Articles of War by Nick Arvin Page A

The men in their beds either twisted and knotted themselves in the sheets or remained strangely still. Heck felt sorry for them all. He touched the envelope in his pocket and hurried toward the corner, where the nearest stove burned. A pile of wood as tall as Heck himself stood beside it. A spindly old man with gnarled fingers was tending the fire, and when he opened the stove door to fling a log inside, Heck strode up beside him, crumpling the envelope in his hand, and tossed it into the flames.
    Moving away, he glanced back and saw the fire tender looking curiously after him. Heck abruptly turned down an aisle between long rows of wounded. He slowed and watched the faces as he walked. He told himself he had no reason to be surreptitious. He came to a soldier who looked lucid and calm, his legs wrapped in bandages, his left foot missing entirely. Heck said to him, offering the two packs of cigarettes, “Would you like some smokes?”
    The wounded soldier’s eyes neither blinked nor widened. “Sure.” But he did not move to take the cigarettes, so Heck put them on the bed and hurried away in embarrassment.
    He wanted to exit through a doorway opposite from the one he had entered. He moved rapidly down an aisle of wounded with, on one side then the other, the noise of pained breaths sliding past him. He reached the end of the aisle with a feeling of relief. Starting toward the door, he saw the doctor who had first assessed his injury in this same hospital. He hoped the doctor might have forgotten him, but already the man’s big square head and thick dangling mustache had turned to Heck, and his features had tightened in recognition. “You’re still here,” he said.
    Heck stopped. “Yes, sir.”
    The doctor had a clipboard in his hand and he gestured with it as if driving nails. “Why are you still here?”
    â€œI’ve been awaiting reassignment. Sir.”
    â€œWhy don’t you go back to your unit?”
    â€œNo orders, sir.”
    â€œNo orders.”
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œHow is that cut on your leg? Infected?”
    â€œNo, it’s been all right. Sir.”
    â€œHaven’t you made any inquiry as to your return to your unit?”
    Heck had no answer. Seeing this, the doctor interrupted: “I’ll see to it. What is your name?”
    Heck thought of lying, but he remembered the note he had just burned, his daily sentiment of guilt. He said, “George Tilson, sir.”
    The doctor lifted a page on his clipboard, made a note, turned away.
    When Heck stepped outside, even the thin light of the clouded sky seemed blinding. He wandered toward town in a state of aching anxiety.
    As he walked through the streets the rain renewed itself. When occasionally he saw other people, they were huddled into the collars of their coats and under their hats and emerged out of the obscuring rain like headlong phantoms intent on tasks in the distance. Finally the wet and the cold began to penetrate into his consciousness, distracting him from his fears. He retraced his route back through town and past the warehouse.
    Inside his tent it was warm and crowded and smelled of human filth and damp wool, burning coal and tobacco. Men glanced up briefly from conversations and card games and paperbacks. Everyone was here; all the cots were full. Quentin nodded at him. Heck arranged his things to dry as best he could and lay down. Later, while the rain still beat on the canvas of the tent as if in an infantile rage, two men asked him to join a cribbage game. As they played the two men debated, in startling detail, the relative physical merits of various pinup girls. That evening, when the cribbage had broken up and everyone else in the tent seemed to be writing letters, Heck lay worrying that whoever had addressed the note to him would do something as he slept. But he fell asleep anyway, and he dreamed of pinup girls on tractors in the fields of Iowa in summer. For