"Shut up!" Michael shouted thickly. He grabbed Noah and shook him hard. "Shut up! You're talking like a maniac! Don't ever let me hear you say anything like that again!"
"Let me go," Noah said calmly. "Keep your hands off me. Excuse me. There's no reason why you should have to listen to my troubles. I realize that."
Slowly Michael relinquished his grip. Once again, he felt, I have failed this battered boy…
Noah hunched into his clothes. "It's cold out here," he said pleasantly. "Let's go inside."
Michael followed him into the CP.
The next morning Green assigned them to their old platoon, the one they had been in together in Florida. There were still three men left out of the forty who had been in the original platoon, and they welcomed Michael and Noah with heartwarming cordiality. They were very careful when they spoke of Johnny Burnecker in front of Noah.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
"So they asked this GI, what would you do if they sent you home?" Pfeiffer was saying. He and Noah and Michael were squatting on a half-submerged log against a low stone wall, their meat balls, spaghetti and canned peaches in rich combination on their mess kits. It was the first warm food they'd had for three days, and everyone was very pleased with the cooks who had got the field kitchen so close up. The line of men, spaced ten yards apart so that if a shell came in it would only hit a few of them at one time, wound through a copse of bare, artillery-marked beeches. The line moved swiftly as the cooks hurriedly dished out the food. "What would you do if they sent you home?" Pfeiffer repeated, through the thick mash in his mouth. "The GI thought for a minute… Have you heard this one?" Pfeiffer asked.
"No," Michael said politely to Pfeiffer.
Pfeiffer nodded, pleased. "First, the GI said, I'd take off my shoes. Second, I'd lay my wife. Third, I'd take off my pack." Pfeiffer roared at his joke. He stopped suddenly. "You sure you haven't heard it before?"
"Honest," said Michael. "That's a hell of a funny story."
"I thought you'd like it," Pfeiffer said with satisfaction, wiping up the last thick juice of the meat balls, spaghetti and peach syrup. "What the hell, you have to laugh every once in a while."
Pfeiffer industriously scrubbed his mess kit with a stone and a piece of toilet paper he always carried in his pocket. He got up and wandered over to the dice game that was going on behind a blackened chimney that was all that was left of a farmhouse that had survived three wars before this. There were three soldiers, a Lieutenant, and two Sergeants from a Communications Zone Signal Corps message centre, who had somehow arrived here in a jeep on a tourist visit. They were playing dice, and they seemed to have a lot of money which would do more good in the pockets of the infantry.
Michael lit a cigarette, relaxing. He wiggled his toes automatically, to make certain he could still feel them, and enjoyed the sense of having eaten well, and being out of danger for an hour. "When we get back to the States," Michael said to Noah, "I will take you and your wife out to a steak dinner. I know a place on Third Avenue, on the second floor. You eat your meal and watch the L pass by at dish level. The steaks are as thick as your fist, we'll have it very rare…"
"Hope doesn't like it very rare," Noah said, seriously.
"She will have it any way she wants it," Michael said. "Antipasto first, then these steaks, charred on the outside and they sigh when you touch a butter knife to them, and you get spaghetti and green salad and red California wine, and after that, cake soaked in rum and cafe expresso, that's very black, with lemon peel. The first night we get home. On me. You can bring your son, too, if you want, we'll put him in a high chair." Noah smiled. "We'll leave him at home that night," he said.
Michael was gratified at the smile. Noah had smiled very seldom in the three months since they had returned to the Company. He had spoken little, smiled little. In his taciturn way, he had attached himself to Michael, watched out for him with critical, veteran eyes, protected him by word and example, even when it had been a full-time job trying to keep himself alive, even in December, when it had been very bad, when the Company had been loaded on trucks and had been thrown in hurriedly against the German tanks that had suddenly materialized out of the supposedly exhausted Army in front of them. The Battle of the Bulge, it was now called, and it was in the past, and the one thing Michael really would remember from it for the rest of his life was crouching in a hole, which Noah had made him dig two feet deeper, although Michael had been weary and annoyed at what he considered Noah's finickiness… Michael looked over at Noah. Noah was sleeping now, sitting up, leaning against the stone wall. Only when he slept did his face look young. He had a very light beard, blondish and sparse, as compared with Michael's thick black mat, which made Michael look like a hobo who had been riding the rods from Vancouver to Miami. Noah's eyes, which, when he was awake, stared out with a dark, elderly tenacity, were closed now. Michael noticed for the first time that his friend had soft, upcurling eyelashes, full and blond at the tips, giving the upper part of his face a gentle appearance. Michael felt a wave of gratitude and pity for the sleeping boy, muffled now in his heavy stained overcoat, his wool-gloved fingertips just touching the barrel of his rifle… Looking at him now, this way, Michael realized at what cost this frail boy maintained his attitude of grave competence, made his intelligent, dangerous, soldierly decisions, fought tenaciously and cautiously, with a manual-like correctness, to remain alive in this country and this time when death came so casually to so many of the men around him. The blond lash-tips fluttered softly on the fist-broken face, and Michael thought of the times Noah's wife must have stared, with sorrowful tenderness and amusement, at the incongruous, girlish ornament. How old was he? Twenty-two, twenty-four? Husband, father, military man… Two friends, and both lost… Needing friends as other men needed air and, out of that need, worrying desperately, in the middle of his own agony, how to keep the clumsy, ageing soldier called Whitacre alive, who, left to his own blundering, ill-trained devices, would most certainly have walked over a mine by now, or silhouetted himself against a ridge to a sniper, or out of laziness and inexperience been mangled by a tank in a too-shallow hole… Steaks and red California wine across the gap spanned only by hallucinations, the first night home, on me… It was impossible, and it must happen. Michael closed his eyes, feeling an immense, sorrowing responsibility.
From the dice game, the voices floated over. "I'll fade 1,000 francs. The point is nine…"
Michael opened his eyes and stood up quietly and, carrying his rifle, went over to watch.
Pfeiffer was shooting and he was doing well. He had a pile of paper crushed in his hand. The Services of Supply Lieutenant wasn't playing, but the two Sergeants were. The Lieutenant was wearing a beautiful officer's coat, brindle-coloured and full. The last time he had been in New York, Michael had seen such a coat in the window of Abercrombie and Fitch. All three men were wearing parachute boots, although it was plain that they had never jumped from anything higher than a bar-stool. They were all large, tall men, clean-shaven, well dressed, and fresh-looking, and the bearded infantrymen with whom they were playing looked like neglected and rickety specimens of an inferior race.
The visitors talked loudly and confidently, and moved with energy, in contrast to the weary, mumbling, laconic behaviour of the men who had dropped out of the line to have their first warm meal for three days. If you were going to pick soldiers for a crack regiment, a regiment to seize towns and hold bridgeheads and engage armour, you certainly would not hesitate to choose these three handsome, lively fellows, Michael thought. The Army, of course, had worked things out somewhat differently. These bluff-voiced, well-muscled men worked in a snug office fifty miles back, typing out forms, and shovelling coal into the rosy iron stove in the middle of the room to keep out the wintry chill. Michael remembered the little speech Sergeant Houlihan, of the second platoon, always made when he greeted the replacements… "Ah," Houlihan would say, "why is it the infantry always get the 4Fs? Why is it the Quartermasters always get the weight-lifters, the shot-putters, and the All-American fullbacks? Tell me, Boys, is there anybody here who weighs more than a hundred and thirty pounds?" It was a fantasy, of course, and Houlihan made the speech shrewdly, because he knew it made the replacements laugh and like him, but there was a foolish element of fact in it, too.