The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [34]
But she said nothing. Slowly, as in other dark nights, she ran her finger tips over his body, over the scar that cut down the whole trunk of his frame. She ran her fingers over the bumpy seam as a child runs a toy back and forth over a welt in the sidewalk, the slight rise and fall almost hypnotic.
Mosca sat up straight so that his shoulders rested against the wooden headrest of the bed. He folded his hands behind his neck as a cushion and said quietly, “I was lucky I got that where nobody sees it.”
“I see it,” Hella said.
“You know what I mean. It would be different if it were on my face.”
She kept her fingers moving over the scar. “Not to me,” she said.
The fever in his body made Mosca uncomfortable. The fingers moved soothingly over him, and he knew she would accept what he had done.
“Don't faH asleep,” he said. “I always meant to tell you something but I never thought it important enough.” Mockingly he gave his voice the singsong inflection of one about to tell a fairy tale to a child. “I'll tell you a little story,” he said. He groped for a cigarette on the night table.
The ammunition dump stretched for miles and miles, the shells stacked in clusters like black cordwood. He, Mosca, sat in the cab of the bullet-shaped truck and watched the prisoners load the vehicles in front of him. The prisoners wore green twill fatigues and on their heads floppy hats of the same material. They would have blended easily into the forest around them if it had not been for the large, white letter P painted heavily on their backs and on each trouser leg.
From somewhere in the forest three blasts of a whistle sounded recall. Mosca jumped out of the cab of the truck and yelled, “Hey, Fritz, e'mere.”
The prisoner he had made straw boss over his three truckloads of workers came to him.
“We got time to finish this load before we start back?”
The German, a small man of forty, with a curiously wrinkled, old-young face, stood before Mosca without obsequiousness, shrugged his shoulders, and said in broken English, “We be late for chow.”
They grinned at each other. Any of the other prisoners would have assured Mosca that the load could be finished, merely to remain in favor.
“Okay, dump what you got,” Mosca said. “Well let the bastards squawk;” He gave the German a cigarette and the German shoved it into the pocket of his green twill jacket It was against regulations to smoke in the dump area though, of course, Mosca and the other GI guards did so.
“Get the rest of the Fritzes loaded and give me a count.” The German left him and the prisoners began to pile into the trucks.
They moved slowly over the dirt road through the forest. Where other roads intersected more vehicles joined the procession, until finally, the long line of open trucks, in single file, left the shade of the forest and entered the open countryside, the lemon-colored sunlight of very early spring. For guards and prisoners alike the war was very far away. They were safe, between them the issue had been settled. They moved in quiet and seeming content from the forest land of the ammunition dump to the barracks enclosed in barbed wire.
The GI guards, men who had been wounded too badly to be returned for line duty, had had enough of war. The prisoners regretted their fate only in the evening when they saw their guards pile into jeeps for a trip to the nearby town. The prisoners” faces behind their barbed wire had the wistful envy of children watching parents prepare to leave their homes for an evening out
Then, in the very early morning light, they would ride out together to the forest. During the morning breaks, the prisoners would scatter around on the grass munching pieces of bread they had saved from breakfast. Mosca gave his crew more time than was usual. Fritz sat with him on a pile of shells.
“Not too bad a life, eh, Fritz?