The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  “Ten grand worth of Uncle Sam’s money,” he said. “She could use it. Not bad for a few months’ work, either way you look at it. Of course, I’d have to be dead for her to make out. What about you?”

  Henry smiled. “Before he died, my grandfather encouraged me to travel.”

  “The hell you say,” Lew said, and looked at him queerly and then gave Henry a second look that he took to mean they would be friends.

  “Maybe we’ll be fortunate,” Henry said.

  “Quit your fucking around,” Gunny said as he came back down the line.

  “I hear that,” Lew said, and gave a wink of his eye.

  Lew turned about, and then he turned again after Gunny disappeared.

  “Him and me were in the Pacific together. He’s a real pussycat.”

  For a time they rode under canvas in trucks over the dusty and bumpy road, their tailbones bouncing on the hard wooden slats of the seats, their spines jarring against the rake of the sideboards. While some took pleasure in the truck rides, their grinding transmissions, roaring engines, and stinking exhausts, the trucks fatigued Henry and he wanted to be marching again. After being at sea for so long, he wanted to be moving on his own two feet.

  Their progress slowed as they encountered clusters of Korean families moving south. A marine reached out from the back of the truck with his lit cigarette and set slow fire to a mattress bundled atop an A-­frame a Korean was carrying. The men in the truck laughed and then a second marine, imitating the first, did the same, lighting fire to a family’s bedding perched on an A-­frame. Henry wanted to say something for how wrong that was, but he didn’t. He looked to Lew who didn’t say anything either. He knew the violence that seemed to be always within them, convulsive and necessary. Daily, there were fistfights on the transports for slights real or perceived.

  “You shouldn’t ought to do that,” Henry said, and the men quieted.

  “What the fuck does it matter to you?” the first marine said, turning his attention, rising up over him.

  Henry covered his eyes with his hands, paused, and then stood up to confront the man.

  “Leave him alone,” Lew said. “He’s just a kid.”

  “There’s no need to go sticking your oar in,” the marine said, but clearly he did not want to get into it with Lew. Henry sat back down.

  “You missed a great opportunity to keep your mouth shut,” Lew said.

  Lew’s words stung, but they were enough to save him a beating and the soldier backed away as the drivers let out the clutches one after another and their engines revved, the trucks lurching forward. They were on the move again and then their truck jumped and stalled out and the driver was roundly mocked.

  The truck was moving ahead, but not long before it stopped and let them out for no reason they could see. They were in another nowhere place just a few miles beyond the nowhere place they’d recently left behind.

  “Right about now I wish I was anywhere but here,” Lew said.

  “Where would you go?” Henry asked.

  “Anywhere is good enough.”

  “Mount up!” Gunny bawled out.

  “He’s a corker, that one,” Lew said, and they stepped off and they were marching again on both sides of the road humping north to where they did not know. There was a deep ditch that ran alongside the road, and as Henry walked he scrutinized it for cover on a moment’s notice and then conceded each found place to the next man in the marching line and found another. He kept walking that he might inherit the next sanctuary of deadfall or boulder, a copse of scrub pine.

  The confrontation in the truck, he let it pass from his mind. However right he’d been, he felt a boy and a foolish boy for having spoken up, but what else could he have done?

  He came to a place beneath hackled trees where Lew was looking at something. Three men and a woman lay in the ditch. Theirs were heads without backs to them, their hands bound with wire. They were his first dead. Their faces were blown and contorted and he thought what hard painful work to be killed.

  “Don’t think about it,” Lew said.

  “When do the hunters go up?”

  “When they need us.”

  “When will that be?” Henry said.

  “Not ever, I hope.”

  He passed from beneath the hackled trees and the high wind of autumn was roaring overhead. He remembered seeing the compass rose on his back, the image traveling from the mirror held up behind to the mirror he held in his hands. He touched at his pocket where letters were collected and then he walked on, a hitch in his step on the side where lay the heavy weight of his weapon.

  Chapter 15

  THEY MARCHED DEEPER INTO the north, deeper into the season, and it seemed with each step the air was changing, cooling, closing its grasp on the earth. In the days to come it would sharpen and feel good and then turn brittle and sugar with frost and freeze and become deadly.

  Yesterday, he’d seen kids playing marbles on the grounds of an abandoned elementary school.

  The soldiers they were driving north were hungry and tired and murderous. There were more ditches, more of the murdered and executed, their wired hands, their blown heads. To the south, from where they came, there were reports of bandits raiding the supply lines. The word went out the Chinese had entered the war, men had been bayoneted in their sleeping bags, and to the west was a three-­day running battle, fighting man to man, hand to hand, and fifteen hundred enemy killed. Each new arrival was inspected and questioned for news of his experience; each had heard the stories too or knew someone who had, but they seemed impossible stories: they were going to drop the bomb, they’d be home for Christmas. Lew half believed it to be so. In fact, he half believed everything he heard.

  Henry walked on, erect under the drag of his pack and the weight of the BAR. For him these stories were the whisperings of fate, the undertow of inevitability, and nothing could change where he stood. His grandfather had fought in the war between the states. His uncles in Mexico and France. They tamed horses and they rode them. They’d put their hands on horses every single day of their lives and they thought the horse was God’s finest creature, finer than God himself, and he’d been trained at their knees that soldiering was work and this was the work his family did. He did not worry it and he trusted he would be good at it when the time came.

  They spent that night in Hamhung, where they cleaned their rifles and ate spaghetti, mashed potatoes, lettuce, and cake and lay down in a dirty warehouse under a corrugated steel roof that heated by day with the ever-­slanting sun. In sunlight it became like a griddle on a stove, crumpling and banging with expansion and now with the cool night it pinged with contraction. The warehouse floor was gritted with iron filings and scattered steel shavings and held by years of seeping oil from leaking machines. All the machinery was gone. All the copper was stripped from the walls and not a bolt or a screw left behind. In the warehouse he found a child’s toy and articles of clothing.

  The hunters, Henry and Lew among them, kept to themselves in their own corner of the vast shed and would continue to do so wherever they billeted: the little schools, the halls and churches. They kept their own fires and their own mess. They were, for the most, unmarried and childless men. They ate together and slept together. Each knew where the other was at all times. To say they were outcasts would be inaccurate, and to say they were hard men would be wrong because some of them were only boys but boys who were already men. When it was their turn, when those who had gone before the column were dead or fatigued, they’d step up and they would take the point and like the videttes of old, they would be first up the road.

  They lay awake that night with their backs to the walls or sprawled on their sleeping bags. Lew showed him a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt, his one item of person he intended to wear whenever he needed cheering up.

  “Do you know the one about Prince Albert in the can?” one of them said.

  “Hey, fathead,” Lew said. “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Lew, you’r
e such a son of a bitch,” the one said.

  In the darkness there were long rows of floating cigarette embers until one by one they went out, and they fell asleep for how tired they were. Soon the rats came out and chewed at their bootlaces and sipped the peach syrup from ration cans. The rats found jelly beans and held them in their paws and ate them as if they were small oblong heads. The rats sat on their chests, licking the syrup from their paws, and crawled across their sleeping faces and suddenly one man woke up cursing and another man woke up and fired a .38 into the darkness. The gunshot cracked and echoed in the high hollow chamber of the warehouse, causing every man to come from sleep, grab and charge a weapon. When the warehouse lighted with the hissing white glare of lanterns, it was an illuminated tableau of lethal men crouched on their knees, curled close to the floor like animals and no more than a length of breath from exploding.

  But no one else fired his weapon, and with the single round nothing was killed or wounded. There was no threat for the moment, so they laughed it off and unstrung themselves and settled down again, but Henry’s heart beat painfully in his chest. His veins, neck, and eyes strained and pulsed. Killing rats, he realized, was another way in which you could be killed.

  In the morning he awoke to graying in the east. The order went out to shave so they heated water and took out their soap and razors, and their cheeks were newly blue in the morning’s cold. In the still-­gray dawn the wind picked up and there was the clang of corrugated metal from the roof. It was a cloudy cold sky, slate blue, with a strange halo around the sun.

  That day they continued north through a wooded valley with trees on both sides of the road. They carried their weapons in the crooks of their arms or yoked across their shoulders. In their slouching stride they could walk all day and all night. On the air was the scent of pine trees and running in the deep shadows there was a thin stream with frozen moss, jeweled green and blue with glittering melt ice. Then the countryside thinned of life and opened up again and the cold began to promise discomfort.

  His walking dream was to awake some day soon and it be a hot and musty room in the boathouse, folded in the satin heat of the city, the flat black river flowing beneath the bed, the sound of the rattling train from over river. Mercy’s back is naked and she’s sitting on the edge of the bed brushing her hair.

  “Don’t it hurt,” he says.

  “I like it,” she says, collecting and balling the hair from the bristles.

  “I can do it for you,” he says, and she hands him the brush.

  “Tonight,” she says, “you come see me?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, drawing the brush through her hair.

  “You better,” she says, “or I will come find you and kick down the door.”

  Beneath them the play of water, a slap and gulp in the eddies that swirled about the pilings, the big fish sounding.

  He wrote and rewrote words in his mind. Dearest Mercy . . . Where are you? . . . I am here and the knowing part of me tells me why . . . Tonight I think I was on my way here all along and have now arrived . . . As much as I want to let go of the past, that cannot be. I am held by the recent memory of . . .

  He’d experienced little, but what he’d experienced with Mercy he’d experienced the all of it. He wanted to believe it again, but she’d disappeared, and try as he might, he could not. He wrote to forget as much as to remember.

  He marched on, silently. She was with him now, through tight passes on the road that followed a rock-­strewn riverbed where tufted willows grew, and then she was gone.

  In some steps came the distinct sensation he’d been here before and had remained in some formless shape that was waiting for him to resume his presence, and now he was stepping inside and the shape was fitting him. The shape rose up from the earth or descended from the sky and closed about him. The fit was uncanny and frightening. This was home now and these men were his true family. His grandfather had told him that in war most of the time you only remember what happens six feet to either side of you, so he continued to map every new landmark and identify every new strongpoint.

  To the east there was a triangle of locust trees all bent in the same direction as if they’d raised themselves in a constant wind. To the west was a mountain peak that rose to height in staggered elevations so perfectly structured it might be the constructed burial mound for a giant race of people. There, an odd shelf of rock resting in opposition to the prevailing syncline. But on the whole, it was an empty and barren country, and clouds were banking. It was colder now and there would be a snow.

  They advanced farther up the road, deeper into the country. Spotter planes were constantly leaving from the east and returning from the west, drifting, circling, floating. The line of march was already too long and too thin to be supplied and supported by reinforcements, and they all knew this, even the fools among them. Each man knew they were the lethal plaything of the old men who directed them, the old men who were always fighting the last war.

  He knew they’d be coming back down this road, and when they did he knew they’d be cold and hungry, winnowed and bleeding. It was just a matter of time.

  “Henry,” Lew called, whipping around smartly to march backward. “What’s the story about the kids leave bread crumbs in the woods to find their way back?”

  “How should I know?” he said.

  “You’re a kid, ain’t you?”

  “I don’t ’member.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Old enough.”

  “My mind has to know what that damn story is.”

  “One of us will ’member,” Henry said, and Lew spun forward again.

  Loose stones grated under his boot treads. No matter how he tried not to, he thought of Mercy and when he did she was always inside a shroud of mystery. Their days together were silent or spent talking about nothing at all. He held memory of kissing her and their lovemaking in the white and gold rooms, desperate and hungry for each other. They preyed on each other and tore deeply and always left behind was a small emptiness that needed to be filled again. There were times now when he hated her, but it was hatred short lived. It would flash in his mind and burn brightly and disappear in a wondering question. Where did she go?

  “Hansel and Gretel,” he whispered, remembering the time before this time.

  Chapter 16

  IN THE MORNING SLEEPING bags hung from every tree, drying after a night’s cold and bitter drizzle. Snow had fallen in the night, the temperature had plummeted, and all about them was the cracking rime. He wondered if daylight would come at all and then it did. It was still snowing, great heavy flakes as large as wood shavings.

  The stink of burning diesel fuel permeated the air as the heavy engines built to a din. They ate pancakes with syrup and drank scalding-­hot coffee and after breakfast they drew on cold-­weather gear: pile-­lined parkas with fur-­trimmed hoods, mittens with trigger fingers, mitten inserts, waterproof trousers, clumsy thermo boots, heavy socks.

  They’d given up their steel helmets and they wore Korean caps made of dog fur with ear lappets, one down and one up to hear and then change sides to warm the cold ear. The march north was fast and had not been foreseen and many of them lacked woolen underwear, parkas, and fur caps.

  A game of football broke out and they tackled each other in the snow. They sweated and they shed their new gear and their thighs burned. One man dislocated his shoulder and another broke a finger. And then they were told to mount up.

  That afternoon they filed past steel drums of boiling water and with long tongs a cook fished out cans of meat and beans for each. There was more scalding-hot coffee and tins of fruit cocktail. Their calves ached from the cold of the march. So swift were the events of the last few days, Henry could not recollect where he had been or what a time he’d had. One night he’d slept in a dog tent and another night in an abandoned warehouse and another on a goose-­feather mattress in a half-­destroyed house and another night they billeted in a disused church.

&
nbsp; Higher still, they crossed the terrestrial ice of the freezing plain, the frost line, and pushed even higher as anxious to find its source. There was only cold and more cold. On one side was the Yellow Sea and on the other the Sea of Japan. It was a war-­torn country, five hundred miles long and two hundred miles wide. When they reached the next plateau a blast of extreme cold was sweeping across the land and causing much suffering to the sparse population and would continue to do so through the teeth of that season.

  They paused again. Stretched along the roadway were shacks made of lumber and concrete block. Daylight was a rapidly declining element as the sun hurried from the sky earlier each day. It would be colder than any cold he’d ever experienced in his life. When they stopped, they paced and beat their chests with their fists. They did not fall out in the ditches and along the berms because the sweat of march sapped their body heat, and sitting down to stand up again required more effort than worth sparing. It became as if a single electric nerve ran through them. It diminished their hunger and tightened the muscles in their shoulders. It clarified their vision and made their hearing more acute. It coursed beneath their thinking minds and for some it became their minds and washed away the thoughts of all other possibilities in the world of life except cold.

  They marched on and as they marched there was the singularity of them, the short-­time self-­sufficiency of men laden with war gear walking a mountain road in a foreign land. As Henry climbed the road, it was as if he were held aloft on the palm of a great outstretched hand buffeted by cold and wind, a bringer of death. Canteens began to ice and freeze and split. Bolts froze in the weapons. There were hobbling men with blackened toes inside their boots and hands cracking open with chilblains.

  The numbers of the Korean laborers began to dwindle, and the farther north they pushed they melted into the country­side. Men with short time left to serve began to lag or hide in caves until they could hitch a ride to the rear and the sea and home.

  Lew turned around to walk backward against the snow stinging like shot pellets. He held out his canteen and Henry took a drink. His body shook for the solution of water, grapefruit juice, and the sick-­bay alcohol it contained.