‘Floyd’s bad,’ George shouted.
Sergeant Carlson ordered them forwards. Ray had to get past Floyd who looked across at him with wild eyes. His head was jerking. ‘Please,’ he said.
Ray shot into the oncoming fire. Another grenade was thrown which disappeared down into the enemy hole and sent up handfuls of rock and gravel and maybe some human stuff. Afterwards, a strange sight — hands rising up out of the ground. Small and simple human hands wavered at the tops of arms, empty.
‘They’re surrendering,’ Ray said it to himself then shouted, his voice hoarse and cracking. ‘They’re surrendering!’
Sergeant Carlson shouted, ‘Stay careful! We don’t know. I’m … Randall!’
Randall was up on his feet walking towards the hands that were persisting in the air. He walked until he was standing over them. ‘They are!’ he shouted back. ‘Fuckers are just giving up.’
The others, all but Floyd, ran forward to see. There were four Germans standing in a cleft in the rock with three dead bodies at their feet. There must have been more of them to start with but in a part of the trench hit by a grenade it was hard to work out from the remains.
‘What do we do, sarge?’
Ray stared down at the shaven head of one of them, at the fingerprint pattern of growth visible in the little sparks of hair. The German looked back up at Ray. The whites of his eyes were red. There was a gum of white spit in the corners of his mouth that jerked as he babbled in German. Ray’s bayonet was swinging in front of them. One little stab.
A shot. Then another. Randall was shooting them, point-blank shots bursting down into them. He shot the one at Ray’s feet then Carlson grabbed Randall round the arms and fell with him to the ground. ‘For God’s sake, Randall.’
The last living German was shaking, dancing on the spot, his hands at either side of his head, fingers paralysed into claws. He was trying to lift his feet out of the wetness around him.
‘Ray, watch Randall,’ Carlson said. ‘No fucking choice now.’
Sergeant Carlson stepped forward and shot the last one.
From behind them George called out, ‘Floyd’s dead.’
5
What was he remembering? He had the picture in his mind but couldn’t locate it — paint running in a gutter, white paint very clean against the pasted greys of the street. Ray could only have been four or five. It was Mitchell’s. That was it. The storefront was being painted. Men were washing out the cans and emptying them into the drains. A smooth clean chemical smell. Looking up, a man in overalls smiling. Ray’s brain relaxed with pleasure as the memory came back whole. They were running past a burned-out fighter plane that had crashed onto its face, its tail in the air. Wosniak had been replaced now by a boy they called Red. Floyd had been replaced also: a boy called Alex who insisted on his own name. They called him Alice instead.
Almost there, almost into the colourful upheaval of the mountains. This might be it, the last day. They kept moving under Carlson’s command, his hair now white from the sun. Aircraft, their aircraft, growled overhead on raids. They saw men, prisoners, sitting on the ground with their hands in the air, weaponless, unburdened and exempt. Bodies they kept running past. Some were blackened and swollen, bursting their skin, others neat on a dry stain of red blood. Sometimes their clothes had been blown off and they were randomly naked from the waist down or across the back. Ray was still alive which didn’t make sense. Several times Stukas had spilled down towards them and let out their bombs and the earth had jumped, towering upward for a second, roaring. Men died all around him and he was fine. Once he felt himself inflating, growing larger and larger, filling the deadly space around him and still nothing, no bullet or bomb or shrapnel pierced him.
Such were his thoughts now, big and weird. His mind no longer raced as it had at first. Instead single images, memories, kept catching as in a malfunctioning projector, the actors slowing down nonsensically and stopping, the images blistering and burning through as his mind gave way to exhaustion.
And it was over. The tanks were leaguered. All the surviving soldiers were together. They dropped down to sleep on the ground without pitching tents. They woke up to find themselves in an actual place with facilities being built and a town nearby. Here they’d be rested, refreshed, let loose for a night before the next push.
6
After a shave, Ray’s cheeks felt numb and glassy under his fingertips. After a shower, blasted clean, he felt very small and bare. He looked down at his unhurt body, his white stomach shrunken hard around cubes of muscle, his meekly hanging genitals, his long thighs and bony feet. The only signs of war on him were a few notches in the skin of his hands and arms and the fact that he was slimmer, more sinewy, healthier. He dried himself fiercely, scrubbing at his surface with the thin army towel and dressed for town.
Soldiers in clean uniforms were everywhere. The streets thronged with them, their voices caught and echoing between stone walls. There were so many of them, all loudly alive. Ray looked around at them and saw repetition, like a natural phenomenon with lots of the same thing coming at once, like birds or rain. Around him George, Coyne and Randall were wearing the same uniforms, were talking in the same way, smiling and gesturing. It was a good thing to get lost in. It was safe. A prod in his back startled him. Beside him a small boy stood with cupped palms saying, ‘Joe, Joe, you have cigarette for me?’
‘Sure. Why not?’ Ray tapped one out of his pack and handed it over.
The boy took the gift without thanks and pocketed it, absorbing it quickly into his possession the way the ground absorbs water. ‘Joe, you want fuck?’
‘Not now, kid. Scram.’
‘Hey, you made a friend,’ George said.
‘Not really, I haven’t.’
‘Hey, mister, you want fuck?’
‘Now, son …’ George began and Randall interrupted.
‘Tell him we’ll see his sister later. Right now we want drink.’
The boy circled around them as they walked until Coyne shoved him with his boot. After that he moved on to another group ahead of them, catching the hand of a Negro soldier and examining it.
It seemed there was a bar ahead but already it was too full with a great still crowd formed around it. They couldn’t get close so turned to try another direction. On the top of a wall, looking down at him, Ray noticed a cat. Its large eyes catching the sun were lit a startling green. Its striped velvet face, with wide whiskers and pink fastidious nose, rested just above its forepaws. It shifted as they strode past, holding Ray’s gaze, its shoulder blades undulating under its loose skin. Just a cat living its cat’s life in silence, half out of sight, doing its thing. Ray felt his throat tighten against the threat of tears.
‘Here’s a place,’ Coyne announced.
Excepting one occasion as a child when he and his brother had got sick on their father’s grappa, Ray had never really drunk. A little red wine at weddings and that was that. But tonight he would drink as a man and as a soldier, battle-hardened and deserving.
With the first glass they toasted victory, then Wosniak and Floyd, and after that to dispel the quickly enclosing gloom George offered ‘Wild nights!’ The wine was cool with a pleasant innocuous fruit flavour. Ray knocked it back as he would any other drink to quench the thirst he now noticed he had. As the wine washed through him, he felt a fibrous stiffness in his face and scalp start to loosen. The tension in his body drifted outside of him as he drank, surrounding him, buzzing pleasantly. Later glasses of wine tasted less and less wholesome, growing acrid with the residue each one left in his throat and the many cigarettes Ray smoked.