“That tannic-acid treatment they give ’em?” Donofrio asked.
“That’s right,” O’Doull said. “Tans their hide, scars it fast so they don’t weep fluid out through the burns. They get better results with it than with anything they used to do.”
“Tans their hide…” Donofrio shuddered. “Must hurt like hell while the poor guy’s going through it.”
“I bet it does, yeah,” O’Doull said. “But if you’ve got burns like that, you already hurt like hell. You heard this guy before you knocked him out. How many syrettes of morphine did you say he had in him, Eddie?”
“Three,” the medic answered. “I hear these guys with the burns, a lot of ’em turn into junkies ’cause they need so much dope to get ’em through it while it’s bad.”
“I’ve heard the same thing,” Donofrio said.
“Yeah, so have I,” O’Doull said. “You can’t blame ’em, though. If they didn’t have the drugs, a lot of them would kill themselves. There just isn’t pain much worse than a bad burn.”
He methodically went on debriding flesh that would never heal. The smell made him hungry and nauseous at the same time. That was one more reason to hate burns. “What happened to the rest of the barrel crew?” he asked.
“Don’t know for sure,” Eddie said. “All I know is, he’s the only one we brought back. Maybe the other guys all got out and didn’t get hurt. Here’s hoping.”
“Here’s hoping,” O’Doull agreed. His eyes met Sergeant Donofrio’s over their masks. They both shook their heads. Much more likely that the other four men in the crew never made it out at all. Much more likely that they burned to death. What kind of memories were now dimmed inside this fellow’s head? Would he hear his buddies’ shrieks for the rest of his life? Too bad there’s no morphine for the soul, O’Doull thought.
The burned soldier was still mercifully unconscious when the corpsmen took him off for more treatment farther back of the line. O’Doull shed his mask. So did Vince Donofrio. “That was a tough one,” Donofrio said.
“Burns are about as bad as it gets,” O’Doull agreed. “I’m going outside for a cigarette. You want one?”
“After a case like that? What I want is a good, stiff drink. I guess a butt’ll have to do.” Donofrio was another one who didn’t drink when he might have to deal with patients soon. O’Doull approved, though he wouldn’t have said anything as long as the medic didn’t show up smashed.
He pulled out a pack of Raleighs, gave one to Donofrio, and lit another for himself. After the first drag, he said, “Getting away from the smell in there is good, too.”
“Bet your ass,” Donofrio said. “That’s another thing smoke is good for.” He inhaled, held it, and then blew out a blue-gray cloud. Even after that, he made a face. “You know what it reminded me of? Like there’s spare ribs in the oven and the telephone rings, you know, and it’s the gal’s sister, and she gets to yakking and doesn’t look at the clock till she smells stuff burning-and then it’s too damn late.”
“That sounds about right,” O’Doull said. “I wonder why they call them spare ribs. I bet the pig didn’t think so.”
Donofrio laughed. “Good one, Doc! I bet I steal it.”
“You better not,” O’Doull said, so seriously that the medic looked surprised. He went on, “You’ll cut into my royalties if you do.”
“Royalties?” Donofrio snorted. “You want royalties, go to Mexico or France or England.”
“Sure, tell an Irishman to go to England for the king,” O’Doull said. “You know how to win friends, don’t you?”
“In a poker game, right?” Donofrio could be even loopier than Granny McDougald.
“Poker game.” O’Doull shook his head. He couldn’t get the wounded barrelman out of his thoughts. “That poor son of a bitch sure had the cards stacked against him.”
“Yeah.” The medic scowled, too. “One good thing-his face came through pretty good. He won’t have to go through life like that guy in the book-The Phantom of the Catacombs, that’s what the name of it was. You ever see the movie they made from it? Scared the crap outa me when I was a kid.”
“I was grown up by then, but I know what you mean,” O’Doull said. “They ought to do a talking version now. They have for a lot of the old silents, but not that one-not yet, anyway.”
“Who do you suppose they’d get to play the Phantom?” Donofrio asked. “You could put anybody in one of the other parts, but the Phantom? Everybody who saw the movie would be comparing him to Lon Chaney.”
“Not everybody,” O’Doull said. “The silent version’s more than twenty years old now. Most people younger than you never saw it. They would have stopped showing it as soon as talking came along. When was the last time you saw a silent movie?”
“Been a while,” Donofrio admitted after a little thought. “You don’t even worry or wonder about crap like that, but it disappears when you aren’t looking. Like Kaiser Bill mustaches, you know? Now it’s just a few stubborn old farts who wear ’em, but my old man sure had one in the last war. Everybody did. Hell, I think even my mother did.”
O’Doull laughed. “You said it-I didn’t.”
“My mother’s a nice lady,” Donofrio said. “She heard me going on about her like that, she wouldn’t beat me up…much.”
A green-gray truck pulled up. “You guys get ready to take your aid station forward,” the driver said. “Front’s moving up again. You’re too far behind the line.”
He sounded as if he came from Kansas or Nebraska. All the same, O’Doull said, “I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. Give me the password.” Confederates in Yankee clothing remained a nuisance. O’Doull hoped U.S. soldiers with drawls were also making the enemy sweat.
“Oh-Sequoyah!” The truck driver couldn’t sing worth a damn, but that was the opening for a hot new Broadway show, and the day’s password. He pointed at O’Doull. “Now give me the countersign, or I’ll figure you’re one of Featherston’s fuckers in disguise.”
Fair was fair. “Away we go!” O’Doull said dutifully. The driver nodded. O’Doull turned to Donofrio. “Time to pack up and leave our home sweet home.”
“Leave, my ass-we take it with us,” Donofrio said, and then, with a shrug, “What the hell? It’s not like we never did it before.”
“I’d rather go forward than back,” O’Doull said, and the medic nodded.
As Donofrio said, they’d had practice knocking down the aid station. And it was designed to fit inside the rear compartment of a deuce-and-a-half. Military engineering extended to things besides rifles and barrels. Making aid stations go into the trucks that had to move them fit the bill, and the people who’d put things together knew what they were doing. Even the operating table folded up for a smooth fit.
“Let’s roll,” the driver said.
Roll they did, down past Dalton, Georgia, toward Resaca. O’Doull and Donofrio rode in the cab with the driver; Eddie and the other corpsmen who gathered casualties stayed in the back of the truck. Several bodies hung in the Dalton town square. HE SHOT AT SOLDIERS, said the placard tied around the neck of one of them. The others bore similarly cheery messages.
“They love us down here,” Donofrio said, eyeing the bodies.
“Who gives a damn if they love us?” the driver said. “Long as they know they better not screw with us, that’s all that counts.”
Oderint dum metuant. An ancient Roman playwright had put that into three words. Let them hate as long as they fear. English was a less compact language than Latin. O’Doull didn’t suppose he could expect a truck driver to match a poet’s concision.
War’s wreckage littered the landscape: burnt-out barrels from both sides, crashed airplanes, smashed houses and barns, hastily dug graves with helmet-topped rifles taking the place of headstones. O’Doull nodded to himself. The aid station had got too far behind the front. Smelling death again reminded him what war was like.