Until I Find You by John Irving Read Free Book Online Page B

gentle movement of the bed had at first escaped his notice. Although his mother’s eyes were closed, she was awake; her lips were parted, her breathing was rapid and shallow, and the muscles of her neck were straining.
    All that could be seen of the littlest soldier was his feet. He must have been lying with his head between Alice’s breasts, which were under the covers; he was probably recovering from a nightmare, or so Jack deduced. (That would explain the quivering of the bed.) Besides, Jack knew it was a night for bad dreams, having just had one himself; it seemed perfectly obvious to the boy that the soldier had suffered one, too, and had therefore climbed into bed with his mom. Jack no doubt still thought of the soldier as a fellow child.
    Suddenly the littlest soldier’s nightmare returned with a vengeance. He violently kicked the covers off—Jack saw his bare bum in the bathroom light—and Alice must have squeezed him too hard, because he whimpered and groaned. That was when her eyes opened and Jack’s mom saw him standing there—another little soldier, this one at attention. Alice didn’t recognize her son at first; it must have been the uniform.
    Her scream was a shock to Jack, as it was to the littlest soldier. When he saw the four-year-old in uniform, he screamed, too. (He sounded like a little boy again!) And Jack was suddenly so afraid of the mutual nightmare they must have been having that he, too, began screaming. He also peed in his pants—actually, in the littlest soldier’s pants.
    “Jackie!” his mother cried, when she caught her breath.
    “I dreamed I drowned in the moat,” Jack began. “Dead soldiers, from the past, were with me. You were there, too,” he told the littlest soldier.
    The soldier didn’t look so little now. Jack was astonished at the size of his penis; it was half as long as the bayonet on the rifle he’d used to rescue Jack, and it was thrust forward, at an upward angle, in the manner of a bayonet, too.
    “You better go,” Alice told the littlest soldier.
    True to his calling, he took orders well; he marched straightaway into the bathroom, without a word of protest, and when he’d done his business there, he came back to Alice’s bedroom to fetch his clothes. Jack had taken off the soldier’s uniform, folded it neatly on the chair, and crawled into bed with his mom.
    Together they watched the littlest soldier dress himself. Jack was embarrassed about pissing in his rescuer’s pants, and he could tell the exact moment when the little hero discovered what had happened. An expression of uncertainty and distress was on his face—not unlike the anxiety and discomfort Jack had seen there when the brave lad was inching across the thinly frozen moat in his long underwear.
    But after all, he was a soldier; he gave Jack a glance of vast understanding and grudging respect, as if the boy’s peeing in his pants struck him as appropriate to the situation. And before he left, the littlest soldier gave Jack and his mother what Jack had intended to give them: a proper salute.
    Despite having seen him stark naked, Jack hadn’t noticed a tattoo—not even a bandage. The boy thought about it, in lieu of falling back to sleep—which would, in all probability, return him to his nightmare about drowning in the Kastelsgraven.
    He asked his mom his troubling question. “Did you give him a free tattoo? I didn’t see one.”
    “I . . . certainly did give him one,” she replied, with some hesitation. “You just missed it.”
    “What was it?” Jack asked.
    “It was . . . a little soldier,” she answered, with more hesitation. “It was even littler than him.”
    Having seen his half-a-bayonet of a penis, Jack had revised his impression of how little the soldier was, but all he said to his mother was: “Where did you put it?”
    “On one of his ankles—the left one,” she said.
    The boy thought that the bathroom light must have been playing tricks on him, because he’d looked