I knelt beside her and placed her fingers on the M1’s stock. “Feel that?” I said.
“Yes.”
“My best friend burned his initials there in the spring of 1953.”
Down below, people were shouting, their voices filled with hate and bloodlust and a form of desire that cannot be sated, cannot be explained, and I am convinced is passed down by a single creature who, millions of years ago, cracked apart his shell and was startled to discover the feast that awaited him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
IF YOU SUBSCRIBE to a Judeo-Christian view of our tenure on earth, war does not leave you with many positive memories. There is a short-lived exception, though. For days before you’re moved into the line, you carry a nauseating ball of fear in your stomach and a stench in your armpits like spoiled clams. Then you hear a sound on your flank similar to Chinese firecrackers popping; in seconds it grows in volume and velocity until it becomes a sustained roar of automatic weapons and mortar and bazooka rounds and hand grenades and incoming artillery and explosions like locomotive engines blowing apart and dirt showering down on your steel pot, followed by the screams of those whose arms or legs are gone and whose torsos twitch on the ground as though electrocuted.
Then it stops in the same way it started. You slide down in your hole and touch yourself all over and, in disbelief, discover the Angel of Death has passed you by. The joy you experience is like none you have ever known. You’ve not only proved your courage, you’re painted with magic, chosen by fate to survive the war and accomplish great deeds, to walk the earth as the friend of God and
man.
Perhaps that same evening, in the twilight, you sit on the edge of your foxhole and eat your C rations, pork and beans or chopped eggs and ham, and listen to the dull knocking of .50-caliber and watch the tracers glide like segments of neon into purple hills filled with enemies you no longer fear. The sense of peace and control you experience is ethereal.
Of course, you eventually learn all of this is an illusion, but like many self-manufactured opiates, it’s a grand one just the same.
And that was how I felt after Saber gave me his M1. It was a beautiful weapon, with its heft and balance and peep sight and deadly accuracy and its eight-round clips you could load as fast as you could thumb one into the magazine and roll the heel of your hand off the bolt.
I looked down at the bonfire. Maisie and Spud and Cotton had been pushed on their knees.
“What are you going to do?” Jo Anne said.
“This,” I replied.
I propped myself against a boulder and aimed at Darrel Vickers’s back and fired a solitary round. The report echoed through the entirety of the canyon. I saw him grab the top of his left shoulder with his right hand and look at the blood on it. The crowd receded from the bonfire like water running backward. Some ran for the bus; others crouched among the shadows in the rocks. Both Darrel and his father looked up the incline in my direction, although I doubted they could see me. Mrs. Lowry was bent into a ball over her husband’s body, her face buried in his chest.
“That you, Broussard?” Darrel yelled. “You can’t shoot for shit!” He waited in the silence. “No comment? Is Jo Anne there? Jimmy Doyle says she chugs serious pud.”
I aimed through the peep sight again, this time lower, right under the breastbone. I wet my lip and began to squeeze the trigger.
Darrel cupped his hands around his mouth, seemingly indifferent to the round he might have to eat. “Think you got us by the shorts? Watch your army buddy at work!”
Doyle came out of the shadows and stood behind Spud and Maisie and Cotton with a cigarette lighter raised above his head.
“Your friends are soaked in gasoline!” Darrel said. “Come down or we light them up!”
I saw a shadow zoom across the rocks around us. I looked up and saw one of the winged creatures making a wide turn, coming back for another flyover.
I wanted to burn the whole clip on Darrel. I thirsted to shed his blood in every way I could. I knew then I had denied my true identity my whole life, that indeed the Holland legacy of violence and mayhem had always lived inside me. I wanted to blow Darrel Vickers apart one piece at a time, then reload as I walked down the slope and do the same to his father. I wanted to kill them for the boy whose blackened body was little more than embers about to collapse into ash, and I wanted to kill them for Moon Child and all the other people they had tortured and murdered, and I knew, like my ancestors, I would never have a minute’s remorse.
Jo Anne got to her feet and put her hand on my shoulder. “What should we do?” she asked.
“About what?”
“Everything.”
“Stay behind me,” I said.
I began firing at Jimmy Doyle. I saw his face and head break apart like a flowerpot. I saw one round drill through his throat and another cut the fingers that gripped his lighter. Then I swung the iron sights on Darrel and got off one wide round before he went behind some rocks and began firing wildly with the Luger. I also fired at his father, then the bolt locked open, and the spent shell and the empty clip ejected with the brief metallic clink that every soldier who has fired the M1 rifle never forgets.
* * *
DARREL WAS RUNNING up the slope, headed for cover in the larger rocks. I pushed another clip into the magazine and released the bolt and fired three rounds, each ricocheting and whining into the darkness with a sound like a bobby pin twanging.
“I’ve got to get a better shot at Darrel.”