17
Stepping into the bright fall sun was cleansing. I stood on the front step with my face tilted into the sun, eyes tightly closed, and was caressed by a breeze redolent with the scents of leaves and car exhaust.
I shivered, throwing off the clinging dread and madness behind me like a dog shedding water, and started walking to the car. Anne seemed to relax, blinking in the light as if waking from a dream. When we got to the car, I opened the trunk and changed out of my tattered shirt.
The car was deliciously quiet and clean as we pulled away from the curb. I rolled the windows down to let some air circulate around us.
Anne looked at me seriously once we were moving. “Should we call someone? The police?”
“I don’t know what the point would be. The victim was homicidally insane, and the perpetrator acted only to save a life. The public doesn’t need to be protected and the perp doesn’t need to be punished. I think we’re better off leaving things as they are.”
“I guess. Although it doesn’t feel entirely right to me.” Anne leaned back against her headrest and closed her eyes, clearly drained. “Where to now?”
“Since we’re here, I figured I may as well pay my respects to an old friend. You mind?”
She shook her head, never opening her eyes.
We drove in silence to the Arlington National Cemetery, just listening to the wind whipping past the windows and our own thoughts. I parked in the visitor lot and led Anne into the vast, perfectly manicured expanse of the cemetery. The grass was a deep emerald green, and as always, a deep hush permeated the air.
I bypassed the visitor’s center; I already knew how to find Section 36. All of my oldest friends were buried there. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever been here not wearing my dress uniform with Maggie on my arm.
We didn’t have far to walk, the section that I wanted was right near the entrance. “I always thought this place would be stark and kind of oppressive. But it’s not.”
“There’s art here, even outside of the memorials. It always makes me think of cathedral art. The kind of things created by people with an eye on something larger than themselves.”
“It seems like a waste. We shouldn’t be glorifying war like this.”
I swept my hand out, indicating the endless rows of white tombstones studding the rolling lawn. “Yeah. Every morning we used to wake up scared to death that before the day was out, somebody would be face down in the mud with a sucking chest wound, and it wouldn’t be us, and we’d miss out on all that glory.”
I stopped in front of a grave marker, no different than any other one in this sea of tombstones. “This man saved my life more than once. He died saving all of us. If he were the only soldier buried here, then this whole goddamn cemetery would be the least this country could do for him.”
Shadroe Decatur
PFC
US ARMY
May 23 1920
November 3 1944
The stone was unchanged since the last time I had seen it. Unchanged from the first time I had seen it. The color was slightly different than the stones around it, a little brighter and more pure. It was made of Yule marble, same as the Tomb of the Unknowns. We got no medals, no public honors, no recognition of our unique service of any kind. I guess this was the government’s way of making it up to us after we were dead. Hooray.
“Best friend I ever had. Here’s to you, Rat.”
“Seems like all of your nicknames had a story. What was behind that one?”
I shrugged. “Nothing much. Just looked like a rat. Short, wiry, long nose, no chin. Took about five seconds in Boot.”
“He died in the war?”
I nodded, not taking my eyes off of the smooth white stone. “He was the only one. He died making sure he was the only one.”
“What happened?”
“Bags. Chased us all across Poland, getting thicker the closer we got to Piotr’s hideout. We were caught outside, no cover, just out in the open. Two of ‘em found us and just started coming in. We’d gotten ourselves boxed in by a barrier minefield. We’d been air-dropped in from a base a few miles away, just before dawn, and were just plain lucky that we hadn’t landed smack in the middle of the damn thing in the dark.
“We landed just outside the markers when they caught up to us. By that time we’d faced three or four of them in total, but always just one at a time, and we’d barely survived. They scared us pretty badly. Guns were nearly useless, especially since they wore steel helmets and moved like greased pigs, and they tended to run up on you before you could fire more than once anyway, and then they’d let your air out with those knives. We’d never seen two at once before.”
I sat down on the soft, fragrant grass. Anne joined me. “It was like a Buster Keaton reel. We started shouting and shooting, and running every which way. It wasn’t exactly how they trained us, but like I said, we were plenty scared. I guess we just panicked.
“They started pelting up on us with their knives out, one in each hand. In the split second before they reached us, I knew we were dead. There was no way we’d take one down before they killed somebody, much less both before they killed all of us. All that speed and strength and savagery. They could punch half a dozen holes in you before you could blink, and all the way to the hilt.
“We saw a German patrol go down once, died to a man fighting just one. We killed it from a distance while it was peeling the skin off the last one. Anyway, before I knew it, they were among us, slashing and stabbing. I barely managed to block the first hit. The second got me, down to the bone.
“Then all of a sudden they were flying past me. Shadroe had slammed into them from behind, one arm around each waist, and flung all three of them right past me into the minefield. Shad knew what he was doing, and his aim was good.
“He hit one of those AT mines square on top. Anti-tank mines take a couple of hundred pounds to set off. Turns out three grown men will do it. The whole fight was over in seconds. Even so, three of us were bleeding, Patrick bad enough for Henry to have to slap a field dressing on it. Just like that. If Shad hadn’t saved us, we’d have died right there.”
“Sounds like he was a hero.”
“I guess so. Frank and Don are here, too. Your grandfather soon, I suppose.”
She shook her head. “No, he wanted to be buried next to my grandmother. I already missed the funeral.” Her eyes glittered, but no tears fell.
“You didn’t have to.”
“It doesn’t matter, he’s already gone. Funerals are for the survivors. He always said that. I’m going to catch the people responsible for his death. That’s what matters.”
“Cake would have hated that. To lose his granddaughter for some kind of hollow revenge. It’s pointless.”
“You are so full of it. Why are you doing this then?”
“It’s not revenge.”
“Then what?”
“You know how Piotr got the blood for his big pit of blood? He hung people from hooks over the pit and bled them out. Hundreds of them. We saw a dozen or more hanging like meat over the pit, and a mass grave that had to be filled in with a bulldozer.”
“Taking revenge for other people is still revenge.”
“I’m not doing it for them! Piotr is here, in this country. He’s got new bags. He’s taking back the altar pieces.”
“He’s doing it again.”
“Yes. He’s doing it again. How do you think he’s filling his pit this time? I’m not doing it to avenge some ancient wrong, I’m doing it because somewhere there are people waiting in line to be hung from a hook and bled dry. All kinds of people, not just adults.”
