by Alyson Hagy
Then. Trip flares fountained all along their front. There were bugle blasts. Torrents of cursing. Shouting. There were Chinese whistle shrieks that became blue flames inside his ears. He never remembered crawling back to his position, though he remembered Pilcher’s face, how Pilcher’s eyes were blistered with the acid wash of betrayal. He had to shove Pilcher out of the gunner’s position where he’d settled himself in sacrifice. He had to make them both believe that he was rock solid again. They began to fire, late, and the gun was sluggish in the cold, but they reaped the shadows that moved toward them, rank by rank. Their muzzle belched its bright orange flame of invitation. The grenadiers would come for them very soon. That was how the Chinese targeted a machine gun.
Mortars began to plummet into their lines, sizzling dirt and ice, and there was flash after flash from the poorly made Chinese concussion grenades that blinded them for a second or two but inevitably fell short. Pilcher linked belt after belt of ammunition as they swept the field, pivoting from stake to stake, cross-stitching their tracers with the red lines from Spoonhauer’s faraway gun. There were so many Chinese. Marine mortars shoveled the parading men into waist-high piles, and still they came, the men from the rear picking up the weapons of the fallen. When Pilcher unpinned a grenade, Adams knew some of the Chinese were finally getting through, getting closer. Which was why neither of them saw Hobbs fish-flopping out of his hole.
Then the gun stopped. It stuttered only once, its barrel steaming like the back of an exhausted animal, before it coughed up a last licking tongue of flame. Pilcher released the belt and cleared the firing mechanism, but the gun wasn’t jammed, and they both knew it. There was still covering fire from Spoonhauer’s squad, so they tried again, but the gun was down—too hot, too cold, or both.
He set Pilcher above him with an M1 and several clips. He was supposed to keep his hands covered, but he had no choice. He took the trigger housing off before he removed his gloves because he didn’t want to touch the gun’s cooked metal until he had to. Then he stripped off his gloves and put the flashlight he kept in his pants pocket between his teeth. Except the flashlight, too, had frozen. With nerveless fingers he felt blindly for the pin he suspected had been bent by the torque of the firing mechanism. He found it. If the ruined pin burned his fingertips, he couldn’t feel it.
The air above them was torn with riptides of light, and there was more noise than his ears could hear. Pilcher hovered over him, saying something with his blackened face.
Okay, Adams signed. He understood. The line was fraying, and they needed more covering fire to give them time to put a new pin in the gun. Pilcher would go get more men. He mouthed three words to Adams. Wait for me.
Adams nodded. And he drew the German pistol he’d bought in Wonsan.
Pilcher rose from his rabbit hunter’s crouch, his M1 jumping like a compass needle. But, after just a few steps, he stumbled. He seemed to leap in the direction of Greenbaugh’s hole as if he meant to leap, then he collapsed into a scrap of shadow. His frozen feet, that’s what Adams wanted it to be. He wanted Pilcher to stand up after tripping on his frozen feet. But Pilcher never moved. Adams felt Pilcher’s rise and fall in the parabola of his own pulse. He swung his unholstered pistol and shot into the blunt muzzle fire of a Chinese burp gunner. He fired until his clip was empty. When he hunkered to reload, he realized the long, toneless screech in his ears was his own.
He wasn’t going to last long by himself, so he began to feel it again—the greed for living he’d felt when he’d beaten Hobbs, when he’d begun to sense it was his own brutal clarity of purpose that had summoned the Chinese. Some men were weak, some were strong. Some men were meant to be outnumbered. He was counting his grenades by touch when a dark shape tried to lizard itself into the back of his hole. He cocked his pistol even as his bones filled with a venomous thrill. It would be Sutherland. That was only right. Sutherland had risen from the aid tent and yanked the needles out of his arms and thundered up that godforsaken hill to help him, to tell him what to do.
But it wasn’t Sutherland. It was Hobbs.
Bald, bloody-mouthed, twitching like a broken-backed dog that’s found its ditch: it was Hobbs. His uniform was plastered with substances that were moist and clumped. His mouth hung wide open. Adams kept his pistol raised. He wasn’t sure he recognized the man in his sights.
Hobbs was sledding a fat Browning Automatic behind him, dragging it like it was a piece of salvaged timber. Adams knew the B.A.R was a precious opportunity; it was a weapon he could use, yet he kept himself from snatching at the gun. He didn’t want to be rushed by hope, not ever again. And he didn’t want responsibility for Hobbs. He turned and fired an unconsidered clip from his pistol into the area his machine gun was supposed to cover. The Chinese had, for the moment, backed out of range.
“He, he, he, he.” Hobbs stiff-armed the B.A.R., trying to angle it against his legs like a crutch. And he was saying something, or trying to. A close mortar drop blew pulverized rock into the air, and while Adams swiped a hand across his face, tasting blood and cinder, he saw that Hobbs had barely flinched. His eyes were melted wide open.
Adams made himself reach out for the other man, his friend. He waited for the electric hatred to spark again between them, but he didn’t feel it this time, he felt something watery and dwindling instead. Hobbs’s body tilted into his own, and it became as shapeless as a wool sack, the great canvas kind they’d filled at the Cow Creek shearing sheds when they were young. He probed Hobbs’s neck for a pulse, his belt and pockets for ammunition. Hobbs was alive, but he carried nothing with him, not even a bandage. It was as if he’d been picked clean.
Rifle fire increased along the line. The Chinese, Adams guessed, had finally found a weak point. They would gush through it like oil. He touched his last two grenades, then rubbed the Browning as if to give it some life. One more genie, one last bottle. The words came to him in Sutherland’s blunt, currentless voice. He rested the gun across his thighs and reached forward to slip the hood of Hobbs’s parka over his shaved and naked head. Hobbs had come back to him, the saboteur, the fool. He’d nearly ruined everything, and then he’d tried to bring some kind of salvation to Adams, as if there was anything left on that damnable hill that might save either one of them.
“He, he, he, he.” Hobbs’s gashed mouth continued to gulp around a single syllable. Adams tried to prop him in the deepest portion of the pit. It was, he thought, the same as being alone.
He swung the B.A.R. over the pale crown of burlap bags. As soon as he sighted movement, he pulled the Browning’s trigger and fired a short burst. That marked him, by damn. He could see white-clad figures duckwalking toward Greenbaugh’s position, which now lay quiet and smoldering. The Chinese would get to him next. He felt a sifted desire to say something final to C.D., something clear and practical formed from the boyhood lives that were all that would ever give their disposable bodies a name. But he didn’t know what the right words might be. As he scanned the landscape in front of him, he saw the first flowers of a white phosphorus barrage bloom their way uphill. The barrage was on a line with their gun pit. Adams thought about the white fire of the winter sun over Bell Butte. He thought about the red petals of his guts blossoming on a slab of Korean ice. He fired the last few bullets in the Browning, then dropped it. Come and get me, then. There was no reason to hide anymore. Thousands of the bastards. They needed to know who he was before they killed him, who he’d tried to be. Not taken alive. But when he tried to stand tall in the gun pit, when he tried to make himself into a target they’d remember, he got snagged. Tripped. Thwarted. He was flattened onto the cartridge-covered bottom of the pit. Let me go, damn it, you need to let me go. Those were the only words he could scream into his mouth as the coward C.D. Hobbs grappled the two of them together, and the world they knew went flat and scorched and bright.
Adams pried himself out of the ground. His eyes and lungs were seared shut from smoke. He didn’t know who he was, where he was. Blind, deaf, spinning
in an inferno. He would never know the name of the marine who dragged him to the aid station. The man did not have a face, only the steady, out-of-place strength of a plow horse. The same man carried Hobbs, peeled and burning, off the line and left him with the overwhelmed corpsman who was manning a makeshift aid station on the backside of the hill. The corpsman, whose name was Wade, shed tears as he worked. Adams remembered this. The corpsman was sheltered from the wind by a wall of dead marines, his forearms were jellied with frozen blood, the Chinese were shelling the hilltop, and he was down to his last ampule of morphine. He wept tears of terrible frustration. But when he saw that Hobbs’s stomach hadn’t been ripped open by the blast, he stuck that final ampule into his own blackened mouth so the painkiller inside it would thaw.
“Hold him hard,” he ordered Adams as he struggled with Hobbs’s clothes looking for an unfried patch of skin. Adams held Hobbs hard. He gave Wade the Baker knife. The blade was slim and sharp, and the corpsman slashed an opening in Hobbs’s smoking parka. Adams watched plummeting flakes of snow melt against Hobbs’s melted skin while Hobbs bucked and writhed until the morphine made his pain unreal. “Get him out of here,” the corpsman shouted, “while you’ve got a chance.” And Adams tried to get them out of there. But his numbed feet would not allow him to walk upright. He dragged himself and Hobbs to the base of a thorny bush. It was as far as he could go. He curled under the branches of the bush like a wounded pup and waited for his own tears.
Here they come.
Here they come.
But no one came for him.
Nobody walked or crawled off Hill 1281 until the next morning. That’s the story the marines would tell. The whole damn position had been surrounded. The Americans, outnumbered a dozen to one, fought with their rifle butts and fists until dawn.
But a stretcher bearer somehow came for Hobbs, creeping through the smoke and the night, a stretcher bearer who looked familiar and who worked alone. Adams asked the corpsman, Wade, if he knew the marine with the reddish beard and the rosary wrapped in his bandolier, but the corpsman was dead from a shrapnel wound to the neck. He could not answer Adams’s questions. Neither could the reinforcements from Able Company, the ones who poked at him with their frosted bayonets because they assumed he was dead and rigged with booby traps. It was a new day then, an hour of bloodless silence in the cold. The first slow spill of sunlight chastened itself behind the scrim of winter. The dead were laid out in rows. Adams hobbled off Hill 1281 on the arms of marines who looked older than any men he’d even seen. He had been spared. His friend was gone, no one knew how or when. He and Hobbs, all of Easy Company, all of America’s army, had been severed by the jaws of Chosin.
Trumpet Bell Land & Sheep Company
Baggs, Wyoming
1975
AUGUST WAS SWELTERING. THE ENTIRE MONTH WAS AN unbroken invasion of heat and crickets. And Charlotte gave them no warning. She hitchhiked from San Francisco to Wamsutter on the interstate, then caught a ride south with a road-survey crew that politely drove her all the way to the front door of the house. Charlotte found Maria Delores in the kitchen scrubbing a skillet. During her years away from the ranch, Charlotte had developed a skeptical attitude about her brother’s romantic activities. She assumed Maria was Adams’s latest short-time woman, and she began to act badly. She spoke Spanish well enough to offend Maria Delores a dozen different ways, so when Adams finally came in from the fields with Hobbs and Maria’s husband, Omero, all of them in high rubber boots flecked with the legs and wings of interfering crickets, Maria removed her apron and went to sit in her husband’s quarter-ton truck. The three men immediately understood it was their duty to repair the invisible damage they smelled in the air that also smelled of the tortillas and beef and beans laid out for lunch.
Adams began by embracing his sister. “I don’t believe it,” he said, surprise and an unexpected wariness mixing in the capsule of his chest. “I don’t believe what I’m seeing.” Hobbs embraced Charlotte too. Then Adams introduced the silent Omero, saying that he and Maria Delores were lifesavers since it was hay season and a very busy time on the ranch.
Charlotte was clearly mortified by her mistake, though she fought the embarrassment that striped her face and made no apology for it. Adams could see she wasn’t ready to admit that her tangled feelings about coming home to the Trumpet Bell had already led her to be cruel.
He said, “I am amazed. Why don’t you sit down with us, have some lunch.” It wasn’t in him to postpone an afternoon of work just because Charlotte had turned up with a stuffed seaman’s bag stenciled with the name of some pawnshop sailor. Even though he hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, he wasn’t going to chase after her with special treatment. They all sat at the chrome-legged kitchen table, and Adams served the lunch, except to Charlotte who swore she wasn’t hungry. They ate in silence until Hobbs started in with his questions.
“How was your trip, Charlotte? Did you see a lot of rain?”
Charlotte said she hadn’t been rained on.
“Did you leave things good in sunny California? Are the oranges out there ripe to eat? Did you stop to visit the ocean?”
They were plain, inoffensive questions uttered between damp swallows of tortilla and milk, accompanied by Hobbs’s cheerfully bobbing head, but Adams would later wonder if it got away from him right there at that first meal. Was Charlotte so stung by her mistake with Maria Delores that she shied toward Hobbs like a spooked filly? Did C.D. know what he was reaching for when he reached out to Charlotte? Maybe what happened later wouldn’t have happened if they both had been more alert. Maybe Charlotte would have reserved her sharpest knives for him and for Buren, her brothers, which seemed to be her intention at the time.
They finished the lunch and left the dishes stacked near the sink before going to the porch to have cigarettes. Hobbs mentioned that Charlotte’s old bay horse, Redrock, was still alive, and he introduced Charlotte to the pair of collies, Nan and Sol, who were lolling in the slim shade of the house. Nan and Sol were in some half-remembered way descended from the dogs Charlotte had known as a girl.
“I’m glad you’ve got good dogs,” she said, her smile finally relaxing into a genuine curve.
Adams found himself watching her as he gave her one of his cigarettes. She had the freckled, kid-glove skin of their mother, the kind of skin that retained a fine array of wrinkles around the mouth and eyes but never lost its shine. Her red-blond hair had given up the curl of childhood and now lay sleek against her small skull. She wore the hair long, bound at her neck in a clasp of turquoise and silver. There was lots of jewelry on one wrist—most of it strings of simple, colored beads—and none on the other. Adams admired his sister’s layers of cotton vests and skirts, especially the blues and purples that deepened the pale concentration of her upturned eyes.
She had been married in California, he had even met her husband once, but he thought her arrival at the Trumpet Bell might mean the husband was out of the picture. It didn’t matter. He would accept whatever stories she chose to tell about herself. He would help her if she asked for help. The uneasiness he’d felt at her arrival was what he always felt prior to a change of some sort. Charlotte was his sister, the undeterred creature who had once followed him to every far-flung corner of the ranch and placed on him her earnest, sometimes petulant, demands. Her years as a teacher in California might have reshaped her in some ways, but he sensed the woman he saw in front of him would still be difficult to deny.
He said, “You can set up in your old room. Maria Delores can get you some sheets. It should be fairly clean in there.”
She said, “I’ll handle it. I won’t bother anybody with extra work. I’m not exactly a guest.” She smiled and patted the wrist above his work-harrowed hand. She left her hand on his as she ground her cigarette into the wooden planks of the porch with her rope-soled sandal.
When the three men returned from the fields later that evening, they could see Charlotte had been working with the horses. One of
them, Redrock, was still wet from exercise. Maria Delores was back in her husband’s truck, but that wasn’t unusual. She often waited there for Omero at the end of the day. Adams went to his own truck and took from his cowhide wallet the money he owed Omero and Maria Delores plus cash for the next week’s groceries.
“We done good today,” he said to Omero as he handed off the tight fold of bills. “I don’t think my sister meant to be such a surprise.”
Omero and Maria Delores nodded, their faces guarded and polite.
“I appreciate your help on the groceries, Maria. I’ll make sure you’re queen of the kitchen from now on.”
Maria touched her neck just above the collarbone. “Gracias, Señor.”
“Gracias to the two of you for getting us through the day.”
The couple drove out the drive and headed south toward a trailer Adams owned near Piney Butte. Although Adams had offered to move the trailer closer to headquarters, Omero hadn’t accepted the offer. He and Maria Delores liked their privacy. Now that Charlotte had arrived in all her glory, Adams thought the arrangement might be for the best.