“This is bullshit!” Diddens said again. This time he yelled it, but his cry had nothing to resound against and it failed to carry. Vellinghausen had undergone a week of shelling by both sides, followed by a pitched two-day tank battle before the Germans conceded the town for good to elements of the 8th Armored Division. Almost all the buildings were badly damaged. Most of the main street of Vellinghausen was gray sky.
“Calm yourself,” my grandfather said. He understood that from Diddens’s point of view, it seemed absurd to have come across France and four hundred miles into Germany without being touched by artillery or small-arms fire only to be shot with an arrow. On the other hand, there was a venerable school of thought that taught when a conquering army showed up in your hometown at the head of a trail of death and destruction, you were supposed to do what you could to make conquest expensive, using whatever came to hand. That type of behavior was the stuff of poems and heroes. In the past three months my grandfather had seen poetry and heroism of this nature cost the lives of several Germans, three first-rate jeep drivers, two radiomen, and Lieutenant Alvin P. Aughenbaugh, Ph.D. This Diddens was Aughenbaugh’s replacement, and he was all right, but I don’t think my grandfather ever recovered from the loss of Aughenbaugh. He would not tell me the circumstances of his friend’s death other than to say that it came in the back of a jeep while my grandfather was trying to keep him upright and talking until they could find an aid station.
“Did it hit bone?” my grandfather asked Diddens.
“I— ” The question seemed to give Diddens something to focus on. He gritted his teeth and studied his heavy boot. He was moving his foot around inside it. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Can you put weight on it?”
Diddens put a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder and raised himself off the ground. He drew in his left leg and lowered himself onto the left foot. He gasped. “Uh. No.” He stuck his foot back out. This time he just sat down flat on the cobblestones, as if now were any kind of time to take a rest. “Ah, jeez. It really hurts. I think the point must be coming out of the bottom. Is it coming out of the bottom? Can you see?”
My grandfather frowned. They were already behind schedule. Vellinghausen was not even supposed to be a stop on their route. They were supposed to be following the 3rd Armored Division, but a map failure, a moonless night, and unexpected panzer movement south of Lippstadt had entangled them with the 8th. Forward regiments of the 3rd were already a day or more ahead of them, headed for Paderborn. A day or more closer to Nordhausen.
My grandfather reached for the gun at his hip. At the same time he bent over and grabbed hold of the shaft in Diddens’s foot. He jerked the arrow backward. It slid loose with a moist pop. The head emerged streaked with purple from the hole it had made going into the boot, just to the left of the laces.
Diddens let out a yawp of outrage and shock. “What?” he said.
My grandfather stood up and came out from behind the heap of plaster chunks, roof tiles, and plaster dust that had been hiding them. He raised the gun and swept the street with his eyes, thinking about angles and sight-lines. He noted without lingering on them a black and orange cat, a bicycle that concussion had twisted around a hitching post to symbolize infinity. Behind the rubble pile Diddens clutched his foot and diverted his thoughts from the pain by describing in Alabaman detail the unnatural use that my grandfather had made of my great-grandmother. Up the street on the right, a bakery occupied the ground floor of a stucco townhouse painted the color of lemon custard. The houses this side of it had paid off the tank gunners’ luck with jackpots of rubble like the one they had taken cover behind. My grandfather traveled his gaze up the pale stucco to the third story. Its paired windows seemed to be at about the limit of the effective range of an archer.
“What are you doing?” Diddens said. “Get down, are you fucking nuts?”
My grandfather knew he was taking chances. In general it was best, for example, not to try to remove a sharp object from a puncture wound because it might be acting to plug the hole it had made in some major vein or artery. But there were no major veins or arteries, as far as my grandfather knew, in the human foot. As for stepping into the middle of the street when you knew somebody out there was trying to kill you with a bow and arrow, he had decided to test a personal theory that since the arrow had gone into Diddens’s foot and not his head or his throat, the archer must not be much of a marksman.
“No,” my grandfather said. “Just in a hurry.”
In the ruins of K?ln he and Aughenbaugh had interviewed a captured Wehrmacht truck driver—irrespective of what it said on their bills of lading, all truck drivers carried information—who reported having hauled a shipment of machine parts in mid-March to a group of “professors” at Nordhausen. One of the professors he claimed to have seen there was a thickset young blond whom the driver described as clearly the man in charge.
As it happened, my grandfather, along with all the other hunters in the unit, was recently issued a detailed inventory of thousands of leading Nazi “professors.” It was code-named the Black List and was said to have been compiled from a German original found by a Polish janitor at Bonn University, half-flushed down a toilet in the mayhem of the German retreat from that city. My grandfather’s orders were to track down the scientists, technicians, and engineers whose names appeared on the Black List and capture them before the Russians could. At the top of the Black List was the name of a physicist said to be the inventive mind behind the V-2 rocket, one of which had come close to killing my grandfather and Aughenbaugh that night in London. According to the limited intelligence the Allies had on him, this rocket man was a beefy blond fellow.
My grandfather had never wanted anything more than he wanted to be the man who brought in this Wernher von Braun. Or maybe at that point—he told me—what he wanted more than anything was to see one of von Braun’s rockets. That desire was, at the moment, the only certainty he possessed, apart from a strong intuition that one of the Russian hunters traveling west from Poland behind the fast-moving Red Army would never sit around crying because he had an arrow in his foot.
Something whispered in my grandfather’s left ear, and just behind him a mallet struck a block of wood. The flower box, planted only with mud and ash, had taken another hit. The time had come to test his hypothesis about the archer’s marksmanship. So far the man was shooting one for three.
The fourth arrow hummed in low and whistling and clattered against the cobblestone street about fifteen feet in front of my grandfather. It skittered along, struck some jut in the cobbles, and bounced. Its vector was deformed by the impact, and it shot up at an eighty-degree angle to the street. It tumbled interestingly through the air toward my grandfather, end over end and moving slightly to the left of him. He reached out as it came cartwheeling and managed to snatch it as it went by.
*
It was not that my grandfather felt no fear.
“I was afraid the whole time,” he told me. “From the minute I got there. Even when no one was shooting at me or trying to drop a bomb on my head. But whenever they did shoot at me, what happened was, it made me angry, too.”
“And the anger trumped.”
“It was, you know, it flooded over me.”
“Yeah.”
“It just washed everything else away. That was the time . . . In my whole life, that was the time I got some use out of it. When somebody was shooting at me.” He twisted his mouth. “But I didn’t know until that day it worked with arrows, too.”