Hanging on

The sentry's corpse was startlingly white. It lay on its back by the edge of the river, one hand on the middle of its chest as if it were feeling for its own heartbeat. The skin was snowy, unnaturally white, almost phosphorescent. The body hair was too light to be seen. The dead man looked like a big, molded doll, all of painted rubber: long rubber legs, rubber arms, a thick rubber penis now horribly limp and curled over two rubber, felt-furred testicles. In the light of Kelly's torch, there were only two spots of color — the incredible blue eyes, and the red- black blood on the upper torso which had poured out when Coombs had slit the sentry's throat.

That could be me, Kelly thought. Someday, it will be.

He turned away, shifting the beam of his torch, and came upon Danny Dew who was standing directly under the bridge. Leaving the corpse behind, trying to forget it, he went over to the Negro. “That was amazing,” he said.

“What?” Danny Dew asked. He was stripping out of the German uniform. His powerful black body gleamed with perspiration; droplets of sweat clung to the tightly curled black hairs on his chest, like jewels sewn into his skin. He looked like an oiled harem guard. Except that he wasn't a eunuch.

“That none of the Germans noticed you weren't— weren't Aryan,” Kelly said. “That was fantastic.”

Danny Dew laughed, showing lots of white teeth. Were they really white, Major Kelly wondered, or were they only bright by comparison with Dew's dark face? That was one of the great mysteries that had haunted white Americans for as long as Major Kelly could remember. His mother had always said their teeth were not clean and white, but only appeared to be, because the rest of them was “painted so dark.” Major Kelly remembered hours spent in discussions of Negro dental conditions, the family gathered around the kitchen table like a group of psychic gypsies discussing the netherworld. Even this near, even though Danny Dew was a close companion and had been for months, Major Kelly could not be sure about his teeth.

Danny Dew said, “I pretended I was white.”

“Pretended?”

“Well, I was the only one down here big enough to look good in that uniform, so I had to do something, didn't I? So I directed myself at those Jerrys, and I thought white.”

“But you still looked colored.”

“To you. I wasn't directing myself at you. Anyway, looks don't matter. It's all in how you think.”

“Even if you were thinking white, you looked colored,” Kelly insisted.

“If you can't accept it, forget it,” Danny Dew said, tossing off the last of the German uniform and picking up his own pants. “But it's all in the head, Massah Kelly, all in de ole head.”

Kelly leaned back against the hard edge of a bridge support and said, “I can't accept that, no. If all a man had to do to become someone different was to think himself different, there wouldn't be a war. Each of us could be a German, Japanese, Britisher… No one would want to fight anyone else any longer.”

Danny Dew buckled his belt and pulled up his fly, struggled into his shirt which stuck to his sweat-slicked chest. “That's why I wish other people would start using their heads, like me,” he told Kelly. “If everyone just pretended more, we could get out of this crappy place.”

14

At four in the morning, only a few of the men in the camp were asleep. Six enlisted men were sitting in the woods immediately south of the camp, drinking cheap whiskey out of tin cups and singing songs over the graves of the two dead Germans. They weren't really mourning the dead men. But they couldn't just throw them in the ground and walk away. If the tables were turned, they would want someone to drink and sing over their graves, at the very least. They got very drunk, and they ran out of songs to sing.

In the shabby rec room of the HQ building, about twenty men sat on the benches and in the cafe chairs Maurice had provided for a price. They drank more cheap whiskey out of more tin cups. They didn't sing, though. They just sat there, drinking, not looking at each other, as if there were a religious service in progress.

Under the earth, in the main bunker, ten other men were playing poker at a pair of battered wooden tables. No one was enjoying the game, but no one wanted to call it off. If they called it off, there was nothing else to do but think. No one wanted to think.

Other men wandered about the camp, going nowhere, trying not to run into anyone. These were the ones who couldn't play poker. They had to think.

At four in the morning, Major Kelly was in the rec room. He was talking to General Blade, who had just put through an emergency call on the big wireless set. “You've got an emergency, Major,” the general said.

Lieutenant Slade, standing at Kelly's shoulder, stiffened. Maybe he would get to be in a battle, after all.

“Sir?” Kelly said.

“A unit of Panzer tanks, armored cars and infantry trucks are on the way toward you. They ought to be crossing the bridge in a few hours.”

“Twelve Panzers, sir?” Major Kelly asked.

General Blade was unsettled by the major's inside knowledge. “How could you know that?”

“They passed over the bridge three or four hours ago,” Kelly told him. Then he told him the rest of it, except for the account of Slade's gun work. He wasn't trying to protect Slade, not at all. But he was afraid that, if he told Blade about the dead cyclist, the general would recommend Slade for a medal or something, and then The Snot would become unbearable.

“Well,” General Blade said, “I'm glad to see you've got such good relationships with the locals — that you've cultivated them as informers.”

“Yes, sir,” Kelly said. He saw that Lieutenant Slade was fidgeting about, debating whether to insist that Kelly mention the backhoe which they had lost in the bargaining with Maurice. He was probably also trying to think how to let the general know about him killing the cyclist. Kelly placed a finger to his lips to warn Slade off.

Still, the lieutenant said, “Aren't you going to tell him about the backhoe?”

Slade was close enough to the microphone for it to pick up what he had said. General Blade had heard. “Backhoe?”

“You little shit,” Kelly said.

“What was that?” the general asked.

“Not you, sir,” Kelly said.

“What's this about a backhoe?”

“We lost it, sir,” Slade said, loud enough to be heard.

“Lost it?” the General asked.

Major Kelly pulled his revolver from his holster and leveled it at the middle of Lieutenent Slade's face. “You know what this will do to your face?” Kelly asked.

Slade nodded, swallowed hard.

“I'll put one right up your nostril,” Kelly promised.

“A backhoe?” General Blade asked. “Up my nostril? Kelly—”

“It's all right, sir,” Kelly interrupted. “I was talking to Lieutenant Slade.”

“What's going on there, Kelly?”

“Slade's drunk,” Kelly said. “Too much celebrating after the Germans went by.”

The General was surprised. “I didn't think he was that sort — to drink so much.”

“It happens, occasionally,” Kelly said.

Lieutenant Slade colored, opened his mouth to speak. Kelly thrust the revolver close to his face, shutting him up.

“One more thing, Major,” General Blade said. “I've also been informed that the Nazi high command is considering switching a Panzer division from the Russian front and moving it westward within a week or so. That would mean a convoy of eighty tanks or so, supply trucks, truck-mounted 88 mm antiaircraft guns, quite a string. Naturally, if they are dispatched and use the route that'll take them over your bridge, they're going to camp there with you for the night. It would take half a day, anyway, to put that big a force across the bridge.”