Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  The wounds in my legs had never healed and had become infected, and when I slowed my pace in the snow Kwong jabbed the barrel of his gun into my scalp. I felt the skin split and I fell forward on my hands and knees. Kwong kicked me in the kidney and pulled me erect by my hair.

  “You walk, cocksuck,” he said.

  I put my arm over Joe Bob’s shoulder, my side in flames, and limped along with the others to the yellow brick building that Ding used for his headquarters. Bertie Fast’s eyes were wide with terror, and I could see the pulse jumping in his neck. He looked like a child in his oversized quilted uniform and all the blood had drained out of his soft, feminine face. Even Joe Bob, with scars from the black Betty on his butt, was afraid, although he held it down inside himself like a piece of sharp metal. But the wild Turk showed no fear at all, or possibly he didn’t even know what was taking place. His hot black eyes stared out of his white, twisted face, and I wondered if he had the trowel hidden somewhere inside his clothes. His tangled black hair had grown over his shoulders, and he breathed great clouds of vapor, as though he had a fever, through his rotted teeth. He stood immobile with the rest of us while Kwong knocked on the door, and I thought that beyond those hot black eyes there was a furnace instead of a brain.

  Ding sat behind his desk in his starched, high-collar uniform with a tea service in front of him. Dixon stood in one corner by the oil stove, his face heavy with lack of sleep, and there was a large, swollen knot above his right eyebrow. His eyes fixed on Ding’s desk when we entered the room, and drops of sweat slid down his forehead in the red glow of the stove.

  Ding finished his tea, flicked a finger for a guard to remove the tray, and lit a Russian cigarette. He leaned forward on his elbows, puffing with his harelip, his eyes concentrated like BB’s into the smoke, and I knew that we were all going to enact a long and painful ritual that would compensate Ding in part for his lack of a field command.

  “I know there’s a plan for an escape,” he said, quietly. “It’s a very foolish plan that will bring you hardship. There has never been an escape from a Chinese People’s detention center, and you’re hundreds of miles from the American lines. Now, this can be very easy for you, and it will also help the men who would be shot in trying to escape. Give me their names and you can return to your building, and nothing will be done to the men involved.”

  We stood in silence, and the snow melted off our clothes in the warmth of the room. I looked at Dixon, and for a moment I wished that Ramos had killed him as soon as he had come back from the wood detail. The cut in my scalp was swelling and drawing tight, and my legs felt unsteady from fear and the pain in my calves.

  “You’re not in a cowboy movie,” Ding said. “None of you are heroes. You’re simply stupid. I don’t want to punish you. I don’t want to see the other men shot. There’s no reason for it. This war will be over someday and all of you can return to your families. It’s insane for you men to die in trying to escape.”

  Our eyes were flat, our faces expressionless, and the room was so quiet that I could hear Kwong shifting the weight of his burp gun on its strap.

  “Do you want me to punish all of the men in your building?” Ding said. “Do you want to see the sick Australian punished because of a stupid minority? All of you grow up on silly movies about Americans smiling at death. You think the Chinese are busboys in restaurants and laundrymen for your dirty clothes. You believe your white skin and Western intelligence reduces us to fools in pigtails groveling for your tips.”

  “We don’t know about no escape, Colonel,” Joe Bob said. “Nobody can crack this joint. Dixon give you a lot of shit last night.”

  “You do think we’re stupid, don’t you?”

  “No, sir, we don’t. I done time before, Colonel, and I don’t want to get burned because some jerk wants to run. Believe me, there ain’t no break planned.”

  “What do you have to say, Airman?” Ding said, and turned toward Dixon.

  Dixon’s face blanched and he swallowed in his throat. He hadn’t thought it was going to be this tough. His eyes looked up at us quickly and then fixed on the desk again. His words were heavy with phlegm.

  “It’s like I told you, Colonel. They been planning it a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I heard them whispering about it in the corner the other night after they blew out the candle.”

  “Which ones?” Ding drew in on the cigarette and looked at Dixon flatly through the smoke. He was really tightening the rack now, and he enjoyed tormenting Dixon as much as he did us.

  “All of them, I guess. It was dark.”

  “You haven’t told me very much to earn all those extra gifts.”

  Dixon’s face flushed and drops of sweat began dripping from his hair.

  “You should move away from the stove,” Ding said. “It’s bad for you to become overheated.”

  “Colonel, we ain’t trying to con you,” O.J. said. “We got on Dixon because he wouldn’t share nothing and he was eating vitamin pills, and he thought we was going to knock him around. He went off his nut and started beating on the door and screaming for Kwong. There wasn’t no more to it.”

  “Would you like to say something, Private?”

  “No, sir,” Bertie said. I had to turn and look at him. His voice was high with fear, but I didn’t believe the resolve that was there, also.

  “Do you want to suffer with these other men?”

  “They told you the truth, Colonel. There ain’t any break.”

  “You haven’t spoken. Would you like a turn?” Ding said to me, and at that moment I hated him more than any other human being on earth, not merely for his cruelty but also for the mental degradation that he could continue indefinitely with his physical power over us.

  “There’s nothing to say, sir. Dixon lied.” I wouldn’t let my eyes focus on his face, but he sensed my hatred toward him, anyway, and he smiled with that crooked harelip.

  “So the corpsman believes me stupid, too. What are we going to do with you American fighting men? That’s how you’re called at home, isn’t it? What would you suggest if you had my position? Intelligent Western men like you must have suggestions. You’re a Texan, aren’t you, Corpsman? You must have learned many lines from cowboy movies.”

  “They gave it to you straight, Colonel.”

  “He was one of them last night,” Dixon said. “They were going to smother me in my sleep.”

  (At the time I would have never guessed that the terrified man in the corner, sweating in the heat of the stove, would one day have his picture on the front page of newspapers all over the world as one of the twenty-two American turncoats who chose to remain in Red China after the peace was signed. However, the photograph would show him with full, clean-shaved cheeks, his cap pointed neatly over one eye, a red-blooded enlistee fresh out of the Chicago poolrooms.)

  “Then maybe we should begin with you, Corpsman,” Ding said, and motioned Kwong with his hand.

  The sergeant slammed me down in the wooden chair in front of the desk. Ding lit another cigarette and dropped the burnt match into a butt can. The room was now close with the smell of our bodies and the cigarette smoke. I could almost feel the cruel energy and expectation in Kwong’s body behind me.

  “Do you want this to be prolonged, or do you want to talk in an intelligent manner?”

  I stared into nothing, my shoulders hunched and my hands limp in my lap. I could hear the Turk breathing through his teeth in the silence. Kwong slapped me full across the face with his callused hand. My eyes watered and I could feel the blood burning in the skin.

  “Do you think you’re in a movie now, Corpsman?” Ding said. “Are the Flying Tigers going to drop out of the sky and kill all the little yellow men around you?”

  I stared through my wet eyes at the wall. The lines in the room looked warped, glittering with moisture, and the oil stove burned brightly red in one corner of my vision. Ding nodded to the sergeant, an indifferent and casual movement of mayb
e an inch, and Kwong brought my head down with both hands into his knee and smashed my nose. The blood burst across my face, my head exploded with light, and I was sure the bone had been knocked back into the brain. I was bent double in the chair, the blood pouring out through my hands, and each time I tried to clear my throat I gagged on a clot of phlegm and started the dry heaves.

  “He don’t know nothing, Colonel,” Joe Bob said. “Sometimes the guys bullshit about escape, but he don’t even do that. He knows they’re bullshitting and he always walks away from it. He don’t have no names to give you.”

  “Would you like to give me some names?”

  “It ain’t nothing but guys setting around shitting each other about a break, Colonel. Anybody in a joint does the same thing, or you start beating your rod with sandpaper after a while. Dixon’s a goddamn fish and he couldn’t cut it, so he sold you a lot of jive.”

  “Your corpsman hasn’t been hurt at all. The sergeant can do many other things to him.”

  “I know that, sir,” Joe Bob said. “It just won’t do no good. He can’t tell you nothing.”

  “Then I think you should take his chair,” Ding said.

  My hands were covered with blood and saliva, and I was still choking on my breath, but I wanted to go over Ding’s desk and get my thumbs into his throat. However, I never got the chance to learn if I was that brave or desperate with pain and hatred, because the Turk suddenly stopped breathing a moment, his white face filling with dark areas of rage, and his hot, black eyes glared insanely. Then he shouted once, a bull’s roar that came out of some awful thing inside him, and he started for Ding with his huge hands raised in fists over his head.

  Kwong stepped quickly in front of him and swung the stock of his burp gun upward into the Turk’s mouth. I could hear his teeth break against the wood. He reeled backward on the floor, his lips cut open in blue gashes, then Kwong raised his foot back, poised himself, and kicked him in the stomach. The Turk’s breath rushed out in a long, rattling gasp, he drew his knees up to his chin, and his face went perfectly white. His mouth worked silently, the veins rigid in his throat, and his eyes were glazed with pain like a dumb, strangling animal’s.

  Ding was on his feet, shouting in Chinese at Kwong. His waxlike face was enraged, and he kept stabbing one finger in the air at some point outside the building.

  “He’s crazy, Colonel,” Joe Bob said. “A stir freak. He probably don’t even know where he is.”

  “You wouldn’t behave intelligently,” Ding yelled. “You stand there with your confident faces and think you’re dealing with comical peasants. You’re stupid men that have to be treated as such.”

  Kwong pulled me out of the chair by my collar and pushed me toward the door, then he began kicking the Turk in the spine. The Turk’s breath came in spasms, and when he tried to suck air down into his lungs the blood bubbled on his lips.

  “Pick him up and carry him!”

  Joe Bob and O.J. lifted him between them by the arms. His dirty black hair hung over his face, and his chest heaved up and down.

  “Look, Colonel, we ain’t to blame for what some nut does,” Joe Bob said. “He ain’t much better than that with us. We got to watch him all the time.”

  Ding spoke again in Chinese to Kwong and the other two guards, and they leveled their burp guns at us and motioned toward the door.

  “They’re going to kill us,” O.J. said.

  “Colonel, it ain’t fair,” Joe Bob said. “We never give you no trouble out of our shack.”

  “I told you it could have been very easy for you.”

  “There wasn’t nothing to tell you,” O.J. said. “Do we got to lose our lives because we give it to you straight?”

  “Fuck it,” Joe Bob said. “They’re going to waste us, anyway.”

  Kwong hit him in the ear with his fist and pushed us outside. It had started to sleet, and the ice crunched like stones under our feet. The sun was a hazy puff of vapor above the cold hills, and then we saw a lone F-86 bank out of the snow clouds and begin its turn before it reached the Yalu River. It dipped its wings once, as all our planes did when they passed over the camp, and then soared away into a small speck on the southern horizon. We stopped at the work shack, and each of us was given a G.I. entrenching tool. The Turk dropped his in the snow, and Kwong picked it up and punched it hard into his chest.

  “You hold, cocksuck,” he said.

  Kwong chained the door shut, and we marched across the compound, past the silent faces of the progressives who watched us from their exercise yard, past the few men who had stopped scrubbing out the lice from their clothes under the iron pump, past our own shack and the men inside who were pressed up against the cracks in the wall, and finally into the no-man’s-land between the two fences that surrounded the camp.

  “Here. You dig hole,” Kwong said.

  “Oh, my God,” Bertie said.

  “You dig to put in shit.” He kicked five evenly spaced places in the snow, and then raised his burp gun level with one hand.

  We folded our entrenching tools down like hoes and started chopping through the ice into the frozen ground. The bridge of my nose was throbbing and the blood had congealed in my nostrils. I had to breathe through my teeth, and the air cut into my chest like metal each time I took a swing. The Turk knelt in a melted depression around him, thudding his shovel into the ground, while large crimson drops dripped from his mouth into the snow. I raised my eyes and saw the compound filling with men. The guards were unlocking all the shacks while Ding delivered a harangue through a megaphone. He had his back to us and I couldn’t understand the electronic echo of his words, but I knew the compound was receiving a lesson in the need for cooperation between prisoner and captor. Hundreds of faces stared at us through the wire, the steam from their breaths rising into the air, and I began to pray that in some way their concentrated wills could prevent Kwong from dumping that pan of bullets into our bodies.

  He walked back and forth in front of us, his eyes bright, his hand rubbing the top of the ventilated barrel. His face was as tight and flat as a shingle, and when one man slowed in his digging he jabbed the gun hard into his neck. Some of the prisoners said Kwong had been a train brakeman in North Korea before the war and that all of his family had been killed in the first American bombings. So he enjoyed his work with Americans. And now he was at his best, in his broken English, with the loading lever on the magazine pulled all the way back.

  “Deep. No smell later,” he said.

  We were down two feet, the mud and broken ice piled around us. I was sweating inside my clothes, and strange sounds lifted in chorus and disappeared in my mind. The wind polished the snow smooth in front of me, rolling small crystals across Kwong’s boots. His leather laces were tied in knots across the metal eyes. The sleet had stopped, and the shadow of my body and the extended shovel moved about as a separate, broken self on the pile of dirt and ice that grew larger on the edge of my hole.

  “I ain’t going to buy it like this,” O.J. said. “I ain’t going to do the work for these bastards.”

  “You dig deep,” Kwong said.

  “You dig it.”

  “Pick up shovel,” Kwong said.

  “Fuck you, slope.” O.J. breathed rapidly, and the moisture from his nose froze on his lip.

  “All stand, then.”

  “Mother of God, he’s going to do it,” Bertie said.

  The sun broke from behind a cloud, the first hard yellow light I had seen since I had come to the camp. My eyes blinked against the glaring whiteness of the compound and the hills. The ice on the barbed wire glittered in the light, and the hundreds of prisoners watching us beyond the fence stared upward at the sky in unison, their wan faces covered with sunshine. The stiff outlines of the buildings in the compound leaped at me and receded, and then Kwong turned his burp gun sideways so that the first burst and recoil would carry the spray of bullets across all five of us.

  “You stand!”

  We got to our feet slowly, o
ur clothes steaming in the reflected warmth of the sun, and stood motionless in front of our graves. My body shook and I wanted to urinate, and my eyes couldn’t look directly at the muzzle of his burp gun. I choked in my throat on a clot of blood and gagged on my hand. Joe Bob’s face was drawn tight against the bone, and Bertie was shaking uncontrollably. O.J.’s arms were stiff by his sides, his hands balled into fists, and there were spots of color on the back of his neck. The Turk’s heavy shoulders were bent, his ragged mouth hung open, and the blood and phlegm on his chin dripped on the front of his coat.

  “You want talk Ding now?” Kwong said, and smiled at us.

  No one spoke. The line of men behind the fence was silent, immobile, some of their heads turned away.

  “Who first?”

  “Do it, you goddamn bastard!” O.J. shouted. Then his eyes watered and he stared at his feet.

  “You first, then, cocksuck.” Kwong raised the burp gun to his shoulder and aimed into O.J.’s face, his eyes bright over the barrel, a spot of saliva in the corner of his mouth. He waited seconds while O.J.’s breath trembled in his throat, then suddenly he swung the gun on its strap and began firing from the waist into the Turk. The first burst caught him in the stomach and chest, and he was knocked backward by the impact into the grave with his arms and legs outspread. The quilted padding in his coat exploded with holes, and one bullet struck him in the chin and blew out the back of his head. His black eyes were dead and frozen with surprise before he hit the ground, and a piece of broken tooth stuck to his lower lip. Kwong stepped to the edge of the grave and emptied his gun, blowing the face and groin apart while the brass shells ejected into the snow. When the chamber locked open he pulled the pan off, inserted a fresh one in its place, and slid back the loading lever with his thumb. The other two guards began to kick snow and dirt from the edge of the grave on top of the Turk’s body.