Simple. Backed into the very corner Harp had just been in.
“I do have your seat, next to the beautiful Catherine. So if ‘snap’ is your game of choice, ‘snap’ it is. Good luck.”
“Good luck to you,” Harp said.
He gave the pack a few more shuffles and then cut the deck roughly in half, slapping one share in front of Michel and taking the other for himself.
“Mugs away,” said Harp.
Yes, Michel thought, I guess I am a goddamned mug now, playing this ridiculous paesano game, and he placed his first card on the table. Harp followed, then Michel, then Harp. Michel stopped.
“Harp, perhaps you can clarify for me. When two cards match—say a jack followed by a jack—I ‘snap’ the same hand down as I played the card with?”
“Come on, stop trying to hose us,” said Riggs. “You see two of the same cards and wham, get your hand down fast and hard.”
“Fast and hard,” repeated Michel under his breath, as he laid out an eight of spades. Harp followed with a nine of clubs. Then there was a seven, queen, two, seven, one, six, ace, jack, four, four … and just as Michel’s eyes lit up in register of the pair there was a flash of movement from the other side of the table. Michel’s hand was caught fully holstered.
“Too slow, Frenchy,” chuckled Harp as he dragged the cards in. “Mugs away.”
Michel began, placing a ten of diamonds, then came a three, king, five, ten, ten and Harp’s hand shot out, the noise of the slap met with “oohs” from around the table as it became apparent a whitewash was in the offing.
For his part, Michel kept his cool, but a fire kindled in his gut. His shoulders straightened and his brow betrayed a glint of menace. Perhaps he would still manage to impress the girls, and perhaps not. He intended to have some fun either way.
“Harp, you have quite the skill there. You must have been training those hairy palms since you were a teenager,” said Michel.
The two women giggled coyly and the men sniggered at Harp’s expense.
Harp seethed while trying not to show it. “Them sour grapes, Michel? The thought of losing mommy’s cards getting to you, eh?”
His buddies roared with laughter as the ladies descended into worried but transfixed silence. Michel flashed a forced smile as the adrenaline started coursing. It worked fast. He recognized the vital sensation of potency that washed over him.
So this is how it is. Win, or tear the whole house down.
“Tell me, Harp, what is the trick?” said Michel.
“You don’t listen, Frenchy,” interjected Riggs, pepped up on Harp’s victory. “It’s simple, yeah? See two of the same cards and whammo—el hando go whacko on cardo, fasto and hardo,” he drawled as if speaking to a Spanish simpleton.
“Fast and hard,” repeated Michel, eyes fixed on Harp. “Mugs away?”
“He’s learning,” said Harp to no one in particular.
Michel carefully laid his first card: the one of hearts. Harp frivolously slapped down his: the queen of hearts. Slowly, his chest and shoulders high, his abdomen coiled tight, Michel placed his next card.
Five of spades.
Eight of diamonds.
Two of clubs.
Jack of hearts.
Six of clubs.
Ace of spades.
Ace of diamonds.
In the blink of an eye Harp’s hand shot out to claim victory. But rather than quietly losing the draw like a dumb chump, the moment Michel saw the pair he thrust to his feet, sending his chair hurtling backward. His shoulder shot back and then Michel’s palm catapulted down. First Harp’s hand and then the wooden table crumpled beneath the immense force of the blow, the table splitting in two and buckling into a “v”. Glasses and cards flew in every direction.
Snap. Fast and hard, it was on.
7
Henry had lost track of his precise tally of beers—not that he was keeping count, more that he could remember and then there came a point when he could not.
He had been holding up his end of animated silence with his good buddy Ernie. Now and then he shot a glance toward Michel, that weird continental bastard.
“Just look at the slippery sod, sweet-talking them girls,” Henry mumbled to himself. He turned back to his beer and took a long draft.
There was a sudden loud noise and then a chair bounced off Ernie’s back and grazed Henry. The Australian bear stumbled to his feet and turned and leered at the group of men directly in front. They were jumping around a broken table like idiots, and one of them was in the process of lifting a chair above his head.
The staggering giant said nothing. He started moving, taking a shaky first step, then used his momentum to keep upright and worked his way to a good head of steam in four or five strides. Head down, arms out, Ernie hit the man with the raised chair head-on and kept going, eventually coming to a stop in the middle of a mob of soldiers the next table over.
Henry watched the scene unfold, his jaw agape. Ernie was now in the middle of it, bodies flying around him. Michel was a few yards away.
Is he dancing? No, just fighting, thought Henry.
Then Henry noticed the girls caught up in it all. Damsels in a bar brawl, and clearly in distress. They needed to be saved by an Englishman, by a Henry, and he was all those things and more.
“I’ll save ya, girls,” he called.
A rushed mouthful of ale and then Henry was ducking chairs and men and an assortment of debris. “Come on,” he hollered, grabbing the waist of the blonde and the arm of the red-head, “I’ll have you out of this in a jiffy.”
Dragging and pushing, Henry shepherded the two women to the far corner of the bar where the publican had taken cover, armed with a mattock sans mattock-head.
“You’re right, me darlings. You’re safe with Henry,” said Henry, directing his chivalrous comments to the blonde around whose waist his arm remained wrapped. Her chest heaved as she nuzzled into Henry’s body for protection.
♦
Across the room, Michel was on the move. One quick step saw his left foot planted on the back of the prostrate mess that had been Harp, now no more than a convenient launching pad. In a single fluid motion, Michel’s right leg shot out, his torso swung back and all his bodily force channeled into a size eleven standard army issue. His boot rammed flat and square into the chest of Riggs. A puff of air was all that remained as he hurtled rag-doll across the room.
Michel sensed movement to his side and pivoted in time to see a freight train that looked like his new friend Ernie careen through a man. Another table took the full force of the collision, with three of four legs snapping. Ernie got back to his feet and back-handed one man then sent a wrecking-ball fist through another who saw it coming but just stood there and took it—like the Beefeater he was.
Happy-ugly-always-drunk Chuck had jumped to the defense of his buddies. With his head down, he cannonballed himself at Michel, who redirected the Canadian’s momentum with a simple parry from his open left hand. Chuck sped by and sprawled into men and barrels. Half-full glasses of beer went flying and in a flash one of the disenfranchised drunks had hauled Chuck to his feet and sent a blow across his jaw. Chuck was either too drunk, too tough or just too plain dumb and ugly to leave it there.
He shook off the blow and let rip with a flurry of wild punches, meant for nobody and everybody. That fight became an all-in and spilled into the next table so that a melee started there, too, and within thirty seconds of Michel’s opening sortie the whole tavern had erupted into one indiscriminate rolling brawl, friends belting friends, strangers wrestling strangers. The Maison des Cartes had turned into a Wild West saloon.
Away from the worst of it, in the corner of the saloon, Henry remained valiantly by his charges, throwing the odd shadow jab as a rival hound came too close, though none posed any real danger. For the most part, Henry, the women and the publican just hunkered down, watching the scene unfold with a mixture of horror and fascination.
One smart punter tried to make
the most of the situation by getting a belly of free booze. He extracted himself from the fighting and jumped onto the bar. His eyes lit up with the sight of all that whiskey and brandy. He reached out for the top-shelf where they always kept the good stuff. Just as his fingers were about to close on a bottle, crack! A blow took his legs out from under him. As he groped about on his knees there was a rush of movement and the thick end of a mattock-handle bunted into his face.
“Pirate!” raged the old publican, as he holstered his mace and spat in the general direction of the semi-conscious man who landed ass-first on the stone floor.
Back in the fray, the real fighting had coalesced around a central nucleus. At the middle of it was Michel, dancing about and having a fine old time like only he knew how. Behind Michel, Leo finished off one of the chumps who had planted a decent blow in his guts, before turning his attention to the mean French bastard who had started it all. He wound up a fierce right hook.
Michel did not see the blow coming till the last second. He reacted quickly, bobbing under the swinging arm, but he caught it late and Leo’s fist ricocheted off the back of his head, shaking but not felling him. Leo was still recovering his swing when Michel bobbed up and moved in close, delivering a withering flurry of hard, fast, controlled piston-punches to Leo’s face. The Canadian’s head recoiled backward and toward the floor. Michel’s punches followed him down—just as he had been trained to do.
As a savateur, Michel had no qualms about going in hard. A fight is a fight. You fight to win, to annihilate, or you do not fight at all. Do less, and you end up with a knife in your back. It was the philosophy he had acquired as a teenager when learning the centuries-old French martial art of savate, a style of street-fighting perfectly suited to close and chaotic action. It had developed from the rabble-rousing of hardened French sailors scrapping at port and sea and anywhere trouble found them—or they found it. In, hard and fast, close and controlled.
Michel let instinct take over. He followed his fists and feet as they sunk into man after man. Every now and then someone landed a blow from behind, the best effort coming from a soldier who had wised up and instead of blunting a fist on the dancing fighter, broke a chair across his broad back.
The blindside felled Michel. He quickly got back to his feet—a little groggier, to be sure—and sent his assailant slumping to the floor with a jab-hook combination.
On the other side of the tavern, Ernie had just about exhausted his stock of victims. Some of the patrons had disappeared at the first sign of trouble. A dozen or so of the broken but conscious ones had managed to crawl from the melee to lick their wounds in the dying afternoon sun. There were even a few keen drinkers who had actually gone back to their beers as they dodged flying glass and limbs and timber.
With no great urgency, Ernie now occupied himself in attempting to defenestrate a fellow who had really done nothing wrong other than look sideways at the big Australian. The windows were too narrow to throw a man through, so Ernie pushed and heaved and kicked and thrust, wedging him in head-first till he was stuck solid as Excalibur.
By the time Chuck and Michel had come to round on each other, they were two of the last fighters standing—though there was not much scrap left in either one. Still, neither was the sort to back down from a fight.
They sized each other up. Though drunk, Chuck had enough sense to know he was up against a bigger man and a better fighter. For his part, Michel had little desire to fight Chuck, who struck him as a decent enough sort.
Fate intervened when the publican’s wife shuffled from the opening behind the bar at her quickest pace, a rifle cradled in her arms. She cast a glance to her right and met eyes with her husband.
“Where have you been? Look at this,” the publican cried in French, his arms flapping. “They have destroyed my tavern!”
“I searched for the shotgun but could not find it. It is gone. I look and look and look, but it is nowhere! So this is all I can find …” she offered, holding up a rifle.
“The arquebus? You stupid woman! The gun is two hundred years old!”
“Then you find the shotgun.”
“Mother of Mercy … I just hope it is still packed. Give me the gun,” he said.
“I will shoot the gun,” she replied firmly.
“What? Give me the gun, you crazy old goat!”
“Drink your milk, old man!” she replied, raising the ancient carbine to her shoulder. She aimed at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.
Poooof! went the rifle in a fantastic flash of smoke and fire. It was not the threatening boom of a shotgun, but it certainly won the attention of Ernie, Chuck and Michel.
“Fini!” screamed the publican’s wife. “Fini!” she repeated, leveling the empty gun at the brawlers circling one another.
Michel stopped and looked at the woman brandishing an old Spanish arquebus. A grin started to break out on his face, and he looked back to Chuck.
A chortle now rolled from Michel’s throat. As Chuck’s smile started creeping back onto his own bloodied face, Michel, still tittering, extended a hand to his foe. “What do you say, friend. Fini?”
He was no French speaker, but Chuck clearly understood. “Fini,” he replied, as his posture finally relaxed. He let out a deep breath of relief.
“So, Chuck, my friend, what say I buy you a beer?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I reckon I need it.”
♦
Later that night in an old barn made of stone and wood, the familiar sounds of livestock rustling and crickets chirping were disturbed by sounds of a different kind.
On an improvised bed of straw, the heaving body of a buxom and slightly plump blonde woman ground up and down over Henry’s quivering frame. His hands groped wildly at her luscious milky breasts, at her soft round ass, at her ample womanly hips and again at her heaving chest. As he did, she planted her hands firm on Henry’s boyish chest and ground down and up, left and right.
She paused in pleasure, craning her neck and letting out a sigh, then continued rolling her hips, her full weight pressing hard on Henry’s pelvis, grinding, grinding.
“Ohh, Henry …” she whimpered.
“Henry,” gasped Henry.
“Henry!” cheered Ernie, slumped in the corner, enjoying the show.
“Ohh Hennry, Hennnnry …”
8
The tip of Leroy’s cigarette glowed red as he drew down hard, filling his lungs with smoke. He held the warmth till it burned a little, then slowly exhaled a snaking gray vapor and watched it disperse.
He drew down again and again until left with just a hot nib. He inspected the butt, saw it was done and with a simple movement flicked it from his fingers. He followed its path through the air with his eyes. It fell within the no-man’s-land of the two perimeter fences. A prisoner was onto it straight away, poking a stick through the fence, trying to drag the butt closer.
“Piss off, you dumb seagulls!” yelled Leroy in French. “Achtung! Schnell!”
The man dropped his stick. He and a group of prisoners wandered off a little, but they did not leave. Leroy was sick of them, looking up with their big sad eyes like a pack of hungry dogs pleading for food, scraps, attention, help—looking at him like he should give a damn about their welfare.
Surely they knew he did not care whether they lived or died, let alone whether they should enjoy the luxury of smoking a scavenged cigarette. In fact, his feelings went beyond indifference and verged on hate—not exactly of them, more of the fact he was fated to be their overseer.
As far as Leroy was concerned, he should have been rushing the German trenches of the Somme or Lorraine, killing the men who had invaded his country, not babysitting civilians and a handful of soldiers so pathetic they chose capture rather than fighting their way out of it. He would happily die for his country, if they only gave him the chance.
Three of them from the mountain valleys above Oraon whose birthdays fell within two months of one another had agreed to wait till they were of age, then enli
st together. In the meantime, older friends and many others from the close-knit towns of the Vosges region returned in caskets. Some would never return, having become pieces of flesh and bone scattered throughout a field, or an anonymous corpse in a mass grave.
It was not that Leroy had been ignorant to that fact. It was that he knew he had to go to war with his friends and countrymen. He simply had to fight, even if that meant he might die. How else was he supposed to live with himself after the war?
Walking into that recruiting office he had been a supremely fit young man. He had been running the farm with his younger brother for two years, ever since his father became an invalid after losing both legs in a plowing accident. They had coped just fine. Yet by the time Leroy walked out of that office, he was labeled for life: unfit.
It was true that he did not hear as well as some. But so what? He could run. And shoot. And wrestle and fight and swim and climb a tree and damn near anything. Being deaf in one ear had not made a difference to any of that, and surely would make no difference to his ability to spring from a trench and dash across a field and pull a trigger and stab a bayonet through a Kraut’s chest. He had said all that when they told him the news—plead his case—but the recruiter did not care.
Leroy was shattered, then and still now, for they had forbidden him from going to war, from following his friends, from doing the right thing and being part of something. What followed was even worse. He had already signed the papers and so the army could do with him what they pleased—and they did.
While he was unfit to fight as a soldier he was, apparently, perfectly fit to babysit German cowards. And so he felt a kind of hate toward the prisoners, as if they were the reason he was there and their lack of guts to fight in the field was the root of all his misery.
If only they would try something. He imagined ten of them springing him. Then he would show them how good a soldier he was. Leroy slapped the butt of the Hotchkiss machinegun. It spun on its mounting and he let the barrel come to a stop by stabbing into his arm. He swung it back around and got behind the weapon, gripping the steel ring-hold on the stock. He leaned over, following the line of the sights. He steered the barrel across the exercise area, sweeping over a group of prisoners kicking a leather ball.
No Trench To Rest (The French Bastard Book 1) Page 5
