Nefarious: Talcott's Story

CHAPTER I

I sat on a bench in Thunderbolt, the smell of pine and salt in the air, for the ocean was not far. I chewed the end of my cigarette, a holdover from my war years-the last years I'd lived. I struck a match from the underside of the bench and lit the end, the tobacco sizzled and the smoke lingered in the sticky heat of the day and I inhaled and wished I could feel my lungs turn to rice paper-that old cut down the back of my throat, sharp as a knife, but I felt nothing, I tasted nothing but disappointment. The hand-to-mouth motion of inhale and exhale was my only comfort since it reminded me of eating, and disappointment wasn't the only taste on my tongue, but regret. I regretted my willing change, my acceptance of death-offered to me in a fox hole on the cratered fields of France. From my splintered seat near the road that led to Tybee Island, the roar of the cars, the contented sighs from their brakes, morphed into the sounds of the trenches, and I closed my eyes as I took a long drag.

The still, morning fog brought with it the coughing-a chorus in a melody that signaled you were still alive. The damp and cold would settle in your lungs at night and force its way out with the morning revelry, and that morning in late June which would commence the infamous Battle of the Somme was no different.

I'd awoken near-drowning in phlegm and a rat ran across my bare, swollen foot as I laced up my boots. I startled and reached for my pistol, but it stole up over the parapet. The rats, grimy bastards, were the only ones well-fed.

Earlier in my tour, I'd come across corpses without eyes, and knew the British were not good enough marksmen to have shot them out. One night while posted on sentry duty, I'd peered over the parapet, like a fool, I admit, and found the rats feasting on the eyes of the bloated bodies. They were numerous, and moved as a fetid blanket over the dead like grave robbers.

I scraped the mud from the sole of my boots on a table leg, shoved my feet into them and thought of my mother and how frantic she would have been if she were alive.

I was only three when she died, and could still remember how she fussed over me. "My little Cott," she would dote and pinch my cheeks, her hands soft and covered in flour. In my dreams, they fluttered like doves, and soon gave way to columns of a pale and sickly miasma that seeped across the barbed wired No Man's Land. The straw-colored cloud would sink to the mud, and form the shape of a lifeless man without eyes. His bloated jowls would quiver, his body quake with violent retch and I would awaken, coughing and bleary-eyed.

"Henderson? Tommy keep you up all night?" Rifleman Wagoner emerged from the fog and darkened the door of my dugout. He was still covered in mud from yesterday and only his teeth gleamed in the dimness.

The rains hit less than a fortnight ago and didn't stop for almost a week. The wall of the south-end of the trench had liquefied, collapsed and almost flooded the entire network. Wagoner and I, along with a small unit of men, were sent to rebuild it. Torn bits of uniform, pieces of stalhelms and bones and limbs became loosed from the dirt-we lived in a graveyard.

I yawned. "Yes. I smelled him braising in hell."

"Hell smells like shit." Wagoner coughed, rubbed his nose on his sleeve. I took the crate from underneath my table as Wagoner lit a lantern and hung it to a nail in the doorframe. He took a seat, and I disassembled the contents of the crate-blade, brush, bowl, mirror, tin and jug of cold, week-old tea. Wagoner took the mirror and studied himself.

"Hell looks like shit," he said and put it down on the rough-hewn table. I'd already attached the strop to the back of the chair, and began to sharpen the blade. Wagoner uncorked the jug and poured the tea into the bowl, unscrewed the tin and lathered up the brush. I took it from him and soon covered his beard in a thick foam.