by Cullin Mitch
The maddening reality, however, refused to transform itself in his memory, regardless of how he intended to modify events with the aid of words and a computer. For it was only five days after setting foot on Korean land, during their first full operation at the front, that the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry regiment found itself positioned in the hills above a curving railroad line — the bare tracks beneath them cutting over a small double-arched concrete trestle near the village of No Gun Ri. On that Wednesday, the sun blazed high, enhancing the humidity, reflecting off of rifles and binocular lenses. Cicadas purred within acacia trees. Long-necked herons were spotted at times, flapping across a sky which was dotted with clouds. Down below — close to the trestle, gathered under acacia trees and in the shade beside the railroad embankment — were exhausted, frightened refugees: six hundred or so weary souls (elderly, middle-aged, young, entire families who had been evacuated from the Chu Gok Ri valley), wearing billowing white clothing and walking on rice-straw sandals, hauling livestock while making their way to the village of Hwanggan, but resting now among the cool shadows before proceeding with heavy packs or children on their backs — aware all the while of the Americans scattered around the hills, yet feeling secure in the relative stillness of a bright midday.
Hollis has always had difficulty placing himself there in a hillside foxhole, or accurately remembering what actions he took as the events of July 26 unfolded. In some regard, his recollection was not unlike the perspective of the herons which swooped above everything — the rice paddies, the distant pine groves, the valley, the railroad tracks, the refugees, the Americans — gliding for the jagged slopes of White Horse Mountain. Yet he knows other soldiers blew whistles at the moment three air force planes emerged through the clouds, roaring from the horizon, and sailed low toward the refugees. And he knows, as the refugees paused and gazed upward at the planes, the valley below him suddenly exploded in a deafening thunder — again and again and again, shaking the ground with greater anger than any earthquake he would experience in Southern California — throwing stones and trees and bags and bodies into the sky, blasting limbs apart, tearing clothing away and turning the day to night amid a storm of dust and dirt. Cattle bellowed in chorus with human screams. The wounded briefly moaned for help or gasped last breaths. Then more bombs and rockets fell, machine guns rattled from the planes, as survivors ran in every direction, stunned and panicked — some dragging children, some pressing hands on their ears, some incapable of moving — while pieces of people and livestock crashed hot to the ground.
When the planes retreated, careening beyond the clouds, they left in their wake an appalling aftermath. The tracks running parallel to the embankment had become a twisted, fractured mess of steel, and craters fumed where just previously villagers had rested on rice-straw mats. Shrouded by the heavy smoke which obscured the destruction, the wounded lay dying, either motionless or writhing near burning baggage and smoldering carnage (bits of fingers, severed heads, naked torsos, a dead man's legs pointing straight up at the heavens). Weaving through the mortally injured and the remnants of bodies, its entire brown hide set ablaze, a solitary cow managed to reach the perimeter of that hellish scene — the black smoke unfurling there ahead of it, faintly revealing faraway mountains and blue sky — and heaving a prolonged cry of misery, its legs buckled and it collapsed into a silent, fiery heap.
The refugees fortunate enough to escape the attack had fled for the hillsides, while others found shelter inside the narrow, 200-foot-long passageway of a culvert underneath the railroad, or beneath the twin tunnels of the trestle. But many of those clambering along the hills, striving to find safety, soon ran out of options; when word came through the line to open fire on them, it was McCreedy who, without any hesitation, immediately discharged his M1 after catching a small girl in his sights and, upon striking the child, exclaimed, “Got her!” And though Hollis tells himself no one was murdered by his weapon, at least not on that day, he is fully aware of having aimed his rifle — perhaps at rocks, maybe at those who were already killed — and pulling the trigger. Then what's lodged in his mind isn't so much his participation in the action, but, rather, freeze-frames of memory capturing the untested teenage cavalrymen who stood or knelt closest to him; only days previously they had entered dank Tokyo bars, fondling taxi dancers and requesting sake or beer, yet, with the passing of a week, they were gripping their weapons in Korea and shooting, for the first time in their lives, complete strangers. How quickly they had all adapted — launching mortar shells at defenseless groups of refugees, spraying machine-gun rounds into the culvert and the trestle tunnels, killing villagers even as they understood they were there to fight for them, firing simply because they were ordered to do so.
Presently, the rifles and machine guns led the soldiers from the hillsides, bringing them to where smoke enveloped that confounding terrain, the dark plumes drifting over corpses like souls ascending. Boots pushed at bodies, checking to see if anyone in the air-strike zone had lived, while, at the same time, surviving villagers were being herded together — brought from the hillsides, the surrounding fields, the tracks — and ushered slowly toward the trestle. Either weeping aloud or too stunned to make a sound, parents held their children, just as others helped the wounded ones who couldn't walk; the rifle muzzles and soldiers guided them forward — past ravaged limbs, their feet stumbling on the fallen — sending the villagers into the two cavernous tunnels beneath the bridge. But for the injured ones who had been unable to stand or move forward, they were promptly dispatched with point-blank shots, yet were fortunate enough to receive a swifter death than what would eventually befall those crowded inside the tunnels. The gunfire would sporadically echo there during the afternoon of the twenty-sixth until the morning hours of the twenty-ninth, hundreds of rounds ricocheting from the concrete walls at dusk, the heavy shelling, tracers illuminating the pitch interior at night as meteor-like bullets ripped into huddled figures.
Even after the survivors were crowded into the tunnels, McCreedy continued roaming above them near the tracks, stepping through the smoke with Schubert trailing close behind, ambling casually from corpse to corpse; when Hollis came upon the pair, they were standing on either side of an elderly woman who must have died from fright rather than injury: she lay perfectly intact among the ruin, spine against the ground, eyes fixed wide, legs straight, slender arms outstretched but with her thin fingers curled inward as if they were clutching at air. Without a trace of emotion, McCreedy leaned toward the woman — one hand gripping his rifle, the other hand gliding across her face — and, like magic, an Indian Head penny materialized on each of her eyes, covering her wide brown pupils.
Knitting his brow in bewilderment, Hollis shouldered his rifle as Schubert snickered and said, “Sleep tight.” Then he followed the pair for a while, watching the two bend down here and there, placing Indian Heads on the faces of the dead (the pennies soon dotting the eyes of dismembered children and charred men and mutilated women in what seemed, to Hollis, an irrational attempt to even out history). With the incomprehensible mass killing of the refugees not yet fully processed, it was the behavior of Schubert — enjoying himself beside fresh corpses whose faces superficially mirrored his own features, acting nothing like the shy, thoughtful young man on the transport ship — which initially mortified Hollis; it was as if he were recognizing in the kid the signs of a potent malady which had begun spreading quickly from man to man. Pausing by the blackened, fuming trunk of an acacia, Schubert snickered again while McCreedy poured more pennies out of the bulging prophylactic, replenishing their palms.
“Here you go,” McCreedy said, thrusting the condom at Hollis. “I haven't forgotten about you.”
Hollis hesitated. He half closed his eyes, which were irritated by the smoke, and, very slowly, said, “That's okay. I'll pass.”
McCreedy was stunned. Schubert snickered uncomfortably. They both stared at him with the same perplexed look; then they glanced at each other and, once more,
stared at him.
“Now come on,” McCreedy told him, his voice barely masking annoyance. “You can't pass on an opportunity like this. You got an obligation here to fulfill, right? We all do. Come on.”
“It's okay, really,” Hollis said, stepping back from the condom. “I'd just rather not.”
A stern expression surfaced on McCreedy, even as he tried speaking calmly, his tone conveying the kind of urgency which was meant to change another's position: “Look, you better climb on board, son.” He reached forward, pressing a single Indian Head into Hollis's left hand, where it was kept within a fist. “You need to start seeing the bigger picture, or you might not get a place at the table, got it?”
Nothing McCreedy had said made sense, but Hollis still burned with an immense hatred for him; and when walking away to go elsewhere — upon catching the sound of both soldiers whistling beyond him in the veil of smoke, humming the old Gaelic drinking song which George A. Custer had adopted as the 7th Cavalry's marching anthem — he felt sickened by McCreedy and harbored a great sadness for those whose eyes were sealed beneath such cruel pennies. After depositing that single cent on a crooked rail track, hoping it would eventually get crushed flat, Hollis turned around, gazing back to glimpse the murky, receding figures of McCreedy and Schubert (stooping and rising, stooping and rising). Someday — he sensed it at his core but was never able to articulate it clearly to himself — there will be more of your kind than mine. Someday, he was sure, the world will be governed to accommodate the exclusive cupidity, unfounded fears, and willful inanity of people like Bill McCreedy.
Here in the backyard, the cacti now recall melting snowmen, globular and icy shapes thawing as Hollis scoops with the spade — clearing slush, tending an untenable garden which has somewhat relieved his conscience of the massacre he had witnessed: the refugees huddled beneath the railroad trestle at No Gun Ri, the men, women, and children seeking shelter there, but dying instead underneath the large twin arches, falling from bullets fired by his battalion; what horror he's conjured when sometimes shutting his eyes in the garden, like an incubus arising through memorial and continuing onward with him, a thread of regret keeping him beholden and disrupting the tranquillity of his hard-earned retirement.
And, as well, there is that other vision — the listless figures in gas masks, the stray herd of cattle — entering his sleep during the night. Upon arriving at Nine Springs, with the beginning of his newfound leisure, it had come to him more readily, more vividly, as persistent and pervasive as the cancer which had begun to spread unnoticed inside Debra. While the meaning of the cattle had always mystified him, the symbolic procession of restless souls had not: early on, he ‘d recognized them as a manifestation of his own guilt concerning No Gun Ri, a visitation from those who sought resolution or amends for their unjust deaths. Out in the garden they also started coming to him, weaving through his mind, distracting him. Yet the planting of a single cactus could stifle the recurring thoughts; when digging a new hole, when lowering the roots of barrel into the earth and patting down the soil, he saw nothing but life and creation, and, with time, the vision grew less and less troublesome, appearing infrequently at night while becoming nonexistent in his waking hours.
All the same, nobody has heard him address this grievous memory from the war — not Debra or Lon, no one he's ever met. He hasn't spoken of these crimes, of rifles fired at mothers holding babies, villagers digging under corpses as gunfire ricocheted — a wholesale slaughter issued discreetly by the 1st Cavalry Division headquarters, stating that refugees crossing the front lines should perish in case they might be the enemy hiding behind peasant clothing. Except he never saw the enemy at No Gun Ri, simply terrified bodies rushing about below him, screaming from one end of the bridge tunnel to the other, scrambling to avoid the shooting which rained through both sides — until body lay upon body, everything unmoving but blood and the faint, shallow breathing of the mortally wounded (how awful ebbing between man-made arches, how tragic greeting death where safety at last seemed palpable). Yes, he had pointed his rifle, had fired too — although, he feels certain, only the ground and the bridge supports took his bullets; even if, possibly, his bullets had ricocheted into the innocent and caused fatalities, Hollis remains proud of the fact that he didn't directly kill anyone, and, in the intervening years, he has never allowed that belief to waver.
For that matter, he is also proud of his garden, because it has become a remembrance of sorts — as thorny and forbidding, to his mind, as any reliquary. How right, then, for his skin to get punctured on occasion, his own blood dripping into places his fingers can't touch. So he is pleased with his efforts, his mornings spent planting. He doesn't shudder whenever the flesh is pricked, or curse himself; he can accept the pain easily, dutifully in fact, as a tithing offered to this soil where so many spines blossom (now more needles flourish here than bullets expended at No Gun Ri, soon a cactus will exist for each person who died). In fashioning the garden, he has begun to settle his burden, attaching that vexing recollection to something beneficial: a slow transformation which, in time, he prays will alter the darker ruminations — hopefully placating the restless procession within his dreams, the straggling forms signifying his culpability — ushering forth pink spring flowers nestled in the midst of cacti spines instead of the living turned abruptly dead, irrelevant, discarded by history yet present to him still.
At some future point, he believed he would sleep contentedly in his bed and nap warmly inside his hut, untethered from regrets, free to enjoy his days while anticipating flawless golf swings — doing so as the sun nourishes his garden and shines down on this ever-widening, arid development. Then he would never again doubt the choices he has made for himself, even should Lon recline beside him, muttering, “It won't stop, Hollis — won't stop until there's no desert left. Not so long ago this was wilderness — the last spot on earth we would've inhabited.” No, he had planned to avoid any second guessing after the garden is completed; he ‘d already told himself it was meaningless to think much about the past, or to contemplate how these streets and homes and golf courses were simply blueprints in an office somewhere, a design requiring cheap property. He has made himself forget that all of this real estate, not long ago, was once farmland owned by a sole Mexican family (probably a large family, with at least one child who saw fit to bury a handful of toy soldiers in shallow, fortuitous graves), disregarding whatever leftovers are evident at the fringes — orange trees beyond the development, cattle gnawing along the outer limits like exiles from another place in time.
“Look, everyone gets their moment under the sun,” he wanted to tell Lon. “They've had theirs, we're having ours. You know, maybe everything is just exactly as it's meant to be. Have you considered that?”
But while he may wish to think otherwise, Hollis will always be conscious of rarely encountering few colors other than his own pallid blush, his very wrinkled kind. And, too, he can't envision last night's snowfall as anything less than an emblematic one, a paradoxical showering, covering what, in its origin, was meant to be brownish and coarse yet has since been concealed by good roads, consummate planning, gated uniformity — that snow chilling Nine Springs with its inexplicable arrival, hinting at the impermanence of those now sequestered here; how it descended with such assurance, claiming the earth — how, then, it faded almost as quickly, melting away, disappearing into the ground, turning the loamy soil to mud, and offering precious little else before finally departing.
SAFE PLACES TO DIE
11
Before her chemotherapy began, Debra had made up her mind: she wasn't going to start treatment with any reservations or the slightest amount of dread, nor would she deceive herself by pretending the chemo wasn't destined to underscore the magnitude of her illness (surely quelling whatever sense of control she had had over her own fate, at times producing vast feelings of discouragement). So, she had decided, there wouldn't be an internal struggle against what was about to occur; rather, she had ac
cepted the therapy as an essential step toward recovering her health, while also relying on a practical-to-a-fault, no-nonsense mental inclination which — she reassured herself — was befitting of a West Texas woman. “You should know by now, we're pros at separating the meat from the bone,” she ‘d told Hollis. “We've got bullshit scrapers embedded in our souls.” That pragmatic side of her was key, for she believed it gave her a better opportunity to rise above the vagaries of her situation and tolerate the fact that her life was evolving in a manner which she could have never predicted. Moreover, she wouldn't allow herself to entertain hysterics — not even when she recognized twinges of panic or anxiety in Hollis — because she knew the treatment was inevitable and that she must be wholly resigned to its assault on both the disease and her body. As such, she had understood beforehand that the chemo was, in the very least, a wayward ally of sorts, albeit a horribly toxic and draining one.
Then while sitting for hours on end at the Arizona Cancer Center — relaxing in an open, brightly lit space, tended to by a small staff of attentive clinical and research nurses — she and Hollis had been relieved that the Patient Treatment Suite wasn't like the place they had secretly imagined. Without saying so, they had each shared a similar fantasy of a sterile yet archaic ward, a cramped environment lined with stretchers which were partitioned off by white plastic curtains — where stoic nurses strolled from patient to patient, filling out charts as the very ill grew sicker following the administration of chemotherapy. But, in truth, the cancer center had four modern treatment areas (three with reclining lounge chairs and a television mounted on a wall, one with stretcher beds for those who wished to rest throughout the therapy). Instead of voicing discomfort or writhing from pain, the other patients around Debra passed the hours in relative peaceful-ness — eating potato chips and pizza slices and hamburgers, watching afternoon talk shows, listening through headphones to portable CD players, flipping the pages of newspapers or magazines, talking and playing board games with family members, napping — while the drugs went into their arms as if dripping from a leaky spigot, the chemicals burned up their perfectly good veins, and the IV bags hung above every seat.
