‘You shouldn’t even be in the Army,’ said Weary.
Billy was involuntarily making convulsive sounds that were a lot like laughter. ‘You think it’s funny, huh?’ Weary inquired. He walked around to Billy’s back. Billy’s jacket and shirt and undershirt had been hauled up around his shoulders by the violence, so his back was naked. There, inches from the tips of Weary’s combat boots, were the pitiful buttons of Billy’s spine.
Weary drew back his right boot, aimed a kick at the spine, at the tube which had so many of Billy’s important wires in it. Weary was going to break that tube.
But then Weary saw that he had an audience. Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers’ blue eyes were filled with bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh.
Three
The Germans and the dog were engaged in a military operation which had an amusingly self-explanatory name, a human enterprise which is seldom described in detail, whose name alone, when reported as news or history, gives many war enthusiasts a sort of post-coital satisfaction. It is, in the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called ‘mopping up.’
The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her mine was Princess.
Two of the Germans were boys in their early teens. Two were ramshackle old me droolers as toothless as carp. They were irregulars, armed and clothed fragmentarily with junk taken from real soldiers who were newly dead. So it goes. They were farmers from just across the German border, not far away.
Their commanander was a middle-aged corporal-red-eyed., scrawny, tough as dried beef, sick of war. He had been wounded four times-and patched up, and sent back to war. He was a very good soldier-about to quit, about to find somebody to surrender to. His bandy legs were thrust into golden cavalry boots which he had taken from a dead Hungarian colonel on the Russian front. So it goes.
Those boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home. An anecdote: One time a recruit was watching him bone and wax those golden boots, and he held one up to the recruit and said, ‘If you look in there deeply enough, you’ll see Adam and Eve.’
Billy Pilgrim had not heard this anecdote. But, lying on the black ice there, Billy stared into the patina of the corporal’s boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.
Next to the golden boots were a pair of feet which were swaddled in rags. They were crisscrossed by canvas straps, were shod with hinged wooden clogs. Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was the face of a blond angel of fifteen-year-old boy.
The boy was as beautiful as Eve.
Billy was helped to his feet by the lovely boy, by the heavenly androgyne. And the others came forward to dust the snow off Billy., and then they searched him for weapons. He didn’t have any. The most dangerous thing they found on his person was a two-inch pencil stub.
Three inoffensive bangs came from far away. They came from German rifles. The two scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just been shot. They had been lying in ambush for Germans. They had been discovered and shot from behind. Now they were dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet. So it goes. So Roland Weary was the last of the Three Musketeers.
And Weary, bug-eyed with terror, was being disarmed. The corporal gave Weary’s pistol to the pretty boy. He marveled at Weary’s cruel trench knife, said in German that Weary would no doubt like to use the knife on him, to tear his face off with the spiked knuckles, to stick the blade into his belly or throat. He spoke no English, and Billy and Weary understood no German.
‘Nice playthings you have, the corporal told Weary, and he handed the knife to an old man. ‘Isn’t that a pretty thing? Hmmm?
He tore open Weary’s overcoat and blouse. Brass buttons flew like popcorn. The corporal reached into Weary’s gaping bosom as though he meant to tear out his pounding heart, but he brought out Weary’s bulletproof Bible instead.
A bulletproof Bible is a Bible small enough to be slipped into a soldier’s breast pocket, over his heart. It is sheathed in steel.
The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary’s hip pocket. ‘What a lucky pony, eh?’ he said. “Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don’t you wish you were that pony?’ He handed the picture to the other old man. ‘Spoils of war! It’s all yours, you lucky lad.’
Then he made Weary sit down in the snow and take off his combat boots, which he gave to the beautiful boy. He gave Weary, the boy’s clogs. So Weary and Billy were both without decent military footwear now’ and they had to walk for miles and miles, with Weary’s clogs clacking, with Billy bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, crashing into Weary from time to time.
‘Excuse me,’ Billy would say, or ‘I beg your pardon.’
They were brought at last to a stone cottage at a fork in the road. It was a collecting point for prisoners of war. Billy and Weary were taken inside, where it was warm and smoky. There vas a fire sizzling and popping in the fireplace. The fuel was furniture. There were about twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, staring into the flames-thinking whatever there was to think, which was zero.
Nobody talked. Nobody had any good war stories to tell.
Billy and Weary found places for themselves, and Billy went to sleep with his head on the shoulder of an unprotesting captain. The captain was a chaplain. He was a rabbi. He had been shot through the hand.
Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl. The owl was hanging upside down from a rod of stainless steel. The owl was Billy’s optometer in his office in Ilium. An optometer is an instrument for measuring refractive errors in eyes-in order that corrective lenses may be prescribed.
Billy had fallen asleep while examining a female patient who was m a chair on the other side of the owl. He had fallen asleep at work before. It had been funny at first. Now Billy was starting to get worried about it, about his mind in general. He tried to remember how old he was, couldn’t. He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn’t remember that, either.
‘Doctor,’ said the patient tentatively.
‘Hm?’ he said.
‘You’re so quiet.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You were talking away there-and then you got so quiet’
‘Um.’
‘You see something terrible?’ ‘Terrible?’
‘Some disease in my eyes?’
‘No, no,’ said Billy, wanting to doze again. ‘Your eyes are fine. You just need glasses for reading.’ He told her to go across the corridor-to see the wide selection of frames there.
When she was gone, Billy opened the drapes and was no wiser as to what was outside. The view was still blocked by a venetian blind., which he hoisted clatteringly. Bright sunlight came crashing in. There were thousands of parked automobiles out there, twinkling on a vast lake of blacktop. Billy’s office was part of a suburban shopping center.
Right outside the window was Billy’s own Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de Ville. He read the stickers on the bumper. ‘Visit Ausable Chasm,’ said one. ‘Support Your Police Department,’ said another. There was a third. ‘Impeach Earl Warren it said. The stickers about the police and Earl Warren were gifts from Billy’s father-in-law, a member of the John Birch Society. The date on the license plate was 1967, which would make Billy Pilgrim forty-four years old. He asked himself this: ‘Where have all the years gone?’
Billy turned his attention to his desk. There was an open copy of The Review of Optometry there. It was opened to an editorial, which Billy now read, his lips moving slightly.
What happens in 1968 will rule the fare of European optometrists for at least 50 years! Billy read. With this warning, Jean Thiriart, Secretary of the National Union of Belgium Opticians, is pressing for formation of a ‘European Optometry Society.’ The alternatives, he says, will be the obtaining of Professional status, or, by 1971, reduction to the role of spectacle-sellers.