They went out in pairs the next day. One was the driver, the other was the carrier. The letters were hand written, tri-folded then sealed shut with wax. They looked like something from a by-gone time. Peter went with Jack, hopping into the sidecar of the motorcycle before Jack sped off down the dirt road that led away from the town and the barracks. They didn’t know where Frank and Jack were headed. They had been instructed to tell no one. Harry had gone with another guy named Bill who they had met on the boat over. He was a nice fella, one of those classically handsome American guys that could turn the head of any woman on the street. The French girls they’d seen in town had all noticed him first, whispering behind their hands and giggled the way women do, pointing to him sitting at the bar as if no one could see what they were doing. Bill was an alright guy, Frank though, but he was only here because he’d been too stupid to get into law school. He had to do something to make his dad proud.

               That left Frank to go with Fred, and Fred wanted to drive. Frank had wanted to drive too, but he lost the staring match that Fred started when he said so. Frank just sighed instead and hunkered down in the sidecar, feeling like a tag along, or a sister, as he folded his arms across his chest. Fred handed him the letter. He resisted snatching it and stuffing it into his breast pocket. Instead, Frank soothed his blistering pride by pulling his cap down over his eyes, pretending to need a nap, even though it was 8 in the morning. Fred kicked the motorcycle into gear and they were off down the dirt road.

               They couldn’t talk on the drive, the machine was too noisy, and the wind stole any of the words he would have said. Frank watched the countryside roll along in the distance. There were whole sections that look burnt to a crisp, pocked with muddy pits and fallen trees and crisscrossing wires. Then there were other patches which looked untouched. Sometimes they passed a house or a farm. Not a single one of them looked inhabited. Perhaps the people who lived there were just good at hiding. He couldn’t imagine living this close to some of the terrain he’d seen. What had these people had to endure?

               There were other places that he couldn’t quite describe, places that gave him unspeakable chills in his blood, places that didn’t feel like they were part of the whole. He’d heard about these places, the places where the horrors spilled through. If the stories were true, that is. Frank wasn’t sure, but he could imagine why someone would invent a story about those places even if it wasn’t. It was like walking through a ghost, like trespassing into a tomb. The whole sky seemed to darkened when they came upon one, and the menacing feeling seems to lift like a cloud as soon as they passed through. That made him think about the book of Exodus, and he nearly laughed, thinking how proud his mom would be that he’d been thinking of the Bible. But that cloud that descended in the Bible was holy. These places, whatever they were, were the opposite.

               They drove until the sun was sailing directly above them, to a little encampment at the base of a hill. The hill had single tree left standing on it. There were at least 5 stumps that he counted around the tree, the trunks of in splinters all down the hillside. There were five buildings here, shoddy, looking as if they’d blow over in a stiff breeze. As they pulled up, and Fred killed the motor of the bike, a door opened on one of the buildings. A women in French uniform dress emerged, shielding her eyes from the sunlight.

               “Hello?” she called, her accent heavy.

               Frank slowly rose from the seat, legs stiff, taking care with climbing out onto the gravel. “Madame Joile?” he asked. He held up the letter so she could see.

               She came forward, and he was surprised to see how old she was. She walked with a stiff leg, as if she couldn’t quite bend her knee. Under her cap he could see that her hair was starting to gray. She was wrinkled all around her eyes and the lines around her mouth were deepening into grooves. “Americans?” she asked. Frank nodded, stretching out his arm, the letter dangling from his fingers.

               She snatched up the paper, tearing open the seal. Her eyes sped back and forth across the page. She nodded, closing her eyes in what looked like pain when she came to the end of the message. She began tearing the paper into tiny pieces and then she ate it.

               She ate it.

               Frank stared at her, not believing his own eyes, as she balled each strip in her first and stuffed it into her mouth. His mouth was hanging open by the time she was finished. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and laughed at his expression of horror. “We need to be sure,” she said.

               “Sure of what?” Frank croaked.

               “No one else reads them,” she said. Then brushed her hands on her uniform and waved them away. “No message to return today,” she said. Then she turned around and marched back to the run-down shed from which she had emerged.

               Frank turned his eyes to Fred, who was clicking his tongue against his teeth, staring after the French woman with narrowed eyes. He slid his eyes over to his companion when he noticed him staring. “You wanna drive back?” he asked.

               Frank waved the question away, and sunk down into the side car. They’d spent half a day to deliver a letter to a woman who had eaten it and then sent them away as if they were annoying kids on her lawn. What kind of farcical, mind-numbingly banal assignment had they been seated with? He pulled his cap down over his eyes as Frank drove. This time, he did take a nap.