Melter said, slowly. “Now, you are joking again.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, I think you are joking again,” said Melter in a pale, thick anger. He shifted his gun to the ground, considering new tactics and decided about it. “Well, listen here, smart boy, for your information, I will tell you something.” He jerked one hand. “Those men you passed in the field, they weren’t playing, no, they were really, actually, finally dead! Dead, yes, dead, you hear! Dead! Not playing, not kidding, not joking, but dead, dead, cold dead!” He beat it at Johnny like fists. He beat the air with it and turned the day into winter cold. “Dead!”
Smith winced inside. Johnny, don’t listen to him! Don’t let him hurt you, Johnny! Go on believing the world is a good place. Go on living intact and unafraid! Don’t let fear in, Johnny. You’ll crumble with it!
Johnny said to Melter, “What’re you talking about?”
“Death!” bellowed Melter wildly. “That’s what I’m talking about! Death. You can die, and Smith can die, and I can die from bullets. Gangrene, rot, death! You’ve been fooling yourself. Grow up, you fool, before it’s too late! Grow up!”
Johnny stood there a long time, and then he began to sway, his fists in big farmer-knotted pendulums. “No. You’re lying,” he said stubbornly.
“Bullets can kill, this is war!”
“You’re lying to me,” said Johnny.
“You can die, so can Smith. Smith’s dying now. Smell his blood! What do you think that stench is from the fox-holes, wild grapes for the winepresses of war? Yes, death and bones!”
Johnny looked around with unsteady eyes. “No, I won’t believe it.” He bit his lips and closed his eyes. “I won’t. You’re mean, you’re bad, you’re—”
“You can die, Johnny, die!”
Johnny began to cry, then. Like a babe in some barren wilderness, and Smith wrenched his shoulder trying to get up. Johnny cried and it was a new and small sound in the wide world.
Melter pushed Johnny staggeringly toward the front lines. “Go on. Get out there and die, Johnny. Get out there and get your heart pinned on a stone wall like a dripping medal!”
Don’t go, Johnny, Smith’s shouting got lost in the red, pain cavern of his interior, lost and useless and mute. Don’t go, kid. Stay here, don’t listen to this guy! Stick around, Johnny-lad!
Johnny stumbled away, sobbing, toward the blunt staccato of machine guns, toward the whine of artillery shells. His gun was held in one long limp arm, its butt dragging pebbles in a dry rattling stone laughter.
Melter looked after him in a hysterical kind of triumph.
Then Melter hefted his weapon and walked east over another hill, out of view.
Smith lay there, his thoughts getting sicker and dimmer, and Johnny walked on and on. If only there were some way to cry out. Johnny, look out!
An artillery shell came over and burst. Johnny fell down on the ground without a sound and lay there, not making a movement of his once-miraculous limbs.
Johnny!
Have you stopped believing? Johnny, get up! Are you dead now? Johnny?
And then darkness mercifully gathered Smith in and swallowed him down.
Scalpels rose and fell like small keen guillotines, cutting away death and decay, beheading misery, eliminating metal pain. The bullet, plucked from Smith’s wound, was cast away, small, dark, clattering into a metal pan. The doctors pantomimed over and around him in a series of blurred frenzies. Smith breathed easily.
Across the dim interior of the tent Johnny’s body lay on another operating table, doctors curious over him in a sterile tableau.
“Johnny?” and this time Smith had a voice.
“Easy does it,” a doctor cautioned. The lips under the white mask moved. “that a friend of yours—over there?”
“Yeah. How is he?”
“Not so good. Head injury. Fifty-fifty chance.”
They concluded with Smith, stitches, swabbings, bandages and all. Smith watched the wound vanish under white gauze, then he looked at the assembled crowd of medics. “Let me help with him, will you?”
“Well, now, after all, soldier—”
“I know the guy. I know the guy. I know him. He’s funny. If it means keeping him alive, how’s about it?”
The scowl formed over the surgical mask, and Smith’s heart beat slow. The doctor blinked. “I can’t chance it. What can you possibly do to help me?”
“Wheel me over. I tell you I can help. I’m his bosom-pal. I can’t let him conk out now. Hell, no!”
The doctors conferred.
They transferred Smith to a portable stretcher and two orderlies delivered him across the tent where the surgeons were engaged with Johnny’s shaved, naked skull. Johnny looked asleep and dreaming a nightmare. His face twisted, worried, frightening, wondering, disappointed and dismayed. One of the surgeons sighed.
Smith touched one surgical elbow. “Don’t give up, Doc. Oh, God, don’t give up.” To Johnny: “Johnny-lad. Listen. Listen to me. Forget everything Melter said. Forget everything he said—you hear me? He was full of crap up to here!”
Johnny’s face still was irritated, changing like disturbed water. Smith gathered his breath and continued.
“Johnny, you gotta go on playing, like always. Go on ducking, like in the old days. You always knew how, Johnny. It was part of you. It didn’t take learning or teaching, it was natural. And you let Melter put ideas in your head. Ideas that may be okay for people like Melter and me and others, but don’t jibe for you.”
One surgeon made an impatient gesture with a rubber-gloved hand.
Smith asked him, “Is his head hurt bad, Doc?”
“Pressure on the skull, on the brain. May cause temporary loss of memory.”
“Will he remember being wounded?”
“It’s hard to say. Probably not.”
Smith had to be held down. “Good! Good! Look,” he whispered quickly, confidentially to Johnny’s head. “Johnny, just think about being a kid, and how it was then, and don’t think about what happened today. Think about running in ravines and through creeks and skipping pebbles on water, and ducking b-b guns, and laughing, Johnny!”
Inside, Johnny thought about it.
A mosquito hummed somewhere, hummed and circled for an endless time. Somewhere guns rumbled.
Someone finally told Smith, “Respiration improved.”
Someone else said, “Heart action picking up.”
Smith kept talking, part of him that wasn’t pain, that was only hope and anxiety in his larynx, and fear-fever in his brain. The war thunder came closer, closer, but it was only the blood hurled through his head by his heart. Half an hour passed by. Johnny listened like a kid in school to an over-patient teacher. Listened and smoothed out the pain, erased the dismay in his expression, and regained the old certainty and youth and sureness and calm acceptance of belief.
The surgeon stripped off his tight rubber gloves.
“He’ll pull through.”
Smith felt like singing. “Thanks, Doc. Thanks.”
The Doc said, “You from Unit 45, you and Choir and a guy named Melter?”
“Yeah. What about Melter?”
“Funniest darn thing. Ran head on into a burst of German machine-gun fire. Ran down a hill screaming something about being a kid again.” The doc scratched his jaw. “We picked up his body with fifty bullets in it.”
Smith swallowed, lying back to sweat. Ice-cold, shivering sweat.
“That’s Melter for you. He just didn’t know how. He grew up, too fast, like all of us. He didn’t know how to stay young, like Johnny. That’s why it didn’t work. I—I gotta give him credit for trying, though, the nut. But there’s only one Johnny Choir.”
“You,” diagnosed the surgeon, “are delirious. Better take a sedative.”
Smith shook his head. “What about home? Are we going, Johnny and I, with our wounds?”
The surgeon formed a smile under the mask. “Home to America, the two of you.”
“Now, you’re delirious!” Smith let out a careful whoop of glee. He twisted to get a good look at Johnny sleeping so peacefully and easily and dreaming, and he said, “You hear that, Johnny? We’re going home! You and me! Home!”
And Johnny replied, softly, “Mom? Oh, Mom.”
Smith held Johnny’s hand. “Okay,” he said to the surgeons. “So now I’m a mother. Pass the cigars!”
Darling Adolf
They were waiting for him to come out. He was sitting inside the little Bavarian café with a view of the mountains, drinking beer, and he had been in there since noon and it was now two-thirty, a long lunch, and much beer, and they could see by the way he held his head and laughed and lifted one more stein with the suds fluffing in the spring breeze that he was in a grand humor now, and at the table with him the two other men were doing their best to keep up, but had fallen long behind.
On occasion their voices drifted on the wind, and then the small crowd waiting out in the parking lot leaned to hear. What was he saying? and now what?
“He just said the shooting was going well.”
“What, where?!”
“Fool. The film, the film is shooting well.”
“Is that the director sitting with him?”
“Yes. And the other unhappy one is the producer.”
“He doesn’t look like a producer.”
“No wonder! He’s had his nose changed.”
“And him, doesn’t he look real?”
“To the hair and the teeth.”
And again everyone leaned to look in at the three men, at the man who didn’t look like a producer, at the sheepish director who kept glancing out at the crowd and slouching down with his head between his shoulders, shutting his eyes, and the man between them, the man in the uniform with the swastika on his arm, and the fine military cap put on the table beside the almost-untouched food, for he was talking, no, making a speech.
“That’s the Führer, all right!”
“God in heaven, it’s as if no time had passed. I don’t believe this is 1973. Suddenly it’s 1934 again, when first I saw
