“Brazil was beautiful, and a welcome change from dull, drab New York,” Ashley explained to Stam as his fingers and scissors slid through her hair, “but it was hard to pay much mind to things like that.”
Stam listened, but kept her head in place.
“The car belonged to this old couple, the Bosserts. They—”
“I thought you wanted to be distracted,” Stam inter-rupted him.
He took a breath, silenced as he remembered his initial intention. He said nothing more as he snipped a few final strands of hair and backed away. He framed Stam’s face with his fingers in the air, winking one eye as best as he could. He nodded as he turned his attention to the counter and began cleaning up.
“Hey, Ash,” Aurelio called as he approached from down the hall. “It’s almost noon. I was gonna get started on the lawn for you.”
Stam climbed out of her seat and removed a towel from over her shoulders only to be stopped by Ashley.
“Shirt?” he asked, offering a loose-fitting black T-shirt to cover her unclothed torso.
With no motivation beyond habit, she slid it on just before Aurelio’s head peeked around the door.
“Do you want me to—hey, nice hair.”
“Thank you.”
“You kind of look like… Edie Sedgwick.”
“She does?” Ashley, busy shaking a comb dry, examined his work on Stam’s head.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“She was, well, an actress, I guess,” Aurelio replied, glancing at Ashley.
“Sort of.” Ashley couldn’t offer a better description, and was still struggling to come to the same conclusion as Aurelio about Stam’s hair.
Aurelio noticed his confusion and offered help, “Did you ever see ‘Vinyl?’”
“I don’t really like Andy Warhol.” Ashley shrugged helplessly.
Aurelio laughed. “Yeah, me neither, but in ‘Vinyl,’ her hair was like… well, kind of like that.”
The meaning of it all was still obscure and bewildering to Stam. Ashley instinctively took note and looked at her. “It’s a compliment,” he said, smiling. “She’s often touted as one of the most beautiful women of the 1960s.”
“Yeah, but, eh,” Aurelio fumbled in his attempt to compliment Stam further, “you look, well, even better.”
“Thank you,” Stam replied.
Ashley politely excused himself from the room, patting Aurelio on the shoulder as he passed. “Want some lunch before you go out?”
“Sure.” Aurelio waited for Stam to join them. She followed at her own pace, idly stroking her hair as she walked. She looked uncertain.
“It looks really good,” Aurelio reassured her. “Ahh, but… you always look good.”
Stam smiled and reiterated, “Thank you,” before having her attention quickly pulled away by a loud squawk.
“Out!” Sydney flapped his wings furiously. “Out!”
She started toward the bird. Aurelio watched her for a moment before finally breaking his gaze away and approaching a door in the kitchen. Nearby, Ashley was busy stripping the husks from a few ears of corn.
“The mower is up and running?” Aurelio asked with his hand on the doorknob.
“Yeah, I filled it up.”
“You know, I can give you a ride to the gas station next time if you don’t get your car back soon and don’t want to take the bus.”
“You do enough as it is.”
“Well, it’s no problem, just let me know,” Aurelio responded as he opened the door. He noticed Stam approaching with Sydney perched on her forearm.
“Out,” the bird squawked again.
“Can you take him with you?” Stam asked, offering him to Aurelio.
“He could use some sunlight,” Ashley added.
“Oh yeah.” Aurelio smiled and took Sydney. “Vamos, amigo.”
“Aurelio!” Sydney screeched, hopping onto his arm.
“Buen pajaro,” Aurelio praised him as he shut the door to the garage behind him.
In the kitchen, Ashley and Stam heard Sydney’s proud reply outside disappearing beneath the loud cranking sound of the garage door opening. “Good bird!”
Ashley went back to shucking corn while Stam locked the kitchen door and then took a seat on their couch in the living room. She began paging through a newspaper. The two focused on their activities in silence until Ashley finished the last ear of corn and plunked it into a pot of boiling water.
“I need a distraction,” Ashley eventually said, refer-ring to their earlier conversation. “It has nothing to do with what I want.”
Stam said nothing. She seemed to understand what he meant.
“Sorry about the hair,” he added.
“Perhaps you should take it all off,” she suggested. “It would take more time to grow out.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not trying to butcher you,” he said. “And besides….” He hesitated once more, failing to hide frustration in his voice. “What is time to you or me?”
Again, Stam said nothing.
“Aurelio likes it,” Ashley added.
“Does it make such a difference?”
“To him? Probably not. It doesn’t really for me anymore either—it’s just a habit now.”
Silence resumed.
“By the way,” Ashley spoke up once more as he threw a dash of salt into the pot. “I got some bus tickets to Cleveland for us for this weekend… to eat.”
* * *
Gunther’s feet shuffled painfully through the snow. Every step felt like his last, like the next would be impossible to take. Heinz’s soft whimpers had dulled, and all Gunther could do was shake him weakly. “Stay with me. Wake up.” His body was limp, but warm to Gunther’s touch. “Stay with me….”
They followed the river the Hauptscharführer had pointed out on the map. Gunther couldn’t count the miles, but it seemed like they might wind up walking forever. He could feel Heinz getting heavier on his shoulder, his own strength dwindling, and all hope fading. The wind howled and bit at Gunther’s ears, and each new snowflake felt like a tiny shard of glass cutting his frost-coated face. He pulled Heinz closer, burying the bully’s face in the folds of his coat and doing what he could to block the wind. “It can’t be much farther.”
The night wore on and Gunther’s morale waned. Each bend of the river looked just like the last and the forest grew ever thicker. Each short movement required careful calculation lest he scrape a tree branch or stumble on a log, and through his thick haze of thoughts and frantic emotions, it infuriated him. What was wrong with him?
He couldn’t press on any farther.
He’d been taxed beyond mortal limits. He couldn’t move Heinz another inch. With a stumble—though he could hardly feel it—he knew Heinz was slipping from his arms, and he dropped to help bring him down gently. As Heinz hit the dirt and snow below, Gunther sank down beside him. The two lay on the ground by the river, and too weak to say a word, Gunther reached out to his tormenter’s dark, frostbitten hand.
There was no change around them. Gunther had expected things to fade as they had before—for darkness and silence to engulf him—but they did not. His eyes felt frozen in every sense of the word, and try as he might to shut out the world, it was impossible. He watched, immobilized by the cold and pain, as snow began to cover Heinz as it had the dead.
“Hey—”
There was a sound: words.
“Wer ist da?”
The words were German, but Gunther could hardly make them out.
Then, a light suddenly shined across the two bodies. Gunther heard another word shouted, and then responses. He tried to twist and look toward the commotion, but before he could mount the strength, he felt strong arms grasp him and turn him facing upward. Above him, a man looked down, and then another. They were saying something.
“Er ist tot….”
He knew the words. “He’s dead.”
Gunther tried to make a sound, and the two faces above him looked startled, even horrified.
“Oh, Gott….”
Gunther heard the men talking back and forth again. One of them checked Heinz.
“He. Lebst Du noch?”
Another pair of strong arms took hold of Gunther. He felt himself lifted upward—it hurt, just as everything else had. He tried to scream, or at least gurgle, but had no success. He could hear German voices, but found it hard to process their words.
“Er sieht nicht gut aus….”
“Die Pfleger werden ihn ruhigstellen.”
Gunther struggled to speak, “Help… me.”
In response, he heard shouting—more words he had to struggle to comprehend with his tired mind.
“Oh, shit. Is he conscious?”
“Medic, over here. Quick.”
Gunther was placed on a soft surface. Above him was a canvas covering. Faces buzzed around him and voices called out orders while hands and arms holding needles and bandages passed over his body.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“Got that injection yet?”
He was numb from the cold, and much of him was coated in ice and frost, but from the corner of his vision as his eyes darted about, he saw two medics stripping away his bloody, frozen clothes and someone sticking a thick needle into his arm. Another man’s face appeared above Gunther’s suddenly, looking down at him and speaking urgently, “Can you hear me, son?”
“Yeah,” Gunther managed to painfully cough out.
“We’re gonna give you morphine for the pain—I need you stay awake for me. Can you do that?”
He could only groan.
“Son? Stay with me.”
The man clasped Gunther’s cheeks; the warm hands felt like fire on his cold, brittle skin. He shook violently and felt his body restrained by the figures around him.
“Doc, I dunno about this,” someone said.
Words drifted about.
“There’s a lot of tissue damage down here. Look at this shrapnel.”
“This kid hardly has a stomach left.”
“Look at this.”
The face above him was scanning his body, and eventually looked back at Gunther’s peeled eyes. “Can you feel this, son?”
He felt nothing.
“This?” the man asked again.
There was a tiny point of pressure somewhere on his left arm. Gunther nodded, and one of the other men looked at another, shocked.
“Can you move your foot?”
Gunther struggled and folded his toes, however minutely.
“We might be able to save the limb.”
“There’s no way. Look at this.”
The face above him disappeared amid more heated, urgent discussion. Gunther could only pick out pieces of the conversation, but nobody seemed quite sure what to do with him.
“Help… me,” he pled again. Some of the numbness in his fingertips, ears, and nose was disappearing, and in their place was a burning, itching sensation. He could feel something warm and wet on one arm, both arms, on most of his body. As agonizing hours passed, feeling was returning and there was pressure all across his skin. The scrapes and bruises from earlier, his raw flesh blistered from the cold, his shredded midsection, and the sharp stabbing of the bite mark on his neck all resurfaced, and Gunther felt panic rising with them.
“Help me.”
He shook violently, needing to be restrained once again. Tears began to well in his eyes as they unfroze and a whimper formed in his throat, graduating to a moan. The pain of his injuries was winning over every ounce of his self control. He began to thrash about wildly, bashing one of the medics near him.
“Hold him down.”
They pinned him to the bed, and a needle jammed into his arm—whatever it was proved ineffective.
“Please, help me,” Gunther cried, begging they do something to dull the feeling.
“What else can you give this guy?”
“He’s had almost ninety milligrams of morphine already—he can’t handle much more.”
“Well, it’s obviously not working.”
The squabbling continued, and Gunther’s efforts to writhe and free himself continued to be fruitless. As the pain came on stronger, he gave up, settling into a fetal position, crying—oscillating from a weak sniffle to agonized howl every few minutes. A sheet was wrapped across his mouth, only marginally deadening the sound of his screams. Now and then one of the doctors would inject him with something else, or bandage another wound, but all Gunther could do was lie on the bed, shaking uncontrollably in short, rapid bursts. In between his cries, a name occasionally crossed his muffled lips as his mind fired off in desperation.
“… Luther… Heinz… Martin….”
“… Jens….”
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