Chapter 12: Loose Ground

The rain was coming off the low edge of the poncho in one sheet, and where I stood the sheet came down across my boots.

Every man in the squad was sitting on his heels in the mud with his face tipped up at me, and every one of those faces had the same thing on it, which is the face of a man at a funeral who has been told to keep it straight. I have known that face my whole life. Ray had his head down and one hand flat on the ground, which was Ray’s way of telling me he was not going to be any help. Chee sat on the far side, not looking at me and not looking at Dodd, with a face on him like a wet stone. Keene watched me the way he watched the radio, like I might say something worth writing down.

So I put on Dodd’s voice and gave it back to him.

“It ain’t my turn, Sergeant,” I said. “Somebody else goes first. It’s supposed to go around.”

That got me what I was buying. Keene laughed into his sleeve. Tank made a sound down in his chest like a truck failing to start, and two men in the back turned their heads. Ray went once, with no noise out of him at all. Chee made a face at me and looked away before Dodd turned his head, which Dodd did not see and every other man there did.

Dodd heard the laugh. He knew it was at him, and he could not find the joke in it.

“You quit talking like me,” he said.

He said it flat. There was no push in it and no heat. That was the thing about Dodd. He had been in the army five years and had made his peace with being a man whose voice never carried, and he had learned to say one thing at a time and then wait.

“You want to say something, say it in your own voice,” he said. “This ain’t a vote. I ask, you answer. Hollis goes first.”

He had given me the floor in front of the squad, and I had nothing to put on it.

“Sergeant, what are we supposed to be talking about?” I said. When I am caught I get stupid on purpose. “Nobody said what the subject is. You can’t have a discussion without a subject.”

Dodd looked at the lieutenant.

Pruitt did not look back at him. Lieutenant Pruitt was standing at the edge of the poncho with the map under his arm, out of the light, and he had been there the whole time. He had already said his piece — the creek ran northwest, the rock on the far side of the valley was worth a look, we went down in the morning and came back before dark — and he had said it once and stopped. He was the kind of officer who said a thing once, and now he stood in the dark and let a staff sergeant run a squad meeting.

Dodd had an audience he had not asked for and nothing in his hands.

“We’re going to sing,” he said.

Nobody said anything. It was a bad idea and every man there knew it was a bad idea, including Dodd, and Dodd had said it out loud, so it was an order.

He raised his hands like a man conducting a band he did not like. “Sound off,” he said.

“One, two,” we said. There was no tune in it. Somebody was sharp and somebody was still on the “off,” and Tank was half a beat behind everybody else and stayed there.

“Sound off.”

“Three, four.”

Then Keene took his “four” and ran it out. Keene was eighteen and his voice had not picked a register yet, and he carried that “four” out into the dark like a calf calling after something it has lost, and the whole squad came apart around him. Chee barked once and got it back under. Somebody behind me said something under his breath that the lieutenant chose not to hear.

Pruitt bent his head and coughed. The cough came half a second behind the laugh it was covering, and every man standing there heard it for what it was, and nobody looked at him.

Farther up the slope a lamp came on and stayed on a while and went out. That was the engineers in the next tent, listening to us. Sound carried in that hole in the ground. It went down the valley and came back up. I would think about that again about twelve hours later, and off and on for the rest of my life.

After that the lieutenant said his piece.

“This is a classified reconnaissance,” he said. “It is not written down anywhere anybody can read it. It does not go in letters. It does not get talked about in a bar. You will not say where you went and you will not say what for.”

He did not raise his voice for any of it.

“This outfit has a name,” he said. “It was earned before any of us drew breath, and a week from now I would like it to still be a good name. Tomorrow you will get one order at a time and you will hear it the first time, because I am not going to say anything twice.”

He looked at the map under his arm and did not open it.

“Sleep,” he said. “We go down at first light.”

We went up the slope in the dark and lay down in the wet. Nobody talked. Tank said one thing into the dark, which was that he had never in his life heard a worse “Sound Off,” and that it was my fault, and then he went to sleep the way Tank went to sleep, like a man being paid for it.

In the morning the rain was still coming and the creek was up. It had been loud the night before. Now it was the loudest thing in the world.

We went down off the ridge in single file. There were twelve of us — eight soldiers and four civilians, the two road engineers and the surveyor and the geologist — and there was a soldier in front of each of the four, which is how you walk a man who is not a soldier down a wet hill.

Before we started, the lieutenant stopped us at the lip and gave us the order of the day, and the order was about noise. One of the engineers had told him and he had checked it, and now he told us. Down in that valley there was no wind, no traffic, nothing that ate sound. A shout went up one wall and came back down the other and kept going. Six weeks of rain had gone into those slopes. It was all sitting up there above us, dirt and trees and rock the size of a house, held in place by a few roots and by nothing else worth naming. A dropped tool, a yell, a shot, anything loud, and the whole face would come.

“Nobody talks,” the lieutenant said. “Nobody yells. Nobody fires. If you go down, you go down without a sound, and the next man keeps walking.”

He stepped off the lip and we went down after him in single file, and from then on I did not hear one man in that party say a word above a whisper.

We had been going a little under an hour — Keene had been complaining about his boots and then he stopped complaining and started counting, which is what men do in the middle of a morning — when one of the two road engineers went.

He was on a chute of wet rock with his hands out in front of him and his weight back, and he had stopped thinking about his feet. I have watched men do that a hundred times, and it is always the same half second. Then he was not on the chute anymore.

It made almost no noise. There was a scrape, and a small sound like a coat dragged off a chair, and then nothing for a long time. Nothing is the worst of it. In that country there is always supposed to be more after a man falls.

We found him at the bottom of it, in the green that grows in the fold of a valley where the water sits. He had gone down about two hundred feet, most of it rock. We could not look at him and we could not stop looking at him.

Voss got down there before any of us. She was the surveyor and she had come out of the same office he had, and she had known him longer than any of us had known each other. She started to make a noise. I could see it coming up in her the way you see water come up in a pipe, and there was nothing behind it yet that anybody could stop.

Baird got his hand over her mouth.

“Don’t,” he said. He did not say it loud. “Don’t make a sound.”

She put her face into his coat and stayed there, and what came out of her came out with no air in it at all.

The lieutenant took his hat off. The rest of us did the same, and we stood in the rain in the green with the man in front of us. Nobody said anything. Anything said would have been heard.

Chee and I did what had to be done. Between us we got him into a canvas and wrapped him and tied it. He had been with the party three days. I never got his name. I heard it once, I think, in the truck that first day, and I could not bring it up.

The lieutenant looked at the ground and made a decision about where to put him, and I understood it without being told. We could not carry him up out of there and still do the day’s work, and nobody could be left with him, so he was going to stay in the valley and we would take him up on the way back.

Tank took the entrenching tool. He dug the way Tank did everything, hard and fast and personally offended, and I stood on the far side of the hole with my eyes going up the slope, because every stroke of that tool was a noise and every noise was going up to the wall above us and coming back.

He was four strokes in. I know it was four because I was counting them.

The dirt came apart and something blue came up out of it.

It was about the size of a basketball. It went up and turned twice in the air and then it came at us. We went down and sideways like a bunch of birds and it went over our heads and hit the ground and rolled, and the blue went out of it, and what was left sitting in the wet grass was a bug.

It was small, about the size of a ladybug, and it was built wrong. Red, and clear as glass, so that you could see through the case and through the wings and into the working parts. The working parts had a light in them. It moved around inside the way blood moves in a thing that has blood.

Nobody had anything. Tank said, “What in the hell is that,” which is what Tank says when the rest of us are thinking the same thing and he is the only one willing to carry it.

Baird pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one knuckle and got down on his knees in front of it. He had glasses you could see the thickness of from ten feet away, and he had spent his whole life wanting to know what a thing was. He took the bug up between two fingers, the way you would lift a fly off a table, and brought it close to his face and turned it in the light.

Where his fingers touched it, it went blue.

Then he went. The fire came up at the point where he held it and went over him from the collar out, faster than a man can step back, and then there was a burning man standing in the green in front of us with the thing still in his fingers.

His skin came up in blisters and then went. His glasses came off his face and fell in the grass and lay there with the lenses black. He went down on his back and twisted and screamed.

Here is what I remember about the next part, and it is not the fire. It is that we all heard it. That valley was a box. The scream went up one wall and came back down the other and went up again, and every one of us understood in the same second that he was making a sound that could bring the whole slope down on top of us, and that there was not one thing any of us could do about it, and that we were going to stand in the green and listen to it until it was done.

I was not thinking about him. I was thinking about the wall over our heads, and so was every other man there.

Somebody got a shovel and went at him with dirt. He got two loads on and it did nothing at all, and the lieutenant said stop, and the man stopped with the shovel still up in the air. Doc, who was our corpsman, went as far as him and came back and did not say anything, and the look on his face was the whole answer.

He was burned from the hair on his head to the soles of his feet, and burned through. There was nothing in that valley to fix him with and no way to get him out of it. If we had put the fire out he would have had an hour, or two, on his back in the grass, and then he would have died anyway, and we would have spent the hour with him like that. Nobody had to say it out loud.

Voss turned her back on it and put both hands over her ears and stood there with her mouth open, and to this day I do not know whether she was trying to cry or trying to shout, and neither did she.

Keene had his hands on Tank’s back and was shaking, and Tank let him. Tank did not say a word to him, which for Tank was the same as taking his hat off.

Dodd had his pistol out, barrel down, thumb on the catch.

“Sir,” he said. “Let me.”

The lieutenant put his hand on the pistol. Not on Dodd — on the pistol. He pushed it down. He was still on his feet. He had not put his hat back on since the burial.

“No shots,” he said. “A shot goes up that wall and comes back down on us. The bayonet. Let me.”

He took a rifle off a man and looked at the bayonet to make sure it was seated, and it was. Then he went and stood over what was left of the geologist and looked down at him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Baird,” he said. He did not say it loud, because nobody was going to hear anything over the noise the man was making. Then he shut his eyes and put the bayonet through the man’s heart.

The screaming stopped. The fire did not.

The lieutenant took the rifle in both hands to pull the bayonet back out, and the blade came up blue.

It came up the steel and over the guard and up the wood. It went faster than an eye can follow. Nobody in that party saw the moment it left the blade and got onto him. Then it was on his hands and his arms and his chest, and it was on his face while he was still standing up, and then he was a burning man in front of his own squad.

We knew him. Pruitt was not a big man, he did not have a big voice, and there was nothing about him that told you to be afraid of him, and he was the hardest man I ever served under. I watched him carry a man half a mile out of a draw on his own shoulder with a cracked rib. Whatever that fire was, it was enough to make Lieutenant Pruitt scream, and every one of us heard him do it, and that told us more about what we were looking at than anything else that morning could have.

Dodd was crying. He had the pistol up and he was crying and he meant to shoot him and end it, and the lieutenant turned his head — on fire, on his own feet, with the last of it — and said:

“I’m ordering you. Nobody fires. Get them out of here.”

Then he did the rest himself. He knew what his own noise was doing to the ground over our heads better than we did. He turned the bayonet around and put it into his own chest and held it with both hands and went down.

He took a long time. We stood there and watched him burn down. When it was over there was a small pile of ash where he had been, about as high as a boot, and there were no bones in it.

The valley was quiet. The creek was running, and the creek was the only thing in that valley making any sound at all, and I have never in my life been more aware of what a creek sounds like.

Two piles of ash. Ten minutes before, there had been a man standing in each of them.

I have heard one thing in my life that was supposed to explain that ball of fire, and I will put it here, where it belongs. Years later a man in a bar told me that ground which stays wet will rot what is under it, and rot makes gas, and gas will light in the right air and burn a while and go out by itself. He was very pleased with it. I let him keep it. It accounts for a ball of fire the size of a basketball coming up out of a hole in the ground. It does not account for the fire going up a steel bayonet and into a man, and it is not going to account for what came up out of the ash.

Then something came up out of Baird’s pile.

It came up slow. The same blue, the same size. It came up to about the height of a man’s chest and stopped and hung there, and it turned and faced us.

It could have been the air moving. It could have been a bug that had just come up out of the ground and was looking for a direction to go. But it turned until it was pointed at the middle of us, and then it stayed there.

There was a sound with it. Not the fire. A small quick dry sound, like a hand of cards being shuffled across a room. Wings.

Four or five rifles came up. Nobody fired. I do not know which of us would have fired first, and I know I did not. I would rather have had that whole wall come down on me and be done with it than have the thing touch me.

Dodd stepped out in front of us.

He still had the pistol in his hand. He put it away.

“Lieutenant’s dead,” he said. “I’m taking the squad. Nobody fires.”

He said it the way he said everything, with nothing in it.

“Every one of you is going home,” he said. “That’s the order.”

I knew what he was doing. I had hold of his arm before I knew I had moved.

“It ain’t your turn,” I said. I said it in his voice, and I do not know to this day why I did that. “It’s mine.”

He took my hand off his arm and let it drop, and he did not look at me.

“You quit talking like me,” he said.

Then he turned around and went at it. He got two steps.