Heck was unsettled by Quentin’s quiet, although in truth it merely hung in equipoise with his own. When he saw that Quentin had, at last, run out of cigarettes, he offered one of his own. Quentin hesitated, as if accepting it would signify the acceptance of a burden. Finally he reached and took it. “Thank you,” he said. He presented a meekness that was somehow not quite believable. He drew on the cigarette and positioned it carefully in his fingers. He looked round the tent before saying, “Thank you. What is your name?”

  “George Tilson. But they called me Heck when I joined the army.” It occurred to Heck that he liked this name, that he carried it before himself and insisted on it. It seemed to distinguish this person he had become from his past, pre-army self.

  Quentin weighed things a moment. He admitted, softly, “That’s a funny nickname.”

  “It’s because I don’t swear.”

  Quentin laughed. “You won’t say fuck?” He glanced around before adding, “Fuck, everyone fucking says fuck here.”

  “I promised my mother, when I was little. And now she is dead.”

  Quentin looked away and back, twice, dartingly. “I’m sorry.”

  The conversation subsided. Across from them, two men played cards over a cot, using cigarettes for stakes and both smoking hard and fast enough to rapidly dwindle the stakes. One occasionally accused the other of cheating in a tone that meant he didn’t mean it.

  Quentin touched Heck on the shoulder. Blushing, he said, “I fell, getting off the truck, fell and hurt my ankle.” He spoke low and confessionally. “Getting off to pee.”

  Heck told how he had fallen in the rubble of a building and Quentin nodded sympathetically. Outside, trucks could be heard moving and someone was elaborately cursing the mud and from the direction of the mess area came the metallic crashing of a dropped pile of steel dishes and pans—and the card player who had been accused of cheating fell heavily to the ground and slid under a cot and pawed at the ground and moaned.

  Heck thought the man had heard shells or bombs coming, and he nearly rolled out of his cot and to the ground himself. But the other card player stared incredulously, and Heck realized that all the man had heard was the noise of the pans. The sound of the man’s low, breathy simpering and the scrape of his fingers occupied the entire space of the tent. He was nearly invisible under his cot, but the cot itself lifted and fell like a large, heaving animal. His feet could be seen; he was barefoot.

  Finally Quentin set his cigarette into the can he was using for an ashtray and walked over softly, almost on tiptoe, and bent to touch the man on the shoulder. “Hey, fella,” he said. “It’s okay. It was just some pans.” Quentin tugged gently, and the man allowed himself to be drawn out. His hands were trembling but he smiled. He looked around smiling and sat on the end of his cot. “You all right?” Quentin asked. The man nodded. He gazed toward Heck, but Heck could see that the man did not see anything.

  The other card player gathered up the cards. After a few minutes the barefoot man announced loudly, “I’d dropped something. I was looking for it.”

  No one commented. He was still staring in that way of not-seeing.

  Heck stood and pulled on his coat and left the tent. He had to walk a long time before he could think of things other than that stare.

  The barefoot soldier was gone the next day. A slow but steady circulation of men were assigned to the tent, then on to their units, creating a routine in and out of bags and equipment, rounds of introductions and good-byes. There was a sense of pressure in the air, as if dramatic weather were always imminent. Some of the men drank outrageously in town and were to be seen lurching about. Most, in their anxious boredom, attempted patience and resignation. One of the men in Heck’s tent had stolen a radio, and, when he could run a cable to a generator, they listened to the BBC and the news of the front. The news was very good, and some said Berlin could be taken by Christmas. Heck had trouble imagining Christmas. He smoked a lot. He went into town each day and strolled the streets. He was familiar with brick streets at home but cobblestones were a novelty to him, and they provided welcome relief from the mud. The houses seemed small. It was very pleasant to meander around and peer into the windows of the bakery and the sweets shop, to watch the women pin up their laundry, the children playing games, the men loading coal bins in preparation for winter. The war in its inscrutable mercy had bypassed this town, and most of the people here were pleasant toward the Americans. Heck avoided the raucous cafés where many of the soldiers passed time, and the nearby house where, it was generally known, a GI could find a certain kind of woman. Heck began to enjoy listening to the French talking; he did not understand any of it, but it sounded to him like a pretty language, such as might be exchanged between birds. The town’s children had learned to ask, in English, “Any gum, chum?” He acquired a black rubber hooded poncho and walked even when it rained, and although his boots, socks, pant legs, and bandage became soaked he little minded. In the rain the streets were almost entirely abandoned to his possession. He purchased a pipe and experimented with it for a day, but he could not keep the bowl lit without drawing on it hard and often, so that the tobacco was quickly burned out and his tongue felt scorched, and he reverted to cigarettes.

  Within days routines had developed. When he paused to examine the offerings in the bakery window the same heavy-set woman inside always smiled and waved. A particular quartet of children were always the first to find him in the morning and as such were daily assured of fresh gum. He paused to examine the fountain in the center of town and tried to imagine what it would have looked like before the war, when it was fed with water. He imagined that on sunny days rainbows would play around it. There were three old men who sat in a row on a bench in the town square and argued constantly, with gnashing of teeth and gesticulations of exasperation and tremendous sighs of indignity. From the far side of the square Heck watched how arguments flowed between the three of them, sometimes these two against that one, sometimes another of the possible pairings, sometimes all three declaiming simultaneously and so exaggeratedly that there appeared to be no agreement between any of them on any subject on the face of the earth. In the early evening, phonograph music drifted from certain houses. Music seemed a marvel. Heck experienced occasionally a simple, powerful exaltation over the fact of being still alive. To be alive seemed the only fact that could matter, that he was breathing and warm and retained his limbs and senses.

  He wondered if possibly the army had forgotten him entirely. The men in Heck’s tent came and went and still he remained and he did not object. He was again in some vague military limbo, and he was beginning to understand that the army had many different kinds and places of limbo.

  Quentin too remained, rarely leaving the tent except to eat. He tended to the tent’s coal stove and to his letter writing. When Heck asked, Quentin said he was writing to his fiancée. He wrote on a steel clipboard that he had somehow begged or bartered out of the hospital, and whenever someone loomed near enough to read what he was writing, Quentin hunched over the clipboard and shielded the page with his hands. When someone tried to tease him about writing dirty to his girl, Quentin ignored it. He had a way of greeting people by looking away while smiling tentatively that reminded Heck of his own father.

  Quentin seemed to have decided to regard Heck as a sort of fellow conspirator. Heck had taken the music box out to look at it for a moment before going to sleep when Quentin leaned over and asked, “Is it your mother’s?” Heck shook his head. Quentin wavered, then leaned nearer. “There is a girl? You’re in love?” Heck started. Quentin grinned. “Yeah?”

  They were quiet a minute.

  “I’ve lost her,” Heck said. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “You have to find her.”

  “I don’t know where. I don’t even know where to look.”

  “What’s important is to search.” Quentin spoke with a rapid, hissing insistence that alarmed Heck. “You’ll find her.”

  “I hardly know her.” Heck put the music box away. “We don’t even speak the same language. Her father is insane.”

  “Well, perhaps you’re not in love.”

  Heck stared at his feet.

  “Are you in love?”

  Heck said nothing.

  This seemed to give Quentin new confidence. He said happily, “Confused is a part of love. The confusion isn’t important. What’s important is what you do. If you search, it’s love. If you don’t search, it’s not love. You’re going to search?”

  Suddenly Heck despised Quentin. “No,” Heck said without looking around. “No. There’s nowhere to search.” But after a minute the bitter emotion was already fading, and he longed to take the music box out again.

  The next day he began to try to write a letter to his father. But it all seemed so embarrassing—his foolish injury, this useless waiting. It seemed that from any words he wrote, any words at all, shame would ooze like blood from razor-cut flesh. He rolled over toward Quentin. “Hey.”

  Quentin was finishing his day’s letter packet, folding it and wedging it into an envelope. “Yes?” he said, without looking up.

  “What should I write to my dad?”

  Quentin shrugged.

  “Well, what is all this that you write to your fiancée?”

  “I tell her how much I love her.”

  Heck wrote, “Dear Dad.” He stared at this a minute. He said, “Okay, but what else?”

  “The weather, the food.”

  Heck couldn’t imagine that his father would care about these things. He wrote, “I’m doing all right. Little action.” After a moment he added a bald lie: “But they keep me busy.” He capped his pen and set it aside. To Quentin he said, “Do you have a picture of her?”

  “A picture?”

  “Sure.”

  Quentin looked away and did not answer. He sealed his envelope and put it into a canvas rucksack under his cot. Heck watched him a moment, then frowned and lay back.

  An hour passed and several of the men were already asleep when Quentin leaned over and whispered, “Heck.”

  Heck rolled to look at him. Quentin’s Adam’s apple dipped as he swallowed. The soft blue veins at his temples pulsed. Heck tried to picture Quentin fighting a war, killing men. It was not an impossible image, but it was awkward—it could be constructed only as collage, its parts in disproportion to one another. Quentin said, “She doesn’t exist.”

  “She’s not your fiancée?”

  “She doesn’t exist at all. I wish she did. I wish she did so bad that I can see her, I can hear how she talks, I know what she does all day. I know what she smells like and what her favorite foods are and the kinds of clothes she wears. I know how she would write her letters back to me. She has a lot of questions, and I try to answer them all. But she doesn’t exist. She’s all made up.”

  “Quentin—”

  “That’s why you’ve got to find your girl, Heck. I’ve been thinking about this. You have a chance at someone real. She talks funny and her father’s crazy, so what? So what? She loves you—why else would she give you that beautiful music box? That’s why you’ve got to find her, Heck. She’s a real girl. She loves you. You love her.”

  “Quentin, I—please.”

  Quentin looked around. “No,” he whispered, apparently to himself, and shook his head. “No, of course not.” After several seconds, however, he added, “But what else have I got? I haven’t got a real girl. I’m in bad shape. I’m in lousy shape. You have a real girl, Heck. A real girl. You have to find her. Promise me you’ll find her?”

  Heck stared at him.

  Quentin slumped. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  It turned out to be very easy to go back. He was only forty miles from the Normandy beaches and the Channel waters, and he got a ride on a supply truck that was returning to Omaha Beach. The dead had been cleared from the roads and even some of the potholes had been filled. The driver whistled as he drove and he drove as if he knew nothing of death—Heck lost count of the number of times they were up on two wheels and came down again to four with a crash and a violent rocking of the truck. In a screaming of rubber they halted for a rangy-looking cow that stood in the middle of the road. They sat looking at the cow—the driver whistling “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Heck silent, the cow chewing cud—and several minutes passed before the cow moved listlessly away and the driver raced the engine and popped the clutch.

  The driver began talking about his girlfriend back home. “She’s got eyes like lanterns. One if by land, two if by sea—I’m coming back by sea. And her, you know, melons, they’re big like her eyes. She complains, she says they’re too big, can you imagine? Too big? I tell her they’re just the right size for me. I’m a big guy; I got to have a big pair of melons.”

  Heck glanced over. The driver did not look like a particularly big man. He thought of Claire, the feel of her breasts. He said, “I prefer them smaller.” Then he blushed.

  The driver, however, didn’t even look at him. He said, “Well, sure, some guys do.” He began to whistle again.

  Omaha was still crowded with fresh armor and mountains of supplies and general anarchy. The low, half-formed waves in the distance of the Channel were the color and shape of weals on flesh. Heck set away immediately for the château. He walked with the pulsing noise of the sea pacing him on the right, then turned and pushed inland. He passed rapidly through the little glade where the beehives stood. The hardwoods were dropping yellow and red leaves across the ground. The still-green pines looked a little odd, as if overly optimistic.

  He reached the house and there was no movement, no sign of life. The door stood open and the doorway gaped blackly. In the mud outside were dog prints of various sizes.

  Inside, his eyes adjusted slowly, parting the darkness in slow increments. It appeared as if no one had been here in months, or years. The little table was gone, as well as all the bedding, supplies, and even the garbage. A fine layer of dirt and dust lay undisturbed across the floor. He walked over to where he remembered the fire burning, but he could detect no trace of it: no ash, no blackening.

  He looked up and above him floated the irregular hole in the ceiling that had vented the cooking smoke. In it the sky glowed with a clouded, parchment-colored light. It smelled here of animal feces and wood rot. It was strange to be here again—it had the quality of returning to a place not seen since childhood. He scuffed his foot in the dirt to mark for himself his physical existence. Then he stepped outside and stood in the relief of daylight and tried to think where they might have gone. But he had no idea; they could have gone anywhere.

  He walked for a while unaware of his surroundings, thoughts shifting over his burdens of worry, what had happened to Claire and her family, how he would get back to the hospital, his cowardice, his fear. He pondered going back to the cave where she had taken him, but what would he do, crawl alone into the dark? He had no desire for the close darkness.

  A hum of bees. He was in the clearing again. The noise of the bees was weaker and more sluggish than it had been when he was here with Claire. He stopped and stared at the hive she had opened. Then, slowly, he moved toward it.

  He unlatched the front and peered in. He could see nothing but the seething movement of bees. With one hand he groped inward, trying to move his hand and fingers slowly and unthreateningly to feel in the corners, and he winced and muttered as he was stung once, twice, then three times. A fourth sting caused him to yank his hand out and stumble backward. His fingers were sticky and the places where he had been stung were already swelling. There had been nothing, nothing in there. The pain was intense.

  He found a piece of paper in his pocket and, writing awkwardly with his left hand, printed on it, “Dear Claire, where are you? I love you. Iowa.” He folded the paper and took out the music box and placed the note inside it. He was stung once more as he put the music box into the beehive and closed and latched it. Then he turned and sprinted through the woods toward the Channel.

  Back at Omaha Beach he went into a medical tent and a nurse frowned over his hand and gave him a couple of aspirin and a moistened bandage. Then he wandered among the trucks. There were scores in various stages of arriving and departing, loading and unloading, idling, waiting in lines, maneuvering for position. He discovered the same driver who had brought him here. He looked at Heck’s bandaged hand, looked at Heck. “Need a ride back?”

  “Please,” Heck said, nearly choking on the word and his gratitude.

  4.

  INTERMITTENT RAINS HAD FALLEN ALL DAY. THEY CAME AND went so slowly, and the trees and the tent flaps dripped so regularly into the brown standing water, that even when the rain paused it still seemed to be raining.

  Heck stepped out to use the latrine and when he returned he found an envelope on his cot. On it was written only his name. No one else was in the tent. He lay on his cot with the envelope in his hands and the pinpoints of light that punctured the tent canvas seemed to be moving, twisting. Heck closed his eyes.

  After a minute he sat upright and examined the envelope. The paper was thin and weak. He tore it open and found inside a single sheet of paper, folded once. He set the envelope aside and sat a moment with the paper in his hands, looking at it, wondering. With a movement of his thumbs, he flipped the page open. It said: “You God damned bastard.”

  Heck stared at the words, one after the next, forward, back. He closed the page, opened it again, closed it, until the shapes of the letters were etched into his brain. He put the page back into the envelope.

  Quentin came in. “Letter from home?” he asked.

  Heck nodded. Then he laughed. He did not know why he was laughing, but he laughed hard. Quentin stared at him. This was the most noise he had made in days.

  Finally, gradually, the laughter dropped. Quentin asked, “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Heck said. He looked at the envelope and wondered, who had put this here. Which of the men had done this? It might have been any of them: to Heck, mired in his own problems, the men around him had all remained more or less indistinguishable, except for Quentin and the fellow who had cowered from the falling pans, but that one had been sent away a couple of weeks before. Heck didn’t regard any of the others as particular friends or enemies. They came and went, from the hospital, to the front, faces, bodies filling cots; they became a blur and he gave them little heed. But one of them had noticed him. Perhaps this was just a joke. You God damned bastard. No, more likely someone had finally noticed that he was idling and wasting time here, that his wound, never serious, was now largely healed, that there was no discernable reason he should not be sent immediately back to the line to face the same risks that the others here had faced.

 

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