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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: lulu.com
ISBN-10: 1257814222
Pages: 222
Copyright: Aug 8, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781257814220
Price: $13.49 (eBook)
One man's journey through a century of change, trying to find that last elusive wilderness.
In a century that set out to tame, civilize, and revolutionize the world Teddy always managed to stay a step ahead and find the last wild places. Where I’m Bound I Can’t Tell opens with a troubled kid in the nineties named Lee smart mouthing his way through community service. Meeting Teddy will forever change his life. Born in 1900 Teddy could never stand still, running away to join the French Foreign Legion as a boy he never returns to the states until the 1980’s. Along the way he crosses deserts, explores the Amazon, bears witness to Gandhi’s movement, sails oceans, hunts with Zulu, and becomes an aid worker in Africa. While Lee struggles to grow up and learn what kind of man he is going to be Teddy teaches him about the infinite possibilities of life.
Excerpt
Chapter Twelve
I wanted to see Arabia, pestered Albert and the guys about it near non-stop from the moment that some poor unfortunate had started telling tales of the mysterious sands. We were a roving band of heroes in my teenaged imagination, and I wanted us to wander into the orient. Day we were transferred to the Turkish Theater I was jumping up and down in a very unlegionnaire fashion. Youthful exuberance didn’t even bow down when the sun was burning so hot overhead my hair had changed color and my lips bled when I yawned. Serving with cavalry units I was walking in one of my fondest dreams. We had four days rations left for ourselves and three for the horses and we were looking down on Beersheba listening to the Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis all around us. We weren’t only legionaries in foreign lands anymore, we were in foreign armies all told.
Kipping under a makeshift tent that we’d fashioned by fixing bayonets, plunging rifles into the ground, and spreading a blanket over the upturned butts of the rifles, I listened to Albert humming another of his favorite arias. He told me the story of La Boehme, another Puccini opera that I could barely follow the meaning of, but after everything I’d seen all the glorious tangents that Albert would go on about were starting to come a good deal clearer. Against my will I was getting an education after all.
There was something enchanting about staring across the desert and feeling the heat of the afternoon radiate all through me as I heard Albert humming an Italian Opera about loss and love, and then he couldn’t hum anymore he had to start singing softly, and the whole piece was set to a steady beat of artillery fire close by. Something made me think of Elizabeth, my red-headed queen, and that silly day on the tower bridge, then I remembered that look on Buffalo Bill’s face when he’d handed over his knife, it was still nestled in my back pocket even now. I wriggled my feet in my boots and felt two socks on my feet, mother would have been so proud. Snapping out of my musings Albert paused in his song to pass me a notebook where he was making me practice my figures and he mumbled something about how apropos it was to study math in the land of the Muslims. For the barest fraction of a memory we were having a picnic overlooking land from the bible that Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Hebrews had lived and died for. Then it was our turn to go die for it.
Just as the sun was starting to sink and we were thinking that we’d bought another day without a battle when the order came down. I went as pale as I had on that first horrid day in the trenches. A tingle shivered down my spine and Albert had to hoist me to my feet and keep me there with a steady hand at my back. When they said mount we obediently hopped to the saddle out of pure reflex. Some of the Aussies had asked me if I was a Yankee cowboy, and I’d been just desperate enough to impress them not to notice that they were joking with me, but all the same I’d taken to the back of a horse easily enough. I was a cowboy after all.
Before I even had time to start pestering Albert about where we were heading we were at the top of the ridge with the whole army bearing on Beersheba, the sun sinking down across the desert and buried from view by the minarets of the mosque. Staring at it I very nearly started to cry and realized I was murmuring lines from a poem one of the French Officers had given me back on the western front, ‘But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night;’
As we kept pushing on the first artillery shells started to come over, some of them landed just ahead of us as men and horses yelled in alarm and screamed with rage. Just as the dust was starting to kick up I glimpsed the ground ahead torn apart by gullies. We ducked down into the first and had to turn and hunt for a spot shallow enough to break out the other side, and then there were still three more gullies ahead. The shells kept raining down, they wouldn’t let up, but our horses wouldn’t spook and we wouldn’t stop.
Breaking out of the last gully and trying to gather up the speed to charge the trenches the dust became unbearable, the desert hadn’t seen a rain in six months and the ground was a fine powder under the hooves. The dirt swirled around and found its way down my throat, my nose, into my eyes, and the Turkish trenches kept getting closer but I could hardly see my horse’s ears let alone anything ahead of that.
Then the machine gun fire started to fill the air all around me, the sound of the guns was so powerful it even stood out over the rumble of the cavalry charge. Looking down from the saddle I saw Turks in a safe, deep, hole firing away at their guns, the Turks looked to me like giants and I spurred my horse on before they could spot me. I needn’t have bothered urging my horse on, I just had to let him go, he wanted to get past the trenches as badly as I did. No man in all the history of the world ever crouched as low to his horse as I did that day.
Through all the dust, smoke, and the near blanket of bullets I saw the trenches coming into view up ahead. They were wide, with sandbags out front and I knew there was no way my horse could jump that as loaded down as he was and after the last two miles. The trench was full of Turks, with bayonets fixed on rifles and grenades, more grenades than I ever fancied I’d see and I heard them popping over the constant drone of the machine guns.
My mind was a blank, for a second all I could think about was that I was riding headlong in to die, but I couldn’t do anything else. Then a flash on my right that I squinted to barely make out as riders from the 12th were streaking in and busting through a narrow gap in the trenches. I swerved in behind them and rode on, looking down on Turks hurling grenades and shooting as fast as they could. Then I put my eyes forward, and realized that there was nothing between us and Beersheba now.
We broke free of the dust cloud consuming the valley, there were no other riders or defenders ahead of us and we could see on seemingly forever across the flat country. We passed two big guns with a team of horses that a pair of Turks was working to get to the front, but they were snared in a great sandy gully. Then we were riding into the main street of Beersheba.
I heard galloping horses behind me and then Albert was blazing past me and waving his sword like a crazed berserker shouting inane war cries that might have come straight from one of his operas. Just as Albert wheeled on out of sight a magnificent roar tore through the air and I thought it was a new volley of machine guns opening up, but it was the Turkish ammunition dumps exploding.
At the end of the street several riders went straight into the thick of it, Albert right at the lead of the men, but there were starting to be Turks appearing around us. Some of them were unarmed and I rode right toward them, shouting what Arabic I knew for them to give it up. One of them was a well dressed officer riding a pony and I crashed into him with as much as my horse and I had left in us to do. Then I was on the ground, spitting up dust and flailing to get my feet under me again and my gun in front of me. I looked around and saw nothing but Turkish faces closing in on me, and they were all pulling back the bolts on their rifles. In a second that felt like it dragged on for an eternity I had a dozen thoughts, I wanted my mother, this is the end of me, father had it right, and finally I thought to myself that I’ll do as much damage as I can before they take me.
Not one of them fired a shot, no sooner had I brought up my side-arm to start popping off shots than they tossed their rifles to the ground and threw up their hands. I gulped at the air; I hadn’t even realized that I’d been holding my breath.
By sundown the fight was over and we were pushing our prisoners through the streets trying to make sense of it all, as we always did when the violence was over. Horses had died right along with the men, and I was realizing that to a lot of the cavalry fellows their loss was felt every bit as much.
Next morning we were sent out to search every home and building in the town, Albert made sure he was paired with me just as he always did, telling the Aussie in charge that he was my big brother. When the man pulled a face Albert easily explained that he was the German brother and I’d run away to America at birth with the nursemaid. It made the officer laugh enough that he sent us on our way and was already telling a bunch of the lads the made-up story.
The first house we went to I ducked inside and the darkness of the room made my skin stand up on end, then I realized that there was a Turk on my side of the room. I don’t know how it happened, but I was just about to stick him with my bayonet before I realized that the fella was sick, bedridden, and barely holding on to a stich of life. Albert was cackling at me so hard he nearly doubled over while the Turk looked up at me with sad eyes burning with questions.
“I haven’t ever seen you move so fast,” Albert finally managed to say around his guffaws. I mumbled my excuses and tried to make it through the rest of the day without another embarrassing foul up. There wasn’t a chance of Albert leaving well enough along however.
Sure enough, everywhere I went in Beersheba all of a sudden ever soldier in the town knew who I was and what I’d done, or nearly done. Some of them called out that I should have bayoneted the bastards, others asked if I was scared of the poor sick Turks, while some just mentioned that their mother’s had slightly less permanent home remedies for the flu.
In the early afternoon we went out to the trenches and started digging graves, and looking at the field I wondered if it was a job that we would ever finish the sands were so littered with bodies. We cursed the Turks with every swear we knew, but, at some point, someone said what I think we’d all thought in the back of our minds, we’d have done them the same as they did us. It wasn’t the Turks we cursed then, it was the ones who started the war. When will the human race be sensible and just ban war altogether? It would never happen as long as the neighbor had something a powerful man wanted.
No one spoke as we looked over the graves, the little mounds of dirt, unmarked, and wholly unfitting the men and mounts that were resting in them. Albert put a hand on my shoulder and I looked up at him, “They were good friends.” He said quietly.
“We didn’t know most of them.”
“Didn’t need to, they were good friends.”
They weren’t the last friends I’d have to bury either.
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