Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow Read Free Book Online Page B

favorite ditty.
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The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous?
The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous?
The mademoiselle from gay Paree
,
She had the clap and she gave it to me
,
Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?
    Â 
    I’ll never forget the first time I drew a bead on a Heinie, a sergeant with a handlebar mustache flaring from his upper lip like antlers. I aimed, I squeezed, I killed him, just like that: now he’s up, now he’s down—a man I didn’t even know. I thought how easy it was going to be shooting Harry Hines, a man I hated.
    For the next three days the Boche counterattacked, and then I did learn to hate them. Whenever somebody lost an arm or a leg to a potato masher, he’d cry for his mother, in English mostly but sometimes in Spanish and sometimes Yiddish, and you can’t see that happen more than once without wanting to kill every Heinie in Europe, right up to the Kaiser himself. I did as Fiskejohn said. A boy would stumble toward me with his hands up—
“Kamerad! Kamerad!”
—and I’d go for his belly. There’s something about having a Remington in your grasp with that lovely slice of steel jutting from the bore. I’d open the fellow up left to right, like I was underlining a passage in the sharpshooter’s manual, and he’d spill out like soup. It was interesting and legal. Once I saw a sardine. On the whole, though, Fiskejohn was wrong. The dozen boys I ripped weren’t holding potato mashers or anything else.
    I switched tactics. I took prisoners.
“Kamerad!”
Five at first.
“Kamerad!”
Six.
“Kamerad!”
Seven. Except that seventh boy in fact had a masher, which he promptly lobbed into my chest.
    Lucky for me, it bounced back.
    The Heinie caught enough of the kick to get his face torn off, whereas I caught only enough to earn myself a bed in the field hospital. For a minute I didn’t know I was wounded. I just looked at that boy who had no nose, no lower jaw, and wondered whether perhaps I should use a grenade on Harry Hines.
    Click, click, my keeper turns to the left. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle, waits. The Old Guard—the Third U.S. Infantry—never quits. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: can you imagine? Three A.M. on Christmas morning, say, with snow tumbling down and nobody around except a lot of dead veterans, and here’s this grim, silent sentinel strutting past my tomb? It gives me the creeps.
    The division surgeons spliced me together as best they could, but I knew they’d left some chips behind because my chest hurt like hell. A week after I was taken off the critical list, they gave me a month’s pay and sent me to Bar-le-Duc for some rest and relaxation, which everybody knew meant cognac and whores.
    The whole village was a red-light district, and if you had the francs you could find love around the clock, though you’d do well to study the choices and see who had that itchy look a lady acquires when she’s got the clap. And so it was that on the first of July, as the hot French twilight poured into a cootie-ridden bordello on the Place Vendôme, Wilbur Hines’s willy finally put to port after nineteen years at sea. Like Cantigny, it was quick and confusing and over before I knew it. I had six more days coming to me, though, and I figured it would get better.
    My keeper heads north, twenty-one paces. The sun beats down. The sweatband of his cap is rank and soggy. Click, click: right face. His eyes lock on the river.
    I loved Bar-le-Duc. The citizens treated me like a war hero, saluting me wherever I went. There’s no telling how far you’ll go in this world if you’re willing to belly-rip a few German teenagers.
    Beyond the Poilu and the hookers, the cafés were also swarming with Bolsheviks, and I must admit their ideas made sense to me—at least, they did by my fourth glass of Château d’Yquem. After Cantigny, with its