If I wasn’t already used to the pain I might have broken down and died right then.
“Easy,” Bonnie was saying.
She proffered a fold of twenties.
I took the money and headed for the door.
“Easy,” Bonnie said again. “Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?”
I turned back and kissed her, my lips tingling as they had in the dream where the hornet was hiding in Feather’s grassy grave.
3 3
6
Athin coating of freshly fallen snow hid the ruts in the road and softened the bombed-out buildings on the out- skirts of Dusseldorf. The M1 rifle cradled in my arms was fully loaded and my frozen finger was on the trigger. At my right marched Jeremy Wills and Terry Bogaman, two white men that I’d only met that morning.
“Don’t get ahead, son,” Bogaman said.
“Yeah, Boots,” Wills added. “Try and keep up.”
General Charles Bitterman had ordered forty-one small groups of men out that morning. Among them were thirteen Negroes.
Bitterman didn’t want black men forming into groups together.
He’d said that we didn’t have enough experience, but we all 3 4
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thought that he didn’t trust us among the German women we might come across.
“I’m a sergeant, Corporal,” I said to Wills.
“Sergeant Boots,” he said with a grin.
Jeremy Wills was a fair-looking lad. He had corn-fed features and blond hair, amber-colored eyes, and big white teeth. To some lucky farm girl he might have been a good catch but to me he was repulsive, uglier than the corpses we ran across on the road to America’s victory. My numb finger tightened and I gauged my chances of killing both soldiers before Bogaman, who was silently laughing at his friend’s joke, could turn and fire.
I hadn’t quite decided to let them live when a bullet lifted Wills’s helmet and split his skull in two. I saw into his brain before he hit the ground. It was only then that I became aware of the machine-gun reports. When I started firing back Bogaman screamed. He had been hit in the shoulder, chest, and stomach.
I fell to the ground and rolled off the road into a ditch. Then I was scuttling on all fours, like a lizard, into the meager shelter of the leafless woods.
Machine-gun fire ripped the bark and the frozen turf around me. I had gone more than fifty yards before I realized that somewhere along the way I’d dropped my rifle. In my mind at the time (and in the dream I was having) I imagined that my hatred for those white men had brought on the German attack.
The rattling roar of their fire proved to me that the Germans were desperate. I didn’t think they could see me but they kept firing anyway.
I took out my government-issue .45 and crawled around to the place where I had seen the flashes from their gun. I moved 3 5
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through the sound-softening snow hardly feeling the cold along my belly. I had no hatred for the Germans who tried to kill me out there on the road. I didn’t feel that I had to avenge the deaths of the men who had so recently despised and disrespected me. But I knew that if I let the machine gunners live, sooner or later they might get the drop on me.
The Nazis wanted to kill me. That’s because the Nazis knew that I was an American even if Bogaman and Wills did not.
I went maybe four hundred yards more through the woods and then I slithered across the road, making it back to the clump of branches that camouflaged the nest. I jumped up without thinking and began firing my pistol, holding it with both hands. I hit the first man in the eye and the second in the gut. They were completely surprised by the attack. I noticed, even in the two short seconds it took me to kill them, that their uniforms were makeshift and their hands were wrapped in rags.
The third soldier in the nest leaped at me with a bayonet in his hand. The impact of his attack knocked the pistol from my grasp. We fell to the ground, each committed to the other’s death. I grabbed his wrist with one hand and pressed with all my might. The milky-skinned, gray-eyed youth grimaced and used all of his Aryan strength in an attempt to overwhelm me. But I was a few years older and that much more used to the logic of senseless violence. I grabbed the haft of his bayonet with my other hand while he wasted time hitting me with his free fist. By the time he realized that the tide was turning against him it was too late. He now used both hands to keep the blade from his chest but still it moved unerringly downward. As the seconds crept by, real fear appeared in the teenage soldier’s eyes. I wanted to stop but there was no stopping. There we were, two men who had never known each other, working toward that 3 6
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young man’s death. He spoke no English, could not beg in words I might understand. After maybe a quarter of a minute the blade passed through his coat and into his flesh, but then it got caught on one of his breastbones. I almost lost heart then but what could I do? It was him or me. I leaned forward with all my weight and the German steel broke the German’s bone and plunged deep into his heart.
The most terrible thing was his last gasp, a sudden hot gust of breath into my face. His eyes opened wide as if to see some way out of the finality in his body — and then he was dead.
I jumped up from my sleep in Saul’s Rambler. A sign at the side of the road read the artichoke capital of the
