Graham: Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks
“Do you not fear God?” a voice cut through the darkness, slapping Graham in the face like a bucket of cold water, shattering the rather comforting darkness that had overtaken him ever since he had died.
How long had it been? He felt as if he had slept forever. His body tingled with energy. It hadn’t hurt. Dying. Not in the way he had expected. The worst part by far had been the waiting. Graham had never known what to expect once life had ended. He had been raised a believer and for all his talk, his faith never left, but rather faltered.
After a while Graham opened his eyes. He was tied to a chair, bound tight at the wrists – and with a shuffle of his legs his ankles were also added to the list of secured limbs, fastened by large steel cuffs that looked like something you would find on the electric chair. They were hinged and locked into place by large old-fashioned bolts.
A gust of cold wind sent a shiver up Graham’s spine, creating a full body wave of goose bumps which ran along behind it like the wake from a boat. He was in a dark room. It was cold, and somewhere he could hear water dripping in slow steady drops; a leaky pipe? The floor beneath his feet was bare concrete, and above his head a naked lightbulb swung back and forth. Its dust-encrusted shell only offered a limited level of sight. To Graham it looked like a basement.
“I asked you a question. Do you not fear God?” the voice asked again. It was neither angry nor threatening, but rather curious. Its question posed with genuine – or at least well-acted – interest.
“Why would I fear him? I’ve seen what he can do, I lived through it. From my way of working things out he should fear me,” Graham said. His voice came out strong and proud despite his dry throat and feeble shallow breaths. “I survived his petty games and came through the other side still willing to play my role. That makes us at least even.”
The voice laughed. It was not a mean spirited laugh, but a simple chuckle of continued amusement.
“Oh yes, your war all those years ago, yet the memories so fresh in your mind. I can taste them,” it whispered. “I know the things you saw. We use them here as tales to calm the younger ones of our kind.”
Graham couldn’t see its face but he could tell that wherever it was, it wore a smile. Its eyes gleaming in the darkness, quite possibly red; or green, an absurd yet certain thought came to him.
“You don’t scare me. So just get it over with already,” Graham said, drawing his shoulders back as far as his bonds would allow.
“Very well, let’s see if you can accept your judgment.” The voice changed to a snakelike hiss.
As if on cue, the room began to spin. Colors flashed, filling Graham’s entire field of vision with the power of a thousand flash bulbs going off at once: the Hell Press, eager to get front page pictures of the newest recruit. When it all cleared, Graham found himself still tied to the chair, in a dusty field. A few struggling plants jutted from the ground; not growing so much as reaching out of the bulb trying to claw their way out of the soil and escape. Vines and stems twisted and hooked like bony fingers scratching away at the earth. A choking air hung all around him. Graham coughed. He could feel – no, he could taste the dust; it was putrid and dried out his mouth immediately.
It was hot. There was no wind. Graham looked around and knew where he was. He wasn’t surprised at all: he had always said to anybody who asked him that a large part of him had died over there...here...the Netherlands...in Europe. The whole godforsaken war had murdered him. Yet the field – this one small place – had been the spot where the final nail had been driven into his coffin. It was the cornerstone behind every dream or nightmare he had for the rest of his life. And now it seemed he had finally come home.
In the distance, Graham heard a thundering explosion. Another blast followed soon after, and with it, as if carried away from the battlefield, were the screams and shouts of those caught in the path of the blasts. Several lesser explosions followed like an echo. They came in waves, volleys of fire. The determined artillery unit made not war, but rather a work of poetic beauty; a vicious score to orchestrate their side’s movements and intentions. The earth around him shook as if it were scared by what approached. Accompanying the explosions was a mechanical sound, a tired groaning source of motion that was unmistakable even to ears long since unaccustomed to war: a tank. It was moving fast, and in their direction, and it was then that Graham realized he was not alone.
He was, in fact, surrounded on all sides. Men stood behind him. The majority were in uniform. Graham couldn’t tell where they were from; the only thing he saw was their dead, lifeless faces, all staring blankly towards him. Eyes white, not empty, but bleached by standing in the sun, immobile for too long. The group stood, their weapons on the floor, discarded, clutched at by the grasping digits of the war-ravaged greenery. There were civilians among them also; men, women, and even a few children; a quick count had Graham thinking they numbered around fifty.
They all simply stared at him, yet Graham doubted that any of them could see. “Hey, hey, could one of you come and untie me?” he called out but got no response. All the while, the mechanical whining grew louder as the tank, no, wait...tanks, approached.
“They won’t help you,” a voice inside his mind said.
Graham didn’t recognize it as one of his own. Over the years he had created many different voices that dealt with his past. Each character had their own role and part to play in his dreams. It was the same ownerless voice that had spoken to him when he was still in the basement.
“Don’t you remember where you are?” it asked him.
“I couldn’t forget this place if I tried,” Graham said inside his mind. He learned early enough that talking just made him look even crazier. “I remember everything about this place,” he said. His voice threatened to break, yet he did his best to remain defiant. “Who could ever forget something like that?”
“That’s good, because all of these people remember you,” the voice answered. It ignored Graham’s question in favor of a chortled laugh.
Graham recoiled on his stool; images flashed into his head like a slideshow. Images that weren’t new to him but seemed somewhat more vivid than the last twenty years’ dreams had been.
“What do you mean?” Graham asked, dumbfounded.
“Oh, I never like to spoil the ending. I would rather let them tell you themselves anyway. I enjoy a bit of a role-play from time to time,” the voice sneered. “So just close your eyes and cast your mind back. Go, they’re all waiting for you. Don’t worry; maybe you can win this time.”
“Bobby?” Graham whispered.
***
It was 1944, the start of winter, Arnhem Bridge still stood, yet operation Market Garden had been deemed a success despite the fact that casualties and unplanned problems – an arguable consequence of war – had depleted numbers in the north of Holland by more than double the estimated figures. Graham led his small company – they totaled twenty – on a regular tour of their designated stretch of countryside.
They had not been part of the market or the garden, but rather had been stationed closer to the Belgium border. Graham was the first one to see the church. He led the way, whistling a nameless tune to himself as he went. The first thing he saw was the wisp of smoke on the horizon. It had snapped him out of the comfort zone he had slipped into; smoke meant fire, fire meant people, and that invariably meant Nazis – or so they had all come to think. As they got closer, however, a strange calm washed over them all. They came over the crest of a slight rise in the road and it was then Graham saw the church. A small fire was burning out front. The emergence of a figure from behind the church set them all on alert. Yet the closer they got the more confident they became with the knowledge that whoever was there was friendly.
Graham was the first to make contact with the family; a farmer, his wife, and their three children. A boy of about thirteen, a tiny, scrawny thing with a mop of unruly jet black hair which had already begun to thin in places, giving the kid the look of a middle aged man.
The two daughters were in no better physical condition. The youngest, Wilhelmina, would have been a cute looking thing if not half staved. She was only six years old, and despite her skinny frame and a swollen left arm that hung limp at her side, she still had a sparkle in her eyes; the eternal optimism of youth. Comparably, the eldest daughter Johanna who was eighteen, was quite the opposite: her face was sunken, her eyes dark and deadened to all emotion. Her hair was a beautiful chestnut color, her body not as skinny as the rest but certainly on the wrong side of healthy.
She had smiled when Graham approached, and part of him – that small part nobody can control – fell in love with her. She looked utterly helpless, scared and indefinitely damaged by what she had borne witness to. Yet, despite it all, she was, for lack of a better word, beautiful. She wore a shirt that came to just below her hips, and a pair of shorts that had been so damaged, Graham would have believed it if they had said they had once been trousers.
They welcomed the American troops with open arms and kisses to each cheek. The only one who didn’t offer her cheek was Johanna. It was the mother, a woman who looked twice her forty years, who told Graham through a rudimentary mix of English, sign language, and Dutch that her daughter had been raped by the German soldiers in the town they had lived when the occupation happened.
Just as they let their guard down the ground began to tremble as tank tracks tore at the dried dusty soil.
“Sarge, targets approaching from the south. My count is at two tanks. Panzers are my best bet. Not enough movement for a whole platoon. I would say just a couple of stragglers,” Henry Balfont said. His thick Southern accent disguised every other word. Graham was the one person who seemed able to understand him well enough to not have to ask for a repeat of every other sentence.
“Move the men; head into the trees yonder. Henry, take the family with you just for precaution. Let’s not make any hasty decisions before we know what we’re up against,” Graham answered. The trees would give them the best position for mounting a possible attack while also offering enough shelter should the unexpected guests be too strong in numbers. Better then to wait for them to move on, radio the news and then stage an attack under more favorable conditions.
“Yes, Sarge,” Henry called in response, although it came out sounding like “Ayuh-Saage” before signaling to the others. They moved silent and they moved fast, but when Graham turned back to the family, they were gone, the doors to the church just closing behind them. Graham ran over to the door but it was locked. He knocked and waited, then knocked again, harder this time. The drone of the approaching tanks grew closer. The door didn’t open.
“Come out, we will protect you,” Graham called to them. “You don’t have to be scared,” he added.
It was a blatant lie, but he guessed they either couldn’t understand or wouldn’t listen to him anyway. He tried once more, refusing to give up until the last possible moment. They would not be able to explain their presence in the church and would no doubt be killed.
“Sarge, come on, will ya?” Henry called, grabbing him by the shoulder. “Jimmy’s got the base rat on the wire. What do you want us to say?” Henry asked him as they ran for cover.
The air turned grey as a lone tank approached, and offered Graham the first clue that things were not as they appeared to be, but he waited nonetheless.
The tank drove up to the church, stopping close enough for the barrel of the cannon to be inches away from the sidewall. The other held back, standing point.
Graham and his men watched as seven men clambered out of the machine, not wearing the expected Nazi uniforms, but rather a mixture of what seemed to be every uniform involved in the war; the American Army and Air Force, British infantry and RAF colors. Some of the men had even gone so far as to mix and match their military ensemble with British shirts and American trousers and boots. Graham couldn’t see any of the marks of the 30th Infantry; his unit.
“You seeing this, Sarge? They’s tryin’ to be us,” a New Yorker named Martin Brittori whispered. They were the same words that were on the lips of the entire group. Martin laughed under his breath. Graham smiled in spite of himself. “Shall we go t’em?” Martin asked.
Graham was about to answer when one man dressed in a complete British uniform walked to the church, picked up a rock and threw it through one of the small windows. This seemed to be some sort of signal, because the others walked over to the door and with a small burst of gunfire succeeded in wrenching them apart before storming the building like a modern day SWAT team. They all heard the screaming, followed by the familiar rattling burst of gunfire erupt from within the church. The men emerged soon after, holding both the wife and Johanna by the hair. They dragged the women behind them as if they were mules at auction. There was no sign of the father, son, or young Wilhelmina.
“What do we do, Sarge?” a voice said up from the background. Graham didn’t hear who it was; he was focused on the scene unfolding before his eyes. The fight or flight syndrome, as people had labeled it over the years, raged through his body. Graham knew that any action would result in bloodshed, and although it took him many years before he would admit it to himself, the only thing he had thought about back then was which way would be the most likely to leave him alive.
The group remained in the trees and watched in silence as first the mother and then the daughter were bent over the tank to be stripped and beaten by the soldiers who cawed with laughter throughout the whole ordeal. Johanna screamed while the mother was silent, her face unemotional, broken; she had surrendered.
“Sarge, we can’t wait any longer. Jesus, look at what they’re doing, for Christ sake!” Martin shouted from beside him. “Come on,” he called and charged out of the coppice followed by ten other men, the movements fueled by rage, their actions clumsy. Their minds shunted over into the passenger seat for their joy ride into death.
“No!” Graham called after them – but his words were cut off by gunfire, and not from the group of men, but from a new group, hidden by the trees to their far left. Their attention still held by the helpless women.
Martin was the first to fall, his head exploding in a red mist; quite possibly the same mist that had descended over him a few moments earlier. The rest of the group fell after a scattered burst of panic fire tore through them. The first shot was more luck than a specifically aimed headshot.
Graham had seen them, something, a glint of light which he was sure came from either a pair of binoculars or the sight of a rifle, but he hadn’t seen it in time to stop Martin from doing exactly what he himself had wanted to do.
“Two o’ clock. Unknown number of targets. Watch the trees and open fire as soon as they emerge!” Graham shouted over the rattling sound of his own gunfire directed towards the tank. The German soldiers threw the women to the floor behind the tanks in what looked at first glance like a strange act of protection.
The Nazis (for there was no other option other than that) jumped inside the British tank which they had somehow acquired – no doubt at the same time they picked up their uniforms, Graham reasoned. They heard German voices barking orders on all sides of them, and when the tank’s engine roared into life the group’s resolve was broken.
The battle intensified and when the turret of the giant tank turned in their direction Graham didn’t need to give any orders. The group turned and fled. They moved along the trees rather than deeper into them. No sooner had the last man broken into a run than a booming shot rang out, shaking the ground like an earthquake. The splintering sound of trees being felled shook their bones. Tendrils of smoke overtook them like a mist rolling across the English moors; only the snarling hound was not the Baskerville ghost, but the machine gun fire of German troops.
By the time they stopped moving to regroup, the hidden German soldiers had emerged, another tank, this one a Panzer with approximately ten men walking beside it, all in German uniform.
Graham couldn’t help but offer the world a wry smile.
“Waas’up, Sarge?” Matthew Paterson asked, his voice barely a whisper, his body crouched low to the ground behind a small bushel which had at one time been a wild blackberry plant.
“Just thinking about how fucked we seem to be,” Graham whispered in return. Their situation was indeed grave and at that point in time he saw no options open to them other than to make a stand.
The ensuing battle was inevitable. The German troops joined together and spread out, leaving the tanks guarded but not occupied. Graham knew that once the skirmish began the tanks would be useless, as not even the Germans would use them in such close proximity to their own troops.
Matthew, Henry Balfont, and Jimmy Stevens, the radio operator, were the first to fall, followed soon after by a number of German soldiers. The cover offered by the trees, although sparse, was enough to give Graham and his men a degree of shelter. They moved fast but with caution towards the edge of the copse, moving away from the church. Graham was relieved when no more German troops arrived. The numbers had not been in their favor when it began, and with nine of his initial twenty men dead and one other with a nasty wound in his shoulder, things hadn’t gotten any better.
“Listen, we need a plan. If we run now they’ll mow us down. If we stick in the trees they’ll unleash the big dogs on us.” Graham gestured towards the tanks. The Germans were less than a hundred meters away, remaining outside the line of trees.
Graham crouched down to his haunches and fired a burst towards the moving stumps that were legs attached to hidden German bodies. None of his shots killed but several of the group fell, their screams breaking the eerie silence that had fallen. Graham sprang from the trees, his rifle ready, and unleashed another volley, partnered by Harold McCarb – the oldest man in their group at twenty-five – yet he still had yet to be promoted to a higher rank despite his near perfect service record. He and Graham had both enlisted together before the war even started, unlike the majority of the others.
“Walter, John, we’ll divert their attention. You guys need to get to those tanks,” Graham instructed the two men he knew could operate a tank.
They sped off at once without even daring to question his order. The skirmish wasn’t a long one; Graham took a flesh wound to the right thigh from one of the tank guards – who he had rightly guessed didn’t dare even consider firing the big guns into their own men. He remained on his feet long enough to fire one round. The man’s face disappeared in a cloud of red, and he fell backwards onto the Panzer and everything fell still. The only sound that remained had been groaning of the injured Germans, their bodies broken and bleeding, their guns fallen out of reach.
Slowly, the scene around Graham began to dilute the same way a photograph reduces in clarity over the years. The color was the first thing to fade. Then the lines and boundaries of everything began to blur. Colors ran and collided with each other. The tanks half sank into the ground, their motors still grumbling. Graham looked to his left, but Harold was gone. He had been replaced by a faceless, flesh colored orb; the eyes, nose, mouth, everything had been erased. The dawning realization that it had all been a dream came when Graham tried to move. He was still sitting, lost between worlds. His wrists were bound, his legs also. His army uniform was gone, replaced instead by a strange and rather uncomfortable suit, the top button fastened in a choking fashion.
“You remember, I see. Well, that makes my job somewhat easier,” a voice said.
Graham felt a surge of emotion rush through him, and he fought hard to keep control of himself, tensing his jaw until it hurt.
“How could I forget? But it was a war. I killed. I shot first and cursed when I missed, but I accepted what happened over there,” Graham said defiantly. The room was cold and his breath clouded before his face with every word he said.
“Really? You can tell yourself that, you can even tell me that, but we both know that this is where you finally broke. Doesn’t it still haunt you, the look on those women’s faces?” Was there pleasure in the voice?
“Fuck you. I still remember them...how could I forget? I remember every man who served and died by my side, so I guess you’re out of luck.” Graham tried to sound strong, but even he could hear his voice start to waver, just a little.
As Graham’s eyes adjusted he found he could make out more and more of his cell. The walls were lined with wood. There was nothing but earth on the other side; he could smell it, rich and peaty. Before long, Graham could see from one corner to the other, yet try as he liked, he could not find the owner of the voice.
“I believe you, I really do. That’s why our time together it about something else entirely,” the voice whispered in Graham’s ear.
“Oh, then please enlighten me, set me on the right path so that we can get this over and done with,” Graham responded, not with fire and guile but anger. An instinctive reaction brought on through having to relive memories that now they had been replayed and brought to the surface again didn’t seem to matter.
“First, answer me this: why did you leave them?” the voice asked. It came from behind him now. Graham turned his head. He saw someone, two people in fact. Shadows in the corner, but just as Graham thought he could see his tormentor both figures disappeared, leaving him with a different scene to contend with. He saw the old church; the brick and stone walls had crumbled away, the small spire fallen through the roof and stood but a few feet proud of the walls that had supported it for so many years. Graham recognized it without a moment’s hesitation.
Then all of a sudden they stood before him. Stared at him, their heads tilted to the right. They studied him. Their faces blank, expressionless. Their grey, sagging flesh was covered in open wounds which, even after so many years, still wept. Fleas and ticks sprung joyously from one body to another. They opened their mouths, yet speech was impossible for the women as they had no tongues. They had long since rotted away or been eaten by some hungry scavenger. As a replacement, each mouth contained a thick white maggot, their bodies swelled so large and obese after having gorged on the rotting treasure trove they had discovered that they now barely fit inside the respective mouths that they called home.
“Johanna, Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry.” The words were empty. They were words he had spoken a hundred times over the years but never had he wished them so earnestly.
The corpse muttered at him, angry mumbled sounds. Yet her eyes said volumes. They stared blindly at Graham but he understood well enough that it wasn’t anger, but warning; a plea for him to once again turn around and just keep walking.
“Answer my question, peon. Why did you leave them? You never gave a second thought to that family,” the voice said through the women. Their mouths opened and closed in no particular synchronicity with the words, like fish. “You just packed up your things and left, eager to get back to the comfort of your platoon and spread the word of your heroics.” The last word was spat, as if it left a foul taste in the back of the mouth.
“They were dead. It’s not as though burying them wouldn’t have helped. We needed to get back and advise those that needed to know what had happened,” Graham lied. He stuttered as he spoke. He always was a bad liar.
“That does make a convenient excuse for you I’m sure, but utterly irrelevant. You see, they were alive; they were healthy, in fact. In spite of their exterior ailments, their bodies were strong. But thanks to you, their family was taken from them, their patriarch, their hunter-gatherer, and their future, the small child. Their bodies were left to rot inside that church...riddled with holes. They drowned in a sea of their own blood. Alone. The women didn’t dare go back inside, not even to say goodbye,” the voice snarled.
“You turned and walked away from us. The fight was over and you turned heels and took your men away from danger.” The two women continued to convey the words of the mysterious narrator whose face he dared not show. Their bodies were thin and haggard, their arms and legs so tiny it looked as though they would break if they had to so much as hold each other’s hands. Their hair was matted and filled with leaves and twigs.
“I thought you were dead,” Graham said, his voice beginning to crumble. “With all the gunfire we just thought you were dead.”
He could feel the warm, salty tears stinging his eyes. Graham tried as hard as he could not to let them fall. It was unavoidable. Not because he was angry or because what he saw upset him, but because he was lying. He hadn’t thought that they were dead, not back then, not at the moment. Truth be told he had simply forgotten them, he had been happy to survive and wanted to get himself and his men (although if you asked him at the time, he would have said that they too were expendable) away from the encounter and back to the rest of the unit. There was comfort in numbers. It wasn’t until much later, as they sat around a makeshift table playing cards for cigarettes, that the family came back into his head. It was then, at that point and no sooner, that Graham convinced himself that they had died. They had been dead as soon as they had been pulled from the church, the rest was just a faded memory; selective, they called it. It helped him sleep a little that night, and over the years it simply became truth.
“No, no, we were alive and scared. We were alone, our shelter and food taken from us. We were forced to stand there through the cold nights, the wet days.” The words were accusatory, barbed, and meant to hurt. Then it went silent. Their voices muted, and then his voice returned.
“It was starvation and dehydration that took them. It ravaged their bodies and melted their minds long before their hearts stopped. They died cold, alone, and still believing that you would come back for them.” The words cut Graham like a hot knife. He tried to tell himself that they were dead; nothing could bring them back anymore. It was too late, the damage had been done in Graham’s mind. The floodgates opened and try as he might, Graham could do nothing to stop it.
“I’m sorry. I never stopped thinking about you, both of you. It was because of you, Johanna, that I became a teacher. I taught children your age. I wanted to help them understand life. Not just in terms of schooling, but in the broader terms of reality. I helped prepare them for everything life would throw at them, not just the standardized ‘do not copy your neighbor’s answer’ kind of problems, but real issues. You saved my life. I got out of the military as soon as the war was over and I never looked back. You stayed in my dreams until the end and I mean that.”
Graham felt his emotion building but his words were cut off. His windpipe closed as if someone had shoved a cork down his gullet. His lungs began to burn and although he was dead Graham felt his heart begin to race. His face grew dark, his limbs heavy; his thumbs and fingers became useless, fat sausages that dangled from his arms in bunches like fruits on a tree.
“I know what you did. I see everything. Don’t you get it? I didn’t create these images; I just found them in your mind and pressed play. It’s my job to ensure that you see everything in the stark, unrepentant light of day. I am merely the tour guide, here to keep you on track and, well...maybe have a bit of fun with you on the way.” The pressure around Graham’s throat abated, and as he gasped for air with burning gulps, his captor continued to talk.
“I don’t care about them and neither should you. They died, you lived, and that’s all that matters in your petty human world. Believe me, down here, it’s remarkably similar. I would cast my own brother into the pit of Assisi if it would help me advance another level down. Your real problem is what happened to you because of that day,” the voice said, but no longer boomed or demanded. To Graham it sounded like the nar