hooblersluger:

“Malark, I’m sorry, but it’s Skip,” he said. “He’s dead. Penkala, too.”

I simply sat on the edge of a slit trench like a man who’d been out in the cold too long. Numb. My brain told my mouth to speak but it was like the words were frozen in place.

“How’d… it… happen?” I asked, my voice but a whisper.

“‘Bout a hundred yards down the line. A major shelling. Muck and Penkala were caught out in the open, then finally found a hole. George Luz had been scurrying around during the blitz, too. Muck and Penkala yelled for him to get in their foxhole.”

Roe paused. I kind of nodded, rocked forward and backward a bit. Put my hands over my face, fingers as numb from the cold as my brain from the news.

“Luz is down on the snow, snaking his way toward them, and

– boom

– direct hit on the foxhole. Shell found them as if it had eyes.”

I looked away, toward nothing. Thought of Faye Tanner back in Tonawanda.

I didn’t need to think on that one long; later, I’d hear that beyond a shredded sleeping bag and a few body parts, there wasn’t much to see. I shook my head sideways. That wasn’t Skip Muck back there in that foxhole. Skip Muck was sitting on the floor of the PX with me listening to the Mills Brothers sing “Paper Doll” on the jukebox. He was getting my food for me when my legs had given out on the march to Atlanta. He was swimming the damn Niagara River at night, a thought that made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

I did neither.

“Thanks, Roe. I’m fine.”

He reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said, pressing the cross of some broken rosary beads in my hand. “He’d want you to have it.”