Warpath

I give her some cash. “This round is on me.”

“Thank you, Richard.”

She smiles again, and that’s enough thanks for me. “If they have booze, make sure it finds its way into mine.”

“Sure.” Halfway out the door Willibald speaks up. “Molly.” She stops, turns around. He stares at her for a second, says, “I want the same thing.”

“Oh. Of course. Two spiked coffees from the hospital. Coming up.”

“Good girl,” Willibald says. Molly leaves and it is just us widowers left.

Willibald turns to me with the pace of a clock hand, ticking off the seconds of the universe with the authority of time itself. He says, “Getting your hands on someone, now there is something else we have in common.”

“Do we?”

“Yes.”

I nod and grunt. He smirks, and to my surprise he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a flask. “Something tells me this place ain’t gonna mix our coffee right.” He uncaps the flask, drinks. Hands it to me. I take a pull. Scotch. Good scotch.

“I smell gun powder on you,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Well...”

“Oh, bah,” he says, waves a dismissive hand. “Just say you’re welcome. A man my age can’t do the things he should anymore, even to my detriment. Those shitheads would have gotten clean away with it if it fell on me to avenge to my wife.”

“You’re welcome.” Quiet. I’m not used to thanks.

“That’s a hell of thing, you know. As old as I am, unable to even the score for the woman I love. I pray you never feel this weak. This helpless. Like a baby. It tears a man apart.”

“Cancer stole my wife,” I say, not wanting to think about it. “Ate her from the inside out. I do know what you mean by being helpless. In my early twenties I was that helpless. I fought in a war. I killed men. But I couldn’t kill cancer. I never will.”

“I see,” he answers, and it is good enough for me.

No conversation for a time. Then, out of the blue, he says, “Now, there’s a concept for you, all right. Getting your hands on someone.”

I turn to him. “It’s a hell of a thing.”

He never meets my eye, just looks at that wall; at that distant place he has been seeing so much of tonight. “I arrived in Europe forty-three days after Normandy fell to the Allies. I was eighteen, fresh out of basic. Eudora and I got married on furlough and I headed straight into the dragon’s mouth. She got herself a job at a war bakery; said she’d kiss every pie box that came off the line and went my way.

“Those fucking Krauts on the Eastern Front, freezing to death while they fought the Russians, they raped everything they came across. I heard their head Nazi doctor out there felt that raping young women was an acceptable morale deterrent against jacking off. Kept the homosexual desires at bay, as well. Can you believe it?

“I was eighteen, born and raised in Wyoming. Never really crossed my mind...the things evil men do. You get in war and all of a sudden whatever nightmares you had in the darkest parts of sleep become commonplace reality. You smell them. They soak into your clothes; keep you damp with their filth. They get their stink on you like mud in your boot treads. Rape as a moral deterrent. Only the fucking Nazis.”

Another man’s story about rape. Great.

“The Western Front seemed to be spared of the brunt of it, especially by comparison. But it happened. I know the French women got it. I saw a poor gal who had been beaten before they did that to her...and I grew up. Right then. Right there. Boot camp be damned. Going to war be damned as well. I matured into a harder man than the war could have otherwise made me. She wasn’t particularly attractive. Not even that thin. But she had the parts for sex, so someone forced it. I remember how she just grasped her groin and moaned like she had been set on fire for a minute and put out. Left to suffer until Death swooped in with its talons. Just never came. Not that way, anyhow. She just agonized. And I remember how, even through her black and swollen eyes, her tears fell. It was raining out, and I knew the difference between the raindrops and her sorrow.

“Someone needed to pay.”

He rubs his face the way I do: a long and drawn-out motion. A weary hand pressing hard.

“I waited. Found her in the infirmary a few days later. Did Graham ever tell you I could draw?”

“He said you made a living doing book covers, movie posters, custom work and the like.”

“Yes.” Willibald gritted his teeth. “She described the man to me. I drew him.”

He met my eyes. There, in those old windows to his old soul, I saw that thirst for revenge floating at the top. “And I found him.