“Really, Dan, there isn't—”
“Shit,” Danny Dew said. “You're smirking behind that frown. You think you'll make me let down my defenses— and then you'll laugh at me. I know you sadists. Come on, now. Everyone laughs. No one's ever sympathetic.”
“Nothing to be sympathetic about,” Kelly said. “You have ordinary—”
“There!” Dew said, pointing and grinning. “That's better! Laugh. Go on, don't worry, laugh your head off. That's the way!”
Kelly looked around the blanket-walled room. Only the two of them were there, and neither of them was laughing. “I'm not laughing,” he said.
“That's it!” Danny went on. He slapped the table, grinning and nodding his head. “Laugh it up. I told you they were funny!”
“But—”
“Well, now, try to be decent about it,” Danny Dew said, no longer grinning. “You don't have to laugh that hard. You'll make yourself sick if you keep it up, for Christ' sake. Now, stop it!”
“Who's laughing?” Kelly wanted to know. He wasn't laughing at all.
“Stop it, you bastard!” Danny said. “Come on, Kelly!” He put his balls away and zipped his fly, stepped back against the blanket. “I'm going to leave if you don't stop. You ought to be ashamed. Do you laugh at cripples and blind men?” He lifted the blanket flap. “You get hold of yourself. I'll expect an apology.” He left.
To the empty room, Kelly said, “But I wasn't laughing, Danny.”
It was a shame, the major thought later, that Danny Dew — who could think himself into being anyone else in the world — could not pretend himself another set of balls if he thought his own were funny. Not even Danny Dew, who could become a white man at will, not even Danny could escape everything.
So thanks to Danny Dew, the bridge was completed at two o'clock in the morning, twenty-six hours after the unit set to work on it. The last of the men staggered out of the ravine like the dead returning from hell. They had worked a sweltering day and a muggy night, and they could hardly see where they were going. Most of them trudged back to the main bunker, but no one wanted to sleep underground. They fell down in the grass and looked at each other and mumbled about the heat and fell asleep. A few men could not sleep, at first. They had been driven to the limits of their endurance, and they had come around the bend of exhaustion to a sort of manic insomnia. But in an hour, lulled by the snores of their fellows, they too slept.
A score of men went to the rec room where there was ice for cold drinks that Maurice supplied. Privates Hoskins and Malzberg were trying to start a poker game in the rec room, even though they were almost too tired to shuffle the cards. The men slumped on the benches and floor and looked at Hoskins and Malzberg as if they were insane. Actually, they were.
Hoskins sat at a scarred table talking to the men. “You worked hard,” he told them. “You deserve a little fun, an interesting game.”
Malzberg, the tallest in the unit, stood in the middle of the room and spread his arms despairingly. “We're doomed anyway,” he said, in a rumbling voice full of the sadness of ages. “We've no chance. We're all dead men. We can't afford to throw away our last precious hours of life in sleep.”
By the time he'd finished, all the men in the room had fallen asleep.
“Blackjack?” Hoskins asked.
Malzberg sat down, dwarfing the table. “Deal,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later, even they were asleep.
6
“Kelly, wake up.”
The major snorted, blinked, opened his eyes and looked directly into Private Tooley's flashlight. “Turn that thing off!”
Tooley turned it off, blinding both of them. They were only inches away from each other, but it was like being sealed up in two separate cans side by side on a grocery shelf. Talking from his can, the pacifist said, “I have something to tell you.”
Kelly sat up on his cot, felt the canvas shift under him and the spindly frame twist with his weight. He smacked his lips. “What time is it?”
“Four in the morning.”
“What morning?” Kelly asked.
“I know you just got to sleep,” Tooley said. “So did I. But this is important. Kowalski just sat up in bed and warned me about another raid. He was shouting so loud he woke me.”
Kelly tried to think who Kowalski was, but he couldn't get his mind functioning. The room was too hot. His undershorts were pasted to him with sweat, and even the cot canvas was damp and slippery. “Another air attack?”
“Yes, sir,” Tooley said. “His exact words were: 'Rising sun, bombs in the trees, bridge kaput.' “ Tooley shifted as his haunches stiffened, wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Did you hear me, sir?”
Major Kelly remembered who Kowalski was. He said, “Tooley, the Germans haven't had time to learn that the bridge is back up. And if they're judging by our past record, they won't come around again for a couple of days. No informer in this unit could have passed the word to the krauts in so short a time.”
“Sir—”
Kelly kept his eyes closed, trying not to wake up any more than he had to. Besides, he was afraid that if he opened his eyes again, Tooley would flick on the flashlight and shatter his corneas. “Don't pay any attention to a bag of shit like Kowalski. Look, the rising sun is the symbol of Japan, not Germany. I don't think the Japs could have diverted a bomber to the middle of Europe just to attack our little bridge, eh? Not likely, eh? Eh? Look, Tooley, what you do, you go back to the hospital and go to sleep. And if Kowalski starts blabbing again, you smother him with a pillow.”
“But Major Kelly, I—”
“That's an order,” Kelly said.
He listened as, reluctantly, Tooley got up and lifted the blanket and went away. Then he lay there, trying to imagine that the heat was not heat at all, but a snug blanket draped across him and that he was twelve and back home and sleeping in his attic room and that it was winter and snow was falling and his blanket kept him warm, very warm, against the cold… In a few minutes, he fell asleep as the frogs and crickets, cavorting in the snow, croaked and chirruped secret messages all the way around the world to Germany.
In the morning as dawn lined the horizons, after the frogs had gone to bed and the crickets had been silenced by the growing dew, in the first orange rays of the elevating sun, Major Kelly was awakened by the shrieking approach of a bomber. A big one. Coming in low.
Kelly leaped out of bed, wearing only his damp shorts and an expression of admirably controlled terror in the face of a familiar intolerable persecution. He grabbed his service revolver from the top of the pasteboard trunk and plunged through the khaki-colored Army blanket and out the door of the HQ building.
The day was far too bright, even at dawn. The sunlight put a flat glare across the mist that lay over the camp and made the French countryside seem like a stage setting under the brutal beams of a score of huge kliegs. He raised an arm to shield his eyes, and he saw the plane. It was a B-17, highlighted by the new sun. It swooped over the camp, straight for the bridge.
“One of ours!” Slade shouted. He had stumbled out of the HQ building in the major's wake and now stood at his left side. He was, as usual, a vocal repeater of visual events.
“Why didn't I listen to Kowalski?” Kelly asked.
Slade gave him a curious look.
The B-17 let go at the bridge with two bombs that slid straight for the span's deck like Indian arrows for cavalry targets. All of this was out of place, unfitted to the peaceful morning, the slightly chilled air, and the sun like an open oven door in a country kitchen. Still, as the big plane turned up on the other side of the gorge, the bridge leaped up in a spray of steel, wood, cable, and concrete. A flash of light made the day seem less bright by comparison, and the roar of the explosion brought the sky falling down. The twisted beams, miraculous in flight, glittered prettily and fell back in a chiming heap. The flash of the explosion gave way to smoke which rolled out of the gorge and devoured the edge of the camp.