Docker and Trankic studied their line of march, which curved in an easterly direction from Namur toward Germany. The towns of Werbomont, Manhay, Vielsalm were behind them now. They had passed through them at night, the houses and shops blacked out, trucks and guns noisy in the narrow streets and windswept squares, with Larkin at the wheel of the jeep and Docker beside him plotting the course on a grid map braced against his knees.
Bastogne, the site of VIII Corps headquarters, was also behind them, but south by twenty or thirty miles. They looked at the names of villages on the Salm and Amblève Rivers — Stoumont, Foix and Lepont — and in other directions — Spa and Malmédy and St. Vith and Stavelot.
They studied the contour of the terrain, the bridges and roads, the mountains and valleys where the other guns of the 269th were posted in a thin north-south line through this sector of the Ardennes.
“I can read maps all right,” Trankic said, and looked at Docker, “but I ain’t any good at reading minds, Bull. So you better tell me about it.”
“We’ve traveled about sixty miles the last few days,” Docker said. “On the same line as the battery, according to our maps and orders. But if there was an error in parallax of only two or three degrees between the section and the battery at the IP, the error would be compounded fifty times by now. That’s one thing. The second is that you haven’t picked up any German units on the radio for the last thirty-six hours.”
“So now we don’t know where the battery is, and don’t know what’s in front of us. That about it. Bull?”
“That’s about it,” Docker said.
Trankic nodded again and uncapped his canteen. “You want a drink?”
“Sure.”
Docker held the canteen in his gloved hand and took a swallow from it. The whiskey was ice cold and stained his lips blue-black but he was grateful for the swift and powerful heat it churned up in his stomach.
The whiskey came from Normandy, from the invasion area designated Utah Beach in France where the 269th had landed on the third week after D-Day. Utah was north of the other American invasion beach, which was code-named Omaha, and still farther north of the British beaches, which were coded Gold and Juno and Sword. Utah was divided into two sections, Tare Green and Uncle Red, and Dog Battery’s guns had been on Beach Red with units of the 4th and 79th infantry divisions.
In the shatteringly noisy chaos of those landings and regroupings, with beachmasters shouting commands through bullhorns and 40- and 90-millimeter cannons pounding the skies at strafing Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts, Trankic had spotted and appropriated eleven five-gallon jerry cans of ethyl alcohol which (they’d decided later) had probably been ticketed for the engineers or medics.
Trankic, who had been a sandhog and bootlegger in Chicago before the war, had distilled the alcohol to get rid of contaminants, and then stirred oak chips in the mixture to absorb its fusel oils. After adding color and sweetness with sugar charred in a mess kit to the shade of tawny molasses, Trankic had at last triumphantly evolved a “whiskey” that tasted no better or worse than a cheap, blended bar bourbon. The only flaw in his eventual product (and everyone agreed it was a minor one) was that on interaction with metal canteens and cups the whiskey turned glossy and dark, as rich and glowing as black satin. It was known throughout the battalion as Trankic’s “Old Black Jolt” and it had an effect so intense that it seemed to explode like a series of linked grenades from the back of the throat to the top and bottom of the skeletal system.
As Docker studied the map and felt the winds becoming warmer on his numbing lips, he realized in some curious warping of time that those tumultuous hours on Utah Beach seemed more distant to him than Sicily, where he had been hit, and Africa, where the Big Red One had been blooded for the first time, and battle flags of American units had been ground into the sands in the scorched files of the Kasserine Pass.
He remembered that someone had been firing at them on Utah in France, they didn’t know who, they saw only the explosions of dust and shale in the ground beside their trucks, holes appearing magically as if made by some invisible sewing machine, and that Trankic was shouting, “Hold it, for Christ’s sake, these goddamn cans are full of alcohol...” And Larkin at the wheel of the truck had yelled at him, “If you’re trying to be the first immortal, go fuck yourself...” But Trankic, his face smudged with smoke and wet with sweat, had stood fast in that noise and chaos and had thrown can after can of the alcohol up to Shorty Kohler and Tex Farrel, scrambling onto the tailgate himself only a split second before Larkin floored the accelerator...
Trankic took a drink now of his black liquor, wiped a black blur from his lips, put the canteen in the canvas pouch hooked to his cartridge belt and said, “So now I know what you’re worried about. But there’s something else. We got a couple of guys in the section, Dormund and Gelnick, who’d be just as much good to us if they were back in the States peeling potatoes. And five to six kids who’d do fine if there was somebody ’round to change their diapers.”
“So don’t worry about Schmitzer pounding on Spinelli. It might help toilet train him.”
Dormund came sloshing awkwardly through the snow. “Sarge, I got the biscuits hotting up on the engine block, but the guys are gonna get on me anyway ’cause I got trouble with the pump-stove and it’s gonna take a long time to cut firewood.”
“Where the hell is Gelnick?” Docker said, ignoring him. “Did he go down the hill with the other guys?”
“He didn’t go with nobody. He’s in the truck in his fart sack with a lot of blankets on top of him.”
“Goddamn him.” Docker replaced his helmet and walked through the snow to the trucks.
Dormund looked anxiously at Trankic. “I didn’t mean to get him in trouble.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Sarge won’t send Gelnick back to the CP, will he?”
“He’ll probably scare the shit out of him, but he won’t transfer him back there.”
“You sure he won’t?”
“Shit, I just told you. Maybe I should have fixed you a head out of a tin can after all.” Trankic rapped Dormund’s helmet with his knuckles. “That one of yours got some holes in it.”
“Come on, you’re joking with me. It’s just a wretched joke, okay, Trankic?”
Dormund had come on the word “wretched” in England. A girl in a pub had smiled pleasantly at him one night and called him a “wretched drunkard” and since then he had been addicted to the word.
“Sure, sure,” Trankic said. “Now get a fire going.”
Corporal Larkin sat perched on a cold tree stump in the valley below Section Eight’s temporary gun position. He was reading a Rex Stout paperback and thinking, as he looked up to check around, that he liked Archie Goodwin better than Nero Wolfe. Not that he had anything against the fat detective and his beer and flowers, but Goodwin had the run of the city and that’s what Larkin liked best, reading about neighborhoods he’d grown up in and worked in. Even the Village which was full of queers was all right. The upper Bronx was better and Yankee Stadium, where everybody said DiMag would be the first guy to hit a ball out. Ruth and Gehrig never did, and DiMag hadn’t either, not yet anyway. But it was the bars on Third Avenue near where he lived that he liked best, all those Irish names with basements where they had steak rackets every month, all the steak you could eat and all the beer you could drink for three dollars, and fights by young brawlers trying to make it to St. Nick’s or the Garden. And battle royals, the kind his uncles had the hots for...
Private Irving Gruber, who somehow managed to remain overweight on GI field rations and was usually called Tubby, carefully packed a large snowball and lobbed it at Carmine Spinelli as he stood urinating with thoughtful precision into a rotted hole in the trunk of a tree. The snowball struck Spinelli just above the collar of his jacket, soaking and splattering his head and neck and shoulders. Wheeling around, his piss cutting a ginger arc in the white snow, he looked resentfully at Gruber.