We had moved on to the worst of the things we had seen and the worst we had done, pulling up the dregs of our experiences and showing them to each other with a morbid sort of fascination. I let him know what I and the rest of my squad had done in a little village where we suspected the locals were on the side of the enemy. He didn’t look at me differently when I was done and I can never put into words how grateful I am for that simple fact.
He reached for his cigarettes again, and discovered the pack was empty. He reached for another beer and learned that they too were all gone. He shrugged and settled himself more comfortably in the wicker chair. “I reckon I should tell you about the Château,” he said. And in his voice I heard a dread that made even Normandy seem like a pleasant story.
I looked over at him, and saw him close those bright old eyes of his. His face looked as strained as it had when my grandmother died and when he heard about my father. I swallowed the fear I felt when I saw that look, and I nodded in the dark. “I guess maybe you should,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own.
“I wasn’t any older than you are now; might have been a year or two younger. I know I’d just barely gotten through basic training when I got over to France. It wasn’t like I’d expected at all. There were places where the war had made its mark, to be certain, but there were places where you’d have never known anyone was capable of even picking a fight. I’d seen a bit of both.”
He looked at me and his mouth smiled tightly, though his eyes stayed just as dark and stormy. “Met me a few fine women when I was over there, too. Some of them were very grateful to see a bunch of Yankees with supplies. But that ain’t what this here story’s about, is it?
“We weren’t all that far from Paris. We’d been in a few skirmishes and were lucky enough to come out of them with our hides intact. Mostly we managed to survive, but we weren’t winning very much. There were only a handful of us to begin with. Jenkins was the Sergeant, and he was the highest-ranking soldier we had left at the time. Lieutenant Price had gotten himself killed only two days before, and we were supposed to be heading back to the field command. Only problem was, we couldn’t figure out where we were trying to go. When Price died, he wasn’t alone. Billy Sinclair was on radio duty at the time and he and the radio both got themselves blown to pieces. We weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the way our week had been going, if you can catch my meaning.”
He stopped for a minute and without a word went back into the house. He came back out with more smokes but left the beer behind. “There were only five of us left: Jenkins, myself, Toby Baker, you’d have liked him, Eddie, he was a little butterball from Ohio, but he had a great laugh and he shared it a lot. After him there was Emit Springer from New York and there was one last fella, a man named Jon Crowley. Where he was from, I couldn’t begin to tell you and I hope to never find out. In the middle of this entire snafu, Crowley was the only one of us who wasn’t sweating bullets. He was as calm as a man could be, and normally about three times happier than he had any reason to be. He wasn’t even part of our squad. He was just a straggler we’d sort of adopted along the way.
“Came out of the west right after everything went sour, and started walking in the same direction as us. Crowley was just as happy as a clam to run across us, and it wasn’t long before we invited him to join in on our march. We were on the same side, and he had better food than the rest of us combined. He’d run across a nice supply of sausages and bread the day before.”
Grandpa looked me straight in the face then, his eyes lit only by the glow of the ember he cupped in his hand. “Eddie, no man before or since has ever scared the hell out of me the way he did. There was something about him that just wasn’t right. He didn’t scare me all the time, only when he looked directly at me, or talked to me… or smiled that nasty, evil grin of his. And Eddie, he smiled a lot. The worse things looked, the more he seemed to enjoy himself.
“He wasn’t right, is what I’m saying. There was something about Crowley that made me want to hide under the sheets or call for my mother.” He cleared his throat, maybe afraid I didn’t know what he meant, but I did. “Anyhow,” he continued gruffly. “There were five of us left and most of what we had on us had been almost useless. Maybe we had a hundred rounds left all told, and were as lost as we could be. Knowing that Paris was close by and getting there isn’t the same thing. We had one advantage going for us… we were the good guys in the eyes of most the locals. There were a few who maybe didn’t mind the Nazis so much, or maybe had a deal going to report anything unusual, like a small group of American soldiers, but we hadn’t run across any.
“It was only a matter of time before we could work everything out and be on our way safely. At least, that’s what we kept telling ourselves and that’s what Jenkins kept telling us too. Lord, but we wanted to believe him.
“Not long after the sun had set, we got to moving ourselves from the field where we’d spent the day. We had to move at night because the Nazis sure as hell weren’t going to ask us how we were before they started shooting. You know what I mean, I suspect.”
I nodded my agreement. There were times when maybe the Viet Cong were too tired to look for us and times when we were too tired to look for them, and then there were times when we hunted each other like hounds with a fresh blood trail to follow. Maybe it was the phase of the moon or maybe it was just a vibe you picked up after a while, but sometimes you could tell when something was going to go poorly. You could tell when the enemy was in a killing mood.
“We’d only gone a couple of miles, tops, when we heard the convoy coming. Crowley heard them first, and in the darkness, with the moon above, I could see his smile when he noticed the sounds of vehicles rumbling past. His teeth flashed like lightning and his voice was amused when he spoke. ‘I’m guessing that those aren’t the good guys, fellas. I think we might want to make ourselves scarce.’
“He was right. The trail of German trucks that came past our little hiding place by the side of the road were huge. If it was less than thirty vehicles all told, you could have fooled me. Most of us kept our heads down, but Crowley laid in that trench next to the road and watched like a kid at a parade as every one of those loaded machines swept past us. How he managed to not get spotted is something I’ve never figured out.
“When the last one was gone and the dust from their passage had settled, Crowley slid down with his back to the road and smiled from ear to ear. ‘That’s a lot of security going up the road. I wonder what they’re hiding.’ I reckoned we could do without finding out until we got reinforcements, and I know everyone else agreed with me, but Crowley lost his smile when I made that comment. I think I liked him better with the smile right then. ‘We’re lost, Finch. Don’t you figure maybe we should find out what those Jerrys are up to before it can come back to haunt us?’
“I asked him what he meant and he shook his head, a look on his face that said he felt like maybe I was a bug, and one he wouldn’t mind squashing under his foot. ‘They weren’t just trucks, old boy.’ He looked at me as he spoke and I had to look away. I figured if I’d kept staring I was likely to wet my pants. ‘All of those trucks had SS soldiers on them. They were hiding something, maybe something big.
“I hated him right then. I hated him because I knew he was serious, and I knew he was right. The Allies had just started making ground in France and, if the Nazis had something big planned, we had to let someone know as soon as possible. There were a few groans, but no real protests. We all knew what we were getting into when we volunteered for the war, but it seemed a little odd to me that Jenkins didn’t even try to take command. He just let Crowley lead the way.