Tide King Page 2

  But the waves were too powerful; the landing crafts could not get in close enough to the shore to let the men out. They would have to swim. One end of the craft, its gate resting just under the water; the men stood and began to wade out waist-high. The first were sighted immediately by the 352nd Infantry German Division waiting ashore. From their concrete bunkers among the dunes and perches among the cliffs, the Germans scattered those first hundred men like pins. Shells exploded water into the boat, and the remaining men inched back, pressing against the sides as bullets rattled off the floor, walls, men.

  “Picking us off like fucking lemmings,” Johnson said from where he and Stanley sat in the back. He stood up and began to climb the wall of the boat. “Come on Polensky, you waiting to die?”

  Stanley scrambled up the wall after Johnson, the weight of his packs and rifles pulling at him like children. The water stunned him for a second, and he was confused, thinking he was at Porter’s Beach as a child, the chilled water of the Chesapeake Bay grabbing through the wool of his bathing suit and squeezing his nuts, his sister Kathryn bobbing beside him.

  But it was Johnson beside him, the lasso of his arm pulling Stanley away from undertow of the boat. Stanley’s fatigues stuck to him like skin. He wondered whether his rifle would work wet, if the grenades attached to his belt would go off after he threw them. He crouched in the water so only his eyes, helmet, bobbed above.

  They waded to the shore, the water throwing up around them as the German shells exploded underneath, bullets flicking around them like whitecaps. No matter how fast he moved, Stanley fell behind Johnson’s long stride, Johnson becoming his human shield, which filled Stanley with relief and disgust. Thirty feet in, to the right of Stanley, a man’s upper body rose as if being yanked from the water by an invisible hand before sinking into the sea. The men thinned out closer to shore; if by miracle one were to make it to the beach, he was fired upon from several directions, his body a dancing pile in the surf.

  The water squished in his socks and his underwear, and the straps of his backpack cut against his shoulder. He thought of stupid things while in danger, like his bedding being wet that night when he unfurled it to sleep, his cigarettes gone to mush. He touched his helmet, wondering if the herb he’d stuffed there that morning was secure. Suddenly Johnson lifted his rifle, set, and ran, firing at the shore. Stanley followed, although he thought it was a waste. He wasn’t even looking at the beach. He was crouched so low that the current shoveled water into his open mouth and now here was Johnson, moving his big legs out of the water like pistons, lead flying from his rifle, a human tank forgetting it was closer to jellyfish than steel.

  But Stanley followed. He moved his legs and spread out to the right of Johnson. He felt the burning in his hamstrings, the blood straining his heart, the veins in ears ready to spout like whistles. The shelling and fire screamed in his ears until it became quiet. The beach grew on each end; he could see the bunkers of the Germans beyond the dunes. Pinholes of light flicked from them; the water spit bullets around him in response. He aimed his rifle toward the holes and fired, the kick pulled him forward. He feared his skeleton, his muscles, might fall out of his body behind him. He clamped his mouth shut and felt the shells and pebbles of the surf scrape against his knees.

  He had made it. He looked left for Johnson. Good fuck, the farm boy made it, too.

  On the beach, they found a man who was not quite dead. They wanted to find a man who was dead, but they could not be picky. The man who was not quite dead was moaning and breathing thick, gurgly, lying on his stomach. Almost dead. He and Johnson rolled the body on its side and propped their rifles on its left arm. Above them, 50 yards up the beach, lay the Longues-sur-Mer battery, or the German bunkers, huge square cement structures that housed mortars and men. Artillery fire flashed from these holes and scattered the sand around them. Stanley reached for the dying man’s helmet to put between the rifles, a barrier so they could peer up to shoot. A pack of cigarettes fell to the beach from it, which Johnson picked up and pocketed. Why Stanley hadn’t put his own cigarettes in his helmet to keep dry, instead of the herb, he didn’t know. There was no time to mull it over. They were alive, but only by luck and perhaps not for long. Around them, disembodied heads, arms, and backpacks floated in the air before gravity pulled them back to earth. Stanley coughed and shivered, peering up and sighting his rifle on one of the bunkers.

  “I’ll shoot and you toss the grenade,” he said to Johnson over the fire. He may have screamed it, he may have thought it. Either way, no sound seemed to come from his mouth but Johnson understood, reaching toward his belt. The body flung backward at them like a flying log, taking fire. They braced against it. If the man had not been dead, he was now.

  Johnson hurled the grenade. His long arm seemed to reach out and leave the grenade at the entrance to the bunker, like a gift. They ducked, felt the vibration rumble through the sand. The smoke from the grenade curled into the grey of the sky and the grey of the sky ate the smoke. It was impossible to see where anything began or ended.

  Stanley felt a pull at his trousers. A tear in the side of his pants exposed flesh, blood. A bullet had grazed him, tearing a zig-zag down his leg. The Germans hidden in the cliffs around the bunkers were shooting at them. Johnson rolled to his left, stood up, and barreled for safety to a formation of rocks fifteen feet ahead. He waved Stanley on.

  One of theirs, Green, was waiting there. Blood ran down his face, cleaning it of black soot on one side. Green jerked his head toward a rip in the fortified wire around the German embankments. The sand was slippery from the blood. Stanley spread his arms like a plane and continued running, his rifle flapping against his chest.

  Beyond the barbed wire they waited, the men wearing the other helmets. They seemed surprised that Stanley, Johnson, and Green were there. Months of waiting at Omaha for the Allies to strike, and now they stood, unsure, like boys at a dance. Green pulled out his pistol and shot the first man he came to in the face. The man dropped, his body hitting the earth before his blood. Stanley shoved his bayonet low into a man’s stomach, avoiding the ribs. Johnson held his rifle waist high and waved, spraying all those around him with bullets.

  They did this for a long time. They killed men with helmets not like theirs. They stabbed them and they shot them and they lobbed grenades at them and they twisted their necks and they did this until the other men retreated. Then they smoked some of the cigarettes they’d taken earlier. Stanley knotted his handkerchiefs, wet and pink tinged from the bloodied channel water, and tied them around his leg. He watched the cloth drink up the blood until it was full, and then Johnson gave him his handkerchiefs while Green looked for the medic.

  Some other men came over and smoked their own cigarettes. Everyone was dirty and smelled and shivered. Some cried. Some prayed, their mouths wide and moving. Some went through the pockets of the Germans and put watches, cigarettes, soft-edged pictures of girls into their boots and helmets. Stanley smoked his cigarette and wished he could tell his mother he was alive. Johnson stretched out his long legs as another man squatted, fanning a fire. Stanley laid his wet, torn cigarettes on the sand to dry. Most men were quiet, although some talked. Stanley wished they would shut up. It had been two years, two continents of this shit. The only way he could get through it was with silence, the air thin and yet full of salt, the beach full of dead men and yet life still lingering. His thoughts empty, body heavy.

  “Come on.” Johnson stood up. “We can’t leave them like that.”

  That work, they did silently. They stacked the bodies of their men in rows like one would stack cordwood for the ships to take them to sea. Then they emptied their own backpacks, their bowels, and waited again for their orders.

  They spent the summer moving inland toward Germany. The war will be over soon, Stanley wrote his mother. His twentieth letter. The Germans are running like cowards. He played poker with Johnson and Ennis, throwing pennies and cigarettes and girlie pictures into a German helmet they use
d as a pot. I hope you are well and do not worry about me. He spent one week at Netley Hospital for his leg wound. Nothing much has happened to us in Europe, except we are getting fatter. He lost twenty pounds since leaving the States. Hopefully by the time you get this, I will be on the train home. In September, they entered the Hürtgen forest.

  “I would die for a ham,” Johnson let his cigarette dangle as he settled in the brush. It was a game they played sometimes, what they would die for, since they might die for much less.

  “I would die for a turkey sandwich,” Stanley answered. Spruce and balsam trees cloaked their eyes, yielding little forest beyond a few feet. The tree limbs, low, grabbed, and the men walked with a semi-permanent stoop.

  “I would die for a woman’s hips. I would put myself between them and sleep like the dead.” Johnson grinned, his teeth white against the green cave. Water dripped constantly. The men could never find the source of it. Sometimes it confused Stanley, and when he slept for brief periods and woke, he thought he was at his parent’s house, down the hall from the leaky faucet.

  “Stay here.” Johnson’s arm would grab for Stanley’s ankle as Stanley began to push forward through the brush.

  “The sink is fucking leaking,” Stanley waved him off, before Johnson yanked and Stanley fell down into the bed of pine needles that covered the forest floor.

  “I would die to get out of this forest,” Stanley said as they ate the last of their bread and coffee. The supply lines inland were farther away, their rations fewer.

  “I would die for dry socks.” The mud and fog lay on them like a film. In the dark undergrowth, the men rubbed against the trees and each other like ingredients in a stew. Where were the Germans? Surely not as stupid as the Americans, Stanley thought, burrowing through the forest, their tanks and artillery and Air Force stalled by the dense formations of trees and rough terrain. The Allies were all alone.

  Stanley peed in the snow. The cold air crept into his open pants and ran down his legs. Before he could even finish the German shelling of the tree canopy began again, and Stanley crouched and hugged the spruce in front of him without even pulling up his zipper. Around him, splinters from the trees rained down like daggers, along with hot metal. Ennis had looked like a wooden porcupine when they pulled him back behind their lines a few days before. The shrapnel in Ennis’ chest had been bad, and he and Johnson, trapped in front of a patch of machine guns, pressed themselves to the snow and needles and mud for hours, Ennis between them, moaning for his mother.

  Three days earlier, the First Division had discovered the Germans, hidden and waiting for the Allies to amble past the river, when their eyes were tired of the undulation of snow and trees, when their bodies were cold because, in anticipation of quick victory, the Allied brass had not thought to ship winter clothes to the front. For weeks, as the Northern chill swept in, Stanley and Johnson and the others had measured their boots against dead men’s, their inseams, their chest sizes, looking to replace their wet, worn clothes with ones slightly drier, slightly cleaner. Stanley wore two shirts other than his own, each caked and itchy with medals of blood.

  Stanley crawled on his hands in the red and brown snow back to the slit trench he had dug with Johnson earlier that afternoon. They had covered the opening with tree limbs and hoped it would protect them from the shrapnel and wood. Inside, they were asshole buddies, sitting back to back, or asshole to asshole, chest high in the hole, branches and snow over them as they watched for movement beyond their line.

  “You all right?” Johnson asked as Stanley shivered against him. After nightfall, it became frost. The dead men stuck to the earth.

  “I think I’m going to have the runs something awful.”

  “Well, go have them the hell out there.”

  “You just want me shot at.”

  “Just go behind that tree over there. I’ll cover you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m joking. Just be quiet.” Johnson’s hands felt frozen to his carbine. He would give his left hand, purple and granite under his glove, for a cigarette. He felt the pressure of Polenksy’s back leave his, a creeping cold between his soldier blades, as Polensky turned around in the trench and squatted, helmet under his ass.

  “You know, we should have a code word, a personal one, in case one of us leaves the hole.” Johnson tried to talk over Stanley’s sounds. A cigarette would go a long way to blunt the smell. But smoke could be seen at night. Rot, shit, and death smelled day and night, as assessable as air.

  “What’s wrong with the company’s password?”

  “Nothing. I just thought it would be good if we had our own. So I always know it’s a Kraut in the burned-out house I’m about to fire into and not you.”

  “Jesus Lord Christ,” Stanley grunted from his side of the trench.

  “That’s not a good one, Polensky. Too many guys already know it.”

  “Screw you. Christ…I ain’t going to wear this again, that’s for sure.”

  “Just clean it out with some snow. You may not need to protect that empty head of yours, but where are you going to store your socks and corsage?”

  “Up your ass.”

  “Well, I know for sure that hasn’t seen any action.” Johnson aimed his rifle toward a flutter by the trees on his right. Geese? Squirrels? “How about metalanthium lamp?”

  “That’s your word?”

  “Pretty good, huh?”

  Suddenly, movement rocketed upward from the same trees. Mine? Mortar? Geese, definitely geese. The feathers and pulp floated to earth, shot by two others in the company. In response, the Kraut line lit up like flashbulbs. Polensky fell into position next to Johnson, his helmet, an overturned latrine, unstrapped on his chin. Around them, the snow spit bullets, feathers from feather pillows. For a second, Johnson closed his eyes, thought he would let himself get hit. To feel the cool, light fabric of a pillow, a flat one, a hard one, a moldy one, it didn’t matter. His head whipped to the right, and he thought he’d gotten his wish. But it was only Stanley, punching him with an open palm.

  “Wake up, dummy,” he shouted at him above the soft explosions. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Johnson grunted, but he realized he was smiling. He liked this Stanley. He fired off a round. “Shithead.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Stanley answered, firing off his own. Johnson could see he was smiling, too.

  The brass said the Hürtgen Forest was 50 square miles. It seemed to stretch to 100, then 200, then 300, as late October became early November and late November became early December. Stanley did not understand how they could not see the Germans and yet the Germans could see them.

  “They know these forests. They’re stuffed in bunkers while we walk right by them,” Johnson said, coughing. Johnson had developed a cough-snore-shiver in his sleep. Perhaps Stanley could boil the herb for tea, soothe Johnson’s deathly rattle. I still have the root, Stanley wrote to his mother. Although I suspect I will have no reason to use it. You never even told me how. Should I put it under my lip, in a wound, perhaps? His right foot smelled. There was no time to unlace the boot and find out whether his toes had rotted. We are warm and fat and happy. Save me some Chinina.

  “Duck blood soup,” Johnson laughed later, when Stanley described Christmas dinner at home. “You eat everything, don’t you, Pole? Makes me want to come to your house to dinner after the war.”

  “Right now, I would eat anything,” Stanley shivered. He shivered when he was awake and he shivered when he was dreaming. His breath was staccatoed with shivers. He shivered when he peed and he shivered when he shat and he shivered when he shivered. Stanley would eat his shivers, if he could, but they would probably give him diarrhea, he thought, like everything else.

  They were still in the Hürtgen Forest, pissed as hell about it. Stanley and Johnson had taken turns moving out ahead, little by little, looking for mines and trying to clear brush for a path out. The visibility was ten feet, at best, and the soldier, with his bac
k to Stanley, appeared from the foliage like a mirage. It had to be one of their men, so close by. Stanley tapped him on the shoulder just as he realized the man looked wrong, the uniform, the helmet. As the man turned, Stanley pulled out his revolver and plugged him in the right cheek. The man fell, the wound cratering inward in his face like a black hole before bubbling up, blood oozing on the smooth, unshaven skin.

  He was a boy. Stanley wondered if he was lost. His eyelids flickered, and Stanley wondered whether he should touch them, hold his hand. He kicked away the boy’s rifle. The boy’s fingers opened like petals. Stanley touched the boy’s forehead with his left hand, his right cocked on his pistol, near his hip.

  “Mutter,” the boy said, a whisper wet with blood. When he reached up toward Stanley, Stanley shot him. The arm fell back toward the body. Stanley shivered. He shivered in his heart and his throat and the tears from his eyes warmed his face until it grew cold and sticky and he shivered again. He thought to eat his mother’s herb, to protect himself. It could not hurt. When one no longer believed in anything, he considered, all things could possess equal power.

  “You all right?” Johnson appeared from the brush, as Stanley groped in his helmet, feeling for the crumbled flowers. He put a hand on Stanley’s shoulder. His grip was gentle, as if handling crystal, unlike his usual vice of fingers that dug right into Stanley’s collarbone.

  “Yeah.” Stanley put his helmet back on quickly without retrieving it and rolled the boy over, face down, in the snow.

  They walked in a diamond formation: Stanley walked in the back, Johnson in the front, one man, red-haired, was to their left, another, blond-haired, to their right. Stanley didn’t know their names. It seemed a waste to learn them. Wood and shrapnel fell from the sky, mixed with snow, hitting the ground in hisses. The trees burned standing still. Stanley listened to the fire eating the wood, the snap of twigs and branches as they broke free of the parent trunks and fell down to the forest. Smoke poured from the nooks and crannies of the burning bark, and men were forced to crawl. On the ground, the red-haired man, in front, would tap the top of his helmet and point in the direction of movement, and they all would crouch and fill that direction with fire, grenades. But then the blond man on the right threw a grenade that hit a tree and bounced back toward them, and they dove leftward and rolled down a small hill.