Chapter 18: The Seam

The Seam

I had the knife out of my belt when it came up the last ten feet, and ten feet is not a distance. I could hear it on the rock. It had made the same sound coming off the shelf — something wide and wet taking hold and letting go, taking hold and letting go — and the grade of the wall had not changed the beat of it.

Delgado’s voice came across the face from twenty feet away. Twenty feet on a rock wall, with the leg he had, was the outside of what he could reach, and he reached.

“Hollis. The hole card.”

I knew what he meant before he finished the second word.

We had gone underground with two grenades. Tank put one down the trench in the tunnel, and he kept the other, and he named it while he was hooking it on his belt — the hole card — and nobody had said it out loud since, because a thing you are keeping for the end is not a thing you discuss. I had counted us dry twice that night. The second time I was wrong, and it was Delgado who told me so, from twenty feet away, with one leg dead under him.

Tank was above me with both hands in a seam and one boot on a nub of rock, and he had nothing left over, so he took his right hand off the wall, got the card off his belt, and threw it backhanded across the dark, end over end, the way you throw a horseshoe.

“Coming down,” he said. “Catch it. If you drop it I will come down there and kill you myself.”

I had no free hand for it. Both of mine were on the rock. So I drove the knife into the crack above my fingers, drove it to the handle, and hung my weight on it, and that gave me the other hand back, and I caught the grenade in it, flat, hard enough to numb the arm to the elbow.

The spoon was under my thumb. The pin is not made for teeth, and neither is the rest of that job. I got the ring in my mouth and pulled, and the pin came out and took a strip of my lower lip with it, and the spoon was still down under my thumb and the card was still in my hand.

I looked down between my arm and the stone.

It had stopped climbing. It was eight feet under me with its head up and its mouth open. The tongue came out and hung there and felt along the face of the rock, the way it had felt along the shelf.

I threw the thing down into the mouth, flat and hard.

The tongue took it out of the air.

Nobody told me it would work. I knew what that tongue did with anything that came near it: it had taken Tank by the legs on the shelf and I had put a knife in it twice to get him loose. A tongue does not ask what it is bringing in.

It swallowed, and then it made a sound I have not heard anything make before or since — a blow struck hard somewhere the sound had no way out.

The front of the head came off it. That hide had turned three knives all night, but the inside of a mouth is not hide. The jaw went with it, and the long body let go of the wall and hit the rocks at the waterline and rolled once and lay there with its belly up, and the river went over it. Nobody went back for it.

I stayed where I was. My hands were closed on the rock and I could not make them open. When they did, I got the knife out of the crack and put it back in my belt.

Then the mountain moved.

Not a shiver. A long push, like a horse standing up under a saddle. The whole face of it went out from under us, and inside that sound there was another sound that did not belong to rock. Up above, on the far side of a hundred feet of stone, somebody was working. You could hear it through the rock.

And a seam of sky came open in the roof.

It was thin and it was white and it hurt my eyes, and I did not place it for a second. Then I did.

“That’s ours,” Tank said. “That’s a fire mission. Somebody up there has a battery and they are dropping it on a grid square and we are under the edge of it. That’s what opened this roof.”

“Or it was coming open before the guns got here,” Delgado said.

Neither of us answered him, because all three of us were already climbing.

The slope over us was the same ground as below, ash and pumice, loose, going up at forty-five degrees to a crack in the world. Four hundred feet of it. Maybe five hundred. The ground came off under a boot in sheets; you got three feet and lost two, and the two you lost went down and took the man behind you with it. My hands opened up somewhere in the first hundred feet and I stopped keeping count of that. Steam was still coming off Tank’s neck and shoulders. Delgado climbed it on one leg and two arms. Nobody was talking.

The light got wider. There was air coming down through it, air that smelled like green things and rain and smoke.

“That’s sky,” I said. “On your feet. Hands and feet. Go.”

We went. The last thirty feet is a slot, a chimney in the limestone not much wider than a man’s shoulders. Tank came to it with both legs cooked and Delgado had one leg left, and I was the only one of the three of us still moving, so I took the slot and went up it.

I came out on top on my belly and got a knee under me and then a foot, and there was a country out there. Green on green, water standing in it, cloud sitting down on the far ridges. Morning, or close to it.

Tank came up the slot to eight feet under the lip and stopped. He could not get over the edge on his own. The edge was undercut, and the rock at the edge was not rock. It was a stack of plates.

Below him, Delgado got his shoulder under Tank’s boot and pushed.

“Take him,” Delgado said.

I had the belt and I was the one on top of the lip, so the order was mine to give. I could have dropped the belt past Tank to Delgado and taken Delgado first, and I did not. I gave it to Tank. Whether that was the difference between one man in that slot and two, I do not know, and I have not let myself decide it either way.

“Tank,” I said. “You first.”

“I heard you,” Tank said. “Don’t look down here. Don’t look at me. Pull.”

We had no rope. We had belts. I knotted mine to his and put the length of it down the slot, and Tank got it around his chest under both arms, and I lay on my belly on that lip with my shoulders over the edge and pulled, and he came up. Three pulls, and the last of it on his hands, and I got his belt with one hand and dragged him over the edge, and we lay in the dirt there for as long as it takes to breathe twice.

Then we put the belt back down the slot.

Delgado got the strap under his arms. I have gone over the four seconds after that more times than I have gone over anything else in my life. Here is what I know, and here is where the knowing stops. I know I said his name one time, low, because that was as loud as I had. I know the belt was in my hands and that the order had been mine to give. I know he came up two feet and slid back one, and came up two feet and slid back one, because the wall he was on was loose and he had one leg and he could not push off it. And I know that the shelf on his side came out of the wall in one piece, and the belt went slack in my hands, and then it was quiet.

The quiet up there was total. Tank was breathing beside me, and nothing else in that country made any sound at all.

We dug. We dug with the knife and we dug with our hands. Some of the pieces we moved were the size of melons and some of them were the size of a truck, and the pile did not change. I do not know how long we did it. The sun came up while we were doing it.

Then Tank said my whole name, first and last, which is what he said when he wanted me to hear him over something, and he had me by the collar of my shirt.

“He’s dead,” he said. “You keep at that rock and you’ll be dead, and then there’s two of them down in there and one of me up here, and I am not carrying you off this hill.”

We came down off it. There is a firebase in the valley under that mountain, two or three miles off, with men in it, and I have never been able to give a straight account of the rest of that day, to anybody, including myself.

Three days later I was lying in a bed at the hospital down on the coast with both hands wrapped to the knuckle, and the skin was growing back over what the rock had taken off them.

There was a screen around the bed and other beds outside the screen and other men in them, and a fan turning somewhere that did not reach me. A colonel came in with a young officer behind him carrying nothing. He shook the hand with the least wrap on it. He sat down on the edge of the bed like a man who had been told he had ten minutes, and he told me the division knew what had happened up on that ridge. He told me I had done a hard thing and done it right. He told me I was going home on the next bird out and that the paperwork was already moving.

Then he asked me how I was doing.

I said, “Sir, I’m—“

And the word after it was not in me.

The colonel waited. I will say that for him. He waited, and then he said, “All right, son,” and stood up, and the young officer opened the screen for him, and they went away down the ward.

I never got the word out. Not to him. Not since. And it was not grief that held it back. It was arithmetic. I lay in that bed and I did the count the way you count rounds, back to the first night of it.

Pratt. Pruitt. Dodd. Doc. Keene. The engineer, whose name I never did get. Delgado.

Three of us went into that water down there. Two came out. One of them was asleep down the ward with his legs wrapped to the knee and his mouth open, and one of them was me.

I have had ten years to say I was fine. I have not said it yet.