The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [37]
“They’re afraid,” Marshall said. He sipped his ale, trying to make it last.
“But this family is going to help us.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three days. Every day they say I’m going.”
“I think the invasion is coming any day,” Nelson said. “I kept hearing that on base.”
A step on the stairs. The signal Marshall had learned, the chut! sound and Allo Allo.
The woman had brought two blankets. Pete thanked her. “Merci,” he knew to say.
“Mercy bucketsful,” said Nelson, grinning as he took the blankets.
Marshall understood from the woman’s gestures that Pete and Nelson would have to sleep in the hiding closet, to stay concealed. He helped her move the chest away from the small door. There was some bedding inside.
“Both of us, in there?” Pete said. He and Nelson laughed.
Marshall tried to make them understand the seriousness of the house rules.
“Not a sound,” he said.
“I hope I don’t fart,” Pete said, with a glance at the woman. “She doesn’t understand fart, does she?”
“She’ll know it when she hears it,” Marshall said angrily. “And so will the Germans if they show up here. So knock it off.”
“O.K., O.K.”
“Seriously. No laughing. No snoring. Nothing.”
The woman stayed. She straightened the photograph on the wall.
“That’s her son,” Marshall explained. “This was his room. He was sent off to a work camp in Germany.”
Pete and Nelson made sheepish noises then, and Marshall was glad he had caused them discomfort. He was feeling like a veteran at evasion.
“She wants our cups,” he said.
After the woman left, he reiterated all the cautions. “These folks are laying their lives on the line for us,” he said.
Marshall offered his bed, but the other two would not take it. “We’ll take turns on it if we’re here very long,” he said. “I hope we get out of here in a day or two so we can go get a forged ID. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
His attempt to joke fell flat.
HE LAY ON THE SMALL BED thinking about Webb and Hootie. Hadley was a fool, maybe a POW by now. Chick Cochran, the right waist gunner, had bailed out. Or had he? Hadley said he did. Maybe Chick was in the wreckage. Where were Grainger, Redburn, and Campanello now? They couldn’t have gone far with their wounds. They could be hiding and getting treatment, but if they had to go to the hospital, they might have had no chance at escaping. He knew Ford and Stewart had headed for the woods, in a different direction from Marshall and Hadley. He counted nine. And Marshall made ten.
14.
“NICOLAS! NICOLAS ALBERT?”
“Oui.” The man with the baguette turned toward Marshall. “Américain?”
“Oui. I was here in the war.”
“Un aviateur américain! American flyer!” Nicolas banged on the door.
Marshall’s sudden reunion with Pierre and Gisèle Albert and their son, Nicolas, made him think of a boisterous litter of puppies waking up from a nap. Yes, Marshall was going well. How was Pierre going? How was Gisèle going? They were going well. Nicolas too. Marshall’s French was going excellently.
The twelve-year-old boy was recognizable in Nicolas the man. Marshall remembered him eagerly bringing in daily reports of the aircraft he had spotted, the whereabouts of Germans in the streets, activities he had seen around the train station or the post office or the school. The Germans had requisitioned his school, occupying one half of it and crowding the boys into the other. Marshall recalled that Nicolas had been earnest and intelligent, full of questions about America.
“Do you still have your American maps?” Marshall asked him now.
“You remember? Bien sûr. I have a weakness for geography, but I have not yet traveled to your country.”
Nicolas was a school superintendent, and he often had lunch with his parents. He and his wife lived in a suburb of Chauny, and their two daughters were attending a university in Nancy. Gisèle insisted that Marshall join them for the meal. There was plenty, she insisted. She was tiny, with a narrow