In the Shadow of Blackbirds(48)

“They’re bad for your breathing, you know,” I said, nodding to his cigarette. “And if these masks do help fight the flu, that gaping hole in the front of yours isn’t going to do you a lick of good, either.”

“Who are you, my aunt Gertie?” He jerked his chin at me and bit down on the cigarette. “I bet you’re also part of the noble crusade to outlaw booze.”

“I just know some of the easier ways to avoid an early grave.” I set his rejected cookie back into the basket. “You should take care of yourself so you can heal. You’re still young. What are you, about nineteen? Twenty? Twenty-one at most?”

He stared me down. “Just light my match, sweetheart.” The cigarette fluttered in his lips as he spoke. “This little cigarette is the only thing keeping me from putting a bullet in my head.”

The chill in his gray eyes made me want to recoil, but I kept my face stoic. I lowered the basket to the ground and lit his cigarette for him with trembling fingers, as if he were an explosive I was afraid of detonating.

He exhaled a stream of smoke out of the side of his mask instead of directly into my face, and his eyes softened. “Thanks. You’re a doll.”

“You’re welcome.” I looked at his good hand. “Are those scars from the war?”

He exhaled another white cloud. “Barbed wire. We rolled entanglements between us and the enemy’s trenches, and it was sharp as hell. I came back from war a real cutup.”

I reached down for the basket, ignoring his dark pun, and felt his gaze burn against the top of my head.

“I’d give you a hand, doll,” he said, “but the Krauts already got it.”

“Stop it, Jones.” Carlos lowered his half-eaten cookie. “Don’t pay any attention to him, querida. He’s got a strange sense of humor.”

I picked up the basket. Jones was staring straight at me while he took a long drag on his glowing cigarette. I turned away and left the two of them behind. My back slouched more than before. Confidence left my stride. The harsh scent of bitterness surrounding that boy hurt worse than the smell of kerosene.

The other masked soldiers turned my way, their expressions expectant, as if I could truly do them good with a simple basketful of cookies. They welcomed me with misshapen, bandaged faces, empty sleeves where arms should have been, healing burns, gashes with red, crusted skin, crutches, absent legs, joints throbbing with rheumatism, and the taste of an indescribable weariness that made my own muscles ache.

Unlike Jones, most of the men were polite and sweet, offering quiet words of thanks.

I came upon a boy who was missing his left arm and leg. Between the bandages and his flu mask, his head was a jigsaw puzzle of intermingled gauze that swallowed up more than seventy-five percent of his face. He slept in one of the leather chairs, head tilted to the right, his chest rising and falling with easeful slumber.

“That one’s in the arms of Madame Morphine,” said the man sitting in the chair across from him—a graying fellow with an eye patch. “I’ll take his cookie for him.”

“I’ll save it for when he wakes up,” I said.

“He might not wake up for a couple hours.”

“If you were sleeping as peacefully as he is”—I handed the man his own fair share—“wouldn’t you be upset if someone else took your cookie?”

The man wrestled down his mask to show a wistful grin. “I would give far more than a cookie to be able to sleep as peacefully as that, little miss.”

“You don’t sleep well?”

“Not anymore I don’t. Not after they dropped me down in the trenches with the rats.”

I fetched another cookie out of the basket and nudged it into his hand.

He patted my elbow. “Thank you, miss. I won’t tell a soul.”

“Get some good sleep,” I said. “You’re not in the trenches anymore.”

My next stop was a table of three young men playing poker, their wounds less visible than the others’, although a pair of crutches leaned against the back of the shortest one’s chair. They sat with more ease than the rest of the convalescing fellows, and they enjoyed touching my fingers when I handed them their treats.

“Thank you, blue eyes.”

“Much obliged, girlie.”

“Aren’t you a sweet thing?”

The tallest of the group, a scarecrow of a man with a bulging Adam’s apple, sang “Pretty Baby” to me, and I blushed and thanked him and wished he would stop. In an armchair next to them, a curly-haired redhead with a leg wrapped in bandages leaned his forehead against the palm of his hand and wept silent tears.

“Would you like a cookie?” I asked him while Mr. Scarecrow kept on singing behind me.

The man didn’t answer. He didn’t even look my way. Another long tear rolled down his masked cheek and soaked into the gauze.

Mr. Scarecrow cut off his serenade mid-chorus. “That’s Mulroney. He cries all the time, which is pretty dang embarrassing to watch. You may as well keep walking so you don’t have to look at him.”

I bent down closer to the weeping soldier and put my hand on his arm. “I know how you feel. The world’s been getting the best of me, too.”

The soldier’s eyes met mine.

“Would you like to escape from your troubles for a while?” I asked. “I’d be happy to go find a book I can read to you. Maybe we can both take a short vacation from the real world.”