“Hello!”
Diana almost jumped out of her skin. There stood Betsy, holding Stan. And there beside them was her husband, Buster Neft. He had a limp worse than Ed’s: he’d come back from the South Pacific a year and a half before with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He’d been an outstanding high-school tackle before the war. He’d talked about playing college ball, but a shellburst made damn sure he wouldn’t. Now he worked at Delco-Remy, too. Close to half of Anderson did.
Betsy went on, “We knocked at the front door, but nobody came. Bus heard you guys talking back here, so we came around and….” She ran down when she noticed her folks weren’t responding the way she’d expected them to.
Her husband saw the telegram still in Ed’s hand. “What happened?” he asked sharply. When Ed didn’t answer, Buster came up and took the wire. He didn’t need to hold it away from himself to read it. “Oh, no!” he said, and threw his free hand in the air in anguish. “God damn those motherfucking sons of bitches to hell!”
Part of Diana thought those were the words she’d been looking for herself but couldn’t find. Part thought they didn’t go nearly far enough.
“What is it?” Betsy snatched the telegram away from Buster. “Pat!” she wailed, and let out a shriek that set the baby howling. Buster took him. Betsy ran to her mother and father. They clung together.
That shriek brought neighbors out to see who was murdering whom, and why. They converged on the McGraws’ house. Several of them had lost somebody in their family, or at least had somebody hurt. They knew what the McGraws were going through because they’d done it. And the ones who hadn’t-the lucky ones-all knew people who had. How could you not?
Somebody-Diana forgot who-pressed a cold tumbler into her hands and said, “Drink this up.” She did, thinking it was 7-Up. It turned out to be gin and tonic, and almost went down the wrong pipe. But she felt a little better with it inside her. It built a thin wall between her and everything else. She could still see through the wall, and hear through it, too. She could even reach over it and feel what was there. But the bit of distance the gin gave was welcome.
“Such a crying shame,” a neighbor said. She was crying; it made her mascara run. “Pat was a good boy.”
Everybody nodded. “If you didn’t like Pat, you didn’t like people,” another neighbor said. “I don’t know a soul who didn’t.” Everyone nodded again.
“Such a…waste.” With women all around him, Buster swallowed some of what he might have said. “I mean, when I got hit, we were fighting the Japs. I knew why I was on that beach-to make the slant-eyed so-and-so’s say uncle. But to get killed on occupation duty? That’s a joke, or it would be if it was funny. What the heck are we wasting our time-wasting our people-over there for now that the…darn war’s done?”
“That’s what I said when I showed Ed the wire,” Diana exclaimed. “That’s just exactly what I said. Isn’t it, Ed?” She blinked-she was talking very loud and very fast. The gin must have hit her harder than she thought.
“You sure did, honey.” Ed had a glass in his hand. Where did that come from? Diana had no idea. Not surprising, not when she didn’t know who’d given her that welcome gin.
“I wonder how many people all over the country are going through the same thing for no reason,” Betsy said. Her mascara was all over her face, too. Most of the women’s was.
“Too many,” Diana said. “One would be too many. One is too many.” Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed. Yes, she could feel what was there.
“It’s a lot more than one,” Buster said. “All these loonies with bombs strapped on…But I don’t know how many. I wonder if anybody outside the War Department does. Papers sure don’t talk about it. You just pay attention to them and the radio, everything’s fine over there.”
“And that’s not right, either,” Ed said. His face was redder than the sun should have made it. Whoever’d handed him that drink had fixed him a doozie. Well, why not? Wagging his index finger in the air, he went on, “I can see why we didn’t talk so much about casualties while the war was still cooking. Hitler and Tojo’d find out stuff they didn’t need to know? But now? What makes a difference now?”
“Brass hats don’t want folks back here to find out how bad they snafu’d things over there,” Buster said wisely.
Ed nodded, vigorously enough to make the flesh of his double chin shake. So did most of the men gathered there: the ones who’d served in either war, Diana realized. She only blinked again, in confusion. “Snafu’d?” She wasn’t sure she’d even heard it right.
“It’s short for ‘situation normal-all, uh, fouled up,’” her son-in-law explained. Even at a time like that, Ed managed a grin and a grunted chuckle. Diana wondered why. Then she saw it could also be short for something else. She blamed the drink for slowing her wits. She wasn’t about to blame herself-no, indeed.
“We ought to know the truth about what’s going in,” she said. “Isn’t that what we fought the darn war for?” The news about Pat had horrified Ed into swearing in front of her. She couldn’t imagine a calamity that would make her swear in front of the neighbors.
“You’re right,” Betsy said. She took Stan back from Buster.
The baby was eight months old. He had two teeth. He could say “dada” but not “mama” yet, which irked Betsy. He smiled whenever anybody smiled at him or whenever he just felt like smiling. Why not? He had no idea what was going on, the lucky little guy.
Betsy’s face crumpled. “He’ll never get to know his Uncle Pat now,” she said-almost the same thought as Diana’s. Betsy started crying again. Stan stared at her. He could cry whenever he felt like it, too-could and did. He wasn’t used to seeing Mommy do the same thing.
A neighbor touched Diana on the arm. “If there’s anything we can do over the next few days, sweetheart, you sing out, you hear? Anything at all, and don’t be shy,” she said. “If we don’t help each other, who’s gonna?”
“Thanks, Louise. God bless you.” That made Diana think of something else. She still could think straight if she worked at it. “Ed! We’ve got to call Father Gallagher.”
“We sure do.” He shook his head, which made his jowls wobble some more. “So much to take care off. And for what? For a waste, a big dumb waste.”
“That’s what it is, all right. Nothing else but. And nobody should have to die on account of a big, stupid waste,” Diana said. “Not Pat, and not nobody-uh, anybody-else, either. It’s wrong, don’t you see? It’s wrong.” More nods said her neighbors thought so, too.
V
If Lou Weissberg hadn’t known what he was looking for, he never would have found it. Even knowing, he almost walked right past the forest bunker. Sergeant Benton saved him, pointing and saying, “Reckon that’s it, sir.”
“Is it?” Lou turned back-and got a raindrop in the eye. Mud squelched under his boots. It was a miserable day to go poking through the woods. But he finally saw the join between the regular forest floor and artfully camouflaged dug-up ground. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He gestured to the squad of GIs who’d come with them. “Okay, guys-we’re here. Spread out and form your perimeter.”
“Right.” The corporal in charge of them sounded no happier to be futzing around in the middle of the Bavarian woods than Lou was. Nobody’d asked his opinion, though, and nobody was likely to. “Take your positions,” he told his men. “And for Chrissake watch out for trip wires unless you want your balls blown off.”
Thus encouraged, the soldiers moved out around the bunker. Half of them carried M-1s, the others grease guns. If they had to, they could put a lot of lead in the air. Nobody touched off a Bouncing Betty, for which Lou thanked the God in Whom he’d had more and more trouble believing since he found out about Dachau and Belsen and the murder camps farther east.