Street Boys

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “All that we had left,” Dante said in hushed tones. “There were about a dozen and we laid them in under the rocks about ten feet apart, just like you told us to do.”

  “That should be enough to wipe out at least half those tanks,” Connors said. “And if more than twenty soldiers come out of that alive, I’d be surprised.”

  “So I did a good job?” Dante asked.

  “Yes,” Connors said to him, slowly getting to his feet and retrieving his weapons. “You did a very good job.”

  “Now can I have a cigarette?” Dante asked, running to catch up to Connors.

  “Wait until after the war,” Connors said, looking over his shoulder.

  Nunzia poured red wine over her hands and dried them on a clean dishrag. She looked down at the wounded boy and smiled, moving a row of damp, thick strands of hair away from his eyes. They were inside one of the four tunnels, the boy resting on a soiled thin mattress, his head propped up on three folded shirts. There were a half dozen lit candles around them and in the shadows of the semidarkness, Nunzia could see the severity of the boy’s stomach wounds.

  “Come ti ciami?” she asked the boy.

  “Maurizio,” he said.

  He was close to twelve, thin, with a sweet angular face and deep, rich black eyes. His hands rested quietly at his side and he moaned slightly with each sharp jolt of pain. He looked into her face and nodded. “Non che niente da fare,” he said in a low voice.

  Nunzia rested two fingers across his lips and rubbed her hand along the sides of his face. She reached behind her and pulled out a sopping wet cloth from a small pot filled with brown water. She squeezed the water from the cloth and rested it on top of Maurizio’s warm forehead. Nunzia turned when she saw the shadow approach, pulling a pistol from her waistband. She lowered the gun when she spotted the familiar face.

  “Thought you could use some help,” Connors said.

  “The shrapnel wound is very deep,” she said. “I think I can stop the bleeding and bandage it up. But I don’t know what to do about the two bullets in his stomach.”

  Connors looked down at the boy and then back up to Nunzia. “He’s losing too much blood. Those bullets need to come out.”

  “I don’t know how,” Nunzia said.

  “Please,” Maurizio said, running his tongue across dry lips, his words coming out in slow spurts. “Don’t touch them. I know you want to help. But I can’t take the pain. Just stay with me. Both of you. Don’t let me die alone.”

  Nunzia wiped at the corners of her eyes and leaned in closer to the dying boy, holding on tight to both his hands. Maurizio stared up at Connors, his breath coming in tight hushes. Connors yanked his canteen off his hip and poured some water into his hand. He dipped two fingers into his wet palm and brushed them against Maurizio’s cracked lips.

  “My rosary beads,” the boy whispered, moving his fingers along his pants. “They’re in my pocket.”

  Connors dug a hand into the boy’s pocket and eased out a string of black beads, the bottom row wrapped around a silver crucifix. He gently pried open Maurizio’s palm and placed the beads in the middle, then closed the hand and held it to his chest for several seconds. He rocked on his heels and watched as the boy brought the crucifix up to his lips. “Grazia,” he said, his eyes once again shining.

  The boy began to shiver and shake, the blood gushing from the open wound, his thin legs trembling under the torn cotton pants. He held out his arms and awkwardly lifted his head. “Be with me,” he said to Connors and Nunzia. “I’m too afraid to die alone.”

  Connors and Nunzia stretched out in the middle of the empty tracks, resting their heads on Maurizio’s thin shoulders, their arms wrapped around his bloody body. They closed their eyes, listening as the boy said a soft and gentle prayer.

  They stayed and held him until he died.

  Connors waited for Nunzia outside the tunnel entrance, his uniform drenched in Maurizio’s blood, a moist cigarette smoldering in his right hand. His face was flushed red and he pounded against the hard brick wall with his fists. All soldiers reach a point, as do most men, when the reality of death overwhelms them. It can happen on a battlefield or in a mess hall. With some, it can occur decades after the last bloody body was seen, thousands of miles removed from the painful memory. But the moment always finds its place. For Steve Connors, that place was in the middle of an empty train tunnel in an Italian city torn to shreds, listening to a frail boy taking his last breath.

  Nunzia stepped up behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Connors kept his head down, eyes staring holes through the grimy side of the wall, his hands pressed against the still-hot bricks. “I cleaned his wound and found a shirt in the back pile that fit him,” she whispered. “And I folded the rosary beads around his fingers.”

  “They try to teach you to keep it all buried, from day one of boot camp,” Connors said, the top of his head pressed against the wall. “To act as if you can’t see any of the horrible things that happen around you. To keep your focus on the enemy and not on some guy you just left bleeding back in the middle of a mud field, whose last name you’re not even sure you can remember. But how can you not see it?”

  “No one really survives a war,” Nunzia said. “There are never any winners or losers. There are just those who bury their memories and those who live with them every day.”

  Connors turned around and slammed his back against the wall, his eyes bitter and red. “He was twelve and he got shot in a battle over train tracks,” he said. “And he died braver than any soldier I’ve ever seen in the field. He looked right into my eyes and there was no anger there, no hatred. There was just a quiet peace. That little boy understood more about living and dying than I ever will.”

  She walked over to him and rested her head against his shoulders, her arms wrapped around his waist. “Death and war is all that most of these boys have known,” she whispered. “What happy times they’ve had in their lives are so far in the past, it’s difficult to even imagine. They now live day to day. Just like me and just like you.”

  Connors clasped his hands around hers and held on to them tight, his head still crammed with images he knew would linger for the rest of his life. “The other boys are waiting,” he said finally. “We need to be with them.”

  “They wait for you,” she said. “Vincenzo is their heart and my father was their soul. But you’re the one who lifts their courage, who makes them believe they belong on the same field with the Nazis.”

  “It doesn’t sound like I’m doing them any favors,” Connors said.

  “You give them hope,” Nunzia said. “That’s something they haven’t had since the war started and it’s something no boy should be without.”

  Connors lifted Nunzia’s face, his arms around her waist. “Is that what I give you?” he asked. “Hope?”

  “Yes,” she said with a gentle nod of her head. “That and much love.”

  “I’ll look for you when the dust settles,” Connors told her.

  “I know you will.”

  He brought her back up to him and kissed her one last time.

  34

  SPACCANAPOLI

  The final battle for the streets of Naples began at two in the afternoon on a sunny first day of October.

  The sky was as clear as a pane of glass and the sun burned down on the large piazza that was dominated by bombed-out houses and dark, imposing office buildings, their windows blown out. In the center of the square was a large church, its three-tiered steeples grasping for the heavens, its curved stone steps leading to the shuttered iron doors. Seven wide alleys led into and out of the square, a dim route to another area of the city. Spaccanapoli sat on Naples like a giant squid, it’s large tentacles spread in all directions.

  Four boys were positioned in each of the alleys, hidden against the sides of walls, guns and cocktails in their hands. Vincenzo peeked out from behind a large mound of rubble off one of the main alleys. He saw fifteen Nazi tanks move up and down the square and i
nto the side streets, a large contingent of soldiers following in their wake. Von Klaus stood in the well of a tank in the center of the square, his eyes on the empty buildings, binoculars at rest, his body calm and at ease. Vincenzo leaned back down, head and shoulders resting on the sharp piles of brick and stone, wishing that somehow he could make the peaceful morning last forever.

  Von Klaus surveyed the positions of his tanks and the placement of his soldiers. He took a deep breath and tapped against the side of his vehicle. The men in the well below him slammed in the first shell, braced themselves against the tank walls and fired. The first shot of the final battle landed in the middle of an abandoned pharmacy and sent it crumbling to the ground.

  Vincenzo lit the fuse end of his kerosene bottle and hurled it over his head, watching it land against the rear of a Nazi tank. The hidden street boys jumped from their posts along the nooks and crevices of the alleys and fired at the soldiers that were stationed at the base of the square. The Nazis whirled at the sound of the shells landing at their feet and returned the shots with a furious volley of their own. The boys emptied their guns and began to back into the alleys, tossing rocks at the soldiers who were following them in, a tank trailing each small group. Vincenzo monitored the action, running down the center alley, sliding through the front door of the collapsed tram blocking his path, and emerging from the other end. He moved from one alley to the next, gazing over the tops of the trams, watching the boys lead the tanks and soldiers down the narrow strips. The Nazi soldiers were in aggressive pursuit, stepping over the bodies of fallen boys and firing down on those who scampered toward the trams. “Remember to jump in the driver’s side,” Vincenzo shouted. “It’s the only place not mined.”

  He watched one boy slip and tumble across the dark cobblestones and then quickly get back to his feet, his body one long strip of welts, bruises and open cuts. He turned, threw his last rock at a rushing Nazi and looked across the tram at Vincenzo. “What if the tanks don’t even try to go over these?” he asked.

  “We’ve left them no choice,” Vincenzo reassured the boy. “A tank never backs up. Especially if it sees its enemy waiting on the other side.”

  “I only pray you’re right,” the boy said. He dove head first into the driver’s side door.

  “So do I,” Vincenzo said in a low voice, his eyes on the Nazi tank less than twenty feet away.

  Nunzia, Franco, Claudio, Pepe and Dante were running across the far end of the square, pursued by six Nazi soldiers, both groups firing at each other. The children circled and dove behind the edges of a large, empty fountain next to a pink stucco two-story building. Angela bolted out the shattered front door, tossed a lit kerosene bottle toward the soldiers, then jumped in beside the others behind the base of the fountain. The explosion killed two of the soldiers, sending debris down across their backs and heads. The children braced against the sides of the fountain and checked the ammo on their guns, the soldiers’ footsteps a rock-toss away. “They’re coming at us from both sides,” Angela said, glancing above the clipped wing of an urchin. “We can’t let them trap us in here.”

  Dante secured his last clip into the chamber of his machine gun. “I’m tired of running,” he said. “I’m tired of everything. I think we all are.”

  Nunzia looked at each of the children, holding them down, away from enemy range. “We just need to go a little farther,” she pleaded. “Once I get you out of the square, then you can rest.”

  “No,” Dante said, his warm eyes sad, his lips pursed and determined. “We came here to fight, not to run.”

  Nunzia watched as, one by one, they nodded their heads in agreement, then checked their rifles, machine guns and pistols, prepared to step into the teeth of the fight. “The Nazis have seen our backs for three days,” Angela told her. “It’s time for them to see our faces. See who it is they’re fighting.”

  Nunzia looked above the rim of the fountain, a dozen soldiers easing in closer to them, crouched down low, machine guns at the ready. She turned back to the children around her. “Spread out across the base,” she said, “and fire until your guns are empty. If you need to run, head for the side alleys above us. And God be with you all.”

  They rose as one, firing the last of their bullets at the surrounding troops.

  The return volleys were heavy, landing against the sides of the fountain and in the pink stucco wall behind them. Pepe rotated his machine gun from left to right, taking down two Nazi soldiers before the sting of a shoulder wound sent him sprawling to the dirt. Angela fired her rifle from waist level, scatter shooting and landing with a sniper’s precision. She tossed aside the empty gun and pulled the blade from the crook of her neck and flung it into the chest of a leaping soldier, his reach a mere inches from her face. Nunzia emptied her pistol and jumped under Franco and Claudio’s fierce fire, reaching for the machine gun of a fallen soldier. She came up on one knee, ripping bullets into the fronts and backs of the oncoming Nazis.

  Beyond them, the piazza had exploded into a vast killing field, the fire on both sides heavy and often hitting its mark. The tanks rained down their anger on both brick and body, rumbling through the side streets and over collapsed and burning structures, seeking out their human targets. Von Klaus worked one end of the square, shouting out orders, directing his scattered troops to wreak their havoc on an enemy he never envisioned being as resilient or as dangerous as the street boys. Kunnalt, his shoulder bleeding from a wound sustained in the tunnel battle, was keyed in on the other end, his tanks firing at the array of silent buildings and the wild scampering of the children. Plumes of thick smoke, haze and blood filled a square that had once been the pride of all Neapolitans.

  Connors was on the steps of the church, in the center of a small arsenal of machine guns, flame throwers, kerosene bottles and grenades, six boys spread out to his left and right, firing down on the Nazis with the final remnants of their rage. He tossed aside an empty machine gun and reached down for another, looked up across the square and saw Nunzia lead Angela and the boys on their valiant charge. He signaled the boys around him to seek shelter and keep firing as he inched his way forward, separated from the woman he loved by the enemy he loathed.

  Vincenzo stood across the road, surrounded by a kneeling and wounded cluster of street boys, their weapons strewn by their sides, each watching as the tanks made their move onto the toppled trams. The front ends of the tanks squeezed down on the rusty hulks of the ancient buses, the sound of bending steel and breaking glass vibrating out of the dark, smoky alleys. The treads on the tracks churned as they eased themselves into the soft well of the hunkered vehicles. Fabrizio stood behind Vincenzo, the mastiff at his side. “Don’t worry,” Vincenzo said in a voice loud enough to be heard above the din of the tanks. “Maldini will not let us down.”

  The tank in the middle alley went first.

  The mines buried inside the tram gave off a violent and angry shudder, then the force split the tank and the body of the bus in two. The front end of the tank flew out from the mouth of the alley, trailing a long thin line of flame and smoke. It flipped end over end and skidded to a halt along the edge of the rail tracks. The tram let loose a large gulp of fire up the alley walls, torching what remained of the convoy of soldiers before forcing its flames into the open square.

  The next three explosions shook the foundation of the piazza and sent the facade of many buildings and homes tumbling to the ground in scattered heaps. Soldiers and boys fell, carts and statues were toppled, shattered glass came down from on high, slicing its way through flesh and bone.

  Von Klaus looked at the fires coming out of the alleys, shaken by the blasts, his face tinged a heavy shade of red from the intensity of the four-edged cauldron, knowing that within the confines of those tight dank corridors he had lost four tanks and twenty brave men. He slammed his fist against the side of his tank, as much in frustration as in anger, losing the tight leash he kept on his emotions, finally allowing the hardness of the street soldier to overcome the
frailties of the man. He ordered his tank to circle around toward the mouth of the empty alleys and fire a volley of shells as it moved. The treads ran over and crushed rocks, glass and bodies. He saw Kunnalt, wounded and fighting on in a corner of the square, his soldiers firing at a woman and a line of street boys. “You win,” he shouted across the space between them. “You’ll finally get your wish.”

  “Which wish is that, sir?” Kunnalt shouted back.

  “To see them all dead,” Von Klaus said.

  His tank moved forward, his eyes still on the bleeding young officer, the fires and explosions around them growing louder with each passing second.

  The B-24 flew above the demolishing landscape, its experienced crew looking down at the inferno that engulfed Spaccanapoli with silent dismay. “Hold off on dropping any bombs,” the pilot instructed through his mouthpiece. “They’re too bunched up. We’ll end up wiping out the whole plaza. I think it’s best to bring it around again and see if we can get some gunfire in there without hitting somebody other than Nazis.”

  “You get us close enough, we might be able to knock off some of them tanks,” a gunner in the bubble, Sharky, said. “Help give those boys a little bit of a break.”

  “Anybody make out that guy from the Thunderbirds in the crowd?” the pilot asked.

  “Hard to see through all the smoke, but it looks like there’s a G.I. cornered over by that church to your right,” another voice answered.

  “Whatever we do, let’s make sure we don’t hit any of those kids.” The pilot glanced over at the lieutenant to his right. “They’re dealing with enough shit without having to worry about us on their ass.”