Hanging on

“Well,” Beame said, “I'm very nervous.” He let her see how his hands were shaking. “At times, I'm so terrified I'm not functional. I haven't had a good night's sleep since we landed here.” When she nodded sympathetically, Beame could not let go of the subject. “I have awful nightmares. I can't eat. I pick at my food and get indigestion, and the worst gas… I've been constipated for three weeks. If I could have one good shit, I think—” He realized what he was saying, and he wanted to leap off the edge of the ravine.

She looked down at the workers again, embarrassed for him. She presented Beame with a lovely profile which soothed him and made him feel like less of an ass. Indeed, he felt as if he had been transformed into a spirit by the white heat rolling off her. If she turned and touched him, her hand would go straight through.

After a long silence, he heard himself say, “You're beautiful.”

She looked at him timidly, blushing again. “Thank you.”

Beame's heart rose. She was just what he had thought she was! A flower, an innocent, a girl-woman as precious as anything he had ever wanted. And if he just did not start talking about his constipation again, he might be able to win her.

2

Sergeant Emil Hagendorf had a voice like a 78 rpm phonograph record playing on a turntable forever moving at 60 rpm, and he always sounded morose. “You don't know what it's like,” he said, morosely.

Major Kelly sat down on one of the rec room chairs. “What what's like?”

“Chaos,” Hagendorf said. His pasty face grew paler at the word.

“I live in chaos,” Kelly said.

But the major knew his own ability to cope with the chaotic did not help Hagendorf. Before the war, Emil, the unit's chief surveyor, had developed a comfortable philosophy of life. He believed there was a precise order and pattern to everything in the universe. He thought he could look dispassionately at anything—religion, sex, politics, money — survey it as he would a roadbed, stake it out, and eventually understand it. He had lived by his philosophy, a man of order and routine. He rose at the same hour each morning, neither smoked nor drank, and took a woman only as often as his system demanded one. He planned his future as carefully as he surveyed land, and he was able to cope with whatever came along. Drafted, he went through basic training with high marks, was quickly promoted, seemed at home in the Army. Then, when he was behind the lines with the unit for one week, he became a sloppy, inefficient, falling-down drunkard. And Major Kelly had not been able to rehabilitate him.

“You've got to stop drinking,” Kelly told the chief surveyor when he confronted him in the rec room that morning.

Hagendorf picked up his bottle of wine and went over to the dart board that was nailed to the rec room wall. “See this? It's divided into all these little sections.” He pointed to each of the sections on the board, which took a while. “Throw a dart here, you get five points… or here, you get ten. Or a hundred, here. I once thought life was neat and compartmentalized like that.”

“Life isn't like that,” Kelly said.

“I know, now.” Hagendorf took a long swallow of wine, his whiskered neck moving as he drank, sweat beading on his white face. “My whole philosophy — gone. My sense of direction, fundamental beliefs — destroyed by General Blade. And you.”

“What's that got to do with drinking too much?” Kelly asked.

“You'd drink yourself to death, too, if your philosophy of life was suddenly proven wrong.”

“No. I'd find something else to believe in.”

Hagendorf shuddered. “That's chaos. What do you believe, by the way?”

“That this is all a fairy tale, grand in color but modest in design. You and I are figments of some Aesop's imagination.”

“That's the worst philosophy I've ever heard.” He clutched his wine bottle in both hands. “It's illogical. A good philosophy must be based on logical precepts, on valid proofs. How can you prove we're figments of a cosmic imagination?”

“I don't have time to argue with you, Emil,” Kelly said, his voice rising on each word, until there was a hysteria in it which matched Hagendorf's hysteria. “The Panzers are coming! We have a whole village to build in just six days!” Red-faced, trembling, he unrolled a tube of onionskin paper and flattened it on the table, used a pair of metal ashtrays to hold down the ends. “I have a job for you, Emil.”

“Job?” Hagendorf looked skeptically at the paper.

Briefly, Kelly explained how they were going to hoax the Germans with the fake town. He tapped the paper. “I've done a preliminary blueprint of the town we'll build. You'll mark off the streets and lots.”

Hagendorf blanched. “You can't ask that of me!” His face was soft, soggy, pale as a fish belly. “Surveying again — I'll get a taste of how it used to be. I'll crack up!”

“I've been fair, Emil. You haven't had to work in weeks. Beame and I have done the bridge surveying, but that's simple stuff. I need you for this.” He pointed at the wine. “And no drinking until you're finished with the job.”

“You're killing me.” Hagendorf came over and looked at the plans.

“We already have the road that comes from the east and crosses the bridge.” Kelly traced this with his finger. “We're going to need two more streets paralleling that road — here and here. Then we need two crossing streets that go north-south. Finally, I want a sort of service road running all around the village, at the edge of the woods.”

“This is going to take a lot of time,” Hagendorf said.

“You have today,” Kelly said.

“Impossible!”

“Hagendorf, we have six days. Only six days! Every minute I waste arguing with you, the Panzers get closer. You understand me?”

“Can't do it without wine,” Hagendorf said, finishing his wine.

“You have to. I don't want this marked out by a drunk. You've become a real wino, Emil. You don't know when to stop.”

“Untrue! I've cut back. I've only had one bottle so far today.”

“Jesus, Emil, it's only an hour since dawn. You call that 'cutting back,' do you?”

“You're going to destroy me,” Hagendorf said. His round shoulders slumped more than usual, and he appeared to age before Kelly's eyes.

“Nonsense,” Kelly said. “Now, move! Let's get down to the machinery shed. Your men are waiting. We've dusted off your theodolite and other tools. Hurry, Hagendorf! Six days will be gone before you know it.”

“My theodolite,” Hagendorf said, dreamily. His mind spiraled back to more pleasant times when the world could be measured and known. Abruptly, he dropped his wine bottle and started to cry. “You really are destroying me, sir. I warn you! I warn you!”

Fifteen minutes later, as Kelly stood by the shed watching Hagendorf stagger away with his assistants, Private Vito Angelli — the Angel from Los Angeles as Pullit had begun to call him — came along with his French work crew. They all jabbered at once, laughed, and gesticulated furiously, as if they were on stage and required to exaggerate each gesture to communicate with the people in the back rows. Angelli stopped them at an enormous bomb crater north of the machinery shed.

Kelly hurried over and clapped Angelli on the shoulder. “Going okay?”

Angelli was thin, dark, all stringy muscles, intense eyes, and white teeth. “We've filled in all the other craters below the bridge road.”

Angelli could not speak French, and none of the workers could speak Italian or English. Therefore, Angelli used a lot of gestures and smiled a great deal, and said, “Eh? Eh?” When dealing with his relatives who had come to the States from the old country and who often spoke a different dialect of Italian than he did, he had learned the best way to be understood was to punctuate everything with numerous ehs. It never