Monkey Boy

and touched the guts with his finger and said, Still warm, Herb. This just happened, it was those shots we heard from over there a coupl’a minutes ago. The forest terrain sloped downward from the path, as if down into a gulch, but the underbrush was thick. We plunged down into it, bent over, our rifles held against our ribs, says Herb. That’s when we heard trucks, the tractor sound of trucks pulling cannon, somewhere on a road above us. Holy moly, now what was this, Yolanda? Was it our side getting ready for an assault on the town, or was it the Jerries bringing in their own hardware? Well, it wasn’t long before we heard the explosion of a grenade, not so near us but not that far. That was followed by the unmistakable racket of combat. Around us, the underbrush had thinned out. The ground was now smooth, covered in plant mulch and some low, soft plants like ivy, and the trees were evenly spaced. A family of boar went by, looking like big furry fish trotting along on skinny little legs, the mom and dad with their tusks and two little boarlets, maybe the siblings of the one we’d just seen dead. An owl flew slowly, slowly over our heads. We heard the explosion of artillery shells, landing in or near the town. Fighting was breaking out over here and also over there and all along a wide circumference that seemed to be slowly closing in on us through the forest. Eddie pulled on my arm and said, Look, Herb, look at that. In the twilight, pecking at the ground, was a family of woodcocks. Eddie and I sat down on the forest floor. Honest to God, Yolanda, I’ve never seen anything so extraordinary as that hidden forest gulch filling up with animals, there in that dark-green glowing dusk, while the earth occasionally shook with explosions. A doe and her fawns, Yolanda, over there, and some more boars went by. I saw a mother and her boarlets calmly lay down behind some trees not twenty feet from us. There were plenty of rabbits, too, including some of those huge French hares, looking so placid. When Eddie went off to relieve himself, he saw a red fox, sitting there calmly watching him. We were in a kind of enchanted wood, Yolanda. It was where the animals came to escape the hunters and the fighting, and Eddie and I were there too. We were blessed, Yolanda, though by what divine power, I can’t say. Maybe it came from the animals, maybe from what was inside Eddie and me. Do you understand?

Mamita asks, a note of wonder in her voice: Herb, this is going to be your painting?

Herb gestures at the charcoal drawing of the young man and says, Eddie and Herb together in the Normandy forest. I haven’t decided yet on our postures.

Herb and Mamita stare silently at the drawing of Eddie.

We didn’t expect to make it, says Herb. Especially if our side was taking the town, at any moment we were going to have crazed escaping Jerries crashing through there, into our hiding place. Eddie said, Herb, you better get rid of that dog tag. It had a little Star of David beside my name. As if it’s that simple to say what a person is and what prayers or other nonsense should be said over his corpse: us army private herbert felman, age 34, jew. We’re the Jerries, so we hate Jews, and it’s our duty to treat them with special savagery. There must be thousands of buried Star of David dog tags everywhere in Europe the war was fought, wherever Jewish soldiers found themselves in imminent danger of capture or close-range murder. Sure, I buried mine in that dirt, it must still be there. European kids search for and collect them now, I read somewhere. Well, probably because Eddie and I thought that might be our last night, that’s what made it happen, Yolanda. It was a feeling that had been growing inside us and between us since D-Day, as we made our way through the countryside to Paris. Just like it happens between young lovers in books by Chekhov, Tolstoy, or in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Have you read it, Yolanda? Oh, you should. Like being turned inside out and emptied out and filled back up with a new feeling that seems to have no border, that just wants to flow into your lover any way it can, just as you want your lover to flow into you. Yolanda, I didn’t think that was for people like me. I thought I was going to die, probably sooner than later, without experiencing young love, or let me call it, if you don’t mind, the rapture of love. It was the first rapture for each of us. Like Hemingway wrote in his novel, All things of the night cannot be explained by day. But I’m not going to try to explain. I just want to paint it.

Mamita, could it ever really have been that kind of love with Daddy? Or just with the Italian. Was it like that with the Mexican Honeywell technician?

Mamita laughs with surprised delight. All the animals will be in the painting too?

Yes, of course. And that extraordinary light, Yolanda, of evening falling deep inside an ancient forest, that light somehow also infiltrated by the flash and fire of lethal artillery explosions up above, not exactly visible but that you will see somehow extrasensorially, if that’s a word. I owe Eddie this painting, but I owe it to myself even more.

Oh Herb, it’s going to be beautiful and famous too. I just know it. Biblical, but not like Sargent, it will show the truth because it is true, hiding with the animals saved your life.

Oh no, not biblical! exclaims Herb with a laugh. But you’re absolutely right. If I ever surpass Sargent in only one painting, it will be this one.

What happened after?