by Mitch Albom
“There’s the birthday boy,” his mother crows when he rambles into the room. He wears a button-down white shirt and a blue tie, which pinches his muscular neck A grunt of hellos and raised beer glasses come from the assembled visitors, family, friends, pier workers. Eddie’s father is playing cards in the corner, in a small cloud of cigar smoke.
“Hey, Ma, guess what?” Joe yells out. “Eddie met a girl last night.”
“Oooh. Did he?”
Eddie feels a rush of blood.
“Yeah. Said he’s gonna marry her.”
“Shut yer trap,” Eddie says to Joe.
Joe ignores him. “Yep, he came into the room all google-eyed, and he said, ‘Joe, I met the girl I’m gonna marry!’ “
Eddie seethes. “I said shut it!”
“What’s her name, Eddie?” someone asked.
“Does she go to church?”
Eddie goes to his brother and socks him in the arm.
“Owww!”
“Eddie!”
“I told you to shut it!”
Joe blurts out, “And he danced with her at the Stard—!”
Whack.
“Oww!”
“SHUT UP!”
“Eddie! Stop that!!”
Even the Romanian cousins look up now—fighting they understand—as the two brothers grab each other and flail away, clearing the couch, until Eddie’s father puts down his cigar and yells, “Knock it off, before I slap both of ya’s.”
The brothers separate, panting and glaring. Some older relatives smile. One of the aunts whispers, “He must really like this girl.”
Later, after the special steak has been eaten and the candles have been blown out and most of the guests have gone home, Eddie’s mother turns on the radio. There is news about the war in Europe, and Eddie’s father says something about lumber and copper wire being hard to get if things get worse. That will make maintenance of the park nearly impossible.
“Such awful news,” Eddie s mother says. “Not at a birthday.”
She turns the dial until the small box offers music, an orchestra playing a swing melody, and she smiles and hums along. Then she comes over to Eddie, who is slouched in his chair, picking at the last pieces of cake. She removes her apron, folds it over a chair, and lifts Eddie by the hands.
“Show me how you danced with your new friend,” she says.
“Aw, Ma.”
“Come on.”
Eddie stands as if being led to his execution. His brother smirks. But his mother, with her pretty, round face, keeps humming and stepping back and forth, until Eddie falls into a dance step with her.
“Daaa daa deeee,” she sings with the melody, “… when you’re with meeee … da da … the stars, and the moon … the da … da … da … in June …”
They move around the living room until Eddie breaks down and laughs. He is already taller than his mother by a good six inches, yet she twirls him with ease.
“So,” she whispers, “you like this girl?”
Eddie loses a step.
“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m happy for you.”
They spin to the table, and Eddie s mother grabs Joe and pulls him up.
“Now you two dance,” she says.
“With him?”
“Ma!”
But she insists and they relent, and soon Joe and Eddie are laughing and stumbling into each other. They join hands and move, swooping up and down in exaggerated circles. Around and around the table they go, to their mother’s delight, as the clarinets lead the radio melody and the Romanian cousins clap along and the final wisps of grilled steak evaporate into the party air.
The Second Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
Eddie felt his feet touch ground. The sky was changing again, from cobalt blue to charcoal gray, and Eddie was surrounded now by fallen trees and blackened rubble. He grabbed his arms, shoulders, thighs, and calves. He felt stronger than before, but when he tried to touch his toes, he could no longer do so. The limberness was gone. No more childish rubbery sensation. Every muscle he had was as tight as piano wire.
He looked around at the lifeless terrain. On a nearby hill lay a busted wagon and the rotting bones of an animal. Eddie felt a hot wind whip across his face. The sky exploded to a flaming yellow.
And once again, Eddie ran.
He ran differently now, in the hard measured steps of a soldier. He heard thunder—or something like thunder, explosions, or bomb blasts—and he instinctively fell to the ground, landed on his stomach, and pulled himself along by his forearms. The sky burst open and gushed rain, a thick, brownish downpour. Eddie lowered his head and crawled along in the mud, spitting away the dirty water that gathered around his lips.
Finally he felt his head brush against something solid. He looked up to see a rifle dug into the ground, with a helmet sitting atop it and a set of dog tags hanging from the grip. Blinking through the rain, he fingered the dog tags, then scrambled backward wildly into a porous wall of stringy vines that hung from a massive banyan tree. He dove into their darkness. He pulled his knees into a crouch. He tried to catch his breath. Fear had found him, even in heaven.
The name on the dog tags was his.
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
When his country entered the war, Eddie woke up early one rainy morning, shaved, combed back his hair, and enlisted. Others were fighting. He would, too.
His mother did not want him to go. His father, when informed of the news, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly.
“When?” was all he asked.
Since he’d never fired an actual rifle, Eddie began to practice at the shooting arcade at Ruby Pier. You paid a nickel and the machine hummed and you squeezed the trigger and fired metal slugs at pictures of jungle animals, a lion or a giraffe. Eddie went every evening, after running the brake levers at the Li’l Folks Miniature Railway. Ruby Pier had added a number of new, smaller attractions, because roller coasters, after the Depression, had become too expensive. The Miniature Railway was pretty much just that, the train cars no higher than a grown man’s thigh.
Eddie, before enlisting, had been working to save money to study engineering. That was his goal—he wanted to build things, even if his brother, Joe, kept saying, “C’mon, Eddie, you aren’t smart enough for that.”
But once the war started, pier business dropped. Most of Eddie’s customers now were women alone with children, their fathers gone to fight. Sometimes the children asked Eddie to lift them over his head, and when Eddie complied, he saw the mothers’ sad smiles: He guessed it was the right lift but the wrong pair of arms. Soon, Eddie figured, he would join those distant men, and his life of greasing tracks and running brake levers would be over. War was his call to manhood. Maybe someone would miss him, too.
On one of those final nights, Eddie was bent over the small arcade rifle, firing with deep concentration. Pang! Pang! He tried to imagine actually shooting at the enemy. Pang! Would they make a noise when he shot them—Pang!–or would they just go down, like the lions and giraffes?
Pang! Pang!
“Practicing to kill, are ya, lad?”
Mickey Shea was standing behind Eddie. His hair was the color of French vanilla ice cream, wet with sweat, and his face was red from whatever he’d been drinking. Eddie shrugged and returned to his shooting. Pang! Another hit. Pang! Another.
“Hmmph,” Mickey grunted.
Eddie wished Mickey would go away and let him work on his aim. He could feel the old drunk behind him. He could hear his labored breathing, the nasal hissing in and out, like a bike tire being inflated by a pump.
Eddie kept shooting. Suddenly, he felt a painful grip on his shoulder.
“Listen to me, lad.” Mickey’s voice was a low growl. “War i
s no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it, you hear? No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don’t think about who you’re shootin’ or killin’ or why, y’hear me? You want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think.”
He squeezed even harder.
“It’s the thinking that gets you killed.”
Eddie turned and stared at Mickey. Mickey slapped him hard on the cheek and Eddie instinctively raised his fist to retaliate. But Mickey belched and wobbled backward. Then he looked at Eddie as if he were going to cry. The mechanical gun stopped humming. Eddie’s nickel was up.
Young men go to war, sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. A few days later, Eddie packed a duffel bag and left the pier behind.
The rain stopped. Eddie, shivering and wet beneath the banyan tree, exhaled a long, hard breath. He pulled the vines apart and saw the rifle and helmet still stuck in the ground. He remembered why soldiers did this: It marked the graves of their dead.
He crawled out on his knees. Off in the distance, below a small ridge, were the remains of a village, bombed and burnt into little more than rubble. For a moment, Eddie stared, his mouth slightly open, his eyes bringing the scene into tighter focus. Then his chest tightened like a man who’d just had bad news broken. This place. He knew it. It had haunted his dreams. “Smallpox,” a voice suddenly said.
Eddie spun.
“Smallpox. Typhoid. Tetanus. Yellow fever.”
It came from above, somewhere in the tree.
“I never did find out what yellow fever was. Hell. I never met anyone who had it.”
The voice was strong, with a slight Southern drawl and gravelly edges, like a man who’d been yelling for hours.
“I got all those shots for all those diseases and I died here anyhow, healthy as a horse.”
The tree shook. Some small fruit fell in front of Eddie.
“How you like them apples?” the voice said.
Eddie stood up and cleared his throat.
“Come out,” he said.
“Come up,” the voice said.
And Eddie was in the tree, near the top, which was as tall as an office building. His legs straddled a large limb and the earth below seemed a long drop away. Through the smaller branches and thick fig leaves, Eddie could make out the shadowy figure of a man in army fatigues, sitting back against the tree trunk. His face was covered with a coal black substance. His eyes glowed red like tiny bulbs.
Eddie swallowed hard.
“Captain?” he whispered. “Is that you?”
They had served together in the army. The Captain was Eddie’s commanding officer. They fought in the Philippines and they parted in the Philippines and Eddie had never seen him again. He had heard he’d died in combat.
A wisp of cigarette smoke appeared.
“They explained the rules to you, soldier?”
Eddie looked down. He saw the earth far below, yet he knew he could not fall.
“I’m dead,” he said.
“You got that much right.”
“And you’re dead.”
“Got that right, too.”
“And you’re … my second person?”
The Captain held up his cigarette. He smiled as if to say, “Can you believe you get to smoke up here?” Then he took a long drag and blew out a small white cloud.
“Betcha didn’t expect me, huh?”
Eddie learned many things during the war. He learned to ride atop a tank. He learned to shave with cold water in his helmet. He learned to be careful when shooting from a foxhole, lest he hit a tree and wound himself with deflected shrapnel.
He learned to smoke. He learned to march. He learned to cross a rope bridge while carrying, all at once, an overcoat, a radio, a carbine, a gas mask, a tripod for a machine gun, a backpack, and several bandoliers on his shoulder. He learned how to drink the worst coffee he’d ever tasted.
He learned a few words in a few foreign languages. He learned to spit a great distance. He learned the nervous cheer of a soldier’s first survived combat, when the men slap each other and smile as if it’s over—We can go home now!–and he learned the sinking depression of a soldier’s second combat, when he realizes the fighting does not stop at one battle, there is more and more after that.
He learned to whistle through his teeth. He learned to sleep on rocky earth. He learned that scabies are itchy little mites that burrow into your skin, especially if you’ve worn the same filthy clothes for a week. He learned a man’s bones really do look white when they burst through the skin.
He learned to pray quickly. He learned in which pocket to keep the letters to his family and Marguerite, in case he should be found dead by his fellow soldiers. He learned that sometimes you are sitting next to a buddy in a dugout, whispering about how hungry you are, and the next instant there is a small whoosh and the buddy slumps over and his hunger is no longer an issue.
He learned, as one year turned to two and two years turned toward three, that even strong, muscular men vomit on their shoes when the transport plane is about to unload them, and even officers talk in their sleep the night before combat.
He learned how to take a prisoner, although he never learned how to become one. Then one night, on a Philippine island, his group came under heavy fire, and they scattered for shelter and the skies were lit and Eddie heard one of his buddies, down in a ditch, weeping like a child, and he yelled at him, “Shut up, will ya!” and he realized the man was crying because there was an enemy soldier standing over him with a rifle at his head, and Eddie felt something cold at his neck and there was one behind him, too.
The captain stubbed out his cigarette. He was older than the men in Eddie’s troop, a lifetime military man with a lanky swagger and a prominent chin that gave him a resemblance to a movie actor of the day. Most of the soldiers liked him well enough, although he had a short temper and a habit of yelling inches from your face, so you could see his teeth, already yellowed from tobacco. Still, the Captain always promised he would “leave no one behind,” no matter what happened, and the men took comfort in that.
“Captain …” Eddie said again, still stunned.
“Affirmative.”
“Sir.”
“No need for that. But much obliged.”
“It’s been … You look …”
“Like the last time you saw me?” He grinned, then spat over the tree branch. He saw Eddie’s confused expression. “You’re right. Ain’t no reason to spit up here. You don’t get sick, either. Your breath is always the same. And the chow is incredible.”
Chow? Eddie didn’t get any of this. “Captain, look. There’s some mistake. I still don’t know why I’m here. I had a nothing life, see? I worked maintenance. I lived in the same apartment for years. I took care of rides, Ferris wheels, roller coasters, stupid little rocket ships. It was nothing to be proud of. I just kind of drifted. What I’m saying is …”
Eddie swallowed. “What am I doing here?”
The Captain looked at him with those glowing red eyes and Eddie resisted asking the other question he now wondered after the Blue Man: Did he kill the Captain, too?
“You know, I’ve been wondering,” the Captain said rubbing his chin. “The men from our unit—did they stay in touch? Willingham? Morton? Smitty? Did you ever see those guys?”
Eddie remembered the names. The truth was, they had not kept in touch. War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
“To be honest, sir, we all kind of fell out.” He shrugged, “Sorry.”
The Captain nodded as if he’d expected as much.
“And you? You went back to that fun park where we all promised to go if we got out alive? Free rides for all GIs? Two girls per guy in the Tunnel of Love? Isn’t that what you said?”
Eddie nearly smiled. That was what he’d said. What they’d all said. But when the war ended, nobody came.
“Yeah, I went back,” Eddie said.
“And?”
“And … I never left. I tried. I made plans… But this damn leg. I don’t know. Nothin’ worked out.”
Eddie shrugged. The Captain studied his face. His eyes narrowed. His voice lowered.
“You still juggle?” he asked.
Go! … You go! … You go!”
The enemy soldiers screamed and poked them with bayonets. Eddie, Smitty, Morton, Rabozzo, and the Captain were herded down a steep hill, hands on their heads. Mortar shells exploded around them. Eddie saw a figure run through the trees, then fall in a clap of bullets.
He tried to take mental snapshots as they marched in the darkness—huts, roads, whatever he could make out—knowing such information would be precious for an escape. A plane roared in the distance, filling Eddie with a sudden, sickening wave of despair. It is the inner torture of every captured soldier, the short distance between freedom and seizure. If Eddie could only jump up and grab the wing of that plane, he could fly away from this mistake.
Instead, he and the others were bound at the wrists and ankles. They were dumped inside a bamboo barracks. The barracks sat on stilts above the muddy ground, and they remained there for days, weeks, months, forced to sleep on burlap sacks stuffed with straw. A clay jug served as their toilet. At night, the enemy guards would crawl under the hut and listen to their conversations. As time passed, they said less and less.
They grew thin and weak. Their ribs grew visible—even Rabozzo, who had been a chunky kid when he enlisted. Their food consisted of rice balls filled with salt and, once a day, some brownish broth with grass floating in it. One night, Eddie plucked a dead hornet from the bowl. It was missing its wings. The others stopped eating.