The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“Well, we can take our choices, and it’s a finger any way you look at it,” the sergeant said. He had a knitted sweater tied around his ears under his helmet, and two fingers of his left hand had started to swell with frostbite. “We can sit on our ass here and shoot everything we got on one gook, and in the meantime we’re going to get left, because those other fuckers aren’t going to wait on us, and we ain’t going to have nothing except a frozen pecker to stick out of this hole when they send their patrols through here tonight.”

There was no answer, but each of us was thinking of that hundred yards of wind-polished snow that at least four of us would have to cross before we would be beyond the angle of the machine gunner behind the slit in the bunker.

“OK, it’s Paret, Simpson, and Belcher,” the sergeant said. “Paret, you stay on my ass. We’re going around behind him and blow that iron door open. What you got left in the Browning, Roth?”

“A half clip and four in the bag.”

“Put it in his face until we get all the way across the field.”

The BAR man started firing, and we went over the top of the ditch in a run, our shoulders crouched, our boots like lead weights in the snow. The two other men headed toward the left side of the bunker, their breath laboring out in a fog before them. I followed hard on the sergeant, as though I were trying to run in a dream, and then the sun broke through the overcast and turned the snowfield into a brilliant white mirror. Our tracks looked sculptured, like a dark violation of the field’s whiteness.

The snow became deeper and softer, and the sergeant and I pushed for that safe imaginary angle beyond the range of a machine gun’s swivel. Then the slit burst open with flame, and I saw the bullets clip in a straight pattern toward me in the snow. For a moment I saw the sergeant’s face turn and stare at me over his shoulder, as though he had been disturbed in an angry mood. I fell forward on my elbows, my boots still locked in their deep sculptured depressions, and heard the snow hiss and spit around me.

The whiteness of the snow ached like a flame inside my eyelids.

Where are you hit?

I don’t know.

Jesus Christ, his back is coming off.

Get up over the rise and tell them to wait. Shoot out their tires if you have to.

They better have plasma. Look at the snow.

I felt the nurse rub salve with a piece of cotton over my back and pull the gauze back into place. The rain broke on the win-dowsill in dimples of light, and I could see the dark green of the elms and maples waving in front of the old brick buildings across the street. I raised up on my elbows and felt the skin burn on my back. The plaster cast on my forearm was like a thick, obscene weight.

“Don’t turn over. You have some pretty bad blisters there,” a man’s voice said.

Buddy’s father was bent forward in a leather chair at the foot of the bed, his square, callused hands folded between his legs. His gold watch chain glinted against his faded Levi’s, and his wide forehead looked pale in the room’s half-light. His gray eyes were staring straight into mine.

“They put you under before they set your arm. The doctor said it might hang on a while after you woke up.”

My arms and bare chest were damp against the sheet, and I wiped my face with the pillow. The pressure sent a sudden touch of pain along my eyebrow and the bridge of my nose. I heard him pull his chair to the side of the bed.

“They really did a job on us,” I said.

He nodded with his eyes squinted, and I saw that he was looking over my face rather than at me. I propped myself on one elbow and softly touched the hard row of stitches under the strip of gauze bandage on my eyebrow. There were flecks of dried blood on my fingertips. When I moved, my back burned as though it had been scalded.

“How’s Buddy?”

“He’s asleep in the next room.”

“His head hit the glass when we went over in the ditch. Then they really hit him,” I said.

“He’ll be all right. He was awake earlier and we talked, and then he wanted to sleep for a while.”

“How bad is he?”

“He has a concussion, and they put twenty stitches in his forehead.”

Outside, the rain was dripping from

the trees, and I could hear someone punting a football in a front yard.

“I tried to stop it,” I said. “I got one of them with the tire iron, but they had already broken my arm.”

He rubbed his coarse palms over his knuckles and looked momentarily at the floor, then at me. There was a thin part line in his graying brown hair, and his eyelids blinked as though he were keeping some idea down inside himself.