Those Across the River

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

DECEMBER.

I was standing in John “Granny” Giangrande’s apartment with my shirt off, facing his pretty window that gave on Lake Michigan. He was behind me, inspecting my back over his tiny glasses. He whistled.

“Goddamn, Nichols. I thought your back was fouled up before.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you plan to tell me how you got these?”

“Later.”

“And where’s Dora?”

“Later. Let’s drink.”

LATER, WHEN MY shirt was on and the night was black and bitter cold outside, and a little snow had started sticking on the window, we sat on his couch and drank his good wine. It was the kind of wine a guy who works on State Street and has no kids drinks.

About midnight, our dead friend Dan Metzger came up, like he always did when we were alone and had a bottle, which was part of the reason we rarely saw each other alone with a bottle. Funny thing was that I’m the one who saw it, but Giangrande’s the one who always cried first. It’s important to understand that about Granny to know why he did what I asked. It also makes more sense when you know how badly he was picked on at St. Ignatius and how many fat lips and busted heads I got standing up for him. It makes more sense yet when you remember that he sat stateside with a research job while Dan and I waded in the mud and got whizbangs and 75s chucked at us. That wasn’t his doing, of course, and it’s nothing I would Lord over him, but I knew it worked at him and I was quietly glad for anything that might sway him.

Men who want revenge have no dignity.

They have already died and sold everything.

I told Granny what happened only after I had sat with him long enough for him to remember how much he loved me and to hear that I wasn’t nuts. I’m not saying I was sane. But I was demonstrably not nuts. So I told him what happened. But there was still the matter of what I wanted. I only told him what that was when we were both good and pie-eyed, and when, if not belief, something other than disbelief sat on his face.

“I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that stuff is, do I?”

“No.”

“Or how much time I’d do for making it?”

“No.”

He was swaying on the couch.

“I will say yes, but provisionally. I reserve the right to say no tomorrow.”

“Agreed.”

“And I will say yes not because I believe you, but because you believe yourself. Which is good enough for me.”

“Thanks, Granny. Thanks so much.”

“And because you’ve never asked me for anything.”

“This is big.”

“Yeah. But maybe lots of little things every time I needed them sat in the bank and gained interest.”

“You’re talking like my father.”

“I know. And the fact that you and I are becoming old men and still know how each other’s father talked, that’s a reason. I’ll do it, Frankie. If this is some big joke you’re pulling, then I’ll be your patsy. And if you’re dragging me to hell, like Father Patterson always said, then fuck the Jesuits.”

I hugged him to me.

“Have you told your brother any of this stuff?”

“Not much.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I won’t.”

“You know who else?” he said, struggling to light a cigarette.

“What?”

He swayed and closed his eyes.

“Might go. Eicher.”

KARL EICHER WAS another vet.

He was also our friend from high school years, but not grade school. During grade school he had run with the neighborhood kids who bullied us for being Catholics. His parents were harsh Lutherans and he hated them and hated how poor his father was and always had something to prove, but he was a guy who always needed to be part of the dominant tribe. His allegiances against the neighborhood Catholics began to shift as more Poles, Italians and Slovenians moved in, and shifted completely by the time the war broke out in 1914 and everything German was suspect. Karl Eicher became an unfortunate name to have. Now he was a minority. Now he needed the three awkward guys with glasses who went to the hoity-toity Catholic school.

He was a good guy to know, though.

He could get dirty pictures.

And he loved to fight.

When I went to find him, he was in Gary, Indiana, standing with the other day laborers by the docks. Right where Granny said he would be. He looked rough. He looked like the last guy you’d pick for anything but a cheap killing. I guess that’s what I was after.

His face lit up when he saw me, not from affection, but because I was dressed decently and he knew he’d get a beer and a sandwich.

He was right.

Karl Eicher.

I hadn’t kept up with him the way Granny had.

I lost touch with him in 1917.

In the war, he went with the Marines and, because he was little and mean, they used him to go into dugouts and tunnels. He ended up with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in Belleau Wood. I think it was a high point for him.

Granny told me how rough things had been for Eicher; that he had twice hit Granny up for money and that he had sent it. The war had sat on him hard and he couldn’t keep work long. He sailed for a while, then went to D.C. with the bonus army in ’32 and got teargassed with the other vets looking for the money the government owed them.

I had nothing to lose telling him what happened.

He had nothing to lose hearing me out, nothing but the rumble in his stomach.

He chewed his pastrami and nodded noncommittally, washing it down with the last of his beer.

I got up and got him another one.

Then I did what Granny suggested.

“You don’t have to believe me, Karl. But if you come along and do what I ask, no matter how crazy it sounds, when we come back, I’ll give you my car.”

THE TRIP SOUTH seemed short. We were all glad to see the snowy farms of Indiana and Ohio behind us and to be able to crack the windows to smoke. We didn’t talk very much at first, but by the time we hit Kentucky, Karl Eicher and I had become drinking buddies; we drank Old Crow out of a bag until we started swerving and Granny made us stop for coffee. He drove us into Georgia, but I took over when we got close.

Then the mood changed.

We all felt it.

WHITBROW WAS DEAD.

Those across the river had killed it.

The toe of the corpse was the Nobles’ filling station, overgrown with brown weeds and stripped of anything valuable. White, painted letters on the busted window advertised:

FREE PECANS WITH FILL-Up

The last p had been made smaller to fit because the painter had not measured it. Ursie Noble had not measured it.

The Canary House had been vandalized.

It had not been burned, as I expected, but all the windows had been busted out and the doors taken away. All the furniture was gone, even the porch swing, and someone had been using the living area as a dump.

A family of raccoons were nesting in the pantry, the doors and hinges of which had been stripped.

Upstairs was worse.

Upstairs was personal.

Someone had written WHORE on the wall of our bedroom and left the bones of a pig on the remains of the mattress. The mattress had been cut to shreds. Some prudent scavenger had made off with the headboard.

The office wasn’t as raw, but it was still hurtful. My rolltop desk was gone, of course, and the bottle of Drambuie I had stashed in it had been drained and left upside down on the sill. Someone large had taken a shit in the corner. I hope the SOB really mashed his thumb moving that desk.

What was truly funny about this was that I didn’t know if the monsters in the woods or the good citizens of Whitbrow had done these things.

Granny helped me clear out the living room and get the pig out of the bedroom, and, before I could propose another remedy, Eicher shot the raccoons.

Granny and I scowled at him, and left him to pitch the bodies out himself, which he did, muttering all the while about filthy little cunts and rabies.

He didn’t need silver bullets to kill them, but that’s what they got.

That’s the only kind of bullet we had.

And we had a lot of them.

We got our sleeping rolls and camped and waited.

I STAYED OUT of sight in the house for the next few days. Granny immediately went to Atlanta for supplies, then came back and sequestered himself in the cellar, working practically round the clock. Eicher took a stroll through town. Eicher told me that it looked like the Huns had been through; everything was boarded up and overgrown and he never saw a soul.

Not a soul.

Someone had written GOD HELP US on the courthouse.

Whitbrow had ceased to exist.

FIVE DAYS AFTER we got there, it sprinkled, and then that turned to snow that didn’t last. Granny was already done with his awful work in the basement lab he had built, and it was just a question of waiting for the full moon.

When it came, we got out of town for the night. Rented a room in Morgan’s only hotel. Drank bourbon. Played poker for silver bullets. Talked crassly about neighborhood girls. You wouldn’t think we were all pushing forty. It was so good to be with old friends, to have something to do, to be in motion.

I actually slept well.

WE GOT UP early that morning and had a stroke of luck.

It warmed up.

A hard rain came and looked like it meant to stay.

We left Morgan, passed Whitbrow and drove to a point in the road that the survey maps I had ordered showed would give us quicker access to Megiddo Woods than going through town. We parked the car and got the gear out, but we didn’t suit up until we were out of sight. Three men in surplus army gear and gas masks will tend to attract attention. Especially when all of them have rifles and pistols and shovels and one of them is carrying a rack of mason jars on his back.

Six mason jars full of brown, oily liquid.

Mason jars filled with mustard gas of very high quality, brewed up by the youngest of the men who helped perfect its use as an American weapon in 1917.

THIS IS HOW the idea came to me.

After I left Kentucky, I had checked myself into a Southside Chicago flophouse and filled the bathtub with beer. I promised myself not to leave until I had died or drank it all. I didn’t tell my brother I was in town. I sat with my .45 on my lap, listening to the radio; before long I nibbled on the end of it and might have squeezed the trigger, except that I wanted to finish Hector and the others more than myself.

That’s when I figured it out.

How to kill them.

Silver was too hard to deliver; they saw you coming. They smelled you. They were fast. And silver was dicey; Dora had survived a gut-shot. But burning would work. Martin said fire killed them. Martin used fire when they cornered him. And Hector had a brand on his chest, and burns on his arms from his days as a blacksmith. None of that had healed back.

The last piece of the puzzle came while I tickled the beard on my chin with the barrel. I laughed! I set the gun on my nightstand and paced around in the frigid room.

Yes!

Martin’s cough from those damned strong cigarettes. His lungs weren’t healing themselves. Their lungs could burn and they could die that way. I could make them cough and drown in their own fluids, like those poor wrecked bastards in the gas wards. Even if they lived, they would never be right. They would be easy hunting.

That was when I checked out.

That was when I went looking for Granny.

I didn’t even drain the beer out of the tub.

NOW WE WERE marching through the woods in the rain like three ghosts from the AEF. Tin hats and all. Enfields and 45s packed with silver bullets. Even if we couldn’t steal a march on them, even if they saw us first, I wanted them to see the big, soulless eyes of the gas masks and the silhouettes of the helmets and to know that something worse than they were was after them. I wanted them to be scared now. I wanted to give those fuckers bad dreams.

But those damned masks.

I had forgotten how much the nose clamp hurt.

Using the maps and the compass, I got us to Uphill Rock. The same tree leaned against the same big stone like Sisyphus at his hopeless labor. The rain was good. Even though it soaked us, it hid our scent, hid our footsteps.

Eicher went to pull his mask off so he could whisper something to us, but Granny wouldn’t let him; he insisted that we stay geared up whenever we were around the mustard, not to take a chance. By the time you smelled that sweet, garlicky smell it was too late.

Eicher motioned that he saw something.

The entrance.

Like a frowning mouth in the rock, half covered over with leaves.

Jesus, this was it.

Eicher motioned for us to cover him, and he put his rifle down and crept around to the side of it, slowly. Slowly he positioned himself and peeked in.

I guessed there would be four. Five if Dora had returned. I held up four fingers. He shook his head and held up seven.

Goddamnit. They had propagated.

Now he backed off the entrance and Granny came up.

The two of them were supposed to chuck while I covered.

Not so different from clearing a machine gun nest.

I got ready.

But Granny wasn’t ready. He was shaking, bad. I wondered if the jars were rattling. Thank God for the rain.

Eicher took three jars off Giangrande’s back and handed them to him. He took the other three.

He put up one finger.

They would pitch on three.

He put up the second finger.

Granny shook his head.

He couldn’t do it.

But Eicher could.

He threw his three jars one after the other, then he took Granny’s away from him and threw those, too. He pulled Granny back and got his rifle ready. Granny went to his position and took his rifle, but he just hugged it to him. He was in full panic.

A naked man walked out of the cave, blinking his eyes. He looked familiar, but I didn’t have time to figure out why. Eicher shot him. He didn’t understand what was happening to him. Then I shot him, too. He crumpled.

Granny looked like he was going to be sick. He went to pull his mask off. I dropped my rifle and went to him, stopping him from doing that, but he broke away from me and staggered off in the direction of the car.

More shots rang out.

I started after Granny, but then went back to help Eicher.

He had shot another man, who was holding his stomach and bellowing, collapsing awkwardly against the rocks. He shot him again.

There was motion behind him.

Two naked women running away.

Curly Woman and another one I didn’t recognize from the back.

He shot that one, and she twisted and fell. Curly kept going. Eicher dropped his rifle and took out his pistol, running up quite close to the wounded one. She was pointing at him as if he were a bad child and saying “NO!” while he shot her three more times. It must have been a reflex. If it weren’t so horrific and heavy with pathos it would be funny. It was Anna Muncie, the teacher of the younger grades, and she died scolding her killer.

This god-awful scene transfixed me, or I would have been faster.

The black one came out of a hole in the ground.

Hector.

The biggest one.

In wolf form.

He was all over Eicher, and now I didn’t have a shot. Not until Eicher was disemboweled. Then something hit me from the side, hard, and I went into the ground and had the wind knocked out of me. My rifle went flying.

Even as it was happening, I groped for the pistol. I wrenched onto my back just in time to see Mustache jumping on me. He must have thought he was in wolf form still because he tried to bite me. He was salivating. His eyes were wide and insane and I saw his open mouth over my face, felt his teeth on my eye plates, felt his hand grasping the edge of my helmet, trying to wrench it off me. If there is anything worse than being attacked by a huge, supernatural wolf, it must be being attacked by a very powerful naked man who believes he’s a wolf.

One more good wrench like that might have broken my neck, but he tried to bite me again. Saliva ran out of his mouth all over my mask.

I was dazed.

I couldn’t inhale.

But I did have the gun in my right hand.

It was between us and I couldn’t cock the hammer. He was so strong. I was sure this was it.

Then he realized biting wasn’t working and he reared up to hit me. For just that second, I had room. I cocked and squeezed. The gun went off, tearing through the middle of him.

He still hit me, but not as hard as I think he would have.

I think that would have killed me.

Instead it just cracked my left eye plate and made me see stars.

He grabbed his stomach and rolled off me, sitting Indian style and breathing hard, not looking at me. His eyes were tearing up from the gas, or from the injury, I don’t know.

Thank Christ I looked to my right.

The black one was stealing close to me, but quickly, like a border collie stalking sheep.

I don’t know how to communicate just how terrifying these things are up close. It’s hypnotic. You want to piss and shit yourself. You want your mom. It was big and fast and quiet and it was coming.

Then it sneezed. A great rope of snot came out of its muzzle.

It kept coming, but the spell was broken now.

I shot it.

It yelped, and broke and ran.

Crookedly, though.

It was hurt.

Maybe dying.

I managed to inhale.

I had a cracked rib.

I sat up.

Mustache was on his side now, looking small and white, bleeding uncontrollably through his fingers. I noticed the puckered white scars where his arm was burned from the fight with Martin.

I shot him again.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, this was a mess. Granny was nowhere to be seen. I got up and went to Karl Eicher.

He was all untucked.

His legs spasmed rhythmically like he was trying to run.

But he was gone.

His blue eyes were still open under his mask.

His cruel, schoolyard bully eyes.

His joking, pool-shooting eyes.

I took his mask off and shut his eyes.

I LOOKED BACK at the first one we shot, and I saw why he looked familiar. I also saw why I hadn’t placed him.

It was one-armed Mike.

With two arms.

SOMEONE WAS COMING out of the entrance to the cave.

He was clutching a dirty cloth, maybe a towel, around him.

Freckled and homely and redheaded. I recognized him. He had played softball with us that first day. Pete. His name was Pete. He stumbled out into the cold rain with his free hand up, coughing, his eyes shut but tearing, his nose running freely.

“Please don’t shoot me,” he said, and sneezed horribly.

I didn’t know what to do. He was so full of gas he was bound to die.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and pointed the gun.

He couldn’t see me, but he knew what I was doing.

“PLEASE!” he screamed.

“You’re full of mustard gas,” I said, shouting so he could understand me through the mask. “It’s all over you.”

“I know it’s somethin bad. I just want to wash it off. I just want to stand in the rain and wash it off.”

I felt myself unraveling.

“You can’t,” I said.

“Why?!” he yelled.

“It won’t work.”

“I’ll go to the river then. I didn’t hurt anybody. I promise. I just want to go to the river and wash.”

I didn’t say anything.

It occurred to me that he didn’t know who I was.

“I’m gonna go now. Please don’t shoot me.”

“Okay,” I said.

And I let him go.

Feeling his way past the trees.

Blind and poisoned and naked.

It wasn’t mercy.

I would have finished it if I were merciful.

I let him go because I’m weak.

THAT’S ALSO WHY I didn’t go to La Boudeuse to shoot the others, as I had imagined I would.

I didn’t care anymore.

I was done with this place.

I took my shovel and buried Karl Eicher. I took my time and buried him deep. I put the rifle and helmet over his grave as markers.

I went back to the car and found Granny there, looking numb. I stripped out of my gear and left it by the side of the road, along with my weapons.

The car ride back to Chicago was long and silent, and I knew there’d be no more Christmas cards. As far as Granny could see, he had been fooled by two lunatics into committing some horrible crime. After all, he only saw us shoot and gas people. Naked people in a cave in the middle of the woods, yes. But people. He had been gone before the big bad wolf came.

All he said about what happened was, “I won’t go to the police.”

I said, “Thanks.”

He kept his word.

And I kept mine.

ONCE I HAD taken Granny back to Chicago, I drove to the docks at Gary, Indiana, where the day laborers stood around a fire in a garbage can, trying to keep warm. It was early in the morning, and they were all still hopeful. They all came up to me at once, telling me what they could do. Painting, loading, carpentry.

I shook those offers off and tried to sound like a cop, saying, “Any of you guys know Karl Eicher?”

Several of them nodded.

“Any of you friends with him?”

Two guys said yes.

“He got family?”

They both shook their heads.

“Which of you knows him better?”

“I was in the merchant marine with him in ’28–’29.”

“Can you drive?”

“I can.”

“I can, too,” said the other guy.

“Merchant marine, come with me, I’ve got a job.”

He got in the car.

I drove him to the bank near the train station, got a notary, and signed the car over to him. He looked at me suspiciously until I left him the keys and headed for the train.

“Why would you do this?” he said.

“Because I said I would.”

He walked over and fingered the bullet hole in the body of the car, looking like Detroit’s answer to Thomas the Apostle.

“Karl comin back?”

“No.”

“You do something to him?”

“Yeah,” I said, and I left.

He didn’t follow me.