Quiet Company
In the silence between shell blasts, two soldiers find something like peace in the middle of hell.
The earth shook again. A dull punch somewhere beneath him. His fingers clawed at the mud, elbows digging into the craters of shell-pocked France. The smell was rot and cordite. Something metallic in the blood, something sour in the air.
He crawled low. His name was Private First Class Nathan Heller. Nineteen. From Abilene. He did not say it out loud. He did not even think it with pride. It was just a fact, like the sky being grey or the shells falling again. That name, that boy, they belonged to a place before this. To porches and buttermilk and dirt roads, not to this open grave.
A shell cracked somewhere behind him. He did not flinch. There was no space left in him for fear. It had burned out two days ago. What was left now was instinct. Muscle. Breath. And the hope that maybe if he stayed low enough, maybe if he moved just right, the war would not notice him.
Then he saw it. The hole. Like the mouth of some buried thing, yawning open in the mud. He slid in without asking. Rolled. Landed hard on a canteen. The figure inside jerked, hand going to rifle, then stopped.
"Jesus. Thought you were a rat."
Nathan nodded. Didn’t speak.
The man was older. Maybe thirty. Gaunt face, three days of stubble, blood on his sleeve. The light was dim but steady. They were underground now. Safe was not the word. But covered. Shielded from view. Enough.
They sat in silence while the guns kept talking. Hours passed like fog. Sometimes they slept, or something like it. One eye open. Sometimes they just stared. Nathan offered half a tin of beans. The man declined.
"Name's Keating," he said eventually.
Nathan said his name, too, though it came out low. A whisper scraped raw.
Keating nodded. "Texas?"
"Yeah."
"Figured. You got the lean look. Cattle and bone."
Nathan said nothing. They listened to the war walk overhead. Mud shifted. A scream, far off. Not close enough to worry about.
"You married?" Keating asked.
"No. You?"
"Was."
Silence again.
"Sorry," Nathan said.
Keating shrugged. "She ran off with a shopkeeper in Saint Louis. It wasn’t a love story. It was a detour."
A shell landed too close. The earth groaned. Dirt sifted into their hole like sugar. Nathan tucked his head to his knees.
They didn’t speak for hours after that.
Later, Keating lit a cigarette. The glow was faint, then gone. "You ever fish?"
Nathan nodded. "Lake Abilene. My uncle’s place. Catfish mostly."
"There’s a creek in Missouri," Keating said. "Runs clean and cold. You can sit in it with a bottle and not talk for hours. No one cares. You get out, your skin smells like stone and moss. Best smell in the world."
The image came to Nathan like a postcard. He tucked it away.
They didn’t talk about the others. About who might be alive, or where the rest of the unit had gone. That kind of thinking was dangerous. A man could survive a week without food, three days without water, but not an hour with hope. Hope would kill you fast.
They slept in turns. One watched the top of the hole, the other curled tight against the cold. They shared water, passed it back and forth without speaking. Keating told stories sometimes, about working the rails, about a bar in Cincinnati where the bourbon was so strong it made your teeth itch. Nathan tried to picture the bar. The itch. The woman who poured the drinks. He couldn’t. All he saw now were trees with no leaves, mud in the folds of a man’s neck, the twitch of fingers in death.
On the second night, Nathan spoke first.
"You think it stops? Ever?"
Keating didn’t answer for a long time. Then, "Everything stops. That’s the problem."
The third day broke with no sun. Just a thinning of the dark. The sky was the color of paste. The bombing had slowed. They could hear the difference. Less fury. More distance.
Keating sat up. Cracked his neck. Winced.
"Might be they pulled back."
Nathan nodded. He reached up. The surface looked calmer. Smoke drifted instead of roared. Shouting now, but not the kind that came with blood.
"You go," Keating said. "See if they’re ours. If it’s clear, yell."
Nathan looked at him.
"I'll cover you if not."
He climbed. One hand. Then another. Mud slid. His boots kicked loose dirt. He paused at the lip. Listened.
"Hey!" a voice called. "Heller? That you?"
He turned. Stood.
"It’s me!"
They waved. Three men, one with a bandage around his head. One carried a stretcher. The captain was among them. The shape of him familiar even in silhouette.
Nathan turned back.
"Keating! Come on! We’re clear."
No answer.
"Keating?"
He slid back down. The hole was empty. The corner where the man had sat was just dirt. The pack he carried. The tin he drank from. Gone.
Nathan stood there a long time.
Back at HQ, they cleaned him up. Gave him broth. Checked his ears. The captain came by. Sat next to him, squinting.
"You were in that foxhole three days?"
"Yes, sir. With Keating."
The captain frowned. Flipped through his book. His ledger of the dead.
"Keating," he said slowly. "That your friend?"
"Yes."
The captain nodded. Showed him the list.
"Keating died on the first wave. Shell fragment to the neck. We buried him before nightfall."
Nathan looked. The name was there. Thomas Keating. B Company. KIA.
He closed his eyes. Thought of the man’s voice. The creek. The cigarette in the dark.
He nodded. Said nothing.
They let him sleep in a real bed that night. The sheets were too clean. The room too still. He turned to the wall. Listened for breathing that wasn’t there. Held his canteen like a relic. And dreamed of Missouri, where a cold creek ran under a sky full of clouds, and a man sat waiting, with nothing to say and no reason to speak.