Beautiful Ruins (27)

Richards had been listening to me gripe for days, and he thought I was all talk, that I could no more shoot myself in the foot than I could levitate. “Don’t be stupid,” Richards said. “War’s over.”



That was what was so perfect, I told him. Who would suspect it now? Earlier in my war, a foot-shot might not have been enough to send me home, but now, with the thing winding down, I liked my odds. “I’m going to do it.”



Richards indulged me. “Fine. Do it. I hope you bleed to death in the stockade.”



“Death would be better than this pain.”



“Then forget your foot, shoot yourself in the head.”



We’d stopped just short of this village, and decamped in the rubble of an old barn on a vine-covered hillside. Richards and I set up OP on a small ledge that served as our cover. I sat there debating with Richards which part of my foot I should shoot, as easily as a man might talk about where to have lunch, and that’s when a scraping came from the road below us. Richards and I looked at one another silently. I grabbed my carbine, pushed up to the ledge, and rolled my sight along the road below us until I landed on the approaching figure of . . .



A girl? No. A woman. Young. Nineteen? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? I couldn’t say in the dusky light, only that she was lovely, and that she seemed to be bouncing alone on this narrow dirt road, brown hair swept up and pinned in back, face narrow at the chin, rising over flushed cheeks to a pair of eyes framed by bursts of black lash, like two lines of oil smoke. She was small, but everyone in the bruised shin of Italy was small. She didn’t appear to be starving. She wore a wrap over a dress and it pains me to not recall the color of that dress, but I believe it was a faded blue, with yellow sunflowers, though I can’t honestly say it was so, only that I remember it that way (and I find it suspicious that every woman in the Europe of my memory, every whore, grandmother, and waif I encountered, wears the same blue dress with yellow sunflowers).



“Halt,” Richards called. And I laughed. Here was a vision on a road beneath us and Richards comes up with Halt? Had I my wits beneath me instead of brutalized feet, I’d have steered him to the Bard’s more existential Who’s there? and we’d have done the whole of Hamlet for her.



“Don’t shoot, nice Americans,” called the girl from the road, in pristine English. Unsure where this “Halt” had come from, she addressed the trees on both sides, then our small ledge before her. “I am walking to see my mother.” She held up her hands and we rose on the hillside above her, rifles still trained. She lowered her hands and said that her name was Maria and that she was from the village just over the hill. Despite a slight accent, her English was better than most of the guys’ in our unit. She was smiling. Not until you see a smile like that do you understand how much you’ve missed it. All I could think about was how long it had been since I’d seen a smiling girl on a country road.



“Road’s closed. You’ll have to walk around,” Richards said, pointing with his rifle back the way she’d come.



“Yes, fine,” she said, and asked if the road to the west was open. Richards said it was. “Thank you,” she said, and started back up the road. “God bless America.”



“Wait,” I yelled. “I’ll walk you.” I took off my wool helmet liner and patted down my hair with spit.



“Don’t be an idiot,” Richards said.



I turned, tears in my eyes. “Goddamn it, Richards, I am walking this girl home!” Of course, Richards was right. I was being an idiot. Leaving my post was desertion, but at that moment I’d have spent the rest of my war in the stockade to walk six feet with that girl.



“Please, let me go,” I said. “I’ll give you anything.”



“Your Luger,” Richards said without hesitation.



I knew this was what Richards would ask for. He coveted that Luger as much as I coveted dry socks. He wanted it as a souvenir for his son. And how could I blame him? I had been thinking of the son I didn’t have when I bought the Luger at a little Italian market outside Pietrasanta. With no son back home, I’d figured to show it to my wayward girlfriends and my lousy nephews after too many whiskeys, when I’d pretend not to want to talk about my war, then would pull the rusted Luger from a bureau and tell the lazy shits how I wrestled it from a crazy German who killed six of my men and shot me in the foot. The black-market economy of German war trophies depended on such deception: retreating, starving Germans trading their broken weapons and their identifying insignia to starving Italians for bread, and the starving Italians in turn selling them as trophies to Americans like Richards and me, starved for proof of our heroism.



Sadly, Richards never got to give the Luger to his boy, because six days before we shipped home, me to listen to Cubs games on the radio, him to his wife and son, Richards died ingloriously of a blood infection he acquired in a field hospital, after surgery for a ruptured appendix. I never even got to see him after he went in for a fever and gut ache, our moron lieutenant simply informing me that he’d died (“Oh, Bender. Yeah. Look. Richards is dead”), the last and best of my friends to go in my war. And if this marks the end of Richards’s war, I offer this epilogue: A year later I found myself driving through Cedar Falls, Iowa, parking in front of a bungalow with an American flag on the brick porch, removing my cap, and ringing the doorbell. Richards’s wife was a short, boxy thing and I told her the best lie I could imagine, that his last words had been her name. And I handed his little boy the box with my Luger in it, said his daddy had taken it off a German soldier. And as I looked down on those ginger cowlicks, I ached for my own son, for the heir I would never have, for someone to redeem the life I was already planning to waste. And when Richards’s God-sweet boy asked whether his father had been “brave at the war,” I said, with all honesty, “Your dad was the bravest man I ever knew.”