Peace

by Richard Bausch

  Marson knelt down, pulled back the field jacket, and looked at the bandaged place. He saw no stain of blood on it. “You’re not bleeding now,” he said.

  “I can feel it,” said Asch. “Inside.”

  “Stay still,” Marson said, and again he gestured to the old man to get down. Joyner had already moved to the other side of the tree, had already stepped into the water of the little stream, which the snow had covered. It had not quite frozen over. He cursed and sat down. “Fuck’n ice. Goddamn it. I’ll get frostbite now and lose a fuck’n foot.”

  Marson walked over and helped him stand. They stood on the other side of the tree, in the moonlight, and they realized it at the same time, looking out along the snow lane, fearing the shot they would not hear.

  TWENTY-ONE

  IT TOOK A LONG TIME, working to free the corpse, breaking the frozen crust with their entrenching tools, and then scooping at the snow with their hands to get to the outline of it. Ice had formed over the face, and the hands had frozen so solidly that the fingers would not come free. Joyner chopped through four of the fingers with the sharp end of the tool to free the left hand. He gagged and coughed, moving off a few feet, to the trees. He kept gasping. “This is awful,” he said. “Goddamn.”

  “Come on,” said Marson.

  “I’m sick.”

  The old man coughed and moved out from the tree, holding Asch’s pack. “Che cosa state facendo? What that you do?”

  “Down,” Marson said to him, gesturing.

  Joyner made his way back to the body and began tearing at the snow around the legs. He kept muttering, cursing, glancing at the open space in its bath of lunar brightness. Marson got down to help him, and the old man simply crouched and watched them.

  Somehow they got the other hand free without damaging it. Twice they stopped, and listened, and Joyner went and checked on Asch, who was by turns fitfully awake and unconscious. The old man went back to the tree trunk and sat against it, with Asch’s pack behind him for a cushion. He rocked back and forth in the cold, arms clasping his upraised knees, staring at Asch, and intermittently he would raise himself and fix his gaze on the open area of ground.

  The body was rock solid, stiff, and much heavier than either of the two soldiers imagined it could be. Finally the old man had to come around the tree and help. They got it upright, but the arms were outstretched, as though it were reaching for the clear, star-and moon-bright sky. The shadow it made across the trampled surface of snow looked like the shadow of a statue. “I never thought I’d ever wish for rain,” Joyner said. “Something other than this fuck’n moon. Jesus.”

  They lifted the body like a big solid log, carried it to one of the trees just beyond the campsite, and propped it there. Marson broke through the crust of snow and piled some of it around the feet for support. There were about eleven inches between the feet, the legs having spread slightly in the toppling over from being shot.

  “Nobody’s gonna be fooled by this,” Joyner wheezed. He stood there trying to gain his breath back.

  “Can we get the arms down?”

  “Solid as stone.”

  “Wrap your blanket roll around him.”

  “Have to use Asch’s. Mine’s covered with blood.”

  Asch’s was also covered with blood, and stiffening in the cold. They got it to conform to the shape of the body. Then they stepped back a little to look at it in the dimness. It looked as though the soldier were trying to climb the tree.

  “Let’s wrap the blanket around the arms and the tree,” Marson said, “and leave the head out.”

  They tried this. Joyner was gasping for air and coughing, gagging. Marson kept track of the old man out of the corner of his eye. When they got the body tied, they stepped back again to survey their work. Now it looked as though the figure were hugging the tree.

  “Shit,” Joyner said. “It’s gonna have to do.”

  Marson put Asch’s helmet on it. He had to pack the helmet with snow. Joyner emptied the clip from Asch’s carbine and lay it in the fold of the blanket near the chest line. Through it all they had to keep pausing to listen.

  “Well,” Marson said, gazing at it. “I don’t know.”

  “It looks like a stiff tied to a fuck’n tree.”

  “A mannequin,” Marson said. “But maybe from a distance.”

  Asch made a noise of choking, and they hurried around to him. Saliva had gathered in the back of his throat. He coughed it up, looked at them, muttered something about the cold, and began to murmur, crying. They couldn’t make any of it out. Then he lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  Marson stationed himself near the base of the tree and scoped the lane between the rows of trees. Joyner sat beside him with his back to the trunk. The old man faced Joyner, crouched low, gazing at Asch, who kept twitching and moaning, but did not come to. Marson felt the searing pain in his foot. He waited for the strength to move. There were more clouds now, a wide shoreline-looking expanse of them, advancing incrementally from the east. Soon it would be as dark as it had been in the rain. Marson indicated this to Joyner, who nodded.

  They got Asch across Joyner’s back, and with the old man carrying Asch’s pack, they started again, making their way slowly, torturously down, and Marson did not remember it being this steep at this part of the climb. But the snow held them some, the crust of it breaking with each stride they made and then hugging their thighs. The old man took them back down the path on which he’d first led them, and at one bend in it, he paused, and looked to his left, expectation on his face. He peered through the trees.

  “You see something?” Marson asked him.

  “Niente.” But there had been that look.

  When they came to the place where they had seen the buck, they moved to the lee of a big tree and paused again. Asch remained unconscious but breathing. The old man put the pack down and leaned on it, sighing.

  Marson looked at him, certain that there had been a subtle change in him; now he seemed like someone full of anticipation. His manner was that of a man waiting in ambush.

  “Angelo,” Marson told him, smiling. “If you do anything to guide them to us I’ll shoot you before I take the first shot at them. Capeesh?”

  “Guida,” the old man said, nodding. He smiled but then seemed to think better of it. He had his arms wrapped about himself, leaning against Asch’s pack.

  “I said from the start I don’t trust him.” Joyner was winded. His words came with a rasping. “Christ. He’d do it, too. You see it now, too. Right? You think he’s Fascist, too.”

  “I don’t know what I think,” Marson said.

  “Non sono fascista,” said Angelo.

  They waited. Joyner drank from his canteen and then, after a hesitation that demonstrated his distrust, offered it to the old man, who had just put a handful of snow in his mouth. The old man shook his head. “Grazie, no.”

  In the next half minute of silence they heard a shot, echoing across the silent snow and the blackness of the trees, from very far.

  TWENTY-TWO

  SOUND CARRIES FARTHER at this height, Marson told himself. The shot was behind them. He believed it had come from there. “I’m going to double back,” he told Joyner. “And take him out.”

  “Naw, look,” Joyner said. “Let’s just get back down off this fucker.”

  “We can’t move fast enough. He’ll pick us off. He’ll get where he can see us all and he’ll pick us off.”

  “I don’t think so. I think we should get down to the road fast.”

  Marson thought a moment. “Let Angelo take you down. Just keep going. I’ll catch up to you either way.”

  The old man stared from one to the other of them. But then he pointed back up the mountain. “Tedeschi,” he said.

  “Yeah. Get going,” Marson said.

  Asch moaned.

  “This cold will save his life,” Joyner said. “He can’t bleed like he would in warmer conditions, I know that.”

  “Get him down this mountain. I m
ean it. I’ll follow. I can follow the snow trail.”

  Joyner shook his head. “I got a bad feeling.”

  “We’ve gotta know anyway what’s trailing us. If it’s a regiment, they’ll need to know down on the road, right?”

  “It’s a sniper. I think he probably won’t come much farther.”

  “Just do this for me,” Marson said. “Take Asch and go.” He looked at the old man. “Down the mountain. Capeesh?”

  “Sì,” the old man said. But clearly he did not understand anything, and only meant to show his loyalty.

  Marson indicated Asch, and Joyner, and then he pointed down the mountain. “Guida.”

  “Oh,” the old man said, almost eagerly. “Sì. Yes. Yes.”

  “Sorry,” Asch mumbled, not quite conscious.

  “Okay, we’re going down,” Joyner said to the old man. “You take one false move and you’re dead. Morto. Capeesh?”

  Angelo looked frightened.

  Marson indicated the direction, and gestured again. “Down.”

  “Sì. Yes.”

  He moved off. The old man watched him go. Joyner was doing something with Asch, and Marson saw that he had removed Asch’s watch. He went on, wending slowly back through the trees, keeping to the right of the path and going from tree to tree, skirting the ground they had already covered but remaining within clear sight of it, moving very slowly, stopping frequently to listen to the woods. Around him the moonlight began to fail, the shoreline-bright mass of cloud having come over, thin at first, so that the moon shone behind it, but thickening, darkening. The woods seemed more dense in the gloom. At one point it came over him like revelation that he was in Italy, alone, in woods, in the middle of the longest night of his life, and there was someone out there with a scope rifle, hunting him. He stood against a big tree, breathing the odor of its heavy bark, and thought of the pain in his heel. It hurt worse all the time, and yet he could not quite get his mind around it as pain. This that he felt now, stalking the dark, expecting every second to be shot, this was the kind of strain that overmastered the physical discomforts he was suffering, and there was still the cold, the freeze at his fingertips and at the ends of his toes, the shivering, and the feeling of wanting simply to lie down and rest, even knowing that to rest was to die. He could not conjure the slightest image of his own life before this moment, this black quiet, with the terror of any motion or sound, and the sting in his lungs, the shakiness of the muscles in his lower back and his legs.

  All for thee, most sacred heart of Jesus.

  The words had no meaning. There existed nothing anymore but these woods, this deep stillness. His senses were sharper than they had ever been, and yet he could not think of anything but the darkness and what could be hiding in it. He moved in the blackness like a cat, searching for a place to wait in ambush.

  He came to within a few yards of the campsite and saw the corpse lying next to the tree. This fact thrilled him. He got down on his knees, behind a stone outcropping, and waited. After a few minutes of listening, and panning the lane with the scope, he got to where he could see the corpse, but he could not tell in the dark if there had been a hit. He was a few feet away from the downed tree’s root system, and he got below the line of it, moving closer to the slight depression in the snow where the fire had been. It had grown too dark to be sure of anything. He simply waited now, reasonably certain that a bullet had knocked the corpse over—the ruse had worked perfectly—and the corpse must have dropped like a shot man. The sniper, if he were indeed following, would then come forward, keeping his distance, moving with the deliberateness of his kind. It felt that way to Marson, as if he were seeking to stop some species, a creature occurring in nature.

  The dark was nearly complete. The possibility existed that the sniper had moved beyond this little square of ground, and so it was necessary to try watching in all directions. Marson turned slowly, looking through the almost useless scope. The sense that the sniper may have got by him fed his terror. And it was terror: a deep, black, nerve-tic distress so pervasive that it was hardly aware of itself. Marson stared out at the night in a freezing, fixed gaze of expectation. The darkness yielded no sound. The wind had died. The air grew colder all the time. The line of trees, left and right, the open lane, all of it seemed to be fading out of existence as light left the sky.

  Once or twice, over the next minutes, he believed that the corpse moved, or sighed, or took in air. His mind began playing tricks on him. He saw another deer and almost shot at it. The sound of the hooves piercing the snow crust startled him so badly that he let go a little cry from the bottom of his throat. The deer went on. The woods grew silent again. The cold changed in increments of freezing, everything turning to ice. The condensation of his breath froze on his lips. He was beginning to believe that the night would yield up nothing and this had all been a waste. Certainly Joyner and the old man must be well down the mountain, with their cargo. He saw in his mind the look on Asch’s face as the bleeding went on, and he knew he should feel sorry for him. He had felt sorry for him, and for everyone in the world. But he did not feel it now. He could not find any sense of Asch as another someone. It was as if he were an idea, only a word on someone’s lips, a concept. In his mind’s eye, he saw the little cracked photograph of his own daughter, and it meant nothing to him. It was a photograph, insubstantial as thought. The waiting was changing him, emptying him, draining all the human elements, as if his spirit were bleeding. He tried to picture Helen, his father and mother, the street, the surround, as he had seen it on that last day. He could not call it up. He could not begin to imagine it. The memory of it all was breaking up, dissolving, being effaced awfully. He could see quite clearly the eyes filled with wonder of the dying soldier, the woman’s smudged calves. He had become a pair of eyes, staring, two hands on a rifle. A cold watchfulness, shivering in the wind, waiting.

  He had not really thought through how he would proceed when he encountered the sniper, what sort of action he might take. He did not know if he was capable of a shot from ambush, and this would have to be just that. He tried imagining himself through it, as he had often imagined himself through pitching to one hitter or another, when he was a good baseball player and there were stupid, trivial things to worry about. He could not see himself through it. He tried to call up the longing he had felt to have his life back again, and he had felt it for so long, and that was gone, too, now. He told himself that he would never complain about anything in his life, if he could take his life out of here, home from this cold dark country with its hills and valleys and mountains, its bad weather. But these were just words, just noises in the mind.

  And sleep began to come over him, with stealth, like a kind of nerve-killing predator, closing him down. He nodded off once, caught himself, straightened a little and tightened his grip on the carbine, then nodded off again. His head came against the rough bark of a thick root, and he jolted awake, amazed at the power of this drowsiness, even knowing that he could pay for it with his life. His eyelids were so heavy, so heavy. He took a handful of the snow and put it on his face, felt the intense sting of it, trying to recover his senses. And very quickly the drowse began again. He knelt and pulled at tendrils of the tree’s root system, for exercise. Again, he put snow on his face. He saw himself standing in the clearing, and the deer were all around him, and he was falling far.

  He woke almost shouting, holding the whimper back. The field had not changed. The night had not changed. He did not know how long he had been asleep, or if indeed he had been asleep, until he remembered the deer surrounding him, and the wide clearing he had stood in.

  He had no sense of time, and now he had no sense of how long he had been watching the slow progress of a darker shape in the darkness, about a hundred yards from the little campsite, coming along just at the line of the trees, with the open snowfield to the right. He looked at the figure through the scope, but the glass was fogged now. He attempted to spit on the lens but could not produce enough saliva, so he pu
t it in the snow and wiped it off, then raised it and found that he had lost the shape. He tried to see it again in the darkness and could not find it. He was ready to believe that he had been mistaken about what he saw, that it had been nothing more than another deer. He scanned the field again, the line of trees, and saw no moving thing. He put the scope down, and stared. Nothing. He waited, and felt the sleepiness again, and then saw motion, unmistakable, like the darkness itself moving. But it was a shape in the darkness, and he was immediately wide awake. It was no deer.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE MAN SEEMED faintly unconcerned with what might be waiting for him, though he was paying some attention to the darker places in the trees. His attitude was that of someone being cautious without fully believing that caution was necessary.

  Marson carefully, as soundlessly as he could, attached the scope to his carbine, then got to his knees behind the downed tree, and drew a bead on him.

  Not quite gradually, but with a sensation of a slow widening of himself, he felt a lessening of tension, as if something had been released in his blood, a drug, preventing him from feeling what he had felt only seconds before. In his mind he saw, in no order but in jumbled images, the Kraut dying, the soldier with the burned hand, Asch lying in the snow bleeding out of the little holes, the legs of the dead woman, the scenes of carnage going back to Salerno—and it was all one thing, cold in him, ice at the heart, something dead as the stone where he lay. He himself was stone, a statue’s eyes looking out of dead granite, sighting along the barrel of the carbine, as he knew the sniper had done. Everything he had ever been, everything he had ever believed in or hoped for, and all his memories of home—they were all gone, elsewhere, obliterated in the freezing darkness of this pass, drawing the crosshairs over the figure approaching, and feeling his own finger tightening on the trigger. He could not shoot. He let go of the trigger, brought the carbine down to his side, watching the shape come on. He experienced a tremendous urge to look upon the face, but then thought of the place where he was, this place he had come to in his life. It felt, in some wordless way, like a whole life that he had only begun to live.