Chapter 7
The battle for Monte Cassino lasts nine days. Clark’s swift return from the road to Rome drives a wedge between the Germans’ line of resupply and the soldiers who had swarmed over the ruined abbey. Turns out they were out of shells.
They don’t see most of it - Phillips orders them swiftly out of combat and back to the job they’re supposed to be doing. They listen at a distance to the sound of guns and other men dying, heads bent over their own particular tasks. A whole world of soldiers had been ordered for when the Americans abandoned Monte Cassino to fill in the gaps left behind: Gurkha Rifles from Nepal, Maoris from New Zealand, engineers from South Africa, two whole divisions of Poles, and the road must be cleared for them to arrive safely.
Rogers and Dugan steal away each night to take down road signs and put up false ones, and spy on the Germans as they shuffle troops across the Gustav line. To keep their feathers from ruffling around Cassino, Jim and Gabe take to the radios, casting dummy signal traffic for the Nazis that a seaborne landing is being planned, north of Rome. From Carter’s double agent, they receive word that the 26th and 90th Panzer divisions have been quietly ordered to the coast.
They all breathe easier, except for Jim; as soon as the Indian troops arrive they’re being sent back down the hill in bags, and Jim sweats and curses for a full day until Gabe tells him that the radio’s under control.
“You sure?” Jim asks, hesitant
“Go do that voodoo that you do,” Gabe says, already replacing the headset over his ears, but he smiles when Jim claps him hard on the back and heads to the medical tent to offer his help.
And Barnes, well - Captain America spends two days up on Snakehead Ridge testing just how bulletproof Stark’s costume is, and he and Monty and Dernier are among the first inside what used to be one hell of a church and is now one hell of a tomb.
-
The strangest sight after it’s all over isn’t Captain America, still in full battle kit, tossing boulders over his head so the rest of them can drag dead Germans and Italians out of the rubble so they can be laid out. It’s the bear some Polish soldiers from the 22nd Artillery Supply Company bring along on a little leash, carrying crates of ammunition on its back.
Jim watches as the thing snuffles its way through the scrub. It’s a brown bear, smallish, and the harness it wears makes it look somewhat like a paratrooper.
“They said their Sergeant Major’s a real bear in the morning,” Barnes murmurs, and Jim almost chokes on the stick of Wrigley’s he’s just jammed in his mouth.
“We had a bear,” Dugan says, ignoring him. “It danced.”
“‘Bout as well as you, probably,” Jim says.
“Better,” says Dugan generously, as if he’s more proud of the circus bear than he is of himself. “Actually, we set it up so’s we wrestled. Part of the strongman act. I won, of course.”
“I wonder if Captain America could beat a bear,” Gabe says, clapping Barnes on the shoulder. Then he lets his hand slide off, like he’s been stung. Maybe it’s that other troops are watching and wouldn’t want to see a Negro with his hands on Captain America, or maybe it’s the funny look Rogers has just given them.
“I have it on good authority that bear ranks only a Private,” Monty informs them. “It could get in real trouble for striking a superior officer.”
“Like Captain America’s any more of a - ” Barnes starts, then clamps his mouth shut.
“They’re talking medals,” Monty goes on serenely. “Mind you, I was under the impression the Americans gave those out for putting your boots on the proper feet.”
One of the Poles, meanwhile, has approached, holding out a hand to Captain America. He says something unintelligible. Jim glances at Jones, who is their default linguist, and Jones shrugs and shakes his head. The Pole stops and slaps his chest. “Jakub!” he says. He draws himself up and pronounces, in his best American accent, quoting the announcer from the USO reels, “And now, the Captain America! Hero of Allies!”
Barnes smiles and softens a little, and then Jakub shakes his hand. Then Jones’s. Jones is somewhat surprised. The rest of the Poles gather soon enough and they talk using mostly enthusiastic hand signals and fragments of English. One of them turns to talk to a comrade of his in another language, one that’s familiar. Barnes answers in surprise; Jim watches the Polish man blink back, startled, and then launch into a torrent of what’s got to be Yiddish.
Jim, meanwhile, isn’t quite sure how to converse outside of Morse. He watches the rest of the guys and shakes a few hands, then defaults to taking out his pack of Lucky Strikes - a popular and coveted brand among soldiers of all nationalities and stripes - and handing them around. He’s just paused to light up his own when he turns and hears a shout.
The bear has approached and now rears up right in front of him, pawing at the air. Even Dugan takes a step back, and Barnes has his pistol cocked before Jim can even blink. Monty dances away, almost tripping over a clod of frozen dirt, and Rogers’s head jerks back in surprise.
Jim freezes. The cigarette hangs trembling from his lip and he stares at the animal, which, while maybe small for a bear, is taller than he is when on its hind legs. Its breath smells like that of his brother’s dog after it’s been snuffling around the chicken coop: sharp with hay and pungently metallic.
They haven’t cut its claws. They’re sharp and black, like polished fingernails. Its eyes are huge.
Jim hears laughter. It’s the Poles.
“Wojtek,” one of them says chidingly, and starts talking to the bear, which swings its head around ponderously, like it’s disappointed. The soldier strokes it behind the ear affectionately. He says something to Barnes.
Barnes has his pistol lowered, now, and cautiously tucks it back into his belt. He says something in Yiddish to the Polish soldier, who must also be a Jew. The Polish soldier grins and makes a gesture, and Barnes laughs, startled.
“He wants you to give the bear a cigarette,” he tells Jim.
Jim blinks. “What?”
“Wojtek,” says one of the soldiers, gesturing.
“Uh, the bear’s name is Wojtek, Wojtek wants a cigarette.”
Tentatively, slowly, Jim reaches into his pocket. He wonders if this is a joke. He shakes a cigarette out into his palm and then holds it out toward the bear, the tip in his fingers. The bear swings its head away.
The Pole says something, and Barnes translates, “You gotta light it first.”
“You serious?” Jim said, out of the corner of his mouth. Barnes shrugs.
Jim thinks for a second and then he says, “Okay. Why doesn’t Captain America give it to him?”
“Captain America!” comes the shout, repeated until it echoes out through the ranks of soldiers.
And that’s how the war photographer attached to one of the companies winds up snapping a photograph of Captain America handing a lit cigarette to a bear.
“Yasher koah!” the Polish soldier says.
“What’s that?” Dugan mutters.
“Good going,” Barnes says, lighting a cigarette of his own and watching the bear puff and snuffle. “It means, good going.”
“Yasher koah,” Jim says.
-
He doesn’t see Sergeant Barnes until the next night, lurking out near the latrines. He startles when he sees Jim, and then relaxes. “Whaddaya doin’ out here?” Barnes asks.
“Could ask you the same thing,” Jim says, and accepts one of Barnes’ cigarettes. They’re back in the main camp, which is about as noisy as any other base Jim’s ever been stationed at, although if Barnes is hiding he picked a decently secluded spot - even if it smells like piss, which was Jim’s reason for being there.
“Everyone wants to shake my damn hand,” Barnes mumbles, around his own cigarette. “I took off the costume but half the guys wandering past’re wondering where Captain America is and when they can shake his damn hand. I was going out of my head, and then -”
He stops talking abruptly and rubs a hand through his hair. Jim can sympathize. He feels about ready to shake off his own skin, if only to get rid of the smell of blood and shit that feels like it’s painted on him. That morning the Germans had tried to regain the railroad station in Cassino town through some deception of their own: a thick blanket of smoke had been laid down at dawn, and the battalion guarding it had been caught unaware. Jim can still smell it all over his hands, acrid even over the cigarette smoke and the piss stench. They might’ve won the hill, but the shooting hasn’t stopped.
He feels like he could fall down and sleep a hundred years, but he felt like that for the last three nights running and hadn’t managed much sleep at all.
Barnes looks around, furtive, and steps close. “They’re sending us to France,” he says. “Something big in the works they’re calling Overlord. They don’t know where we come in yet but -”
Jim leans back, passes a hand over his face. Barnes is close enough Jim can smell soap and the stuff he’s got slicking his hair back and something else, something faint and sour that makes him feel like he’s back in the med tent. Barnes doesn’t notice; his attention’s been caught by men passing some distance off, loud and laughing. Jim puts an elbow in his side just to startle away that stillness.
“Come on,” he says, and flicks his cigarette away.
Barnes waits while he pisses, and they walk together back towards their little city of tents. Carter’s made an appearance; Barnes takes one look at her and Rogers and Jones cuddled up over a densely marked up notepad, and makes a beeline for the card game being dealt on the other side of the fire.
Jim lingers, eyes on the bottles of beer lined up in front of Dugan’s tent. Even Carter has one, dark and glinting in her pale hands. He’d give just about anything for coffee instead, or the tea he gave up drinking around the same time he gave up speaking Japanese, the bitter barley they grew themselves next to the chicken houses. He takes a bottle though, when Barnes looks up and realizes Jim’s still standing there at the edge of the light.
They’ve played three rounds and Dugan’s lost as many packs of cigarettes when Dernier appears and proclaims, “We’re going to town.”
“Where’s town,” Barnes asks, with a crooked smile, like he’s expecting someone to quiz him about his geography again. He’s been all crooked smiles, back in the camp - his hands steady around his cards. If Jim hadn’t seen him hunched and crazed-looking down by the latrines, he’d think Barnes hadn’t a care in the world.
“A little while,” Dernier says, vague. “We have been invited. Captain America has been invited.”
Barnes grimaces, but is overruled - in short order there’s five of them piling into a Jeep, beer bottles clinking between their their feet. Gabe and Carter had stayed behind, but to Jim’s surprise so had Monty: he’d lifted one eyebrow, said, “I know better,” and turned back to the letter he was writing to his wife.
To call their destination a town is a stretch. Most of Cassino has been bombed to hell and back, and the countryside is salted with mines. They have to drive for a while to find anywhere that doesn’t look like a crater, and the place makes Fresno seem like New York City. There are little shops, closed now, and Dernier translates the signs for them: dry goods, livery. Looks like it was a nice place to live, back before the war showed up.
They’re going to a home on the edge of town, that some of the Poles managed to give Dernier directions to. It's set back a ways back but even so Jim can hear the sound of music and laughter bright and clear, all the way down the road. Three stories, rough hewn brick, vines climbing up the gate that Jim touches hesitantly as they pass. They’re dead, of course. It’s the middle of winter and the place has a familiar look that he doesn’t piece together until they’re nearly at the door: it’s the look of a farm with no one there to care for it.
Inside is warm, and bright, and full of girls. A cheer goes up as they walk through the door: “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” and they’re drawn into a group in short order. Poles and Americans and some Brits, and the girls -
Even the girls have seen the Captain America reels, somewhere or other.
Dugan hands over a few of the AM-lire notes they were all issued once they didn’t die on the beach landing, and bottles make their way onto the big, rough-cut table. The liquor inside is clear as water and tastes like gasoline, and makes even Dugan cough and pound his chest after the first swig. Jim’s a little more cautious with his glass, but everyone around them wants to drink with Captain America and his famous commandos, and it’s not too long before they’ve emptied the first bottle and then the second between all of them.
For a while it’s nice, cozy. Jim’s tucked in the corner between Rogers, who brought a sketchbook and isn’t doing much talking, and Dernier, whose attention is on one of the Italian girls, gracefully allowing him to pour her drinks. It’s fine with Jim, even if he can feel some of the Americans staring at him once in awhile. He doesn’t have too much to say anyway, and when he leans back in his chair, away from the liquor and perfume smell drifting across the table, he can smell the herbs hanging in bunches along the beam over his head, still fragrant with summertime.
There are light spots on the wall where pictures hung. Jim wonders what they’d been.
Barnes is the first one to catch on. He’d been dancing with one of the girls, but bowed out when they came to the end of the record. He wanders back over to their table and puts one heavy hand on the back of Rogers’ chair before straightening up and tucking it back in his pocket.
“You brought us to the cathouse,” he says to Dernier.
“Quoi?” Dernier says, peering up at him unsteadily.
“Putain,” Dugan says, and Dernier laughs. He’s got a girl under his arm, and says something to her. French has enough in common with Italian that they both think whatever it is, is funny.
Jim’s face feels hot, from the grappa and the music and the heated air in the room. He’d thought - well, he didn’t think much of it, other than that the farm didn’t belong to these girls, but maybe to the old woman who’d been sitting in the other room, exchanging bottles for lire. Exchanging something, at least.
There’s a touch on his shoulder: dark hair, big smile. The swell of her breasts is soft and enticing under the open collar of her dress. “Vuoi ballare?” she asks. Monty had known better.
“No, no,” he fumbles, “Grazie.” He turns back to his drink but she stays and rubs a hand over his shoulders.
“Whassamatter,” Dugan says, “you don’t want some company?”
“I got a,” Jim says, slurring a little, “I got a girl,” but then he looks up and sees the expression on Dugan’s face. Dugan looks away, casts that gaze across the crowded room. Someone’s changed the record and it scratches restlessly before the trumpets start to play again: a distant, brassy honk. One muddy, booted foot is braced on the empty chair next to him. He’s sitting with his legs spread wide, one broad hand on his thigh. The chair he’s sprawled in looks like it’d been hand carved.
“Get your damn feet off that,” Jim tells him.
Dugan snorts into his drink and scrapes the sole of his boot idly down the leg of the chair.
The woman has maneuvered, meanwhile, around Jim’s seat, and settles onto one of his knees, glancing behind her curiously to see his reaction. He curls a hand around her waist instinctively, to keep her balanced. She smells of cheap lavender scent, not the gardenia Mika used. There’s a smoky harshness to the stuff.
“Son’ tutti finocchi?” she says, curiously, looking away from Jim and leaning over to Dernier.
The thud of Dugan’s boot on the stone flooring is hard enough to make the record jump, and also the girl on Jim’s knee. “Who you calling finocchi?” he snarls.
Jim looks round automatically for Gabe, but he’s not here, so there’s Dernier, his mouth uncomfortably half-open. He lets out an uneasy chuckle: the same in every language, it means he doesn’t quite know what to say. Barnes, too, has stopped and is looking over at them, his drink tipped halfway toward his mouth. He and Rogers both are frozen.
Jim wonders if ‘finocchi’ means something like ‘Jap.’
The girl has stood up and says, “Eh, lo so bene, baffo?”
Dugan’s flushed red all the way up to his hairline, and he reaches out and snakes an arm around the woman’s waist before Jim can react, palm flat on the warm curve of her hip where it’s been resting on Jim’s leg. She squeals indignantly at the rough treatment, staggering back into Jim to keep from being yanked sideways.
Jim’s hand goes up to grab Dugan’s wrist - and stops when he meets his eyes instead.
“I’ll show you how much of a finocchio I am,” Dugan says to the girl, and he’s puffed up now, grinning with one side of his mouth, “Come va cinque lire, eh?”
Rogers’ chair scrapes against the stone floor, loud enough that some of the men look towards them, curious. Jim looks past Dugan and sees that the other girls were looking already: hard eyes, inscrutable. “How about ten,” Rogers says, flat.
The girl pulls free of Dugan and Jim both. She looks at the short, skinny man standing across from her, his fists pressing against his notebook, open on the table. He’s smudging his sketches: three of the prostitutes huddled together on the low bench under the window. Jim and Dugan and Dernier, in profile. Barnes, dancing, smiling - arm up over his head to twirl the girl.
Half the room’s fallen quiet and is looking at them. Rogers just stands there, chin tipped up. His face is flushed and his hand is balled up in a fist around the pencil he still holds, but he holds out the other one to the girl and gives a small, tight smile.
Jim’s eyes dart up to Barnes, standing over Rogers’ shoulder. They lock eyes, but Barnes doesn’t say anything. He has that look again, that Jim saw by the latrines - wild-eyed, and empty all the way through.
Somehow this gambit works: the girl sidles over to Steve, looks down at him. She runs her hands through his hair, turning his head back curiously. He’s blushing like crazy now, and he doesn’t look happy, but he sets his jaw and submits to her scrutiny. She laughs.
Dugan laughs too. “Have at her, finocchio,” he says, and Barnes lunges for him.
Rogers checks him neatly - shifting back so his bony shoulder hits Barnes right where the star sits on his costume. They both stagger forward and it’s enough to break the moment. It isn’t until Rogers is halfway up the big creaking staircase, leading the girl by the hand, that Jim realizes he’s still halfway out of his own seat, his fists clenched and shaking.
-
Rogers doesn’t come back downstairs for a long time. Barnes doesn’t come back inside at all. Jim finds him by accident, stumbling outside to piss. He goes out the kitchen door and the sound of the wind shaking through the wheat fields points his feet left, towards an outhouse he doesn’t remember is on a different continent and not theirs anymore, and is startled when a voice calls: “Steve?”
Jim stops. He can’t see anything. The faint haze of starlight above his head can’t cut through the black night. He can’t even see his own hands. “No,” he says, after a moment.
“Oh,” Barnes says. Jim turns towards the sound of his voice and then stumbles over his own feet, going down hard on the frosty ground. After that it seems only reasonable to go the rest of the way. Flat on his back, the stars look much brighter.
Somewhere close, there’s the sound of liquid sloshing against glass. “Gimme some’a that,” Jim says.
“Think you’ve had enough,” Barnes says.
“Yep,” Jim concedes, and Barnes takes another swig from his bottle, invisible in the dark.
The ride back to base is subdued. Dernier had gone upstairs too, and Jim can smell it on him, that salt smell, sweat and sex. That harsh lavender perfume. Jim puts his head out the side of the car and thinks of gardenias, and home -
He thinks of December in California. He’d been twenty-two for a little more than a month. He’d borrowed his chichi’s car to take Mika to the ocean. She’d worn a blue dress, and as they drove she’d put her hand out the window as if she could touch the fields they passed, sunlight sparkling over the bare skin of her arm. The air was sweet with garlic and warm until they got closer to Monterey, when the garlic fields gave way to strawberries and artichokes all the way across the horizon, great thistley bushes with blooming purple hearts.
He’d meant to ask her to marry him that day, but maybe it was for the best that he hadn’t.
“Je suis désolé,” Dernier says.
Jim opens his eyes. The headlights cut a white circle through the night. “What?” he asks.
“I know you are not the faggot,” Dernier tells him, and takes a hand off the wheel to pat Jim’s knee. The car jerks a little, and from the back Dugan lets out a rumbly little complaint.
“Finocchio,” Jim says, realizing.
“Oui,” Dernier says, rueful. “The girl, she did not realize. I say to her later, that one is not the faggot. So no one will think this of you.” He pats Jim’s knee again.
Jim looks over his shoulder. Barnes’ head is tipped back, face turned towards the window. All Jim can see is the line of his jaw and the faintest slice of his eyes, shadowed so even that bright blue looks black. Dugan’s in between him and Rogers, like a chaperone.
“S’okay,” Jim mumbles, and that’s all he knows until there’s an arm around his shoulders, and a soft voice saying, “On your feet, Private.”
The Jeep is parked; they’re back at base. It’s quiet all around them, the fires gone out, the shooting stopped. Their little circle of tents is dark and silent.
His cot is cold and hard, harder and colder than the ground had been back at the farm. Barnes goes so far as to drape Jim’s blanket over him, until Jim can shove a hand at his knees and tell him to fuck off. But he doesn’t fall asleep when Barnes obeys: stays shivering in his cot, staring mindlessly. There’s a sliver of light - not even light, really, just a softer shade of gray where the canvas flap hasn’t closed completely. Gabe in his own cot is invisible but for the light soles of his feet, sticking out from under his lump of blankets.
“Bucky, come on,” Rogers says.
“M’goin to bed,” Barnes says. He sounds muffled, already in the tent he and Rogers share. Rogers must still be outside, standing in the cold. “Go fuckin shower or something.”
“Buck, you know I didn’t -”
“Sure,” Barnes says, “yeah sure, you didn’t.”
There’s a rustling noise, and a soft thud: it sounds like Rogers has thrown something at Barnes, who grunts faintly. “Take a look,” Rogers says.
Silence for a while. Gabe shifts on his cot, flopping over onto his back. The world rolls under Jim’s shoulders, less steady than the ships he’s taken to Italy. His stomach sugary sweet with booze. The sound of turning pages, just the barest whisper at the edge of Jim’s hearing.
“You drew her picture,” Barnes says. “That’s -”
“Yeah,” Rogers says steadily. “I did.”
“Well,” Barnes says, very quiet. “Well, whaddayou know from girls, anyway.”
“Not much,” Rogers says, and Jim hears the heavy flap of their tent close.
Whatever Rogers says next is too faint for Jim to hear and he drifts a little, lost in the waves of his own drunk. He doesn’t mean to listen, and for a while doesn’t realize he is: to the faint, barely-heard sound of skin on skin, to the creak of the cot. It mixes into his own dreams, that salt smell, the frothy surface of the Monterey Bay, Mika’s hot skin on his own, sunlight on her arms. Loving her in the sunshine, in the cab of his chichi’s truck. Then Barnes groans - a soft stutter of sound - like ice in Jim’s stomach, and he opens his eyes to find himself alone and cold and so lonely he has to close his eyes again, shut them tight against the swell of feeling bubbling up in his chest.
He hears someone crying, and in his confusion thinks it’s him, maybe. It’s not until morning - the weather turned back to shit, icy hail and them in wet socks after they tramp out to the latrines, him and Gabe eating field rations in their tent - that he realizes it was Barnes instead.