When Kelly came up front, after the confrontation with Liverwright, Nurse Pullit said, “I heard all about it!”
“It wasn't like she said,” Kelly told the nurse.
“He doesn't remember,” Lily said.
She and Nurse Pullit giggled.
So far as Kelly was concerned, Lily's story was fantasy. One moment, he was under the bridge watching it come apart over him; the next moment, he was a quarter of a mile downriver, by the water's edge. He couldn't figure out how he got there, and he refused to believe the grotesque picture Lily painted. He chose, instead, to believe that he had pretended to be out from under the bridge— and therefore was out from under it, just as Danny Dew had pretended to be white.
“Just like riding a horse with a dildo,” Lily Kain said, shaking her head and laughing.
Major Kelly couldn't take any more of that. He turned away from them and walked to the far end of the bunker. As he passed Liverwright, he said, “You're dying.” Liverwright seemed pleased by his honesty.
Private Tooley, who was stationed at that end of the bunker, washing out scrapes and cuts which his new batch of patients had sustained, said, “If you'd heeded Kowalski's warning, you wouldn't have been under the bridge in the first place.”
“Who in the hell would ever think Kowalski knew what he was talking about?” Major Kelly asked, turning to look at the mad Pole who lay quietly in his cot, staring at nothing. “Kowalski is a zombie, a bag of shit. He can't even feed himself any more. How in the hell was I to know that this dumb bag of shit would be right?”
Private Tooley daubed some grit out of a sliced forearm, then sent the man to the front of the bunker where Lily and Nurse Pullit were dispensing antiseptics and applying bandages. He said, “I wish you wouldn't call him names like that.”
“What should I call him, then?”
“Private Kowalski,” Private Tooley said. “That's his name.”
Major Kelly shook his head. “No. That isn't the Private Kowalski that I knew. The Private Kowalski that I knew always laughed a lot. Has this bag of shit laughed recently?”
“No, but—”
“The Private Kowalski I knew liked to play cards and used to bitch a blue streak when he lost. Has this man tried to get up a poker game since he was brought here, or has he cursed you out?”
“Of course not, but—”
“Then this isn't Private Kowalski,” Major Kelly said. “This is nothing more than a bag of shit. The sooner you accept that, the better you're going to feel. A bag of shit doesn't die. You don't have to be sorry for it.”
“Next time,” Tooley said, trying to change the subject, “you better listen to him.”
“Next time, let's hope there's more to his ravings — like dates and times. What good is an oracle who can't give dates and times?”
Private Kowalski belched.
“There!” Tooley said.
“There what?”
“He's improving.”
“How so?”
“He belched.”
“The only thing a belch is an improvement over is a fart,” Major Kelly said.
“But it is an improvement.”
Major Kelly shook his head. His head felt as if it were going to fall off. He could not allow that. His headache was bad enough now. “You will never learn, Tooley. Things don't get better. They just don't. They stay the same way, or they get worse. Kowalski is a bag of crap, and he'll only get worse. If you want to hang on, accept that. Otherwise, you'll never make it.”
“I'll make it.”
Kowalski belched. Then he farted. Then he relieved himself on the clean sheets.
“A relapse,” Tooley said. “But only temporary.”
Major Kelly got out of there. He turned so fast he stumbled into Private Angelli who was no longer suffering from a bloody nose and who was now seeking treatment for his abraded shoulder. He weaved past Angelli, did not even look at Liverwright. At the front of the bunker, Lily Kain and Nurse Pullit were still giggling, so he avoided them as well. He pushed through the bunker door and collided with Sergeant Coombs.
“I was looking for you,” Coombs said. He was huffing like a bull, and his eyes were maniacally alight. It was obvious that the sergeant would have liked to add something to his statement, something like: “I was looking for you, Diarrhea Head.” However, he restrained himself.
That surprised Major Kelly, because he was not accustomed to the sergeant restraining himself. Apparently, even Coombs could be affected by disaster and the brief but fierce presence of death.
“And I was coming to find you,” the major said. “I want the men on the job fast. That wreckage has to be cleared, salvage made, and the reconstruction begun by dawn. I want you to check the men in the hospital and be sure there's no malingering; if a man's fit to work, I want him out there working. We're not going to dawdle around this time. If there is really going to be a Panzer division sent this way, I don't want them to show up and find a pile of ruins where the bridge should be. I don't want them angry, and I don't want them having to linger on this side of the gorge. Is this clear?”
“It's clear,” Sergeant Coombs said. He thought: you coward. He wanted to stand and fight the krauts for a change, even if they would be putting handguns against tanks. “Something I want to show you, first,” he said, cryptically, turning and stomping up the steps.
Major Kelly followed him topside where the fire in the brush around the bridge had not yet been fully doused and strange orange lights played on the darkness, adding an unmistakable Halloween feeling. They walked east along the river to the latrines, which had taken a direct hit from a misplaced two-hundred-pounder. Most of the structure was shredded, with the undamaged walls leaning precariously.
“Was anyone inside?” Major Kelly asked. The nausea he had experienced in the hospital bunker returned to him now.
“No,” Coombs said. “But look at this!” He led Kelly to the line of earth-moving machines which were parked in the vicinity of the outhouses.
“They don't look damaged to me,” Kelly said.
“None of the machines were touched,” Coombs said.
“Well, then?”
“But they were covered with crap,” Coombs said. He held up his big hissing Coleman lantern as if searching for an honest man. “What a cleaning-up job this is going to be. Christ!”
On closer examination, employing his olfactory sense as well as his eyes, the major saw that what appeared to be mud was not actually mud at all. It really did look like mud from a distance, great gouts of mud sprayed across the windscreens, splashed liberally on the mighty steel flanks, packed around the controls, crusted in the deep tread of the oversized tires. But it was not mud. The sergeant was right about one thing: if Major Kelly had ever seen shit, this was it.
Coombs lowered his lantern and said, “Now let's hear the bit about Aesop, about how all of this is just a fairy tale, grand in color but modest in design.”
Major Kelly said nothing.
“Well?” Coombs asked. He held the lantern higher, to give them a better view of the crap-covered vehicles. “What kind of fairy tales, I'd like to know, are full of crap?”
“All of them,” Kelly said, “I thought you understood that.”
5
The following day was the hottest they had endured since they'd been dropped behind enemy lines. The thermometer registered over ninety degrees. The sun was high, hard, and merciless, baking the earth and the men who moved upon it. The whispering trees were quiet now, lifeless, rubbery growths that threw warm shadows into the gorge and across the fringes of the camp. The river continued to flow, but it was syrupy, a flood of brown molasses surging sluggishly over rocks and between the high banks.