“What the fuck!” Zelenko cried.
Morra jumped him and Hector punched him once, hard, in the kidney, and the man fell to the ground. The others stood aside as Hector lifted the prisoner. The platoon knew him to be unhesitating in battle, vigilant and tireless, never cowed under fire, and no one made any move to stop him. He could lead a squad or even the platoon, if he weren’t so laconic. The boy groaned heavily when Hector slung him over his shoulder, and then lost consciousness. Hector carried him up the path that curled around the hill to the reverse slope, where the field HQ and mobile hospital were set up. Zelenko cursed at him, shouting that he was a stupid mick, a dirty queer, a chink lover, but Hector ignored him.
After the prisoner’s wounds were dressed and his arm relocated in its socket by a medic, Hector took him to the command post. The officer in charge had Hector search the prisoner again, and when he did he found something hidden in a rip in the lining of his jacket. It was a tiny notebook; a photograph was tucked inside. He gave it to the officer, who had the interpreter inspect it.
But it was nothing; just a personal diary. It was written in Korean, and apparently the boy contended he was a southerner, first conscripted by ROKs before being captured by Communists and reconscripted again, but the interpreter either didn’t believe him or didn’t care; he was a Communist now. The interpreter handed the diary and the photograph to the officer, who glanced at them quickly before tossing them back to Hector. While they interrogated him, Hector examined the writing, its lettering very neat and small, and then the photograph. It was clearly a portrait of the boy’s family, his parents and himself and other siblings. What surprised him was how well dressed they were, respectable and attractive, and that they wore Western clothing, suits and dresses. They could easily be one of the Remington Arms Company managers’ families, except that they were Oriental.
The boy was only very briefly interrogated. The intelligence officers had already collected enough information from some other prisoners and aerial reconnaissance over the last week about the strength of the enemy forces. The officer told Hector they had no use for him: he was just a bugler anyway, one of their many expendables. Normally, he would have been sent along with other prisoners to a rear holding area at battalion before being transferred to a POW camp, but there were very few enemy (only two others) taken alive from the assault, and with the promise of an even larger human-wave attack that night, and with no transport available or forward holding area or cell, no one could be interested in his final disposition.
“So where should I take him?” Hector asked. The intelligence officer didn’t look up; the other officers in the tent ignored him, too. Hector didn’t ask again. He knew this meant he should walk him back to the forward line and, at some point, shoot him. It happened all the time, and was practiced by them and the enemy alike. So he did walk him away, the kid trudging miserably ahead of him. He didn’t look back or try to engage or beseech him, which Hector was glad for. He’d killed at least a half-dozen of the enemy in firefights, a couple at very close quarters, but it was always just the flash instinct or response, and he had never had to think the killing through mechanically. Where to stop to do it; whether to have him kneel or stand; whether to give him a moment to prepare or do it without warning; shoot him in the body or the head. The boy was skinny and short but his shoulders were quite broad and Hector tried to focus on this, the suggestion that he was a grown man, a genuine soldier. But it was no use; he looked like any boy wearily ambling home. The early April day was quickly warming and the temperature had risen to forty-five degrees and Hector became uncomfortably aware of the paired alternation of their schussing feet on the softened snow, a rhythm soon to be soloed. Maybe it would have been better (for himself) to have let Zelenko have his way; it would be over already and he would be in the dugout now, warming up his canned rations over a Sterno, maybe cleaning his rifle, writing his short weekly letter to his mother, in which he never said anything new or described much in detail but wrote anyway, in general terms, about the weather, the food, if only to get to signing his name, so she would know he was alive.
They reached the point where the path turned and led around a large, outcropped boulder. Hector told him to stop. The boy did so. He offered the diary and photograph to him, but the boy refused, shaking his head.
“Take it, okay? I don’t want it.”
The boy kept shaking his head, as if he understood that to do so would be his end. For it was his end. It was surely here that Hector ought to do it, if he was going to do it at all; there was something of a precipice as the path jutted out, below it a five-meter fall-off to a natural shallow bowl in the hillside. After he fell into it Hector could simply leave, would not have to drag the corpse someplace else, and it would be over. But he didn’t want to do it. Why should he? Maybe he ought to let him go, let him run away and say that the prisoner had escaped.
But suddenly the boy turned from him and stepped closer to the edge. He wiped his eyes and then simply stared out into the valley, the bright, snowy hills starkly etched against the flat blue sky. It was as if the boy, too, now recognized the suitability of the spot. He must have long realized he wasn’t meant to survive this war. He wasn’t even meant to kill, bugler that he was. On the other side of the hills were his comrades, thousands upon thousands of them, regrouping and resting before another wave attack tonight, and Hector could almost hear the boy thinking about his fate, whether it was better to die like this, one-to-one, rather than sprinting forward in the darkness in a suicidal throng, with just a tin horn in his hand, screaming with a primal fear, his body tensed for the smash of bullets. Hector stepped closer to him. He leveled his rifle at the boy, the barrel nose a mere foot from his bloodied ear. He’d graded out as a sharpshooter but his hands felt numbed now, the gun hollow and light in his grip. The boy’s shoulders tightened, anticipating the shot.
But there came voices on the path behind them. It was Morra and Zelenko. Zelenko’s eyes lit up on seeing them in such a pose, but before he could say anything the boy recognized his tormentor and leaped from the spot. He landed down in the well, just as Hector had pictured he would. He began screaming like a child. One of his legs was clearly broken, the foot craned grotesquely back behind him.
“Man, you spooked him!” Morra shouted. “Just listen to him wail.”
Zelenko said, “What you gonna do now, Brennan? He’s your prisoner, isn’t he?”
Hector pushed past him and hiked down, with Morra and Zelenko trailing him. When they reached the boy he wasn’t crying out anymore, but rather breathing rapidly, wheezing through the spit and phlegm webbing his clenched mouth. The well was in fact a collection of fallen rocks; the snow had veiled the stones. Besides his leg, something had burst inside him.
Hector unslung the rifle from his back. He unlatched the safety. It was not a question anymore. The boy had shut tight his narrow eyes and was ready. But then a sudden pressure pinched at Hector’s head and the world seemed to twist and when he opened his eyes he was lying on his side in the damp snow. Morra had his rifle. His helmet had been knocked off and had rolled a few turns down the hill. His head rang with a harsh note, but he felt almost silkily disembodied, too, like he was at last a little drunk. He sat up. The two soldiers were propping up the boy, who was crying miserably again, for they were taking turns prodding his broken leg.
“We’re square now,” said Zelenko to Hector, seeing him stir. “Hope it hurt. Now stay put.”
“Yeah, right,” Morra said. “Now, this, on the other hand, will hurt a lot.” He stepped with his full weight near the break of the boy’s leg. What came from him then startled all of them, clearing the foul cloud from Hector’s head. It was a transcendent cry, the voice more piercing and pure than a mere body could have ever alone mustered. Then he fainted.
“Shit,” Zelenko said.
Morra said, “I thought these damn gooks had staying power. But I got smelling salts.”
They tried it and the boy startled as if he’d been roughly roused from sleep, half getting up like he wasn’t injured at all. He’d collapse and they’d hold it under his nose until he jumped up again, though each time he jerked with less violence, until at last he flitted oddly, like a broken marionette. He was silent, too, in a state well beyond pain.
Zelenko tossed Hector a bayonet across the snow. “He’s all yours now.”
Morra protested, saying he wanted to finish it, but Zelenko made them go. They took up their weapons and hiked up the incline to the path. Hector heard them march off. Later, a couple of days on, in an informal contest of bare-fisted boxing that an unusually warm stretch of weather brought on, he would beat both men bloody, dispatching Morra quickly and easily, Zelenko with more effort, reshaping his features to near unrecognizable, only stopping when several others jumped him. Afterward the lieutenant asked him to transfer out, and Hector complied, requesting the Graves Registration Unit, for he didn’t wish to commit or witness any more killing, figuring, too, that the dead were dead, and would always stay that way.
But death, he would come to learn, was in fact a tendency. Inevitably the dead came back. The boy, for one. For after Morra and Zelenko left, the boy began to talk to him. Of course Hector assumed he was speaking Korean or maybe Chinese but in fact it was English, broken and mumbled, heavily accented, but somehow Hector was certain he understood.
No live
, he was saying.
No live.
He didn’t have much more than a few moments left, for he was going to die soon anyway, and yet he was insistent. Hector stood up and hefted the bayonet and the boy nodded to him, smiling weakly, snorting with the promise of final liberation. A new light shone from his eyes. A sheer living gleam. And though not wishing him more suffering, not wishing him more pain, mercy as simple as a nothing push on a blade, Hector could not make himself deliver him. He flung the bayonet down the hill. The boy began to cry. Hector retrieved his helmet, trying not to hear him. The boy was now saying something different, his voice barely above a whisper. Hector patted his pockets, for a piece of candy, food. He offered his water canteen.
The boy shook his head. He gestured with his eyes for Hector to come closer. Hector knelt and leaned in and the boy suddenly grabbed at his belt, snatching a grenade. Hector wheeled back away from him, but he was slipping on the side of the shallow well. The boy held the pin. To pull it would be to live a few more seconds. But he waited for Hector to get his footing, waited for him to hike up to the path. At the top he peered down and the boy was gazing skyward, perhaps waiting for him to gain distance, perhaps already blind with the nearing oblivion. Hector sprinted away, getting nearly all the way back to the rear line before he heard the distant, blunted blast.
FOUR
Fort Lee
, 1986
HECTOR ROSE from the cup-sag of his bed.
It wasn’t yet dawn. He stepped to the bathroom and pulled the chain on the light above the medicine cabinet. He didn’t look much different, despite the fight with Tick in the street. His, it could be supposed, was the sentence of persistence. Was it an imposition from yonder? Or a dark talent that he couldn’t help but invoke, whenever loomed his possible demise? His jaw and skull and knuckles were sore, his chest pinging with each breath, though it was not exactly the bodily pains that had roused him. The pains and even the scars would pass quickly, as always. But he felt lonesome in his wounds, and he awoke keenly grateful for the company of the woman in his bed.
Her name was Dora. He liked her but oddly had not yet actually seen her in the daytime. The bathroom light partly illuminated her as she slept. She didn’t stir. She was a redhead from the bottle, by the look of her graying roots. She lay sprawled on her belly with a corner of the sheet flopped over her eyes and cheek, her mouth cracked open like a burrow hole. A molar was missing, something he hadn’t noticed before, and though the picture was not wholly unattractive to him he clicked off the light so that he didn’t have to see her mouth, being long uneasy with the sight of any insides.
He got back into bed. She groaned an unintentionally pleading note. He laid a hand on her cheek and pictured her face. And though of course he knew what she looked like he kept seeing a different woman instead, a woman he remembered from a book he’d read in his youth that had accompanying photographs of hard-used folk living in the wasted land of the dust bowl. The book affected him as a book sometimes can a young mind that is anticipating a story different from what it encounters but is taken up anyway; from the title-
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-
he’d assumed accounts of heroes who’d endured great trials and tendered unequaled sacrifices to their gods and people and thereby won the glory of everlasting fame. From the time he could read he’d devoured those stories of ancient Athens and Sparta and Crete, of Alexander and Charlemagne. Yet what was it he encountered in the book but descriptions of penury and degradation that took on an awesome, almost mythical beauty; and the bleakness he saw in the eyes of one prematurely aged young woman made him think pitiably enough of his mother, who was a beauty in her youth but lost it after his father died and always seemed to be searching out an alternate destiny.
Dora had those same eyes, despite the surface of her easy levity she had them, and so was it this about her that had finally won him over? He hadn’t even asked her to leave after their lovemaking, which was an iron habit of his. The rest of her now, her pale, sleeping nakedness, the smallish shoulders, the bland wide dune of her lower back, the cleft of the broad, stippled bottom enfolding into dark, struck him as fair and vulnerable, but he didn’t disturb her, thinking he ought to let her sleep.