SECOND
The peasants, from time immemorial, have raised a bank of earth about each field, forming a flat-topped ridge, six feet in height, with beeches, oaks and chestnut trees growing upon the summit. The ridge or mound, planted on this rise, is called a hedge, and as the long branches of the trees which grow upon it almost always project across the road, they make a great arbor overhead. The roads themselves, shut in by clay banks in this melancholy way, are not unlike the moats of fortresses.
Honoré de Balzac describing the Norman hedgerows
Coming under hostile fire causes inertia to our troops ... do not believe they are afraid, but bewildered... Prisoners of war say they can tell the direction we’re coming from and how we’re going, which indicates we’ve got to control our fire... and they say we bunch up ... we should be able to control our men better in this terrain.
Notes from a speech given by the 90th CO
to battalion commanders June 15, 1944
That goddam country.
Description by a GI of the Norman hedgerows
~ * ~
D+12
June 18
Joe Amos thrust up his hand.
‘Me, Lieutenant! Give her to me.’
He raised his hand so hard, his feet moved through the sand and Joe Amos found himself standing in front of the platoon, sixty men behind him. Joe Amos noticed a few snickers, a few huffs.
‘Me, Lieutenant.’
Lieutenant Garner gestured for Joe Amos to quit, he could have the assignment. Joe Amos turned to the platoon. He found the pudgy face he was looking for.
‘Grove, come on, man. Let’s do it.’
‘Corporal Biggs, if you don’t mind,’ the lieutenant answered, ‘I’ll make the duty roster this morning.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Dismissed, everyone.’
The platoon shuffled off. Inside a few hours, they’d be dispatched on another run. Three LSTs churned their engines in the shallows to dry their flat bottoms on the beach, then dropped their great ramps to off-load. Another wave of landing craft circled in the flattened tide inside the Mulberry artificial breakwater. Supplies and machinery teemed over the recently completed lobnitz pierheads. Out in the Channel, so many ships traipsed back and forth that Joe Amos caught only snatches of the horizon, dashes of planet between the guardian destroyers pacing and the Liberty ships and transports waiting their turn on the beach or at the pierheads. In Joe Amos’s excited nostrils, diesel stink blended with sea salt.
Lieutenant Garner called out, ‘Private Mays, you stay behind.’
While the others flowed past, a powerful-looking boy held his ground. Joe Amos first noticed him around dawn; the boy was new and Joe Amos had wondered if this was the replacement partner Major Clay had mentioned. Lean but with veined forearms and a waist that funneled up to shoulders like a mantel, Private Mays was dark-skinned. When he said, ‘Yes, sir,’ his voice was deep and strong.
‘Private, this is your new partner, Corporal Biggs.’ Lieutenant Garner waited while the two shook hands. Joe Amos was quietly relieved that Mays did not use the handshake to make an opening display of his muscles. He looked to be younger than Joe Amos, nineteen or maybe twenty.
The officer led the two of them away from the platoon’s Jimmies to a deuce-and-a-half. The truck stood loaded past any regulation, jam-packed with crates of small-arms ammo strapped high above the rails, easily beyond the five-ton limit. Joe Amos expected to hear the suspension creak just sitting there.
‘Yes,’ Joe Amos uttered. Here was his truck, the one he wanted, with the .50 caliber machine gun mounted in a ring welded behind the cab.
‘The two of you get this son of a bitch up to the town of Tamerville. Just beyond Valognes. Map’s in the cab. 79th Division is on their way to Cherbourg, and 3rd Battalion’s short on ammo. You’re taking this right up to the front line. That’s what you wanted, Joe Amos, so you got it. Just get it to them, get back, and catch up with the platoon. Go on with you.’
The lieutenant set his hands on his hips and stopped talking. Joe Amos jumped for the rail, to scamper over the crates and into the machine-gun ring.
Garner stabbed a finger at Joe Amos. ‘Biggs, get your tail behind the wheel! Damn, son.’
Joe Amos dropped off the rail. He flicked a hand at Private Mays, who’d headed for the driver’s door. ‘Go on around. I’m driving.’
Garner shooed them with the back of both hands, like sheep in the road. ‘Mays, get in there next to him and learn something. And dammit boy, Joe Amos, stay out of trouble and get back here.’
Joe Amos fired the engine. He felt the chassis groan.
‘Lieutenant?’
‘You’re still here, Corporal.’
‘When I get back, can I keep this one?’
The officer tossed his head, chuckling.
‘Sure. Now git, they’re waiting on you.’
The Jimmy wanted a lot of clutch to get rolling. The wheels crushed into the sand, the load teetered. Joe Amos needed to pay attention to heave the truck off the beach and into the draw. He expected Mays to start talking the moment they climbed into the cab but the dark private kept quiet. Joe Amos snuck a glance at him. The boy watched Joe Amos’s feet and hands working the truck, just like Garner told him to do.
The load swayed coming onto the bulldozed flats of the draw. The remains of blasted German bunkers spoiled the bluffs on either side, raw marks of the ferocious fighting through here. Private Mays didn’t look at them, he watched Joe Amos.
‘Where you from?’
Mays didn’t answer right off. The question seemed to be submitted to some authority in his head before he spoke.
‘Little town in Florida.’
Mays didn’t name the town. Joe Amos tried another question.
‘What’s your first name?’
The low voice replied, ‘McGee.’
Eyes on the road, Joe Amos screwed up his face. ‘That’s a last name. That ain’t a first name. How the hell’d you end up with that?’
Another pause preceded the answer.
‘Name of the doctor that birthed me.’
‘Well, hell. Didn’t the doctor have a first name?’
‘Yeah.’
Joe Amos shook his head. The boy didn’t appear dull-witted or anything, but getting him talking was worse than dragging this overloaded Jimmy up the hill.
‘What was it?’
‘Adolph.’
Joe Amos rammed the gear knob into second and laughed.
‘Your mama named you Adolph McGee Mays?’
‘I go by McGee.’
‘I guess you do. Shit.’
Joe Amos lugged the Jimmy up to the road and had to wait for another convoy to speed past. These trucks carried stacks of five-gallon jerricans. Every driver ignored the twenty-five-mile-an-hour limit. It didn’t matter, the roadside MPs just waved you by. Now that the invasion was equipped with the Mulberry harbor, the pulse of arriving supplies, vehicles, and soldiers had quickened. The American beachhead grew more crowded, the Krauts gave up ground like misers. The GIs were packing in. The hunger for materiel grew with their numbers, the need for replacements rose with the fighting. From the orange blinks in the night sky and the chatter and boom of guns all day long, Joe Amos got the notion that battle commanders weren’t skimping on ammo or manpower in combat. Feeding them all were the convoys, and only them, right off the beaches. The French rail system was a shambles after three months of hard bombing before D-Day by the Brits and the Americans and sabotage by the French underground. That’s why this road connecting OMAHA to UTAH teemed with traffic twenty-four hours a day, and not just Jimmies. Now there were huge tankers and five-ton tractor trucks towing massive trailers or artillery. The road began to show the wear and tear of constant contact with rubber and weight.
The convoy passed the intersection. Joe Amos gunned the Jimmy onto the paved surface and built momentum. Another column closed fast and he had to step on it to keep from slowing them down. He shifted deftly.
‘See,’ he said to McGee Mays, ‘go ahead and wind her up. Don’t baby her or she’ll stall. She won’t break.’ The Jimmy whined high into second before Joe Amos released her into third. ‘Don’t break, baby.’ Mays chuckled.
Up on the road now, accelerating in front of the Jimmy behind him, Joe Amos pronounced his own full name. He kept both hands on the wheel, which shimmied under the burden. He explained how he was named after Joseph, a son of Jacob, who got sold into slavery by his brothers and became a high official in the Egyptian government. Joseph interpreted dreams and wore a many-colored coat. Also, he was named after Amos, one of the twelve prophets of Israel, who preached about justice and the coming day of God. Amos started out as a shepherd, but once he became a prophet he really let the people have it when they strayed.
‘I like my names. A dream reader and a prophet. Gives you ... I don’t know, some juice. Like a boost or something.’
Joe Amos stalled his chatter. He was accustomed to Boogie always running the talk. It felt good to be the corporal now, the one yammering on. McGee listened hard, he watched hard. Joe Amos didn’t want to take advantage of the boy’s silence.
‘Now, a doctor, that’s good, too ...’ Joe Amos nodded. ‘McGee’s a good name.’
McGee made no answer. He watched the countryside slide by, checked out the dunes turning into hedges and trees. Joe Amos jounced behind the wheel, fixing on the road and the engine.
‘I’m gonna bring you up to speed, alright?’ If the new boy didn’t want to yak about hometowns and women, then fine. But Joe Amos intended to talk.
‘About what?’
‘About the war, damn it. See them dead tanks out there? The war.’
‘Sorry. Go ahead.’
‘Are you dumb or something?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you... Look... sorry.’
‘I ain’t dumb, Corporal. I’m a good driver. I ain’t afraid. And I can kick a man’s ass when I have to.’
‘You talkin’ to me?’
‘I reckon.’
Joe Amos laughed, lifted his hands from the wheel to make a surrender gesture.
‘Alright, then. Gimme that.’ Joe Amos laid out his hand, and McGee, hesitant, slid his palm over the offered skin.
‘Okay,’ Joe Amos said, ‘we got to get used to each other, that’s all. I had a different partner for a while, and that’s, you know, that’s the way he talked. I was just doing the same thing. My fault.’
‘Okay.’
Joe Amos took another glance at McGee Mays. The boy waited, quiet and still. This, thought Joe Amos, this is the real Negro the whites are afraid of. He’s quiet and he may be simple-hearted. He comes from some back-water town in Florida where he’s learned to still that deep voice. They taught him down there to be silent and understanding, and he agreed to be so. They’ve got him convinced of his station. Joe Amos is different, he has some college, he’ll get the rest when he returns home. They figure Joe Amos Biggs is playing the game their way, so they’ll crack the door a little bit for him. But they badly fear McGee Mays in his iron-black and quiet millions. They’re scared he might change his mind, not be so quiet. So they don’t give him a gun, they don’t give him the chance to prove he’s as good as they are at anything they do, work, think, fight. McGee Mays, not Joe Amos, frightens the bejeezus out of them.
‘How you know what’s goin’ on?’ asked McGee. He waved a hand at the terrain. The first busted town came up. ‘1 mean, man, it’s a war. Lookit this.’
‘Same way you’re gonna know,’ Joe Amos answered. He patted the dash of the Jimmy. ‘A week now, I been driving every inch of the beachhead. There ain’t one division I haven’t delivered to. Men, ammo, food, clothes, POL. Then I take back prisoners, wounded, and bodies. By now, I know this part of France better than the generals. And I know what’s going on. I’m gonna show you. You’re gonna know, too.’
‘Yeah,’ nodded McGee. This seemed to strike the boy as a challenge, and he liked it. McGee scanned the land outside the windshield, now risen and diced into the dangerous hedges and fields.
Joe Amos looked from McGee’s shifting features back to the road. His hands tightened on the wheel, not because of any bump in the pavement, but from a temblor up his torso. Like Joseph his namesake, he’d felt a jolt, a dream he’d read on McGee’s face. There’s changes ahead, he saw their coming on this boy like flights of black birds, fluttering and common, turned into clever, squawking crows. There’s change coming and it doesn’t matter who likes it. It was coming like Kingdom.
Joe Amos snagged his thoughts on a hymn, one of his mama’s favorites in their shanty Danville church. Rise up, men of God! His kingdom tarries long. Bring in the day of brotherhood, and end the night of wrong.
‘Tell me,’ said McGee.
‘Alright.’
Joe Amos shoved a thumb over his shoulder, indicating east. ‘Behind us, you got the British and Canadians trying to take Caen. That’s a big crossroads city, right on the highway to Paris. They got themselves stalemated there. Caen’s where the big breakout is supposed to be, get us the hell away from these beaches, but it don’t look like that’s gonna happen anytime soon. The Krauts ain’t giving up Caen. Over on our side we’re getting more crowded every day. So we might have to break out in our pan of France. The only place to do that is right through the hedges. And that ain’t gonna be a party.’
The Jimmy rolled with traffic through a tunnel of tree-tops. McGee, new to this place, said, ‘Damn,’ probably figuring how awful and blind it would be to fight field by field through the bocage. Every time Joe Amos drove over this land, five, six times a day, he felt the same twinge, the responsibility of hauling supplies to the men doing that fighting. White boys or not, he didn’t care what color when he saw them limping or on stretchers, wrapped in gauze or mattress covers, when he was close enough to hear the guns blaze beyond the trees and hedges and wreckage. All he wanted was to be shoulder to shoulder and see, just see, if in the smoke another soldier might not care about color, either. For now, hauling was all Joe Amos could do. He tried to content himself with being channelled through ten thousand guns instead of just one in his own hands.
‘South of here, a couple infantry divisions are working their way down to St. Lô. The 35th, the 29th, and the 2nd. They’re bad news, every one of them. Every time I head down that way I get the shit scared out of me, the way them boys are fighting. Man, I have trucked some bodies up out of there. The Krauts are dug in real good. They’re trying to keep us bottled up, probably for a counterattack. But that ain’t going to be easy for them, because our planes flat own the sky. They move in reinforcements, least during the day, we’re gonna see ‘em.’
Joe Amos pointed ahead and to the right, north.
‘Now, up here, where we’re going, we got two infantry divisions, the 79th and 4th, just starting their move up the peninsula to take Cherbourg. That’s the biggest port in Normandy. Once we get it, we can start landing supply ships there. I mean, there’s only so much that can be hauled over the beaches. And there’s probably another million more men and everything waiting over in England to get here and bust us out into open country. So Cherbourg is key.’
Joe Amos revved with his words. He missed Boogie John, sure, but this was good, driving and talking, knowing. He was the corporal now.
‘We got to keep the boys supplied, got to keep taking it to the Krauts hard as we can, day and night. And that means supplies. Ammo, gas, rations, shoelaces, medicine, what the hell ever. Supplies, man, that’s the lifeblood of war. Somebody said that. That’s what we are. Every truck we drive, every load we deliver, the boys can’t do a thing without what we bring ‘em. Got to have lifeblood. So, see, we need Cherbourg. Problem is, the Krauts know it, too. So they’re probably gonna do everything they can to keep it.’
McGee gazed out his window beyond his resting elbow, off to the northeast, building images of importance and battle.
Finally, Joe Amos cast his pointing finger west, straight ahead.
‘Those three divisions heading north for Cherbourg got their backs turned to the Krauts. So to protect the rear, and make sure the Krauts don’t slip out down the peninsula, we got the 101st and the 82nd Airbornes, and the 9th and 90th Infantries cutting off the peninsula, like a chicken neck.’
Joe Amos drew his finger beneath his chin.
‘Just last night I heard the 9th and 82nd got all the way to the ocean. So now that we got the south sealed off, the 79th and 4th can go whup some tail toward Cherbourg. The 9th’ll be heading north, too, I hear tell. That’s where we’re headed, up into that fight.’
McGee’s big eyes stretched wide. ‘Right into the fight?’
‘Damn close, lieutenant said.’
McGee pointed down at Joe Amos’s feet.
‘Then step on it.’
~ * ~
The Lieutenant Colonel dragged on his cigarette and flopped his heavy boots up on his desk. Leaning back in the chair, he crossed his ankles and blew smoke. Ben did not read relaxation in the officer’s pose, but a grim determination to take one last sip of comfort out of the chair and the tobacco before rising.
‘Okay,’ the officer breathed.
Ben said nothing, to allow the man his short idyll.
The officer dropped his boots to the floor. ‘What’d you say your name was, Chaplain?’
‘Kahn.’
‘Chaplain Kahn. I appreciate you checking in with me.’
‘I like to let the COs of every unit know when I’m around. I’m sort of an itinerant for the time being. Until Billups gives me my own battalion.’
‘Sort of a wandering Jew, huh?’
Ben let the officer laugh alone, but smiled to let the man know he wasn’t offended.
‘You want to take a Sunday walk, Chaplain?’
‘Let’s go.’
Lieutenant Colonel Trow stood and trod on his cigarette. Ben followed him through the remains of the shop to the open doorway. The door stood propped against a crumbling plaster wall, blown off its hinges when 3rd Battalion entered Gourbesville two days ago.
The officer strode into the street and headed west, Ben beside him. The town, like every contested burg so far in Normandy, had been laid waste by American artillery. Only imagination could describe it, fill in the interrupted lines of walls, and lift the colors from beneath the mortar dust and akimbo bricks.
Trow, a lean man with early-graying hair, slung his M-1 into his hands. The town was not large and they reached the outskirts quickly. Instantly, the bocage greeted them on both sides of the skinny road. The Colonel’s pace slowed, his eyes scanning the green unknown.
‘You’re looking pretty gamey, Rabbi. Where you been? Not at the aid station?’
‘I spent the last three days with the 358th, north of here.’
‘Taking an infantry tour of the Tough Ombres?’
‘You could say.’
‘Now you’re doing the 357th. How’s the division look to you so far?’
‘It was pretty quiet where I was. But so far I’d say troubled.’
‘Yeah, troubled.’ The Lieutenant Colonel tugged his ear. ‘That’s a word for it.’
Ben glanced over his shoulder to the rubble of Gourbesville. GIs shuffled between ruins. The spikes of gun barrels rose like bristles in the debris facing west. The Krauts might try to take the town back, though this was unlikely; the enemy strategy was a slow withdrawal into the hedges, to make every step forward for the doughs tortured and bloody.
‘I got here on the 16’th, just before they took it,’ Trow said. ‘I was reassigned over from the 9th when the battalion CO got waxed on the road leading in.’
Ben kept his dismay to himself. Here was one more officer in the 90th who’d been on the job only hours or days, replacing commanders killed or wounded or evacuated for shock or demoted for ineffectiveness. No wonder the division was in disarray.
Trow told his account, keeping his eyes on the bocage. The scrub thickened on the hedges the farther they walked out of town, into a warm and windless embrace.
‘The Krauts had the road pre-sighted with a battery of eighty-eights. That forced the battalion to go through these fields. But the battalion CO, he wanted the road, so he jumped in a jeep and blared right through Bloody Corner. One round took him out, and his driver, they fired that eighty-eight right down his throat. That’s not leadership, Chaplain. That’s plain stupid, getting killed like that. Then both the regimental CO and his assistant bought it, trying to get these men going. These fucking guys.’
Ben had noticed how the men, officers and foot soldiers alike, did not curb their cursing around him. Maybe they sensed that Ben Kahn had been in their boots before, scared, in another country, in a land of dying. Ben didn’t mind their language, it was sincere, and that’s what any man of God wants.
Trow pivoted south, lifting an arm to indicate the acres of fields and hedgerows. Ben squinted in the afternoon light. He raised a hand as a brim to his helmet. He touched the tape wrapped over his red cross by Allenby. In the pastures he spotted the black-rimmed gouges made by 105 mm howitzers and the smaller scoops of 81 mm heavy mortars. The fields and town had hunkered under a downpour of American shells. The town melted away and the ground was grilled. Fat lumps lay in the fields. Butchered cattle. They, thought Ben, were stupid, too, the worst thing to be in a war.
‘They ran, Chaplain.’ Trow lowered his arm. He resumed his walk west, with Ben beside him.
‘We called in the artillery pretty close, about a hundred yards off the nose of the lead company. And they must have got confused or something, thinking the rounds were incoming from the Krauts, because they up and ran. Lit out right for the rear. I saw it. Some of them dropped their weapons. And I’m thinking, What the hell is going on?’
Ben listened. He was likely a decade older than Trow and already this officer sounded like an old father, burdened like all fathers by the price their sons pay for wisdom. Ben felt the urge to tell this younger man some story about his own son, share an anecdote of loss. But Ben had nothing he could say. He did not know and might never know if his son was either brave or stupid. He couldn’t even say if the boy was alive or dead.
‘A captain ran by me, then his whole company sprinted behind him. I screamed at him to stop. That’s how it happens, when the men see their officers crap out. You put this silver on your uniform,’ Trow tapped his collar, ‘you don’t run for the rear. Ever.’
The Colonel spit in the road, cleaning his mouth from the story.
‘I notice you haven’t got a chaplain’s assistant yet, Rabbi. Can’t find anybody in the T-Os you trust?’
Ben grimaced. The Colonel’s comment was scathing. The low morale in the 90th was already leaching into this good man. Ben wanted to defend the division. Tell Trow there was not a single officer or soldier of the 90th who, entering the bocage, had ever been fired at by an enemy before he heard that first round whistle through the leaves. These men, from officer to private, were as green as the bushes, and nowhere near as mature, facing battle-tested Germans at every turn, many of them probably veterans of the Eastern Front. The doughs had reluctant leadership combined with a fearsome assignment, to hack straight into the heart of enemy positions prepared years in advance of their coming. Other divisions in the hedges had performed better, yes, but the tension is so great in combat that one small spark of hesitation can spread like a wildfire if it spreads from top to bottom like it had in the 90th.
Ben answered, ‘No, that’s not it. I figure since I’m assigned to all three regiments, I’d wait till I visited them all to pick somebody.’
But Trow had stopped listening. He bent at the waist and slowed. Beside him, Ben did likewise.
Ahead, in the ditches on both sides of the dusty road, two lines of soldiers huddled. Every man gazed down the channel of the hedges. Trow moved off the road to a ditch, too. Ben followed. The officer made his way up to the closest kneeling soldier.
‘What’s going on?’ Trow demanded.
‘I don’t know, sir. We just stopped, is all.’
‘What company are you with?’
‘Lima Company, sir.’
‘Where’s your CO?’
‘He’s up ahead somewhere.’
‘Alright. Stay put. Chaplain, let’s go figure this out.’
Trow stood to his full height out of the ditch. Men squatting on both sides of the road muttered while the officer and the chaplain walked straight down the middle. Ben noted that many of the soldiers in L Company appeared to be replacements—few wore the crinkling, impregnate anti-gas uniforms and many had yet to throw away their extra equipment. These boys were newly minted from the repple depple and marched out here into the green void. They didn’t have a clue why they were in a ditch or why they should get out of it.
Lieutenant Colonel Trow shook his head.
‘Son of a bitch, Chap, this is just what I’m talking about. I sent this Captain Valentine out here an hour ago to set up observation posts west of town. And I come out to find two hundred men lying in a goddam ditch.’
Trow walked briskly, making every buckle, strap, and weapon on his person clatter as he stalked past the immobile company. Ben lengthened his own strides to keep up and found himself jangling, too, though just with his canteen and backpack.
The head of the halted column came into view around a bend in the hedgerows. A knot of men were gathered on their knees around an object on the ground that looked like a radio. One soldier held something to his head. Trow quickened his pace.
‘What in the hell is this?’
Closing in, Ben narrowed his gaze at what the men had circled around.
It wasn’t a radio. It was a helmet.
Ben ran forward,
‘Colonel! Sniper!’
From behind, he dove at Trow’s knees. He buckled the man at the instant a bullet buzzed past, followed close by a crack out of the hedges.
Trow barely had time to get his hands out to break his fall. Down, he rolled over, Ben still clutching him about the legs. The Colonel’s unbuckled helmet spilled into the road.
Trow said nothing while he scrambled on his belly, retrieving his helmet, then rose to run folded over to the men clustered at the front of the column. Ben stayed on his belly and crawled, not as nimble as the younger Colonel. Beside his elbows digging across the dust, a ruby-patch glistened and soaked into the dirt.
Ben scurried to the ditch, some soldiers helped him to his feet. He kept close to the bordering hedge and, doubled over, jogged to the front of the line. Lieutenant Colonel Trow did not keep his voice down, he was already scorching some ears.
‘Goddammit, Captain, I don’t give a hoot! You got a sniper in these trees, you damn well find him and do something about it and get your column moving! I didn’t send you out here to set up your OP in the goddam ditch! Now, what direction did the shot come from?’
The soldiers parted and let Ben into their ring. At their center on the ground lay a lieutenant. A medic pressed a gauze pad over the downed man’s breast. Empty sulfa packets lay on the road. The lieutenant’s face was shock pale, dark eyes blinking, clouding. He licked his lips, the thirst of dying. One soldier pressed the lieutenant’s hand high to his own chest. The medic snapped red fingers on his free hand, impatient for something. Others in the circle dug in their pockets for more morphine spikes. The lieutenant gulped for air, his jaw and Adam’s apple worked like pistons, but Ben knew this wound, the sucking hole in the chest and lung.
Ben lifted his attention now to the captain, Valentine, with the Colonel’s teeth almost chewing on his ear. The young captain was white-faced, eyes in the dust under the Colonel’s harangue.
‘Get your company off this road, Captain! Spread them out across these fields, and tell ‘em to watch for mines. I want these trees up ahead glassed by every pair of binoculars you got in your company. Then I want you to start blasting away at every damn thing that don’t look like wood. You following me?’
Valentine nodded.
‘I want that sniper’s ass down and I want this company in position. You’re letting one sumbitch in a tree and one casualty hold up an entire company. You better figure it out fast, Captain, men are gonna die.’
The Colonel eased his voice.
‘Men are gonna die, son. And you can’t give up command of the rest of them because you got a man down. Now, I need you to get up and get moving.’
Captain Valentine did not bound to action. He paused, still unsure. Ben guessed the captain was no more than twenty-three. He was a man and still so much a boy. His decisions carried life and death, but no matter how much Trow needed the man in this captain to step forward, the frightened boy in him would not relinquish his hold. Thomas, also a captain, was twenty-three, he’d be twenty-five now. Ben told himself to stop this, he could not superimpose Thomas onto every scared young soldier’s face.
Trow patted Captain Valentine on the back.
‘I’ll stay with the company till we get the son of a bitch.’
Valentine looked at the Colonel, relieved. The captain glanced at a kneeling first sergeant. For the first time, Ben heard Valentine’s voice. It was heartbreakingly pristine and plainly without resolve.
‘Sergeant Moran, you’ve got first platoon for now. Let’s get the men into these fields, like the Colonel says.’
Valentine peeled out of the circle, taking four others with him. The soldier who’d held the lieutenant’s hand had to go but didn’t know where to lay the arm. Ben reached out and took the dying soldier’s grip in his. With Valentine and his men gone, the medic watched the struggling lieutenant’s face, to be sure the wounded man was not watching when he shook his head at Trow and Ben.
Trow grew solemn over the reddening bandage. He muttered, careful that the fading lieutenant didn’t hear him. ‘I don’t even know this shavetail. He couldn’t have been here more’n a couple days. This is what I’m talking about. That kid captain is shitting his pants and everybody around him is ready to do the same. Zero morale. Goddammit.’
With that, the Colonel swept away.
Ben leaned close. ‘Lieutenant, can you hear me?’
The soldier’s face shivered side to side, chilled to the bone by his seeping blood, which took his warmth with it. He nodded. Yes.
‘Mendelsohn,’ whispered the medic.
‘Lieutenant Mendelsohn,’ Ben said, ‘I’ll write your family. I’ll take care of everything.’
The young officer’s lids fluttered. He tried twice before he swallowed.
Ben felt the grip slacken. He had no time for conversation.
The medic fixed his eyes on the Ten Commandments insignia pinned at Ben’s collar and nodded. Mendelsohn was a Jew.
Ben brought his face closer above Lieutenant Mendelsohn and spoke into the man’s gaping mouth.
‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want...’
The hand in Ben’s became a weight. The lieutenant’s head stopped quivering. The gaping mouth issued a gurgle, as if a stone dropped long ago had found water. Ben completed the prayer. From under the OD T-shirt, he tugged Mendelsohn’s dog tags, with the ‘H’ stamped in the right-hand corner for ‘Hebrew.’ He unclipped one tablet, slid it into his pocket, and reconnected the necklace, tucking it in place. The medic rolled up his kit, leaving stained and emptied trash behind. Nameless, the medic jogged off to join his company dispersing in the fields. From the hedges, Colonel Trow’s urging and vulgar voice was the crow for Lieutenant Mendelsohn’s passing.
Ben reached into the dead man’s pockets, for letters and personal effects he would mail with his own letter to the family. He rested his palm across the face of Lieutenant Mendelsohn.
‘Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself, for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.’
He closed his eyes now and raised both hands, alone with Mendelsohn, who could not seek vengeance for himself. Ben would spend the night with L Company, out here on the rim of the regiment beside the young man’s body, watching, listening for the Krauts to move. He held his hands up, kept them up, did not let them fall even when his shoulders burned, until he heard several shots from the company to kill the sniper.
~ * ~
A dirty GI raised a hand. Behind a log, a machine gun swiveled Joe Amos’s way.
Joe Amos slowed for the checkpoint. The brakes squealed to stop the overloaded truck. Gonna need new brake pads, he thought. Running two weeks and already falling apart. That’s because we’re running non-stop.
A corporal sauntered up to the cab window. The man’s cheeks bore streaks of grime. He stank.
‘Ammo?’ he asked.
‘You 3rd Battalion 79th ?’
‘Let’s go, man. I got hungry babies to feed.’
The corporal shouldered his carbine. He moved to the side of the Jimmy, hoisted one boot on the double rear wheels, and catapulted over the rail to the top of the crates. In his rear window, Joe Amos watched the soldier’s boots drop inside the ring of the .50 caliber machine gun.
‘Naw, man,’ Joe Amos grumbled. ‘Damn, what’s he... ? That’s my machine gun.’
The filthy corporal checked the ammo belt, charged the gun’s chamber, and clouted on the canvas roof of the cab twice, pop pop!
‘Hit the road, buddy! Straight ahead. I’ll tell you when to turn.’
Joe Amos spun a griping and scrunched face to McGee. The dark boy grinned and said nothing.
‘White boys messing with my stuff,’ Joe Amos muttered, and slid into first gear.
The Jimmy passed quickly into the town of Valognes. The Krauts hadn’t put up much of a fight here, the streets were not strewn with the shards of buildings like most of the places Joe Amos rolled through.
‘See this,’ he said to McGee. ‘This is a bad sign. The Krauts didn’t make any kind of stand here.’
‘Why’s that bad?’
‘Shows they’re pulling back into Cherbourg. Hitler does crazy shit like that. Picks a spot and tells everybody no one leaves alive. Calls ‘em “fortresses.” He did that last year at Stalingrad, and look what happened. Place got blown to smithereens. A million Russians and Krauts got killed.’
McGee looked quizzical. ‘How you know all this?’
Joe Amos didn’t want to say, Because I went to college and I studied and now in war I listen and learn. What a man knows is what he is. Joe Amos held his tongue because he did not want to draw a dividing line between himself and McGee, the student and the strong-back Negro. Joe Amos came to war for every black man, so he shrugged, as if to say, I just do.
McGee asked another question. Despite the boy’s earlier remark that he was not afraid to be here, McGee appeared fidgety the more Joe Amos drove through the town, headed to the front line.
‘How come them soldiers back there didn’t check us for paperwork or nothin’? I mean, couldn’t we be infiltrators or somethin’?’
Joe Amos chortled. ‘Come on, man. The Germans don’t have no colored boys driving for them.’
McGee didn’t laugh. Joe Amos had guessed right, the boy was nervous. Joe Amos kept talking. ‘Besides, we don’t even have paperwork. Shoot, writin’ things down was the first thing COM Z stopped. Too much supplies got to get moving too fast to worry about paperwork. We get a load, we get told where to go, we fire up and go. Bang, baby, we get it on.’
Joe Amos put some pizzazz in his voice, to rile McGee past his worries. He held out a flat palm, waiting for McGee to slap it with spirit.
‘Hey, brother, we’re in the shit now. This is where we want to be. Give it to me!’
Reluctant, McGee spanked Joe Amos’s hand.
The road out of town narrowed as the Norman roads always did, a tar stitch between hedges. Branches and twigs reached into the lane, scraping the cab and rails. Clearly, the Germans had prevented the local folk from trimming these hedges, knowing at some point the Allies would come this way. The corporal knocked on the roof again. The canvas bulged down at Joe Amos’s head.
‘Turn right, up ahead. See that dirt road?’
Joe Amos guided the Jimmy off the road and down the lane. The earth was rutted from zero maintenance and recent tank tracks. From high in the cab, Joe Amos began to. see in the fields the trail of American soldiers, their litter, and a few German bodies.
‘Another couple hundred yards,’ the corporal bellowed, rapping again on the roof. This was aggravating; the corporal stood not only behind the gun Joe Amos coveted, but his constant rattling on the roof implied that Joe Amos wasn’t paying attention.
Before he could shout out his window some curse at the corporal to stop banging, sounds of automatic fire slashed from the fields and bocage ahead. The corporal swiveled the machine gun. Answering gunfire burst out of the bushes, coming from the corporal’s unit dug into the bocage. Joe Amos saw no muzzle flashes or smoke. He pushed forward as fast as he could without tipping the track over in the washboard ruts. This was the first time he’d driven this deep into the hedgerows. It was blind, all noise and green.
‘I can’t see shit,’ he said without looking at McGee. ‘Man, how can they fight in here? You can’t see a damn thing.’
Another smack landed on the roof. The corporal ordered a left turn at a dirt crossing. Joe Amos negotiated the bend and wheeled the Jimmy down an even narrower lane another hundred yards, when the corporal pounded one more time.
‘Right here! Stop!’
Joe Amos hit the brakes. Before the truck quit rolling, the corporal had tossed the first crate down to a soldier who appeared out of nowhere. In moments, a dozen men leaped out of the hedges wearing on their helmets cut branches stuck into webbing, all looking like the soldiers of a forest god. In a fireman’s brigade, they tossed and hefted ammo boxes away into their hidden and erupting battleground. No one called Joe Amos or McGee down to help. Joe Amos made no move to leave the cab. McGee was out the passenger door before Joe Amos could react.
Strong McGee moved to the tailgate below another soldier who’d climbed up to pitch down crates. In his mirror, Joe Amos watched the boy catch the boxes, maybe fifty pounds each, like pillows and swing them to reaching hands. Joe Amos did not open his door, he climbed out his window, set his foot on the Jimmy’s outside mirror, and clambered up and over into the machine-gun ring. Up here, with his hands on the handles, a finger scratching the trigger, he heard the fighting.
A hundred yards away, an assault raged. Joe Amos gazed into the thickness of the hedges and saw none of it, the leaves stopped everything but shouts and gunsmoke. He even heard German screamed above the tumult. His nostrils widened at the cordite stink and his hands tightened on the handles of the machine gun. If he caught sight of an enemy through the branches, he knew he would empty the whole ammo canister. McGee, a little breathless, called up to him, ‘Lookin’ good, Corporal.’
Edgy and alert in his perch, Joe Amos guarded the truck from an enemy he could not spot. The soldiers stripped the Jimmy’s load in two minutes and carted the crates away into the brush without thanks. When the last box was gone, so were the soldiers. Joe Amos and McGee were left alone in the shade with the battle swelling behind the curtain of the bocage. Mortars coughed somewhere off to Joe Amos’s right, the shells lobbed and landed to his left, the explosions sounded close. McGee stood mesmerized, looking up, and Joe Amos gazed down at him. The two stared while they listened, and imagined the combat on the other side of the hedge.
McGee awoke first.
‘We’re gettin’ the hell outa here!’
McGee leaped into the driver’s seat and flung the Jimmy into reverse. Joe Amos jarred his ribs against the machine gun. The Jimmy’s engine wound high as McGee charged backward down the lane to reach the crossing where there was room to turn around. Joe Amos had to pull his hands from the grips and hold on to the steel ring while McGee raced for the crossing, then cut sharp, shifted forward to first, and headed back the way they’d come. McGee had the truck in third gear and flying in no time, bouncing along the uneven dirt road. The truck almost danced with McGee at the wheel. The boy could surely drive scared.
Joe Amos stayed tall behind the machine gun all the way to Valognes and through the town. He set his hands to the handles and left them there, so the soldiers milling around could see him with the .50 cal in his brown mitts. McGee drove the Jimmy like a scalded cat past the city limits and only slowed when he came up tight against another convoy heading east on the two-lane main road.
With the Jimmy in line and moving slower, Joe Amos leaned to shout into McGee’s driver-side window.
‘Damn, what you think of that? That’s the closest I been to the fighting.’
McGee raised a fist out of the window. Joe Amos made a fist, too, and they knocked knuckles. McGee shouted, ‘Whoooo-ee!’
‘Man,’ Joe Amos said to himself. He wanted to squeeze the trigger, let off a burst. If they weren’t in line with fifty-other trucks, he would have, just to shuck the bark off a tree.
Another loaded convoy approached from the opposite direction. Too many trucks to count rode in echelon behind the lead jeep; the tail of the convoy was lost behind the trees. Joe Amos knew the makeup of a load just by looking at the way it was stacked and the type of cartons or boxes or crates in the beds. The first Jimmy whirred by, and Joe Amos thought, Lubricants. The boxes were cardboard, but the truck squatted low on its axles, the boxes were heavy. The second and third trucks whizzed past carrying the same, then in the fourth Joe Amos didn’t need to guess; once it was past he saw the bed full of artillery rounds, the pointy shell caps arranged neatly in stacked rows, they looked like a fat bed of nails. Then the fifth truck rolled by, another load of lube. This deuce-and-a-half, like Joe Amos’s new truck, had a machine gun welded to the cab. No one manned it.
Joe Amos pivoted his head time and again, watching the long convoy, enjoying the whizzing voom! each passing truck made. The column looked to be over two miles long. Riding in the empty bed, standing behind his gun, he had a fresh view of the power of the convoys, the immensity of the materiel they moved. Just minutes after being so close to the fighting in the hedgerows, he understood better than ever how those boys back there were fighting with the ammunition he put in their hands. He tingled with pride at the job he was doing. Black hands and pink palms humming by raised from the convoy to him, standing behind his machine gun. He waved back.
A new sound rushed at his ears. It was not the burr of truck engines and straining transmissions, not tires grubbing the road. This noise was leaner, an angered yowl that in the first moment he heard it pitched to a higher keen. Joe Amos saw it then: dark wings like a knife-cut in the blue just above the tree line, rushing at the convoy from behind. The wings of the Messerschmitt sparked, left and right of the cowling, blinking brighter than the sun. Geysers of canvas and chips of metal flipped off trucks in the opposite lane; three Jimmies dissolved under the fighter’s cannons. A truck careened off the road, spouting flames. Others pulled to the shoulder. The drivers flung open their doors to bolt for the cover of the hedges. By the time the Kraut fighter made its first pass, the convoy was snarled in the road, some of it burning.
Joe Amos stood in the rolling truck bed and watched. The fantastic event of war had happened so fast, with screeching and bursts, trucks and men in disarray all over the road, flames spewing jets of smoke, he hadn’t even thought of aiming his machine gun and pulling the trigger. He was stunned by how quickly the plane came and went, at how much damage lay sown in its wake. Joe Amos hadn’t even noticed that McGee had stopped the Jimmy, but now he saw that all the trucks on both sides of the road were halted, over a mile of Jimmies and tractors in a dead straight line, a shooting gallery for the Messerschmitt. Most of the drivers had dived in the bushes, the rest were shouting and heading for the ditches and roots. Joe Amos scanned the havoc, wishing he’d fired his gun, damning himself for freezing. A single sound dominated the day. Joe Amos whirled behind him. The lone Kraut fighter wailed, banking steeply, returning.
Joe Amos pounded on the canvas roof.
‘He’s comin’ back!’
McGee shouted from the cab, ‘What you want me to do?’
Joe Amos pressed the machine-gun grips. He bent at the knees to tilt the barrel up and revolved to press his backside against the cab. Dipping his head behind the sight, he moved the barrel at the swinging, silhouetted Jabo.
‘Get out!’ he yelled.
McGee wasted no time flinging open the driver’s door and sprinting for the hedges. Joe Amos did not take his eyes from the leveling, coming Kraut. He heard McGee cussing while he ran.
Joe Amos glanced down the lines of immobile trucks. The convoy was a sitting duck. But, looking closer, he saw every fifth Jimmy, the ones with the .50 caliber machine guns, had a black man standing in the truck bed, two fists on the grips, pointing their barrels at the Kraut dropping altitude and zooming in flat and hard. Joe Amos puffed his cheeks, blew out, and aimed his gun at the German.
Someone in the convoy shouted, ‘Get ready!’
Another called, ‘Here he comes, y’all!’
The Messerschmitt pilot dared every one of these men. He made no evading moves but evened his wings low over the road and roared in, flaring blue and yellow fire out of his nose and twin hanging cannons. A quarter mile ahead, Joe Amos saw gouts of road and metal chucked into the air as the first trucks in line were shredded. Drivers on both sides of the road opened up now, machine guns squalled across the whole column. The Kraut matched his speed and firepower to the convoy’s weapons, he headed straight down the line to keep his profile small, just cockpit and flashing wings.
Joe Amos waited seconds to let the Kraut close in. He got a bead on him and held it, refining his aim, sure he had the fighter between the eyes, and let loose. The machine gun kicked, harder than he was ready for. The barrel wavered away from his true aim. Without releasing the trigger, flailing rounds into the air, Joe Amos tugged the barrel back toward the Messerschmitt’s path. The engine roar ballooned and now Joe Amos heard the yapping of the plane’s own machine guns and cannons. The noise was like a rain of steel pots falling, clanging all around him, bang, bang, bang! Joe Amos went blind to everything but steel and sound and metal splinters and the pressure he put on the trigger and the machine gun pointed into the storm, flinching and clutching, firing and screaming until the fighter was past with a roar. A wash of oily wind kissed Joe Amos goodbye, did not kill him, left him standing in a truck riddled with holes.
~ * ~
‘Vous rentrez à la maison?’
White Dog stood naked at the open window. A breeze licked across his bare privates; he was done and limp, contemplative in the afternoon heat. The chiffon curtain hoisted on both sides of him, framed him, and fell.
White Dog did not turn from the window to face the bed.
‘No. I won’t be going home. I’ll go to Africa.’
She shifted on the mattress, making a noise and a fuss. White Dog could tell she was fluffing pillows to sit against the wall, to talk. He kept his back to her, facing the street six stories below.
No one looked up at his white nude frame filling the window. The afternoon was hot, and Parisians did not notice an undressed fat man in an apartment building high above the sidewalks.
‘L’Afrique? Why not go home to America? You are a hero, no? You were a pilot. You were shot down. Now you have come to Paris to work with the Resistance.’
White Dog chuckled. The French, he thought. They can rationalize anything.
‘I don’t think Uncle Sam’s going to agree with you on that one, mon cher.’
‘Ah, merde. Come, Chien Blanc. Sit with me.’
He heard her pat the bed. She patted harder when he did not turn.
‘Come.’
White Dog pivoted from the window, sighing over to the edge of the mattress. He sat. The cheap springs tilted the whole bed. He scooted more to the center. She made room for him, taking some of the pillows and arranging them for him along the wall.
‘Chien Blanc. Perhaps after so long in Paris, you still do not understand what you are doing for the French people. Le marché noir is...what is it in English, salut?’
‘Salvation.’
‘Oui, salvation for the French. Thousands of men and women are fugitives from the Gestapo. They are Resistance, they are Jews, they are soldiers who are hiding. They have no identification papiers, no ration cards. How will they eat if not from the hands of the black market, eh? How will they survive the Occupation? The black market, it is resistance against the Boche because it is to live, eh?’
She waved an arm too thin for peacetime, only during war would a woman this beautiful be so starved. The spars of her ribs, where they came together at her sternum, showed pale ridges between her breasts. Her blond hair, which should have been golden and strawberry, had only the wan luster of poor nutrition and rare shampoo.
‘And me? The rest of us? What do I do with this, eh?’ She rolled over to the bedside table, grabbed her purse, and stabbed a lean hand into the mouth of it. She yanked out a tangle of francs and held it up like a magician disappointed with the skinny hare she’d pulled from a hat.
‘I wipe my derrière with these! I cannot buy from the regular stores anything! The prices, you have seen them. They are skyrockets! The Boche have stolen all for themselves. In four years they have picked France clean as a bone. Shortages, shortages, I cannot buy vegetables, butter, beef, more than a hundred francs. Eggs, bread, pff! I must be a queen to have a breakfast if I buy from the Vichy stores.’
She stuck the wad of bills under White Dog’s nose.
‘But I bring these to you, Chien Blanc. Then I can eat. Then I can thumb my nose at the Boche and their Vichy ânes and I can live until your Americans throw them out on their ears. Bastards.’
She stuffed the bills back into the depths of her handbag.
‘The black market is patriotique. Yes, you steal, but you steal from the Boche. You sell to the people. You sell to the Resistance. So you put the money in your pocket, what do I care? Bon, better you than the Boche. You are a hero, Chien Blanc. I will tell the Americans that.’
White Dog lifted a knee and scratched between his legs. He knew he did not cut much of a heroic figure anymore. He gazed across the room, out the bright window. He imagined himself a hero. He’d throw up his arms to greet the first American tank. Hey, buddy buddy, where you been, you finally got here! I been here the whole stinkin’ time, hidin’ out. I’m a pilot, got shot down and stayed behind to work with the Resistance, making sure they got everything they needed. Helpin’ the French people out. Oh, this? This gigantic stack of francs and Deutsch-marks? Yeah, I’ll be takin’ these home with me. Can I get a lift? Here’s some cigarettes.
Nope. I’m heading to Africa.
A year and a half in the shadows was enough. He was tired of shadows, no matter that he was making a-score in the black market. There was nothing to spend it on here, no cars, no steaks, no luxury, just cigarettes, booze, women, and jazz.
His days in Paris were numbered. The GIs had landed in Normandy. Adolf wasn’t going to stop them. White Dog looked forward to the Liberation, the chaos and opportunity of it.
Then Morocco, he thought. That’s for me. Or Algiers. Sunlight, warm stucco, palm trees. Just hang on a little longer, until Uncle Sam gets here. A few months after that, a few lucky breaks, then I’m hightailing it.
White Dog let the bubble of home burst. America was not an option, it would have no open arms for him, just a court-martial as a deserter and a criminal—a prison cell and shame. It was better if he stayed dead, a crashed hero to America and a rich bwana to some Africans.
He let his eyes range beyond the window, between the lilting curtains, searching for something else, Paris’s mood. Below the sill, the city rustled. Every automobile sound was a German staff car. Who else had fuel to drive, or papers to go anywhere if they could afford the gas? Paris had been jumpy for almost two weeks, since the Allied invasion. Everyone could sense the Yanks and Brits closing in, even though the armies were still bottled up in Normandy. Not for long. White Dog knew from the beginning that Germany couldn’t hold the Allies back. He’d planned for it. It’s why he decided to stay.
But Paris was more than the Krauts. Streaming just below the surface, jockeying for position, were the French Forces of the Interior—the fifis—and the Commies, the Maquis, the mob gangs, the folks with vendettas, collaborators biting their nails, Vichy on the brink of collapse, more black marketeers, and again the Krauts. The Krauts were crowding at the back door, ready to make a break. The two questions on everyone’s mind were: First, would Hitler’s famous and terrible habit for defending conquered ground turn Paris into a battlefield? Second, would the Krauts take off instead without a fight, and blow the City of Light to bits on their way out?
White Dog didn’t care. He was positioned to win on every count. At the moment his trade was brisker than ever. The Reds, the fifis, the regular Parisiens, all of them swarmed to the black market before the big event, the Liberation, stockpiling everything they could afford. You name it and White Dog’s network was swiping it and selling it, sometimes even back to the Krauts themselves. Guns and ammo, food, spare parts, batteries, real coffee, booze, tires—his crews jacked it all from train cars, warehouses, depots, Vichy shops. Whether the Germans fought for the city or they just blew it up and took a powder for the Rhine, White Dog would make a pile just as he said he would. He’d focus his operation on gasoline. A martyred Paris or a spared Paris, either would be a good market. This wasn’t his city and these weren’t his people, just a means to an end. He’d be lounging in Africa three months after the shooting stopped.
He leaned to kiss the girl on the shoulder. He pressed his lips to bone-stretched skin.
‘Cher.’
‘Ce qui?’
‘You know the Americans are coming. Yes? You know things are going to be different.’
‘Yes, of course. We all wait for them. It will be wonderful. No?’
‘For some. Maybe not for others.’
She scooted away from him on the mattress, to face him square.
‘What do you say?’
White Dog tried to lap his hand over hers but she yanked her fingers from beneath. Instead, he rubbed his chin.
‘I’m saying, in the liberated towns up in Normandy there’s already an épuration sauvage.’
‘A purge? Why do I care if there is a purge? What have I done?’
‘I don’t know, I’m just sayin’. So’s you know. I heard that in St. Saveur le Vicomte, as soon as the GIs took over, a bunch of women got their heads shaved for collaboration horizontale.’
She laughed. ‘That is a funny way to put it, Chien Blanc.’
‘I’m not being funny, cher. Those women got off easy. In other towns, they’re stripped and painted with tar swastikas. I hear a few have been kicked to death. What do you think is going to happen when the Allies hit Paris? I just want you to be careful, that’s all. Stay out of the way.’
She sat bolt upright, indignant.
‘I have not laid a finger on the Boche. No one can say this!’
‘I don’t care, okay? Just, you know, just be careful. It’s gonna hit everybody.’
‘Oui, it is. And good!’ she said, smacking the mattress. ‘The Pétainists, the intellectuals, the fashionable people, writers, actors, maître d’s, all those lâches who lined up on the side of the Germans, looking out for themselves. Pfff! Yes, the épuration sauvage is coming, and I will be in the front line of it. Watch me. I pray for the day.’
White Dog raised his hands in defeat and let the topic go. He’d stepped on a nerve. But he’d spoken plainly; he didn’t care. He made money, regardless of how things turned out. He bought hijacked goods, then sold them to anyone with francs or marks. That wasn’t going to stop because Paris teetered on the verge of a revenge spree. Everyone with a grudge or a suspicion was going to grab scissors, paint, even guns, and take to the streets. The Communists in particular were going to draw blood, since Vichy made a practice of selecting Commie hostages for execution. The Reds, the Maquis, the righteous folk, they’re going to remind the collaborators of their own sacrifices while they’re shaving heads, smashing windows, testifying at show trials, and emptying their gullets of every pent-up hatred four years of jackboots had stomped into them.
White Dog was positioned perfectly. In the shadows at the heart of it all, waiting, planning, he’d worked every angle. The Germans knew he was an American, he’d been betrayed a dozen times over. But the Gestapo never stepped in to stop him because, quietly, he’d made himself invaluable, trading goods, services, and most importantly, information. The Krauts rewarded him with tolerance of his presence, some business, and they’d taken Acier off his hands for a fair price. Besides, the French black market played into the Krauts’ hands: It demoralized the citizens, enflamed disgust with Vichy. The French were kept hungry, desperate, and pliable, eating from the black market trough. The marché noir fed them just enough and made them hate themselves for it, even as they groveled in the shadows.
And the Yanks? Who’s kidding who here? The Americans weren’t going to stop him. They were going to join him. Who would be greedier than a poor, dumb GI his first time in Par-ee?
White Dog had made all the right moves so far, timed everything to a tee.
‘I’m going.’
‘Back to Montparnasse?’
‘Got to keep moving, cher. It’s what I do.’
He slipped off the mattress to take his voluminous trousers off the back of a chair. He stepped into them, leaving the braces dangling, and searched for his socks.
‘Chien Blanc?’
He found his socks and sat on the bed again to slide them on.
‘Qui?’
‘Why do you dress like a zazou?’
These were the children of the well-to-do, the young ones who showed their contempt for collaborationist Vichy by wearing zoot-suit clothes and indulging their love for all things Americain, like jazz and dancing -banned by Vichy—and ‘potluck parties.’ Because of the German curfew, zazou parties usually went all night.
‘Do you miss America, cher? Is that why?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Chien Blanc?’
‘What, mon cher?’
‘Are we cowards? Les Français?’
White Dog drove his arms into his starched white shirt and tugged his braces over his shoulders.
‘Are the French cowards? No, cher, you are not. Why do you want to ask me that?’
‘Because,’ she said, gathering the sheet over her own nakedness now that he was dressing, ‘when the Americans come, will they think we did not fight the Boche?’
White Dog found the packet of sugar in his deep coat pocket. He set it on the bedside table.
‘No, cher, they won’t think that at all.’
He stood beside the bed, buttoning his shirt,
‘Lookit, you got your asses kicked by the Krauts, no question. But it wasn’t a fair fight. It’s taking the Americans, Great Britain, Canada, the Soviet Union, ail of ‘em together to beat the Krauts. You never stood a chance. That’s not cowardice, doll. That’s reality.’
He patted her dull hair and turned the doorknob.
White Dog could have left her more francs. But he closed the door, leaving her only the sugar. The cash in his pocket, White Dog’s own salvation—his reality—went with him.
~ * ~