Sleeping Arrangements

I no longer recall what triggered the idea of this little story. First, it's not erotic. As usual, I was torn about which category it would best fit in. At the heart of it are the feelings of two men for each other, so I went with "Gay Male". If you're looking for a quick sexy read - this is not it. Although there's no sex, all the characters are over 18.

There are descriptions of battle-field violence and vague memories of childhood abuse. If any potential readers struggle with those issues, please be forewarned.

Thanks to LarryInSeattle for editing.

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For most of the week prior the days had been so warm they had been able to forgo the extra burden of their great coats as they went about the mundane tasks of maintaining the line. That was nice. What wasn't nice was the mud. The snow melted and the wheels of the trucks and the endless process of men marching to and fro turned the soft ground into a quagmire. Winter returned, all the more spiteful for having tasted its coming demise. The great coats reappeared. Muddy earth froze into ruts designed to turn ankles. The uneven surface added another dollop of misery to the simple act of walking. He would have sworn there remained no part of his feet free of callus, yet a new blister nagged at his left heel. Later, while changing to his "dry" socks, he would ask Will to lance it.

A practical man, he put his blister in prospective. He was walking away from the line. After nearly a month, tonight they would sleep in relative safety while others peered into the dark. The random shelling, designed not to kill but to harass, would not keep him awake. Asleep, his brain retained the ability to track the whine of the shells. He would wake if his slumbering mind noted a change in tone signifying "this one will be close". Whether their intent was to destroy or not, the shells were quite capable of killing; random men would die and their names be duly noted in their hometown papers. Even at the "rest" camp, he would need a hole to sleep in. Digging in the frozen earth would be a misery but he was not troubled. The men they were replacing had not slept in the open. They would have done the digging. He and Will would find one and make it home for the next week or so, always assuming there were no breakthroughs along the line, on either side. If the enemy broke through they'd be rushed forward to plug the hole. If their side broke through, they'd be rushed forward to exploit the opportunity. No, other than the fact that it might go on forever, stalemate had its advantage. Better the random death by sniper or shell than the insane rush forward into a maw studded with teeth that spit hot metal.

They stopped at the mess wagon. He would have claimed a place to sleep first but Will had stopped. It was a mistake. He knew this. He stopped anyway. His stomach, full for once with hot food, had drained him further. Part of him considered crawling under the wagon, balling up under his coat, and sleeping. Instead, he pushed away from what was left of the snapped off tree he leaned against and went to look for a hole. Will trailed behind.

He had been with the company two weeks longer than Will. He never discovered he was six months Will's junior, if mere birthdates counted. To Will he has an old hand. Like a new hatched chick, Will had imprinted on him and whether he liked it or not he had become responsible for the kid. That was four months ago. He had no interest in tallying up how many new kids had followed Will in those four months.

They found a hole. The resemblance to a open grave no longer troubled him. He didn't imagine it bothered Will either but this hole was more grave-like than most. There was a body in it, face down, frozen in the mud. Bodies did not bother him. It wasn't the body itself that disturbed him but rather why was it there. Why had no one bothered to remove it? Since it was half buried in ice and frozen mud it could not be a new body. Perhaps a shell had disinterred it? It looked too complete for that. Beyond the fact that it was frozen, unmoving, face down in mud, there was no obvious reason for the body to be a body. Unlike most, this one was intact. There was a head and two arms and two legs. There were no gaping holes demonstrating that beneath the skin we're just meat and bone and shit. The cracked ice along the right ear was perhaps more reddish than the rest but that might just be clay. He fell back on his innate practicality. How the body in the ice had become a body was immaterial. What mattered was the ground was frozen solid and there were no other holes.

He looked at Will then past him. They were the only two still standing. Dusty steel helmets bobbed up and down, barely visible as men settled in to sleep or change their socks or add scribbled lines to the unending letters they wrote to wives or lovers or, in some cases, both. As if to prod him to action, a shell exploded beyond the rise to their right. It had not been close enough to require a flinch but it did serve as a reminder that even here safety was a relative concept. He turned without speaking and walked toward a copse of denuded trees. At one time, in a past even the earth could no longer recall clearly, this has been a field of soft hay and the copse a peaceful garden of green shade and soft breezes where one could lie and watch rabbits hop from plant to plant and lovers gathered for solitude. Now it was mostly jagged stumps, only one tree still bore a single branch. He gathered a few of the smaller branches from the ground, knowing without looking that Will was doing the same. He carried them back to the hole and dropped them on top of the frozen body. Will contributed his. They spread the branches evenly across the bottom of the hole. Will produced a ground cloth and tossed it over the branches.

He slipped into the hole and settled against one wall, pulling his rucksack after him. There was enough room for them to sit on earth, not the now invisible body, with only their outstretched legs resting on the dead man. He rummaged in a coat pocket and took a bite of the chocolate he kept there. He washed it down with the now cold coffee he had filled his canteen with at the mess wagon. He leaned back against his pack and set about the task of unlacing his boots and prying them off his feet. He kept his extra pair of socks inside his coat. Not inside his shirt. Inside his shirt his own sweat would have kept them damp. He knew he was fooling himself but the sweat from his skin offended him. His feet stunk. He wasn't sure they would ever again not stink, so his socks stunk. His body stunk but under the stink he was sure the sweat from his body smelled of fear. He knew this could not be true but that didn't matter. He kept his second pair of socks in the inside pocket of his coat. There they stayed warm, almost dry and free of the odor of his fear.

The new blister covered half the side of his heel. He nodded at it. Will freed his knife from its scabbard. The knife was sharp but, as he always was, he was surprised at how much it hurt when the point was pressed against the milky surface of the blister. When the tip of the knife broke through the skin, fluid spurted onto the knife. The groan of pain he had suppressed escaped his chest as a sigh of relief. Will wiped the knife on his pant leg and placed it back in its scabbard and turned to his own boots and socks.

For a moment, the man relaxed against the earth and savor the cessation of the throbbing in his foot. It was too cold to sit with a naked foot for very long. He unbuttoned his coat and retrieved his dry socks. He pulled one on, winching as the wool slid over the deflated blister. He pulled his boot back on, debated lacing them up and decided not to. He preferred to imagine running was not in his immediate future. He turned to his other foot. He wasted a minute or two trying to rub some of the dirt off his foot before slipping the now cold sock onto the still filthy foot. He pulled the stiff boot on, muttering incoherent curses as he did so. He was vaguely aware that Will mirrored his actions.

He settled against his pack, considered pulling out the Bible he kept there and decided not to. He was not religious, though everyone assumed he was. He had been unable to decide what book or two was worth the added weight. In the end he chose the Bible, not for religious instruction but for literature. It had enough intrigue, heartbreak ,and mayhem for any number of novels. He had stopped wondering at Will's lack of a book, or for that matter a letter. He had looked up from one of his own letters once and opened his mouth to ask Will if there was no one he had to write to but closed it without asking. An innately practical man, he could see nothing useful in such knowledge.

In any case, there remained hardly enough light to read or write by. The dark bleed across the ground, spilling into hole after hole. The day had been bright despite the frigid air but in the edge of the sky that held onto the light he could see purple and pink clouds building. There would be no stars or moon. There was no point in sleeping yet. It was too cold to sleep alone unless you had to. They sat on Will's ground cloth. Soon, they would inch toward one another, as everyone else would be doing. They would sit or slouch together, making themselves small enough to huddle under their two coats, one atop the other. They would huddle under the coats with the remaining ground cloth over the top to keep the frost off. They wouldn't be warm exactly but warmer than curled up alone under a solitary coat.

Tight sleeping arrangements were not new to him. His army cot was the first bed he had not needed to share. He had four brothers and a sister. The farmhouse had two bedrooms. His parents got one. The other, with its two beds, was for the boys. He was the second to the oldest boy. He and his older brother shared one bed and the three youngest got the other. Except on the coldest nights his sister preferred a pallet in the kitchen to a room full of farting boys. On nights where the nail heads in the roof sported inch-long icicles, the third oldest shifted beds and she slept with the younger two.

His clearest memory of his sister was of her and his mother waltzing around each other in the small kitchen, getting breakfast going while he and his brothers bitched about having to get dressed and do chores before school. He had an epiphany one day during basic training. He had been in line in the predawn dark, half asleep, waiting for someone to slop thick tasteless oatmeal into a bowl. The soldier wielding the ladle was wide awake, awake and irritated. Something in the expression made him think of his sister. Until that moment, standing there in the dark waiting for that oatmeal, until that moment he had never considered what his sister did each morning to be a chore. The sheer magnitude of this revelation stopped him in his tracks, resulting in a jostle and half-hearted, half-awake curses from the man behind him.

He wished he could write her a letter, tell her of his revelation but that was impossible. His sister had married at seventeen. A year later she and her child were dead. Nor could he tell his mother of his discovery. As if unable to face the prospect of a world killing itself, she had died just as the rumbles of possible war became reality.

His practical nature precluded any qualms about sleeping with only a few tree boughs separating him from a frozen corpse, so it was probably the cold, not thoughts of death and burial, that made him shiver. It was an unspoken rule that Will, not he, would signal the need to initiate an attempt at sleep. He did not know if Will saw him shiver but a moment later, he heard the rustle of Will shucking off his coat.

He sat up and shrugged out of his own coat. He reached into the top of his pack and pulled out his ground sheet. He balanced his helmet on top of the pack and tugged his wool cap lower over his ears. As he did so, he felt Will's hip against his. He curled up to his left, using his pack as a pillow and wedge. With practiced ease, he flipped his coat up and over his body and Will's. There was a swoosh of cold air as Will did the same with his coat. Careful to not disturb the pile of coats, they reached down and pulled the ground sheet over them. He dropped his face into the open collar of his jacket and drifted to sleep as one by one the other holes fell silent. Off to his left he heard Olshansky's distinctive baritone snore with its whistling coda. He half listened for sarge to threaten to shoot Olshansky if he didn't shut the fuck up, forgetting as he began to drowse that the sergeant he was thinking of had been two sergeants ago.

He slept and he dreamed. He dreamed he was sleeping. His older brother was there but they weren't crowded in the cramped bed of their childhood but lying in the grass in the cemetery behind the church that each year leaned a little further away from the wind that constantly blew out of the west. Their sister and her child would lie nearby soon enough. In his dream, his brother pressed something hard against his back. A teasing voice whispered in his ear, "Don't worry, little brother, some day you might have a real dick, too instead of that little pee pee". In the dream, they were both grown men, bearded and muddy. He'd heard those words but not in his sleep and not in a dream; he'd heard them long ago, torn between staying warm and moving away from his brother's words and body.

He was no longer sure he was dreaming. He felt warm breath on his neck. He could feel it tickle the strands of hair that escaped from under his wool cap. Through his jacket and cloths, something hard rubbed against his back. He was hard. A hand pressed against his hardness. It moved. His brother had touched him once or twice, laughing at his nighttime erection but his brother never moved his hand against him like this. He felt the body along his back stiffen and the hand clutch. In his dream he came in his mud-caked fatigues something that had never happened in the crowded bed of his youth. In his dream, he fell asleep embarrassed, reminding himself to wake up before his brothers so he could clean up the mess, not his older brother, his younger brothers.

He woke to the irritatingly incongruous sounds of birds chirping. His back was cold. His coat had slipped to one side and had taken the groundsheet with it. Pieces of his dream came back to him. He wondered about his younger brothers, wondered if they had any idea of what they'd been spared by sleeping in the other cramped bed. He worried that this forever war would get its claws into them He'd rarely spared a thought for his older brother, who was more than capable of taking care of himself. He touched his back. His blouse was tucked. The jacket seemed in place, no bare skin. He shifted, rolling over and stopped. His crotch was wet, sticky. Goddamn it. He frowned and touched his back again. It had been a strange dream. He reassured himself it was a dream. He stood and pulled at the front of his pants. He had a second pair of socks but as for the rest of his clothes, they were it until his squad was pulled back for R&R and a shower. He cursed under his breath wondering how long it would take for his underwear to dry out. He bent his head trying to see if the front of his pants looked wet and decided they simply looked filthy which is how they should look.

It was early. Will was gone. He could see other men standing and stretching, heard a few raspy "watch where you stepping" and "move your ass". He picked his coat up off the ground and shrugged it on. It had lost whatever warmth their bodies had given it. He clambered out of the hole, trying to avoid stepping on the boughs or the body underneath. He tugged at the front of his pants again as he stood. He leaned back into the hole to retrieve his helmet. As he settled it on his head, he turned. Will was sitting on a log near the mess wagon. A trail of smoke rose from the wagon and he could see men bustling. The giant dented steel coffee urn steamed. As he turned, he imagined he saw Will quickly turn his head away. He took two steps away from the hole and fumbled with his pants. He had to pee so bad it hurt. He stood, a slight bend to his back so that he could pee past what his brother had called a piss boner.

He finished and, trying not to keep fiddling with his pants, he walked to the mess wagon and grabbed one of the tin cups from the rack. He filled his cup. There was nothing to eat yet. He turned toward Will, who sat alone on the dead tree. He started that way, felt the stickiness in his pants and instead veered toward the tree he had leaned on last night as he ate. He thought Will's eyes followed him but pushed the thought away.

As he walked, he raised the cup to his lips and blew on it, as if the thin tin cup hadn't already surrendered the bulk of the coffee's warmth to the cold. He lifted the cup but had not yet completed his first sip when the ground blew up around him. As he sailed through the air he wondered at the fact he had not heard the shell. He landed next to the tree, unsure of whether he was whole or not. His arms scrambled to cover his helmetless head as the ground tossed underneath him. Then it was quiet except for the ringing in his ears.

He could see his helmet lying just beyond the tree. He reached for it, noting that his arm worked and that there were no holes in the sleeve and no blood visible on his arm or hand. He settled the helmet on his head and pushed himself to his knees. Nothing hurt and his arms and legs appeared to be capable of doing as asked. He shook his head, trying to clear the ringing but only made it worse. He found himself on his hands and knees retching and telling himself no matter what do not shake your head like that again. He had to steady himself against the tree to stand.

The mess wagon was intact. The men who had been readying breakfast less so. Some lay unmoving, others mimicked his effort to stand, though none appeared to be unbloodied. Men crawled from their holes and began to make their way toward the wagon. He started in that direction as well. The log that had rested near the wagon was no longer on the ground. It canted crazily over a new hole. He did not see Will.

He walked to the log and the crater. A piece of cloth peeked above the edge of the crater. As he got closer, he could see it held part of a leg. Strapped to it was a familiar scabbard. Where the waist should have been, a silver-grey loop of bowel protruded. The rest of the body and other leg were missing. The genitals were exposed. The warm soft thigh they should have lain against was gone. Instead they rested on cold hard dirt. The pallid organ was soft and unmuddied. That more than the lonely piece of leg caused him to weep.

Still silently weeping, he did not notice when he was lead away.

He remember little of the aide station or hospital. He had a several pieces of dirt and gravel buried in his neck. He never knew that the back of his jacket had been spattered with bone and flesh. It, and the rest of his clothes went in the fire. He was bathed and put to bed where he slept unknowing. He had vague memories of the recovery billet. He kept to himself. One of the wounds on his neck refused to heal which kept him returning to the front. Only after the end of the war was announced did the wound finally heal.

He had no memory of Will. His waking self wasn't even aware that he'd forgotten him. He recalled Will only in dreams he could never remember when he woke. He was never aware of how it hurt his wife that he could not sleep with her touching his body. She knew every detail of every one of the white scars that peppered his neck, having stared at them as she tried to sleep. She knew he got them in the war. He never spoke of it and she never wondered if they had anything to do with his sleeping habits. She assumed his desire to not be touched as he slept was simply another aspect of his practical nature.