Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

We heard Kwong running through the frozen snow outside. Dixon’s face was white with fear, and he brought his knees into the door as though they could splinter wood and snap metal chain after his feet and fists had failed. Kwong turned the lock and threw open the door, with his burp gun slung on a leather strap around his neck and the barrel pointed like an angry god into the middle of us. His squat, thick body was framed against the gray light and the snow-covered shacks behind him, and his peasant face was concentrated in both anger and anticipation of challenge. He grabbed Dixon by his coat and threw him into the snow, then flicked off the safety on his gun.

“Crazy,” Joe Bob said, pointing to his head. “He had the shits all week. Shea tu. Blood coming out his hole.”

We were all frozen in front of the burp gun, each of us breathing deep in our chests, our hearts clicking like dollar watches. I couldn’t look at the gun. Dixon got to his knees in the snow and started crying.

“He needs medicine,” Joe Bob said, and held his head back and pointed his thumb into his mouth. “Shits all the time. Got shit in his brain.”

“You fucked,” Kwong said, and kicked the door shut with his foot, then locked the chain.

He must have hit Dixon with the stock of his burp gun, because we could hear the wood knock into bone, then the two of them crunched off in the snow toward Ding’s billet on the other side of the wire.

The next morning at dawn Kwong was back with two other guards. They opened the door and motioned us against the far wall of the shack with their guns before they stepped inside. The fire in the stove had died out during the night, and the room temperature must have been close to zero. We stood in our socks, shivering under the blankets we held around our shoulders, and tried to look back steadily at Kwong while his eyes passed from face to face. He already knew the ones who had been chosen for the first interrogation, but he enjoyed watching us hang from fishhooks. Then he motioned his burp gun at five of us: O.J., Bertie Fast, Joe Bob, the Turk, and me. We sat down in the middle of the floor and laced on our boots, then marched in single file across the yard with the guards on each side of us. The pale sun had just risen coldly over the hills, and as I looked at our dim shadows on the snow I felt that my last morning was now in progress, and that I should have bought it back there in the Shooting Gallery and whoever shuffles the cards had just discovered his mistake and was about to set things straight.

The wounds in my legs had never healed and had become infected, and when I slowed my pace in the snow Kwong jabbed the barrel of his gun into my scalp. I felt the skin split and I fell forward on my hands and knees. Kwong kicked me in the kidney and pulled me erect by my hair.

“You walk, cocksuck,” he said.

I put my arm over Joe Bob’s shoulder, my side in flames, and limped along with the others to the yellow brick building that Ding used for his headquarters. Bertie Fast’s eyes were wide with terror, and I could see the pulse jumping in his neck. He looked like a child in his oversized quilted uniform and all the blood had drained out of his soft, feminine face. Even Joe Bob, with scars from the black Betty on his butt, was afraid, although he held it down inside himself like a piece of sharp metal. But the wild Turk showed no fear at all, or possibly he didn’t even know what was taking place. His hot black eyes stared out of his white, twisted face, and I wondered if he had the trowel hidden somewhere inside his clothes. His tangled black hair had grown over his shoulders, and he breathed great clouds of vapor, as though he had a fever, through his rotted teeth. He stood immobile with the rest of us while Kwong knocked on the door, and I thought that beyond those hot black eyes there was a furnace instead of a brain.

Ding sat behind his desk in his starched, high-collar uniform with a tea service in front of him. Dixon stood in one corner by the oil stove, his face heavy with lack of sleep, and there was a large, swollen knot above his right eyebrow. His eyes fixed on Ding’s desk when we entered the room, and drops of sweat slid down his forehead in the red glow of the stove.

Ding finished his tea, flicked a finger for a guard to remove the tray, and lit a Russian cigarette. He leaned forward on his elbows, puffing with his harelip, his eyes concentrated like BB’s into the smoke, and I knew that we were all going to enact a long and painful ritual that would compensate Ding in part for his lack of a field command.

“I know there’s a plan for an escape,” he said, quietly. “It’s a very foolish plan that will bring you hardship. There has never been an escape from a Chinese People’s detention center, and you’re hundreds of miles from the American lines. Now, this can be very easy for you, and it will also help the men who would be shot in trying to escape. Give me their names and you can return to your building, and nothing will be done to the men involved.”

We stood in silence, and the snow melted off our clothes in the warmth of the room. I looked at Dixon, and for a moment I wished that Ramos had killed him as soon as he had come back from the wood detail. The cut in my scalp was swelling and drawing tight, and my legs felt unsteady from fear and the pain in my calves.

“You’re not in a cowboy movie,” Ding said. “None of you are heroes. You’re simply stupid. I don’t want to punish you. I don’t want to see the other men shot. There’s no reason for it. This war will be over someday and all of you can return to your families. It’s insane for you men to die in trying to escape.”

Our eyes were flat, our faces expressionless, and the room was so quiet that I could hear Kwong shifting the weight of his burp gun on its strap.

“Do you want me to punish all of the men in your building?” Ding said. “Do you want to see the sick Australian punished because of a stupid minority? All of you grow up on silly movies about Americans smiling at death. You think the Chinese are busboys in restaurants and laundrymen for your dirty clothes. You believe your white skin and Western intelligence reduces us to fools in pigtails groveling for your tips.”

“We don’t know about no escape, Colonel,” Joe Bob s

aid. “Nobody can crack this joint. Dixon give you a lot of shit last night.”

“You do think we’re stupid, don’t you?”

“No, sir, we don’t. I done time before, Colonel, and I don’t want to get burned because some jerk wants to run. Believe me, there ain’t no break planned.”

“What do you have to say, Airman?” Ding said, and turned toward Dixon.

Dixon’s face blanched and he swallowed in his throat. He hadn’t thought it was going to be this tough. His eyes looked up at us quickly and then fixed on the desk again. His words were heavy with phlegm.

“It’s like I told you, Colonel. They been planning it a long time.”

“How long?”

“I heard them whispering about it in the corner the other night after they blew out the candle.”

“Which ones?” Ding drew in on the cigarette and looked at Dixon flatly through the smoke. He was really tightening the rack now, and he enjoyed tormenting Dixon as much as he did us.

“All of them, I guess. It was dark.”

“You haven’t told me very much to earn all those extra gifts.”

Dixon’s face flushed and drops of sweat began dripping from his hair.