FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #9

It was the thing he'd always loved about her. She didn’t offer him a word of her broken English as he slipped a handful of coins over the scuffed counter. Not bothering with thanks, he slipped his hand around the glass mug of frothing beer that she offered him. Foam rose up at the lip of the glass like seawater at the prow of a battleship. Her eyes peered out in a faded shade of slate under smoke-black hair, held back with a hairpin like a beetle pinned on a card. The woman turned her eyes toward the floor, just a face in a roomful of nighttime wanderers, filling the room with their drawling, drunken voices.

In the day, you could hear voices in French and Dutch ringing out in every town. Further north, in the place they called Flanders, it was nothing but Germans, not yet ready to leave with their guns. Most men who went to Flanders didn’t come back. The ones who did didn’t tell stories.

“Back in Toledo, they told me never to drink that Kraut shit. Told me never to join the Army either, but here I am.”

“I never had a choice. Couple of hotheads decided to torch the only brew-joint in town. Mr. and Mrs. Ludenheimer went back home to Germany after that. They got the guys who did it in court a few weeks later. All they could say was ‘Don’t blame me! President Wilson made me do it!’”

“Can’t beat that logic.”

“I’m sure he said that in his last speech. ‘Freedom, democracy, peace, and torch the Krauts!’ That about right?

“Yeah…guys always tell me that when I ask what we’re doing out here. But I don’t see nothin’ but bullets and mustard gas. That, and sleeping in trenches up to my ass in rats. Jesus…if Wilson just wants to fuck up some Krauts, why can’t he just say it?”

“C’mon, Sarge…we finally get a few weeks away from the trenches, and what are you doing? You’re bitchin’ about the god-damn trenches! Just sip your damn beer and shut up. That’s an order.”

The sergeant did as he was told. A minute later, he tossed his empty glass to the table, giving a ring more eloquent than anything he could have said. Around him, the room emptied. The dark iron clock in the town center ticked onward, its metal-wrought hands never slowing for a heartbeat’s time. Like a great beast resting its head, the people of the town found their homes again, and stilled as sleep took them over. In the bar, the sergeant still listened for sounds to the North. Flanders never slept, they said.

Midnight came, with nothing but clinking glasses and a boozy hum to welcome it. The dark-haired woman stayed silent, her hands and eyes kept busy with scrubbing empty mugs. No laughs to share with her neighbors. No strong-handed husband to wrap an arm around her waist, to twist that deadened face into a smile. No one had to ask why. Women didn’t run taverns by themselves unless they didn’t have a choice…and the Germans had left a lot of corpses when they came through.

“I’ve met too many god-damn widows in this town…”

The Sergeant got a strange look from a soldier at the next table.

“The sound of the bombs, I don’t mind. The guns, I can deal with. Even those god-damn…what the hell do they call those flying things? The ones with the guns.”

“They’re called aeroplanes, Sarge.”

“Yeah. First time I saw one of those things, it scared the shit out of me. I thought it was the craziest damn thing I ever saw…but I got over it, y’know? That’s what you gotta do in this war, right? Either you get used to it all, or you stick a fuckin’ gun in your mouth. I got used to everything…but the worst part is coming to town.”

“Nobody in town’s trying to kill us, Sarge. You gotta go to Flanders for that kinda action.”

“But look at the women…how many of them do you think wound up widows in this god-damn mess? They see us coming in with our guns and our uniforms, and they hate us for it. They never speak to me, but God…the looks they give me sometimes…”

Caught in a quiet moment, free from the soldiers’ eyes, the woman behind the bar looked down at a rough-cut rectangle of metal, glass, and paper, and took the object in her roughened hands. From the tiny picture-frame, a man in a crisp soldier’s uniform studied her with a cold gaze, as he brought his hand to the brim of his cap in a crisp salute. There was nothing in that sepia-toned face, left wrinkled from all the times she’d clutched it tight to her chest, that would have set him apart from the thousands of men just like him who marched into the trenches at Flanders every week.

And there wasn’t a line in the woman’s face that would set her apart from the others in that little town who couldn’t spare a word for the strange soldiers from the West who didn’t speak their language. Nothing to let them know about the nights before he had died, when every bomb-blast at Flanders followed her into her nightmares; and nothing about the nights after, when she woke up after midnight in sheets damp with tears.

 

At a table at the far end of the bar, the Sergeant brought his head up slowly, as if it were every bit as heavy as the rifle he carried with him. Some of his friends had left, making their way to the join the rest of the unit, ready to polish their rifles and face Flanders without a shudder. The others stayed here, slumped across tables and floors surrounded by empty glasses. A night in a barroom’s better than a night in a trench, even the new ones knew. Only one stayed awake, his booze-blurred gaze fixed on the Sergeant like a man half-asleep. His mouth stirred, as if ready to offer him a few wise words that would keep him alive in Flanders a day longer. But no sound came out.

With the bar swimming in and out of vision around him, the sergeant struggled to his feet. Where is the door? Where did my friends go? Simple enough questions, but to the Sergeant they might have come from the mouth of an old Greek philosopher. He had made it at least five feet across the bar when he saw a door standing in his path. Hands trembling, he wrapped his fingers around the knob and gave the door a pull…and again, he saw her.

The dark-haired woman wore a nightgown, and she sat at the edge of a rough bed as an oil-lamp gave a dull glow. The picture frame rested easily in her hands, like so many other nights, as a tear traced an uneasy line down the curve of her pale cheek. Just like so many other days, her eye met his…and for the first time, he saw her.

He tried to remember the days with old girlfriends in Toledo before the war, and the scenes of romance in every dime-store novel he had ever read. He inched his way toward the woman, ready to take her in his arms, ready to wipe the tears away with a stroke of his soft hands. He stretched out his hand…and her arm swung out, a pistol grasped in her knotted fingers.

Until that day, the woman had never spoken a word to him. Now she offered him two: “Verlof. Nu!”

Her voice trembled, and the tears only streamed heavier. The sergeant could only give her an open-mouthed stare in response. He backed his way out, and stumbled backwards through the door. The night air chilled his face, and the town stayed silent with no words to comfort him. He closed his eyes, waiting for the far-off sounds of Flanders’ guns to lull him to sleep.

back to Contest #9