A Midnight Clear. William Wharton

beards.

      Then they disappear. I figure they’re behind the château. I wait. Waiting is 99 percent of soldiering. Sometimes it’s only waiting for chow, sometimes it’s waiting like this; but definitely too much waiting.

      Then Shutzer comes around the other side of the château. He leans forward and peers through one of the shutters. Gordon slinks along behind him and is swinging his head back and forth like some bird dog trying to pick up a scent.

      Gordon and Fred Brandt both claimed they had the best schnozzolas in the world. They insisted they could pick up smells other people don’t even dream about. Once at Shelby, out on the firing range, we had a smelling contest using a pair of Jim Freize’s socks as bait. Freize could stink up a pair of socks in two days so they stood by themselves. His feet were like a dog’s tongue; it was the only part of him that sweated. And some sweat.

      It was a treasure hunt. I went into the woods and hid a pair of Jim’s socks; then Gordon and Brandt had to search them out by scent alone. Both of them were remarkable. They’d find those socks faster than it took me to hide them. Fred won in a best of ten series but it was close. I think the difference was mostly a matter of luck with the wind.

      Now Mel has it to himself. We called him Mel the Smell for a while there, but he objected to the double meaning. Actually, Mel’s on the neat side, not in a class with Wilkins, but way ahead of me or most of the squad, even Morrie.

      Gordon and Shutzer start down the hill. They both take a side and are peering carefully at the steep road. Once Shutzer leans and carefully scratches at a spot with the tip of his bayonet. They cross the bridge, then the road on our side of the bridge, and come up toward us. I step out from behind my tree.

      ‘How’d it go?’

      Shutzer sits on the ground beside me.

      ‘Nobody home. Looks like nobody’s been there for a while, either.’

      Gordon hands me back the scope. I should’ve asked for it before they left. Chalk off another two points.

      ‘Can’t see what’s inside. There are curtains or drapes inside the shutters. I checked the doors and there’re no signs of boobytraps. It looks as if we’ve got ourselves a château.’

      Of course everybody’s dribbled in from the spots I put them and are gathered around. Shutzer’s pulled off his boot and is wringing out his sock.

      ‘Well, it isn’t the good old University of Florida with fifteen hundred acres of orange trees growing under Spanish-moss-covered oaks around an Olympic-size swimming pool, but it’s a step in the right direction, I’ll say that.’

      When Shutzer gets his boot back on, we climb into the jeeps and roll uphill to the château; no mines, no machine-gun bursts, no snipers, nothing.

      We force a front shutter and window with a bayonet. It’s a French window-door and, as Gordon predicted, no boobytrap. We sidle in the door and stand just inside, letting our eyes get used to the dark after all the glare outside.

      My God! What a room. It looks like a ballroom or a very fancy small gym. There are parquet floors and on one end is a gigantic fireplace, big enough to walk into. Long golden damask curtains go from floor to ceiling over the windows. The windows must be fifteen feet high.

      Everybody files in so we’re all standing there staring. None of us has ever seen anything like this before. And what makes it so eerie is there isn’t one piece of furniture in the room.

      I know it’s time to play sergeant again; somebody has to. We need to unload all the rations and crap from the jeeps and set ourselves up. But we only stand there, overwhelmed.

      I’m definitely feeling like Cinderella who was not invited to the prince’s ball. I feel very disinvited. Shutzer’s the first one who moves; he sashays out to the center of the floor. Shutzer’s about five six, round but not fat. He’s loaded down with all the military furbelows: bulging field jacket, two bandoliers around his neck, ammo belt filled with M1 cartridges, bayonet, aid kit and canteen. He wears camouflage netting over his helmet, the only one in the squad. Gordon says it makes Shutzer look like an escapee from the South Pacific. Shutzer claims he wears it so he’ll recognize his hat; helmets are too much all alike.

      Shutzer’s OD pants are stiff with greasy dirt; we’re all the same, even Wilkins; there’s no way to wash them and no others to change into. The wool soaks up grease and gets darker until the fronts are stiff and almost black.

      Shutzer steps out onto the floor and gazes around; then he starts singing, grunting, humming ‘The Jersey Bounce,’ and breaks into a jitterbug routine by himself in the middle of that huge room.

       They call it the Jersey bounce,

       The rhythm that really counts,

       The temperature always mounts

       Whenever they play …

      ‘Come on, Mel, let’s show ’em how we did it at the old USO.’

      Gordon comes out, rifle slung on his shoulder. He starts dancing with Shutzer. The two of them, bayonets clanking, canteens bouncing, bandoliers swinging, try some of the classic hand-over-head jitterbug maneuvers but their rifles get in the way. I watch those crazies, working it out in the middle of the Ardennes, and I remember Shelby.

      In those last days, when we finally believed they really were going to ship the Eighty-tenth Division overseas, we went into a mild state of panic. Shutzer insisted this was proof that, despite all the propaganda, we were losing the war. Sending this outfit to fight anybody must be a desperate last resort.

      But the thing bothering us most is that in our squad, with the exception of Wilkins, we’re all virgins, eleven unwilling, unready to die, virgins. I don’t know if all this virginity was only a normal factor of the times or if there is some negative correlation between sexual precocity and what we call intelligence. Maybe it was only an accident of space and time. Who knows.

      We’d spend evenings trying to coax details out of Wilkins. His wife was in town and he’d do anything to make sure he got his weekend pass. If his KP or guard duty happened to fall on a Saturday or Sunday, we were all willing to jump in and sub for him, a vicarious pleasure. None of us ever met Linda, but we all knew her. In a sick, sex-hungry, Biblical sense, we all knew her.

      Of course, Mother was very reluctant. He wasn’t about to satisfy our puerile salaciousness. To all our entreaties, questions about how often and how much, his only reply was a sly smile and bashful ‘Oh, it isn’t like that at all,’ or ‘You guys are sex maniacs.’

      So, it got to be less than three weeks before shipping out. I think it was Morrie who came up with the idea, or maybe it was Shutzer. Four of us managed a weekend pass and headed into town to hunt a nice, complaisant whore who could put us out of our misery, initiate us into the rites of manhood, emancipate us from the lonely compassion of our five-fingered widows.

      All together we had fifty dollars. Ten was for a room at the Jefferson Hotel. This was for two but we knew a back way to sneak in the others. It was Gordon, Shutzer, Morrie and I. We figured any more would be some kind of gang bang and we had more romantic aspirations. The rest of our money was to go into the ‘investment’ and a bottle of bourbon. Forty dollars was a lot of money in those days.

      There was much speculation and discussion on the kind of woman. I think each of us was scared we’d get involved with a real woman and wouldn’t be able to manage it. We agreed pure chance, not game skills, would decide the ‘pecker order,’ so we matched coins. Morrie won, Shutzer second, me for sloppy thirds and Gordon on the tail end. (Think of that, a quadruple pun!)

      We settled into the hotel. Gordon and Shutzer had been nominated for the search, the recon part. We knew better than to hustle girls at the USO. We’d all tried that at one time or another, but the forces of morality were greater than our tactical skills. The B-girls in the bars were generally too much for us. None of us could make the grade with a genuine soldier-town whore, and none of us was