by David Treuer
Somewhere, in the direction the dog went, was his house, one among the few that made up the village. It was small but solid enough. And in it, Stella and Margaret and Junior all curled up in the same bed. Sometimes when he came back late he would stand over them, wondering how he would fit in there. He would remove his green U.S. Forest Service shirt and somehow, with his pants on, find his way into the tangled brush of their limbs. The mattress sank lower. When he turned, the whole bed rocked and pitched and the springs bounced, but they never woke, just tossed on the bed as though on the wave of some new dream. They slept the same whether he was there or not.
The truck idled in front of the Wigwam.
“I don’t keep it around.”
“You always were smart.”
“You think?”
“No,” said Prudence. “No, not really.” But then she laughed.
It felt as though they were just starting some kind of conversation they were always meant to have.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s just go.”
“You think?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Let’s just go.”
“Richard gonna care?”
“He won’t unless I do. Stella gonna care?”
“What she don’t know.”
“Yeah, yeah, Billy.”
Billy put the truck in gear and they rolled out of the village.
“Turn left,” she said. And he did, and they were once again on the blacktop.
In a few minutes they passed the place where he had first seen her that night. That, too, seemed so long ago, of another age. She had been a different girl then, walking along the road, and he had been a different man.
They passed the turnoff to Judd’s Resort and the Big Winnie Supper Club, and Prudence pointed at a mailbox set back from the highway. Billy turned and followed the long driveway south through a small potato field and up to a small log house.
“I can’t ask Gephardt,” said Billy. “I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to,” said Prudence. “He’ll sell to me.”
“Germans will sell to anyone.”
“You complaining about that?”
“Does he sleep hard?”
“He never has before. But I guess we’ll find out. You got money?”
“Do you?”
“What do I look like to you? Just hand it over. I’ll take care of it.”
The booze was losing its grip on Billy. He never went to Gephardt’s if he could help it. When he did—to sell rice, or get something welded or fixed—he ground his jaw and looked down, though Gephardt was always friendly enough. It was strange to think about, but Gephardt had been at the camp that day—he had to have been, when the other prisoner went missing. Germans sure enough fucked everything up. His shoulder hurt.
He dug in his trouser pocket and found four dollars left over from his stop at J. C. Penney in Grand Rapids. He had walked around the racks for a long time, through the women’s clothes and kids’ clothes, over to the men’s and back again. He had no idea what to buy. Too many choices. Too many things he didn’t understand. He didn’t read anymore for the same reason. But how he had once loved the books Frankie sent. The sight of those packages wrapped in brown paper was really something. But there were too many choices now, and no one who could help him make them. Too many changes to everything.
It was summer, and Margaret and Junior usually wore the same thing—overalls and T-shirts. But Billy had wanted to get them something nice. For Margaret especially. He didn’t really know what to say to her most of the time. What does one say to a ten-year-old girl anyway? As it was, she went to school and she did well and she listened to Stella and did her chores. In the summer, on Sundays, he’d put his chair outside the front door and sit there in the sun, and he could see her with her hands on her hips, surrounded by a group of boys, or squatting down in the center of them, all their heads bent low as they listened to some story or instruction. She was in charge of all of them. But around him she didn’t say much. She just studied him, watched him, did what he said, and disappeared.
Just that summer he had added a new chore to her list: she had to bring him lunch every day. Stella would pack it in an old lard pail and tie flour-sacking around the top, and Margaret had to carry it out to the fire tower at noon and climb the two hundred feet up the stairs with the pail banging against her legs, and then the remaining twenty feet straight up the ladder and through the trapdoor. He made her wait while he inspected the contents and ate the first few bites. She never looked out over the edge or made conversation or gave any sign, really, that she wanted to stay.
He could have brought the pail himself in the morning when he left. It would have been easy enough. And he had eaten enough bad food in the Army, so a stale sandwich or a warm jar of milk was no big thing. But he hoped—well, he wasn’t sure what he hoped—but he hoped something would happen between them in the fire tower, swaying two hundred feet over the trees. He might say something. Or she might. But neither did. And then he’d say, “Go on now,” and down the ladder she’d go, to walk the three miles back to the village and resume doing whatever it was that ten-year-old girls did and thinking whatever it was they thought.
Junior was different. He was quiet but in a different way. Obsessive about his games or absorbed in whatever he was constructing out of sticks or bark or whatever was at hand in the yard. That’s how Frankie had been when they were boys. Billy understood that.
He hadn’t been sure what to get Margaret. But the school year was coming around, and her overalls were wearing out at the knees, so he circled back to the dresses. He was still out of sorts from his visit to the VA. Being around all the uniforms, even being around the other servicemen—the older ones and the ones coming back from Korea—made him edgy. He’d stopped at a bar in Royalton and they had served him without saying anything or acting funny about it. He had stopped again at the VFW in Grand Rapids—they’d serve him, even though he was Indian, and let him buy a pint. Then he moved on to the J. C. Penney. A dress would do, both for Margaret and for Stella. A dress for the new school year. And something for Stella to wear to church. Junior was six, so he got more overalls, big enough to last the year.
* * *
Prudence had gotten out of the truck and was knocking on Gephardt’s door. Her dress was still wet and caked with dirt from when she’d fallen in the ditch, but she held herself as though she didn’t notice it. The one he had gotten for Stella was much nicer, he thought, a little longer. But Prudence looked good in hers. It was all about how you carried yourself.
The cripple, Mary, answered after a minute or two and then retreated into the house. God, she was a sight. How she made it around on that leg, Billy would never understand. A minute later Gephardt himself appeared at the door. He handed Prudence a mason jar with a zinc lid, filled with clear fluid. He said something—Billy could see his lips moving and his head nodding, all smiles—but Billy couldn’t hear him, which was just as well. Prudence handed him the money and he shook her hand and then closed the door, and Prudence turned and held up the jar in one hand and made the “V for Victory” sign with the other on the stage of Gephardt’s front steps.
* * *
Billy had seen only one dead German before the war, and after three days in the water he didn’t look like much, didn’t look dangerous at all. Billy was there when Felix pulled him from under the dock. He came to the Pines every day after the shooting to check on Frankie. At first Frankie wouldn’t leave the house, and Emma spent her days flowing up and down the stairs with trays of food, bowls of soup, towels, tonic, even whiskey, which had been Jonathan’s idea, and when that didn’t work, he’d prescribed Veronal. Ernie said there was nothing to do except to go fishing, which he did. But Billy came and sat by Frankie’s bed on the first day. On the second, Frankie seemed a little better and Billy asked him if he’d like some books. Frankie s
aid, “Sure,” so Billy went all the way back to the village and got from under his bed some of the ones Frankie had sent him. By the time he got back, Frankie was asleep again, so Billy left them by his bed. On the third day, they remained unopened.
Late that afternoon, Felix finally got around to cleaning the dock, and that’s when he found the body. He said nothing about his discovery, in his usual dumb way. He’d used the rake to snag the German’s shirt and float him out from under the dock. Then he’d tied a rope under the corpse’s armpits and pulled it onto the riprapped bank.
It wasn’t long before Emma and Jonathan came out of the big house, and the kitchen girls stopped what they were doing and came and stood around the body as well, and then the news of the discovery carried over the water and the super from the prison camp rowed over. Within a couple hours, the sheriff and constables and members of the search party were there, too. No one moved the body. Billy was there, and he saw that the German was missing some of his fingers, chewed off by turtles, and that the parts of his skin that had been submerged were white, and strings of white tissue like the tentacles of a jellyfish trailed off his face, whereas the skin that had been exposed to air was black and stretched so tight from bloating that it had ruptured, leaking here and there what looked like jelly.
Everyone was so absorbed in the spectacle of the body that no one noticed Frankie until he spoke. He had gotten out of bed and come downstairs, and he couldn’t stop saying, “He was there? He was there all along? Right there? Right there?” He said this over and over until Billy and Emma led him back to bed.
Around sunset the sheriff and his deputies lifted the German into their boat and brought him back across the river. The other prisoners buried him outside the fence that night and when they were done, they stood around the grave and sang, “So nimm denn meine Hände.” The sound carried across the river and into Frankie’s room, where Billy sat watching him sleep. He wasn’t sure if he should reach out and touch Frankie or not. When it got dark he lit the kerosene lantern on the table next to the bed. Frankie opened his eyes.
“Hey, Frankie,” said Billy softly.
Frankie turned his head away.
So nimm denn meine Hände
und führe mich
bis an mein selig Ende
und ewiglich.
Ich mag allein nicht gehen,
nicht einen Schritt:
wo du wirst gehn und stehen,
da nimm mich mit.
“You want me to read to you?”
“No.”
“Who knew, Frankie. I mean, who could have known?”
“Fucking Germans.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I leave tomorrow. Doctor’s orders.”
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. They were supposed to have two weeks. They were to go squirrel hunting and fishing. They were to have parties in the big house. Frankie was supposed to smile.
In dein Erbarmen hülle
mein schwaches Herz
und mach es gänzlich stille
in Freud und Schmerz.
Laß ruhn zu deinen Füßen
dein armes Kind:
es will die Augen schließen
Und glauben blind.
“Already?”
“When are you going to do your part in all this, Billy?”
Billy shrugged. Frankie looked away from the window open to the river, back to the woods to the north of the Pines. They went on and on. On toward Canada and north to where there were no more of them to be had.
“Are you sure I can’t read something to you? Or anything else?”
Wenn ich auch gleich nichts fühle
von deiner Macht,
du führst mich doch zum Ziele
auch durch die Nacht:
so nimm denn meine Hände
und führe mich
bis an mein selig Ende
und ewiglich!
The lamp flickered. Billy listened as the singing died out over the river. He heard Ernie down at the dock tying up the rowboat and singing some mocking version of the hymn in a wobbly falsetto. Emma was in the kitchen. Judging from the smell of smoke drifting through the window, Jonathan was on the front porch with his pipe. Billy reached out and took Frankie’s hand.
“Can I?” he whispered. It was the closest he’d ever come to naming whatever it was between them.
“It’s not ‘can I.’ it’s ‘may I.’”
Billy’s heart beat fast.
“May I?”
“We’re not kids anymore, Billy. We’re not children, after all.”
Billy let go of his hand.
“Will you look at me, Frankie?”
“No.”
“I was just trying to help. To help you. Look at me.”
“No.”
“Please, Frankie.”
Nothing.
Billy waited a moment and then stood up. He walked to the door and opened it. Then he turned. It was just like a movie. Frankie looked at him and then looked away. And that was the last time.
A cigarette glowed under the eaves of the boathouse. “Watch out for my fish there,” Ernie said without pointing. Billy looked down at his feet. There was a muskie—a big one, four, five feet—lying stiff in the grass where the German had lain. Its body glowed white in the lamplight.
“Where’s Felix?”
“Up the hill, burying that girl you shot.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Ernie continued to look at him.
“You did, right?”
“Did what?”
“You shot her. You were the one who shot her.”
“Yeah. Yeah it was me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay you’re telling me it was you. So, ‘okay.’”
Billy didn’t know what else to say. His hands flapped at his sides a couple times and he half turned toward the house, then he got into the rowboat and pushed off, watching the Pines recede into little pinpoints of light and lamp glow.
* * *
Two years later, he had advanced, one ant in a division of ants, from Normandy on D+1 across the Aure and into Trévières, up Hill 192 and down into Saint-Lô and from there to Brest. After forty days of watching bomb after bomb after bomb fall on Brest, they advanced through the streets and took the city, one building at a time. By the time Billy was done with Brest he had seen more dead Germans than he could count. In Normandy, they’d been swollen with flies in the ditches, fried black in their bunkers, but in Brest most of the dead looked fairly tame—a little blood from the mouth or nose and ears from the shock of the bombs.
By the time they pushed into Germany in October 1944, the weather had grown cold. A month later they were pushed all the way back through the snow and the cold to Elsenborn Ridge, where they held on without reinforcements against a superior German force for ten days before the Germans gave up their advance—ten days in a bunker he and Van Winckle from Arkansas had dug out of the frozen ground and covered with planks salvaged from an old barn. A week after Elsenborn they advanced into Germany near Aachen, and Van Winckle stepped on a mine. His legs disappeared in a mist of flesh and blood. Billy felt a pain in his shoulder and he sat down next to Van Winckle with a grunt. He looked and saw that his arm was hanging at a strange angle and his whole side was covered with blood.
None of it was quite real. None of it was very memorable. Not the clang of the landing-craft door opening, not the steady rolling boom of the shells overhead or the almost constant shaking of the ground. Not even killing his first German. He barely remembered that. Not the firestorms over Brest or the screaming of the horses near Saint-Lô. Not even the misery of Elsenborn or the surprise of having a piece of Van Winckle’s land mine blow through his shoulder. None of it, not one bit of it stood out as
sharply as the smallest thing he remembered about the Pines.
Even the weather had seemed glorious back then. The days had gone on and on and on, as though stretching themselves out to make room for the games he and Frankie had played when they were boys, the long treks down the tote road with a .22 to shoot squirrels. Sometimes moods would come over Ernie and he would go off by himself, and those times were the best. Then Frankie and Billy would go even farther. They didn’t shoot many squirrels, but sometimes Billy would say, “Watch this,” and he would raise his gun and take a shot at a squirrel high in the trees and it would fall, slowly, so slowly to the ground and he and Frankie would rush over and watch in that cold, cruel, curious way of boys as it died, and Frankie would bend so close that Billy could smell his hair and sometimes he’d put one hand on the squirrel’s body and the other on Frankie’s neck, as if to direct his attention to the animal, and he would feel the same warmth, the same animal aliveness there.
Sometimes clouds rolled in and night came on suddenly, much earlier than it usually did. Then the family would gather in the sitting room and, if the mood was right, the boys would play charades or Chinese checkers with Emma. On rare occasions when Emma had enough to drink, she would sing and Frankie would accompany her on the piano. Frankie, so shy, so tentative and thin, would come alive. His fingers became sure and strong as they pounded out the chords to “All the Things That You Are.” Emma gazed down at Frankie when she sang, not at Jonathan, who sat in his chair, reading while the music fell all around him. Later, when they were older, Frankie would sing, and Ernie always did something funny toward the end, like warbling in falsetto as he came down the stairs wearing something of Emma’s. Even Jonathan would laugh about it a little. And Billy would sit and watch, as immobile as Jonathan, wishing desperately that he had something to offer.
But Frankie was good at guessing his moods, and he would break into Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee,” which became a kind of code. Because later they would find a way past the minefield of the adults’ attention and Ernie’s pranks and steal some time in one of the empty cabins. And there, in the dark, with the smell of cold ashes from the Franklin stove and the feather pillows that still held the medicinal scent of mothballs, and the wool blankets that smelled like the rain coming down outside, they would lie down side by side on a single bed. And Billy would wrap his arms around Frankie and breathe in the smell of his neck, the back of his head still damp with sweat. He’d lay his hand across Frankie’s chest and feel his heart. Frankie would push his hips back against Billy’s, and Billy would press back, his erection stiff against his pants. They’d keep moving this way until, slowly, hard, harder, excruciatingly, he’d come, his breath ragged, black and blowing, on Frankie’s neck.
