The Heavenly Table

20

BACK AT CAMP PRITCHARD, Lieutenant Bovard was standing weak-kneed and hungover outside a barracks, watching Sergeant Malone demonstrate some exercises to a group of fresh recruits. Last night, he had bypassed the usual cocktails and small talk at the officers’ club in Meade and accepted the sergeant’s halfhearted invitation to have a drink at the Blind Owl, a tavern a few blocks farther down Paint Street across from the foul-smelling paper mill. Imagining the place would be jumping with all manner of sordid characters, from knife-wielding ex-convicts to pasty-faced gamblers to alcoholic adulterers to perhaps even a fallen woman whose sleazy talents included picking up coins off the floor with her nether parts, Bovard found himself instead in a dreary, piss-smelling room lit by a couple of sooty, rusted lanterns watching Malone stare silently into the fly-specked mirror behind the bar while the only other customers, a decrepit banjo player and his young harp-playing sidekick, sat in the corner nursing mugs of flat, musty-tasting beer and debating where they were going to make their bed come closing time. A bit disappointed, the lieutenant was just getting ready to call it a night when the sergeant, sometime around his fifth whiskey, suddenly began talking about his experiences with the Red Cross on the Western Front. Malone spoke in a low, somber voice for the next two hours, his eyes never straying from his reflection in the glass, as if he were a priest watching a stranger spill his guts in a sanctuary. At midnight, the bartender, a burly, wooden-faced oaf who hadn’t emitted a single sound the entire evening, turned out the lamps; and the sergeant, in mid-sentence, shut up and never said another word, not even during the taxi ride back to the base.

After slipping past the guards at the gate, Bovard had stumbled to his quarters so aroused from what Malone had said that he was still awake at reveille, his handkerchief stiff with ejaculate and his hand cramped so badly that he had a difficult time lacing up his boots. Two cups of strong coffee had revived him somewhat, and now, watching the new soldiers break out in a sweat, he felt himself growing hard again. One boy in particular had caught his eye, a slim, olive-skinned youth named Wesley Franks. Thankfully, his erection quickly subsided when he heard Malone call out, “At ease!” Wiping some sweat from his brow, he glanced at the men as they collapsed to the ground, gasping and moaning. He watched a tubby boy named Meecham roll over on his hands and knees and puke in the dirt. Jesus, he thought, a few leg raises and jumping jacks and they’re crying like schoolgirls. No, this wouldn’t do. A single second-rate gladiator working weekends on the coliseum circuit for a few extra denarii could have wiped out the entire fucking platoon with a butter knife.

He then looked over at Malone, and suddenly became aware of the wheezing in his lungs, the rivulets of whiskey residue streaming from his pores. Built like a blacksmith, with a thick, black mustache and a long jagged scar running along his jawline, the sergeant was certainly an imposing figure, but, shit, he was also nearly twice as old as any of them. Perhaps because of a strange sort of camaraderie he now felt with the man after listening to his confessions in the Blind Owl, or maybe because he was ashamed that he had spent the night jacking himself into a frenzy over what he’d heard, it suddenly didn’t feel right to just stand around, as he had been doing the last couple of weeks, and allow Malone to handle everything. Bovard thought for a minute. Though he’d never seen a man gutted with a bayonet or slept standing up in a pit swimming with rats, he did still hold the record at the Hill School for the mile, had been captain of the rowing team at Kenyon. Tossing his cap to the ground, he told Malone to go sit in the shade. He ordered the men to line up and tighten their boot laces. My God, they could barely stand. What they needed, he thought, was something inspirational, a short speech aimed to get them focused. “A soldier of the Roman Empire,” he began, “could jog all day long at a steady pace with a full pack that weighed somewhere between thirty-five and forty pounds.” Pleased with his opening, he paused for a moment to let that bit of information sink in. He was about to continue when someone in the back mumbled, “What the hell’s he talkin’ about? Fuck, we ain’t Romans. You a Roman, Davy?”

Bovard’s face quickly flushed crimson with anger and embarrassment. Oh, you’ve got that right, you dumb hillbilly, he thought to himself. Not a one of you sorry bastards would make a good pimple on a legionnaire’s ass. He was on the verge of blurting out such an insult when he glanced at Malone, still standing at his side, a passive look on his face, ready to take over again whenever his superior had had enough of playing leader for the day. He steadied himself. “No, we’re not,” he said instead, “but we are Americans.” Then he turned and pointed at a tall oak that stood half a mile away at the eastern edge of the base. “Three times to the tree and back, gentlemen. Follow me.”

After he’d run them into the ground — a quarter of the men lay practically helpless in various spots along the route — Bovard casually walked over to where a shaky Wesley Franks was sprawled out in the grass attempting to uncap his canteen. “Here,” he said, crouching down on his haunches, “let me help you with that.”

“Thank you, sir,” the boy managed to say between gulps of air.

Bovard twisted the top off and handed the canteen back; and Wesley sat up and proceeded to drain it. Resisting the urge to tell him to slow down, the lieutenant waited until he was finished, then asked, “Where are you from, Private?”

“Place called Veto, sir.”

“Is that in Ohio?” Bovard said, as he tried not to stare at the sweat dripping off the boy’s smooth handsome chin onto the crotch of his brown pants.

“Yes, sir, over near Belpre. It’s just a little place.”

Bovard was about to ask the boy about his family when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Malone start walking toward him. “Keep up the good work, Private,” he said instead. Then he stood and jogged effortlessly across the field to meet the sergeant as several of the men lying nearby watched him with hatred in their eyes.

“I think that’s about all they can take this morning, sir,” Malone said. “Looks like you wiped ’em out.”

“Whatever you think best, Sergeant. I guess maybe I did go a bit overboard.”

“Not at all, sir. Not at all. There won’t be anybody holdin’ their hand when they get to the Front.”

They waited silently for the men to recover, watched a crew push a borrowed French SPAD out of an airplane hangar and point it toward the gravel runway. Bovard thought again about what Malone had told him in the bar last night. Of course, he knew that most of it was nothing but lies and bullshit and myths perpetuated by soldiers who were bored or superstitious or terrified, but hadn’t Homer and Virgil once sought inspiration out of the same bloody timeworn cloth? Standing in the early morning sun, relaxed by the run, he felt his eyelids growing heavy, and then…and then…and then he and Wesley are pinned down in a funk hole in the middle of No Man’s Land near a section of the Hindenburg Line. Night finally falls and they sleep in each other’s arms, exhausted and smeared with other men’s blood and guts and skin. An ugly, jaundiced-looking moon casts a sinister glow over the smoking landscape. Just as dawn breaks, a whistle sounds a long, paralyzing note from a sector of the German trenches, and, in what seems like no more than a few seconds, he and Wesley are overrun by a company of enemy soldiers, screaming savages with pointed helmets and fat, piggish faces. Though they put up a valiant fight, and Bovard imagines it as the most glorious few minutes a man could ever hope for in this world, the two don’t stand a chance against such overwhelming odds. After the Huns shoot and hack and bludgeon their bodies beyond recognition, they quickly become food, first for the swarms of flies and rats, and then, a few hours later, for the tribe of deserters that Malone claimed live in the tunnels and caves beneath No Man’s Land and prowl the battlefields under cover of darkness, robbing and cannibalizing corpses. The sergeant swore — this was sometime around whiskey number eight — that he and another stretcher-bearer had come across such a group of ghouls one night while out searching for the wounded after a particularly bloody skirmish, English and French and Russian and Italian and even a Turk, all banded together, mad as hatters and feasting on a cadaver, gibbering in some new language they had formed underground. The lieutenant was just beginning to imagine Wesley and himself being eaten, bones and all, by some nefarious monster dressed in a slop-encrusted uniform of many colors, when he became aware that someone was talking to him. His eyes flew open. Malone was looking at him curiously. “Are you all right, sir?” he repeated.

“What’s that?” Bovard said, looking a little dazed.

“I asked if you were all right, sir. You seemed—”

“No, no, I’m fine,” the lieutenant said, quickly regaining his composure. “In fact, Sergeant, I don’t believe I’ve ever felt better in my entire life.”