“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.