Tunnels
Paris. August 26, 1944... When Pfc. Chester Michael left for the war in Europe, he didn't think he'd die like this...
Paris. August 26, 1944.
When Pfc. Chester Michael had gone over all the ways he that he might die in the war, when he thought about them back at the barracks weeks before Utah Beach ever happened, the top things on the list were: gettin shot, gettin blown up, and gettin fuckin shot. Weren’t those the normal ways that soldiers were dying in this war? Yeah. So that’s probably how he would die too. By getting shot at, and those shots not missing.
But like this?
Down here in these tunnels? With that smell—it was like this mucky kind of smell, reminded him a lot of the old Pond behind Jack’s uncle’s farmhouse. It was a kind of standing-water-type smell; how it smells once the water had got something it shouldn’t have gotten into it and then that thing had absorbed that water and let it fester.
A vivid flash of an image shot into his mind, of the time he and Jack had been swimming in it and they found, when they were getting out, washed up on the muddy shore of the pond, the bloated decaying soggy body of a dog. It’s fur, all still wet and sagging, covered its body except at one spot where the thing’s skin had been peeled away, and it revealed its ribcage.
They had never went swimmin in the pond again. And momma had made him hose down in the back yard and he had used an entire bar of soap. She had him thinking he’d have tape worms growing out of his ears, the way she went off on him for just swimming in a pond.
But momma was cautious like that. And she’d given him hell too, when he’d come home and told that he’d signed up for the army. That he was gonna go—had to—no matter what she said about it. She cried, but she understood. They’d been attacked. She understood that he had to go. But still she worried about him getting shot.
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