The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead

and chewed at their bootlaces and sipped the peach syrup from ration cans. The rats found jelly beans and held them in their paws and ate them as if they were small oblong heads. The rats sat on their chests, licking the syrup from their paws, and crawled across their sleeping faces and suddenly one man woke up cursing and another man woke up and fired a .38 into the darkness. The gunshot cracked and echoed in the high hollow chamber of the warehouse, causing every man to come from sleep, grab and charge a weapon. When the warehouse lighted with the hissing white glare of lanterns, it was an illuminated tableau of lethal men crouched on their knees, curled close to the floor like animals and no more than a length of breath from exploding.
    But no one else fired his weapon, and with the single round nothing was killed or wounded. There was no threat for the moment, so they laughed it off and unstrung themselves and settled down again, but Henry’s heart beat painfully in his chest. His veins, neck, and eyes strained and pulsed. Killing rats, he realized, was another way in which you could be killed.
    In the morning he awoke to graying in the east. The order went out to shave so they heated water and took out their soap and razors, and their cheeks were newly blue in the morning’s cold. In the still-gray dawn the wind picked up and there was the clang of corrugated metal from the roof. It was a cloudy cold sky, slate blue, with a strange halo around the sun.
    That day they continued north through a wooded valley with trees on both sides of the road. They carried their weapons in the crooks of their arms or yoked across their shoulders. In their slouching stride they could walk all day and all night. On the air was the scent of pine trees and running in the deep shadows there was a thin stream with frozen moss, jeweled green and blue with glittering melt ice. Then the countryside thinned of life and opened up again and the cold began to promise discomfort.
    His walking dream was to awake some day soon and it be a hot and musty room in the boathouse, folded in the satin heat of the city, the flat black river flowing beneath the bed, the sound of the rattling train from over river. Mercy’s back is naked and she’s sitting on the edge of the bed brushing her hair.
    “Don’t it hurt,” he says.
    “I like it,” she says, collecting and balling the hair from the bristles.
    “I can do it for you,” he says, and she hands him the brush.
    “Tonight,” she says, “you come see me?”
    “I don’t know,” he says, drawing the brush through her hair.
    “You better,” she says, “or I will come find you and kick down the door.”
    Beneath them the play of water, a slap and gulp in the eddies that swirled about the pilings, the big fish sounding.
    He wrote and rewrote words in his mind. Dearest Mercy . . . Where are you? . . . I am here and the knowing part of me tells me why . . . Tonight I think I was on my way here all along and have now arrived . . . As much as I want to let go of the past, that cannot be. I am held by the recent memory of . . .
    He’d experienced little, but what he’d experienced with Mercy he’d experienced the all of it. He wanted to believe it again, but she’d disappeared, and try as he might, he could not. He wrote to forget as much as to remember.
    He marched on, silently. She was with him now, through tight passes on the road that followed a rock-strewn riverbed where tufted willows grew, and then she was gone.
    In some steps came the distinct sensation he’d been here before and had remained in some formless shape that was waiting for him to resume his presence, and now he was stepping inside and the shape was fitting him. The shape rose up from the earth or descended from the sky and closed about him. The fit was uncanny and frightening. This was home now and these men were his true family. His grandfather had told him that in war most of the time you only remember what happens six feet