by Glenn Taylor
After a while, Ledford climbed out again and got low. He set the butt of his rifle to his shoulder and looped the sling around opposite arm. Bellied down and zeroed in, he watched under the glow of a flare as a thin Japanese soldier ran across the ridgeline ahead. Ledford led him a little, shut an eye, and squeezed. The man buckled sharp, like a rat trap closing, and a black silhouette of blood pumped upward. Immediately, a hot sensation flooded Ledford from head to belly. A wave of sickness. A swarm of stinging blood in the vessels. He rolled back into his hole. His head lolled loose on his shoulders and he lurched twice. Killing a man had not been what he’d anticipated. “God oh God,” he said. “God oh God.”
SUNDAY-MORNING DAYBREAK BROUGHT the battle to its end. The Marines had held. Their horseshoe line bent but never broke.
Ledford walked the ridge with McDonough at his side. Neither spoke. They looked at the bodies covering the ground like a crust. Hundreds of them. Nearly all had bloated in the sun. Their eyes were open, glazed, burning yellow-white in their staredown with the sky. Some of their faces had gone red. Others were purple or a strange green-black. The smell was too much for McDonough. He cried to himself and covered his face with a handkerchief and muttered about his sinuses, blaming everything on his bad pipes. Ledford tried not to breathe. He felt for the boy from Louisiana. This was too much for him to bear. He’d known it since McDonough had pissed himself in the foxhole. The smell had gotten bad, and McDonough had apologized. Ledford had told him, “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” He’d vowed in his mind to watch over the boy.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Ledford watched McDonough climb the sandbar west of the Matanikau River. The boy turned back to stare at the water’s surface, suddenly wave-white, alive with the plunk and stir of hand grenades, mortars kicking mud. He looked Ledford in the eyes, confused, and then his face exploded. His body sat itself down on the embankment, almost like he still had control of it and had decided to rest his legs. McDonough rolled the length of the embankment into the water and bobbed there, knocking against a tree root that had caught the collar of his coverall.
After that, when Ledford went flat on his bedding at night, he saw it: McDonough’s confused face and the way it was instantly changed into something no longer a face, into something Ledford’s brain could barely comprehend. His memory held no pictures such as this one. The only thing that came close was a sight he’d beheld as a boy. He’d come upon his father on the front porch, the dog whimpering and held off the ground by the scruff of its neck. His father swung a switch at the dog’s backside, just as if it was a boy who’d done wrong. At the corner of the porch, where the chipped floorboards came together, sat a heap of ruined leather. His father’s white buckskin mitt lay there, mauled almost unrecognizable. He’d kept it oiled regular since his time in the Blue Ridge League in 1915. Now the dog had gotten a hold of it and it was ragged-edged and wet and ripped from the inside out. Same as McDonough’s face.
Ledford played a little game with his brain for six straight nights in late September of 1942. The game played out on the backs of his eyelids, where the furnace fires had set his mind on visions. Now he’d lay down, shut his eyes, and here would come McDonough’s ragged-edged no-face and his daddy’s exploded buckskin mitt and the squeal of the dog and the crack of the switch on short-haired hide. All of it would amplify against those eyelids until it became so loud that Ledford could not be still. He’d open his eyes and the sounds would quiet. But no man can hold open his eyes forever, and when they closed again, Ledford’s heart beat against his breastplate double-time, and he sat up bone straight for fear his own mind and body were killing him. On it would go like this until he got up from his bunk and swallowed sufficiently from his own pint or somebody else’s. Whiskey was the only thing to save him.
Erm Bacigalupo had won enough poker hands to own what little liquor the men had left. Some of it was Navy-smuggled, some of it was swiped from bombed-out Japanese camps. Either way, Ledford owed Erm for liquor. It was all written down on paper scraps Erm kept in his cigarette tin.
On the seventh night, the whiskey finally killed the pictures and howls in Ledford’s head. Rendered them temporarily gone.
He woke up the next day a new man. His voice had changed, gotten deeper. There was a whistle in his left ear. But from that morning on, Ledford was no longer visited by McDonough’s exploding face.
In the days to come, he saw other men suffer similar fates to McDonough’s. The enemy took to staking American heads on sharpened bamboo poles. It wasn’t long before a Marine returned the favor.
After a time, Ledford found a quiet space inside the whiskey bottle. It was the same place his daddy had once found.
Ledford listened to the woods. He watched the treetops sway. He slept easy and ate well.
Rachel’s letters saved him. He could get a hard-on just picturing the pen in her hand, moving across the paper he now held. I love you, she wrote, and he wrote it back.
OCTOBER 1942
HE AWOKE IN HIS foxhole at 0300 hours. It was black and quiet. The dreams had visited him again, but already they were gone. At the mouth of his hole, Erm crouched, smoking a cigarette. “Let’s go,” he said.
Ledford stood. He slugged hard from Erm’s flask.
In front of him, Erm covered ground in silence. They put five miles behind them at a quick clip. Stopped, breathed, slugged the flask. Tucked themselves into the ridge folds west of the Bonegi and crept, then belly-crawled toward a small camp of sleeping Japanese. The rain beat in torrents. Its sound allowed them to move unheard. Its curtain allowed them to advance unseen. Single-file, they belly-crawled, stopping now and then to survey. Each gripped his .45. The mud sucked at their bellies and hips and knees.
Behind the enemy’s line, Erm looked for sleeping pairs.
He found two such men tucked inside a makeshift tent of bamboo shoots and canvas. He peeked inside the open flap, then signaled for Ledford to stand watch. Erm slipped inside. Ledford kept his head on a swivel, once or twice glancing at the sleeping men inside. Each had dropped off while eating a tin of rice, now emptied and atop their chests. Ledford watched the slow rise and fall. He listened to the snore, recognized the exhaustion. The rain kept up. There was no sign of movement on the perimeter. Erm reached from the tent and tapped his shoulder. Your knife, he mouthed. Ledford holstered his .45 and fished the dogleg jackknife from his breast pocket. It had been his father’s before him. Pearl-handled and well made. Thackery 1 of 10 etched by hand on the flat. He’d spent hours honing the bevel on a pocketstone.
Ledford watched Erm crawl between the two men. One of them wore a thin mustache, the other was clean-shaven. They were rail thin. Young as McDonough. Ledford looked at the lids of their closed eyes, barely discernible in the low glow of their lantern, its oil nearly spent. He watched the eyeballs rolling wildly underneath. It was deep sleep. Dream sleep. He wondered for a moment what haunted these men, and then he watched Erm looking from one to the other and back. He chose the one on the left, put his hand over his mouth and drove the jackknife into his jugular vein, pulling it across the throat with all the muscle his forearm could muster. Blood came fast and heavy, surging in time with the young man’s heart. Erm waited out the few soft gurgles, his eye on the other soldier, who continued to snore. He wiped the blade across the dead man’s still chest, one side and then the next, so that it made a red X next to the empty rice ration. He folded the blade shut and handed it to Ledford.
They left the tent and maneuvered back to blackness. On their way, Ledford considered the young soldier they’d left alive. He envisioned him stretching awake come morning, wiping the sleep from his eyes and turning to face his comrade. What horror the young man would experience—what confused detriment to arise to such a sight. This type of warfare could not be measured. It was more than payback for McDonough, more than putting a chopped head on a stick. More than taking a father forever from a baby girl whose picture he carried. This was what their drill instructor back in boot had told them would win wars.
The man had sat in earshot until daybreak just to hear the screams of German boys echoing across the French forest. The awful screams. “Nothing like it for defeatin the enemy,” he’d told them. That was so long ago now. Now here he was.
Before him, Erm walked in silence and thought of his cigarettes, dry inside a tin in his foxhole.
Ledford trailed behind. The jackknife jostled in his breast pocket as he walked. He thought of his father scoring glass.
He wondered how he’d come to follow such a man as Erm. Rain beat his shoulders numb. Its sound was everything.
ON A SATURDAY, in front of the pagoda at Henderson Field, Erm Bacigalupo said something he shouldn’t have. What followed would confuse every eyewitness, for it showed them that in wartime, friends and enemies are difficult to discern.
Erm enjoyed messing with those he deemed “country.” It was a hundred-degree afternoon, the last day of October, and Erm had picked a heavyset seventeen-year-old from Mississippi who’d just sailed over from Samoa with the Eighth Regiment. Three men sat on the skinny bench against the front wall, watching Erm size up the new boy. He up-and-downed his utility uniform, fresh-issued. “Look at the sharp dresser,” Erm said, fingering the coat’s buttons. Like everybody else, he knew the boy only wore the coat to hide his baby fat, and Erm wanted him to take it off so he could make his life more miserable than it already was. “Look at the buttons on this thing. Anybody told you about the copper pawn, Country?”
“Huh-uh.” The pits of the coat were sweated straight through in circles the size of a phonograph record.
Ledford was under the pagoda’s corner, his reading spot. He closed his Bible and slid out. The Bible’s bookmark was a letter he’d gotten from Rachel that morning. Eli Mann, her grandfather, was dead at ninety-one.
Ledford propped his elbow on the dirt and watched the men on the porch.
Erm kept at it. “Copper pawn’ll give you ninety-five cents a button. You know how to get there?”
“Huh-uh.” He tried to remember what he’d been told about this kind of northern talk from this kind of northern man.
“It’s at the top of Mount Austen, but they’re only open from midnight to two a.m.”
Somebody laughed and somebody else told Erm to shut up. Ledford stood up and started to walk inside.
The boy from Mississippi said, “Mount Austin, Texas?” and everybody laughed at him. Ledford looked at the boy’s face, the way it wore a confused, familiar look. He stopped and stood behind Erm.
“This one isn’t even worth it,” Erm said. “This one’s dumber than Sinus.” Sinus was what some of the men had called McDonough, as he never shut up about his sinus problems. “You watch out, Country,” Erm said, tearing the copper buttons off the boy’s coat one by one. “Sinus ended up on a Jap spit with an apple stuck where his mouth used to be.” All but one of the men quit laughing. Erm stuck the buttons in his pocket and turned to the two still seated. “Old Sinus doesn’t have to worry about his clogged head anymore, does he?” he asked them. “Japs opened it up wide.”
Ledford grabbed Erm by the back of his neck, just as his father had done the dog that day on the porch so long ago. With a fistful of shirt-collar, he lifted the other man an inch or more from the ground and slammed him, face first, into the dirt. Then he took a knee next to the Chicagoan with a smart mouth and rolled him over, blood already thick with dust, front teeth already broken. Ledford raised his fist as high as he could and brought it down square on Erm’s face. He got in two more before they pulled him off, the other man half-asleep and gagging on sharp little pieces of tooth, bitter little rivers of blood.
NOVEMBER 1942
IF THERE WERE ANY boys among them, Bloody Ridge and Matanikau had made them men. Bayonet-range fighting will do that, quick. Ledford didn’t worry on the enemy any longer. If he kept an eye open, it was for Erm. The sureness of death’s liberation had sunk in. Someone was coming for him, and it didn’t matter much whether that someone was his comrade or his enemy.
When a man accepts that he will no doubt die, he is free to live.
The pagoda’s shade was cooler. The rice rations tasted better. The whiskey was like drinking the sun.
Ledford grew accustomed to seeing things he’d not imagined stateside. One Marine safety-pinned six enemy ears to his belt. Heads stuck on a pole were not uncommon. Erm had joked of the sight, and now Ledford knew why. It was just another thing to look at while you smoked.
Still, Erm never spoke to or looked at Ledford after having his top teeth knocked out. He didn’t speak much to anyone. He’d developed a noticeable lisp since the fight. The man’s tongue knew not where to go.
Once, he’d gotten excited about a rumor that was spreading. “The division is about to be relieved,” he’d said, lisping all the way. “We’ll be parading in Washington by Christmas.” The next day, his eyes were back to staring blank at nothing, all pupil. Black as jungle mud.
Some said Erm was shooting morphine he’d won in a stud game. Ledford felt guilty for what he’d done to the hard Mac from Chicago. In some ways, he hated the man, the secret they shared of a maneuver in darkness. In others, he admired him. It crossed Ledford’s mind to apologize, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak on much of consequence to anyone in those days of preparation. They were to push the Japanese out of the airstrip’s artillery range.
Ledford found himself uncharacteristically hungover on the morning he marched toward Kokumbona on the heels of an Air Fleet strike. Positions were to have been secured and the movement through the jungle was to have been a safe one, but something was not right. Ledford felt it in his headache and in his bones. He looked at the Marines around him. They felt it too.
It was quiet. Ten yards to his right was Erm Bacigalupo. He looked as though he might vomit. His cheekbones stuck out. His lips were in a pinch.
Then came the hard clap of a single Japanese rifle, and Ledford’s every muscle seized. He dropped and rolled toward a thicket of green, but the noise had got to him this time. A burst of machine-gun fire originated somewhere too close, and then the thump of a mortar shell blew out his eardrums. All was still. Then ringing. His vision went seesaw. He stood, and just before another mortar landed before him, he made eye contact with Erm, who was running in his direction. Then another thump, and then silence. Ledford was aware of hurtling through the air. Something had gone through him, and he lay on his back, touching at a torn spot on his chest. Air emanated to and from this spot. It had gone clear through, and he breathed from it. He was deaf, but he could hear it plain as day, in and out, pfffffffffff-hooooooo. The left shin was also torn, smoking gray wisps and spilling black blood on the ground cover.
The thought came. This is it.
But then a corpsman was there, and he stuck in a shot of morphine. And then there was a stretcher and some movement, and then nothing.
The night ahead was something Ledford would never forget. He lay in a wounded dugout, eight feet deep, at Henderson Field. The heat inside the earth there was too much to take, and the men were packed shoulder to shoulder. They screamed. The smell induced gagging. Ledford tried to keep deaf, but his eardrums were healing. He tried to shut his eyes, but the swirls on the black stage of his eyelids erupted like they never had. His stomach jumped and his throat crawled up his tongue. He breathed through his mouth, labored, like a dog.
Once, before passing out, he turned and saw Erm, three men away from him, his forehead wrapped in bloody gauze. He stared at Ledford, and a corpsman came by and stuck Erm with morphine, and he smiled, toothless.
The next morning they were flown out to a Navy hospital. Espiritu Santo it was called. It was there that Erm said to Ledford, “I told you we’d be home by Christmas for the parade.”
The USS Solace carried the men to New Zealand. On board, an infantryman younger than Ledford cried with joy in his bunk. Everyone ignored him. They all spoke upwards, to the ceiling. Loud. Some perched on an elbow to see their surroundings. It didn’t seem real that they could be o
ut of the jungle.
“Think they’ll have any KJ billboards up back home?” somebody said.
“What’s a KJ billboard?” It was the teary kid.
“Ain’t you had your eyes open doggie?” Ledford said. He was drunk and delirious. “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. There’s one plastered across every piece of plywood in the Solomons.”
The kid shivered. Jungle disease was in his blood. “I’m done with killin,” he said. “Japs or no Japs.” He looked down at his shaking fingertips. “I just want my fingernails and hair to start growing again,” he said. As dysentery came, such growing went. The jungle blood could rot you inside out.
“Yeah,” Ledford said. “You’re done with it all right doggie. You go on and turn soft. Let those nails and hair grow real long.”
A couple Marines laughed. Another one said, “Damned pansy Army dogs.”
Erm Bacigalupo said, “Put some panties on while you’re at it and bend over.” Everyone laughed hearty. There was no longer any room for soft. A code needed to be kept. Among men who’d done what they’d all done together, none could ever speak of going soft again. To do so would invite their nightmares to the waking world.
That night, Ledford made his way on crutches to Erm’s bunk. He apologized for knocking his teeth out. “I’m truly sorry for it,” he said. He held out his hand and they shook. Ledford pledged that once stateside, he would buy his friend some new teeth.
AUGUST 1945
IT WAS MONDAY, the sixth. The grandstand at Washington Park Race Track was filled. Elbow to elbow they sat and waited, Southside Chicagoans and out-of-towners together. They’d come for the match race between Busher and Durazna, for which the purse was twenty-five grand.
Under the grandstand overhang, Ledford and Erm swilled from their respective flasks. They studied their short forms in silence. A fat lady in a flowered hat sat down in front of them and Erm made a farting sound. She turned, frowned, and fanned herself with a program. “Excuse you,” Erm said to her. He flashed his smile and winked at her. His teeth were white as ivory, set solid and paid in full. When the woman left to find a more suitable seat, Erm hollered, “Keep fannin honey, you don’t know from hot.” He stood for no reason and wobbled a little on his feet. He sat back down. “Did you see that broad? She was wide as she was tall.”