Snowing A Little in Paris

By William R. Burkett, Jr.

Another masterful collection of short fiction from the author of Mean Grey Old Morning, After August, Twin Killing, and Sleeping Planet. Here are impressionistic stories about military days in Europe and budding love in the City of Lights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AbsolutelyAmazingEbooks.com
• Release date: May 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310417757

Book preview

Snowing a

Little in Paris

And Other Tales

of the Cold War

William R. Burkett, Jr.

The New Atlantian Library is an imprint of

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING eBOOKS

Published by Whiz Bang LLC, 926 Truman Avenue, Key West, Florida 33040, USA

Copyright © 2013 by William R. Burkett, Jr.

Electronic compilation copyright © 2013 by Whiz Bang LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized ebook editions.

This work is based on factual events. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their contents.

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To H. The first time should be like flying, to compare all the others to. And it was.

Contents

1 Snowing A Little In Paris

2 Military Police School

3 Secret Agent Man

4 Exclusion Area

5 Pulling Alert

6 The Chocolate Debt

7 Squad Room Lost In Time

8 Warhead

9 Nylon Distraction

10 Innocently Abroad With

The Colonel’s Daughter

11 Mistaken Identity

12 Philosophy of the

Graves Registrar

13 Idle Hands

14 A Death in Seattle

1

Snowing A Little In Paris

The day before New Year’s Eve that year, one of the Headquarters Detachment MPs went berserk coming off duty and shot up the arms room. We already had our first call but were still lying in our bunks trying to decide to get up. We each had a top sheet and two scratchy wool Army blankets, and we always laid our big OD parkas with the button-in liner over the top of that. We were warm and snug that way, even when the idiot German furnace keeper banked the fires at midnight. After he did that, it was almost as cold inside as it was outside by reveille. We were too warm inside our little cocoons to worry about what it was that vibrated up through the building to our third-floor squad room in little thudding shocks, like doors being slammed far off.

When he broke outside down below and ran off toward the woods screaming, we knew what it was, all right. He let off his last couple .45 rounds out there, flat pops that didn’t sound anything like guns do on TV.

We still didn’t get up to look. It wasn’t our concern. We didn’t stir at all until we had to get up or miss guard mount. Then we got into as many layers of clothes as we could put on under our fatigues. By then it was light enough to see the ice lying in wide, ragged patches in the fields over toward the German village where the puddles had been in November.

We got quick breakfast in the first floor mess hall and then got our rifles and magazines out of the basement arms room. Headquarters CID men in civvies were interviewing the armorer. They stopped talking until we were gone. After guard mount, we loaded onto the three-quarter-ton squad truck. Somebody said it was Trotta who had gone off the deep end. They caught him over near the railhead with a fresh clip in his pistol, trying to get up the guts to eat the barrel. He had been shipped straight down to a rubber room in Landstuhl Medical Center before we even finished eating.

We picked up our mail to read on the way out to the exclusion area. I had one letter. It had a Paris postmark. My heart began to bump hard. Her handwriting flowed across the page like music from a desert flute. Some of the words defeated me. She begged forgiveness for her clumsiness in attempting to write in an alien language, which she spoke much better:

It’s snowing a little in Paris and it’s very cold outside. Me too. I have the impression I am snowing in my heart and is cold. Thanks thou for been a little fire comes from far away just thank you for been existed for me…

By the time we got out to the main missile-storage bunkers it was snowing again in Germany. B. Walter and I were the BAF (Backup Alert Force) this guard-trick. We got into the break shack and huddled the stove quick. The ride out always felt like it emptied your veins of heat and put ice back in, just the quick couple miles over the rutted road through the snowy evergreens. But BAF was gravy duty, where you hugged the stove and listened to Armed Forces Network on the radio or maybe read the worn paperbacks.

You never slept on BAF, because that was asking for it. Some guy on Ten would slip on that icy catwalk up there and bust a leg on the loading apron, and you’d be up there for the rest of his trick. Most of us didn’t talk much either. B. Walter was the exception. Even the cold didn’t faze him. He was born and raised in Blue Norther country anyway. He looked like a Bavarian school boy, apple cheeks and all, if they made Bavarian schoolboys six feet plus and two-thirty.

Poor Trotta, he said.

Yeah, I said. You knew him, didn’t you?

We were drinking buddies. He shrugged. He went to Georgia Tech. Had a broad there, and all. They were going to get married when he finished his military. But he got a Dear John. Who don’t? When B. Walter smiled, his button eyes vanished in fatty wrinkles beneath his shock of yellow hair. He wanted to do his military first. Get it over. He was Regular Army. RA all the way.

Sometimes, I said, it takes the RAs harder, this duty. A gust of wind drove snow against the shack’s dingy windows. I listened to the guttering song of the little stove. But my mind was on Paris…

The cold in Paris a week ago had been a still, quiet cold. The rain slipped through the streetlights with hardly a sound, trying to turn to sleet. The holiday crowds provided all the noise – the laughing, toy-horn tooting crowds – and the bleating horns of the traffic. The evening before Christmas Eve was the first time I saw Paris.

I was sitting next to Goldman in his beat-up ‘50 Volks when I saw the Eiffel Tower, framed between two banks of roofs down a twisting market street. Morganstein and Novak crowded forward from the back seat to see, too. For me at least the sight evoked a powerful emotion, akin to coming home …

I’m going to Paris today, B. Walter said to me suddenly. Soon as this shift is over. Want to come? We’ll share expenses.

I can’t, I said. I’ve already had my three-day holiday pass. I went Christmas. I’ve got the duty New Year’s.

You should have been here Christmas, B. Walter said. Fisher told us all to bring our canteens to the arms room when we came to get our guns, and to only fill ‘em half-full. You should have seen us. We’d turn over our weapons card and Baker would go get our rifle while Fisher took care of the canteens. He had a big kitchen funnel, and he had some bottles of I.W. Harper hid in the rocket-launcher tubes.

Why that specific brand? I asked.

Fisher says I.W. Harper bottles are the exactly correct caliber for the tubes. B. Walter smiled happily. He kept pouring and then swigging until he used it all, and he musta drunk about half of it straight down, but we all got plenty in our canteens. That was the easiest shift I ever pulled. We got to singing Jingle Bells about midnight. We really sang it, too. Some lights went on over in town. Then they went back off. We must have scared hell out of ‘em. ‘Specially when Ricio started trying to shoot down Santa Claus. Two full mags.

They do anything to Ricio? I asked him.

Uh-uh. He didn’t hit anything, so they just charged it off to disposing of surplus ammo. We had him going, though. Told him they were going to dock his pay a dollar a round. You should have been here.

No, I said. I should have been right where I was. And I should be there right now. I should never have left.

Then why did you?

I would have been AWOL if I’d stayed, I said.

He shrugged. You’re a damn draftee. This more important to you than anything?

It’s not that. There was no point in using a word like duty with B. Walter. I’d just get the horselaugh. But she agreed I had to come back. Because I always do what I’m supposed to do.

She, huh? He grinned. So that’s why you ain’t been over at the club. Got you something going in Paris, huh?

No, I said. I did have. But not now. Not ever again.

The pack-phone jangled. B. Walter picked it up, listened, said Yeah and then Yessir and hung up.

Got a couple loads up at the gate for open storage, he said. We gotta ride shotgun.

We dropped heavy magazines loaded with twenty rounds apiece of 7.62 NATO into each of our parka pockets, and slung our rifles behind our shoulders, muzzle down. Then we put on our pile caps. They made us look like a cross between Admiral Perry and Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted. We went out into the stinging, blowing brightness of the day.

There were two big Diesel semi-tractors hitched to long flatbed rigs, each with a solid, lumpy cargo roped under frozen olive-drab canvas. It might have been some sort of industrial machinery, but it wasn’t. There was enough stuff tarped down to make a good size city into radioactive history in a hurry.

There was enough in the exclusion area, where we were going to store these two trailers, to do the same for most of Russia. That was why we stood such ungodly guard tricks and couldn’t all go on pass the same weekend. There always had to be a certain strength present. It was all a charade to us, because we read the newspapers about vanishing documents in Washington, and moles in the Pentagon and out at Langley, and we knew that nothing we did here was a secret to the other side.

We also knew we were right on the crosshairs of somebody’s shit list, if war came. If the other side came at us conventionally, Blitzkrieg-fashion, like in the old days, we had