The Coldest Night Read online

  “When you fall in love with a woman,” Lew said, “it’s over for you and you might’s well die.”

  Lew told him he was engaged to three women: Bernadette, Viv, and Kitty. All three of them were lovelies and were waiting for him. He then said in no uncertain terms that Henry needed to get his head out of his ass.

  On the twisting road behind them was the division and on the other side of the pass was a descent into the five-­fingered valley of Yudam-­ni, a little village tucked in the foothills of the high peaks of the Taebeks, the frozen Yalu River, Manchuria.

  “This is about the last place I can think of I’d like to get hurt bad,” Lew said.

  “Which way?” Henry said.

  “It don’t matter,” Lew said. “There’s no right way to do a wrong thing.” He paused. “That way,” he finally said with a chop of his hand.

  The next night they rigged out and slipped into the darkness again, leaving behind the shallow scraped-­out foxholes. Each man on line in snow and ice was looking across a field at a mountain, intent on some inner world as he listened to the eerie sounds the wind blew.

  They took up a forward position on the flank of a high rugged spur on a ridge to the north. Gunny told them if there was an attack it would be at night to avoid the airships. He told them the enemy, who were not confirmed to be in country, moved and fought at night. They wore thick padded green or white uniforms, caps with a red star, carried a personal weapon, eighty rounds of ammunition, a few stick grenades, spare foot rags, sewing kit and a week’s ration of fish, rice, and tea. Their day began at 7 p.m. They marched until 3 a.m. and then prepared camouflaged positions for the day. Only scouts moved in daylight. It would be close and mixed up. They’d get inside the mortars. They would rush past, trying to get as deep into their position as possible, and attack the command posts. They would probe the weaknesses, swarm and divide and isolate and then kill one by one. It was their way of fighting. They cut off the head, he told them, and the body died. It was the way they’d won the Chinese war. Gunny knew because he’d been there and he admired them for how willing they were to die.

  They tried to scrape the ground, digging to bury their profiles, but the earth underneath them was frozen over a foot deep and so finally they stretched out on a high shelf of earth, hunkered inside the green hoods of their parkas where they could watch and listen. On the mountain ridges there were four rifle battalions lying in darkness and behind them were battalions of artillery. To the northeast was a frozen reservoir.

  The cold felt like a thousand needles cutting into his face and not a star was showing in the slatelike sky. As the hours of darkness passed, the cold sky cleared and blued and a ghostly moon appeared.

  In his mind he traveled back to the city. He was supposed to be in school. He knew that he’d lived there but now could not remember having done so. He’d lied about his age at the recruitment office and they did not seem to care.

  He recalled Lew’s advice. He was changed since last night and it was as if a gift conferred.

  A sound, what was it? He cocked his head and listened. There were no sounds unknown. All sounds had source and were signature. It came again, the crunch of snow.

  Someone was approaching, silent as a pulse beat. The sound stopped and slowly the sound back traced its path.

  “I think we are in for a very uncertain future,” Lew said. He lay beside him, a walkie-­talkie inside his parka to keep it warm.

  “They talk about you,” Henry whispered.

  “What do they say?”

  “There is no one meaner or tougher than Lew Devine.”

  “Shit,” Lew said, and spit.

  “Do you think we’ll ever get back home?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “You know, Lew, they got names.”

  “I don’t know their names,” Lew said.

  “It’s easy enough to find out.”

  “I don’t know their names because I don’t want to know their names.”

  “You know mine.”

  “My cross to bear.”

  There was a stillness in the sky, the deep blue light resting on the land down to the shadowed blackness of the dry streambed and back up again and turning black as it silhouetted the parallel ridge. After a while Lew fell asleep, the black stubble of his frozen beard wreathed with ice, while Henry kept watch and it was some time later a deer materialized, stepping tenderly among the heaped boulders in the dry streambed. The deer was white and was not stepping as much as it was simply moving, as if passing in a world of private ether. It only seemed aware of the great antlers it wore on its head. This he concluded for how tilted its head, as if threading the air, as if weaving its tines into the sky.

  He scanned the black silhouette of the parallel ridge and when he cut his eyes back to the streambed, the white deer had disappeared and he was changed back and his heart was filled with longing and fear. He stood watch the next hour on a parapet, a stone ledge in their tiny redoubt. He let Lew sleep on as the lonely light of a blue-­gray mist was giving way and steely night was falling and the world becoming a deeper and deeper gloom. He blew on his curled red fingers and wiped snot from his nose. The cold and fatigue made him gloomy and simpleminded. This night is awful, he thought, but it is still a night in my life. He felt pain and bitterness but also a strange sweetness so complete as his worlds began to merge. He just wanted to lie down and be still.

  With the toe of his boot he nudged at Lew who came from sleep instantly and in full possession of himself, his weapons and his ability to use them. With his gloved hand he muffled a cough and a gurgle and silently cleared his throat onto the ice.

  “Another crummy night in old Korea,” he finally said.

  “Great view,” Henry said.

  “That’s why you woke me up?”

  “Watch,” Henry said, and for only an instant the earth seemed to move, to take and hold a breath.

  “Rest your eyes,” Lew said, but he did not rest his eyes.

  “I think we’re outnumbered,” he said.

  When the morning light rose behind them, the mountain shadows lifted and in the grim dawn the terrain before them was as if a vast and turbulent sea, successive ridge after successive ridge.

  At daybreak there was a rumble in the east and suddenly the bombers were on station high overhead. Marine Corsairs ripped through the near atmosphere. Their fins were like steel knives cutting cold and in their wake they left invisible moils of air.

  At breakfast there were rumors they were moving west again and linking up with Walker’s Eighth Army. The word went out to mount up. The rumor confirmed, they were pushed west on the only road cutting through the great ridges of the looming mountains, but not for long. A spotter plane messaged there were road blocks in their path. The engineers moved up with flamethrowers and then diesel bulldozers and with their wide blades they shoved the charred debris aside and sent the stone and logs plummeting into the valley below.

  They moved on again and came to a frozen stream and a stone bridge, the bottom a gorge of scouring creek boulder. They waited again for the engineers to blow more road blocks and the bulldozers to clear them away.

  “The Reds are out there,” Lew said. “I’d bet money on it and I’m not a gambling man.” And then, “If you get killed by an enemy who is not there,” Lew said, “are you then not dead?”

  Henry suggested Lew take it up with the padre who wore a purple stole and carried a .38 in a shoulder holster. Lew said he just might do that and when he returned he said the padre suggested he quit his horseshit, do his job, and stop wasting the padre’s time.

  “He said that?” Henry asked.

  “Not in so many words,” Lew said, “but there was a lot of emotion behind them. I think the padre’s gone a little mental.”

  “You’d have to start out a little mental to be him,” Henry said. “Tell me again why we came up here and what we are looking for.”

  “Look what I got,” Lew said, waggling a cigar between his fin
gers.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “The padre,” Lew said.

  Lew cut the cigar, giving Henry half and keeping the other half for himself.

  Chapter 19

  THAT NIGHT, THE WIND-­BLOWN snow an impenetrable veil, they rigged out and stepped off again. Darkness now came at four thirty and would last for sixteen hours. They passed through the front line and disappeared, entering the wilderness on the coldest and blackest of nights. They moved slowly, step by step, their bodies low and compressed, heel to toe, separating themselves from the men, the guns, the engines, the iron. They stopped and waited and listened and moved again.

  “It won’t be long now,” Lew whispered.

  “Are you not afraid?”

  “Don’t be afraid until there’s something to be afraid of.”

  They occupied a rocky labyrinth of granite formations. Inside the frosted rocks it was smooth and cold and tomblike. Where they lay had never seen the sun or light or warmed on a summer day. Inside they found a sitting dead, his arms frozen in position to hold the rifle that someone had taken away from him. He wore a quilted coat and canvas rubber-­soled shoes and was gray and rimed with frost and indistinguishable and like the rocks themselves.

  “Last night,” Henry whispered, “I saw something.”

  “What’d you see?” Lew said, feeding a stick of spearmint gum into his mouth.

  “A deer. It was white.”

  “I saw it too,” Lew said.

  “What do you think it means?” Henry said.

  “Don’t be that way. Get some sleep.”

  Henry zipped his bag over his legs to his waist and flattened himself against the slant wall of their stone chamber. He tried to sleep a little and when he next looked at the luminous hands on his wristwatch he thought that he might have, but no time at all had passed. There was no sheltering from the cold and the frost so he gave up and crawled to where Lew was positioned overlooking the valley and the forested slope and the jagged black ridge beyond.

  “About time,” Lew said. His breath was white puffs of steam. “I was wondering when you’d wake up.”

  “I was dreaming about my mother’s peach cobbler.”

  “How’s our friend doing?”

  “Still dead,” Henry whispered.

  Lew handed over his canteen and told him to take a drink. Henry gave it a slosh, uncapped it, and took a sip. The liquor burn went down his throat and was like a sun flaring in his belly. It was a concoction of grapefruit juice and 190 proof ethanol. He drank again and took a third drink and passed the canteen back to Lew.

  “Feel them?” Lew whispered, his breath hanging in the air.

  Henry could not make them out against the boulders and the brush, the snow mantling the earth, but they were there, he knew it. It was hard to look for long without blinking and blinking. Then he saw something moving through the underbrush.

  “Yes,” he said, and he slid the .45 from inside his parka. He touched at his pocket where his letters were collected. He let his mouth to open, to hear better.

  The radio crackled and wheezed.

  “You half a motherfucker,” Lew hissed. He folded his body around the radio to muffle the sound and dropped to the bottom of their redoubt, scraping away a path of frost and shattering icicles that rained down on him where he collided with the dead soldier.

  When Henry looked again there was a ghostly figure bent forward and crossing the traverse of their position. It was incredible to see the white silent phantom movement, dark and shadowy and obscure, the probing patrols come first to draw fire and test the strength of the front line. Then another appeared, as if conjured from the wind and the snow. Henry prodded for Lew with the toe of his boot. Another and then another appeared, the short barrels of machine guns jutting from their hips. He felt a shiver of fear sweep through him and could not breathe. He shrank as near to the rock as possible as they passed on both sides of the stony lair.

  “What are the haps?” Lew whispered as he climbed back up the curved channel of stone.

  Henry turned his head and put his finger to his lips, shushing him silent. The wind lifted a banner of snow, and the apparitions disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. Then the wind dropped and they were there again, so many of them no wind could hide them.

  Lew let go his hold and slid back down into the curved channel.

  “They are slowly coming quick,” he repeated into the radio.

  Still more were coming, wave after wave, as if erected from the earth and snow, sifting through the night, wearing quilted jackets, covering ground silently, their white shapes flickering and dynamic in the swirling snow banner.

  The radio crackled and Lew cursed it.

  “Beaucoup Chinese,” Lew hissed. “Beaucoup Chinese.”

  The patrols kept coming, white and shrouded and silent, and were fantastic enough to make Henry’s jaw open.

  “I miss you,” he whispered. “I miss you so much.” He ached with the pain of the thought as the shadowy figures kept coming. He began to pick up small gestures and the soft sounds they made as he watched the soldiers stream by below him. More came up, filling in behind the patrols and massing in their front, waiting for the order to commit.

  He filled with fear and anguish for the men on line who would receive the brunt of this first attack. How long would it take these patrols to cross the ground between here and there? Had the word been received? Were they ready? Would their weapons fire on so cold a night as this? He could not bear how long this forever moment as he waited and waited for what he knew was coming.

  “Breathe,” a voice whispered close to his ear. Lew had crawled up beside him. “Breathe,” he whispered again.

  Then a star shell climbed slowly in the night’s black atmosphere, paused in apogee, and exploded tentacles of light. They looked away from the flame so not to candle their eyes. In the cast light the soldiers in the valley multiplied a thousand times over. They were above and below and around them in kneeling positions, ready to rise, ready to run into battle. He’d had little idea there were so many men under arms wanting to kill them.

  At first was the faint sound of sporadic firing that came from the middle of the line to their rear. The enemy had arrived at isolated points. Men were shooting. Men were fighting hand to hand. Another shell split the sky, a fiery red tail sizzling behind, and when it passed overhead was a screeching in the night, but it did not explode.

  Then more white-­robed soldiers came over the parallel ridge and misjudging the angle of its slope, they fell and tumbled to the bottom, stacking up behind the kneeled ranks in the valley.

  In the rear the lights were opening up, the rifles and machine guns. The bows of .50-­caliber and .30-­caliber bullets banged the air, whip-­cracked it, and broke it. Grenades were exploding. The heavies opened and the violent storm of the Quad .50s.

  Then all went quiet and there was a lull and all action was suspended.

  Time was interminable.

  Distant trumpets called out from the high ground rising to the west and buglers beyond the ridges answered and it became an arc of eerie calls and countercalls, north, west, south, and back again. The stars seemed to multiply as if gathering to witness and then came the flowing threads of tracers and tongues of flame from mortar tubes.

  “Jesus Christ,” Lew said as he watched them stand and hang on to each other and then rush past them and forward into battle.

  Henry’s legs, hands, and arms began to shake with the excess energy pulsing through his veins. His heart beat faster and then he felt the blood drain from his face and he thought he would piss himself. In short order he felt disbelief, then fear, then anger. There were so many of them, an inexhaustible supply of men in quilted jackets, quilted pants. His heart beat so fast. If he could only sit for a moment. If only he could draw a deep breath and exhale a long sigh.

  He swung his rifle up and pulled it into his shoulder. He tightened the sling and wrapped it around his forearm, but before he
could fire Lew had him by the back of his neck and was dragging him from the edge of the stone embrasure. That wasn’t their job. They’d done their job.

  Suddenly the opening went black, a white figure rising in front of them and the barrel of a machine gun was in Lew’s face.

  Lew made a sound, as if his last, and dropped down the curved stone channel.

  Henry raised and fired the .45 in a single motion. Weight, force, percussion, and the filled space emptied. A volley ripped the air over their heads, the bullets splatting into the rock around them and behind them, shards of granite flying past their eyes.

  Henry looked down to see Lew was hit and he was licking off his fingers the blood he daubed from his chest. Henry crabbed down the stone channel and fell in next to him. Lew smiled and told him it was a tin of raspberry jam he’d crushed and not his heart was shot. He held out his dripping fingers that Henry might have a taste, but Henry declined.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and took another lick for himself.

  There were explosions to the left and the right. There was a sharp zip in the air and a pinging sound and then the sound of drumfire. Splinters and concussions were coming closer with each round. Mortar fire was coming into their position.

  Henry climbed back to the embrasure. Across the vast white terrain he could see a thin sharp tongue of white flame, the muzzle blast of a mortar tube and then another and shells marched up the heights and along the ridge closing on their position. Geysers of frozen earth and black smoke stalked in the air and collapsed back to the ground.

  “We need to quit this place,” Lew said.

  Then there was a horrible screaming in the air, and the earth shook with explosion as interdiction fire roared in from marine artillery miles to the east. They knew to scuttle from their stone chamber and retrace the route they followed in. They ran and flung themselves down and ran again. They crossed into the harbor of their own lines where they took up fighting positions.

  When the attack came again, Henry was inside a world of consuming fire, blinding smoke, the unremitting shock waves of explosions. When they advanced they fired and ran and died, their destination deep inside the perimeter where no artillery, no mortar, no machine gun could strike them. They fired from the hip and dropped grenades in their wake and plunged on into their interior.