Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  “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 hole 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.

  Then on a bright, sun-spangled day I would look up through the slits at the drifting clouds and briefly realize, with a sick feeling in my chest, that they didn’t care about the Marine, they only wanted me to inform on Ramos and the Negro sergeant, and eventually I might begin to cry in my sleep, as Bertie sometimes did, and one morn
ing ask Kwong to take me into Ding’s office. I heard the voices of other men from our shack farther down the row of holes, and Joe Bob whispered hoarsely up through his grate one day that the World War II paratrooper had been machine-gunned and buried next to the Turk. The temperature began to go above freezing in the mid-afternoon, the melted snow ticked into the bottom of the hole, and the reek from the helmet and my own body often made me sick when I tried to eat my bean cakes. My hair and beard were matted with mud and the thick residue of fish heads that I licked from the bottom of my food pan, and my yellow fingernails had grown out like a dead person’s. My ribs felt like strips of wood to my touch, and although I had masturbated my first week in the hole, creating geisha girls under me, with their toy, pale faces and sloe eyes, I couldn’t hold the image of a woman in my mind more than a few seconds. Then on a wet morning, with the fog lying close against the ground, I heard the ice hook click against the sewer grates and the hushed voices of O.J. and Bertie as the guards helped them out of their holes.

  A day later I was still hoping that they would return. It was too easy now to bang on the grate with my food pan and shout for Kwong to pull me out. Whatever I told Ding now wouldn’t have any effect on Ramos and the sergeant, I thought, and it was insane to die for men who possibly were already dead themselves. As the fog rolled over me and drifted through the iron slits I went through all the ethical arguments about surrender, and I discovered that there were dozens of ways to justify any human act, even dishonor. I thought of my grandfather, who had fought the most dangerous man in Texas, and I wondered what he would do if he were here now instead of me. I saw the flashes of Wes Hardin’s revolver, and his murderous, drunken eyes, and my grandfather standing in the open barn door with the Winchester in his hands. Then Hardin wheeled his horse and charged, his fingers tangled in the mane, the shotgun banging against the saddle, and Old Hack leaped forward and swung his rifle barrel down with both hands into the side of Hardin’s head. But his wars had been fought in a different time, between equally armed men, under hot skies and in dusty Texas streets, and death or victory came in a matter of seconds. He hadn’t lived in an age when lunatics locked men in filthy holes and turned them into self-hating creatures that were sickened with their own smell.

  So that night, at feeding time, I knew that Old Hack would understand when I held up my hand silently to the progressive and he pulled me over the edge of the hole on my stomach.

  I was the eighth man to inform. The Australian died in the hole, and it took another week for Ding to break the three remaining men from our shack. Then on a dripping, gray morning we all stood at the wire and watched Ramos and the Negro sergeant executed and their bodies thrown into an open latrine.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was dark as Rie and I drove through the sloping hills toward the Valley. Her face was soft in the glow of the dashboard, and she rubbed one hand on my shoulder.

  “You’ve kept all that inside you for fifteen years?” she said quietly.

  “There aren’t a lot of other places to put it.”

  “You weren’t to blame for their deaths. The others had already informed.”

  “That’s the strange thing about a certain type of guilt. When you try to confess it and draw the whips across your own back, there’s always someone there to tell you that you’re really not guilty of anything. Dixon came back from China a year after the war, and I testified against him at his court-martial. But I didn’t care what happened to him anymore. I only wanted to confess before some type of authority and be exposed publicly for cowardice. Each time that I tried to tell them I had informed, I was told to answer the questions directly and they disregarded anything else I had to say. After they gave Dixon five years, officers shook my hand and wished me luck in law school.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  “Bertie died of beriberi before the truce. O.J. married an Indian girl and was swelling like a balloon with beer fat, and Joe Bob bought a pool hall in Baton Rouge. Four others from the shack testified against Dixon, and the afternoon that he got his five years we all got drunk together, but we found that we didn’t have many good things to talk about.”

  She slipped her arm across my chest and kissed me behind the ear, and I felt her wet eyelashes against my skin. I wanted her again, more strongly than I had ever wanted a woman in my life, and I pressed the accelerator down and the rolling highway raced toward me in the headlights. We dropped down into the Valley, and I saw the Rio Grande under the moon and the candlelit windows of the adobe houses on the far side. She pressed her breasts close to me, rubbing her curly hair against my cheek, and I turned onto the main highway toward my motel.

  I woke early the next morning and leaned over her and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Her sunburned hair was spread on the pillow, and without opening her eyes she put her arms around my neck and pulled me down on top of her. Her body was warm with sleep, and she widened her thighs and ran her hands down my back and moved her lips across my cheek. She breathed softly in my ear, touching the lobe with her tongue, and each time she pressed her stomach into me I felt my skin burn. Then my eyes were closed and I felt my body go weak, the heat gathering like a flame in my loins, and I tried to rise on my elbows and hold it back, but she held her breasts tight against my chest and she tightened her thighs around me and ran her fingers up my neck into my hair.

  “Do it now, Hack, and then we’ll do it again and again and again.”

  She stretched out her legs and flattened her stomach, and then the flame grew more intense and went out of me in a long heart-beating rush.

  It had been years since I had slept with a woman whom I really loved, and the experience now was as strange and wonderful as the first time I had made love to a girl in high school. The times of need with Verisa, which she and I had both grown to accept, with our feigned affection in the dark, and the indifference toward each other when it was over, seemed like a sophisticated imitation of a Tijuana film that we had seen so many times we were no longer embarrassed by it.

  Rie lay against me with her arm across my chest and her face close to my cheek, and I felt her large breasts and the heat in her thighs, and she told me about the strange world of revolution and political rage that she came from: her father, the University of Madrid professor, who was marked for execution by the Guardia Civil during the Civil War and walked barefoot across the mountains into France before the border was closed; her Irish mother, a member of the I.W.W., who worked years for the release of the Scottsboro Boys during the 1930s, went to jail during World War II in protest against the treatment of the Nisei Japanese, and was blacklisted as a schoolteacher in California during the McCarthy era. Rie joined CORE and the Mississippi Freedom Project when she was nineteen and rode across the country to McComb in an old school bus with a boiling radiator and freedom signs painted in white letters on the sides. They were going to integrate lunch counters, bus depots, and water fountains and sit in front of segregated hotels with their arms locked in a chain and sing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Instead, their bus was burned, they were knocked off lunch-counter stools and beaten senseless by clean-cut high school kids, dragged by their hair along sidewalks and thrown into police vans, shocked with cattle prods, spat on by housewives, hit with nightsticks, and crowded into filthy drunk tanks, and some of them ended up on Parchman Farm.

  “Most of the people on our bus were middle-class kids who believed southern cops were a creation out of a Paul Muni movie,” she said. “We were taught how to roll up in a ball with our hands over our heads when they started swinging their clubs, but nobody really thought they would do it. It was just something to talk about on the bus, and everyone was sure that if it really got tight Mr. Clean would appear from somewhere with the Constitution in his hand. After it was all over I was able to accept the cops and what they did and the housewives who were having trouble with their period, but there was one scene I couldn’t get out of my head for a long time. The first day in McComb we tried to integrate th
e lunch counter in Penney’s, and a thug hit the black guy next to me in the head with a sugar shaker and split his skin. The black guy tried to look straight ahead and hold his head up level, and a blond chick of about seventeen took the cap off a salt shaker and poured it into the cut.”

  I felt her breast rise under my hand, and I pulled her close against me and pressed her face into my neck and kissed her hair. The smooth curve of her back felt like the graceful line of a statue, and when she looked up from the pillow to be kissed again her almond eyes and the slight separation of her lips made my head swim and then the fire began to build inside me again.

  Later, we had breakfast in a wood-frame café filled with farm and ranch families that had come into town for church, then we drove down the highway under the early sun toward Pueblo Verde. There was still dew on the pastures, and the light breaking across the hills cast a purple haze over the sage and short grass. The air was heavy with the smell of morning and the oak thickets and the churned mud around the windmill troughs, and when the breeze changed direction I could smell the horses and cattle in the fields and the burning hickory in a smokehouse. A few clouds were drifting in from the Gulf, and great areas of shadow passed briefly over the cattle and moved across the crest of the hills. For just a moment I thought I could taste rain in the air, and then the sky was clear again and the blacktop highway began to gather pools of light.

  There was a union strike meeting and barbecue planned at the Catholic church in the Mexican district that afternoon, and Rie was supposed to provide transportation for the families in the migrant worker camps who didn’t have automobiles. Many of them had been brought in on buses from New Jersey, South Carolina, and Florida, and their crew leaders, who contracted the harvest, would do nothing to help the union, and sometimes they refused to take migrants to the next job if they were seen talking with strike organizers. So we waited on the front porch of the union headquarters for a dozen battered cars and pickup trucks to arrive, and then we rolled in a long rattling caravan down a dusty county road to the first of three labor camps.