Michael heard the jeep coming up through the darkness outside. The windows were covered with blankets to show no light, and a blanket hung over the doorway. The door swung open and Noah came in slowly, followed by Berenson. The blanket flickered in the light of the electric lantern, blowing in the raw gust of night air.
Noah closed the door behind him. He leaned wearily against the wall. Green looked up at him.
"Well?" Green asked gently. "Did you see him, Noah?"
"I saw him." Noah's voice was exhausted and hoarse.
"Where was he?"
"At the field hospital."
"Are they going to move him back?" Green asked.
"No, Sir," Noah said. "They're not going to move him back."
Berenson clattered over to one corner of the room and got out a K ration from his pack. He ripped open the cardboard noisily, and tore the paper around the biscuits. He ate loudly, his teeth making a crackling sound on the hard biscuit.
"Is he still alive?" Green spoke softly and hesitantly.
"Yes, Sir," said Noah, "he's still alive."
Green sighed, seeing that Noah did not wish to speak further.
"OK," he said. "Take it easy. I'll send you and Whitacre over to the second platoon tomorrow morning. Get a good night's rest."
"Thank you, Sir," said Noah. "Thanks for the use of the jeep."
"Yeah," said Green. He bent over a report he was working on.
Noah looked dazedly around the room. Suddenly he went to the door and walked out. Michael stood up. Noah hadn't even looked at him since his return. Michael followed Noah out into the raw night. He sensed rather than saw Noah, leaning against the farmhouse wall, his clothes rustling a little in the gusts of wind.
"Noah…"
"Yes?" The voice told nothing. Even, exhausted, emotionless.
"Michael…"
They stood in silence, staring at the bright, distant flicker on the horizon, where the guns were busy, like the night shift in a factory.
"He looked all right," Noah said finally, in a whisper. "At least his face was all right. And somebody had shaved him this morning, he'd asked for a shave. He got hit in the back. The doctor warned me he was liable to act queer, but when he saw me, he recognized me. He smiled. He cried… He cried once before, you know, when I got hurt…"
"I know," Michael said. "You told me."
"He asked me all sorts of questions. How they treated me in the hospital, if they give you any convalescent leave, whether I'd been to Paris, if I had any new pictures of my kid. I showed him the picture of the kid that I got from Hope a month ago, the one on the lawn, and he said it was a fine-looking kid, it didn't look like me at all. He said he'd heard from his mother. It was all arranged for that house back in his town, forty dollars a month. And his mother knew where she could get a refrigerator second-hand… He could only move his head. He was paralysed completely from the shoulders down."
They stood in silence, watching the flicker of the guns, listening to the uneven rumble carried fitfully by the gusty November wind.
"I've had two friends in my whole life," Noah said. "Two real friends. A man called Roger Cannon, he used to sing a song, "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But honey, are you makin' any money? That's all I want to know…'" Noah moved slowly in the cold mud, rubbing against the wall with a small scraping sound. "He got killed in the Philippines. My other friend was Johnny Burnecker. A lot of people have dozens of friends. They make them easy and they hold on to them. Not me. It's my fault and I realize it. I don't have a hell of a lot to offer…"
There was a bright flash in the distance and a fire sprang up, surprising and troubling in the blacked-out countryside, where people on your own side would fire at you if you struck a match after dark because it exposed your position to the enemy.
"I sat there, holding Johnny Burnecker's hand," Noah's voice went on evenly. "Then, after about fifteen minutes he began to look at me very queerly. 'Get out of here,' he said, 'I'm not going to let you murder me.' I tried to quiet him, but he kept yelling that I'd been sent to murder him, that I'd stayed away while he was healthy and could take care of himself, but now that he was paralysed I was going to choke him when nobody was looking. He said he knew all about me, he'd kept his eye on me from the beginning, and I'd deserted him when he needed me, and now I was going to kill him. He yelled that I had a knife on me. And the other wounded began to yell too, and I couldn't get him quiet. Finally, a doctor came and made me leave. As I went out of the tent, I could hear Johnny Burnecker yelling for them not to let me come near him with my knife." For a moment, Noah's voice stopped. Michael kept his eyes on the distant flare of the German farm going up in flames. Vaguely he thought of the feather beds, the table linen, the crockery, the photograph albums, the copy of Mein Kampf, the kitchen tables, the beer steins, being brightly eaten away there in the darkness.
"The doctor was very nice," Noah's voice took up in the darkness. "He was a pretty old man from Tucson. He'd been a specialist in tuberculosis before the war, he told me. He told me what was the matter with Johnny, and for me not to take what Johnny said to heart. Johnny's spine had been broken by the shell, and his nervous system had degenerated, the doctor said, and there was nothing to be done for him. The nervous system had degenerated," Noah said, horribly fascinated by the word, "and it would get worse and worse until he died. Paranoia, the doctor said, from a normal boy to an advanced case of paranoia in one day. Delusions of grandeur, the doctor said, and manias of persecution. It might take him another three days to die, the doctor said, and he would finally be completely crazy… That's why they weren't even bothering to send him back to a general hospital. Before I left, I looked in the tent again. I thought maybe he would be having a quiet period. The doctor said that was still possible. But when he saw me, he began to yell I was trying to kill him again…"
Michael and Noah stood side by side, leaning against the flaking, damp, cold stone wall of the CP, behind which Captain Green was worrying about trench-foot. In the distance, the fire was growing brighter, as it took hold more strongly on the timbers and contents of the German farmer's home.
"I told you about the feeling Johnny Burnecker had about us," said Noah. "How if we stayed together nothing would happen to us…"
"Yes," said Michael.
"We went through so much together," said Noah. "We were cut off, you know, and we got through, and we weren't hurt when the LCI we were on was hit on D-Day…"
"Yes," said Michael.
"If I hadn't been so slow," Noah said, "if I'd got up here one day earlier, Johnny Burnecker would have come out of this war alive."
"Don't be silly," Michael said sharply, feeling: Now this is too much of a burden for this boy to carry.
"I'm not silly," Noah said calmly. "I didn't act quickly enough. I took my time. I hung around that replacement depot five days. I was lazy, I just hung around."
"Noah, don't talk like that!"
"And we took too long on the trip up," Noah continued, disregarding Michael. "We stopped at night, and we wasted a whole afternoon on that chicken dinner that General arranged for us. I let Johnny Burnecker die for a chicken dinner."