It was '24, and the world was much lighter. We had just won the war, and prosperity in the States seemed an endless proposition.
I was a kid, and a dumb kid at that, and although I had been too young to fight, the army still had the lure of adventure, the promise of camaraderie. I enlisted as soon as I was able, sooner really, because papers weren't always checked as carefully as they might have been. My first tour was spent stateside in the engineering corps, which was more interesting than my hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma, and took me to exotic locales on the continent. But I wanted more, and so I reenlisted, and asked to be transferred overseas.
I got my wish.
China, Guangdong Province.
The base was a small affair: a few makeshift buildings, little more than tents, really, plus a deserted stone house with a wood floor that functioned as a command post/poker room. After a couple of months in a place like this, the lines that separate the coms and the noncoms, the officers and the dogs, tend to blur and stretch. Flat, heavily forested land stretched for a quarter mile around us before sloping down in the east down to the sea. On a clear day we could see grayish-brown mountains to the northwest.
It came, suddenly, just into my third month. Gray clouds massed overhead, hanging so heavily in the sky they seemed almost to dip down and touch the tops of trees. It was a storm like I had never before seen, not even in the heart of Tornado Alley, as the gray grew menacingly into black, a shadow across the earth. Thunder rumbled continuously, but always from a great distance, as though taunting us with a deep, gravelly laugh, edged with warning. The rain came quickly, and though it was April, it was a winter rain, cold and thick. It wrapped itself around you and seemed to somehow cut through the roof that was supposed to keep you dry. Thin strands of light appeared broken in the distance, swallowed quickly by the darkness. It came without end, a night lasting a week.
It was early afternoon on the fifth day of rain, and we were all in the stone house, each occupying himself in his own way. Some played cards loudly, others slept, or tried to, one man pulled apart and cleaned his gun for what seemed like the fiftieth time. A tired gramophone scratched out a concerto. In a corner, Joseph Korzenowski sat and read his Bible by candle, which was beginning to yellow with age. Joseph had been in the army half his life, fought in The War, looked older than his thirty-four years. His dark, unkempt showed flecks of gray. His body was angular, his features pointed. His eyes were ebony black and seemed never to stop moving. Most of the guys avoided him; they said fighting had cracked him. I don't think that was it, though. They were afraid, but not of him. They were afraid of something he knew, and they wanted nothing to do with. Maybe I was too young, or too stupid, but I was more curious than afraid. And yet, perhaps for the same reason I wasn't afraid, whatever he knew eluded me. He talked to me a lot, told me stories. He told me of living for months in a four by four hole in the ground, more mud and cloth and blood than man, of watching men die, of alternately cursing and begging God, of wondering why, if he could end the misery of others with a single shell, he could not end his own. I listened to him intently, carefully, hoping to catch it, a word perhaps, or a phrase, but the truth, as it often does, wore a shroud, hid behind the cold eyes of another man.
Now I watched him from across the room, his face flickering in the light. The faint orange glow made him look something like a devil thumbing through his Bible, fading in and out of the changing shadows. With almost a start, he looked up at me, lingered in my eyes a second, then stood up. He announced in an even voice:
"I'm going outside."
He began to strip off his clothes, the candle providing an uneven orange spotlight for the crowd of silent voyeurs. He removed everything down to his shorts, then walked to the door, the occasional creak of a board broaching the silence. His declaration struck us all as somehow ominous, and everyone drew back as he passed.
He paused a second at the open door, glanced over his shoulder at us, then passed through. We could hear the rain drops slap at his skin; there was the faint smell of salt and water on flesh. The rain swallowed him up, carried him farther out.
"He has friggin' lost it."
"God damn. Will you look at that crazy son of a bitch. What's he doing?"
"Jesus Christ if he isn't dancing."
It was true: the storm picked him up and he danced with it. We gathered in the doorway to watch him perform, a shadow in the driving rain. Behind us, I could hear the concerto play on. It was strange, because he seemed to dance to the beat of the rain, and so was badly out of step with the music.
He danced like that, half-naked and smiling in a cold steel rain, as if it were the most natural things. Between thick sheets of water we could see him beckoning to us frantically, asking us to join him in his mad tango. No one moved. We glanced at each other sideways, and there was some half smiles, but they were more nervous than amused. I think that something inside each of us wanted to throw ourselves in with him, but we also knew that it was a dance with no end, where the music never stops.
Slowly he moved farther and farther from us, till only his outline was visible against the tree line, then that too was gone. No one thought to go after him. Soon it was too late.
Within a couple of hours we had loaded the company's two horses and ourselves with all we could carry and began the quick march to the river. It was a difficult road made worse by calf-high mud, but our relief at being able to finally leave the confines of the camp made it go by in almost no time.
We spent a fitful night near the mouth of the river, which had by then subsided somewhat, revealing where it had bulged out over the land, trees stripped of their branches, layers of soil stripped away, and leaving behind the dank smell of brine. The warlord's boat was there when we arrived, so we arose before dawn and helped the Chinese crew load our equipment as light began to filter through the rising mist. Two men stayed behind with the horses and went back to the base to await our return. With all of our men, the Chinese, and the supplies, the boat's edge seemed to rise just barely above the surface of the water. As the sun climbed into mid-morning, we were underway. Though the river had drained some, we still had to navigate carefully, as in some places we could see the tops of trees rising out of the water. Less than half a mile from the coast we could begin to see the toll of the flood.
The boat moved slowly down the river, the sky was yellow and pale, like the skin of the dying who floated by in numbers more than we could count. The banks were piled high with those who had floated or been pushed aside to the edge, ensnared there in a grotesque entanglement of arms, legs, and torsos, contorted faces staring sightlessly at us as we crept by. Each body was impossible to separate from the rest, as they seemed almost to cling to one another, in that final moment of recognition before the end.
Occasionally there was movement among the bodies, and my throat would catch. The first time I saw it I rushed to the side, but a Chinese officer held my arm. "Dead already," he explained. "No room here."
We sailed on like that, grim reminders floating by every few seconds. I stood near the aft of the boat on the starboard side, eyes fixed westward. Suddenly I heard a noise near my feet. I looked down over the edge and found an emaciated death mask staring up at me. It was looking into the eyes that I recognized Joseph, who appeared as if he had been gone for weeks rather than days. I reached down to him, and thin, bony fingers grabbed hold of my hand. His touch was intensely cold, almost painful. I heard yells coming from the fore of the boat, but ignored them. The same officer who had stopped me earlier grabbed at my arms and I shoved him away with my free hand.
A faint click, and I didn't have to look to see the muzzle pointed at my head. I looked down and in his eyes, for just a second, it was there: I thought about how a week ago he was in the mess across from me eating rations; I wondered where he was yesterday, where he might have been tomorrow; I saw him there in that trench, tears commingling with blood and mud; I saw the child he once was, smiling brightly, unaware; I saw his family, the people he touched with his life; more, I saw myself, and wondered where I'd be tomorrow; I saw my mother buttoning my shirt; I saw all the girls I've loved: I saw a full house in my hand, and the bluff in the gambler's eye; and somewhere in that instant of seeing all at once I saw, briefly, the truth. Then, just as quickly, it all sank back into pools of black. His hand slipped from mine, then was gone.
The sun beat down, high above the water. I squinted my eyes at it. It struck me, then, how light and dark can blind equally. And still I looked to the sun, though it blinded me, and caused pain, and looked away from the waters of the black river, where there is nothing but shadows, faint reflections, and which, finally, is empty.
copyright 1998 by Torsten Scheihagen