The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon Read online

  “They have great docs at MGH,” someone answers. “They’ll take good care of him.”

  I recognize the voice. It’s Teddy Eagan, a Charlestown cop with whom I often chat.

  Someone else says, “We gotta get a dressing over that wound.”

  “Teddy,” I whisper. “Where’s Anna? Someone should tell her what happened.”

  “What did he say?” a man asks.

  I hear Teddy answer, “He asked about his wife. But she died two years ago.”

  It’s like the voices are drifting to me from an echo chamber. Then a thought comes to me. “Where’s Arlequin?” Panic rises inside me. I can’t catch my breath. I try to raise myself to a sitting position, but instantly feel dizzy and slump back. “Where’s Arlequin?” I mumble again before the doors of the ambulance close.

  1 Night flight

  2 Night at Longchamp (a Parisian horse race track in the Bois de Boulogne)

  Chapter 2

  Night of Nights

  The light is wrong. Too white. Too soft.

  And where is the noise?

  And the pain.

  Where is the pain? Where is the pain?

  Because on this night of nights, under the fullest of moons, the flashes of light are not soft-white, but hard, angry-white and fire-red. And then the pain is real, excruciatingly real, as I jump into the inferno and my breath is snatched by the double shocks of propeller wash and the snap and jerk of my parachute opening and I look up through the floating silk canopy to see the bloated moon with its shivering edges and I breathe and exhale at its fearsome beauty.

  But the moon is too bright and too soft, and I sway and float in 3/4 time, exposed among the silent explosions, descending with dozens of my buddies like a bloom of moon jellies sinking into the abyss and I watch, helpless and heartbroken, as many of my brothers die, blown to pieces in the fireworks of flak that makes no sound, blasted into shards like irreplaceable pottery as they jump from disintegrating planes or are shredded by hot shrapnel or plunge to earth with flaming parachutes trailing impotently behind, and still others, like suspended targets at a midway arcade game, are torn apart by machine gun fire spewing from silent muzzle flashes rising up from the shadowed ground. All soundless images. Then my right thigh explodes in a painless spray of blood and I let out a voiceless cry and see the murky, moonlit earth rise up to meet me and see how the earth glints back at me because I am descending into water and I remember how, in the previous night’s briefing, we had been warned the Germans might flood the fields (but how deeply?) and what if it’s not a field, but a pond, or a lake? Will I drown if I can’t free myself from my equipment? Will I sink like a dead moon jelly into the depths? And where is Jimmy Carson, my best buddy? Jimmy was immediately in front of me in the stick, number three on the anchor line cable to my number four, close enough that I could smell he had shit himself. Like many others. Was the bar of grace so low that I swelled with pride because my pants remained unsoiled, if a little wet? I look left and right and search the ground below and see no collapsed parachutes, no sign of Jimmy.

  The moonlit water rushes up to meet me. It is an unnatural moonlight, as if there is a giant mirror out beyond the moon’s orbit reflecting the dark side’s light back to the lacerated earth. Yet when I land, I don’t sink. Instead, I feel the snap of bone and the expectation of pain coursing through my body from my feet to my shoulders and realize I’ve come down at the edge of a field flooded in ankle-deep water. But where is the pain? And the chute drifts down on me like a shroud, blocking the moon. As I free myself from the collapsed parachute, my blood spreads and dilutes in the water and I see the little finger of my right hand bent inward at an impossible angle and I groan and reach down to my thigh and then throw my head back and grimace. It’s then I see a buddy hanging lifeless in a tree, his blood staining delicate white blossoms red under the parachute draped over him like a deflated halo.

  But it’s not Jimmy. The legs are too short.

  I am aware of soundless explosions and machine gun fire all around me before my mind shuts it all out and I see only the sheen of moonlight in the slick mud next to my face. It smells vaguely like whiskey. I see my mother bending over to brush my forehead with a comforting kiss and it frightens me because I’d heard soldiers often call for their mothers when they’re about to die, and now here she is as if silently summoned, kissing me goodnight on the forehead as she did every night of my childhood. And she asks, “Is the pain bad?”

  I’m confused because there is no pain and it’s not my mother’s voice.

  “Is the pain bad?” The unfamiliar voice asks again.

  I open my eyes to a bright light. Why is the light so wrong? I reach down to feel my thigh. What happened to the pain? “Um, no,” I manage. My own voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else, someone else.

  “It’s the anesthesia,” the voice says. “Don’t worry, we’ll give you more pain medication before it wears off.”

  I look up and see her face, but I don’t recognize her. Anesthesia? What is she saying? I feel discomfort in my nose. I raise my hand and find a plastic tube wrapped around each side of my head and ending in my nostrils.

  “From the surgery,” the woman says. “Those are nasal cannulae to keep you oxygenated.”

  There’s a dull ache in my side. I shift my body slightly to the right.

  “Uncomfortable?” the woman asks.

  I nod.

  “That’s the chest tube. They inserted it between your ribs to drain air and blood from your pleural cavity.”

  I must still look confused, because she says, “Don’t you remember being shot? Coming to the hospital? Being prepped for surgery? They said you were still conscious for a moment on the operating table because you were blinking at the operating lamp. They had to put a cloth over your eyes until the anesthesia kicked in.”

  Suddenly, a series of images appear. A man with penetrating eyes. The flash of a muzzle. The ground rushing up to meet me. A young woman, blue jacket, sunglasses. An ambulance with flashing red lights, and the full moon through the ship’s rigging, and police cruisers sweeping the night with stabs of blue, and sirens like the screams of incoming 88s, angry, flashing lights strobing the night like exploding shells, like the hot slash of tracer bullets, the moon above, lights sweeping the rigging of Old Ironsides back and forth, back and forth.

  And where is Arlequin?

  “It’s okay,” the woman says. “People are often confused when they come out of surgery. It’s the anesthesia. You’re in post-op at Mass General Hospital. My name is Amy. I’m your nurse. You’ve just had a bullet removed from your right lung.”

  “Lung?” I can’t seem to shake the damned confusion.

  “Yes,” she replies.

  I try desperately to think, to make some sense of everything. And then it hits me again. “My dog?” I whisper. “Where is my dog?”

  “What dog?”

  “My dog, Arlequin! He was with me when it happened!” I hear the whine in my voice.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about your dog.”

  “Does my family know I’m here? They need to find him.” I struggle to sit up. “They need to find him!”

  The nurse puts a hand on my shoulder. “You must relax. You’ve had a stressful experience.”

  “I don’t need to relax! I can’t lose—”

  “I’m sure your family is being notified. We found your healthcare proxy in our files.”

  “I can’t lose him!” I say again. I feel a tear slide down my cheek.

  The nurse tightens her grip on my shoulder. “You mustn’t worry about that right now. Somebody will find your dog. Meanwhile, you’re a lucky man. The bullet just missed your heart.”

  More confusion! “I thought it just missed the femoral artery.”

  The nurse shoots me an incredulous look, shakes her head. “It was nowhere near your femoral artery. That’s in your thigh. You were shot in the chest.”

  “Femoral artery.” Those
were the words she’d spoken that first time. “It missed your femoral artery.” A sweet voice. Élodie.

  The nurse smiles at me and looks at the band on my wrist. “Can you tell me your name, please?”

  “Henry Budge.”

  “And your date of birth?”

  “Uhmm, five … one … nineteen twenty-one.”

  “You’re in fabulous shape for a ninety-two-year-old man.”

  I feel a heat in my cheeks. “I’m not in fabulous shape, goddamn it, I’ve just been shot!”

  “But you came through the surgery wonderfully. By the way, the surgeon said, when they did a complete check for other wounds, they noticed you’d been wounded before, but in the thigh. Was that what you meant when you mentioned the femoral artery?”

  “A long time ago,” I manage to whisper. Normandy. 1944. The night of nights. The Germans will probably flood the fields. A bloom of moon jellies.

  “World War Two?”

  I nod.

  “Was it D-Day? I just saw something about that on TV. There will be a commemoration and President Obama will be there.”

  Again, I nod. My mind is beginning to clear. “Seventy years ago,” I say.

  “You were a young man.”

  “We all were. Please. Call my family. We must find Arlequin.”

  “I’ll make sure your family is contacted. Meanwhile, I’ll give you a sedative to help you relax.”

  “I don’t want to relax!” My eyes prickle with tears of frustration. “I want to find Arlequin!”

  But she fiddles with something at the IV pole, that I notice for the first time, and within moments I feel myself yielding to a pleasant, floating sensation.

  The first thing I notice when I regain consciousness is the cold, wet mud pressed against my right cheek. I lift my head to see I’m on the edge of a flooded field. I reach down and feel the wound in my thigh and I examine my hand in the spill of moonlight and my knuckles glisten with blood. The dull thumps of 88 mm flak guns and the sporadic sharp mutter of machine-guns, like the earth coughing up phlegm, all seem to come from a great distance. It’s as though when I jumped from the C-47, across the face of the full moon, I somehow jumped clear out of the war. Instead of gunfire, I hear the croak of a frog, the rasping caws of crows, a dog barking in the distance, the moos of cows.

  And … and splashing footsteps rushing toward me!

  I scan the ground around me. Moonlight glints off the barrel of my rifle ten yards to my right and half buried by my collapsed parachute. I try to drag myself toward it through the ankle-deep water, but I can only move slowly and with excruciating pain. When, at last, I am near enough, I reach out to grasp the barrel of the rifle, but in that instant a boot comes down on the barrel pinning it to the earth with a little splash of mud, and a man’s voice says, “Non, nous sommes amis!”3 It is instantly followed by a woman’s voice. “Claude, speak English. He’s an American.” The woman leans over me and says, “We are friends. Are you badly hurt?”

  “My right thigh,” I answer, gazing at her beautiful face.

  “Is the pain bad?”

  “Uhmm.”

  She uses a knife to cut away the leg of my pants and leans close to examine the wound. She says, “I can’t see very well in this light, but it appears to have missed the femoral artery. You’re lucky. You’ll probably live. It was a bullet or shrapnel. It’s hard to tell.” Gently, she takes my right hand into hers. “Your little finger is broken.” I can’t take my eyes away from her face. Then she says, “We found another paratrooper. Dead. American. He had morphine with him. Do you have morphine?”

  “We were each issued a syrette. It’s in my first aid packet. Did you see a name?”

  “A name?”

  “The dead American.”

  She nods. “Carson.”

  “Oh, fuck!”

  “You know him?”

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I spit the words.

  “I see,” she says, wiping my mouth. “I’m sorry about your friend. But, your first aid packet. Where is it?”

  “I think it’s under me.”

  She searches under me and finds the packet. She tears it open and pulls out the contents: sulfadiazine, sulfanilamide, dressings, a tourniquet, and the morphine. “First, I will sprinkle sulfanilamide on your wound.” I close my eyes while she does that, and then she says, “There’s a tourniquet in your packet. I don’t know if I should use it.”

  “You don’t know?” I search her face.

  “I’m not a nurse.”

  What the hell? “Well, I certainly don’t know.”

  “We should use it, just in case,” she says. “When we have more light, we can see if the bleeding is stopped. If so, we can remove it.” She places the tourniquet around my thigh.

  “Uhmm ….”

  “Don’t speak. I must tighten it now. Ready?”

  I nod, suck in my breath.

  She cinches the tourniquet. The pain isn’t nearly as bad as I expected.

  She rips open the morphine box, pulls out the syrette, and says, “It will absorb faster if I use a large muscle with good vascularity. Is it permissible to use your buttocks?”

  “Vascularity? I thought you said you weren’t a nurse.”

  “I read the medic’s manual. Also, my father was a doctor, and he taught me a lot.”

  I force a smile. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  “That’s a British expression. Can you roll onto your side and loosen your belt?”

  “I was in England before the invasion.”

  “I received my resistance training in England. Help me lower your pants, if it’s not too painful.” She tugs at the waistband of my pants. I feel the cool air on my ass cheeks.

  “You have a handsome butt,” she says, and I can almost hear the smile in her voice. “Here comes the injection.” I flinch at the jab. “Sorry. It will absorb quicker if I massage around the injection site. Do you object?”

  “Do you hear me complaining?”

  Her hands are cool on my right butt cheek. As she kneads the muscle, she looks up to her companions and says, “Jean-Baptiste, you and Claude go back to the barn and bring a litter. And bring Marcel. We’ll need help carrying him. I’ll stay with him in the meanwhile.”

  The man she addressed as Jean-Baptiste hesitates a moment, glares at me, then the two men start back in the direction from which they came.

  “We are staying in a barn, our hideout for the invasion.” Her voice is warm, silken. “We are resistance fighters. My name is Élodie.”

  “Henry.”

  “Uhnree.” I love the way she says it. My nostrils twitch. Through it all, a scent has come to me, heady and repulsive. “What is that awful smell?” I ask. “Is that me? My pants? My thigh?”

  She gestures toward a short, round tree bursting with white blossoms. It cradles a body. “Your comrade came down in a hawthorn tree. They stink.”4

  “It smells like death.”

  “It will take some minutes before the morphine fully takes effect.”

  “Your English is good,” I say, tearing my gaze from the hawthorn tree.

  “Just moments ago, I told you I trained in England. You don’t remember? You must be knackered.” She takes a handkerchief from her pocket and wipes my forehead and then under my eyes. “You have mud on your face.”

  I figure it’s a lie; she’s really wiping away tears. I study her face to shut everything else out because it hurts too much—my thigh, my finger, Carson. I stare at her like she’s a guardian angel. The moonlight is soft on her features. She has a serene oval face, an upper lip like a Cupid’s bow, a graceful, long neck, and opalescent eyes that appear to change from jade to gunmetal blue and back with every movement of her head. “You’re beautiful,” I say.

  “Don’t speak,” she replies. “Here, put your head in my lap. The water is cold, and your resistance is weakened with the loss of blood.” She lifts my head and levers her thighs under it. “If you get sick in addition to everything else, it will be ba
d.”

  This is the first time I catch a whiff of her perfume. I begin to feel drowsy. The morphine? Exhaustion catching up to me? I haven’t slept since long before we left RAF Folkingham. It seems a lifetime ago. I feel Élodie stroking my temple and it has a tranquilizing effect and the next thing I know I’m being jostled through the woods on a litter. Above me, moonlight filters through the green canopy and I notice a pre-dawn brightening of the sky and hear the thump and roar of big guns followed by the crump of exploding shells. Probably the navy softening up the invasion beaches. German 88s answering, their sound mimicking their German name Acht-Achter, like hacking, like the earth clearing its throat.

  I must have dozed again, because the next thing I know, I’m inside a barn. Above me is a hay loft, and the odor of cow dung permeates the air. I hear the vit vit of two swallows tracing filaments of flight around each other and look up to see the birds flitting along the walls of the barn, which are transected by morning sunlight. I’m startled to hear violin music. Played softly. I listen for a few moments, then laugh. “I always thought there would be harps in Heaven, not violins.”

  The music stops, and Élodie’s smiling face appears above me. She holds a violin and a bow in her right hand. She wears a gray dress under a white frock. On the starched collars of the dress are red crosses and between them, at the hollow of her throat, a Red Cross medallion.

  “Does this smell like Heaven to you?” Her laugh is light and delicate, like wind chimes. “I never imagined cow dung in Paradise, and how do you presume you would end up in Heaven, anyway? But, seriously, are you in pain?”

  “A little.”

  “It’s been several hours.”

  I reach down to touch my leg, but she stops me with a light touch.

  “Your injuries are not so bad after all, and the tourniquet was not needed. I took it off. We can give you another syrette if you want. We collected some from your dead companions.”