Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“You want talk Ding now?” Kwong said, and smiled at us.

No one spoke. The line of men behind the fence was silent, immobile, some of their heads turned away.

“Who first?”

“Do it, you goddamn bastard!” O.J. shouted. Then his eyes watered and he stared at his feet.

“You first, then, cocksuck.” Kwong raised the burp gun to his shoulder and aimed into O.J.’s face, his eyes bright over the barrel, a spot of saliva in the corner of his mouth. He waited seconds while O.J.’s breath trembled in his throat, then suddenly he swung the gun on its strap and began firing from the waist into the Turk. The first burst caught him in the stomach and chest, and he was knocked backward by the impact into the grave with his arms and legs outspread. The quilted padding in his coat exploded with holes, and one bullet struck him in the chin and blew out the back of his head. His black eyes were dead and frozen with surprise before he hit the ground, and a piece of broken tooth stuck to his lower lip. Kwong stepped to the edge of the grave and emptied his gun, blowing the face and groin apart while the brass shells ejected into the snow. When the chamber locked open he pulled the pan off, inserted a fresh one in its place, and slid back the loading lever with his thumb. The other two guards began to kick snow and dirt from the edge of the grave on top of the Turk’s body.

“You next, Corpsman. But you kneel.”

The wire fence and the empty faces behind it, the wooden shacks, the yellow brick building where it had all begun, Kwong’s squat body and the hills and the brilliance of the snow in the sunlight began to spin around me as though my vision couldn’t hold one object in place. My knees went weak and I felt excrement running down my buttocks. The wind spun clouds of powdered snow into the light.

Kwong shoved me backward into the hole, then leaned over me and pushed the gun barrel into my face. His nostrils were wide and clotted with mucus in the cold.

“You suck. We give you boiled egg,” he said.

I clinched my hands and put my arms over my face. There were crystals of snow, like pieces of glass, in my eyes, and he brought his boot heel down into my stomach and forced the barrel against my teeth. My bowels gave loose entirely, a warm rush across my genitals and thighs, and my heart twisted violently in my chest.

“Good-bye, prick. You no stink so bad later,” and he pulled the trigger.

The chamber snapped empty, a metallic clack that sent all the air rushing out of my lungs.

Kwong and the other two guards were laughing, their faces split in hideous grins under their fur caps. Their bodies seemed to shimmer in the brilliant light. Kwong pushed his boot softly into my groin, pinching downward with the toe.

“I put new clip in and we do again. Each time you guess.”

He spoke to one of the other guards, who handed him a second pan, then he pulled the empty one loose from his burp gun and held them both behind his back.

“Which hand you like, Corpsman?”

“You fucking chink. Get it done!” Joe Bob said.

The guard who had given Kwong the pan struck him back and forth across the face with his open hand. Joe Bob’s arms hung at his sides while his head twisted and his skin rang and discolored with each slap.

“I pick for you, then,” Kwong said, and he dropped one pan into the snow and snapped the second one into place.

He stood above me, his gun balanced on its strap against his waist, and we went through it again, except this time I curled into a ball like a child, my hands over my face, a sickening odor rising from my clothes, and when the firing pin hit the empty chamber I vomited a thick yellow residue of millet and fish heads out of my stomach.

Then I heard Ding speak in Chinese through the megaphone on the far side of the fence. Kwong’s boots stepped backward, and I saw the shadow of his burp gun swinging loose from his body. But I couldn’t move. My heart thundered against my chest, my body was drained of any further physical resistance, and I kept my face pressed into the wetness of my coat sleeves.

“You lucky. All go to hole now. Another time we have class.”

I heard Joe Bob, Bertie, and O.J. crunch past me, but I still couldn’t lift my head. The other two guards picked me up from the grave by my coat and threw me headlong into the snow. The crystals of ice burned on my face and in my eyes. I got to my feet slowly and stood in a bent position, the compound and the hills shrinking away in the distance and then leaping toward me out of the sunlight. I tried to stand erect, and an electric pain burst through the small of my back and rushed upward into my head. Excrement dripped down my calves into the snow. I looked over at the half-covered body of the Turk in his shallow grave. One glaring eye was exposed through the snow, and his curled fingers extended up as though he wanted to touch his toes. In seconds it seemed that the others were already far ahead of me, crunching silently between the guards toward the far end of the compound. Kwong pushed me forward between the shoulder blades with his hand, and I stumbled along in the slick, wet tracks of the others, tripping on my bootlaces, to the square of barbed wire and row of holes and sewer grates where Ding put the reactionaries.

One of the guards opened the gate and used an ice hook to pull the grates off four holes. Three occupied holes were still covered with tarpaulins from the night before, the creased canvas heavy and stiff with new snow. Ding pushed me forward with his burp gun at port arms into the first ho

le and kicked a G.I. helmet in on top of me, then slid the grate back in place. He squatted down and leaned his face in silhouette over me.

“You can play with prick when you get cold tonight,” he said.

The hole was eight feet deep and four feet wide, and the mud walls were covered with a dirty film of ice. The inside of the steel helmet was encrusted and foul from the other men who had used it, and the sour smell of urine had soaked into the floor. I heard the grates dropped heavily into place on the other three holes, then the guards moved away in the snow and chained the wire gate shut.

I spent the next six weeks there, although I lost any concept of time after the first three days. We were each given two blankets, and at night the guards marched a progressive into the wire square, and he emptied out our helmets and handed down our food pans before they covered the grates with the tarpaulins. We had to sleep in a sitting position or with our feet propped up against the wall, and there was always a hard pain in my spine, and sometimes at night I dreamed that I was in a chair car on a train and if I could just stretch my legs out in the right direction the pain would go away. Then I would wake with the blankets twisted around me, the small of my back burning, and I would stand in the darkness until my knees went weak.

During the day we would talk to each other by speaking upward through the iron slits, then our necks would become tired or there wouldn’t be anything else to say, and each of us would fall back into his silent fantasies on the floor of the hole. The wounds in my legs had festered and small pieces of lead rose with the pus to the surface of the skin, and many times I slipped off into feverish, distorted scenes that lasted until I heard the ice hook strike the grate at nightfall. Sometimes my eyes stayed fixed on the pattern of iron over my head and the distant, checkered clouds, as though I were staring upward out of a tunnel, and then I would be fifteen years old again in a winter cornfield, the sun bright on the withered stalks, with the single-shot twelve-gauge against my shoulder and a cottontail racing across the dry rows. I aimed just in front of his head and squeezed off the trigger, and when the gun roared in my ears I knew that I had hit him clean, without destroying any of the meat, and that night Cap would deep-fry him in egg batter and flour for supper. Then I would be back in the Shooting Gallery, and I’d feel the heavy weight of the stretcher in both palms while the potato mashers exploded in our wire and the B.A.R. man searched frantically in the bottom of the ditch for another magazine. The wounded Marine on the stretcher stared up at me, his eyes full of terror, as I stumbled forward with his weight over the empty ammunition boxes, then the burp guns raked the ditch and knocked men like piles of rags into the walls, and I dropped him and ran. But in one heart-rushing second I saw the expression of helplessness and betrayal in his eyes, and in my feverish dream I wanted to go back and close his eyes with my fingers and tell him that we were all going to buy it, they had already overrun us, and there was nowhere I could have taken him.

Each day I saw the Shooting Gallery again, sometimes in an entirely different way from previously, and the faces of the men in the ditch became confused; their screams when they were hit and their death cries often sounded like a distant band out of tune with itself, and I tried to go back to the winter cornfield and the smell of oak wood burning in the smokehouse and the rabbit racing toward the blackjack thicket. I knew that if I just held that field in the center of my mind, or the smokehouse with a shallow depression in the ground under one wall where my father used to push in the oak logs, I could keep everything intact and in its proper place and I wouldn’t let Ding or Kwong make me admit that I was guilty of a wounded Marine’s death.