The Convict and Other Stories

“The Indian was trying to start a fire,” Willard said.

“You lying son of a bitch.”

“You say that to me again and I’m going to break every bone in your face.”

“You just try it. I’m not one of your darkies on the plantation. You took it, didn’t you? Say it. You had to destroy what didn’t fit into that ignorant southern mind of yours?”

“What?”

“You heard me. You can’t think past what you hear on a hillbilly radio station or a bunch of captured gooks that get marched off behind a hill.”

“I saw the Indian with it,” I said.

“You tend to your own business, Doc,” Willard said.

In the distance we heard the popping of small arms, like a string of firecrackers, followed by two long bursts from a BAR on our right flank.

“What’s that asshole doing?” Willard said, his face wooden in the red twilight.

Then we saw the Chinese moving out of the hills toward us. They appeared on the crests in silhouette, like ants swarming to the top of a sinking log, and poured down the slopes and arroyos onto the rice field. They marched a mortar barrage ahead of them across the field, blowing up the mines we had set earlier and sending geysers of snow and yellow earth high into the air. We shrank into fetal positions in the bottom of the ditch, each man white-faced and alone in his terror, as the reverberations through the ground grew in intensity. Then, when they had bracketed our line, they turned it on in earnest. The explosions were like locomotive engines blowing apart. The ditch danced with light, flame rippled along the strands of concertina wire, and a lon

g round hit the gasoline dump behind us and blew a balloon of fire over us that scalded our skin.

When the barrage lifted, the snow in the craters around us was still hissing from the heat of the buried shrapnel, and the rice field and the horizon of the hills were covered with small, dark men in quilted uniforms. They came at us in waves and walked over their own dead while we killed them by the thousands. The long stretch of field was streaked with tracers, and occasionally one of our mines went off and blew men into the air likes piles of rags. We packed snow on our .30-caliber machine guns and fired them until the rifling went and the barrels melted. When somebody down the line yelled that they were pushing civilians ahead of them, the firing never let up. If anything, the machine gunners kept the trigger frozen back against the guard to get at the men who carried those murderous burp guns with the fifty-round drum magazines.

The bottom of the ditch was strewn with spent shell casings and empty ammunition boxes. Willard was next to me, firing his M-1 over the edge of the embankment, his unused clips set in a neat line in the snow. I heard a shell whang dead center into his helmet and ricochet inside. He pirouetted around in slow motion, his helmet rolled off his shoulder, and the blood ran in red strings from under his stocking cap. There was a surgical cut along the crown of the skull that exposed his brain. He slid down against the ditch wall with one leg folded under him, his jaw distended as though he were about to yawn.

“Get the wounded ready to move, Doc,” the lieutenant said. “We’re going to get artillery in forty-five minutes and pull.”

“In forty-five minutes we’re going to be spaghetti.”

“They got a priority in another sector. Get those men ready to move.”

Five minutes later the lieutenant got it through the throat, and the artillery never came. Before we were overrun, we put a flamethrower in their faces and cooked them alive at thirty yards. Their uniforms were burned away, and their blackened bodies piled up in a stack like people caught in a fire exit. Farther down the ditch I saw Jace with his back propped against the embankment, his face white with concussion and his coat singed and blown open.

I hadn’t heard a grenade in the roar of burp guns, but when I pulled back his jacket, I saw the blood welling through the half-dozen tears in his sweater. His eyes were crossed, and he kept opening his mouth as though he were trying to clear his ears. I laid him down on a stretcher and buckled only the leg strap and made a marine pick up the other end.

“There ain’t no place to go,” the marine said.

“Over the top. There’s an ambulance behind the tank.”

“Oh shit, they’re in the ditch.”

The flank had gone, and then suddenly they were everywhere. They held their burp guns sideways on their shoulder slings and shot the living and the dead alike. Marines with empty rifles huddled in the bottom of the ditch and held their hands out against the bullets that raked across their bodies. The very brave stood up with bayonets and entrenching tools and were cut down in seconds. For the first and only time in my life I ran from an enemy. I dropped the stretcher and ran toward the right flank, where I heard a BAR man still hammering away. But I didn’t have far to go, because I saw one of the small dark men on the embankment above me, his Mongolian face pinched in the cold, his quilted uniform and tennis shoes caked with snow. He had just pulled back the bolt on his burp gun and reset the sling, and I knew that those brass-cased armor-piercing rounds manufactured in Czechoslovakia had finally found their home.

Luke the Gook. How do you do? Punch my transfer ticket neatly, sir. Please do not disturb the dog tags. They have a practical value for reasons that you do not understand. Later they must be untaped and inserted between the teeth because the boxes get mixed up in the baggage car, and I do have to get off at San Antone tonight. Oh sorry, I see you must be about your business.

But he was a bad shot. He depressed the barrel too low on the sling, and his angle of fire cut across my calves like shafts of ice and knocked me headlong on the body of the lieutenant as though a bad comic had kicked my legs out from under me. In the seconds that I waited for the next burst to rip through my back, I could hear the lieutenant’s wristwatch ticking in my face. But when the burp gun roared again, it was aimed at a more worthy target, the BAR man who stood erect in the ditch, the tripod flopping under the barrel, firing until the breech locked empty and he was cut down by a half-dozen Chinese.

. . .

I spent the next thirty-two months in three POW camps. I was in the Bean Camp, which had been used by the Japanese for British prisoners during WW II, Pak’s Palace outside of Pyongyang, and Camp Five in No Name Valley just south of the Yalu. I learned how political lunatics could turn men into self-hating loathsome creatures who would live with the guilt of Judas the rest of their lives. I spent six weeks in a filthy hole under a sewer grate, with an encrusted GI helmet for a honey bucket, until I became the eighth man of eleven from our shack to inform on an escape attempt. But sometimes when I lay in the bottom of the hole and looked up through the iron squares at the clouds turning across the sky, I thought of Jace and Willard and Puritans knocking their axes into wood. Then at some moment between vision and the crush of the dirt walls upon me, between drifting light and the weight of witches’ stones upon my chest, I knew that I would plane and bevel wood and build churches. I would build one at my home in Yoakum, in Goliad and Gonzales and San Antonio, anyplace there were pine trees and cottonwoods and water oaks to be felled. Then I saw the sky re-form as a photograph and the ice clouds turn soft and porous as a Communion wafer.

WHEN IT’S DECORATION DAY

Through the darkness and the tangle of hackberry trees he could still see the burning glow of Atlanta against the sky, like red heat lightning that trembled and then faded on the edge of the horizon. He hadn’t believed that a city built of stone and mortar and scrolled iron could burn (or that anything so large and fiercely determined to resist defeat and occupation could be vulnerable against an army that brought war on defenseless people and gave Negroes weapons to fire upon white men). But that afternoon, when they had mired the gun carriage in a slough bottom and the lieutenant had forced the two freed convicts to push against the wheels at revolver point, he heard the armory by the railroad depot explode, a roar that split the hard, blue sky apart like an angry rip that peeled away from the earth’s surface, and before he could release the spokes of the wheel in his hand or feel the weight of the cannon crushing back into the mud bottom or even leap backward from his own preoccupation with the pain in his back and the sweat bees that swarmed around his head in the heat, he already felt the first tremors roll through the ground under him like a displaced piece of thunder. He saw the geyser of dirt and powdered brick rise in the air above the city and flatten off in the wind, then there was a second explosion, muffled, a contained thump that rippled the black water in the bottom of the slough, and he guessed that Sherman’s artillery had hit one of the powder dumps they had buried yesterday on Peachtree Creek.

Now, under the moon, the smoke drifted through the trees and hung in the shallow depressions, and the cannon and its carriage, coated with dried mud, creaked through the soft dirt of the forest floor behind the two mules. The lieutenant had called a rest only once since they whipped the mules out of the slough bottom, and the boy’s sun-faded, butternut-brown uniform was heavy with perspiration, and the weight of his Springfield rifle, which he held with one arm crooked over the inverted barrel, cut into the shoulder bone like a dull headache. His face was drawn in the moonlight, and his long, blond hair stuck out damply from under his gray cap. There was a thin, red-brown scar under his eye, like a burn, where a Minié ball had flicked across his face at Kennesaw Mountain (where, for the first and only time, he had seen Negroes in Yankee uniforms break through the fog, kneel in a ragged line, and shoot at him—a vision so unbelievable to him in the turning mist and the scream of grape and canister that he lowered his rifle and stared again until the Minié ball ticked across his face like a hot finger).