She waited for the retort, but Lee still hadn’t even unclasped the hands from his chest.

“Hey,” she said gently, sizing up how he trembled. She patted Boy on his flank. She slapped her hat back on her head, and looked up the foot or so to Lee’s face, which looked fresh and raw.

“She can do other tricks,” he whispered.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I said you were a sucker. That was uncalled for.”

“That’s okay.”

“I taught her a lot. She can take a pin out of a grenade.”

“Well, holy smokes, Corporal,” Janis whispered.

Lee smiled a little. She softened. She glanced at him, but couldn’t hold the gaze—it was like struggling against a horse starting to trot, then canter. He reached out and straightened Janis’s hat, which had small red silk flowers on its crown. “Hey,” he said, and so she looked back at him, and, with the same helplessness she’d felt under the weight of his eyes, she couldn’t break the gaze. She shrugged, as if admitting that she, too, was sometimes a mess, and it was as if the rest of the field was fading into faint shouts and blurs, and that was really all it took.

47

At two o’clock in the morning, Mandres was a village of music and firecrackers and rowdy shouts. Men had passed out against the buildings that had so recently been converted; when they awoke, they would be stuck to the fresh paint. Leland walked on loose limbs, his eyes half open. He didn’t walk like a man with $1,282 on him. Whenever he was recognized, drunks expounded to him about his dog’s prowess. The planes were fifty feet apart and two hundred feet in the air. The dog was twelve feet tall, and was it true she was half wolf? He was hugged and handed bottles of gin, which he began merely pretending to sip. There were only so many times he could say thank you.

He walked past a canvas tent through which weird shadows were emanating. When he heard the mutter of a field generator, and occasional choruses of rough laughter, he returned to see movies being projected against a white sheet draped across one wall.

It was a newsreel several months old, showing the first planes with engines from America. In other words, the 135th. It was just starting. Leland hadn’t seen it before.

Leland walked among four rows of church pews, splintered at the bottom, where they’d been ripped from their former home. The men in the audience had tin cups, and the front of the tent housed a tureen whose brutish aroma made Leland flinch. He sat next to a British Army sergeant, who had obviously been in the field: he was sitting up, back straight, head bent slightly forward, and snoring. Outside, a furious burst of firecrackers ignited, which jolted him awake.

“Very rude of us,” he muttered.