The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

And so I let it all run from me, if that makes any sense. I unclenched my fists, loosened my limbs, and let the rain rinse it away from me. I would force nothing from the world, move in no aggressive way toward it. I would yield wholly to the universe and its intentions, if only for these few remaining minutes of my life.

  But the Bullet didn’t come.

  The skeletal blight of the city fell away behind me as I continued to walk.

  The land filled itself with streams, trees—things indifferent to war. Going on about their day in rainy silence. I drank stream water from cupped hands. Ate late-season vegetables volunteered from the soil. If we could only live like that forever—our heads empty save for what our eyes and ears beheld—judging nothing, resisting nothing—tormented or divisive thoughts forever abandoned.

  I had no business surviving out there—unarmed, AWOL, soaked to the point of hypothermia—and yet I did. The world sustained me. Perhaps it did not perceive me as a predator.

  Whatever the case, I am in debt for that day. It is the only unqualified beneficence I have known.

  They found me. The MPs scolded the hell out of me when they got me, told me there was an SS battalion up this way and I was lucky I hadn’t fallen into their hands.

  They loaded me up, took me back to CP in the forest east of Aachen. Arguello was there.

  He asked me how I’d gotten so far from the skirmish. I told him the truth. Everything that had happened to me. I told him I knew that I’d be prosecuted as a deserter and that I fully understood.

  He asked me if there was anything else I wanted to say.

  I said there was not.

  He did something funny then. Arguello, in all his goodwill, always tries to come at it from a different angle.

  He told me I didn’t talk enough.

  I asked him if he meant now or ever.

  He said ever. He said the entire campaign I’d fired more bullets than I’d said words.

  And still hit no enemy, I joked.

  He looked at me for a long time, and I realized I’d smiled slightly when I’d said it. I could tell he’d never seen me smile before, the way he took pause at it. It was the right kind of pause. Like there was hope for me.

  He told me again: “You need to talk.” You have to understand, his intonation was not that of an interrogator. He was saying this as if it were an imperative for my soul. I needed to talk. For the catharsis he believed expression (rather than violence!) afforded. (He is an adherent of Freud and his psychoanalytic method, of which I know little.) The length of this letter perhaps is testament to the possibility that he is right—that I do have more than a little to get out—much of it long unsaid!

  I’m guessing that’s why he’s allowed me the pen and generous amount of paper to write this letter to you. It feels almost like a homework assignment. I have no doubt he’ll read it in the end (and perhaps never forward it to you in the Pacific). But I don’t care. As I said in the beginning, I am beyond the place of lying now, beyond shrinking from anything I think or feel.

  I have no doubt I am in deep shit. But I have earned every ounce of it.

  And will suffer my fate accordingly.

  With much love—

  G.

  VII

  Lily has to walk a bit after this letter.

  Peter is deep in his garage.

  On another archaeological dig, calling vaguely out to her as he burrows ever deeper into his mounds of yesteryear: Trying to find more for you.

  He’s a mad scientist, this one.

  She walks a block or two into the downtown sun, ruminating.

  The earth continues its silent, perpetual belch of sulfur and smoke, an offering to the indifferent sky above, which just shrugs it off, lets it dissipate.

  It’s exhausting to read handwritten letters, she thinks.

  Following someone’s cursive slows the eyes’ march across the page.

  You can never get into a rhythm, but rather have to labor along in fits and starts, in forced intimacy with the writer, whether you like it or not.

  And she’s not sure she likes it.

  She’d rather not be in this man’s head; it gives her the queasy feeling of being a voyeur.

  Better to keep your head down, just like Tish always says, dutifully deal with your own shit.

  Stay out of other people’s business and keep them out of yours.

  No sense getting caught up in the trials and tribulations of a dead man.

  (Because that’s what’s happening here, isn’t it, Lily?

  You always like the wounded ones.

  Maybe because they’re worse off than you.

  And your life doesn’t seem so shitty.)

  Goddammit, Gray, just tell me where you’re buried.

  And where the pot of gold is.

  VIII

  25 December 1944

  B—

  Merry Christmas to you. You will be surprised to know that I am free. Out of the stockade anyhow. I’m not completely sure though that I am in a better place! We are in a snow-covered world that must be utterly foreign to you out there in the Pacific. A forested region called the Ardennes. It is a world of perpetual fog and low-lying clouds blown in from the North Sea, labyrinthine in its trees and rolling hills. The Germans have come alive and are pushing a counter-offensive back at us that is as wicked as anything anyone has seen. It is now we who are on the defensive, dug into our icy foxholes and shelters. They come out of the whiteness at us like ghosts, materializing scant yards before us in perfect snow camo. Their Panzers, their 88s, their soldiers, everything is painted white. It is as if the snowfall itself has come to life and is trying to kill us.

  But perhaps I should take a step back and tell you how I’ve gotten to the place I now find myself. Much has transpired.

  Arguello, that accursed Catholic with all his unsolicited goodwill, kept on me after that last letter I wrote. He indeed read it (and said he’d still send it along; did you get it?).

  I was in the stockade for a number of days while the Army decided what to do with me. Arguello dutifully visited. Saw that, unlike the other men, I did not receive chocolate, care packages, or any letters from back home.

  We began a halting conversation, where he’d ask me personal questions—you have no one back home, do you?—and I wouldn’t answer, then a short while afterward he’d ask the question in a different way, and after a certain amount of this, I’d finally answer, just to get him to stop asking questions! There’s something to be said for persistence.

  He asks me about my youth.

  After enough of this hassle, I finally let on that, yes, I was in a foster home.

  But you have a brother, isn’t that right?

  You read the letter. You know.

  But no one else, he says.

  I have the Army, I say.

  We both manage a laugh at this.

  How about a girl, no girl back home?

  No.

  Then he goes on one of his jags. Tells me that the contents of the letter I wrote tells him, if nothing else, that I’ve at least the glimmer of a soul within. Despite my protestations to the contrary. He tells me that I’m a pretty obvious case—foster kid, insecure, with no support system. Kid like that invariably feels vulnerable, but covers it up with anger. I appreciated how hard he was trying, even if he was far from the mark. (Because there’s no way I’d tell him about the actual truth: about the Pain. Only you know that.)

  He tells me if I stay in the stockade, all that I’m carrying will ultimately kill me, consume me from the inside and work its way out. Because when you’re stuck in a box like the stockade, all you’ve got is your head for company. “And your head, boy,” he says, “is full of a whole platoon of enemies worse than the Nazis.”

  Right he was. If for mostly the wrong reason.

  He told me he arranged to get me out. He was putting his good name on it with the battalion commander.

  I told him I wasn’t going to do any killing and as such wouldn’t be of value to hi
m.

  He told me he didn’t expect me to do any killing. I was going to do the opposite.

  I’m not sure if it’s the same in the Pacific, but over here, most platoons are quickly down to one medic. We’ve trained millions of men to shoot, precious few to stitch. I learned that the night before Arguello’s visit to my cell, our medic had gone down.“Collapsed emotionally” is what they said. Guess a soldier can only die once, but for a medic, he’s dying every single time too, as he’s trying to shovel a nineteen-year-old’s intestines back into his gut and the kid dies, or watches the light wink out of a family man’s eyes while he vainly tries to reattach the top of the man’s head.

  A man dies that many times without actually dying, you can see why he goes mad.

  That was my offer from Arguello. Step in and be the medic—the need was apparently that pressing—or get shipped out to a real tribunal, and get ready to do five-to-ten for desertion.

  I said yes if for no other reason than to be out there in the world again, to breathe real air.

  It was, of course, absurd that it was me. I couldn’t even save myself from myself. But war constantly spins impossibility from possibility due to circumstance. So there I was. A satchel full of morphine syrettes, gauze and sulfa, scissors tied to my wrist, wearing a helmet with the large white circle and red cross on it.

  And we were moving. The lines were jumping off, advancing into the forest. It was a surreal thing, to see the men around me, spectral in the foggy whiteness, bayonets fixed, moving en masse through the knee-deep snow. It was like a legion of unshaven, trench-footed, murderous interlopers in heaven. The snow was frozen on top, so it was first slippery, then crunchy once one’s foot fell through. The forest was filled with these thousandfold, slow, methodical crunches. We would be surprising nobody.

  And with the skies locked up, there would be no air support. But the train of war needed to keep moving, needed to call on the next station. So said the Rear anyhow. The idea, I guess, was to break the German’s counteroffensive, puncture it, reach back inside and seize the next town, where we’d have the luxury of roads for resupply. The men, though, gave somewhere between one and no shits about this. Because all of them, after weeks of being dug into the cement-hard earth, with only their ponchos to shield them from the elements, were ready for a real place to sleep. The generals may have been fighting for strategic geography, but we were fighting for beds, real ones, broken or otherwise. Anything beneath a roof.

  So our spectral phalanx advanced with murderous intent for beds. Someone had liberated bed sheets from a shattered hotel some miles back, and the men had cut holes in them and slung them over themselves; it was the best they could do to approximate the Germans’ beautifully designed all-white winter camo. It heightened the effect that we were ghosts, the way the sheets rippled subtly behind the men as they moved. The world—the men, the snow, the trees, the very air itself—was a solidarity of whiteness.

  Of course, anything so white cannot stay that white forever. Into it must come the color of reality. Which it did: tiny crimson dots flowering intermittently throughout that alabaster scheme. We saw the blood first, exploding into the icy air on men’s tunics, heard the reports a moment later.

  Again, our foe was invisible to us, his muzzle flashes tucked deep and unseen within that fog. And the trees confused the echoing direction of the shots. We knew only that they came from somewhere, vaguely ahead. The men, perhaps too tired to fall back or dig into the impossibly frozen forest floor, just forged ahead, unloading into the whiteness.

  I dropped down with the wounded. Tried to find their wounds amidst all their winter gear. In some of them, the blood was already crystalizing in the frozen air. It was like slush in my hands as I navigated around looking for the actual wound.

  I confess I nearly sent my first—a Nebraskan drunk named Pedals—into shock. Because when I laid eyes on his wound, I threw up on his chest!

  A high-velocity round had clipped his knee perfectly from the side and had shorn off the kneecap in its entirety. It’s a shocking thing to see a human knee without a kneecap—all the spidery tendons and blood vessels beneath. It was not unlike turning over a stone in the yard, revealing all those wriggling earthworms and bugs below, things that are not meant to see the light of the sun, and do their best to burrow away and get free of it.

  He wasn’t screaming or crying (other than that initial Goddammit that came out of his mouth when he saw the contents of my stomach on his chest). I probed around down there, tried to figure out how you fix something like this. (I admit for a second, I thought to look for it, see if I could find it out there in the snow somewhere, as if I could merely snap the kneecap back on and all would be made whole.) It was not something I could stitch. I decided I’d put direct pressure to it, go tight on it with gauze. All the while I’m doing this, cranking this noose of gauze ever tighter around his knee, he’s saying nothing. But when I look up, I can see that there’s new blood, fresh blood, coursing down his chin in a tiny rivulet. In his silent tough-guy forbearance during my fumbling attempts at surgery, he’d managed to bite a hole in his lower lip.

  I couldn’t think of what to say so I called him a dumbshit.

  He told me I should have told him he was a dumbshit ten months ago, when he was thinking of volunteering back in the States.

  I told him he had the fabled Million Dollar Wound now—the one that wouldn’t kill him but was just bad enough to get him shipped home—if that was any solace.

  “And I’d give that million dollars back right now to get rid of this pain. I’m gonna eat my goddamn tongue if you don’t gimme some of that morphine!”

  I felt sheepish. That was one of the few things they’d instilled in me before they shoved me out into this snowy mess and made me pretend to be a medic: When in doubt…morphine.

  His eyes lit up expectantly when I produced a syrette. (The battle was still out there somewhere in the whiteness, but it was someone else’s battle now.)

  I stuck him with the morphine, squeezed, then panicked. Because nothing happened.

  He screamed at me. Who the hell was the dumbshit now?

  And he was right. I realized I’d forgotten to puncture the seal, open the syrette.

  I got things right, stuck him with the needle, and in no time he was my friend again. In fact, I sort of envied him in that moment, as his eyes got glassy from the morphine and all the hardness of battle fell away from his face. He looked like a man delivered.

  In short order, our men materialized out of the fog, pulling casualties with them. German bullets hissing every which way, perforating trees.

  They came stumbling up, shoved their worst stricken man on me—a bloody, pale, near rag doll of a soldier I only vaguely recognized as the youngest member of our squad, an eighteen-year-old out of Phoenix whom we called, in a fit of creative inspiration, Phoenix. He was pink head to toe with snow and blood. They dumped him on me and didn’t say a word; even if I was medic, I was still persona non grata, given my attempt to go AWOL, which everyone knew about. They grabbed Pedals and hustled back toward our lines.

  That left me and Phoenix alone out there. With nothing but that whiteness surrounding us. And those telltale, disembodied crunches somewhere within it. Footfalls, telegraphing someone’s advance. Only this time it was not us.

  I wanted, for a moment, despite myself, to fight. But I had no sidearm. And Phoenix’s was long gone.

  I wanted to run. But I had Phoenix.

  I reckoned that with all the blood flowing from him, even in this frozen air, he didn’t have long. Especially if I moved him.

  Which meant that I had to get into him.

  Oh goddamn me. Goddamn circumstance.

  Here I was going to die trying to fix a man I didn’t have the skills to fix.

  My heartbeat was in my ears, my neck, everywhere. It is one thing to be in battle; it is another thing to be in battle alone.

  Phoenix, beneath all his winter gear, had two wounds (again, puke-worthy
, but my stomach was now empty): a thick, wide laceration in his shoulder that pumped blood no doubt because the bullet had gotten into a major vein; and a baseball-sized hole just beneath it. His ribs were shattered, and you could hear the air he was inhaling through his mouth come whooshing out here. If he did not have his other lung functioning, he’d already be dead.

  How do you fix wounds like that? I guessed the main thing to do was seal them both. Stop the blood flow in the shoulder and arrest the air loss in the latter. The whole point of a medic, as you know, is not to fix a soldier right there on the battlefield, but to stabilize him, keep him in the game ’til you can get him back to the aid station, where real surgeons can effect real solutions on him.

  I put morphine into him. He immediately begged for another. But another thing they’d taught me, and I remembered now, was: One to kill the pain, two for eternity. Like hell I was going to kill this man, given that I was most likely to get killed or become a prisoner of war for the effort.

  I had nothing. Gauze was almost useless. I could stuff the wounds with it, but it wouldn’t stop the flows of blood and air.

  I had to improvise. I could hear German voices out there in the whiteness. Whispers. The metallic clacks of guns being reloaded.

  The best I could come up with was my own poncho. I cut a strip away from it, laid it atop his chest wound, taped it in place. The shoulder wound would be harder. It looked as deep and wide as a man’s mouth in full yawn. I fumbled with a needle and thread, with the ridiculous idea that I’d sew him up. Have you ever tried knitting, brother, when an entire Panzer division is bearing down on you?

  I was horrified. I had seconds. The man was about to bleed out and the Germans were going to get me. So, in an inspired bit of panic, I took a large safety pin from my uniform and snapped the wound closed with it.

  And that was it. The limits of my expertise. I grabbed him and struggled back toward our lines. The sound of our crunching footfalls immediately elicited gunfire from the whiteness. But I knew that because I couldn’t see them they couldn’t see me. They were shooting blind. But you put enough gunfire in the air, someone’s bound to lose the bullet lottery, as you and I well know.