White Whale Read online

  White Whale

  Rose Christo

  1

  Cola mit Schuss

  I'd seen COs fit five, ten, fifteen men inside a tank before. Back in AIT they told us this wasn't a good idea. It's different when you're in the thick of it.

  Today there were twelve of us in the tank, still more than there should have been. It was hot, and crowded, and humid, and the plastic lining inside the aluminum walls smelled of sweat and Fox's cheap Tussy cologne. He was always wearing cologne, Fox, on account of "People these days don't know how to look presentable." I didn't know how he'd gotten that stuff past boot camp. I didn't know what cologne had to do with a person's looks. It's not as if you can see it once it's on.

  "Shit," Irish said.

  His shoulder banged into my shoulder. It was some sort of miracle. He was short, Irish, and I was the tallest guy in the platoon.

  The cupola swung open above our heads. I heard it clunking, hissing, heard the sergeant shouting. I ripped the M1 off my back and we all welled up through the cupola like floodwater. We leaned out of the top of the tank and the air around us popped and fizzed with .30s. The carbine jerked in my arms. The sky was gray and sweltering. The Jerries ran at us and two bullets caught on my vest, winding me. I sucked in a breath. I zeroed in on the dark blue uniforms and I filled them with lead. It was easier to think of them as uniforms when they buckled, when they fell. Easier to pretend they weren't real.

  We all dropped back into the tank and Fox slammed the cupola shut over our heads. The stench of gunpowder was fire and poison. The driver in the hull fisted the grip throttle and the tank jerked and sped up, my stomach lurching.

  "Shit," Irish said; but he was grinning like a moron, all teeth, all red hair.

  In the turret basket the loader and the gunner shouted frantically into their radios. They shouted over each other. I didn't know that command could hear either one of them. I shut my eyes and I prayed. I prayed: Kimamato minipina Kice-Munito. Maskawitehew.

  "Incoming!" the gunner yelled.

  Artillery whistled and banged outside the aluminum walls. I felt the heat of it. The whole tank rattled when the gunner fired back with sabots. The shockwaves echoed in my ears, pulsated in my fingers. The driver peeked through the vision blocks and then--no warning--we thrust forward and slammed into a pair of heavy gates.

  "God, God," Fox groaned.

  I opened my eyes. Fox’s hair was slick with sweat. It could have been gel, but the sergeant screamed at him last time he caught him with the Wildroot.

  "This isn't right," Fox had muttered later on, in the barracks. He was Italian, Fox, even had a hint of an accent. "They can't take my toiletries."

  "You mean that's piss in your hair?" Two-Ply had asked. And that had been the end of it.

  I jolted back to reality. The driver and the sergeant shouted at one another. The cupola slapped open again and burning gunpowder wafted thickly inside. We climbed out of the cupola in twos. The hot metal scalded my hands when I hoisted myself out onto the aluminum hood. I dropped to the parched ground. The air was hazy with gunsmoke, gray with dust, red with heat and blood. I smelled the roasting bodies, the exposed bones. I tasted them in the back of my throat.

  The sergeant signaled and we broke into fireteams, four to a team. Fox was team leader and I ran after him. Irish ran after me. The ammo belts on my shoulder felt heavier than gravity. I changed the M1 for the Browning. Underneath my vest my chest was sore. My dog tags were cold against my skin.

  The world toppled suddenly when the support team started screeching and their rifles banged and clanked around us. I ignored them, or tried. The grass was brown and dead under my feet. I followed Fox around a barbed wire fence, his dog tags jangling around his neck. A barracks opened up in front of us, puce-colored, brick. We ducked under a spray of bullets and I took the hammerless off my waist and fired. The guards outside the barracks fell over, first the one, then the other two.

  Irish shouldered open the front doors like a wrecking ball in miniature. A second fireteam joined us and we poured inside the building.

  I faltered. I couldn't help it. Wood bedframes lined every inch of the concrete walls. No mattresses. Hundreds and hundreds of people were piled together on the beds. They'd heard the racket. They lay staring at us with their gaunt eye sockets, their gaunt faces. I'd never seen a human body so thin before, let alone a hundred of them. For a moment I wondered whether they were corpses. But then I remembered: Corpses don't blink.

  "Where are the trucks?" Fox said. He swore. He told Milk to go outside and wait. Milk stumbled and tripped out the doors. He managed to slap himself with his Browning while a third fireteam came in after him.

  "What do we do?" Irish said. I had the idea he was enjoying himself. I hoped I was wrong.

  "American," I started to shout. The guys from the next fireteam over did the same. It was a frantic chorus, and the prisoners started climbing down from the beds. I saw kids my son's age and wanted to hurt somebody. He was six, Rabbit. I'd had him when I was eighteen, when I didn't know anything about being a grown man, never mind a father.

  "Hey!" Milk shouted, over by the doors.

  A moment later I heard the revving of truck engines, tires squealing on the ground outside. I looked to the wooden beds, where the more emaciated of the prisoners lay completely inert. Their arms and legs were brittle, skin stretched taut on bone. They couldn't walk, I realized. A couple of team leaders had realized the same. The team leaders hurried over to the beds. They picked up whoever they could reach.

  "Need the lieutenant," Fox muttered.

  I went toward the beds, the Browning dangling from my shoulder strap. I didn't know who to reach for. Hundreds and hundreds of bodies. Death on every waxy face.

  Out of one of the nooks in the wall a pair of eyes stared back at me. They were dark and brown and big, the eye pits sunken and black. I turned toward those eyes and their owner reached for me with skinny, childlike arms. He wasn't a child. He could have been my age; he could have been older. He looked much older, in the way that skeletons always look much older.

  I put my arms around him. I picked him up. He was lighter than my son, lighter than air. I worried I would break him if I pressed too hard. His wooly hair scratched my chin and glinted in the feeble light. The six-pointed star on his left sleeve glared at me and I felt as if I'd put it there myself.

  * * * * *

  We took the refugees to the 20th Field Hospital in Langenstein. I didn't think it was a good place for a field hospital. The tops of dead gray trees poked the bulbous white tarps of the plastic surgical tents. Nurses raced back and forth, little white hats flying off their heads, and hoisted the stretchers out of the backs of the transport trucks and onto their shoulders.

  I wanted to help them but the sergeant flew over to my squad and started screaming at us to get back to the barracks. Spittle flew out from under his quivering, bushy mustache. Milk stumbled into me; I stumbled out onto the road. We walked, bloody and sweaty and laden with weapons and filth.

  "Someone said we might be going to Austria next," Irish said, stretching his arms.

  Fox looked very tense today. Fox looked tense every day. If he ever took a moment to relax the sky would probably fall on our heads.

  Fox murmured, "I don't really speak Austrian..."

  Down the dirt road there was a convent on the edge of a sleepy village. The priest had said we could bunk outside, but only if we made sure not to look at the nuns. We drew in view of the blond daub building and I saw the bubbling spring beside it, the rolling, green-gray mountains behind it. The barracks around the convent were crude, collapsible Quonset huts, bulging aluminum roofs shining silver in the spring heat. The rest of the company was scattered outside of them: unpacking supplies, gathering for for
mation, even napping under the sun.

  "Tonio!" Irish shouted. He ran ahead of us, as bright as a child.

  "I'm hungry," Milk muttered.

  "You'd better shower before mess," Fox said. "Chief--"

  I didn't like that name. I'm not good with words but I'm good with my face. My eyebrows pinched together and I gave Fox a Look, the kind of Look that said I know where you sleep at night, and I can scalp you with my fingernails.

  "Alright, so that's," Fox said, just before he scampered away.

  Milk flashed me a smile, wan, small and secret. He trudged off.

  Before I made it back to the barracks the CO caught up with me and sent me off to wash the Jeeps. I was dirty enough, but I didn't mind. I liked the tedium: It meant I could think while I worked. I knelt by the mud-covered trucks and I lathered up a giant block of soap. A couple of guys from III Corps said hello when they passed by and I nodded.

  I kept thinking about those prisoners from the death camp. I kept thinking that I couldn't imagine how painful it was to starve to death. I kept thinking how crazy it was to try and kill off an entire race of people.

  I was scrubbing the grime off a hubcap when my hands slowed to a halt. Big brown hands with big brown fingers. A hundred years ago they could have been the hands of an oskapi, the hands of a peace chief or a war chief.

  Crazy.

  * * * * *

  After mess that evening it was early still, but the sergeant rounded us up and sent us on our nightly road march. Milk huffed and puffed at the far back of the line, staggering under the weight of the carbine and the AR. The only guy who walked faster than me was the huge guy from the rifle platoon, the one who looked lost all the time, like somebody had signed him up for the wrong army. Better us than the Jerries. I'd seen him lift an APDS on his own once. It wasn't pretty.

  When we'd finished marching we went to the showers. Afterward Fox and Irish went out for patrols, Fox winding the kinks out of his long, tan arms. I ought to have gone back to the barracks, but I went to the church instead. The friar was outside, sweeping the wood panel walkway. He gave me a strange look but I pretended I hadn't seen. I sat on the cool stone steps, my back to the stained glass doors. I watched the way the thin silver clouds swam through the chilly blue sky. Out over the mountains the fading sunlight looked like puddles of cherry brandy. I wondered if sunlight tasted like Cheerwine. I'd never tasted it before--not the sun, and not the Cheerwine. Back home we didn't get much of either.

  The friar pretended to drop his broom. The second time he did it I got up and walked away. I guess I'd made him uncomfortable.

  On the smooth dirt road the bush crickets sang their night song. I couldn't see the sun anymore but I could feel its misty breath on the back of my neck. The clouds spilled hazy purple shadows on the ground. They eclipsed my shadow until I forgot it was there. I thought maybe I wasn't there. I could have been home with my son. I could have taken him on the wharf and shown him the beluga whales. Someday he'd be a fisherman like his old man. We'd go out boating for sheefish and the migratory charr.

  I stopped walking when I realized I was at the field hospital. A couple of surgeons sat outside the bulky green watering hole, laughing over a joke I couldn't hear. A nurse in a dirty uniform knelt and dumped out bedpans.

  I went up to the nurse and she turned so red, I wondered whether she'd forgotten to breathe.

  "Are they alright?" I asked her.

  "Well," she said, very matter-of-fact, "would you be alright if you'd been starved for months?" She ran her fingers through her pin curls and I knew she wasn't angry with me. "I heard from your captain, you know. The block leader just surrendered."

  "He did?" I asked. I didn't know whether it was a good thing.

  The nurse frowned at me. "Are you off duty?"

  "For a while," I hedged. My mother had been a nurse. I still felt accountable to them.

  "Well," the woman said slowly. "I haven't had a cigarette in days..."

  I caught on. "Where do I take them?"

  "Just back there," the nurse said with relief. She pointed at a DIY tent, plasticky and beige, before she loaded my arms with the empty bedpans. "The disinfectant's in the blue container, hon. Just leave 'em back there when you're done."

  "Alright," I said wearily.

  She bustled off. I wondered whether there was a sign on my forehead that read At Your Service.

  I took the pans out behind the tent. I knelt and twisted the rusted spigot in the ground. A weak bubble of cold water trickled out through the tap. I doused the pans in sticky blue soap and scrubbed them with a colorless brush. By the time I'd finished my hands were so raw, I finally understood the phrase Red Indian.

  I dried my hands on an old towel and stood. The back door to the DIY was propped open and I could smell medicine wafting outside. I reached for the doorknob and meant to pull it shut.

  Through the doorway I could see a woman and two men lying in paper-thin clothes, on paper-thin beds. The woman tossed restlessly in her sleep. I couldn't tell whether the younger of the two men was awake or not. A dull ache found its way inside my chest.

  The elder of the two men looked straight at me. His shirt was open. He was hooked up to clear plastic wires, only one of which pumped blood into his translucent veins. His dark eyes were dim holes in his skeletal face. What was left of his hair resembled patches of brown wool. Even his mouth looked bony, thin lips stretched over too-big teeth.

  I went over to his bedside and I knelt on the floor. His mouth pulled in a way that might have been a smile, or an attempt at a smile. I wanted to tell him to save his energy. I wanted to ask him where he got off smiling when the mere thought of the hell we'd pulled him out of was enough to make my hands shake. I hid my hands between my knees. I told myself he probably didn't speak English.

  "American?" he asked, in a voice like sandpaper.

  Everybody knows that word. American. It doesn't matter what language you speak. It's more of a concept than a word. I love that concept. I hate that concept. I hate it with my whole heart. All boys grow up to resent their fathers. That doesn't mean they love them any less.

  "Indian," I said.

  I didn't know why I'd said it. I didn't know that he even knew what an Indian was. I made sure to keep my voice down so I didn't wake the other two on their cots.

  "Indianer?" the man said.

  I reached into my pocket. I had a candy bar on me, a toasted rice bar. I always had candy on me. At mail call the guys in my squad kept throwing away unwanted gifts from home. If it was licorice or marshmallows, lemon puffs or cream cookies or peppermints, I put on my Look and the candy found its way to me.

  I peeled back the paper on the candy bar. I held it out and the man took it. His hands were like sallow paper strung over frail bones, sinewy veins. I could see the pulse beating in his wrist. I could see the concave hollow of his hairless chest and I saw red, my hands shaking, my head tight with pity and pain. People weren't supposed to do this to other people. We were the civilized animals. We wore clothes and we drove cars and that made us special. That made us different.

  He managed two bites before he gave the candy bar back to me. When I think about it: I don't know how his teeth didn't break.

  * * * * *

  At night in the barracks we pulled the lamp low over the middle of the floor and played poker. We were quiet about it, because the captain was outside, and if he walked by our Quonset hut and heard any noise it was demerits for all of us. Our squad had enough demerits already, what with Fox's cologne and Two-Ply's Diarrhea of the Mouth.

  Fox shuffled the cards with ragged fingernails and Two-Ply, still in his bunk, swung his leg down and kicked me lightly in the elbow.

  "Hey, Chief," he said, when I didn't react.

  Milk stared at his hand and started sweating, not a good look on a guy that pale. His poker face needed practice. Irish glanced from face to face with quick, cunning eyes.

  "You should answer him," Fox mumbled, his head down.


  "What?" I finally said.

  "You aren't a citizen, are you?" Two-Ply said. "Can't vote or nothing?"

  "Don't start," Fox said.

  "I'll open," Irish said.

  "I can't vote," I said.

  "Bullshit," Irish said.

  I wasn't in the mood. I put my hand down.

  "You an Eskimo?" Two-Ply said.

  "He ain't an Eskimo," said Pogue, hanging his glasses on his night chain. He was a five-and-diver, signed up for the college credits. Most of these guys didn't think much of college boys.

  "He ain't an Eskimo," Two-Ply said, wondering out loud. "Damn."

  "I'm from Alaska," I said. I drew three cards.

  "But you're not an Eskimo," Two-Ply said.

  "I'm an Indian," I said. I didn't say: I'm Cree. I didn't say: I'm not a citizen and I still got a draft letter.

  "Will you draw already?" Fox said to Two-Ply. He concentrated very hard on his hand, his small eyes screwed together. "What's it matter if he's an Indian? You're colored, and I'm a Guido, and Pogue over there fell off the back of a turnip truck."

  "No, I didn't," Pogue said stiffly.

  "Least you aren't a Gypsy," Irish muttered.

  "I'm not even playing," Two-Ply said. "I'm all the way over here."

  "Then shut up for a second," Fox said. "I can't think."

  It didn't matter in the end, because Irish won the pot. He cackled like a five-year-old and scooped the chips his way and Milk--who had a weak constitution about these things--turned green, because he'd gambled away his postage money, and his mom liked to know how he was doing.

  We shut off the lamp and got into the bunks and I lay on the cardboard mattress beneath me, eyes on the weak wood frame above my head. I folded my hands on my chest and kept thinking about the death camp, the barbed wire, the men as skinny as children and the children as skinny as babies. I didn't know how the rest of the company could talk and laugh and joke afterward like nothing had happened. Maybe they were desensitized to it. Maybe that was supposed to be the point. All that training, all those screaming drill masters. They teach us words like Jerries and Charlies so the enemy doesn't have a name, a face. You pull the trigger and you're just going through the motions. Only you aren't. It's still a human life you've got to take. There's no getting around it. If you want to save the guy who's dying, you have to kill the guy who's killing him. No matter what you do, somebody's going to wind up dead.