March 15, 1941

The boys pull off their first "adventure"

Hersch "

Saturday, March 15, 1941

            Holy s**t. What a night.

…

Erich "

            We crept along opposite sides of the dark hallway in pairs: Jim and Hersch, me and Gabe. ‘Lights out’ was supposed to be at nine o’ clock, and the dangling light bulb that lit our corridor had gone out, plunging the passage into darkness. Gabe gripped my shoulder and I couldn’t bring myself to bat him away.

            We slipped up the stairs as quietly as anything. I was starting to get the feeling that I wasn’t the only one accustomed to skulking around in the dark. Save for a curse from Jim (who was obviously the least stealthy) the whack to the head Hersch issued him, and the pressure of Gabe’s palm, I wouldn’t have known anyone else was there.

            We were on the second flight of stairs, just a few steps away from the top floor, when the lumbering footsteps came our way. I saw someone’s eyes glint from across the corridor. “Get down,” I hissed to Gabe, and we flattened ourselves against the floor just seconds before Knight came clumping down the stairs.

            No one breathed as he passed us by. We would have been done for if he’d had a lamp, but he didn’t. He trudged right on by us in a heavy half-sleep.

            We clambered up the stairs as soon as he was far enough away. “He’s probably just gone down to use the water closet,” Hersch breathed. “We don’t have long.”

            “Maybe we should go back,” Gabe said, trying, and failing, to hide the panic in his tone.

            “We can’t,” I said, looking him in the eye (to the best of my ability. It was so damn dark).  “We’ll run into him again on the way back if we turn around.

“He’s right. We have to keep moving,” said Jim.

 We nodded and walked faster, finding that, to our infinite luck, our taking that particular staircase to the third floor had led us to the staff dormitories.

            Upon reaching the end of the corridor, we found that Hersch had been right once again. The largest door at the end of the hall was marked with Knight’s initials. Our luck seemed to be running out, though, because when we tried the handle, it was locked. Hersch pulled a pin out of his pocket and worked it into the lock while the rest of us could do nothing but wait anxiously. He seemed like the kind of guy who would usually be good at underhanded things like that, but it was taking too damn long.

            I knew what I could do, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. I had never thought a skill I learned in The Youth would help me in England, but it had come to that. “Move,” I shoved Hersch out of the way, no time to be civil, and threw my elbow against the bolted doorknob until I heard the lock bend. Then I backed up and gave it a good kick.

            The door swung open with hardly a sound. I didn’t have the time or the desire to look back at their wide eyes, so I just slunk into the room. “Spread out and look,” I ordered. Gabe followed me to the chest in the corner and Jim and Hersch headed to the dresser by the door. I got the chest open in a way similar to what I had done to the door, but it was too dark to see much inside. It was Gabe who found the sack. He pulled one of the bottles out and shook it happily in the general direction of Jim and Hersch. I clapped him on the shoulders and grinned, for once glad to have him around.

            I was so excited that I didn’t know anyone was coming until the heavy footsteps were right outside. Without warning, Gabe grabbed my hand and yanked me into the corner behind the chest. I couldn’t see where Hersch and Jim and gone, but a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway and I had the sudden sinking feeling that we were completely fucked.

            Knight sat sleepily on the bed, reaching for something on his nightstand. That was when I saw the two figures behind the door slowly slip out of the room, motioning for us to stay where we were. I realized we were trapped and wondered for a second if we could actually die in that corner of the headmaster’s room.

I turned to Gabe, who had ended up awkwardly crushed against me, and tried to mouth something that looked like ‘f**k.’ But he didn’t answer. He just looked up at me with his big, anxious eyes (how had I not noticed how startling they were before), with an expression that, for some reason, did not at all fit the situation.

            I didn’t have much time to wonder about that, though. Suddenly, something went flying past the open door and a crash came from out in the hall. Knight snapped out of his haze pretty quickly then and he sprung up to go investigate.

             Jim and Hersch sped back into the room once he was gone. We hopped up from our hiding place. “What the hell was that?” Gabe hissed at the exact same time as I said, “What the f**k did you do?”

            “Distraction,” smirked Jim. “No need to thank me.”

            “Yeah, well now what, genius?” Hersch growled. “We’re trapped in here!”

            “F**k!” The footsteps were coming back. We looked madly around for and escape and our eyes all fell on the open window at the same time.

            “Oh, no,” insisted Gabe, “Oh no, no, no, no. We’re not g…”

            “Oh, yes we are!” Without thinking about it, I took a running start at the door, tackling Gabe on my way and carrying him with me as we flew out the window.

…

Gabe "

I probably should have been paying better attention to Erich, considering that he had made more than one unexpected move that night. But there was no way I could have prepared to fly out a third-story window in his chokehold. Zero. None. Nessuno.

For all the excitement that had been built up, the expedition hadn’t lasted long. That’s not to say it wasn’t terrifying, or that I never thought I was going to die helping the guys win their pride back, we were apparently just better at sneaking around in the dark (and I knew damn well where my experience came from) than the west block boys expected.

I’d just spent a long, awkward minute with Erich in the corner behind the chest. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best idea to pull him down with me, but I had also managed to save his a*s, which may have actually put me one step closer towards getting on his good side (that is, if he actually had a good side).

Anyway, I was still a little bewildered from that experience when we suddenly went sailing through the air. If he hadn’t been strangling me within an inch of my life, I probably would have screamed in terror. The ground rose up to meet us at an alarming speed and all I could think of was how I was actually going to die on the quickly-approaching pavement.

Nothing that terrible happened, though. Erich’s ripped sleeve caught on the ledge protruding from the side of the building, slowing us down. Then it tore away and we landed on the soft ground of the unplanted flower beds that lined the building. I never even touched the ground, but remained curled into a ball in his arms with both of us gripping each other’s necks like our lives still depended on it.

I cracked one eye open to make sure we were still alive. When I decided we definitely were, I untangled myself from Erich. “What the hell, man?” I wheezed, winded from the fall and the strangling. “What was that?”

Erich looked at me darkly. “I just saved you’re f*****g life,” he growled. “Steigen Sie von mir, verdammt noch mal.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘get off of me, goddamn it!’”

He pushed me off and I rolled away, finding my legs to be pathetically wobbly under me. “Where’d they end up?” I asked. Jim and Hersch were nowhere in sight.

“S**t, I don’t know,” Erich said, looking around. “You don’t think they… Heilige scheiße!”

Hersch had dropped to the ground right between us, startling us both, “Che diavolo?” I hissed, speaking in Italian before I could stop myself. “What the hell?” I tried again.

“Sorry,” Hersch whispered while dusting himself off, “we hit the gable.”

He nodded up and we looked in that direction to see Jim dangling from a second-story window. “Jim,” Hersch called up, trying to be heard and silent at the same time, “just drop. It’s not that bad.”

Jim made an audible squeak and let his hands slip, falling on his face with a thud. We couldn’t help but snicker as he stood up and wiped the dirt from his nose, trying to play it off. “Great work, guys,” he said calmly as he fixed his hair. “We got it.”

“Um… actually, we got it,” Erich pointed out, motioning to the sack that I had forgotten I still had. My knuckles had turned white from clutching it as we fell.

“Hey, hey, I don’t think so,” Hersch said, pulling a smaller pack out and shaking it for emphasis.

Before we could figure out what each of us had found, a voice came from the dark, “Well, bravo, boys.” We all jumped and turned to see the figures of the west block guys emerging from the shadows. I instinctively shrunk back behind Erich.

“What do you want, a******s?” asked Jim, “We got what you asked for.”

“Oh, we know,” a faceless form sneered, “and we wouldn’t want you to get caught with it, so we’ll just take it off your hands.”

We all looked at each other without turning our backs to the enemy group. It would be easier to just let it go, hand over the goods to avoid a fight. It wasn’t like any of us felt the particular need to get completely sauced right at that moment. Also, though none of us would ever admit it, we were all at least a little scared of the west block guys. Erich and Hersch gave one another a little nod and took a step toward the looming figures, holding out their sacks.

Jim and I obviously misunderstood the secret nod between them and were completely unprepared when Hersch and Erich turned away and took off down the path, sacks swinging behind them. The Wankers were clearly just as confused as we were, and for a split second we just stood there and looked at each other before dashing down the walk after them.

We had a head start, and it turned out that Jim and I were actually faster than Hersch and Erich, whom we quickly caught up to. No one said anything as we tore around the corner, but Jim released a triumphant, “whoo-hoo!” when the door to our hall came into sight. We flew through the door and down the hall with the pack of adversaries at our heels. They were within arm’s reach of us when something slipped from Hersch’s sack and fell to the floor.

“Hey!” one of them cried, stopping short. We didn’t see what happened next, but it sounded like a dozen guys tripping over each other one by one. They were only just getting up by the time we fumbled the door open and slammed it shut behind us.

We collapsed in a heap on Jim’s bunk, laughing and swearing and yelling at the boys outside as they pounded on the door. Fortunately for us, we had forgotten that the latch was broken, causing the door to lock irreversibly from the inside if it was shut all the way.

“Open up, a******s, or we’ll break the door down.”

Somehow, knowing that they could all be distracted by a mysterious object on the floor made us less afraid of them. “Afraid we can’t do that,” yelled Hersch.

“Even if we wanted to”

“And we don’t”

“You see, we’ve got the goods now!”

“We beat you, Wankers!

“Now f**k off!”

We all inexplicably yelled the last words together and continued to scream with laughter until the pounding stopped.

“F**k yes!” wheezed Jim, once we were able to speak. He rolled off the bed onto the floor, lying on his back with his face in his hands. “F**k yes!” It seemed to be all he could say.

“We did it,” breathed Hersch, who was flopped down in the desk chair.

“Hell yes, we did it!” Erich grabbed me and got me into what can only be described as a very friendly headlock. “Didn’t I tell, you kamerad? Didn’t I tell you we could do it?”

It seemed that the only way to be freed was to agree. “Sure did!”

“So, what did we get?” Hersch asked, being the first one to think logically.

“Beats me,” said Jim as he crawled towards the sacks.

Erich let go of me to reach for his own bag. He took out a bottle, popped the top and inhaled deeply. “Whiskey,” he said with a smile, “the old b*****d must hit this stuff hard!”

“Holy s**t!” the exclamation came from the other side of the room, where Hersch and Jim were gazing delightedly into their sack, the one that had contained whatever had distracted the Wankers.

“Kolega, I think we win this round,” said Hersch.

“You got something as good than this?” I said, swirling the whiskey in the bottle.

“Better,” smirked Jim, pulling the pack from his bag. “We got cigs.”

…

Jim "

We were all completely pumped up from our adventure and, given that we had just come into possession of a half-year supply of booze and cigarettes, there was no way in hell we were going to sleep.

We dumped our new stash out in the middle of the room and settled into our spots. I leaned against the bed with my elbows on my knees, Hersch sat backwards in the desk chair, Gabe flopped over on his bunk and Erich sat next to him, pulled over the chest and put his feet up on it. “Right, then,” said Gabe as he tucked a pack into his front pocket, “anyone have a light?”

Erich grunted as he pulled the cork out of his bottle with his teeth. “I might.” He patted his pockets and produced a pack of matches. Then he grabbed the cigarette out of Gabe’s mouth, lit both of theirs together, and tossed the matches to Hersch without missing a beat.

Gabe looked almost excessively awed as Erich handed the cig back. “Impressive,” he commented.

“Yeah, well,” Erich looked smugly at the ground as he put the match out with a flick of his wrist, “you learn a thing or two where I come from.”

Hersch exhaled smoke and passed a match to me. “Like what? Like how to f**k a dame in under a minute before the building gets bombed?”

I tensed, waiting to see what Erich’s reaction would be to that, but he laughed. “Not exactly, but I guess that’s what you should be learning back in Poland, from what I hear.”

We all laughed at that, even Hersch. “Sounds about right!” he laughed, “But I got myself a girl back home, which is more than I’ll bet any of you can say.”

“Yeah right, all you’ve got is a sister and your right hand,” I joked. I didn’t believe that a guy as quiet as Hersch could hold on to a real girl.

“Hey there, I do have a sister,” Hersch interjected, “so you’d better watch it.”
            “Ooh!” We all crowed. He should never have let us in on that, “a sister, huh? That should be fun. Never fucked a Jew before, not many around where I come from.”

Hersch glowered at me and Erich snorted. “Too many where I come from. I could just loan you a few.”

 “Where exactly is that?” Gabe asked Erich, obviously trying to step away from the subject.

Erich took the bottle from him. “Berlin,” he answered.

“No s**t!” Hersch said, obviously surprised, shaking off the jokes about his sister pretty quickly. “It’s got to be rough over there. What the hell are you learning?”

He took a long swig of the whiskey and winced at the taste. “Well, we do learn how to f**k our dames faster than anything, but we know what corner to buy them on and how to get them to bend over!”

We all hooted at that until we started to choke on the smoke from laughing so hard and had to try and stop. “Oh boy,” Hersch laughed, “Then what the hell are you doing here?”

Erich took a drag on his cigarette and blew smoke in Hersch’s direction before answering. “Damned if I know,” he said. “For one thing, it hasn’t been completely blown up yet. Other than that, my Mum basically tossed me out the door once I…” he stopped like he knew he had said too much. “I got some stupid dame in trouble. Guess it was the last straw.” The harshness in his eyes made us hesitant to ask questions.

 “Well, then,” I said, wanting to change the subject, “maybe that’s where I should have gone, then.” I coughed, “I came to England to grab me some broads, but the girls in London were just as buttoned up as the ones back in Beaver Brook.”

They all gave me a funny look. “Man, what the f**k is Beaver Brook?” Erich asked brusquely.

I grimaced, knowing how stupid I’d sounded; I should have lied about where I was from. Compared to Erich’s apparently immense experience, I was about to make an a*s of myself. “It’s the goddamn town I’ve been stuck in for my whole f*****g life,” I said, hoping the extra cursing would count for something. “You got to go all the way to f*****g Barron County to find a dame worth screwing.”

Hersch blew a low whistle through his teeth. “That’s rough, kolega,” he said, like he honestly felt sorry for me.

“I guess,” I mumbled over the cigarette. I had to get the focus off of me. I had the sudden, uncontrollable need to impress them. “Well, then, what about you, Gabe?” He looked up with a start, having been the only one who hadn’t been targeted yet. “You get your hands on enough broads down in… wherever you’re from?” Not only was I trying to lose the attention, but I also wanted to know if there was any truth behind the comment the Wankers had made about him earlier.

Gabe’s eyes got huge for a second before he smoothed out his face and started into a rushed ramble. “It’s Italy, actually, though only for the last couple of years, I guess. I got shipped over there when I was… whoa! Hey!”

Erich had smacked him in the arm at the same second Hersch chucked a book at his head, which narrowly missed and hit the wall behind us. “Quit stalling and get to the broads, man!”

Gabe bit his lip and talked even faster. “Right, the broads, they’re all over in Italy. Really you can’t walk down the street without… there’s the girls… it’s like… and then…” he trailed off and looked unconvincingly around at us. “You know?”

We all turned a skeptical eye to him. Hersch raised an incredulous eyebrow and Erich stared him down.

“You liar!” Erich exclaimed after a second. “You’ve never touched a girl in your life!”

“Well… I…” Gabe spluttered helplessly as we fought to keep straight faces.

“Oh my God, are you a fairy?” Hersch asked, wide-eyed.

“What? I…” Gabe was getting more desperate by the second.

“Holy s**t! You’re a f*****g virgin, aren’t you?”  Erich asked before Gabe could answer the first question (which was the one I actually wanted to know the answer to), smiling like he knew he had it right.

Gabe’s face got beet red and he sputtered some more while gesturing hopelessly with his hands. “I… well… you know… it’s… but…” he sighed, “yeah, I guess I am.”

It got really quiet for a second. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep a straight face while I tried to figure out which accusation he was confirming, then Hersch let go of a honking, stifled laugh and it pushed us all over the edge. We all cracked up like we were never going to get to laugh again, even Gabe, who we were technically laughing at. Whenever it felt like we were going to be able to stop, someone start it up again. I decided that we must have been laughing at his inexperience, since there probably would have been a different reaction had we found out we were rooming with a queer.

Eventually, we all took another long drink and managed to relax. “Well it’s not all my fault,” Gabe said, his face turning redder than the wall next to him as he continued to defend himself, “It’s not like I wanted to go to Italy. I barely spoke the f*****g language. How was I supposed to get a girl into bed if I didn’t know how to ask?”

“Like this!” and with that, Erich was on him, pinning his arms down and crushing his ribs between his legs. If Erich hadn’t the toughest guy I had ever met, it would have seemed like the fruitiest thing I had ever seen. Erich was clearly the hardest drinker of the four of us. His face was flushed from finishing a bottle and a half in less than thirty minutes. I somehow doubted that he would have leaped like that on to another guy sober

“What the… get the hell off me!” Gabe got over his shock in a split second and tried to wrestle Erich off the bed. Eventually Erich gave up and slid onto the floor, laughing has he lit another cigarette. Gabe laughed along, obviously not feeling particularly violated.

“Way to go, Erich,” I joked, smacking him in the arm, “you just tainted the virgin!”

Gabe practically spit out his cigarette from laughing. “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Erich sniggered, “no need to thank me.”

That sent us into another uncontrollable laughing fit. Finally, we all took a long drag on our cigs and a longer swig of whiskey and calmed ourselves down. I had tears streaming down my cheeks, Gabe’s hair was sticking straight up, Hersch had slid out of his chair, and Erich was choking on the thick smoke that filled the room.

“S**t, man,” I said once we had regained the ability to breathe. “I thought I had it bad.”

“Well it’s not that…”

“Don’t you say ‘it’s not that bad,’” Erich cut him off. “It is that goddamn bad. You just can’t possibly imagine.”

“It’s true,” I added. My experience was probably pretty sparse compared to the other guys, but at least I had something to go on.

Hersch leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “S**t,” he muttered, “well we’ve got to do something about that.”

“The Jew’s right!” said Erich excitedly. “If we were any kind of friends, we’d drive off and get this guy a girl right now!”

“Oh please,” Hersch muttered, “look at us, we’re all loaded! We couldn’t even drive a bike straight!”

They laughed. “I guess,” said Erich, “but as soon as we get off this damn campus, we’re buying him a broad!”

“We’ll all buy broads!” I threw my hands in the air in toppled over backwards, finding that I liked the plan more and more. Gabe didn’t say anything about the prospect of losing it to a hooker but leaned back and smirked.

I shook my head and smiled. “Damn. This is going to be the best f*****g term ever,” I said. “We’re going to have the time of our f*****g lives!”

“You got that right,” Erich said, suddenly enthusiastic. He clapped me on the shoulder with enough force that I might have been pounded into the floor if I hadn’t braced myself.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Gabe.

I shrugged and raised my bottle to the center of our ring. “To the best f*****g time of our lives,” we said in unison, taking our bottles back and drinking like it was the last drink on earth.

Gabe looked into his bottle and clicked his tongue. “All right,” he mumbled. “I’m fried enough for tonight. I’m going to bed. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow without another word.

“All right,” Hersch slurred as he made his way over to the bunk.

“Sorry to get you all worked up before bed,” Erich said teasingly, giving Gabe’s back a smack before climbing up to his own bunk.

Gabe muttered something into his pillow that sounded like: “Apology accepted.”

I yawned, put out the light, and crawled into bed. “Good night,” I mumbled.

            “Gute nacht.”

            “Buona note.”

            “Dobranoc”

            We were all snoring within seconds.

Reviews

[Arianna]

ha i really like it.
you know...i think my favrote is gabe.
hes such a mystery and i am determined to figure him out:)
i love your style
and the way you tell your story, its amazing!!!

.novelists.elite.info.
.display. .ana.016.
.memberID. 016
.division. II
.division.leader. Shane
.name. Arianna
.username. nerdypenguin2427
.novels. Sanctuary, Right Side Up
.status. Reader, Early Writer, Role Model
.join date. 04-03-2011

[Coyote Poetry]

Boys and their stories. A very entertaining chapter. Cigarettes, booze and conversation. Always a entertaining chapter. I like what the topics of the conversation. Woman are what are important to a boy's life. Even during a war. A excellent chapter.
Coyote

[hannah]

ohhh i like this :) my favorite is still jim, the gangly comic relief man :) i like how you make the sexual tension between erich and gabe so thick. intense!

[trish420]

Yay! They bonded! I love howe great you are! Even I felt drunk by the end :-) You really are amazing, especially for your age, it is hard to believe you are so young considering the way that you are able to express what you want to without actually saying it.... overall, great as usual, can;t wait for more :-)