Rudy took her arm. “Come with me a minute. Let me show you something.”
He led her to a gravestone that was laid down to one side of the grave, to be erected when everyone was gone. It took a second for Radio to read the inscription. “Hey! It’s just a quotation. Amelia’s name ain’t even on it. That’s crazy.”
“She left instructions for what it would say quite some time ago. I gather that’s not uncommon for flyers. But I can’t help feeling it’s a message.”
Radio stared at the words on the stone for very long time. Then she said, “Yeah, I see what you mean. But, ya know, I think it’s a different message than what she thought it would be.”
The rain, which had been drizzling off and on during the burial, began in earnest. Rudy shook out his umbrella and opened it over them both. They joined the other mourners, who were scurrying away in streams and rivulets, pouring from the cemetery exits and into the slidewalk stations and the vacuum trains, going back home to their lives and families, to boiled cabbage and schooners of pilsner, to their jobs, and their hopes, and their heartbreaks, to the vast, unknowable, and perfectly ordinary continent of the future.It followed that the victory would belong to him who was calmest, who shot best, and who had the cleverest brain in a moment of danger. — Baron Manfred von Richthofen (1892–1918)
Phantom Pain
He was in the library. It was quiet. No guns. No mud. He could crawl in peace, as long as he didn’t make any noise. Mrs. Dientz, the librarian, wouldn’t allow noise.
Ed was worried that he would get dirt in his wound, and it would get infected. The library is full of fungus, like a locker room: you can get athlete’s foot in places you would never put your feet. Wet, too. It was raining, a hot tropical rain, but he was cold and it didn’t warm him. In the library, there was a bamboo umbrella stand that always had a couple of umbrellas in it, no matter what the weather, and a mahogany rack with a pair of rubbers. Maybe he could borrow them. He’d return them. He needed them right now, that was all. The jungle was always so wet. He had forgotten his rubbers, and he needed to get home.
The rain stopped, and steam rose from the dirt. He kept crawling. The mud, thick as peanut butter, smelled like chocolate and skunk cabbage. Large, leathery leaves brushed wet against his head and shoulders as he pushed through them.
His leg was broken, he knew it, and it was chewed all to hell. Bullets from their own gun, captured by the Japs, in one leg, shrapnel from somebody’s mortar — Jap? Yank? Who knew whose? — in the other. His fatigues were torn up and soaked with blood, and there were little ants crawling on them. The jungle wouldn’t even wait for him to die.
The library was cool and quiet, and Ed was talking to Katie. He was whispering, because they were in the library, but he was all muddy because they were in the jungle. He was asking her a question. Had she ever wondered what it would be like to have all the money she could imagine? Just squander it, spend it wildly on everything she wanted? He used to wonder about money, before he joined the Marines, before he shipped out. How did you ever get enough, and what did you do when you got it? Katie was looking at him very seriously, and she nodded her head a little, not like she had ever wondered such a thing, but like she was encouraging him to keep talking. “Well, darling,” he said to her, “this leave I have is our fortune. Let’s spend it like we’ve never spent thirty days before, and just as though we’ll never have thirty days to spend again.”
Did he make that up himself, or did he hear it in a movie? It didn’t sound like a movie with a happy ending. In movies, the soldiers who said things like that always got shot. He hadn’t even said that to Katie, but he got shot anyway. If he ever got another leave, he would be spending it in Australia or New Zealand with a bunch of other leathernecks, not in the South Weymouth public library with his girl.
He sure wanted to see Katie again. He wanted to see his dad and his sister and his librarian. He wanted to tell Katie the things he had never told her except in letters from halfway around the world. He hadn’t even told her that he loved her. It’s the kind of thing you want to say in person.
Ed wouldn’t have gotten shot, except that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t his job to carry ammunition to the guns, but sometimes there’s things that have to be done, and you do them. The day before, the company had cleared an area of underbrush, leaving the tall trees as cover against air attack, and dug themselves in for their first night on the island. It was raining, of course. It rained and rained in this place. Ed dug himself a hole, shared rations with the guys in the holes on either side of him, hunched under his poncho, and managed to get some shut-eye before his watch.
The next morning, the captain and Ed and Johnny Dahn had left the camp to check the position of the left flank of the Third Battalion: the company was due to tie in with them later in the morning. They found the Third, checked their position, made arrangements for later. Then they started back, taking an inspection tour of the lines.
They were just finishing the first platoon when a volley of enemy fire broke loose. They hit the ground fast — it sounded like it was aimed right at them. Marines in the line behind them answered with M1s and machine guns.
The call and response of gunfire was like the responses at Mass: first the priest, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” then the altar boys, “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” You could count on it, and you knew all the voices: the heavy, adult voice of a water-cooled gun, then the chatter of light machine guns; quick, sharp automatic-rifle bursts, followed by flat rapid fire from the Japanese guns, all of it against a staccato drone of grenades and mortar.
When the volley was over, the jungle went as quiet as death. The rain had stopped. In front of the platoon, there was a green wall of trees and brush. Nothing moved there. In the foxholes, marines held themselves immobile, guns in hand, watching the jungle for the slightest movement. Occasionally the sound of a ricochet rang through the trees.
The three marines waited in the silence. Maybe it was five minutes, but it seemed like an hour. Then, dripping wet, like the jungle itself, they made their way back in the rain to the Command Post. They moved cautiously: they didn’t want to startle anyone.
When they got to the CP, however, all hell was breaking loose. The radio was on the fritz, and the men were quickly organizing a circular defense in case of a breakthrough in the lines. While they were busy with that, a wounded kid crawled in on his hands and knees. Ed and Johnny helped him turn over and lie down. He’d been shot three times, once in each thigh and once in the pelvis just below the beltline. No blood, just little round holes, blue at the edges. He was very pale and breathing shallowly: in shock, probably bleeding internally. None of the medical corpsmen were at the CP: the kid needed to be at the battalion aid station, four hundred yards away. Ed and Johnny laid him on a canvas stretcher, and, following the telephone wire, carried him through the heavy warm rain, struggling to keep their feet in the mud.
They’d only gone a short way when they met a party of marines bringing ammunition to the CP. “That was where we got ourselves outfoxed,” Johnny would say later, retelling the tale, ”when we met those guys bringing in boxes of ammo. Quickest shuffle I’ve ever seen. All of a sudden, they were carrying the stretcher away from the lines, and we were headed back to the front, carrying the ammo.”