Hanging On Read online

  "There!" Tooley said.

  "There what?"

  "He's improving."

  "How so?"

  "He belched."

  "The only thing a belch is an improvement over is a fart," Major Kelly said.

  "But it is an improvement."

  Major Kelly shook his head. His head felt as if it were going to fall off. He could not allow that. His headache was bad enough now. "You will never learn, Tooley. Things don't get better. They just don't. They stay the same way, or they get worse. Kowalski is a bag of crap, and he'll only get worse. If you want to hang on, accept that. Otherwise, you'll never make it."

  "I'll make it."

  Kowalski belched. Then he farted. Then he relieved himself on the clean sheets.

  "A relapse," Tooley said. "But only temporary."

  Major Kelly got out of there. He turned so fast he stumbled into Private Angelli who was no longer suffering from a bloody nose and who was now seeking treatment for his abraded shoulder. He weaved past Angelli, did not even look at Liverwright. At the front of the bunker, Lily Kain and Nurse Pullit were still giggling, so he avoided them as well. He pushed through the bunker door and collided with Sergeant Coombs.

  "I was looking for you," Coombs said. He was huffing like a bull, and his eyes were maniacally alight. It was obvious that the sergeant would have liked to add something to his statement, something like: "I was looking for you, Diarrhea Head." However, he restrained himself.

  That surprised Major Kelly, because he was not accustomed to the sergeant restraining himself. Apparently, even Coombs could be affected by disaster and the brief but fierce presence of death.

  "And I was coming to find you," the major said. "I want the men on the job fast. That wreckage has to be cleared, salvage made, and the reconstruction begun by dawn. I want you to check the men in the hospital and be sure there's no malingering; if a man's fit to work, I want him out there working. We're not going to dawdle around this time. If there is really going to be a Panzer division sent this way, I don't want them to show up and find a pile of ruins where the bridge should be. I don't want them angry, and I don't want them having to linger on this side of the gorge. Is this clear?"

  "It's clear," Sergeant Coombs said. He thought: you coward. He wanted to stand and fight the krauts for a change, even if they would be putting handguns against tanks. "Something I want to show you, first," he said, cryptically, turning and stomping up the steps.

  Major Kelly followed him topside where the fire in the brush around the bridge had not yet been fully doused and strange orange lights played on the darkness, adding an unmistakable Halloween feeling. They walked east along the river to the latrines, which had taken a direct hit from a misplaced two-hundred-pounder. Most of the structure was shredded, with the undamaged walls leaning precariously.

  "Was anyone inside?" Major Kelly asked. The nausea he had experienced in the hospital bunker returned to him now.

  "No," Coombs said. "But look at this!" He led Kelly to the line of earth-moving machines which were parked in the vicinity of the outhouses.

  "They don't look damaged to me," Kelly said.

  "None of the machines were touched," Coombs said.

  "Well, then?"

  "But they were covered with crap," Coombs said. He held up his big hissing Coleman lantern as if searching for an honest man. "What a cleaning-up job this is going to be. Christ!"

  On closer examination, employing his olfactory sense as well as his eyes, the major saw that what appeared to be mud was not actually mud at all. It really did look like mud from a distance, great gouts of mud sprayed across the windscreens, splashed liberally on the mighty steel flanks, packed around the controls, crusted in the deep tread of the oversized tires. But it was not mud. The sergeant was right about one thing: if Major Kelly had ever seen shit, this was it.

  Coombs lowered his lantern and said, "Now let's hear the bit about Aesop, about how all of this is just a fairy tale, grand in color but modest in design."

  Major Kelly said nothing.

  "Well?" Coombs asked. He held the lantern higher, to give them a better view of the crap-covered vehicles. "What kind of fairy tales, I'd like to know, are full of crap?"

  "All of them," Kelly said, "I thought you understood that."

  * * *

  5

  The following day was the hottest they had endured since they'd been dropped behind enemy lines. The thermometer registered over ninety degrees. The sun was high, hard, and merciless, baking the earth and the men who moved upon it. The whispering trees were quiet now, lifeless, rubbery growths that threw warm shadows into the gorge and across the fringes of the camp. The river continued to flow, but it was syrupy, a flood of brown molasses surging sluggishly over rocks and between the high banks.

  In the gorge, Kelly's men worked despite the heat, wrestling with the steel beams that never wanted to go where they were supposed to go. The men cursed the beams, each other, the sun, the still air, Germans, and being born.

  Private Vito Angelli, whose bloody nose Nurse Pullit had treated last night, worked on the near side, wielding a pegging mallet against the newly placed bridge plates, tightening connections which Private Joe Bob Wilson tempered with a gasoline hand torch. Angelli slammed the mallet in a slow, easy rhythm designed to accomplish the most work with the least effort. Each blow rang across the camp like the tolling of a flat bell, punctuating the other men's curses.

  At the other end of the bridge, Privates Hoskins and Malzberg were working hard to line up and secure the couplings between the farside pier and its cantilever arm. They were in charge of a dozen men, and they were the only two in the detail with preliminary engineering training, but they were hefting the wooden wedges and driving the hammers as hard as anyone. This surprised the men working with them, for no one had ever seen Hoskins or Malzberg work. Between them, the two men controlled all the gambling in Kelly's camp: poker games, blackjack, craps, bets on the hour of the next Stuka attack, penny pitching, everything. Hoskins and Malzberg were natural con men. They were the only men in the entire unit who had thought to bring cards and dice along when the unit had been flown behind German lines, and both of them acted as if this were the only contribution they should have to make for the rest of the war. However, now that Kelly had warned them about the possibility of more Panzers coming this way, they were as desperate as the other men to get the bridge repaired. If the bridge weren't in shape when the Panzers came, and if the Nazis had to stay by the bridge all night and everyone in Kelly's camp was killed, that would put quite a crimp in their rake-off from the games.

  In the gorge, the cement mixers rattled as some of the strongest men in camp turned them by hand. Saws scraped through damaged planking, cutting new boards for braces and flooring. Stoically, the men worked. Fearfully, too.

  As Major Kelly paraded back and forth from one crisis point to another, he saw that, as usual, the most valuable worker was Danny Dew whose expertise with the big D-7 dozer made the whole thing possible. Because of Dew, the unit put the bridge in place in a record, for them, twenty-six hours.

  As Coombs often said, "Even if he's a nigger, and he is, he can handle that machine like a man should handle a woman."

  Sergeant Coombs was always the first to admit that a black man could be good at something. He didn't like them, he said, but he was willing to give them their due. Once when some of the men went to Eisenhower, the village, to a dance that Maurice had arranged, all the young village girls wanted to dance with Danny Dew. "All them niggers," Coombs observed, "have a natural rhythm." Later, when the men discovered some of the village girls were not averse to a well-presented proposition, Danny Dew seemed always to be disappearing with one or another. "That's a darkie," Sergeant Coombs told Slade. "They have puds like elephant trunks and always ready. It's a primitive trait that's been refined out of white men." When the men played Softball, they all wanted Danny Dew on their team, because he was the best player. "Natural for his kind," Coombs said. "Th
ey're all good at sports, because of their primitive muscles. Our primitive muscles atrophied when our brains got bigger, but them niggers still have primitive muscles." Even when Danny Dew won a pot in poker, Coombs looked for hereditary explanations. "Never play poker with a nigger," he told Slade. "That natural rhythm of theirs tells them when good luck's coming, when to bet heavy and when light. They have a natural instinct for gambling. A nigger can have a fantastic hand and not show it. Natural poker faces. Too dumb to get excited about the right things."

  But the thing Danny Dew did best was operate the D-7 dozer. He could plow up ruins, stack them neatly, and not bend the pieces which had survived the bombing and might be used again. All the hot day, he sat high in his dozer seat, shirtless, ebony muscles gleaming with sweat He waved at Kelly now and then, and he talked constantly to the D-7 as if it were alive.

  The machine was his virility symbol.

  Kelly was fascinated by Danny Dew's relationship with the dozer, because he'd never thought a black man needed a virility symbol. White men bought fast cars or owned guns, built huge and phallic homes and amassed fortunes. But a colored man needed no symbol of his manhood. His manhood was formidable enough to speak for itself. Yet here was Danny Dew with a virility symbol he could not do without. In the morning, he washed the dozer in the river, oiled it, greased and polished it. In the afternoon, he raced it back and forth across the field for fifteen minutes, because he was afraid it would come to feel unwanted unless it was used every day. In the evening, he slept on its wide tread, on a bundle of folded blankets, forsaking his cot in the main bunker. At odd moments, he amorously caressed the wheel, the clutches, the seat, the backrest...

  If you asked-few ever did-he explained in detail about the hydraulic steering clutches, the forward reverse lever which allowed you to drive in all speeds front and back, the booster springs... the stressed blade... the four mammoth cylinders!

  One night when they had been drinking, Kelly asked Danny Dew why he needed a virility symbol. And Dew said, "Because of my balls."

  "Your balls?" Kelly had asked.

  "My testicles," Danny said glumly.

  "They're gone?"

  "No. I've got them."

  "Well?"

  "They're not normal. My testicles are abnormal."

  "Abnormal?" Kelly asked, incredulous.

  Danny took a drink of whiskey. "It's been the curse of my life, Kelly. I feel silly. And feeling silly makes me feel inadequate-and so I need the dozer."

  Kelly hesitated, drank. Then, "What's wrong with your -balls?"

  "They're silly."

  Major Kelly's face felt fuzzy. He wiped at imaginary cobwebs. "Yes, but how are they silly?"

  Danny was exasperated. He waved his arm for emphasis. "Silly! They just are, that's all. They're laughable."

  "Has anyone ever laughed at them?" Kelly asked.

  "Everybody who's seen them." Danny looked suicidal.

  "Even the girls in Eisenhower?" Kelly asked, recalling how easily Danny had gotten the girls there.

  "Even them." Danny took a drink and let whiskey run out the corner of his mouth. He didn't seem to know he was losing it.

  Kelly poured another drink. He was only using the whiskey as an excuse not to ask what, finally, he had to ask. "Could I see your funny testicles?" When Danny sighed, Kelly said, "I don't want to touch them."

  "Sure, sure," Danny said, as resigned as a weak woman submitting to a powerful rapist.

  "You don't think this is an odd request?" Kelly asked anxiously.

  "No," Dew said. "Everyone wants to see them when they hear how damn funny they are." He stood, unzipped his pants with considerable fumbling effort, reached inside, cupped himself, and revealed his cock and balls.

  "What's funny about them?" Kelly asked.

  "Come on," Danny said. "I can see you want to laugh. I'm used to it."

  "They're perfectly ordinary," Kelly said. He looked closely, because he wanted a good laugh, needed a good laugh, but he couldn't find anything funny about them.

  "Don't be sarcastic. Go ahead and laugh, but don't make it any worse."

  "Really, Dan, there isn't-"

  "Shit," Danny Dew said. "You're smirking behind that frown. You think you'll make me let down my defenses- and then you'll laugh at me. I know you sadists. Come on, now. Everyone laughs. No one's ever sympathetic."

  "Nothing to be sympathetic about," Kelly said. "You have ordinary-"

  "There!" Dew said, pointing and grinning. "That's better! Laugh. Go on, don't worry, laugh your head off. That's the way!"

  Kelly looked around the blanket-walled room. Only the two of them were there, and neither of them was laughing. "I'm not laughing," he said.

  "That's it!" Danny went on. He slapped the table, grinning and nodding his head. "Laugh it up. I told you they were funny!"

  "But-"

  "Well, now, try to be decent about it," Danny Dew said, no longer grinning. "You don't have to laugh that hard. You'll make yourself sick if you keep it up, for Christ' sake. Now, stop it!"

  "Who's laughing?" Kelly wanted to know. He wasn't laughing at all.

  "Stop it, you bastard!" Danny said. "Come on, Kelly!" He put his balls away and zipped his fly, stepped back against the blanket. "I'm going to leave if you don't stop. You ought to be ashamed. Do you laugh at cripples and blind men?" He lifted the blanket flap. "You get hold of yourself. I'll expect an apology." He left.

  To the empty room, Kelly said, "But I wasn't laughing, Danny."

  It was a shame, the major thought later, that Danny Dew-who could think himself into being anyone else in the world-could not pretend himself another set of balls if he thought his own were funny. Not even Danny Dew, who could become a white man at will, not even Danny could escape everything.

  So thanks to Danny Dew, the bridge was completed at two o'clock in the morning, twenty-six hours after the unit set to work on it. The last of the men staggered out of the ravine like the dead returning from hell. They had worked a sweltering day and a muggy night, and they could hardly see where they were going. Most of them trudged back to the main bunker, but no one wanted to sleep underground. They fell down in the grass and looked at each other and mumbled about the heat and fell asleep. A few men could not sleep, at first. They had been driven to the limits of their endurance, and they had come around the bend of exhaustion to a sort of manic insomnia. But in an hour, lulled by the snores of their fellows, they too slept.

  A score of men went to the rec room where there was ice for cold drinks that Maurice supplied. Privates Hoskins and Malzberg were trying to start a poker game in the rec room, even though they were almost too tired to shuffle the cards. The men slumped on the benches and floor and looked at Hoskins and Malzberg as if they were insane. Actually, they were.

  Hoskins sat at a scarred table talking to the men. "You worked hard," he told them. "You deserve a little fun, an interesting game."

  Malzberg, the tallest in the unit, stood in the middle of the room and spread his arms despairingly. "We're doomed anyway," he said, in a rumbling voice full of the sadness of ages. "We've no chance. We're all dead men. We can't afford to throw away our last precious hours of life in sleep."

  By the time he'd finished, all the men in the room had fallen asleep.

  "Blackjack?" Hoskins asked.

  Malzberg sat down, dwarfing the table. "Deal," he said.

  Fifteen minutes later, even they were asleep.

  * * *

  6

  "Kelly, wake up."

  The major snorted, blinked, opened his eyes and looked directly into Private Tooley's flashlight. "Turn that thing off!"

  Tooley turned it off, blinding both of them. They were only inches away from each other, but it was like being sealed up in two separate cans side by side on a grocery shelf. Talking from his can, the pacifist said, "I have something to tell you."

  Kelly sat up on his cot, felt the canvas shift under him and the spindly frame twist with his weight. He smacked his lip
s. "What time is it?"

  "Four in the morning."

  "What morning?" Kelly asked.

  "I know you just got to sleep," Tooley said. "So did I. But this is important. Kowalski just sat up in bed and warned me about another raid. He was shouting so loud he woke me."

  Kelly tried to think who Kowalski was, but he couldn't get his mind functioning. The room was too hot. His undershorts were pasted to him with sweat, and even the cot canvas was damp and slippery. "Another air attack?"

  "Yes, sir," Tooley said. "His exact words were: 'Rising sun, bombs in the trees, bridge kaput.' " Tooley shifted as his haunches stiffened, wiped sweat out of his eyes. "Did you hear me, sir?"

  Major Kelly remembered who Kowalski was. He said, "Tooley, the Germans haven't had time to learn that the bridge is back up. And if they're judging by our past record, they won't come around again for a couple of days. No informer in this unit could have passed the word to the krauts in so short a time."

  "Sir-"

  Kelly kept his eyes closed, trying not to wake up any more than he had to. Besides, he was afraid that if he opened his eyes again, Tooley would flick on the flashlight and shatter his corneas. "Don't pay any attention to a bag of shit like Kowalski. Look, the rising sun is the symbol of Japan, not Germany. I don't think the Japs could have diverted a bomber to the middle of Europe just to attack our little bridge, eh? Not likely, eh? Eh? Look, Tooley, what you do, you go back to the hospital and go to sleep. And if Kowalski starts blabbing again, you smother him with a pillow."

  "But Major Kelly, I-"

  "That's an order," Kelly said.

  He listened as, reluctantly, Tooley got up and lifted the blanket and went away. Then he lay there, trying to imagine that the heat was not heat at all, but a snug blanket draped across him and that he was twelve and back home and sleeping in his attic room and that it was winter and snow was falling and his blanket kept him warm, very warm, against the cold... In a few minutes, he fell asleep as the frogs and crickets, cavorting in the snow, croaked and chirruped secret messages all the way around the world to Germany.