Chapter 10
Bocage country.
Gabe saw it written before he ever heard it spoken, in a briefing supplied to them back in Italy. He’d been sifting languages for weeks, parsing out the differences between the Italian he’s learning and the French he knows, translating the Hydra documents they found at Cassino, picking up the odd Polish or Nepali fragments. But reading the briefing he’d thought bocage first the way his mother might say it, the way his parents speak at home when there aren’t white folks to listen in. Bow-cage, the snap of the w, the long drift of a, boxed in. A cage of Belgian gates and Teller mines, of bunkers and pillboxes. Of Panzers bulldozing through vineyards, of towns and churches smashed to pieces from a great height.
The word sounds softer in Jacques’ mouth, as many things do, even when he’s so hot about something he spits syllables at Gabe and Monty, too impatient to wait for translation. Gabe himself doesn’t have much of an accent, just the faintest tinge that comes out mostly when he’s around his parents, or when he’s very drunk. Not quite Georgia, and not quite New York - his words possess all of their Arr’s, wrap crisply around the Tee-Aiches, his verbs rounded out respectably by their proper Gee’s. Flat, the way Jim sounds - ironed out Americana. Flat, like Steve, whose clothes have never been anything but threadbare and didn’t have the luxury Bucky did, of sounding like a punk hanging out on Delancey Street.
He’d asked Jim once to teach him some Japanese, but Jim had looked at him like he was crazy. “Isn’t gonna do you any good,” he said, and then admitted he didn’t remember it much anymore. Like he said, it hadn’t done him much good.
Bocage country. They’d seen photos of it, taken from the air. High above it looks like a patchwork quilt, like the inside of a cheap fur coat. Tear away the lining and underneath you find thousands of scraps, stitched crazily together from the leftover pieces of nicer coats. Mabel May had had one like it, and if you passed a hand over it the wrong way (as Mabel often had), you could feel where the edges were, where stiff bristly brown hairs ceased and then started again.
They’re hedgerows, or at least they started that way. A labyrinth of fields and pastures connected by sunken roads and ditches. In some places the trees grow fifteen feet high and form a bower over their heads, a welcome bit of shade as the days grow a little warmer. Ambush points are everywhere, and they lay traps in likely places: any space of flat ground you could anchor a mortar, a blind turn big enough to hide a tank. A few times they’re nearly surprised themselves.
Going south and west is slow travel, hampered by the thick walls of the bocage. For every kilometer they cross ten, maybe twelve hedgerows, each one a routine of scouting, climbing, falling, mining. Mostly when they peer over the green they only see the ruined countryside. Bombs have been fewer here than near the port of Calais, which mostly means that there’s still enough left to make it look like it used to be a place. They pass bodies scattered about in fields, burned out tanks on the side of the road, still full of dead crew. Cows, disemboweled by artillery blasts, hang upside from trees. The smell chokes the air, which is also sweet with apple blossoms and trees in full leaf.
Later, when his children and his children’s children ask about his war, it’ll be these days he’ll tell them about. He’ll tell them of trading cigarettes and soap with the locals for fresh eggs, tomatoes, apples, fresh cider to fill their canteens with. He’ll tell them of lying on his belly in the tall grass for hours, hunting not Nazis but rabbits, who ran blithely into snares and snapped their own necks.
He’ll leave out the dead cattle and dead Germans, and tell them of the high hedges, the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, the quiet of the countryside - a quiet one can barely imagine when your world is bounded by the East River and the Hudson, full of avenues that heave with people of every nation, creed, and color. Safe stories that he can tell even when he struggles to remember the lies the Army will give him along with his discharge papers, what his service record will look like on paper, and better because they happen to be true. Because they’d been idyllic days, as much as there are any in war, and far sweeter than the ones that came later on.
-
The rabbit hadn’t quite managed to kill itself. They all stare down at it as it flops weakly around. A slow strangulation wrapped around a tussock of long grass, which is bloody where the wire has cut into its neck. It doesn’t seem to notice them, or at least it doesn’t react as Steve hitches his pants up at the knees and crouches down over it.
Gabe looks away as Steve breaks the thing’s neck. A bird lifts out of the trees and takes wing, but otherwise the country is silent around them, indifferent. It’s early still, some kind of vague predawn that makes the hair on the back of your neck lift. Mist still hangs in the air, painting the landscape in shades of eerie, impressionistic pastel.
Monty chuckles, amused. Humidity muffles the sound. “Where on earth does a -” and they both hear the pause, between the word he thinks and the word that comes out of his mouth, “ - city boy learn how to do that?”
It’s a fair question, and one Gabe knows the answer to. He never met Bucky’s family - never wanted to, it hadn’t been like that, and besides that he never went to Brooklyn unless he absolutely had to - but he’d heard all about them, about their little house in Eastern Parkway where Bucky lived when he wasn’t in other people’s beds. The Barneses kept rabbits and chickens and a vegetable patch crammed in between the two, which had been fascinating: for Gabe, trees were in Central Park and animals lived on farms. Bucky had been good with a knife even then. He could take apart a chicken almost as fast as Gabe’s mama could.
Steve, by contrast, is awkward as he slips the garrote wire from around the rabbit’s neck, nearly cutting himself. He drags it flat by one hind leg and then picks it up by the scruff of its neck, fumbling Bucky’s big knife out of his belt.
“Give it here,” Monty says, when it looks clear that Steve means to skin the thing right there. Steve looks up at him, his mouth drawn in an unimpressed line.
“What,” he says, “a city boy like you gonna teach me how?”
Monty turns red. His mustache twitches. “I’m not,” he says, “I grew up in Birmingham.”
His voice, Gabe notices, has shifted in tone. It’s slid upwards in register and softened around the edges, like melting caramel. Like Gabe’s own voice changes when it’s Mabel, almost. It’s been happening for awhile, though if he thinks back he can recall how Monty’s way of speaking shifted back to rigid uprightness around Peggy and has slowly, in her absence, softened once more. Of course they all do change a little around Peggy, Steve smiling more, Dugan getting more gruff - but this is somewhat different.
Steve doesn’t look surprised at this admission, if it is one. The word Birmingham doesn’t mean anything to Gabe - to any of the Americans, probably.
Birmingham. “Where’s that?” Gabe says, aware he sounds like Bucky. They’ve all picked up each other’s manner of speaking, the jokes they make at each other’s expense.
“Near Rhode Island,” Steve says, but he’s still watching Monty.
Monty says, “West Midlands, if you want to know.” He takes the rabbit from Steve, who lets him. It flops in his hand as if it’s a stuffed animal toy, loose around the snapped vertebrae in its neck. He takes out his clasp knife and flicks it open. He keeps in keen-edged shape, proud of British Army issue; light glints off the edge.
He places the rabbit onto the clean grass and begins cutting at the skin around the feet, as if taking off a pair of soft slippers the creature’s wearing. Grass and fur flicker in a sudden breeze that brings the tang of animal blood to Gabe’s nose. It smells different from human blood. More concentrated, darker, with a mulchy edge.
He slits the rabbit’s belly and lets the entrails slither out. Gabe swallows, remembering Alain; the rabbit’s coils of intestine are smaller, differently shaped, and somehow seem both more and less real, more and less intimate. Monty uses the knife’s marlin spike to begin picking the skin free of flesh. It makes a sound like paper tearing. Freed of skin, the rabbit slithers out all muscle: pink and shiny and winking with the bright white of tendon. They’ll spit-roast it hanging over a fire if they have time. There’s no need to worry about smoke; there’s smoke everywhere.
Gabe sets to digging a hole to bury the rabbit’s entrails, though the staining pile they make on the ground is pathetically small and seems inclined to disappear on its own.
He offers a hand to Steve when he stands, who ignores it, of course. He’s got his eyes trained down the lane, one hand shaded over his face. Gabe looks as well, but hears nothing, sees nothing. The wind ruffles its hands through the trees, and draws a cool finger up the back of his neck. Could be just about anything out there.
“Monty,” Steve says, “how many rabbits do you think the Germans are catching?”
-
When they get back to camp, everything is quiet. It’s getting on towards real morning and the temperature has begun to rise. The only things stirring are the wind and the grass underfoot. The stillness gets on Gabe’s nerves.
They move every few days, looking for quiet, tucked away spaces. This one is as good as any: set far back in a field under a lattice of fallen trees, which they’ve further disguised with some canvas that Steve and Gabe had painted to look like you could see right through it, to the bocage wall at their backs. They can see anything coming, unless that anything is mortar fire, or shells dropping from the sky, which happens more than Gabe would have thought. The RAF comes almost nightly now, and whoever is on watch hustles everyone out of their two man tents and into the long slit trenches they dig nearby, and they smoke cigarettes and drink until the world goes quiet and they can go back to their tattered sleep. Or more likely, stay awake and drink and smoke more cigarettes, too unnerved to go back to bed.
When Gabe brushes the canvas aside he finds that’s more or less what the other fellows are doing now: sleeping, and drinking. Dum Dum and Bucky are stripped to the waist, passing a bottle of calvados between them. Jim looks like he’s right out, propped up against the bocage wall like he was flung there bodily by a shell. Jacques’s the only one who still seems fully conscious, also half stripped - bent over something that’s smoking as much as his cigarette.
Steve kicks Bucky’s foot as he passes. Bucky grins up at him, his smile bright even in the stippled light of their shelter. Gabe and Bucky had spent most of the summer of 1939 drunk on cheap wine and each other, so though there’s a slant to Bucky’s smile Gabe can see he’s not drunk the way Dum Dum is. Bucky doesn’t seem to get drunk any more than he seems to sleep, these days.
When he sees the rabbit, Dum Dum lets out a pleasured grunt and reaches eagerly for it. He gets to work stoking the fire and heating up the metal tray that comes in the bottom of their rations - useful as a frying pan if you wrap your hand to hold it - and douses the rabbit in more calvados, which spits when it meets the metal and sends out a sweet, smoky, bloody smell into the air: like rank, wild perfume.
They sit down to eat it with some two-day-old bread that’s about as hard as the Army biscuits that come in packets, but it is bread in its shape, and the shape of things has become important to all of them. This is bread-shaped food, this is the shape of a life, this is your gear in order, soldier. They all wear uniforms. They take them to pieces, but they wear them.
-
They spend their days drinking calvados in the sunshine. They have a list of targets for the nighttime but for once it’s only Steve who knows them, who keeps the treasure map in his head alone. They may be blown to bits by the RAF but more likely they will be shot or caught by the Germans, who are thick among the trees. They left the inflatables hidden in a stone barn that they painted to look like bombed out ruins. No need to fake an army where there shouldn’t be one, not for a few more weeks. Gabe doesn’t know the exact date: this, too, is a thing only Steve knows.
None of them need to be told that it’s safer this way. That a bullet to the head would be the best thing they could hope for, Captain America and his merry men caught behind enemy lines, alone, isolated, without reinforcements. No chance of another work camp, or mercy. They don’t need to see any more of Captain America’s movies to know their value has increased immeasurably beyond the strength of their bodies.
Radio communication is limited. They listen - Jim listens - for set hours in a day, and leaves the radio abandoned for the rest. Mostly they know what they are to do, or at least Steve does. He directs them to fuel depots, to a water purification factory. They stumble over V1 launch sites, which Monty takes particular pleasure in dismantling, and killing the men who have been launching rockets at London. Mostly Gabe sees these places at a distance, removed. His work is painting canvas, sending false signals, and once placing three of Dernier’s explosives in the thin branches of a tree they think Nazis will pass by, and creeping silently away.
He has yet to kill a man: he and Steve and Dum Dum alike. The close up work is done for them, by Jim and Monty and Jacques, and by Bucky who is only Bucky here in the bocage, cut free from his costume.
This is a thing that goes unsaid, like how Jim will always skin the rest of them in poker and they’ll be forced to barter any number of things to get their cigarettes back, and how no matter who takes first watch Bucky will take the last because he sleeps worse than any of them. And how even though Gabe knows Jacques has a lock of hair coiled neatly around the cyanide pill hidden in his wristwatch, he has never yet told them anything about the woman who gave it to him.
They are all cut loose, abandoned. The war unspools without them.
-
He does ask Jacques about her, once. Crouched in their slit trench while Monty’s countrymen gleefully drop bombs around them. The air between them thick, that scorched-metal smell. In the morning it will smell like apple blossoms again, and like dead cattle. The calvados had wound up in someone else’s trench so what they have between them is only cider, frothy and sweet and just beginning to ferment in Dugan’s canteen. The bombs are landing close enough that Gabe’s teeth are rattling around the cloying taste of it, but Jacques is smiling, tilting his head back against the dirt wall so he can see the lights flash over the trees.
“There’ll be nothing left of France, the rate they’re going,” Gabe says. They don’t have to shout because the walls squeeze closely in on them.
Jacques only shrugs and lifts the cigarette to his mouth. “Maybe not,” he allows.
From somewhere else they can hear Bucky laughing and cursing, but not the specifics. It’s a clear night, a good night for the blissful planes high overhead to wreck some havoc, and Jacques’ face is easy to see in the starry light. Gabe can barely see the outline of his own black hands, finds the shape of himself by the gray-green edges of the uniform.
“Do you think much about it?” Gabe asks. “About after the war.”
“Non,” Jacques says, and seems like he’ll leave it at that, but he’s got his hand tucked inside his jacket, in the pocket where he keeps the wristwatch at night so Gabe ventures, hesitant, “Will you find your woman again?”
Jacques laughs, a bright flash of teeth in the night. “In this life or the next.” He offers Gabe a smile. Gabe can’t quite muster one in return. There’s something dangerous around the edges of Jacques’, and something empty in his eyes.
“Three prison camps before Kreischberg,” Jacques tells him, after a moment. He’s pulled the watch out of his pocket now. His thumb strokes the top of it, over the glass behind which the second hand ticks. “The first, Romainville. There was much movement there, in and out, a throughway to the other places they would send us. Ah, but then they decided to move out all the men. So Simone told me: you escape, and I will join you. That time, this worked. The next time, I was caught and she was not. Three months. I broke out. The third time, they know who we are. They capture us both and tell us, if one of you goes, we will kill the other. They move us to different camps. So of course, she tells me to run while I am being transported.” He pauses. He glances up at the sky, then down, shrugs as if settling himself inside of his coat, and then tucks the watch back in his pocket. He pats it and then pulls his collar up, chin to chest, hiding the lower half of his face.
“I did not run that time. They took us to Kreischberg. Then I thought, no, we must try to escape. They lie all the time. They forget. So… who knows?”
Gabe can’t see his face. He does him the courtesy of following his gaze up to the sky. Flares flash in the distance, red and blue. For once he can’t think of the French words for what he wants to say.
“So you…” he says.
“Alors,” Jacques says. Alors: it’s a transition to another topic or the end of one. In French, it can be left that way, floating.
“Alors,” Jacques says again, finally: “When France is free.” He turns the canteen over between his hands, but doesn’t drink. The metal is sticky; it’s left a sweet imprint on Gabe’s fingers. He brings them to his mouth, and the taste sears his tongue and throat like tears. When he looks up, Jacques is smiling, his expression clear and bright.
Gabe puts his damp fingers into his coat to touch the hard outline of the cyanide pill, sewn into the thin cotton lining. Easy enough to tear, to palm the pill into his mouth unnoticed if -
But the thought feels too morbid to examine. He takes the cider back from Jacques’ loose hands.
-
The sun is as brilliant as a lamp compared to the coal-smoke smudges in the sky back home. Here the sky is an indeterminate shade of afternoon like a Monet or Van Gogh, a blurring blue spiral that sucks heat up out of the ground and scatters it shimmering through the air.
Gabe leans back against a log side-by-side with Jacques. He smells like cordite and sulfur. Steve and Bucky sit next to each other, also pressed close. Monty has sprawled on his belly by the fire, taking intermittent slugs of whatever’s left in the bottle and writing a letter. Jim eyes him for a while and then rummages for his own paper and pen, though he defaults to staring off into the distance and squinting like he can’t figure out what to write.
Dugan’s lying on his back shuffling a pack of cards in midair. The cards flitter and whir. He’s good with them. He learned it from one of the magicians in the circus. “What’s that?” he asks Monty, kicking him with one foot.
Monty grunts when Dugan’s foot connects with his ribs. He pushes up to sit tailor-style on the ground, still holding his letter carefully in one hand, out of kicking range. “What do you think it is?” he says.
“She’s already gone ‘n’ married you,” Dugan points out, “and how’s it gonna get to England anyway?” He holds out the deck of cards. Monty isn’t a bad player, and Dugan’s just trying to get his attention.
Monty takes the cards from Dugan and starts dealing. Gabe lifts a hand to indicate he’ll get in on the game, and so do Bucky and Steve. With Bucky in, Jim joins too. Gabe looks at over at Jacques, inviting him without a word, but Jacques only grunts, chewing a little on the end of his cigarette. “The red ink on this is explosive,” he says in French, which surprises Gabe. By now they all can mostly understand without Gabe explaining, but Jacques usually takes pity on the Americans and uses English anyway. To be friendly, he’s said to Gabe.
“Not enough to be useful, I’d imagine,” says Monty, looking thoughtfully over his cards.
“So - writing letters, huh?” Bucky says, squinting at him.
“Your wife is right here,” Dugan says. He’s in a mood today. He almost always is.
Bucky tenses all over. Gabe does too, some feeling like ice filling up his chest. You never get rid of it, that jagged edge of distrust: some point they’ll turn on you, they’ll hurt you. Steve’s the only one of them who doesn’t move. He flicks a cool eye up over his cards and says, “I call.”
Dugan breaks eye contact to snort and fumble and finally throw his cards down. Monty murmurs to himself, looking over his hand, face unreadable. Gabe eyes his own hand. “I’ll raise,” he says, and throws in two cigarettes.
“What the hell do you say to her?” Jim asks, into the brief silence that follows: where someone could pick up Dugan’s comment or not. Bucky’s eyes fix on him, but Jim’s directing the question to Monty, his face creased in consternation. Gabe can sympathize. He’s been in Europe for about nine months now, and has sent back fifteen letters to his parents, about driving trucks and carrying trays and washing dishes. Quiet letters that his mother would be happy to receive. She wouldn’t mind the thought of him carrying trays at all, if it kept him off the front lines - but then again she never asked much where he went at night, or what he spent his money on, or why he wanted to so badly to go to college. Maybe Jim’s more used to telling truths to his loved ones.
Monty wiggles his mustache, considering, and throws down two cigarettes as well. “It’s what one thinks to be true that matters,” he says finally. His actor’s voice, which has been drifting sideways in the weeks they’ve been in bocage country, is back. His vowels roll out round and crisp. “Herein will I imitate the sun, which doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world; that when he pleases again to be himself …”
Jim looks appalled. “The hell is that supposed to mean?” he asks.
“Means he’s sending poetry instead of lies,” Dugan answers.
“Stick to the lies,” Bucky advises.
“It’s Henry IV,” Monty says, sounding injured. “Shakespeare. ‘When he please to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at.’ ”
Gabe laughs. “So who does that make us? Dost thou speak like a king?”
“Certainly not as a soldier,” Monty says. “Not anymore, at least.”
“It’s not so bad,” Bucky says. “This style of soldiering.”
“Oh yes,” Monty says. “Sneaking around in the dead of night, killing men as they sleep. All in the noble service of the real army. We certainly won’t be coming out of this as kings, or as heroes.”
Two nights ago they’d been woken as usual by the drone of planes, but instead of bombs they’d watched paper rain down, fluttering in the gray air like the bats Gabe used to see sometimes in Central Park. Steve had been the one to climb out of his trench, and carry back to them an armload of leaflets, which he’d passed to Bucky to read.
“They’re telling the Germans to surrender,” Bucky said. “That they’ll be treated well by the Americans.”
Gabe reached for one of the papers, and Bucky handed it over with a dark look in his eyes. It did tell the Germans to surrender, or at least that was part of what it said. Steve rubbed a thumb over the top of the sheet in his hand, which was stamped with a red and blue circle, and a white star in the middle. Others, crumpled in Bucky’s big hands, had Captain America himself on them, looking big and strong and undefeatable. In the morning Bucky had joked about using it as toilet paper, but Gabe isn’t sure if anyone is. They’ve been using it as kindling instead.
“What’s he saying?” Jacques asks Gabe now, because even if he’s gotten in the habit of dumbing down his French for the Americans, sometimes they forget to speak English he can understand.
“Monty prefers the straight-forward kind of war,” Gabe answers, and because he’s caught the spirit of it and knows Monty can understand him, adds in English, “We passed their graves: the dead men there, winners or losers, did not care. In the dark they couldn’t see who had gained the victory.”
“War is war, you mean. But it isn’t the war that rankles me so, is it,” Monty says. He throws a handful of leaflets onto the fire, pointedly. They snap and hiss as the flame licks at them: the red ink, maybe. “To me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not.”
“But woman does,” Gabe says.
“By your smiling you seem to say so,” Monty says, and he sounds tired. He looks at Jim. “My Lillian is in the countryside, with my parents. She misses London terribly, but then she’d found even Oxford stifling. That was where we met, you know. Not quite the match her parents had hoped for, a blacksmith’s son. But we’ve had six happy years that I can write her about, and if Oxford didn’t teach me to be a soldier it did still fill my head with poetry, so yes, I write her poems as well.”
“À quoi sert la poésie?” Jacques mutters, and spits on the ground.
“What use is Captain America?” Monty fires back.
Gabe looks at Bucky, who shrugs minutely. “Hope,” Steve says.
Monty snorts. “Hope will be landing on Gold Beach,” he says.
“Yeah, to get shredded by mines and machine guns,” Jim says. “No thanks.”
“That’s a lot of firepower that won’t be on that beach, thanks to us,” Steve says.
“I fold,” Bucky says, and snags one of the cigarettes out of the pot.
-
It’s barely a week later that they make a liar out of Captain America.
It rains that morning, wet and humid wind coming from the shore, shaking through the bocage like it could bring all those walls down on top of them. They’re all of them miserable and waterlogged, waiting crabbily for Steve to decide whether they’re going through with that night’s mission, which is to blow a bridge on a road that lead towards Caen. The RAF had given bombing the hell out of them a miss, so although they’d slept long and well they’d also slept through the start of the storm, and the little pit where they made their fire had gotten wet through. They’re celebrating six full weeks in Normandy with cold rations and soggy underwear.
Gabe is standing a little ways away from their shelter, scraping ration tins clean with Bucky’s big knife. Angry about the raindrops falling fat and heavy on his shoulders. Hungry and sick and tired of the smell of Jim’s sleeping body in the tent they shared, of Dum Dum’s cigars, of that prickle between his shoulder blades that felt like someone was always aiming a gun there. But when it happens -
- when it happens -
When it happens, Gabe is standing a little ways away from the rest of them, scraping his ration tins clean with Bucky’s big knife, and a German soldier falls out of the sky and lands clumsily next to him.
It must be a scout. They climb the hedges.
There’s a moment of strange comedy. The German is on the ground and while he’s down Gabe’s first instinct is to help him up, but then, like the flurry of a rabbit kicking in a trap - un coup, une saccade, une tressaillement - the German has scrambled his legs under him and stood and he’s unslung the long thing of a bayonet and then -
Et puis -
There’s a hiss, the beginning of words in the kraut’s throat, and the smell of breath and metal and
There’s just a moment the kraut stares at him like he can’t figure out what to do and then Gabe drops the trays in his hands.
They fall soundlessly as if he’s standing over a pit. Later he remembers that, dropping the trays and they are gone out of his field of vision or memory as if disappearing into a gaping void opened up at his feet.
He still has his knife, and he takes a solid step forward and drives it up through fabric, and presses, and feels it puncture flesh and it’s not like sinking metal into meat at all, it’s like piercing a balloon but heavier like drumskin that lets go after it’s punctured
Punct -
The German’s mouth opens too, and he makes a thrust forward with the bayonet but it’s pointing over Gabe’s shoulder and all that happens is he jerks their bodies closer. Wet warmth spills over Gabe’s hands. He has the impulse to grab the German by the waist and hold him up. The kraut fights him. He says words in German, very fast. Gott. Hurr. Huren… Hurr - ach. Meine Mutter. Mutter. Was? Was?
Gabe has one hand on the German’s hips. The knife is sunk deep in his guts angled up; he’s gotten it in under the kraut’s ribs. The bayonet has fallen at an awkward angle in his elbow, held up by the strap.
All of this takes place in the span of a few moments, only a breath or two. The German’s mouth is still moving. His hand spasms. Tic. Truc.
His knife is slippery. It comes out easier than it came in, bringing with it a slithering stink.
He hears a shout in German, then one closer up and he’s bowled over from behind. Now he’s on the ground, sticky dirt on his face, and he scrambles up too, and there’s an arm around him and for a moment he starts to thrash but it’s Bucky’s arm and Bucky’s got his shield up over them. There’s the dull plink plink of sound, like rain on a tin roof: bullets bouncing off the thin metal covering their heads. Over the round top edge Gabe sees three more krauts land and get wild-eyed to their feet. One has a pistol, the other’s scrabbling for his bayonet where it’s slung around his shoulders, and the other has a sprig of hedge stuck in the collar of his shirt.
For a moment Gabe thinks they’re all going to shoot him, but then Steve and Jacques and Monty and Dum Dum launch themselves from the shelter, guns cocked. The Germans flinch; maybe they hadn’t even meant to come over the wall at this spot, maybe they had thought Gabe was alone, maybe they didn’t think they’d be outnumbered. Everyone is shouting, the German incomprehensible, the sound like mad and hungry dogs.
On the ground next to him and Bucky is the dead German, the one that Gabe has just killed, his eyes wide and shocked and empty.
Then one of the Germans puts a hand up, fingers pointed to the sky. He’s staring down at the shield, at Bucky behind it. He has an insignia on his sleeve, and when he gestures to his companions they all stop shouting and stand there, guns still pointed, trembling.
Bucky stands up with his shield glinting on his arm. He pushes Gabe behind him, stumbling back towards the others where cold hands receive him. He feels Jacques’ hand on his shoulder, his sleeve, patting him down, but the blood on Gabe’s arm isn’t his, not any more than the knife still in his hand.
“Sie sind der Kapitän?” asks one of the Germans, the one with the insignia. “Kapitän Amerika?”
“Ja,” Bucky answers, “Ja, das bin ich.” He’s been hit, Gabe sees: the leg of his pant has a long tear in it where a bullet has passed through, and blood is wetting down his sock.
Up close the Germans are young, with round baby faces, perfect red circles on their apple cheeks, like the white porcelain dolls Gabe’s only ever seen through the windows on Fifth Avenue. They say something else and Bucky stiffens. He hefts the pistol that he’s got in the hand not holding the shield.
“What’d they say?” someone says, and someone else says, “Put the fucking guns down!” but Bucky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move.
This is his job, this is Mabel’s, this is - but all that comes out of his mouth is French, he says, “Ils se rendent,” he says, “ils veulent se rendre au Capitaine d’Amérique.”
“Shoot them,” Steve says.
Gabe is on his feet, his knees weak underneath him. Jacques’ hand on his elbow holding him upright. They all look at Steve, even the Germans, who appear only curious - the blank, uncomprehending look on their face that says they don’t understand, sie sprechen kein Englisch, and Bucky says, “But they’re surrendering.”
“Shoot them,” Steve says again, and his voice is steady and clear, the only real thing in the world, so Bucky does.
The pistol cracks twice in his hand. It’s louder than the sirens that tear down Lenox Avenue at night, louder than the shells that rain down on them, louder than the thrum of Gabe’s heartbeat, trembling in his fingertips. A hole the size of a quarter appears in the forehead of the kraut who had taken one hand off his gun. Another in the cheek of the one behind him, right in that rosy bloom, that flush of youth.
The third looks at Bucky, astonishment writ large, and then the front of his uniform puffs up with air: behind Gabe, Jacques has taken the third shot. The German’s hands fly up in the sky like birds.
The krauts land in a heap, eyes open and still wide with surprise. The ground beneath them drinks up all the blood.
“Pack up camp,” someone says. “We need to get moving, in case there are more of them close by.”
Then he says - someone must be looking at him, at Steve, because it’s Steve speaking - “Nine days until Overlord. Our attention needs to be on the mission and staying out of sight.”
“Okay, Cap,” Dum Dum says, and there’s the sound of boots shuffling over the earth, the jingle of the krauts’ belts as someone turns one over, starts to strip the body of weapons. A touch on Gabe’s arm, small, warm, firm, Steve, guiding Gabe around by his elbow. And he looks Gabe up and down, so Gabe, too, looks himself up and down, finds his right arm up to the elbow sheathed in blood like a satin glove. The urge to vomit again rises thick in his throat.
“You did fine,” Steve says, softer. And Gabe nods, numb. They’d laughed, both of them, in training. With bayonets heavy in their hands, stabbing straw dummies. Pointed this way and that; run this way and that; kill this thing and that. Look, I got the bitch who poured wine on my best blouse. Look, that’s one for the cop who tried to make me suck him off to stay out of jail. Ha, snuffed the man who beat me up outside the automat. Steve isn’t laughing now, but he doesn’t look all that upset, either. He’s just looking up at Gabe, steady, still.
“You did just fine, May,” he says, “You’re all right. Go get cleaned up.”
“Okay, Cap,” Gabe manages.
He ducks into their shelter to grab the big metal can of water. It’s heavy. He barely notices the weight, his footsteps uneven through the muddy ground. He makes it fifty paces, maybe more - just far enough that the noise of Dum Dum and Monty tearing down the camp fades, all the privacy that anyone ever gets in the Army. He folds over at the waist and vomits his cold rations onto the wet, trampled grass. Meat hash. Tasted bad enough going down, worse coming up. Up his nose too, acidic, funky like Jim’s sock feet.
A footstep crackles behind him, and Gabe whirls, landing hard on his ass. The bloodied knife is back in his hand, but it’s only Bucky - Bucky, looking down at him from a great height.
Gabe turns away. He sets the knife down and out of the corner of his eye, sees Bucky pick it up and start wiping it clean on the long grass. Mabel used to be good at getting stains of of her dresses - mending any little tear. But he can’t think of how. Had it been salt sprinkled thick over the seep of red wine? Or seltzer - bought in thick glass bottles from the corner store, or begged off a forgiving bartender. If he left it long enough, would the rain wash it all away?
The tin, at least, has been cleaned by the rain. He fills it with a little water from the jug and carefully presses the soiled fabric into it. It bleeds pink trails into the water. He rubs his thumb over the stain and the water blushes like he’s washing out a paintbrush.
Bucky sets the knife back down on the grass, within Gabe’s reach. He sets the shield down too, and settles down on the ground, close enough that Gabe can feel the warmth of his shoulder through the cotton cloth of his uniform. He wraps his arms around his knees. He’s rolled his pants up, displaying the bullet wound to the indifferent air: just a long scratch, not nearly as bad as Gabe would have thought, with all that blood.
Gabe pulls his blouse out of the water and wrings it dry. A clean towel, that’s what he needs. Blot stains. Don’t rub them in. The ground is blurry with rain. Bucky settles an arm around his shoulders, and Gabe goes automatically, lets Bucky tuck him in against his broad chest. Mabel had been three inches taller than Bucky in her heels, but he and Gabe are exactly the same height.
Bucky’s cheek presses against Gabe’s temple, scratchy with the beginning of a beard. The shield rests against his foot. Gabe watches the raindrops fall plink plink against the rounded surface and roll off, dew-like, into the grass.
He thinks maybe they’d sat like this once. Sat and listened to the rain. Tucked safe and sound in a room in an hourly motel, the window cracked to let out the smell. Under the bare shelter of tree branches in the knotty sanctity of Central Park. Maybe it hadn’t even been Bucky - maybe it was someone else. The details are faint and smeared like watercolors, his memory washed empty and clean.
