No. Stanley shook his head. Those were just stories soldiers told each other when they were attempting to distract each other when night came and the shelling hadn’t stopped.
In the beginning of the war, the stories had been funny, laced with kissing and half-naked women and sex, and it had been easy to join in and laugh at the right things. Stanley secretly replaced the females with an equivalent male. Of late, the fellows in the stories had looked a lot like Isaac, though Stanley had never mentioned this to anybody.
It was only recently that in the trenches the stories became more dark. In them, the soldiers were doing bad things, with the civilians the butt of the joke. Or the stories were about captured Germans, who always resisted torture by crying and pissing themselves, which only added to the fun.
“Hey,” said Devon, and though his voice seemed to come from far away, the hands that directed Stanley to a chair were warm and firm. “Sit down and I’ll make you some coffee. We’ll get you fixed up and then I’ll make that call, okay?”
“Okay,” said Stanley as he sat down, saying the word like Devon said it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Stanley clung to the edge of the table and watched as Devon went into the kitchen and did something to what looked like a metal coffee pot plugged into the wall. Stanley couldn’t understand why Devon didn’t put the pot on the stove, which was right there. Only the pot began to rumble in under a minute, and Stanley didn’t have time to explain that he didn’t want coffee.
Coffee in the trenches tasted like watered-down tar. There never was enough sugar in the world to make it taste good, but most days it was the only warm thing. If you drank too much of it, then you’d spent a good half hour afterwards squatting over a hastily dug trench, hoping you could get your pants up before another shell exploded.
Devon took milk from a sleek-looking icebox that had an amazing wealth of food inside of it and brought it and the cup of coffee over to the table. He pushed a bowl of what looked like brown sugar and looked at Stanley, eyebrows raised, as if he expected him to take over.
“That’s raw sugar,” said Devon. “I was kind of on a health kick when I came to France and found that I liked it. Help yourself.”
Stanley added sugar to the coffee and a splash of milk, just to be sociable. He needed to go along with it so that Devon wouldn’t get angry and throw him out into the rain, which had started to comedown pretty hard now, sheets of it falling outside the large, paned windows. But when he took a sip, the smoky smell of it hit him seconds before the taste did, and a warm sensation soothed his stomach, his insides.
“This is good,” said Stanley, a little astonished. “But that’s an understatement. This is really good coffee. I never used to drink coffee until I enlisted, and everybody drinks it, so I had to, you know? It tastes bad, and it smells bad, but usually it was the only thing that you could drink because something happened to the water rations, and if you went to the village to get water from one of their pumps, they’d stare at you, and—well, I drank a lot of bad coffee.”
“You like my coffee?” asked Devon. Stanley was surprised to be asked that, as if Devon were truly worried rather than fishing for compliments. Plus, he’d managed to follow all of Stanley’s nervous chatter and dismantle it to its essence.
“Yes, I like it, it’s good,” said Stanley. He took another large swallow and felt the energy moving through him. He leaned back a little in the wooden chair; it creaked beneath him in a homey way, though he knew he shouldn’t be at ease. Until he knew what Devon was going to do next, he needed to be as alert as if he had been captured by the enemy.
“Hey, are you cold?” asked Devon. He took a step closer and looked about ready to place his palm across Stanley’s forehead, as if to check to see if he had a fever.
“No,” said Stanley with some defiance.
“You’re shaking like a leaf,” said Devon. “Listen, why don’t you get out of those wet clothes—I mean, uniform. You can use the shower, and I can loan you some clothes until we find out where you’re supposed to be. Okay?”
Stanley wanted to shout that it was not okay, that he wasnotokay, as Devon seemed to want him to be. It was bad enough to be stuck in a muddy trench with a radio that didn’t work, realizing that he was the only one who wouldn’t be missed if his suicide mission went sideways.
It was almost worse to be stuck in a warm kitchen looking at anicebox that was about ten times the size of the icebox back home, and a stove that looked like a stove on the top, but that had a bunch of lights and switches Stanley didn’t recognize. There was a metal box on the kitchen counter that Stanley had no idea what it did, and another metal box below the counter that was currently growling and churning as if it were about to birth something from inside of it.
The whole of the interior of the cottage was filled with half familiar, half bizarre things. Stanley realized how out of place he felt, and that he was shaking and sweating beneath his armpits, and freezing where his uniform was stuck to him, which was pretty much everywhere.
“I don’t belong here,” said Stanley, his lips numb. He wrapped his arms around himself, clutching at his arms, and looked up at Devon.
“You don’t, and that’s a fact,” said Devon with kind eyes. “But nothing bad’s going to happen to you. I won’t call anybody until we figure out where you do belong.”
“You won’t have me arrested?” asked Stanley. He needed to be clear before he let himself come completely apart. “You won’t callles gendarmes?”
“I wouldn’t call them to arrest you,” said Devon. “Look, I won’t call them at all, okay? I’ll call the local clinic and ask them if they know of anybody who’s escaped the local loony bin, I mean—”
“I’m not crazy!” Stanley stood up and knew he had shouted at Devon. His fists were clenched, and he was probably pissing off the one person who had offered to help him. But he couldn’t help it.
“I’m not crazy, damn it! I’ve just been in a trench watching my lieutenant trying to fix a radio that couldn’t possibly work on account of the fact that it had been hit by a shell. I was up to my knees in mud and the blood and brains of my friends who had been torn to pieces only this morning and who are now very dead. The whole battalion is going to die and I can’t help them because I got hit with mustard gas. So nothing is okay, do yougetthat?”
Devon was silent for a long moment, and he looked at Stanley in a way that seemed to suggest he might be starting to take Stanley very seriously.
“You honestly think you’re in a war,” said Devon. “Don’t you.”
Stanley nodded, a sharp jerk of his chin.
“And what year do you think it is?” asked Devon. “The 44thBattalion was wiped out in early November 1917. And you think you’re back then?”
