When he woke up, the truck was grinding and bucking and he could hear the driver swearing up in the cab. When he’d flagged down the deuce-and-a-half, my grandfather had noted the insignia painted on its front passenger door, a red spot on a gold shield. Beneath this a legend crudely lettered in white paint informed the curious that this truck, whose name was Big-Leg Woman, had been driven continuously since June 1944, from Omaha Beach to the Ardennes, by Corporal Melvin Fish, of the Red Ball Express. Corporal Fish would be accustomed to driving on fucked-up roads by now, but this one seemed to be giving him trouble.
My grandfather poked his head out of the back of the truck. It appeared that some brave tactician had decided to toss a stray unit of motorcycle infantry over his shoulder to cover the SS retreat from the neighborhood. Two or three dozen bikes with sidecars, a couple of squat Kübelwagens. A unit of 105mm Priests on a hilltop to the west had caught the German cyclists on a stretch of open ground. For a hundred yards the road was a chicane of wrecked machines and dead men sunk in a churn of mud. It had not rained for several days, and this was not natural mud; it had been compounded by truck tires and caterpillar treads from dust and blood and whatever home-brew sauce the Krauts were putting in their engines as it leaked from busted fuel tanks to puddle in the ruts. There was hair in the mud. The soldiers, insofar as my grandfather could distinguish their features in the impasto of their bodies, had been the greenest of boys.
For the moment my grandfather was more interested in the condition of the motorcycles. Even before the artillery got to them, they must have been a sorry sight, fruit of the scrap yard, hybrid freaks. Bicycle parts pressed into ad hoc service, a sidecar that seemed to have been formed from a galvanized steel washtub, tires piebald with patches. Bicycles, arrows. Soon they would be throwing bricks and rocks. They were already throwing the bodies of their children.
A little way up the grassy slope that had served the gunners for a bowling alley, a German officer sat on his bike. As Big-Leg Woman skidded and fishtailed past him, his left eye seemed to fix on my grandfather, hanging out of the back of the truck. The right side of the officer’s skull and most of his face, apart from the staring eye, had been shot away. A spray of fine hair clung like dry grass to the blackened cliff of his parietal bone, fluttering in the breeze. His caked boots were planted solidly on either side of what appeared to be a nicely intact motorcycle, low-slung and painted an incongruous shade of khaki. He had a grown man’s build, broad shoulders drawn back to lend his posture a hint of defiance. His gloved fists were locked around the grips of his motorcycle’s handlebars. Maybe he had peeled away from his unit up the rise, hoping to draw the fire of the guns, or had hoped to rally his teenage fusiliers for a suicidal uphill charge toward them. As the convoy of trucks weaved and ground their way through the wreckage, one of the GIs predictably took offense at or could not resist the remnant of that blond head on those arrogant shoulders. He drew his Colt and took a few halfhearted potshots, to no effect. Then he got serious and the head burst into red mist. The carcass with no head stayed smartly upright, straddling the motorcycle.
My grandfather jumped down from the back of the truck, sinking into the grim slurry to his ankles. Like the mud itself, the stench of the mud was an amalgam only war could concoct, like the smell when MP delousing crews made POWs take off their clothes and boots, and the rancid butter gas of unwashed feet combined with armpit and the naphtha burn of bug spray. My grandfather found Corporal Fish’s puzzled face in the right-hand rearview mirror. He waved his thanks for the lift.
The road sucked at his boots. He reached the shoulder and scrambled up to the headless officer. A dense mesh of flies busied themselves in the air just above the decapitated stump as if attempting to weave themselves into a makeshift head. Apart from the stump, which revealed more than my grandfather cared to learn just then about the structural anatomy of the throat and upper vertebrae and the appetite of flies, there was nothing to suggest that the officer, a lieutenant like my grandfather, was prepared to relinquish the motorcycle. Even without his head, he maintained his rigid posture, his air of having dug his heels in.
“Enough already,” my grandfather said. “We get it.”
He took a breath. He worked his arms around the upper torso from behind, turning his face away from the meat and the frenzy of flies. Powerful impulses of his nervous system urged him just to yank the carcass loose and drop or even hurl it to the ground. He forebore. He worked the hands free of the grips with a few gentle twists. He eased the carcass off the seat, hoisted it up, and swung it until the farther leg came away free. He laid the body supine on the grass like he was helping a drunk to bed.
Still holding his breath, my grandfather stripped the body of rifle, cartridge box, and gloves. Black leather gauntlets, heavy and cuffed, very Nazi. He pulled them on. The black leather was spattered with blood. He wiped his hands on the dead officer’s uniform trousers.
He went back to take a look at the motorcycle, a Zündapp. It was filthy but appeared to have been well maintained. It was an uncomplicated machine, engine and gearbox hung on a skeleton like the spread finger bones of a bat. A shaft drove the rear wheel and, he noted, the sidecar’s wheel. Ignition on the gearshift mount. Four speeds. Canvas cover over the sidecar as if the late operator had been accustomed to solitary rides. Apart from the black rubber grips, the seat and tires, and the steel caps of the jerricans, the whole thing was painted a matte shade of desert tan. Stenciled on the nose of its sidecar, a cute little white palm tree hid modestly behind a white swastika. The Zündapp had an air of misplacement, a Central Park polar bear in August. In 1990 as in 1945, my grandfather was willing to devote a minute to pondering the mysteries of the Zündapp’s journey from the Maghreb to the Westerwald and the long downward journey of the Wehrmacht itself from the days of Rommel and the Afrika Korps.
He climbed on. The driver of a passing Willys tapped his horn and my grandfather lifted a gloved hand. He sat a moment, coming to terms with the bulk of it between his legs. He turned the ignition switch, opened the throttle, stepped on the kickstand. The engine rattled to life.
Within ten miles of setting out, he had fallen in love. He had driven a motorcycle only once, for an hour during which he never got comfortable on the BSA belonging to a pool player from Jersey. He remembered contending with alarming phenomena of pitch and torque. There had been a constant sense of lurching. Vibrations were transmitted directly to his bones and joints.
This bike, poised on and steadied by its third wheel, just went. It flowed through upshifts and hugged the road in tight turns. The engine was loud but did not weary the ear. The ride was bouncy but not jarring. The fuel tank between his thighs was nearly full with potato-peel ethanol or distilled shoe polish or whatever it might be. It was an excellent machine, though it had done nothing to help its previous owner hold on to his head. Later my grandfather would remember thinking, as he headed for Nordhausen, that he could not wait to show it to his new friend Wernher von Braun. They would tool around the autobahns of a postwar Germany, von Braun riding in the sidecar like a gentle-natured bear.
*
“Was he still there?”
“No.”
“No?”
“He was gone by the time I got there. Long gone.”
“But you found him.”
He didn’t answer. He was sitting up, face angled toward the window. His breathing looked steady, but it was past lunchtime, and he had not eaten anything all morning but a few bites of Jell-O. I figured he was feeling a little weak. “Grandpa? You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Want a little soup? Mom made you some.”
He kept his eyes on the window as if something interesting were happening at the birdfeeder, out of my line of sight, another doomed attack by the momzer. Only he wasn’t smiling.
“I’m talking too much,” he said after a while.