by Cullin Mitch
While out on patrol or manning a listening post, Hollis sometimes whispered the lines to himself, memorizing the expressions like a prayer. And although the Naktong front was exposed, he always felt a real sense of security after reciting the litany, using it for his own charm — the way others wore crosses around necks, or kept photographs of mothers and girlfriends, or carried lucky pennies in pockets. In fact, nothing usually happened when he uttered the words — no mortar shells came his way, no one came under fire, and the war seemed to be somewhere else. Still, casualties happened, some men were killed or wounded in the brief exchanges across the river, but otherwise the lull prevailed without a major attack. In midday heat the men found shade, relaxing together throughout the uneasy afternoons, and prior to sundown there were card games and long conversations which invariably ran the gamut from God to the Stars and Stripes pinup of August's Miss Morale.
It was during the afternoon card games that McCreedy routinely brought up sex, using any unrelated topic or offhand comment as a segue for what was a group preoccupation. What the military needed to do, McCreedy once suggested, was enlist a unit of Tokyo mama-sans, putting them on active duty inside the foxholes, a little something what'd help release the tension of combat. The men laughed, and one said, “I'd murder every single son bitch here for a lick of poontang,” and somebody else chimed in, saying, “Damn, man, you know it's been too long when the mud starts looking good, know what I mean?” Cards were dealt, bets made, cigarettes bartered. The topic changed in due course, evolving from pussy to sports cars, from sports cars to football — then, invariably, circling back to sex again. The cards were shuffled.
And through the laughter and small talk, it was McCreedy's stealthy eyes which landed on Hollis (never sitting with the group, always close by yet never joining the conversation), glaring at him coldly while talking or cracking jokes, letting him know that he wasn't really one of them; and Hollis didn't flinch, didn't look down but rather met the stare and held it, as if to say: I've already seen too much, you don't impress me anymore. Since No Gun Ri they had avoided each other's company or conversation, and since Schubert was killed McCreedy's gaze had turned toward Hollis, perhaps, at first, imploring his friendship and then, perhaps, admonishing the indifference he was sensing while also dissembling an overall amiability which didn't exist in the depths of him. But when assigned to a two-man listening post, whatever mutual dislike was quietly fostered could no longer be kept at a respectable distance.
Located several yards from the apple orchard, adjacent to a rice paddy, the listening post was built entirely of sandbags — with a large, dying pine tree used for the rear barrier, the base of its trunk reinforced by more sandbags. Sequestered in the cramped space for three nights, the two men hardly spoke, both keeping silent while monitoring the river. Then last evening, having paused to urinate, Hollis arrived at the listening post following McCreedy, and discovered him sitting there — a hand on his rifle, a hand on the sound-power phone — using a sandbag for a cushion. “What, you're still alive?” McCreedy said, not looking too pleased.
“Sorry,” answered Hollis, stepping over his boots.
“Ain't nothing to be sorry about,” he said, with a sardonic smile. “Anyhow, you might as well get in on the bet some of us got running. I'm wagering my tinned biscuits that tomorrow night the gooks will come across the river for us. Tyler and Sims are betting their chocolate bars it's tonight, and ol’ Parsons has put his toilet paper on the line that we'll get evacuated before the gooks can start anything serious. What you say, you in?”
“I'll think about it.”
“Don't think too long. Clock's ticking.”
Hollis looked out at the wild grass and reeds. His stare crossed the river; he scanned the Naktong's western side, letting his gaze travel the shoreline. Green strands of waterweed rippled off the banks like ribbons, waving along the brown undulating surface. Soon McCreedy had risen, propping himself next to Hollis, gazing beyond the sandbags, bitterly saying, “Damn river has gone down again. Wonder how shallow the stupid thing is by now.”
“Can't say for certain,” said Hollis, “but it's pretty shallow. On this side the water is probably waist high, but on the other side I've heard it's deeper.”
McCreedy sighed needlessly as Hollis spoke, then responded with: “Sure, sure, you're a real reliable source of information, aren't you? I suppose you've waded that river dozens of times yourself, you fuckin’ pecker-wood.”
Even after everything they had been through at the front — when cynicism, sarcasm, and profanity had flavored the collective tongue — Hollis was taken aback by the harshness of McCreedy's words. He kept silent for a few seconds, still staring ahead before glancing at the smirking, brutish face hovering beside him, saying, “That's what I heard, all right? I couldn't care less if you believe it or not.” Just then he wanted to be anywhere else but near McCreedy. “Honestly, I really don't give a damn!” Without thinking, he turned around, moving unsteadily to leave the post. Except his exit wasn't allowed, at least not yet: for he was promptly grabbed from behind and, loosing hold of his rifle, thrown sideways against the sandbags — where McCreedy managed, while wearing the same smirk, to deftly pin his shoulders back with clenching fingers and an arm bracing his chest. “Let go,” was all Hollis could muster, his heart racing, his body incapable of resisting the weight pushing into him. “You'd better let go.”
McCreedy sighed a couple of times, deeply, finally saying, “You're one queer customer, you know it?” Hollis blinked impassively, barely suppressing the fear and anger he was feeling, and lowered his gaze. “How come you don't like me, huh?” The smirk became a straight, tapering line; he brought a hand under Hollis's chin and forced his head up until they were eye to eye: “I thought we was buddies, right? What'd Creed ever do to you?”
Then, for once, Hollis registered something like hurt in McCreedy's voice, a perplexed tone betraying vulnerability. But there was nothing he wished to explain, nor had he completely grasped his inherent aversion for McCreedy. He thought: You expect me to laugh at your dumb jokes when I don't want to laugh. You want me to agree with you when I don't agree with you. You decided I was your friend when I didn't want to know you. I always hear you talking, and you talk too loud and too damn much. I've seen the things you've done. You put pennies on the dead. You have no shame or regrets about anything, and I just don't like you. You're not worth fighting for. “What the hell difference does it make?” he said, shaking himself free at the very moment McCreedy eased the bracing arm off of him. “Let go of me!”
“Suit yourself,” said McCreedy, drumming fingertips on Hollis's neck, “ ‘cept I won't be watching out for you once the shit hits the fan, okay?” Then, patting the fingers to the stuffed breast pocket of Hollis's shirt, he added: “Anyway, if you're deserting me here, I'd best get a little compensation, otherwise I'll have to report you, and we don't want that, do we?” He gave Hollis a sly wink, extracting a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket and, the smirk reemerging, transferred it to his own shirt pocket. “I guess we're almost even — ”
By then Hollis was sweating heavily, his skin glistening in the twilight. Slipping around McCreedy, he stooped for his rifle, taking it with a trembling hand, and kept going, aware of the hard stare trailing him. At last escaping the listening post, he felt his hot heart pumping underneath the fatigues — as if his chest had absorbed some of the sweltering, radiant heat of the bright summer day and was releasing it back into the night. He continued along a narrow dirt path — away from the listening post, beyond the orchard — until arriving at the high grass and tall reeds which now camouflaged him. Once cloaked at the river's edge, he grew mad at himself for having been bullied so easily, for not standing his ground any better than he had done. Thereafter, he entertained fantasies of killing McCreedy, of lobbing a grenade at the listening post or demanding his cigarettes be returned before opening fire. But the long night eventually mellowed his anger, subduing it with immediate concern
s: the possibility of enemy attack, his own survival.
How baffling, Hollis later considered, that that brief confrontation at the listening post had upset him more than the grand-scale violence and ruin he had witnessed since No Gun Ri. How vexing that such an insignificant yet personal affront could outrage him more than the sight of an infant being shot in its mother's arm, or of a fellow Garryowen blown apart. Except, he reminded himself, nothing made much sense there. Everything was misplaced, thrown out of kilter. Nothing there was exactly as it should be — and he had ended up in the middle of it, cast alone among crickets, mindful of the river and the nearby listening post he could no longer see.
The dawn preamble had commenced fading the stars, and at first light, faint yellow and blue, gave vague form to the reeds and grass, the shorelines and trees. Hollis inhaled the air, which felt cooler and smelled sweeter than it had during the interminable night. Already the crickets were lessening their volume, the chirps punctuated by longer and longer intervals of silence; soon the morning became extremely calm — the water flowed almost noiselessly, the whir of insects and the occasional rustle of nocturnal creatures had ceased — although the environment alongside the river was still dangerous, more so now with sunrise. The canopy of darkness turned luminous, and overhead the cloudless, transparent sky was tinged with color. Then glowing cloud billows began swirling up behind the mountain ranges, and the sloping hillsides were becoming green and golden.
Hollis brushed aside the reeds in front of his face, peering cautiously round him. But it wasn't the western shore ultimately drawing his attention, nor that of a solitary crow gliding downward to the rice paddy, releasing a caw which was echoed by something else unseen; rather, he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, just up the trail from where he had come last night. Turning his head, he let the reeds sway back into place, adjusting his stare with the wavering of stems.
The listening post was now visible — some twenty yards away, much closer than Hollis had estimated — and McCreedy had emerged past its sandbags and dirt, M1 in hand, scrutinizing the area while half circling the dying pine tree, putting the grayish trunk between his body and the Naktong, shielding himself there. Upon leaning the rifle against the tree, McCreedy undid his pants, tugging his penis out through the fly, and, as the sun angled a ray within inches of his boots, started urinating on the ground, exposing himself in the way he had once warned Schubert never to do (yet he was nothing if not cavalier regarding his own safety, unflinching in the belief that the pennies in his pockets would keep him secure). When finished, he didn't fasten his pants, but instead left his dribbling penis open to view while fishing a cigarette from a pocket, eyes darting here and there, careful not to let his guard lapse and, perhaps, also searching for the whereabouts of Hollis. Behind him sunlight crept along the river, stunning the banks.
Then with McCreedy's exhalation of smoke, the previous evening's anger and humiliation stirred inside Hollis like bile. No damn good, he thought. Worthless. Lifting the semiautomatic, easing the barrel through the reeds, he fixed the sights — the smoldering cigarette, the head in profile, the muscular neck — taking careful aim: McCreedy's right hand slid into his fly, bringing his penis with it, doing so while lowering himself, back pressed against the tree, legs set akimbo; puffing on the cigarette, the heedful gaze now cast toward the crotch of his uniform, McCreedy's right hand squirmed around within the pants, making a wrenching motion which bulged and gyrated beneath the fabric. Hollis, too, suddenly felt an unexpected charge of arousal mixing incongruously with his desire for revenge, the extreme sensation becoming heightened with the spasmodic jolting of McCreedy's boots, the acceleration of motion underneath the uniform — even while he steadied the rifle, finding McCreedy weaker and more assailable than he had ever seen him previously. You'd never know what hit you, he told himself. You'd be gone like that.
And as if it had been impelled from his own mind, a single shot burst forward, terminating the morning calm and stunning the hearing in Hollis's left ear; then, simultaneously, down the length of the rifle he saw McCreedy transfigured into the autonomous, undeniable world of the dead: the round struck him at the neck, ripping apart a jugular vein — splitting bark after passing through him, cracking the trunk of the pine tree — and briefly jettisoned blood up and out like a geyser, giving the illusion of McCreedy's head having just exploded, accompanied by a fine red mist which shimmered for a moment in the air before dissipating into the cascading sunlight. With his head violently jerked to one side and the neck partially severed, the weight of McCreedy's helmet pulled him over, slumping his left shoulder and torso to the ground, raising his bent right knee a few inches — his hand now motionless inside his blood-soaked pants, his boots no longer twitching with pleasure.
Indistinct voices began yelling from the apple orchard. A whistle blew on a hillside. Serves you right, Hollis might have thought, had McCreedy's impromptu demise not confounded him so, robbing his breath, making him senseless. You weren't really that special, you had it coming. But his finger hadn't been at the trigger; he hadn't fired, nor had he truly planned on vengeance: he simply wanted his cigarettes returned. In his left temple, a pulse started pounding against his brain. “In God we trust,” he whispered with the lowest of sound, regaining himself, apprehending then that the lethal shot had been discharged within feet of where he was hiding: “time flies, rest in peace, peace be with you, peace on earth.” Someone tore through the overgrowth several meters behind him, a hunched figure obscured by reeds and bolting for the shore. “Good will toward men, one for all and all for one — ”
What happened immediately thereafter would forever exist in Hollis's memory as a mostly bleared, unfocused event, meshed with sparse flashes of clarity. Without thinking twice, he scrambled from the reeds, uttering words which didn't reach the air, and, McCreedy's tilted corpse burned like an after-image, rushed along the bank, chasing a small figure in a mustard-drab uniform. His boots twisted in sand, across rocks and stones — that much he remembered — yet he couldn't recall if he had fired first, knocking the North Korean soldier to the sand, or if, in fact, the boy had tripped and, with Hollis drawing near, the M1 poised, rolled over, squeezing off a haphazard shot which still hit its intended target. Regardless, they had quickly exchanged fire, striking each other at close range: five rounds from the semiautomatic M1, a single round from a Japanese-made bolt-action rifle. And then, in what had seemed like the fleeting passage of mere seconds, it was all finished; the war had concluded for him, McCreedy, and a young North Korean whose name or short-lived history he would never know.
Subsequently, Hollis scoffed while watching cowboy movies or TV police dramas, frowning whenever a character was struck by a bullet and seized their chest, staggering dramatically, grimacing, and, all of the sudden, collapsing. His personal understanding of being shot was quite different; for he had remained standing on the bank, staring at the dying sniper who lay faceup at his feet, the Japanese-made rifle cast aside. Where did you come from? he wondered. Why didn't I hear you any earlier, or you me? The boy gasped like a stranded fish trying to breathe and oozed red foam between quivering lips and then, producing a slight gurgling noise, stopped living: the brown eyes reflected the sky; the face was round, smooth, hairless; although stained with blood, the mouth and chin were untouched; the coarse black hair was groomed, cropped short; there was a mole on the right cheek, a mole on the left earlobe; the hands were slender, the fingers long and unadorned, the fingernails dirty; the torso was a mess, the uniform oily and glistening with sanguine fluid — the five shots having struck millimeters apart, punching a fist-size hole in the narrow chest; the boy appeared younger than twenty, older than fifteen.
Fueled by adrenaline and panting hard, Hollis glanced at the Japanese rifle and noticed his left leg, saw the blood cascading from a massive gash in his fatigues, wetting everything below his knee. “Son of a bitch,” he said, his voice less enraged than irritated. “Goddamnit.” Like a waterfall
, he thought. Like a crimson waterfall, pooling in the sand around his boot. But he didn't stagger about on the bank or use a hand to cover his injury, nor did he panic or feel anything other than numbness; instead, he promptly used the rifle like a crutch, pushing its butt into the ground and gripping its barrel for support as he sat himself in front of the boy, extending his sodden leg outward, waiting to be helped. Presently, he lay down on the sand, filling his view with a pure expanse of blue ether, and all at once his body grew perceptibly lighter — a point of fraction, as if an unknowable part of himself had risen up, escaping the riverside, choosing to stay in Korea even while the rest of him was bound to be rescued.
