by Alyson Hagy
“We don’t know what the Chinks will do.” Adams spoke with the vehemence that had been stalking him for days, ever since he’d seen that Sutherland was sick. “We just need to get the gun ready. Somebody will decide what comes next.”
Pilcher spat, or tried to. Adams knew they were both thinking the same thing: the time for sensible decisions was long past. He watched as the saliva that pooled on Pilcher’s parka sleeve began to freeze. “Too damn cold for me to worry about it,” Pilcher said. “Get shot up here, I won’t even bleed.”
“You won’t have time to bleed,” Adams said, thinking the Chinese were smart to let the weather do their job for them. “I’ll be kicking your nuts up your spine for being so stupid.”
Pilcher sniffed at the dry, frigid air as if there was a chance he’d smell something good, or at least important. “I didn’t think it could get worse.”
“It can always get worse.”
“You sound like my mama. And all I’d like from her right now—or you—is a mess of dumplings baked with a big, fat, corn-fed hen. I could eat that meal every day of my life. When I get back, I just might.”
They swung around, the gun anchored to Pilcher’s bowed back, and they walked to where Adams had begun to construct the gun emplacement he was supposed to share with Sutherland. Now the pit was his. He looked over at Greenbaugh who was still scratching at his hole, rhythmically, blankly. That’s how it was, he thought. Endurance was its own cruel victory. Every day they had less food, less shelter, less momentum. Soon, one side or the other would have nothing left to fight with or for.
He helped Pilcher ease the machine gun and its waxed garments to the ground. The sun was burning toward the end of its wick. There was too much left to do—a perimeter to clear, tripwire flares to string along the edge of their defenses. Adams stared at the bipod that was lashed to the back of his deflated field pack.
“You know what’s got to happen, don’t you? Now that you’re practically a corporal.”
Adams looked at Pilcher who was rewinding his hand-knit muffler. The mouth he covered was so skewed it looked mean.
“Get every marine you can. Don’t stay in Suds’s asshole and feel sorry for yourself. Don’t wait for the captain to forget us again. Get Hobbs and Begnini on up here.”
“He’s no good for this,” Adams said, thinking of Hobbs, his jaws locking around the words. “I don’t want him here.”
“He don’t got to be good. He’s just got to hold a gun and be on our side. That’s all you can ask for.”
“No. He’s more trouble than he’s worth.” It was easy for him, simple, to shape the words that Sutherland would have shaped.
Pilcher’s yellowed eyes went shrewd with pity. “Well, damn it all then. Whatever you say. But I wouldn’t have picked you as one who didn’t give a man his second chance.”
Adams thought of the last time he’d actually spoken to Hobbs. C.D. didn’t even pretend to muster with the squad anymore. They no longer ate or slept in the same tent. But they’d both been in one of the warming tents the evening before. The medical officers wanted the men to spend at least ten minutes of every two hours in a tent to reduce the effects of frostbite. The heat from the roaring stoves had felt like a salve to Adams, a thick blanket of comfort, even though his feet throbbed so hard with thawing pains that it was all he could do not to cry out. Then C.D. had ruined everything by approaching him and talking to him in jokes. “How you doing, Fremont? What about it?” His voice sounded clownish and shrill in the baked confines of the tent. “You think Old Etch would say it’s cold enough for us out there? Or Gene? I can hear Uncle Gene telling how this is pussy work for men from Wyoming. Bad weather is what we own. We’re used to this kind of cold.”
“Nobody is used to this.” Adams kept his eyes on his wooden feet because they made him feel hard-hearted. He didn’t want to hear from Hobbs. He hated that Hobbs was saying things about the two of them in front of other men. He hated that his body was acknowledging pain. “Nobody should be used to this. Why don’t you shut your mouth.”
“But, Fremont, it’s me talking. You don’t….” He never heard the end of Hobbs’s sentence. C.D.’s voice was drowned out by the puling cough of the flu-ridden marine who sat between them. When Adams next raised his eyes in the murk of the tent, his friend was gone.
“I don’t think C.D. would do us any good,” he said to Pilcher, almost pleading. “He’s used up.”
“Ain’t we all,” Pilcher wheezed. “I just hope the same is true for the Chinks.”
Sutherland had known how to do it. Sutherland had sampled them and raged at them and even blindsided them because Sutherland believed that hatreds were the only glues that held in the end. Hatred for the Communist Chinese. Hatred for niggling officers and the Tokyo command that served up marines like fodder. Hatred for the lack of supplies and ammunition. Sutherland believed all of those things had to smolder and burn within a man in order to make him fight. At his best, Sutherland reminded Adams of the ranch cook Basilio who had run so fierce and scorched at his job. Basilio had lasted at the Trumpet Bell for more than fifteen years until he suddenly began to steal things—belt buckles, spare socks, harmonicas—from the younger herders, Mexicans and Basques far beneath him in responsibility and age. Basilio had been sent away. Nobody offered an explanation for his sudden dishonesty except Old Etchepare who said that disgrace eventually came from heaven to all men.
Adams tried to fill another burlap bag with snow and dirt. The gun pit wasn’t going to be finished before dark. And he was so tired. The news that Sutherland had been taken from them had brought on a dense, pressing need for sleep.
The wavering notes of a child’s song echoed through his weariness.
“I’m working … on the railroad … just to pass … the time away.”
The voice. The tune. They were so weirdly familiar. Adams spun to his left, then to his right, turning fast amid the freshly falling snowflakes that swept across the unfinished marine defenses like scraps of shredded paper.
“… working on the railroad….”
The constant, clawing wind brought tears to his eyes. His feet felt as if they belonged to another creature, something with thick and distant hooves. But he knew what he had heard. He knew that song from long, long ago. Hobbs was out there.
He found the man about one hundred yards to the north. Hobbs was chopping at the frozen earth with a dented entrenching tool as if he couldn’t be stopped. Pilcher was nearby, admiring Hobbs’s handiwork. It was clear to Adams that Pilcher had made it his business to reassign Hobbs to the squad. Greenbaugh had also joined the group, taking a break from his own futile digging. Greenbaugh was staring—half in worry, half in awe—at the machine-like consistency of Hobbs’s digging.
“Be so cold tonight, we’re gonna have to piss on the guns to keep ‘em thawed. I thought we could use an extra pisser.” Pilcher tried to wink one of his swollen eyes at Adams.
“Jesus,” said Greenbaugh.
Hobbs halted his entrenching tool midswing and muttered a few words.
“Huh? What?” Just hearing the soft voice, especially its out-of-place yearning, upset Adams.
“Check your feet?”
He hadn’t checked his feet, despite the captain’s orders. He hadn’t had time. None of them had. But he slid his mittens off for Hobbs, and his latest pair of gloves. His fingers were badly torn around the nails despite the application of gun grease. But they weren’t blue. The sight of them cracked Hobbs’s face with a strange smile.
“You’re doing a good job there, C.D.” Adams didn’t know what else to say.
“Help you in the pit?” Hobbs asked. His irises were as mottled as storm clouds.
Adams stalled. Hobbs couldn’t have asked a worse question. “I’ll detail assignments after the flares are laid.”
“What?” Greenbaugh straightened up. “You’re going to keep him with you, aren’t you?”
But Adams wasn’t going to keep C.D. in the gun pit as his ass
istant. He couldn’t risk it. He had to have somebody with glue.
“I said I’ll square the assignments later.”
“You just squared them.” Greenbaugh showed Adams the underbelly of his eyes. “You’re going to take Ry and stick me with your friend.”
“Come on, Greenie. We’re all in this together.”
“Sure,” said Greenbaugh. “And I’m in it with that.” He pointed his shovel blade at Hobbs who had removed his own gloves and was using his fingers to harvest the snot icicles that hung above his lip. He was eating them.
“Knock it off, C.D.”
Hobbs gave some quick yips, almost like a collie’s.
“Fuck,” said Greenbaugh.
“I’ll work on it,” Adams said.
Hobbs whispered something into the palm of his bare hand.
“What?” hissed Adams, feeling bewildered and besieged.
Hobbs bit into his hand, then he took a hard, immobile look at each of the three men. He pointed over their aligned shoulders. “Somebody wants a ride on the railroad.”
“Jesus. He’s a complete loon.” Greenbaugh dropped his shovel.
“Just to pass the time of day.”
Adams was still trying to decipher the words that had come from the dry sieve of Hobbs’s vocal chords when Pilcher stopped him. Pilcher was staring east, toward Chosin Reservoir. The weather had cleared for a moment. The falling sun bathed the neighboring array of hills in a warm, golden light. Basking in that light was rank upon rank of neatly assembled soldiers. Every hill they could now see was thatched with waiting Chinese.
Adams looked at his watch dial. The captain had put the company on 50 percent alert, so Pilcher lay curled behind him in an arrested state that might be called sleep. It was Adams’s first rotation on watch, and all he knew for certain was that the sky had become a wide-mouthed kettle filled with an endless, purifying cold. The moisture in his breath froze and fell upon the flanges of the gun like the chaff of stars. There was fighting to the west. He could hear the battle sounds and see the toylike flash of distant mortars and the tiny pendants of the flares. The Chinese were no longer hiding in their caves or wherever it was they hid when the spotter planes looked for them during the day. They’d revealed themselves before sunset. They appeared prepared to attack. He remembered what Devlin—prowling, questing Devlin—had told them just before they’d chivvied up to march toward the Yalu. Devlin said, “There’s only one road to this Chosin and the river. If I’m the gook general, I use every night I got trying to cut that road.”
It was time to rouse Pilcher. They both needed to change their socks. He peered across the patchwork of rock and dirt and snow toward Hobbs and Greenbaugh’s hole. Hobbs liked to have help with his shoe pacs. He’d told Greenbaugh that, how Hobbs might need a little help with his feet. Greenbaugh was a good squad member, but Adams suspected it would be a long time before Greenbaugh did anything extra to take care of C.D. Hobbs.
He shook Pilcher awake. Once sleep overtook a man on Hill 1281, if it did, it was difficult to convince that man to come back into his suffering body. He unzipped Pilcher’s sleeping bag and shoved it from his shoulders. Then he whispered to Pilcher to grab onto his rifle. He couldn’t see anything except a pale medallion of skin above the light and dark stripes of Pilcher’s knotted muffler, but his assistant was moving.
He crawled out of his own bag, which had been zipped to the waist, and began to unlace his knee-high shoe pacs. The pacs were warm, but not ventilated. This meant they had to keep changing their socks or their feet might freeze solid in their own moisture. He drew his extra socks from the front of his wool overpants, cursing how awkward he felt. He was so cold he couldn’t coordinate his arms with his legs. When he yanked his shoe pacs off, his teeth began to chatter until his jaw rang with their tune.
Pilcher wasn’t doing so well, either. He’d slept with his pacs off, which was good for reducing moisture but bad if a fight started in a hurry. Guys had lived through firefights like that, bootless, only to hear a surgeon tell them they were going to lose their feet. That’s what Hebert, the corpsman, said. Hebert was always bugging them about their feet. Adams signaled to Pilcher, with his teeth ground together, that he’d help him with his laces when he needed it.
Pilcher nodded. He was still groggy, but he pulled his feet clear of his bag. He fished a pair of socks from beneath the coil of his muffler and handed them to Adams. Adams tried to work fast, priding himself on any remnant of dexterity. He pulled off Pilcher’s socks, one by one, as he cradled both bony heels in his lap. He was about to massage Pilcher’s toes—captain’s orders—when he realized strips of skin had peeled away from Pilcher’s feet with his socks. There was a smell, too, one he recognized above the shared rankness of sweat and smeared shit. The sweetness of rot. He did what he could with Pilcher’s toes, drew on the fresh socks, then shoved the feet into the cold, dry shoe pacs. He worked the stiff laces through the eyelets and up the length of Pilcher’s ankles and calves. Pilcher needed to go to the aid tent at first light. But Adams wasn’t going to tell him that now.
He looked again across the ransacked fifteen yards to the other hole. No shadows. No stirring. But they couldn’t be doing well. Nobody could be, not a Chink peasant or an American marine. He watched Pilcher work himself onto his knees. The other man was sobbing under the layers of his shirts and coats. That’s what it took, weeping. The machine gun rested above them, its barrel pointing into emptiness. The damn thing might not even work at twenty degrees below zero. Sutherland had, just that morning, lubricated the gun with powder because no version of oil or grease or even hair tonic was trustworthy in these temperatures. But Sutherland hadn’t said what to do if the gun wouldn’t fire. He hadn’t acted like it was a possibility.
Adams wasn’t sure it mattered. The gun was the base of fire for their scraggly segment of the line. If the gun went down, they would all surely go down with it.
Two a.m. He was back on watch after an hour when his mind had squatted in a gray and murky place without moving. When Pilcher slapped him into consciousness, the first thing he recognized was a swollen tongue that tasted of bloody rags. His tongue. He sucked some chlorinated water from the ice block of his canteen and gave the high sign to the lieutenant who was making his rounds. Pilcher crawled back into his bag. So Adams was among the first to hear them, the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of footsteps that ground the crusted snow to powder.
Footsteps. He squinted into the killing wind that blew down the barrel of the gun. His eyes shed solid tears. Footsteps, marching. Then came the sound of a Chinese officer singing cadence. His voice was a ghost voice, alone and echoing, and it soared toward Adams’s ears like a dark and ravenous bird. “Nobody live forever. You die! Nobody live forever. You die!” A ghost voice in English. Adams felt himself shrink into the close harbor of his clothes.
Ten divisions of seasoned soldiers. That’s what the prisoners at Sudong had promised. And Easy Company was defending Hill 1281 with fewer than two hundred men.
Here they come.
Here they come.
Here they come.
Warnings rose from hole to hole, then throttled themselves to whispers. Adams took one hand off the gun and pressed his helmet down onto his head as Pilcher kicked clear of his bag. Adams made himself swivel and move, made himself force moisture down his mistreated throat. The ammunition belts were ready. He had a pistol, a few grenades. He couldn’t see a god damn thing yet, only hear them, god damn the Chinese for being so ready for this terrain and temperature. Was Pilcher ready? He elbowed Pilcher in the thickness of his upper arm. He felt the solid brace of Pilcher’s feet and the full flex of his tendons as if they were his own.
Then he heard something else, a thin thread of music spinning itself below the Chinese officer’s taunt. “No-bo-dy-live-you-die. No-bo-dy-live-you-die!” There was another song in the air. “Dinah, won’t you blow? Dinah, won’t you blow? Dinah, won’t you blow your h-h-horn?” Adams’s chest went as numb as
his face. He knew exactly where the song was coming from.
He didn’t even think about it. He just left Pilcher and the gun. He rolled up and over the pitiful sandbags not filled with sand, then crawled left on the blunt points of his elbows and knees. The jitters, the shakes—they all had them. But he couldn’t let Hobbs go full shatter now. He couldn’t. He was the one responsible. Don’t do it, he shouted into the endless cavern of his own head, Don’t sing so they can find us. Don’t make that god damn noise. He knew if Sutherland had been there, he would have slit C.D. Hobbs’s throat without a thought.
He jackknifed into the hole where Greenbaugh was crouched at the front rim, a still life of watchfulness and horror. Hobbs was cross-legged in the black bottom of the hole, invisible except for the bobbing white root of his head. He’d taken off his helmet and hats. Adams grabbed for the handle of Hobbs’s parka hood. As they touched, he was filled with a roaring, insatiable anger that seemed to come from a deep, craving place far below his wished-for discipline. You are not worth it. Those were the words that came to him as he blindly struck out at Hobbs again and again and again. Anger. Sutherland’s glue. He struck at Hobbs’s mouth because it was so unprotected and moving. You’ll get us killed. He felt the notches of Hobbs’s teeth. He felt the puniness of Hobbs’s wagging neck.
That puniness so infuriated him that he reached into the pocket that held the honed Baker knife he’d kept since he was a boy. He would do it if he had to, he really would. He would make Hobbs be quiet. He whispered savagely to Hobbs that he had to stop singing, but Hobbs didn’t stop. It was as though he wanted to be saved from his own uselessness. The wish was right there in the quivering nakedness of his eyes. It was in the tuneless chime of his voice. Adams clamped a hand over Hobbs’s moving mouth, but Hobbs kept singing. As Adams opened the blade of the Baker knife, something black and smooth brushed across his vision, and he believed he saw Hobbs tilt his jaw upward to give him and his blade a better angle.
The thunk, thunk, thunk of the marine mortars surprised him. The illumination rounds went up first, and they backlit the human warp and weft that was about to blanket Easy Company: thousands of Chinese soldiers in perfect ranks, more than Adams had imagined in his worst, elastic nightmares. “You die! You die!” The Chinese officer exhorted his men while Adams watched the knife waver in his enraged hand. He backed away from Hobbs. But his intentions slipped slender and sharp into his blood like an inoculation. He should have felt fear as he lay exposed beneath the fading flares of the battlefield, but he didn’t. He was not afraid. What he felt was a greedy resilience, a hurtling desire to stand straight up so the Chinese could see him. Come at me, you bastards. I’m here. It was as if everything that had once thrived within Hobbs and within himself had blended into a tensile, mocking anger. Hobbs became invisible to him. Hobbs was forgotten. He recognized nothing inside himself except Sutherland’s admonition: Don’t let them take you alive.