At the edge of town he leaned against the wood colonnade in front of the feed-and-tack store and looked out into a deep field that was burned sear by drought. In the distance was a low, brown mountain covered with summer haze. He could smell the drowsy odor of the poppies blowing across the field.
“This is where we go, ain’t it?” he said.
“Let’s just walk on into the field, Hack.”
He heard the dried husks of the poppies rattle around him and the whistle of a locomotive somewhere beyond the curve of the mountain as he went deeper into the field with the captain, this time without resistance or heat or fear of a machine gunner’s twisted, monkey-paw face.
On the far edge of the field he saw an old adobe jail set back in a grove of juniper trees, and he could hear a man railing in his chains. Was that John Wesley Hardin screaming in there, or was it himself or his grandson? he thought.
“No sir, that’s Satan you chained in that cell,” the captain said.
Then he saw the train come around the curve of the mountain, the smoke blowing back over the line of cars and the men sitting on the spine, and for just a moment he thought he could hear the laughter of Mexican girls in a roar of hooves.
WE BUILD CHURCHES, INC.
Across the frozen rice fields the brown North Korean hills were streaked with ice and pocked with craters from our 105s. It was cold and bright, and the concertina wire we had strung around our perimeter was half buried in the snow, looping in and out of the surface like an ugly snake that had been lopped into segments by a lawn mower. But we really weren’t worried about a frontal attack in that third week of November in 1950. We had killed communists by the thousands all the way across North Korea, bulldozing their bodies into trenches and packing the fill down with tanks, until they fled into the hills under a gray sky and hid like bandits. Then the winter swept down out of China across the Yalu, and the hills cracked clear and sharp, and our F-80s and B-25s bombed them twelve hours a day with napalm and phosphorus and incendiaries that generated so much heat in the soil that the barren slopes were still smoking the next morning.
Jason Bradford was seated with his back against the ditch, looking at a picture on the front page of Stars and Stripes. He had a blanket pulled up to his chin, and his mittened hands stuck out from under the blanket. The mitten on his right hand was cut away around the trigger finger. During the night his patrol had run into a North Korean listening post and had lost one marine to a potato masher that the Koreans had got away before the sergeant stitched them all over the hole. Jace’s eyes were red around the rims, and he kept fingering his cheek as though he had a toothache.
“Give me another hit of gin, Doc,” he said. “I’m going to get warm if I have to let the stuff eat down to my toenails.”
I took a bottle of codeine out of my pack and handed it to him.
“Cheers,” he said, and drank from the bottle’s lip, washing the codeine over his teeth and swallowing it with the pleasure a martini would give him. “Now, look at that picture. A picture like that is not an accident.”
A reporter from Stars and Stripes had been photographing an airborne squadron of B-25s, but when the picture was developed, the planes appeared only in the right-hand corner and the frame was filled with the head and shoulders of Jesus Christ.
“You see, I took a course in meteorology at Amherst, and those kinds of clouds don’t make a formation like that,” Jace said.
“That’s what they call an optical delusion,” the corporal sitting across from us said. He was a tall hillbilly boy from north Alabama named Willard Posey. He hated the Marine Corps for a different reason than the rest of us: the corps had sent him to Korea to fight for gooks, whom he considered inferior even to blacks.
“There’s a preacher on a radio station in Memphis that sells them things,” he said.
“Willard, my friend, the whole world is not like the hill country of north Alabama. You have to understand that one of these days,” Jace said.
“I ain’t got your education,” Willard said, “but I know that feller in Memphis is a crook and that ain’t no picture of Jesus. You reckon he’d be looking down on a country full of heathens that tie up men with wire and machine-gun them?”
A week earlier we had found the bodies of sixteen marines frozen in the snow by the side of a railway track. We guessed that they had been captured in the south and for some reason taken off a prisoner train and executed. The baling wire was so tight on their wrists that we couldn’t snip through it without tearing the bloated skin.
Jace fingered his cheek again, pushing ice crystals from his mitten into his beard as though his jaw had no feeling.
“You remember that bunch of gooks we took prisoner about two months ago?” he said. “The lieutenant sent them to the rear with the ROKs. Do you think those guys made it beyond the first hill?”
“That’s monkeys killing monkeys. They been doing that to each other on this shit pile for hundreds of years. That don’t have nothing to do with us.”
“It has everything to do with the lieutenant, and with us, too, Willard,” Jace said.
“You better lay off that gin,” Willard said, and picked up his M-1 and walked farther down the ditch.
Jace took another drink out of the bottle and rested his head back in his helmet. He had turned down officers’ school at Quantico, which his education and good looks and career as a college lacrosse player should have made a natural extension of his life.
“Willard is not educable,” I said.
“Ah, but that’s it. He has been taught.”
“Don’t make a mystery out of a simple man.”
“You southerners hang together, don’t you? When it comes down to that choice between reason and blathering with a mouthful of collard greens, there’s something atavistic in you that makes you home in on the latter like a fly on a pig flop.”
“What is it, Jace?”
“That kid last night.”
“It was just bad luck.”
“My ass. He was only on the line one day. He shouldn’t have been put on patrol. I could hear him breathing in the dark behind me, the kind of breathing you hear when a guy’s heart is coming out his mouth. He must have wanted to prove something, because he worked himself up right behind the point. When we walked into the gooks, a potato masher came flying out of the hole. He just stared at it and poked at it with his foot, like it was something he didn’t want to touch but couldn’t run away from at the same time.”
In the rear someone was trying to start a cold engine in a tank. The starter ground away like Coke-bottle glass in the still air.
“I must have been looking at him, yelling at him, because I saw him light up like fire was painted on one side of him.”
“Give me the codeine and go to sleep.”
“No sleep today, Doc. We’re going to be stringing mines. Somebody said the First Division captured some Chinese at a reservoir up the road.”
“Chinese?”
“They probably grabbed some Korean mountain people who speak a dialect, and some dumb-ass translator didn’t know how to classify them.”
“You better sleep, anyway.”
Jace turned his face at me and squinted in the sunlight. His helmet cut a diagonal shadow across his eyes and made his face look as though it were sewn together from mismatched parts.
“What you got to understand is that I’m a practical man,” he said. “I have one foot solidly in this world. That’s because I come from a family that never got lost in the next world. We knew how to hold on to a big chunk of this one and deal with it.”
I didn’t know what introspection was taking him through a maze inside of himself or even if introspection was the word for it. His voice had a wired edge to it, and fatigue was an explanation that only civilians used. I had seen craziness come in many forms since I had been in Korea, but it usually got men when they first went on the firing line or after an artillery barrage when they became hysterical and had to be sedated with mo
rphine. But Jace had been on the line since Inchon and had had his ticket punched at every stop across North Korea.
“Let me explain it this way,” he said. “The first Bradford in Massachusetts was a ship’s carpenter, and the Puritans were building churches all over the place. But it takes a lot of time to build a church out of squared logs, especially when you got to stop and kill off all the Indians and press witches to death. The first Bradford, the carpenter, was a religious man, and he had an idea that would take care of the problem for everybody. He hired a bunch of guys like himself and built the church on contract. He paid the other guys out of his pocket, and all he asked from the community was a small piece of land set aside in his name. He built churches in Salem, Cambridge, Haverhill, anywhere he found Puritans and wood. This went on for thirty years, until some farmers figured out that he probably owned more land than anyone else in the commonwealth. So these manure slingers got together and had him tried as a witch, and they had some good evidence to use against him. He was as strong as a draft horse, and he could poke one finger in the end of a musket and hold it out at arm’s length. So the manure slingers said he was in league with Old Nick, and they tried to make him confess by ordeal. They staked him out in a field and put an oak door over his body and then added one stone to it at a time. You see, the deal was that if a witch confessed, all his property went back into the public domain. They crushed his chest and snapped his ribs like sticks, but he never let a word of guilt pass his lips.
“His sons inherited his property and they figured a way to protect it against the manure slingers. They incorporated under the name We Build Churches, Inc. You can’t try a corporation for witchery, can you? Those Puritans would deep-fry the balls of an individual, but they knew a business company was sacred.
“And my family has been building churches ever since, and we still own some of the land that was given to the carpenter. There’s a bank in Cambridge built right on top of where he used to keep a smithy.
“Does that make sense to you? Do you know what I mean now by having a vision of both worlds?”
One eye seemed pulled down on his cheek, as though he were aiming along the sights of his M-1.
I didn’t want to answer. I simply wanted the codeine back and to talk with the lieutenant about rotating Jace early. As a corpsman I could do it by saying that I thought he had walking pneumonia.
I heard a truck with snow chains on crunching up the road through the frozen rice field behind us. One of the chains was broken and swinging under the fender.
“That looks like the foot warmers now,” I said. “Give me the codeine so you don’t blow your face off.”
I walked down the ditch past Willard, who was standing against the embankment with his hands in his armpits, smoking a cigarette without taking it from his mouth. The lieutenant was farther on with his back turned to me and his face bent down over an engineer’s compass placed on a mess kit that he had flattened into the snow for a level. He turned an angle on the compass gingerly with one finger and then drew the angle on his notepad.
“Could I speak with you a minute, Lieutenant?”
“Go ahead,” he said, his blue eyes still preoccupied with the mine pattern we were going to lay. He was an Annapolis graduate and a good officer, but he was single-minded sometimes and irritated by what he considered a complaint.
“Bradford’s been spitting up phlegm for two weeks. I think he might have pneumonia.”
“What’s his temperature?”
“He won’t let me take it.”
The lieutenant’s eyes swept into mine.
“What kind of bullshit are you handing me, Doc?”
“I thought he ought to ride back with the mine truck to the aid station.”
“What you thought is you’d slip me a candy-ass con. You’ve been a corpsman too long for that, Doc.”
“I’m supposed to make my recommendation to you, Lieutenant.”
“You’d better listen to me and never do something like this again.”
“Yes sir.”
I walked back down the ditch feeling stupid and humiliated. Up ahead, I saw that Jace had climbed over the embankment and was headed toward the truck. As I passed Willard he caught my sleeve and pulled me to him.
“Don’t wrinkle my threads,” I said.
“Stay cool and have a smoke. I want to tell you something.” He lit a Camel from the one he was smoking and handed it to me. “I heard what you said to the lieutenant, and I also heard what Bradford told you about that kid that got blowed up last night. You done the right thing trying to get him out of here. He ain’t seeing things good in his head, and that gets people knocked off.”
“What do you mean?”
“That kid wasn’t behind the point. He was in the rear all the time. Them three gooks was in a hole at the top of an arroyo, and we didn’t see them till the potato masher come end over end at us. We all went flying down the hill with it rolling down after us, but the kid stood there like his feet was locked in ice. Bradford was the last one down. Maybe he could have knocked the kid back. Maybe any of us could. It ain’t nobody’s fault. But I wanted you to know it didn’t happen the way Bradford said. I tell you what. I’m going to stay so close on his butt he’ll think he’s got piles. If he starts talking crazy again or if I think he’s going to screw up, I’m telling the lieutenant the same thing you did.”
“You’re all right, Willard.”
“Shit. I got thirteen days to rotation and I ain’t getting knocked off because of a crazy man.”
When the sun went down over the hills, a red light spilled across the land and we felt the temperature drop in minutes. The wind blew down out of the hills, and the snow that had fallen that morning was polished into a thin, frozen cake that you could punch your finger through. Beyond the concertina wire the depressions where the mines had been set looked like slick dimples on a piece of moonscape. My feet and ears ached in the cold as though they had been beaten with boards.
In the purple gloom of the ditch Jace was looking around the edges of his pack for something. When he couldn’t find it, he flipped the pack over, then unwrapped the canvas flap and rooted in it with an increasing urgency.
“Who took my newspaper?” he said.
Willard and I looked at his anxious face without replying.
“I want to know who took it. It was tucked inside the strap.”
“The Indian was trying to start a fire,” Willard said.
“You lying son of a bitch.”
“You say that to me again and I’m going to break every bone in your face.”
“You just try it. I’m not one of your darkies on the plantation. You took it, didn’t you? Say it. You had to destroy what didn’t fit into that ignorant southern mind of yours?”
“What?”
“You heard me. You can’t think past what you hear on a hillbilly radio station or a bunch of captured gooks that get marched off behind a hill.”
“I saw the Indian with it,” I said.
“You tend to your own business, Doc,” Willard said.
In the distance we heard the popping of small arms, like a string of firecrackers, followed by two long bursts from a BAR on our right flank.
“What’s that asshole doing?” Willard said, his face wooden in the red twilight.
Then we saw the Chinese moving out of the hills toward us. They appeared on the crests in silhouette, like ants swarming to the top of a sinking log, and poured down the slopes and arroyos onto the rice field. They marched a mortar barrage ahead of them across the field, blowing up the mines we had set earlier and sending geysers of snow and yellow earth high into the air. We shrank into fetal positions in the bottom of the ditch, each man white-faced and alone in his terror, as the reverberations through the ground grew in intensity. Then, when they had bracketed our line, they turned it on in earnest. The explosions were like locomotive engines blowing apart. The ditch danced with light, flame rippled along the strands of concertina wire, and a lon
g round hit the gasoline dump behind us and blew a balloon of fire over us that scalded our skin.
When the barrage lifted, the snow in the craters around us was still hissing from the heat of the buried shrapnel, and the rice field and the horizon of the hills were covered with small, dark men in quilted uniforms. They came at us in waves and walked over their own dead while we killed them by the thousands. The long stretch of field was streaked with tracers, and occasionally one of our mines went off and blew men into the air likes piles of rags. We packed snow on our .30-caliber machine guns and fired them until the rifling went and the barrels melted. When somebody down the line yelled that they were pushing civilians ahead of them, the firing never let up. If anything, the machine gunners kept the trigger frozen back against the guard to get at the men who carried those murderous burp guns with the fifty-round drum magazines.
The bottom of the ditch was strewn with spent shell casings and empty ammunition boxes. Willard was next to me, firing his M-1 over the edge of the embankment, his unused clips set in a neat line in the snow. I heard a shell whang dead center into his helmet and ricochet inside. He pirouetted around in slow motion, his helmet rolled off his shoulder, and the blood ran in red strings from under his stocking cap. There was a surgical cut along the crown of the skull that exposed his brain. He slid down against the ditch wall with one leg folded under him, his jaw distended as though he were about to yawn.
“Get the wounded ready to move, Doc,” the lieutenant said. “We’re going to get artillery in forty-five minutes and pull.”
“In forty-five minutes we’re going to be spaghetti.”
“They got a priority in another sector. Get those men ready to move.”
Five minutes later the lieutenant got it through the throat, and the artillery never came. Before we were overrun, we put a flamethrower in their faces and cooked them alive at thirty yards. Their uniforms were burned away, and their blackened bodies piled up in a stack like people caught in a fire exit. Farther down the ditch I saw Jace with his back propped against the embankment, his face white with concussion and his coat singed and blown open.
The Convict and Other Stories Page 9