The Bavarian Gate By John Dalmas

“What did I ask you?”

“You asked me-” Shorty frowned. “You asked me who it was that’s scared to jump.”

“And you told me it wasn’t you.”

“Right.” Shorty’s head bobbed a brief affirmation. “But who was its ”

“Some poor sonofabitch working on a high bridge, and fell off. You saw it when I clapped my hands.”

Shorty nodded, still frowning, then asked, “Was it real?”

Macurdy looked sternly down at him. “Absolutely,” he said, wondering if it really had been. “Would I lie to you?”

“No … No, you’re one guy I trust completely.”

“Good. You see, I’ve got the sight. I see things other people don’t. It wasn’t Shorty Lyle that was scared.”

They kept walking, a thoughtful Shorty looking at the path in front of his boots. Finally he looked up at Macurdy. “You’re a strange guy, you know?”

“Yep, I am. For me it’s the only way to be. But we won’t tell anyone what happened.”

Shorty put a hand on Macurdy’s arm, and they stopped. “You’re not only a helluva man, Macurdy,” he said, “you’re one helluva friend. Sure as shit, though, someone’s going to ask what happened that I can jump now-Sergeant Bryant for sure-and I’d like to tell him it was talking to you that did it. Okay? But I won’t tell him what happened.”

Macurdy grinned. “Okay. But now you owe me a beer, for services rendered.”

They arrived back at the barracks not actually drunk, but Shorty was a bit oiled. They’d obviously been in a scuffle somewhere, but weren’t much the worse for it.

And on Monday, Shorty jumped next in the stick behind Macurdy. Without difficulty, and found himself hooked on parachuting.

After qualifying as jumpers, they were sent to the expansion area in Alabama for advanced training. On completion, Macurdv was one of a handful promoted to private first class. Afterward the troopers were assigned to various new regiments in training, except for a few, including Macurdy, who were assigned to 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, in England, as replacements for men injured in training, or lost for other reasons.

13

Leave

Because they were headed overseas, the men assigned to the 503rd were given leave-two weeks plus travel time. Macurdy gave his destination as Nehtaka, Oregon, but went first to Salem, Indiana, where Charley and Edna met him at the depot.

They hadn’t seen their youngest son for more than nine years, and Edna hugged him, weeping, a remarkable display of emotion for a Macurdy. Charley simply stared. “Good God,” he breathed when Curtis was able to give him his attention. “You’re another one. You haven’t aged a day.” Then he too embraced their son.

Curtis spent two days with them, and his parents told him some old family lore, stories he hadn’t heard before-that very few had in his generation. His great great gram pa was said not to have aged. He’d disappeared when his oldest boy reached seventeen, only to turn up again, briefly, on one leg and two crutches, at the end of the Civil War. Even then he’d looked young, though scar-faced and short a limb like so many who were young. To learn that his wife had died sixteen years earlier. His two sons recognized him when he told them who he was, but at his request referred to him as “Cousin Martin from back east.”

But after “Cousin Martin” was gone again, one of them told his wife who their visitor had been, and the story leaked to others in the family. But not all, and mostly it stopped there. Until one of the “old man’s” grandchildren-one of Edna’s uncles, who was also a second cousin of Charley’s-had left his wife and children when he was thirty-six and looked about twenty-five. Left without warning, but semi-regularly had wired money from California until about 1915.

“You can probably understand how we felt when Varia didn’t age,” Charley said. “We thought she might be one of my cousin’s kids by some second wife out west. Although from what you told us before, I guess she couldn’t have been.”

Edna took Curtis’s hand. “And now here you are, thirtyeight years old and still so young looking, no older than Frank’s oldest boy. And married, you say.”

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