably dead, the greenish uniforms being shaded by a slow powdering of whitewash.

  Willy Rosor

  Hans Pietsch

  Werner Schmidt

  —not them, really, but three very young veterans of an old war, now dead as their fathers in a place dedicated to death. It seemed so natural there, and yet, as he moved the bodies with his boot, he was afraid—really, shudderingly afraid for a moment—that they would be painfully remembered corpses. It was like murder in a tomb, a tomb in which all the corpses were young men like himself. And he thought, What am I doing feeling so normal and natural in a charnel house? Am I not a civilized man, a sapient, tender, feeling man? Wasn’t I once? Will I ever be again?