Uncommon Type: Some Stories

Christmas Eve 1953

Virgil Beuell didn’t close the shop until nearly dinnertime, when a light snow began falling. The road back home was slick and getting slicker so he drove slowly, wonderfully easy to do in the Plymouth with the PowerFlite automatic transmission. No clutch, no shifting, an engineering marvel. Skidding off the icy road and getting stuck in the snow would be a disaster tonight; in the Plymouth’s trunk were all the treasures due in the morning from Santa, kept hidden and undiscovered there since the kids had declared their wishes weeks ago. Those presents had to be under the tree in a few hours, and transferring them from the trunk of a snowbound car to the cab of a tow truck would alter Christmas Eve horribly.

The drive home took longer than usual, sure, but the length of the trip did not bother Virgil. The cold was what he hated. PowerFlite or not, he often cursed the folks at Plymouth, who were unable to build a car with a heater worth a damn. By the time he slowly pulled up to the house and the yellow spread of the headlamps played on the screen of the back porch and there was the hush of tires coming to a stop on the gravel drive, he was aching slightly from the cold. Virgil had to be extra careful not to slip on the front walkway, as he had done too many times before, but he still got inside the house as fast as a working man could.

As he stamped the snow off his overshoes and hung up his layers of warm clothing, Virgil’s body softened in the warmth pumping up from the cellar through the grates. After buying the house, he self-installed a furnace that was far oversized for the modest home. He put in, too, a beast of a hot-water heater, a commercial unit that never, ever ran out of the liquid heaven that allowed for the kids’ baths and his own long showers. The winter fuel bills were worth the comfort, as was the price of two cords of firewood every winter.

A fire was going in the family room. He had taught Davey how to build one by stacking the wood the way he did his toy Lincoln Logs, like a square house around the kindling, never a pyramid. The kid now viewed making the fire as his sacred duty. Come the first frosts of November, the Beuell home was the warmest place for miles and miles.

“Dad!” Davey came running from the kitchen. “Our plan is working great. Jill is completely fooled.”

“Good news, Big Man,” Virgil said, giving his boy the secret handshake known in the entire world only by the two of them.

“I told her we’d write the Santa letters after dinner, then lay out some snacks, just like you did with me when I was little.” Davey was turning eleven in January.

Jill was setting the kitchen table, her specialty being the straightening of napkins and silverware. “My daddy is home, hooray hooray,” the six-year-old said, lining up the last of the spoons.

“He is?” Delores Gomez Beuell asked, standing as she cooked at the stove, baby Connie straddling the nooks of her elbow and hip. Virgil gave each of the women in his life a kiss.

“So he is,” Del said, pecking him back, then dishing fried potatoes with onions onto a platter and getting it to the table. Davey brought his father a can of beer from the new, huge Kelvinator and ceremonially levered the two opposing openings in the top with a church key, another sacred duty.

Dinnertime with the Family Beuell was a show. Davey was in and out of his chair—the kid never sat through a meal. Connie squirmed in her mother’s lap, content with a spoon she worked around in her mouth or banged on the table. Del cut food for the kids, wiped up spills, placed bits of mashed-up potato into Connie’s mouth, and, occasionally, had a bite herself. Virgil ate slowly, never repeating a bite of any one food, but working his fork around his plate in a circle as he enjoyed the theater that was his family.

“I’m telling ya, Santa needs only three cookies.” Davey was explaining, for Jill’s sake, the facts surrounding the evening’s expected visitor. “And he never finishes a whole glass of milk. He’s got so much to do. Right, Dad?”

“So I hear.” Virgil gave his son a wink that Davey tried to return, but he could only scrunch up the one side of his face to force one eye closed.

“Anyways, everyone leaves him the same snack.”

“Everyone?” Jill asked.

“Everyone.”

“I can’t figure out when he comes. When does he show up?” Jill needed to know.

“Not at all if you don’t touch your dinner.” Del tapped Jill’s plate with her fork and separated some of her potato from her meat. “Bites get Santa here sooner.”

“Right when we all go to bed?” Jill asked. “We have to be sleeping, right?”

“Could be anytime between bedtime and when we wake up.” Davey had answers for every one of his sister’s queries. Since he had figured out the deal with Santa over the summer, Davey had assigned himself the task of keeping his little sister a believer.

“That could be hours. If his milk sits out too long, it’ll go bad.”

“He can make it cold with just a touch! He just sticks his finger in a glass of warm milk and does a whooshy thing and boom. Cold milk.”

Jill found that fact amazing. “He must drink a lot of milk.”

After dinner Virgil and the kids did KP, Jill standing on a chair over the sink drying the forks and spoons one by one while Del was upstairs putting the baby down and grabbing a short, much-needed nap. Davey opened his father’s final can of beer for the night and set it on the telephone table right beside what was called Daddy’s Chair in the front room, by the fire. Once Virgil was sitting and sipping, Davey and Jill lay in front of the phonograph and played Christmas records. With the room lights off, the tree threw colored magic onto the walls. Jill found Virgil’s lap while her brother played the Rudolph record over and over until they knew all the words and started adding their own.

Had a very shiny nose.

“Like a lightbulb!”

Used to laugh and call him names.

“Hey, Knothead!”

When it came to the line about going down in history, they yelled out, “And arithmetic!”

Del came downstairs, laughing. “What would you goofballs make of ‘Joy to the World’?” She took a sip from Virgil’s beer before sitting in her corner of the sofa, tapping a cigarette from her leather case with the snap clasp, and lighting it with matches from the ashtray set beside the phone.

“Davey, poke that log a bit, would you?” Virgil said.

Jill perked up. “Lemme poke the fire!”

“After me. And don’t worry. Santa’s boots are fireproof.”

“I know. I know.”

After Jill took her turn stabbing the fire, Del sent the kids upstairs to change into their pj’s.

Virgil finished his beer, then went to the hall closet to pull out the portable Remington typewriter. Delores had bought the machine brand new for Virgil when he was in the Army hospital on Long Island, New York. He had typed letters to her with his one good hand until the therapists taught him to use what he called five-and-a-half-finger touch typing.

He took the writing machine out of its case on the low coffee table and rolled in two sheets of paper, one on top of the other—always two sheets so as not to damage the platen.

“Leave your messages for St. Nick or Father Christmas or whatever his name is,” he told the kids when they came back downstairs smelling of toothpaste and fresh, clean flannel.

Jill wrote hers first, one clack at a time, letter by letter, key by key.

For his letter Davey insisted on his own separate piece of paper. He told Jill that he didn’t want to confuse Santa. Getting the two pages into the typewriter and lined up straight took him a few tries.

Davey left his letter hanging out of the typewriter carriage, posing the machine to face the fireplace, where Santa was sure to see it.

“You guys should arrange your presents in piles under the tree. To make things simple come morning,” Virgil said. Santa always left the wished-for presents that were his responsibility unwrapped on Christmas morning, ready for immediate play, so Virgil and Del would have time for their morning coffee. The family gifts—from Uncle Gus and Aunt Ethel, from Uncle Andrew and Aunt Marie, from Goggy and Pop, from Nana and Leo, from as far away as Urbana, Illinois, and as close as Holt’s Bend—had been collecting under the tree, wrapped in colorful paper, for days, growing with almost every stop at the village post office.

Once twin stacks of gifts labeled DAVEY and JILL had been built up, the kids put the records back in their sleeves and the albums back up on the shelf. Del asked Jill to tune the big cabinet radio to the Christmas Eve Programs, for seasonal music that was not about a deer with a red nose.

Cookies had been baked on December 23. Jill pulled them out of the Kelvinator and arranged them on a plate while Davey poured milk into a tall glass, then they carried the snacks to the coffee table, setting them beside the Remington. From then on it was a waiting game. Davey added another log to the fire as Jill reacquainted herself with her father’s lap while the radio played Christmas carols celebrating wise men and holy nights and the birth of Jesus.

Not long after, Virgil carried his sleeping daughter up to her bed, sliding her between the covers, marveling at the softness of his little girl’s closed eyes and the lips that were Del’s in perfect miniature. In the front room, Davey was on the sofa, leaning close against his mother as she played her fingers in his hair. “She swallowed it hook, line, and sinker,” he said.

“You’re a good big brother,” Del told him.

“Ah, heck. Anyone would do it.” Davey was looking into the fire. “When Jill first asked me if Santa was really real, like she was afraid to ask you and wanted it to be a secret between just us, I didn’t know what to say.”

“How’d you handle it, honey?”

“That’s when I came up with the plan. To have an answer for every question she had. How does he make it to every house? He goes superfast and there aren’t all that many houses anyway. What about a house with no chimney? He can use the oven or the furnace.”

“Touching the milk to make it cold,” Del whispered to her son as she brushed hair off the soft skin of his forehead. “So smart. So quick.”

“That was cinchy. He’s a magic man.”

“You’ll have to do the same for Connie soon.”

“Of course. It’s my job now.”

Virgil came back downstairs to Daddy’s Chair as a carol, in Latin, was crooning out of the mouth of Bing Crosby.

“Dad, how does radio work?” Davey wanted to know.

At quarter past ten, Davey went off to bed, announcing this might have been the best Christmas Eve ever.

“Should I put on some coffee?” Delores asked.

“You’d better,” Virgil said, following her into the kitchen, where he stopped her from reaching for the coffee can, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her. She kissed back, both of them feeling that such a kiss was one of the reasons they were still married. The kiss lasted longer than either of them expected, then they smiled at each other. Del prepared the coffee as Virgil stood next to her at the stove.

“Next year, let’s try to get to the Midnight Mass,” Delores said. “We are raising godless kids.”

“Just Davey.” Virgil chuckled. Davey had been born seven months after their wedding day.

“The Midnight Mass is so beautiful.”

“Three kids up all hours on Christmas Eve? The drive all the way to St. Mary’s? If we’d tried that tonight with the snow?”

“The McElhenys manage.”

“Ruth McElheny is as nutty as a can of Planters. Ed doesn’t dare cross her.”

“Still. The candles. The music. So pretty.” Del knew that in years to come they’d make the drive to Midnight Mass. Not because he didn’t dare cross her but because he loved to give her what she wanted. But for this Yuletide, there was just his hand over hers in the quiet, warm kitchen of the snowbound house as they sat with their coffee.

Virgil put his overshoes back on and pulled on his heavy coat, cracking open the front door just wide enough for him to slip through. Nearly three inches of snow had collected. Hatless, he went to the Plymouth’s trunk to retrieve Santa’s bounty. Not wanting to risk a fall on the frozen walk, Virgil made two trips carrying small loads. Closing the trunk, he paused a moment to ponder the final hour of Christmas Eve 1953. A cold night, yes, but Virgil had been colder.

Stepping carefully, he felt the pull of a ghost pain where his lower left leg used to be. He took the five steps to the front door one at a time.

Del laid out the nurse’s kit by Jill’s stack of treasures. Honey Walker, the walking doll “just like a real little girl,” needed batteries. Santa had batteries. Before too long Davey would find his Space Rocket Launch Base, with towers and soldiers and spring launchers that, once Virgil assembled the components, actually flung spaceships into the void. Connie would delight in a new play blanket and a set of blocks direct from the North Pole. When all was laid out and Honey Walker had taken a test stroll, Virgil and Del sat close together on the sofa and kissed some more.

After they’d sat, arms entwined, quiet and still for a while, Del eyed the fire, then rose up. “I’m done in,” she confessed. “Try to answer on the first ring, honey. And give him my love.”

“I will.” Virgil checked his watch. It was almost 11:30. Seven minutes after midnight, the shrill peal of the phone broke the silent night. As instructed, Virgil picked up before the first ring gave way to the second.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

An operator was on the line. “This is a long-distance call for Virginia Beuell from Amos Boling.”

“Speaking. Thank you, Operator.” As always, the operator had gotten the name wrong.

“Sir, your party is on the line,” the operator said, clicking off.

“Thanks, honey,” said the caller. “Merry Christmas, Virgin.”

Virgil smiled at his nickname. Because of Amos Boling, the whole outfit had come to call him Virgin. “Where the heck are you, Bud?”

“San Diego. I was over across the border yesterday.”

“You don’t say.”

“Lemme tell you something about Mexico, Virgin. The place is loaded with cantinas and cathouses. Nice and hot, too. How deep is the snow up there in Dogpatch?”

“Seen worse. But I’m sitting by a nice fire, so no complaints.”

“Delores still burdened with you?”

“Gives her love.”

“You are one lucky son of a bitch and that gal could have done better.”

“I know that but haven’t told her.”

Both men chuckled. Amos “Bud” Boling forever joked that when Delores Gomez was taken off the market by Virgil “the Virgin” Beuell, there was no longer any point in getting married. There had been a time, more than thirteen years before, when someone else in the outfit might have come along to snag Delores. Ernie, Clyde, or Bob Clay, or either of the two Johnny Boys would have all taken a run at her had Virgil not met her first. A dance at the Red Cross Center was so chockablock with soldiers, sailors, and airmen that Virgil needed some air and a few moments away from the crowd. He stepped outside for a smoke and found himself lighting a cigarette for a brown-eyed girl named Delores Gomez. By the end of the next morning she and Virgil had danced, laughed, had griddle cakes with lots of coffee, and kissed. Two lives changed forever.

In the years since, Bud had not married and Virgil knew he never would. Not landing Delores had nothing to do with it. Virgil had, years before, figured Bud was one of those men, like his father’s youngest brother, Uncle Russell. Virgil had been around his uncle rarely, the last time during the long day that was his grandmother’s funeral. Uncle Russell had driven from New York City with a friend, a man named Carl, who called Russell “Rusty.” After the service, the burial, and a reunion dinner at the house that ended with coffee and pie, Carl and Rusty drove off into the night, headed all the way back to New York City, still wearing their funeral suits. Virgil remembered his father later saying, under his breath, that “women were neither the weakness nor the passion” of his kid brother. Bud Boling had plenty of weaknesses and a few passions, but just as for Uncle Russell, none of them involved women. “So,” Virgil said. “How you been, Bud?”

“The same, the same,” Bud answered. “Came down here three months ago from a town up north near Sacramento. That’s the state capital, you know. Bought a Buick secondhand and drove it down. Nice town. Navy town. Every cabdriver will tell you he was at Pearl Harbor.”

“You working at all?”

“Not until someone makes me.”

“I know I say this every year, but here it is: I’ve got room for you at the shop. In fact, I could use you with the way things have been going.”

“Doing well, are you?”

“Bud, I’ve got so many orders I’m working six-day weeks.”

“Hell on earth.”

“I’m serious, Bud. You come work with me and you’d be set for years.”

“I’m already set for years.”

“I’ll pay you more than you’re worth.”

“I ain’t worth a flat plug nickel, Virgin. You know that.”

Virgil laughed. “Then just come by for a visit. In the summer. Hop in that Buick and we’ll go fishing.”

“You country boys always make a big deal about fishing.”

“I’d just like to see you, Bud. Del, too. Little Davey would be over the moon to meet you.”

“Maybe next year.”

“You say that every Christmas.” Virgil kept going. “Come see us, Bud. We’ll go to Midnight Mass. We’ll say prayers for all the fellows.”

“I’ve already said all the prayers for all the fellows I’m ever going to pray for.”

“Aw, come on. Next year will be ten years.”

“Ten years?” Bud let the static crackle on the long-distance line. “Ten years for who? Ten years for what?”

Virgil felt like a fool.

Bob Clay had been killed in Normandy on the same day that Ernie, wounded in his right thigh, had bled out. No one realized his artery had been severed because the pool of blood under Ernie never spread, but was absorbed by the damp ground. Nobody saw it. Attention was not paid as closely as it should have been since there were Germans trying to kill them from somewhere on the other side of a thick hedgerow in the French bocage. Mortar rounds coming at them from the unseen enemy kept the outfit pinned down for nearly an hour. Bud and Virgil were in two squads sent to hack through the roots and trees—impossible but for the use of grenades. They flanked the enemy position and killed all of them, but at a cost. Bud’s squad leader, Corporal Emery, was cut in two, literally, by a German machine gun. Virgil was unsuccessful giving first aid to Sergeant Castle, who took three rounds in the chest that severed his spine. Burke’s head wound was beyond aid, and a fellow named Corcoran lost an arm that was cut clean from his shoulder and he was moved back to an aid station. No one knew if he lived or not.

A week later Johnny Boy disappeared and the other Johnny Boy cracked, and one by one, others in the outfit were lost in ways soldiers are lost. For fifty-eight days, from the seventh of June to early August, the outfit was either fighting or moving toward the fighting. Bud was promoted to corporal and Virgil’s teeth began to go rotten from eating nothing but K rations.

On Day 59, the outfit rested at a camp in France—there were cots with blankets and relatively warm showers, hot food, and all the coffee a GI could stomach. Later, a big tent served as a theater where movies where played. Clyde was transferred to Intelligence because he spoke decent French. Every airplane in the sky was either the RAF or the USAAF, and the word was the Germans were on the run, that the worst of the fighting had happened and they’d all be home by Christmas. New guys came in from the replacement depots and had to be drilled and trained. Bud was tough on all of them, and Virgil didn’t want to learn any of their names.

In the middle of September the outfit was given new uniforms, rearmed, and loaded into transports for an offensive in Holland. Four of the trucks slammed into each other in the dark of night. Five soldiers were killed, three were so injured they were no good for the war anymore. The trucks were repaired and moving by daylight. Three days later the outfit was surprised by a German attack just before dawn. The command post was blown up, leading to a confused, chaotic battle that had Virgil and Bud fighting the enemy hand to hand. By chance, three tanks, British Cromwells, were close enough to roar in and overpower the German advance. Many of the new guys were killed in what was their first time in combat, and plenty happened that made no sense, no sense at all.

Virgil lost count of the days before he found himself back in France, where he and Bud slept and slept and slept. They walked around huge, ancient cathedrals and played football. Movie stars came to put on shows. There was a cathouse not far from the barracks, a place called Madame Sophia’s. While many of the officers had three-day passes in Paris, Bud and Virgil and the other enlisted men drilled and trained more replacements, even in the rain. There was a different movie every night. Then came the coldest December on record, and the Germans roared into Belgium. The outfit was loaded onto trucks, driven hell-bent into the night, and dropped off on a road somewhere between Paris and Berlin. Virgil appreciated the spirit of one driver—a colored fellow—who gave him a pack of Lucky Strikes and a wish for God to look out for him.

The outfit marched on roads and across ice-solid fields, along trails dragged out in the gathered snow, hauling ammo and supplies for themselves as well as for others who were already up ahead in the fighting, which Virgil could see in the distance like Fourth of July fireworks. They fought along with the paratroopers who had taken heavy casualties, moving forward in a show of arms meant to convince the Germans that an entire division was at the ready to take them on. The ruse worked. But lives were lost.

The outfit came under artillery fire in the Belgian woods and some guys were blown apart, vaporized. Then Virgil, Bud, and the outfit were sent marching the other way, through Bastogne proper. They passed a neatly arranged stack of dead soldiers just outside the church, burned-out, useless tanks with their treads thrown off, and a pair of cows eating hay a farmer had stocked. The farmer and the cows seemed oblivious to the Germans, who were trying to retake the port at Antwerp, and to the general hullaballoo. The cold cut them all to the bone. It was inescapable. The cold killed some men in the outfit. Sleep was so rare, some guys went nuts and had to be sent back into Bastogne. The hope was that they could gather themselves so they could return to the cold and the fighting.

A new kid—Something Something, Jr.—had the watch. Virgil was in the hole, under the roof of branches, on top of the pine needles that lined the floor, wrapped in a single GI blanket. Sleep was a joke. He had a few Charms fruit candies left in a roll, so popped two into his mouth. One remained, so he rose up from the frozen-ground floor of the hole and palmed the final square of hard candy into the hand of the new kid.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” Virgil whispered.

“Thanks, Virgin.”

“Junior, call me Virgin again and I’ll crack you one.”

“Isn’t your name Virgin?”

“Not to fucking new guys.”

The hole was at the far left of these woods, two trees in from the edge of the rise, overlooking, in daylight, a Belgian farmer’s barren field and, just beyond it, a collection of houses built along a narrow road leading northeast. At night, there was only the void. Somewhere down there were supposed to be the German soldiers. The rest of the outfit was in holes and shelters of their own, spaced off to the right. This was the main line of defense, theoretically. In reality, the idea of an MLD was as laughable as that of a cozy nap. The line was so thin there was no listening post forward of the trees. There was little heavy armor in the rear. The big guns had only a few shells left. There was no kitchen and thus no hot food for miles.

This hole was the seventh Virgil had chipped out of the frozen ground and covered with tree limbs since they had walked through Bastogne. Virgil didn’t want to dig any more of them. Moving to another position meant shouldering weapons and gear, carrying it who knew how far or for how long, digging another hole, and building another shelter, working up the sweat that, in the subzero winter, caused a man’s uniform to freeze to his back. Frostbite had taken more men off the line than wounds from enemy fire. Some of the freezing guys had been able to get out before the encirclement. Those that hadn’t had already lost toes and fingers, some even their feet and hands.

Virgil didn’t want to be one of those guys. He kept his one extra pair of socks tied together and draped across the back of his neck under his uniform to hang in his armpits. His body temperature, what was left of it, would dry the socks out some. He hoped he could always have that reserve of semidry socks to avoid frostbite. He also hoped Hitler was going to come walking across the field waving a white hankie to surrender personally to PFC Virgil Beuell. Right after Rita Hayworth dropped by to offer a blow job.

“I sure could use some coffee,” Junior whispered.

“Tell you what,” Virgil whispered back. “I’ll start a warm and toasty fire to percolate us up a couple of pots. I got some cake mixings, too, and we’ll make a batch for the whole squad and shut the fuck up, you fucking fucker.”

“Butterfly. Butterfly!” A sharp whisper came from the dark to the left of the hole, the password for the day.

“McQueen!” Virgil hissed in response.

A second later, Sergeant Bud Boling tumbled into the shelter, weaponless. He had been trying to sleep during daylight hours, covered up in a hole of his own. Once it got dark he roamed the front in silence, alone, returning at daylight to report whatever he had seen to the CP before tucking away in his dark hole again.

“Krauts. Twenty-five of them. Who the fuck are you?” Bud meant the new guy, Junior. Before a name could be offered Bud said “never mind” and gave an order. “Gimme your rifle and get to the CP and tell them a Kraut probe is coming on the left.”

Junior’s eyes went wide. He had yet to be in any combat. As he kicked his way up and out of the hole, Bud repeated “Kraut probe on our left.” And the kid was gone. Bud readied the M1 rifle, tucking spare ammo clips into his jacket.

Virgil lifted the machine gun in one piece, tripod and all, and faced it at the foxholes nine o’clock. “I was right ahead of them, Virgin.”

“They see you?”

“No fucking Luger-head ever sees me.” The men whispered with the confidence of experienced soldiers, which they were, not like twenty-two-year-old boys, which they also were.

A footfall from the darkness cracked hardened ice.

“Light ’em up,” Bud hissed.

PFC Vigil Beuell pulled the trigger of his machine gun, spitting fire into a column of enemy soldiers not three yards in front of him. Bright muzzle flashes and red tracer rounds illuminated the shapes of bodies and the trunks of trees as other American boys took to their weapons. A fury of fighting lit up the woods, and the thin line of defense took on the look of an impenetrable wall. In a flash as well defined as that from a Speed Graphic camera ringside at a prizefight, Virgil saw the helmet of a German soldier explode in a cloud of fine, blood-red mist and soggy clumps of what had been the man’s head. The German soldiers spread out quickly and spewed death themselves. Bud raised up just high enough to aim his rifle and squeeze out a full clip into the invading force—eight continuous BLAMs—spreading his rounds with a geometric precision until the pi-cling of his empty clip flying out of its breach meant his ammo was spent. Instinctively, Bud reloaded and was raised up again when a body came crashing into the shelter through the pine branch roof.

The German was firing as he fell, hitting Virgil in his left knee without Virgil feeling a thing. Another shot made the fingers on Virgil’s left hand sting like a hornet’s bite.

“Fuck you!” Bud yelled, driving the butt of his M1 across the German’s jaw. “Fucker!” he yelled, smashing the German’s face twice more. Someone began firing parachute flares that lit up the woods in a harsh limelight, and Bud saw he had broken the nose and smashed the jaw of the German, who lay glassy-eyed and motionless. He spun his rifle around, pointed the muzzle at the middle button on the soldier’s uniform, fired two rounds point-blank, and ended the man’s life. “One less of you fuckers,” he said to the dead enemy soldier.

The small reserve force of American boys was coming forward now; what had started as a probe by the enemy had become a severe and deadly mistake for them. A pursuit was under way as the Germans retreated. Virgil ceased fire and was breaking down his weapon to join the move forward when he realized something was wrong. His hand was sticky and his leg was numb.

“My leg fell asleep!” he yelled. Trying to stand, Virgil fell back, on top of the faceless, lifeless German. He tried to stand again, but his left leg bent the wrong way at the knee and Virgil could not figure out what had happened. Luckily Bud Boling was there to help him up. But rather than getting him on his feet, Bud squatted, pulled Virgil over his shoulders, and lifted him clean off the ground.

That much, Virgil remembered of Christmas Eve 1944. Somewhere between the foxhole and the aid station to the rear, he slipped into the slumber of the unconscious.

Virgil felt like a god damn fool.

Next year was an anniversary for him because the war ended for PFC Beuell on Christmas Eve 1944. He awoke at an aid station in Bastogne proper, after the American tanks had come and the German advance had collapsed. A few days later, he woke up again at a field hospital in France. Weeks later he became one of thousands of wounded men in hospitals in England. When Germany surrendered and the war was over in Europe, Virgil began to think of himself as one lucky bastard. His left leg was gone, severed above the knee, and three fingers of his left hand were now stumps, wrapped in so many bandages he looked like he was wearing a gauze catcher’s mitt. But he still had two thumbs, one good leg, his sight, and his manhood. Compared to many other guys in those hospitals and on the ship home, Virgin felt like he had won the 1945 Irish Sweepstake. All he really wanted back was his wedding band, which had been lost somewhere in those woods in Belgium.

Amos “Bud” Boling stayed in Germany for his full enlistment, which meant the duration of the war plus six months. While Virgil was being treated for his wounds and the deadly infections that came with them, Bud was attacking the Siegfried Line and killing his way into Nazi Germany. Then he breached the Rhine River and later the Elbe, swept south into pockets of enemy country that had seen no signs of the war in the four and a half years it had raged around him.

Bud had never been wounded but he’d seen too many who had been, and too many killed. He had also killed a great many German men and boys. He had ended the lives of German soldiers who had been looking to surrender and survive but instead found Sergeant Bud Boling’s merciless eyes. Eighteen German officers were shot dead by his hand, alone or two or three at a time, off the roads and under the cover of trees, behind farmhouse walls or out in open fields. Bud used his .45 sidearm to wring a justice out of the war that made sense only to him. Bud killed one last German in August 1945. He had heard stories about a particular local, a former Nazi Party official who was using the false name of Wolfe. He found the man standing in a line of refugees who were hoping to return to their home cities in different parts of what had been the Third Reich. When Wolfe produced his papers, Bud ordered him out of the line. Behind a low brick wall Bud drew his sidearm and shot Wolfe square through his neck and calmly stood over the former Nazi bigwig as he thrashed about for the last few moments of his life. Bud Boling never talked of any of this. He never talked of the camps he’d seen, either. Virgil never knew any of the specifics. But he suspected. He saw the emptiness, the difference in his friend.

“How long you thinking of staying in San Diego, Bud?”

“Maybe a week, maybe a year. May head up to Los Angeles for the New Year and catch that big parade.”

“The Rose Parade?”

“Yeah. Supposed to be gorgeous. I’d ask you where’re you headed but I already know. The shop for six days a week.”

“I like my work, Bud. Don’t know that I could just amble about like you do.”

“Virgin, I’d rather punch a cop than a clock.”

The men laughed.

“Merry Christmas to you. And you’ll be mighty welcome should you amble our way sometime.”

“Always good to talk to you, Virgin. Glad you’re a happy man. You deserve such blessings.”

“Thanks to you, Bud.”

“Almost 1954. Can you believe it? There you are with Del and Davey and Jill and, uh, Connie? I get the new one’s name right?”

“Connie it is.”

“Virgil the Virgin has three kids. I understand the biology but the reality’s a fucking mystery…”

The men gave each other a round of holiday wishes, repeated goodbyes, and hung up. They would talk again in a year.

Virgil sat in the quiet, watching the fire until one in the morning. Then he pulled up out of Daddy’s Chair to bank the flames so that Davey would have embers to start up the Yule logs. He found the plug for the Christmas tree lights and yanked it from the wall socket, using the thumb, forefinger, and knuckle stumps of his left hand. After almost forgetting, he stopped in front of the plate that held Santa’s cookies and ate three of them. He hesitated, then took a bite out of a fourth cookie, put it back on the plate, and drank a few sips of the milk that had gone warm.

In darkness, he found his way to the stairs, climbing one riser at a time, his left shoe matching his right foot. He checked on both of the sleeping kids and Connie in her crib beside Del’s side of the bed. Del always laid his pajamas out for him, so once he was out of his trousers and had undone the straps and buckles of his prosthetic leg, he set the thing to rest beside the chair and wriggled into his sleeping clothes.

A short stutter of a hop got him into bed. As he did every night, he found Del’s lips and kissed them softly, causing her to purr through her sleep. Virgil pulled the covers over him—the sheet, the two heavy blankets, and the thick quilt. He rested his head on his pillow after the long day and, at last, closed his eyes.

As he did almost every night, he saw the lightning-like image of a soldier’s helmet exploding in a cloud of blood-red mist. He saw the soggy clumps of what had been the man’s head. Virgil forced himself to think of something else, anything else. He searched his mind for an image and settled on a vision of Bud Boling as a young man, twenty-two years old, standing in the warm sunshine on a California street, part of a great throng of people, all with smiling faces, cheering on a parade of floats covered with roses.