“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.
She was a regular at the bar, Smitty’s Below the Bridge, or at least had been a regular for the better part of a year. All the fellows were glad for it. Dora was all right. She was what the place always needed: a good solid-looking woman who didn’t take guff and liked to have a laugh or two and paid for her own drinks. She was smart, too, a book-keeper at the big furniture shop on Lemoine, and perhaps like a lot of them she might have accomplished a lot more in life had certain things gone her way and she hadn’t been so enamored of wine. She wasn’t a full-blown boozer, but she had, in significant part, ceased to care whether her nightly stint in the company of heavy-drinking folks meant she was likely becoming one of them, nor did she mind any longer that she was riding lower and lower in the water, steadily losing buoyancy, and that she might eventually be swallowed up.