Walking Wounded
Lewis Nixon/Dick Winters, R

Most nights this winter you have the room to yourself. Nix gives new meaning to the term “night-owl”: he finishes his work each day by sunset and then disappears until the sky begins to turn gray. On one such night, you finish your own work early and turn in, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Some time after—you don’t know when, only that you start awake and the window above your head is a flat, black void—Nix, in the hall, blunders up against the door in the dark. You hear it open, and then Nix’s shambling walk, disconnected and arrhythmic as though something in his stride is coming loose. You lie on your back without moving, listening to him mutter under his breath in intense concentration as he feels along the wall. Expecting him to pass by, you turn your back to him, so that you don’t embarrass him.

A moment later, you feel the mattress shift as Nix swings one leg onto it. You freeze, waiting. Then his weight is fully behind you, the warmth of him, his ragged sweet breath in your ear, the knob of his knee nudging the hollow behind yours, the cliff-like ridge of his bottom rib pressing the small of your back—Nix lying against you so that you are aware acutely of each bump of your spine.

“Nix,” you say, “uh, Nix.”

“Dick,” he says, surprise but no apology in his slurred voice.

“Nix,” you say, “my bed.”

“Is it?” he says, and you feel him burrow down farther beside you, slipping into a small cave in the blankets. “Since when?”

“You went the wrong way in the dark. And” – you pause, not wanting to say this to him, but needing it to be so – “you’re really drunk.”

“Yeah,” he replies with thoughtful dignity, “you know, I really am.” His warm palms settle on your back, flat in that dip between the shoulder blades, thumbs inward. Reflexively, you arch up a little against the touch, then shift away.

“All right,” you say carefully, reaching back and removing his hands. “How about you go to your bed now?”

“That… is a very good idea. That’s why you’re the CO.” He doesn’t move, but when you hold your silence, he sighs in your ear and sits up. You only roll over when you hear his feet, still in their boots, bump on the floor.

He is a vague black shape above you limned with the pale light seeping in from the hall. For a moment, you wonder why he has come home drunk to you, as he has never done before. Maybe he understands the obscure, unspoken message in his intel reports—he has those flashes of insight sometimes that remind you of how he made battalion S-2—and so he knows that Easy will return to the front soon. Maybe he has a secret of his own, something that happened out there in the vast unlighted world of war; like the boy who stopped silhouetted on an empty plain outside Nijmegen and toppled over himself, his mouth a round black pellet like the hole opened up in his chest by your bullet. Or maybe not. Maybe Nix just drinks because he is Nix, with a brilliant instinct for military intelligence and a charming smile and a hole somewhere in him hemorrhaging. It seems almost a small thing to allow him to fill this gap in your bed if he can’t fill it in himself.

But you say only “Get some sleep. We have to be at HQ in a few hours.”

He nods, pats your hand on the pillow, and says, “Good morning, Dick.”

You allow the touch. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Oh,” he says, and gives you a skewed smile. “For a minute, I almost thought I just woke up here.” He laughs, far back in his throat like choking. “What a stupid idea.”

...

The next night is a frigid one, the freeze coming at last to Mourmelon, and you return from an impromptu meeting with Sink to find Nix already in the room. He’s sitting on his bed in the dark, his head leaning back against the wall and his eyes closed. As you come in, he must sense some shift of weight in the room, or a brief interruption of the light from the hall, because he opens one eye almost guiltily and then closes it with a wince.

“Nice night,” he says conversationally.

“Yeah,” you reply, pausing just inside the door to watch him. “Why aren’t you out in it?” He smiles a slow, lopsided smile, but with his eyes closed the effect is impersonal and rote, like a muscular reflex. “Hungover?” you venture, hating the word.

“Oh, Dick,” he says, tipping his head farther back, “hungover and then drunk again.”

“That so?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, tipsy at the very least. You should try it sometime.”

“No, thanks.” You cross the floor to the next room and sit down on your own bed to remove your boots. As you’re fighting the laces with nearly numb fingers, you hear him leave his bed and follow, but you don’t look up. You sense him above you, so keenly that the back of your neck crawls, and then he sits down beside you and resumes his former position: head against the wall, legs outstretched, completely unselfconscious.

Once you’ve freed yourself from the boots, you say, with your head still lowered, “Nix?” As soon as you hear your voice, you are ashamed of it.

When you glance up, he’s staring back at you, and you search his eyes for any memory, any flicker of what passed between you before. But he has a blind man’s look, gray and depthless, and like a blind man he operates by touch: he reaches out and puts a hand on your knee, lazily, innocently.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing,” you say after a protracted silence. “Never mind.”

He closes his eyes again, sighing, so that his only point of reference must be that warm, warm hand resting on your knee, the knuckles white with a tension you can’t find anywhere else in him, the fingers each a separate small node of pressure. In a moment he says, “How about Guarnere, breaking out to come back to this. He must know something I don’t, because from where I’m standing, we’re moving out any day, and at least the hospital’s warm.”

You don’t say anything.

He opens one eye again, screwing the other more tightly shut for focus. “I mean, explain that one to me, Dick. You see how he still limps? Even if you don’t look at him you can hear it, just the way he moves. These men, goddammit.” He laughs bemusedly. “They just keep on going, don’t they, no matter how they get mangled. We just keep going.”

You want to lay your hand over his, but you don’t. You study that single open eye, blacker even than the darkness of the room, and it tells you nothing. Nix, you think, is not really a philosophical drunk, although sometimes he plays at it. Alcohol interrupts some intricate mechanism in him somewhere, makes him more abstract, when his usual instinct is for the specifics of his intelligence reports: how many guns on which beachhead, which particular road in which corner of Europe they have to hold. Maybe he’s not going anywhere with this; maybe he’s just rattling along, glib and loosened like a wheel coming off its axle.

“That’s what being a soldier is,” you tell him. You don’t expect his hoarse laugh in response.

“Jesus, Dick,” he says, opening the other eye, sitting up straight on your level and looking at you almost with superiority, as though he’s secreted something away, “that’s what being alive is.”

You stare at him until at last he stands, stretching elaborately. “Early night tonight,” he explains. “I get the feeling we don’t have much time left to sleep in peace.” His hand lifts off your knee, and he looks at it sideways as if it surprises him.

“Goodnight, Nix,” you say.

He swiftly reaches out to pat you lower on your leg, where your pants don’t quite cover the faint line of scar tissue left by the ricochet in Carentan. You wince and recoil a little, though it has long since stopped being tender. His hand there, briefly, makes it feel at once alien and intimate to you. He looks up into your face and smiles, an ambiguous expression, and in a low, conspiratorial voice he says, “Here we are, the walking wounded.” You swallow and give no indication of anything. “Goodnight,” he says, and goes away.

In the darkness an ache spreads through you, inhuman and without specific object like the bone-deep pain of cold. You lie back in silence, nudging your way under the blankets. When your legs encounter the warm place on the mattress where Nix sat, you keep going, filling the hole with your own body. You keep going.