Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

A fter Devon showed Stanley how to use a shower, he stepped out and was a little surprised at how quickly the door was shut behind him. He did not believe, not even for a minute, that Stanley was who he said he was. By all the laws of physics, it was impossible that he'd come from the year 1917. Of course, there was always quantum string theory to explain it, but that didn't help because Devon didn't know much about that. But how could Devon resist the idea that Stanley said that he had come from the war, the very war that Devon was writing about?

His obsession was about to kick in, and hard. Stanley said he was from 1917, and though it was impossible that he was an American doughboy, he looked exactly like the sepia-toned images that Devon had been staring at for years. He was Devon's dream come true, a fantasy come to life.

Stanley had the same haircut as the soldiers in those images, a haircut that lacked only a sweep of Macassar oil to groom it into place. Stanley's smile was sweet, though his face was drawn thin by hunger. And though his eyes had an expression that told more of experience than innocence, there was still a brightness to them, an eagerness .

Devon knew he had to watch himself, or the thing his advisor had always warned him about would happen, and Devon would lose focus on his thesis to fall head over heels for Stanley based on who he appeared to be, rather than who he was.

Just then, Stanley opened the bathroom door, dropped his uniform into a brown and tan puddle on the floor, then quickly shut the door again. Devon barely saw the flash of the ID tag around Stanley's neck, and didn't let himself stare. Didn't let himself think about Stanley in the shower, as that would be rude, and wouldn't help Stanley at all. To distract himself, Devon picked up the rifle from where it was propped against the wall and carried it to the table so he could look at it.

Stanley could have gotten the uniform from a re-enactment place, and scoured the internet for the gear. However, he would have had to sell his soul for the rifle and bayonet combo, as they were collector items. At the same time, the bayonet was attached to the rifle with the original heat shield and bayonet lug that looked, beneath the mud, new enough to have come from the factory yesterday. In fact, it had probably come from the factory yesterday.

It had probably been one of Devon's old college buddies who had hired Stanley to play Devon for the fool, and flown him to Ornes, France, just for this one joke. Though, at the same time, Devon couldn't think of anybody who would pay that kind of money just to make Devon laugh at the cleverness of it. Because it was clever and highly detailed, and, yes, a little bit cruel. Even if Stanley weren't real, he was the very image of a World War I doughboy, the spitting image, a sepia-toned photograph brought to life.

His hair, shorn close to fit beneath the helmet, was dark and might have a little bit of red in it. His face still had the roundness of youth, but that had been sculpted away by a lack of food, the harsh conditions in the trenches. His eyes were the color of whiskey, enormous, like the ones in the images of doughboys returned from the war, the expressions of hope removed—

Devon stopped himself. Stanley was no more a doughboy than Devon was. He'd been paid a handsome price to play a joke on Devon. That, or he was an escaped lunatic who only thought he was in the Battle of Ornes, and who thought he was now in the future. It was all very confusing.

Devon picked up his phone from the kitchen counter and looked up the number for the local council office, and tapped in the numbers. The village of Ornes was so small that it was likely that the council offices were closed, but to his surprise the phone was answered, and a French voice greeted him and asked him what he wanted.

"Is there anybody reported missing from a local clinic for psychiatric care?" he asked in his halting French.

"The nearest facility is in Reims, monsieur," said the voice.

"That's great, but is anybody missing from there?"

"You would have to call them, monsieur. Do you have the number?"

She rattled off the number and then said goodbye before hanging up.

It was rather French of her not to be overly curious, so he wasn't really surprised that she didn't ask why he wanted to know. If there had been somebody on the loose in the area, would she have told him? Wouldn't that type of information have been on a need-to-know basis?

Even after living in France for nine months, Devon was still mystified by the order of events when a car accident happened, or when your mail went missing. Or what you were supposed to do when you found a soldier from World War I on your doorstep. Except Devon hadn't found Stanley on his doorstep. He'd found him amongst the corduroy rows of grass-covered trenches that sagged beneath the weight of their crumbling battlements.

But where had he come from? Devon had walked around the trenches many a time. The best two ways to access the area were from the tiny dirt circle in the copse next to the road that served as a parking lot, and from the cottage. Devon had been standing on top of the trenches looking around, and had seen nobody on them. Had seen nobody coming, and as the memorial park was several acres across, he would have.

Had Stanley wanted to surprise him, which he had, he would have had to have been waiting in the trenches for hours. Waiting for Devon to come out of the cottage at some random time when Devon had needed a break from his work. He would have had to sneak up on him with all his gear clanking about him, but Devon hadn't heard a thing. Not a whisper, nothing. Just all of a sudden Stanley had been on top of him, arms pinwheeling, canteen spinning out.

Then he'd pointed his rifle at Devon. That had surprised him, but not as much as the fact that the rifle had been loaded and that Stanley's finger had been on the trigger. He'd really acted like there was a war on and his life was in danger and he needed to protect himself.

His whole body had been at the ready, though the look in his eyes told Devon in an instant that Stanley would rather not kill him. He'd stared at Devon and, in that pause, Devon had been able to take the rifle from him, thanks to self-defense training back home and the fact that the grass was slippery.

Devon picked the rifle up from the pile of papers on the table. It was almost new, and there were initials carved in the stock, which was a crying shame because it would bring the value down, had anybody been willing to part with such a sweet piece. The bayonet had been recently rubbed with oil, though there was a coating of black dust along the blade, which could have been from the mortar explosion that Stanley had talked about.

The band to sling the rifle over your shoulder was made of canvas, not leather, and looked new enough to have been recently replaced. Which meant the rifle had seen hard work, and supplies were such that there was no leather to be found. The canvas would see more hard work, get worn through inside of a month or two, and need replacing again. All of this spoke to the conditions in the trench that Stanley had supposedly just been fighting in.

With a long pet, Devon put the rifle down and went to the pile of uniform and gear that Stanley had left outside of the bathroom door. Devon listened. The shower was running, but it was pretty quiet, as if Stanley was standing beneath the flow of water, pretending he was in a rainstorm. Which was what Devon sometimes did, though he never told anybody .

With the bundle in his arms, Devon went over to the couch and started going through the uniform, top to bottom, touching the trousers, the shirt. He ran his fingers along the seams of the sweater vest, feeling the warmth of Stanley's skin in the wool.

The uniform's jacket was so authentic that it was caked with dirt and smelled like iodine, which was a common disinfectant in those days, used for wounds and rinsing clothes. The dust-colored wool was marked with the stripes of a lance corporal, with a jagged line of crisp black thread to show where it had been sewn back into place after being tugged loose not too long ago.

The khaki colored shirt was a surprise, as American soldiers had worn blue denim, though this shirt might have been supplied by a nearby British regiment. There was no winter coat, which meant that Stanley had been braving the weather in only his uniform jacket. If it was November where he'd come from and the coat was standard issue, which it was, what had happened to it? At least Stanley had a sweater vest to wear, though it was thin and dusty, as though it had recently come from storage.

The trousers were of dull brown wool, and the belt of brown leather, as were the boots, with the requisite forty-eight holes, with woven laces. At least the puttees, the canvas wraps for soldier's legs, were new. Devon ran them through his hands and folded them with some reverence, as usually puttees were the first thing to disappear from any uniform, being used for bandages or slings or just lost in the mud.

The canteen was a fascinating piece of work. It had military grade canvas wrapped over a metal body, with pull-the-dot fasteners that Devon recognized as being from the original factory in Connecticut, which was the geekiest thing that anybody ever knew, and no proof of anything. The screw-on lid was attached with a little chain.

Devon opened the canteen and smelled the contents; water had no smell, but the iodine that it had been laced with did. Iodine was useful for so many things, and, at the time, one of the few ways to purify water so as not to infect the troops with dysentery.

If the water were from World War I, and Devon took a sip of it, then it was likely he could become quite sick from whatever was in the water that Stanley's stomach was used to, and Devon's most definitely was not. He tilted the canteen and poured water in his hand. It glistened and dripped like most water did when let out of its container, but it excited him to think that it had come from the battlefield only moments ago.

The uniform deserved to be treated with dignity, so Devon took everything into the bedroom and hung it up in the closet. He pushed away the other clothes on the rack so that the uniform could dry without getting overly wrinkled. The puttees he hung on their own hanger, and the boots he hung from the boot hanger that had come with the closet. The sweater vest he spread out on a newspaper on the floor; the wool was too thin to hang, and the newspaper would absorb the dampness from it.

The belt and the canteen he lined up against the wall, and the rifle he placed in the corner, although right away, the bayonet left a scratch in the paint, which made Devon wince. The damage was going to come out of his deposit for sure, but mostly he was worried about the bayonet, which he checked hastily, wiping the flakes of paint and also the black dust onto his hand. It smelled like gun oil when he brought it to his face. It also smelled like something else, like fire, as though it had come from an explosion of some sort. Or was his imagination supplying the rest of the story to Stanley's hastily donned costume?