Front Lines

by Michael Grant

  From ground level she cannot see the fire at first, but as she walks she begins to catch glimpses in the gaps between homes. Then, coming around the corner, there it is.

  It is a very old wood-frame house, two stories behind a weed-grown garden, and Rio recognizes it immediately. It is the Stamp Man’s House.

  The Stamp Man’s House—it is always referred to that way—is the most often stared at, most often shunned house in Gedwell Falls. No one has ever seen the Stamp Man, at least not that Rio has ever heard. There are rumors, and there are tall tales. There are even ghost stories told ’round campfires at church camp. But there are no firsthand sightings that Rio knows of.

  The Stamp Man lives with his sister, a middle-aged woman with wild gray hair and a face etched by suffering, leading naturally to suggestions by the more imaginative children that she is some sort of witch. Rio has seen her in town, nodded in a neighborly way, but never spoken with her. Rio knows—everyone in the small town knows—that the sister makes a weekly sortie to the post office to pick up the mail that comes to the Stamp Man, mail from strange, exotic locales bearing the brightly colored stamps he is believed to collect.

  It is she, the Stamp Man’s sister, who now stands barefoot in a threadbare nightgown on the sidewalk in front of the house, hand over her mouth, staring in helpless horror at a window flickering orange.

  The sister notices Rio and cries, “Help him! Help him!” Her eyes glow with reflected firelight.

  “What’s . . . What is . . . ,” Rio stammers, no longer enjoying this forbidden excursion.

  “It’s Peter! He won’t come out!”

  For a moment Rio is confused, not connecting the name Peter with the Stamp Man. “Is he awake?” she asks.

  “It’s the fireplace in my room, I told him we needed to have the chimney swept, but he . . . I have to . . .” She makes a tentative move toward the porch but doesn’t get far. There is something indecisive, a conflict of some sort. “I shouldn’t have burned coal. I should have . . . but wood is so . . . and I can’t . . .” This is all accompanied by weak, fluttering hand gestures.

  An upper-floor window’s glass pane cracks, and seconds later the glass bursts outward, shards clattering on the porch roof and sliding down the shingles to smash on the walkway. A tongue of fire licks upward, touching the eaves. The smell of smoke is acrid and deeply disturbing, not the comfortable smell of burning firewood or leaves, but the more complex smell of burning paint and wallpaper paste, of pillow feathers and Bakelite and tar.

  “Peter!” the sister screams. “Peter!”

  A sound comes from within the house. It might be human, must be human, but it is not a sound Rio has ever heard come from a human throat. It is not a scream but a cry, a warning, but with words slurred to incomprehensibility, a guttural, throat-clearing, strangled sound. Whatever the meaning of this cry, the sister seems to understand it.

  “No, Peter! You must come out!”

  She says it, shouts it, but again Rio detects a doubt, an ambiguity in her tone.

  Rio looks around frantically, hoping for someone, anyone to come along and do . . . something. Something, she doesn’t know what, but something that will take the burden off of her own shoulders, for she sees pleading in the sister’s eyes, a mute neediness. Despair.

  Rio takes tentative steps toward the porch, willing the volunteer fire department to bestir themselves and come to the rescue quickly. But if the volunteers are on their way there is no sign of them.

  “Help him! Peter! Peter!”

  Rio climbs the three wooden steps to the front door, which is closed but surely not locked since the sister must have come out this way. She touches the doorknob. It is not hot to the touch. She peers through the narrow vertical slits of lace-curtained windows beside the door and sees a stairwell inside, and no sign of fire on the lower level.

  Taking a deep breath, she opens the door and reels back from the stench of smoke that has crept down the stairway and now billows out through the door and passes above Rio’s head to rise into the night sky.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Rio asks herself.

  And just then Tam Richlin comes rushing up and asks the identical question, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Rio has never been so glad to see her father. “The Stamp Man is upstairs. He won’t come down.”

  Tam Richlin hears this and nods, showing no surprise but a grim understanding. “He may not care, but this fire could spread to other homes.”

  “I called the operator and told her to call the fire department.”

  “Good girl. But it’ll take them a half hour this time of night,” Tam says.

  “Can we save him?”

  “Nothing can save him,” Tam says darkly. “He died a long while ago.” But then, ignoring his own cryptic assessment, he says, “I’ll give it a try.”

  He races to a garden hose, turns on the spigot, and drenches himself in water. He tears the sleeve from his pajamas, soaks the cloth, and ties it around his head, covering his mouth and nose.

  “Be careful. Don’t get hurt!” Rio cries as her father plunges through the door and pounds up the steps.

  Rio hesitates, feeling useless as the sister weeps openly, and now other doors on the street are opening and other lights are coming on, and at last she hears the distant wail of a siren. But something feels very wrong about standing there and doing nothing. Her decision is not thought out but instinctive: she follows her father’s example, tears away the pocket of her chenille robe, and wets it. Holding the rag over her mouth, she rushes into the strange house and up the stairs.

  As soon as her head rises above the level of the upper floor she gags on smoke, and that’s when she hears the unmistakable sharp, unbearably loud sound of a gunshot. The sound sends her rushing up, taking steps two at a time. Three rooms, one with an open door, are bright with fire that crackles and roars on fresh breezes from the broken window. A second door is closed. A third is open and lit only by candlelight. Rio hears her father’s voice and peers cautiously around the corner.

  The room is stuffed, stuffed almost to the exclusion of furniture, with cardboard boxes spilling reams of paper: old newspapers, age-curled magazines, and thousands of envelopes with the stamps neatly cut away. One entire wall is bookshelves loaded with stamp albums in a dozen different sizes and covers.

  In the center of the room, against the far wall, is a bed. It’s a mahogany sleigh bed like those to be found at many a home in Gedwell Falls.

  Tam Richlin stands before that bed with his back to Rio. And beyond him, propped against a stack of pillows, lies a monster.

  Rio stifles a scream. The creature in the bed must once have been a man, but now he is a nightmare in a sleeveless white T-shirt, revealing a frail, parchment-flesh left arm and a shocking stump where the right arm would once have been. He has only half a face, half an old man’s face, slack and sickly. But the right side of that face is gone. There is a deep crater, as though that half of his face was bitten off by a wild beast. The mouth is a twisted grin on its intact side, but from there the lips seem to melt away, revealing teeth all the way back to the upper molars. The lower molars are mostly gone as the jawbone simply ends, absent, leaving a gaping hole in sagging flesh.

  She can look—must look, cannot look away—at the Stamp Man’s throat, a gulping, spasming pink tube revealed through those absent teeth and jaw.

  The Stamp Man’s right eye is gone as well, but this is blessedly covered by an eye patch.

  He is holding a pistol, aimed at Tam Richlin.

  “We have to get you out of here, Captain,” Tam says.

  The Stamp Man shakes his head vigorously, a gruesome sight.

  “You don’t want to burn to death, Captain. That’s no way to go.”

  The Stamp Man shakes the gun as if to say, “I won’t wait to burn.” Then he waves the gun around the room, not threatening, just indicating all of it. He makes sounds, a wet, slurry mimicry of human speech. Rio can see his t
ongue trying to form sounds, see his throat contracting and releasing, all of it creating no intelligible word, only a cry, a plea, a wail of despair.

  Tam for the first time notices Rio behind him. “What the hell are you doing up here?” he snaps.

  “I just . . . I thought I could help.” She cannot look at him because she cannot will herself to look away from the man in the bed, the Stamp Man, who her father calls “Captain.”

  “Get out of here, Rio.” And when Rio doesn’t move, Tam grabs her bicep and shoves her hard. “Now! Go!”

  Rio flees the room and stumbles down the stairs, gagging on smoke that has thickened to near opacity as the fire builds, sending waves of searing heat and choking smoke to pursue her until she escapes through the front door and almost collapses on the sidewalk.

  “Is he dead?” It’s the sister. She is no longer crying. Her eyes have gone dull.

  “No, he’s—”

  And a single shot rings out.

  Terrible, fearful moments later Tam Richlin emerges, choking, his face darkened by soot and by something liquid that slides down his cheek leaving a red smear.

  The fire truck comes rattling down the block, and even before it comes to a complete stop men in asbestos coveralls and iconic fireman’s helmets pile off, unlimbering a thick canvas hose. Axes and hoses and portable fire extinguishers in hand, the firemen race to the porch, but Tam knows the fire chief and grabs his arm.

  Rio does not hear their conversation, but she sees the fire chief’s face go from determined and a little excited to grim. He nods, and with a few words to his crew, sets them to directing their hoses toward the siding and roof of the adjoining home.

  No fireman enters the burning house.

  The sister says nothing, does not urge them on, but sinks down to sit, legs splayed gracelessly across the concrete sidewalk.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Tam says, and takes his daughter’s arm. There is no arguing with the sad finality in his voice.

  They walk in silence, ignoring shouted inquiries as half the town is now out in the street. Just before they reach home, Tam stops. He hangs his head for a moment, silent. Then he says, “I was about to say I’m sorry you had to see that, but I suppose it’s a good thing.”

  “What was that? The Stamp Man wasn’t burned, what . . .”

  “Captain Peter McFall, US Marines. He was at Belleau Woods in the last war. They had a bad time of it. And he had a very bad time of it.”

  Rio remains silent, seeing the conflict in her father’s eyes. Tam Richlin is a quiet man, not one for long speeches, or even short ones. She waits.

  “I guess the fire was the last straw for him. I guess he’s been waiting for death since that day. Year after year like that. The pain . . . Never able to go out into the world . . . The fire was taking all he cared about, all his stamps, all his . . . what little he had left.”

  “Did he shoot himself?”

  Tam was silent for so long Rio thought he hadn’t heard. Finally, in a single long sigh he said, “He wanted to. But suicide is an unforgivable sin in his faith. You see, it leaves you no chance to repent and atone.” Then, under his breath, bitterly, “As if he had not already paid for the right to sit straight and proud at God’s table.”

  Rio was forming the next question, thinking the words, but I heard a shot, when she realized the truth.

  Captain Peter McFall, retired, would not have been able to repent of suicide. But Tam Richlin had time enough to seek forgiveness.

  5

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

  “Du bist nisht mayn tokhter! Mayn tokhter shist nisht keyn mentshn. Afile natsis!” This pronouncement comes with a side order of two hands chopping the air for emphasis and a head thrown back as if to implore God to bear witness.

  The speaker is Elisheva “Rainy” Schulterman’s mother. The language is Yiddish. In English it means, You are not my daughter! My daughter does not shoot people. Even Nazis!

  It is a very dramatic statement, rendered somewhat less convincing by the fact that in her eighteen years of life, all in this same fourth-floor apartment, Rainy has heard that she is not her mother’s daughter on literally hundreds of occasions, including when she took up piano instead of violin, when she first went out in public with her head uncovered, and when she added ketchup to scrambled eggs.

  “Mother, I doubt very much I’ll be shooting anyone. I’ve qualified on the M-1 carbine, but only just barely. Anyway, I’ve been assigned to the army intelligence training school.”

  “This is good,” her father says from behind his newspaper, which, he has made clear, he will put down once all the food is served. “The army sees she is intelligent.”

  Rainy’s mother, who has been hovering around and bringing new dishes to the table, stalks over, rudely pulls down the newspaper, sticks her face just inches from her husband’s, and says, “Intelligence, old man. Nyet intelligent, intelligence! Learn to speaking English like American, hokay? And no newspaper at my table!”

  Rainy’s older brother, Aryeh, who, like her, is in uniform, winks at her. Rainy rolls her eyes in response.

  They are at the dinner table, which is loaded with mismatched serving dishes full of noodles, chicken, pickled beets, bread, and spinach that has been cooked to a gray-green paste. Steam rises into the light of the shaded bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  Also at the table are the elderly couple from upstairs who are nodding along in noncommittal agreement. To be fair, they also nod along with Rainy. They’re there for the free food.

  “Do they give you gun?” Rainy’s mother demands. “Aryeh, eat some spinach, is good for you blood. If they give you gun it is for shoot, no? Hokay. It is for shoot.”

  “They gave me a gun too,” Aryeh says, hiding a smile. “They give them to all marines. It’s something they kind of insist on.”

  “Hah!” Rainy laughs, which is a mistake, because this launches a five-minute-long diatribe in a patois of English, Yiddish, Polish, German, and some words that are invented on the spot, all of which culminate in the pronouncement that sons are not daughters, and daughters are not sons, and only a woman can give birth, painful birth, lasting hours, while the man is in some tavern drinking.

  “The chicken is good,” Rainy’s father observes once this storm has blown itself out.

  “A woman’s place is in the home, respecting and obeying her fool of a husband!” Rainy’s mother cries.

  “Yes, Rainy,” her father says in a tone of weary irony. “Why can’t you learn from your mother to be respectful and obedient to men?”

  “Very tender, the chicken,” one of the neighbors says.

  With dinner completed, Rainy helps clear the table, moving swiftly between the narrow but elegant dining room and the tiny kitchen so as not to be caught alone with her mother.

  It’s her father who corners her, drawing her down the hallway to a discreet distance.

  “Rainy,” he says.

  “Dad?”

  He sighs, scratches his head, makes a face like maybe what he’s about to say is a bad idea. Then he shrugs and says, “Listen, bubala, you know your cousin Esther?”

  “Not really. Do I have a cousin Esther?”

  “She’s your grandmother’s sister’s daughter. They live in Krakow. In Poland.”

  “Yes, Father, I know where Krakow is.” She doesn’t mean to sound like a sarcastic teenager and softens it by prompting, “So, what about Cousin Esther?”

  “Well, she writes letters to everyone, every branch of the family. Your mother gets a letter three, sometimes four times a year.”

  Rainy waits, sensing a revelation, which comes after a dramatic pause.

  “Nothing. Nothing for a year now,” her father says. “One letter missed, two even . . .” He shrugs.

  “Well, there is a war on.”

  “True, very true. I heard something about that on the radio, I think.” Her father is capable of his own sarcasm. “But when I talk to people at temple, it’
s the same thing. No one hears from Poland, no one hears from Ukraine . . . I’m just saying, you’re going to do intelligence work, no? You might hear something . . .” He lets it hang.

  Rainy draws back, unconsciously putting distance between them. “Father. Dad. I can’t talk to you about my work. Those are the rules.”

  He shrugs and dips his head and squints in a gesture that eloquently conveys his understanding, but also his expectation that rules are not always to be followed blindly. “I understand, and I will never ask you to break a rule, Rainy. I’m just saying you have a responsibility to the army, to this country that we love. But you also have an obligation to our people. Maybe you keep your eyes open. Maybe you see things, maybe you hear things . . .”

  “I better finish clearing the table,” Rainy says, bringing the conversation to a halt.

  With that awkward exchange and the clearing of dishes concluded, Rainy goes to her favorite place, the roof of the five-story building. The roof is flat tarpaper, with some of the tar still liquid from the day’s heat. Blackened pipes stick up in a seemingly random pattern. Beyond Rainy’s perch is a mile of roofs just like her own, and beyond that, in the distance, the skyscrapers that to most people’s minds defined New York City. The skyline is mostly dark for fear of the German submarines lurking just offshore that use city lights to silhouette vulnerable cargo ships plying the coastal route.

  Aryeh joins her, bringing up two cups of hot tea.

  “Had to get out of there, huh?” he asks.

  His sister is a young woman with black hair, which unbound is so wild that it must be obsessively pinned down. She’s cut it for the army, but even short it struggles to get free. She has an olive complexion untroubled by blemishes. Her face in repose is alert, smart, skeptical, and thoughtful. Her mouth is wide, with full lips. Her eyes are large, dark, and quite beautiful.

  “You handled that well,” her brother says. “I saw you about to explode a few times, but you didn’t.” He clinks his cup against hers. “Very mature of you.”

  They are more than brother and sister; they are best friends and have been since a seven-year-old Rainy lost patience with her brother’s incessant teasing and broke his nose with a loaf of very stale rye bread.