Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  “Fuck it. I’m going to sign what the bastard wants,” one man would say. “Nobody believes that shit, anyway. It probably don’t even go out of camp. Ding gets his rocks off and we get some more chow. It’s just a piece of paper. He probably wipes his ass with it.”

  We wrote journals for Colonel Ding, confessing imaginary sins and describing the poverty of our lives in America (many times this was done as much to relieve our boredom as it was to earn extra rations). He particularly liked descriptions of slums and sweatshops. Often we would collaborate on one journal and invent accounts of social injustice that would make Charles Dickens pale. Orphans were beaten with whips by Catholic nuns, virtuous young girls were forced into prostitution and infected with venereal disease by fat bankers, southern policemen fired their pistols from car windows into Negro homes, a dismal pall of despair and political oppression hung over the tenement buildings of the working classes while Zionists with faces like sleek pigs filled their bank accounts with the profits of war. We all had committed every type of sin, from sodomy and incest to fornication with sheep. In the candlelight at night we reveled in our iniquity and wrote detailed histories of ax murders, arson, screwing a dead woman, and male rape in the shower at the Y.M.C.A. No group of men had ever been guilty of greater crimes, and the more depraved the confession the more generous Ding became toward his captives.

  We all grew to know one another in the intimate and physical way that men do when in confinement. There was no secret shame or weakness that one of us could conceal from the others for very long. We shared our love affairs, our nights of depravity in Japanese brothels, our memories of a beating by a bully on the elementary school ground, our failures with wives and company bosses. We knew one another’s smell, latrine habits, particular nightmares, or when one man was masturbating under the blanket. Through hunger and fear our virtues and inadequacies burned just below the skin. When one man in the shack died and was replaced by a new prisoner, we knew him within a week as well as we had the lifeless piece of stone we had dragged out into the compound for the burial detail.

  We were of every background and mental complexion; the helpless who already had the smell of their dying in their clothes; the strong ones, the gladiators, with iron in their bodies, who knew they could live through anything and boiled their fish heads into broth for the sick; the brave and the terrified, the cowards and the Shylocks, the hoarders, the dealers, the religious, and those whose self-sacrifice made them glow, in the hush of their deaths, with the aura of early martyrs. There was Joe Bob Winfield from Baton Rouge, a redneck hillbilly and an ex-convict at nineteen, with leg-iron scars on his ankles and a story about every type of crime and prison caper; Bertie Fast, the house mouse, our one roaring homosexual, who was raped his first week in camp and liked it so much that he went professional; a Sears Roebuck shoe salesman from Salt Lake who wrote endless letters to his wife and children, which Ding threw in the garbage can; O. J. Benson from Okema, Oklahoma, a bootlegger who used to run whiskey from Joplin in a bookmobile before the war; a reactivated World War II paratrooper, the oldest man in the shack, who had spent two years in a German concentration camp; Cigarette Williams, the other Navy corpsman, from Mount Olive, Alabama, a six-foot-five country singer who hanged himself during the night because his feet were so frostbitten he couldn’t put boots on them; the Australian miner who called Ding a bloody yellow nigger and was strung up all day on a rafter by his hands; and the wild Turk who knew no English, a man on fire, a killer with insane eyes and a bricklayer’s trowel hidden in his tick mattress.

  There were many others who came and died or were transferred for interrogation, but only two of them from my shack are important in this brief account of my Korean experience. Private First Class Francis Ramos from San Angelo had Indian-black hair, wide-set intense eyes, hard bones in his face, and hands and wrists that could break boards in half. He used to drive a beer truck before he was drafted, and the muscles in his shoulders and chest were as taut and hard as concrete from years of loading and stacking metal beer kegs. There were white scars on his knuckles where they had been mashed on a warehouse ramp, and another thick, raised scar that he had received in a whorehouse brawl ran back in a crooked line through his hair. He had an obsession with escape. He had spent six months in a city stockade once for nonsupport, and he was released only after the jailer became convinced that he was mad, and solitary confinement and beatings with rolled newspapers would not make him less of a threat to the guards and the rest of the prison population. He had been Golden Gloves middleweight champion of Texas in high school, and sometimes when I looked at his huge fists and the swollen veins in his wrists I had nightmarish images of what he must have done to his opponents in the ring.

  He couldn’t sleep at night. After Sergeant Tien Kwong handed us our food bucket and locked the chain on the shack door, Ramos’s eyes flicked wildly across the walls and ceilings, his breathing became deeper, and then he would set about doing dozens of unnecessary things with the frenetic energy of a man on the edge of hysteria. He put fuel into the stove when we were trying to conserve every twig, boiled water to make soup when we had no fish heads, shook out his blankets and folded them so he could unfold them again, restrung his bootlaces, tried to teach the wild Turk English, and eventually sat alone in the darkness after the rest of us had gone to sleep. He would be so tired the next day that sometimes his head would fall on his chest during one of Ding’s lectures, which meant one night in the hole under the sewer grate.

  Then there was Airman First Class Lester Dixon, captured when the Chinese overran Seoul, a teenage hoodlum from Chicago, one of the dealers, a ten-percenter, a poolroom hustler and reefer salesman on the South Side, slick, a kid with a venal mind and an eye for the profit to be made from free enterprise, blue movies, dope, and fifteen-year-old Negro prostitutes. He had tattoos of skulls and snakes’ heads on his arms, and his hair had grown out long enough to comb back in ducktails. His colorless face was like the edge of a hatchet. He thought of charity as naïveté, bravery as stupidity, and honesty with others, even in a prisoner of war compound, a fool’s venture.

  He shared nothing. He stood first in line for his bean cakes and millet, and ate alone from his tin plate in one corner while the rest of us put small bits of our food into the soup pot on the stove for the Australian who was dying of beriberi. He was never ashamed of not sharing, or at least he didn’t show it; he ate with his face in his plate, his chopsticks scraping against the metal, as though his whole being were concentrated into one scrap of bean cake that he might miss.

  It was a cold, windswept gray morning with hailstones on the ground, and Dixon had just left the shack with the wood detail.

  “I think he’s a snitch,” Ramos said. “I seen him eating some vitamin pills in the dark last night.”

  We were hunched around the iron stove, bent toward the heat. Our breaths steamed out like ice in the silence.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “He took three of them out of his pocket and swallowed them dry.”

  “I don’t know about no vitamin pills,” Joe Bob, our ex-convict, said, “but I got something in my pecker that goes off when I get near a snitch, and that boy gives me a real bone.”

  “If you’re right, what are we going to do with him?” another man said.

  “For openers, you better start shutting up about running,” Joe Bob said. His sandy red hair stuck out from under his stocking cap, and he chewed on the flattened end of a matchstick in one corner of his mouth.

  “We ice him,” Ramos said.

  “Hey, cut that shit, man,” Joe Bob said. “Ding’ll waste the whole shack.”

  “No, he ain’t,” Ramos said. “I’ll tell Kwong that Dixon’s been spitting blood and ask him for some eggs, and then we wait a few days and smother him.”

  “I tell you, buddy, they ain’t that stupid,” Joe Bob said.

  “We got to take him out one way or another,” O.J., the bootlegger from Okema, said. “If Ding’
s greasing him, he’s got to burn somebody.”

  “Yeah, you don’t fuck around with guys like this.”

  “There’s other ways to get a snitch out of the shack,” Joe Bob said. “We can turn the Turk loose on him, and he’ll ask Ding to transfer over with the pros.”

  “You’re not sure about him, anyway,” I said. “He could have gotten those pills off of somebody else in the yard.”

  “You know that’s a lot of crap, too, Holland. He smelled like a snitch when he first come in here,” Ramos said.

  “He’s a pimp and a wheeler, and that’s all he’s been his whole life. That doesn’t mean he’s working for Ding,” I said.

  “I’ll do it in the middle of the night,” Ramos said. “There won’t be no sound, and he’ll look just like every other guy we drug out in the yard.”

  “I ain’t telling you what to do,” Joe Bob said, “but you got some pretty amateur shit in your head for this kind of scene. Ding might be a harelip dickhead, but he ain’t dumb and he’s going to fry our balls in a skillet before you get done with this caper.”

  “The sonofabitch has to go. What else are we going to do with him?” O.J. said.

  “If you got to ice him, use your head a minute and do it out in the yard,” Joe Bob said. “Catch him in a bunch during exercise time and bust him open with the Turk’s trowel. You’ll probably get shot, anyway, but maybe the rest of us won’t get knocked off with you.”

  “If you don’t want in it, just stay out of my face,” Ramos said.

  “Like I said, I ain’t trying to grow any hairs in your asshole. You just don’t know what you’re doing. Like this escape caper. I chain-ganged in the roughest joint in the South, and I started to run once myself, but you got to be out of your goddamn mind to try and crack a place like this. You got two fences to cut through, there’s a hundred yards of bare ground between both of them, and them gooks up on the platform ain’t going to be reading fortune cookies while you’re hauling for Dixie. You better get your head rewired before Ding lays you out in the yard like he done to that Greek that took off from the wood detail.”

  “If I get nailed I’ll buy it running on the other side of that wire,” Ramos said. “I ain’t going to stay here and shit my insides out till somebody rolls me into the yard like a tumblebug. There’s a colored sergeant with a compass and some pliers for the fence, and he figures if we can make it to the sea we can steal a boat and get out far enough for one of our choppers to pick us up.”

  “Goddamn, if that ain’t a real pistol, Ramos. I once knew a guy that climbed into the back of a garbage truck with chains on, buried himself in the trash, and rode down the highway with the hacks looking all over for him. Except he almost got fried when they unloaded the truck in the county incinerator. But you got him beat, buddy. Running across North Korea with a nigra. Now that’s cool. You guys ought to stand out like shit in an ice cream factory.”

  Ramos didn’t say anything more. He glared at the gray ash in the grate awhile, then paced around the shack, beating his arms in the cold. He didn’t have the intelligence or prison experience to argue with Joe Bob, but we knew that he planned to kill Dixon, regardless of what anyone said.

  And it wasn’t long before Dixon knew it, too. He came in from the wood detail late that afternoon, his face red and chafed with windburn, and dropped a load of sticks and roots by the stove. There was snow in his hair, and his quilted pants were wet up to the knees. In the silence we heard Kwong lock the chain on the door. Dixon pulled off his mittens with his teeth and stuck his hands under his armpits.

  “Somebody else is going on that bastard next time,” he said. “That whole goddamn field’s picked clean. I broke two fingernails digging down to the ground.”

  No one answered.

  “Shit, look at them.”

  We turned our faces away or found things to do that would remove us from the eventual meeting of eyes between Ramos and Dixon. But instead it was O.J. and Bertie Fast, the drag queen, who tore open the wrapper and let Dixon look for just a moment inside the box.

  “What is this crap, anyway?” Dixon said. “Maybe I didn’t wipe my ass clean this morning or something. Don’t I smell sweet enough to you, house mouse?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Bertie said, his voice weak and his eyes searching for a spot on the far wall.

  “House mouse, you better not hold out on me.”

  “Fuck off, man,” O.J. said. He was sticking twigs into the fire grate, and his jawbones were flat against the skin.

  “What’s the deal, then?” Dixon said. “You want me to kick in part of my chow for the soup? Okay. No sweat. Is everybody cool now?”

  “Where did you get vitamin pills?” O.J. said.

  “Vitamins? You must have a wild crab loose in your brain.” But he was surprised, and there was a flicker of fear in his face.

  “Yeah. Like those little red ones Ding gives to the pros,” O.J. said.

  “You better see a wig mechanic when you get out of here. You got real problems.”

  “You’re up to your bottom lip in Shit’s Creek, buddy,” Joe Bob said. “This ain’t the time to be a Yankee smart-ass.”

  “You guys have been flogging your pole too much or something. I mean what kind of joint is this, anyway? I spend the whole day digging in the ice with Kwong jabbing me in the ass, and I come back and you guys got me nailed for a pro.”

  “How did you get the pills?” I said.

  Everyone was looking at him now. The snow in his hair had melted, and his face was damp with water and perspiration. He held his two bruised fingers in one hand and glanced at the locked door.

  “I traded them off a spade in the yard for some cigarettes. All right, so I didn’t share them. Big deal. You going to tear my balls out because I want to stay alive?”

  “Which spade?” O.J. said.

  “I don’t know. He’s with the N.C.O.’s.”

  “There ain’t but one over there,” Ramos said.

  “Maybe he’s an enlisted man. What difference does it make? All those boons look alike.”

  “Get it straight, cousin,” Joe Bob said.

  “You guys already want to fry me. It don’t make any difference what I say. You’ve been pissed ever since I come in here because I wouldn’t put in my chow for guys that were already dead. All of you got a Purple Heart nailed right up in the middle of your forehead because you keep some poor sonofabitch alive a few extra days so he can shit more blood and chew his tongue raw. If I buy it I hope there ain’t a bunch like you around.”

  “Okay, you got the pills off a colored sergeant,” Ramos said. He sat cross-legged on his blanket close to the stove, rubbing his dirt-caked bare feet with his hand. “That’s all we wanted to know. Next time you share anything you get in the yard.”

  Dixon stared into Ramos’s face, and then realized that he was looking at his executioner.

  “Not me, buddy,” he said. “You’re not going to stick my head down in the mattress. None of you pricks are. You find some other cat to hang a frame on. How about Bertie here? He don’t keep his ass soft and fat on bean cakes.”

  “Quit shouting. There ain’t anybody going to bother you,” Ramos said. “Just don’t try to bullshit us next time.”

  “No, you’re going to ice me. You been wanting to do it a long time, you spic, and now you got these other bastards to go in with you. Hey, Kwong!” He began beating against the wooden door with his fists and kicking his feet into the boards. The chain and padlock reverberated with the blows.

  “You get down here. You hear me? I want to see Ding!”

  O.J. and Ramos started for him at the same time, but Joe Bob jumped up in front of both of them and stiff-armed them with all his weight in the chest.

  “The shit already hit the fan. Just ride it out and stay cool,” he said.

  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.