The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

Slowly, and with great effort, Beau tugged off his own boots. He peeled back layers of what appeared to be newspaper, unleashing a rank smell of mold. Blistered toes, purple and blue, poked through his damp frayed socks.

  “Beau, that’s trench foot.”

  “I can walk all right; I just can’t seem to wiggle those damn little piggies. You’d think the army’d give us decent boots.” He blew into his palms and rubbed his toes.

  “Here, let me.”

  “I can’t ask that of you.”

  “I’m a nurse, Beau.”

  He shook his head, dazzled. “You’re a nurse now. Unbelievable. Jesus, Juliet, yesterday you were just Tuck’s little tagalong sister. I still can’t believe it’s you.”

  She worked her thumbs gently along the darkened flesh, massaging the edges of the blisters, trying to get the circulation going.

  “So how is Tuck, anyway?” Beau asked. “Last I heard, he’d gotten into some scuffle at a rest hotel.”

  Juliet paused and carefully set one foot down and lifted the other. “He’s missing. That’s all the telegram said. Missing. Since last November.”

  “Crap, Juliet, I’m sorry. Where?”

  “Here in Italy. I think somewhere near the Volturno.”

  “They say the Volturno was bad.” Beau nodded solemnly into the night. His expression made her sad, and she set down his foot.

  “What kind of scuffle?” she asked, wiping her hands.

  “The drunk kind, I’d assume. The blow-off-steam kind. I just heard a story, that’s all, and recognized the name.” Beau dug through his pack for a K ration tin. “Labels wore off these things, so this could be breakfast, lunch, or dinner. But let’s call it dinner, ’cause I’d like to buy you dinner.”

  Juliet watched his fingers, red and blistered, fumble with the lid. The tin kept slipping from his hands, and she could see his frustration. After several more tries, air hissed into the can and he pulled back the lid. He dumped half the contents into a bowl for Juliet and kept the rest for himself. “GI caviar,” he said, plunging in his spoon. He shoved the beans into his mouth. Juliet examined her beans and thought of mentioning Private Barnaby, explaining that he had Pearl’s white glove, that he might soon come to consciousness and be able to tell her something about Tuck. She considered confessing that she’d come all this way looking for her brother. She was tired of carrying the burden of it all.

  “So what do you hear from Myrna?” Beau asked.

  “Zilch.”

  “Well, if you ask me”—he thumbed a bean from his chin into his mouth—“they were never very serious.”

  “I think she’s pretty much in mourning. Everyone back home thinks Tuck is dead.”

  Beau stopped eating and considered this. “You know what? No way. Tuck’s a survivor. He’d want us to keep a positive attitude. He never got flustered before a game like the other players. He won because he was determined to win.”

  A vision of Tuck and Beau came to her: sitting together on a bench after a long practice, staring into their upturned helmets, deep in concentration, discussing strategies. They might have been there now, a few years out of high school, home from college, tossing the ball across the field for old times’ sake. This vision lay so close to the surface, this alternate version of their lives, that it startled Juliet. Would they ever get back to that? Or would they always have the feeling of a life glimpsed, hoped for, and somehow lost?

  Beau was watching the workings of her face.

  “How’s your cheerleader?” asked Juliet.

  “Oh, do not get me started on the whoring, duplicitous ways of Patty Sinclair. The guys said if I mention her name one more time, they’ll hand my balls to the Jerries. I’m one hundred percent done with that witch.”

  Juliet shrugged. “Women.”

  “You’re one yourself, you know,” he marveled. “A real grown woman.”

  Juliet blushed; she liked that he thought of her that way.

  As they finished their beans, thick snores echoed from the cave. One of the soldiers noisily tossed and turned. “You sure you don’t wanna sleep?” asked Beau.

  “With that orchestra playing?”

  He smiled and blew on his hands and tucked them beneath his armpits. “Then lemme teach you how we pass the hours. The game is called Lives. You tell me where you see yourself ten years from now, then I do the same. Usually there’s a few of us, so we can vote on who told the best life. I’ll go first, so you see how it’s played.”

  “Let me guess. Three girlfriends?”

  “I could barely handle one! Hear me out. They say there’s gonna be loans for GIs after the war and I’m gonna take that money to start my own garage. Anyone can fix a car, right? But I’d be giving something extra. You come in for an oil change, but we give the car a wax job, too. New brake pads? You get some windshield wipers. You gotta have an angle, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So where are you gonna be? Teaching in a nursing college somewhere?”

  Juliet was stumped; she had not imagined a life beyond the war, beyond finding Tuck, for quite some time. “I think I’d like to live in a city,” she said, “a big city. A place like New York or . . . Chicago.” Her stomach fluttered at the word.

  “No, no, no. Too cold. Too far. Up there, they think Southerners speak a foreign language. I’m gonna have to forbid that.”

  “I thought this was my fantasy!”

  “Within reason! What about Atlanta?”

  “Chicago it is,” she said. “And I’d like to be a professor. In a scientific field. Maybe chemistry.”

  “Oh, boy, we’ll never work out,” he laughed.

  “Beau, I think we’re butchering this game.”

  “Not at all. We’re adding exciting new dimensions. Now, where’s that brandy?” Beau took two long swigs. “So, there will undoubtedly be a husband. But the important question is: Is he going to be a dull doctor? A boring lawyer? Another professor of, gag”—he jabbed his forefinger at his open mouth—“chemistry? Because some of those thinker types, they don’t know how to make women happy, not in the important way. A man who works with his hands, he knows a thing or two.”

  “You haven’t changed,” said Juliet, smiling.

  “Just a little frostbitten around the edges. Anyway, you still have to pick a husband.”

  “Frankly, I never used to think anyone would want to marry me.”

  “Maybe not when you were thirteen. But don’t be crazy. You’re a lady now. A smart, classy army nurse. You’ll have guys lined up to propose.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “So”—he took another swig—“let’s review: the extent of Juliet’s wild and adventurous life fantasy is . . . a chemistry lab in a cold northern city. Correct?”

  “I guess.”

  “Good, ’cause that means you win! And you know what the winner gets?” He leaned over and kissed her. His lips were cold and moved over hers with an oily, curious intensity. She could taste the beans and the brandy.

  “Thought I’d get that in before you run off to Chicago.”

  “It was much nicer than the first time.”

  “Oh, that. Sorry. I was an asshole.”

  “Yup. Asshole.”

  He reached out and traced her birthmark with his fingertip. “I like it, you know. It’s unique. You’ve gotten so pretty.”

  “That’s sleep deprivation talking.”

  “You don’t even know you’re pretty. It’s why you’re so nice. Crap, I shouldn’t have told you.”

  Tears came briefly to Juliet’s eyes; he had said something she’d always wanted to hear but hadn’t known it. Someone thought she was pretty. She’d always thought she was too smart to want such things. Yet it moved her now. Maybe he was lying, maybe he was tired, but it made her happy, and she leaned against his shoulder. She wanted to lose herself in the bulk of him.

  She closed her eyes and thought of the colonel who died that morning; she thought of Glenda being loaded into the army truck; she thou
ght of the day she waved good-bye to Tuck at the bus depot. It seemed that everything could vanish, at any moment. This could vanish. This comfort with Beau, this one chance, could be taken from her.

  Taking a long, deep breath, she pressed her head against his chest. His heart beat strongly. She let her fingers travel across his arms and could sense his body flexing, coming to life. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. As he slowly reached for a button on her shirt, she nodded.

  “You were my first kiss,” she whispered.

  He smiled. “You were mine.”

  He slid his hand across her stomach and up her chest. She looked around for a moment, into the cave, at the sleeping men. “Will you get in trouble?”

  He kissed her neck and pressed himself against her, and she felt the full weight and warmth of him. He reached for the buckle of her pants and pulled her farther outside.

  “Gunderson,” Beau called into the cave. “Gunderson.”

  The man who had been tossing and turning sat up on his bedroll.

  “Gunderson, you owe me one. Take over.”

  It was not what she had expected. It hurt and it was messy and now she felt sticky and cold between her legs. But the sharpness of it, the insistent bluntness, the strangeness of his body inside hers, made her feel like an entirely different person. Juliet would never do this, she kept thinking. And soon everything else fell from her thoughts except this idea of the her before the act and the new her. She had thought little about Beau. It seemed that being so close to another human being, you would have to think about him, but she hadn’t. She had closed her eyes and thought about herself, her body, what was happening inside her body, as though she were entirely alone.

  After Gunderson was sent back to sleep, Beau settled on his elbows, readjusted his rifle, and looked at the stars.

  Juliet leaned back beside him and wished she could tell him what had just happened to her, as though he hadn’t been there.

  He kissed her head and let his lips linger on her scalp.

  “I’m gonna ask you something, Juliet. . . . How do you save the world from evil?”

  “No idea.”

  “You take out an ad in the classifieds. Wanted: brave young men to defeat the forces of evil in the world. Every boy in every high school across the country is going to sign right up. What you don’t say in the ad? Expect to live in mud and shit and freeze your asses off while you watch your friends bleed to death. Expect frostbite, crappy food, bad attitudes, no sleep, shitty maps, old weapons, and lousy leadership, all while a psychotic enemy pursues you night and day. If you manage to survive, you get the honor of knowing you helped save the world from Nazi maniacs. But you think that anyone fifty years from now will bat an eyelash over it?”

  “They’d better,” said Juliet.

  “Growing up I never thought about all those guys who fought in the Great War. Not once. But I think about them now, all the time. All of Italy, all of Europe, the ground we’re sitting on, is filled with the bodies of guys just like me, who did exactly what I’m doing, thirty years ago.”

  His eyes were red, fixed on a point outside the cave. His nose had begun to run, and he wiped it clean. The stars clustered thickly overhead like coins in a wishing pond. Had all those men, decades earlier, once made wishes?

  “I really hope Tuck is alive,” Beau said.

  Juliet was silent.

  “I’d just like to make it out of here so I can get home to my grandma,” Beau said. “She’s eighty-eight. I’d like to get home so she doesn’t have to sit in that house by herself for what’s left of her life.”

  “You’ll get home,” said Juliet. “You will.”

  Beau nodded firmly. He clutched his rifle close and blinked with intense alertness.

  “Goddamn straight I will.”

  When Juliet and Lovelace returned to the hospital the next morning, Juliet found Dr. Willard seated at a picnic table pecking at his typewriter. Beside him, a Coca-Cola bottle sat like an archaeological find, a cross section of beverage and ash and cigarette butts. The sky had turned gray, and in the distance the thunder rumbled, the serrated edge of a storm.

  “You’re back, then,” he said, studiously typing several words and forcefully hitting the return carriage.

  “Major Decker sent us into the mountains, and we got stuck overnight.”

  “You and Lovelace.” He did not look up. But she wanted him to. She felt changed, she felt womanly, and wanted Dr. Willard to see it.

  “We camped with troops,” she said. “I assumed you were told.”

  He began typing another line, hitting the return carriage twice before pulling the page from the machine and setting it tidily on the table to examine his work.

  “How’s Barnaby?” she asked.

  “Yesterday was an eventful day here.” He patted the sheet he had typed. “I have good news, and god-awful news.”

  “Well, give me the god-awful news first.”

  “Captain Brilling is pushing to start Barnaby’s court-martial proceedings next week.”

  “Next week?”

  “I’m petitioning to buy some time, but I had not expected it to come to this.”

  “Well, what can the good news possibly be?”

  “He spoke.” Willard watched her face as though she were slowly unwrapping a present. “Without Pentothal.”

  “He’s awake?!”

  “Well, snapping in and out of consciousness; but he’s experiencing moments of real lucidity, finally. Brief, but conscious. His eye is now opening on its own and tracking motion, tracking sound, actively taking in what’s going on around him. Earlier yesterday, when I went to check his vitals at 9:28, he said good morning.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “That was all. ‘Good morning.’ But it means he is slowly climbing out of his mental cave. He knew who I was, he knew it was morning. That is, right now, miraculous progress considering where we started.” Willard spoke quickly, and Juliet saw how happy he was to share his news. “Go see for yourself. You’ll notice the difference in his stare. If he says absolutely nothing, don’t take it personally. His speech will come in bursts right now. Lasting a few seconds at best. It’s a little like staring at the sky, trying to watch for a shooting star. It’s easier to just stumble into it. It’ll come more frequently in time, though.”

  In the Recovery Tent, Juliet headed straight to Barnaby’s bed and dropped her bag. An olive army blanket had been tucked beneath his long arms. His eye was closed, flanked by the steep ridges of white bandages.

  “Hi there, Private Barnaby, I’m your nurse. Do you remember me? I’ve been taking care of you for a few weeks. My name is Juliet Dufresne.”

  His eye remained closed, so Juliet sat beside him and eased off some of the gauze, soaping the edges of his chin and patting it dry. She rubbed Vaseline into his stitches.

  Suddenly, he moaned, the sound of a child roused from a nap. His eye opened and sleepily directed its gaze at her face. He reached up and touched her cheek, his fingers traveling slowly toward her birthmark; his eye sparkled with amazement.

  “You’re the sister,” he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  IN THE UNCOMFORTABLE days that followed—hoping, impatiently, for further moments of Barnaby’s lucidity and for a coherent explanation of what he knew—Juliet sought distraction. She worked long hours and after dinner found herself drawn to the hospital’s entertainments—the movies and plays and impromptu dances she’d formerly avoided. Since her night with Beau, she felt newly confident, finally entitled to join all the socializing.

  The late-July nights were radiantly black. Insects thrummed against the tents and dead gnats stippled the surface of every drink. Drinking was unbridled now—no one had had a furlough in weeks, and the news from France, albeit triumphant, wrought a gloominess throughout the hospital.

  Normandy, Bayeux, Cherbourg, Saint-Lô, Caen—each night, the names of the French towns and cities taken by the Allies crackled from BBC Radio. The staff and pa
tients gathered by the radio, listening intently, angrily, not for the news itself but for news of them, for some momentary tribute to the one hundred miles of fortified Italian terrain they’d conquered in the last month, for some scant recognition of the hills and valleys littered with bodies, the rivers clotted with their division’s blood. They began calling Italy “the Forgotten Front.”

  When the radio had been switched off, they all spilled into the recently assembled Rec Tent. News that Bob Hope and Marlene Dietrich had visited hospitals in France prompted Major Decker and Mother Hen to schedule extensive diversions. Several ward men had gotten hold of a copy of Macbeth, and one night it was passed from hand to hand while each man read aloud his part. One of the cooks had a banjo, and accompanying tambourines were made from ration-tin lids; from empty cigarette packs and shrapnel maracas were fashioned. Twice a week, movies were projected onto a large white sheet—The Maltese Falcon, Fantasia, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

  The night of Lassie Come Home, the entire staff except Bernice crowded the tent. She explained to Juliet that she liked only movies in which a woman renounced things she deeply desired, or in which a man had to convince those around him of a looming disaster. She did not like comedies or romances or movies with happy endings, which she said gave people false expectations about life.

  Juliet wasn’t in a mood to argue. She’d just left the Isolation Tent, where Private Eddie Fishwick had been moved. A bullet had pierced his vocal cords, but after surgery he developed septic shock. It was clear he wouldn’t survive. For days he’d been writing furiously. At all hours Juliet could hear his pencil scratching away, pages fluttering. Mute, he handed stacks of his writing to Juliet, his hazel eyes unnerving in their clarity. But the pages held only scribbles—nothing legible. What, she wondered, did he so desperately want to communicate? Were they notes for his loved ones? Were they confessions? Questions? “I’ll put these somewhere safe,” she said, lacking the heart to tell him his dying words were gibberish.

  And now Fishwick could barely work his pencil across the page. He drew faint, uneven lines, mere dashes and arcs, but his eyes sought Juliet’s for signs of comprehension. His skin had taken on a gray translucence. As she left the Isolation Tent that night, he’d shaken his pencil at her; all she could say, guiltily, was “I’ll come check on you later.”