The wind picked up outside, buffeting the tent. Jo was deathly cold; if the truck didn’t come soon, she would have to start the oil stove again, and the orderlies would curse when they had to load it onto the truck, still hot. The Scot was crying, not like a man, but like an exhausted toddler put into his crib to cry himself out, pitiable and whimpering and small. The major shouted, but then cut off his yell midscream; he must have bitten his hand to stop himself. Grandpa was shushing his groggy patients, who were asking where they were, what had happened, where was Bobby, Joey, Ted. The rain was pelting the side of the tent, running in under the canvas and into Jo’s shoes. It seemed like forever until they heard noises outside—a faint rustling over the wind at first, then the unmistakable sound of men surrounding the tent, coming closer. Jo tried and failed to make out whether their muted words were in English or German. She wondered what would happen to them all if they were taken prisoner this far into the war. The Geneva convention was still in place, on paper; she and Grandpa, as noncombatants, were protected. But food, the first and most powerful of man’s weapons when withheld, was scarce; in a prison camp at the end of winter, there would be hardly anything left. Jo did not relish the thought of dying that way, separated from her work, from her dying countrymen, from her dying cause.
The tent flap shot open, revealing a figure as he entered, his rifle level with the flashlight he now switched on. For a moment, everyone was blinded as the piercing light shone on them. Just as quickly, it was shut off, and the figure darted to the far end of the tent, opening the flap there. After what seemed like an eternity, they could feel the phantom relax and hear him walk back to the center of the tent, turning on a flashlight and standing it, end up, on the cool iron of the stove-top. It was the American captain.
He looked at Jo, the doctor, and the six men in turn, rubbing his stubbled chin in thought as if he were about to bid on them at auction. As her eyes adjusted to the light, Jo looked from litter to litter, noting instinctively where a line had to be removed, a cast adjusted. One of the post-op patients looked straight at the light with his dilated pupils, dazed yet unable to turn away. Still the captain was silent; he seemed uncertain how to begin.
“Here’s the thing,” he started, then fell silent again.
“Captain Clark,” one of his men called hoarsely through the tent flap, walking up and hastily exchanging whispers with him. When the soldier left, the captain began again.
“Okay, well, there’s nothing for it. Here goes. The fighting has moved off to the south of us for the time being. There’s no telling how long that will last, and at any moment it could shift back this way. But for now, for the next couple of hours anyway, possibly days, you should be okay.”
To Jo, the captain’s manner seemed inconsistent with the (relatively) good news he was bringing them: he kept looking at the floor, then at the tent flap, but never at her or Grandpa directly. He turned almost angrily when one of the patients cried out in pain, lifted his hand as if to say something, shook his head hastily, and turned away.
“When might we be moving out?” Grandpa ventured, uncertain if the captain might again disappear into the night.
“What?” came the puzzled reply of a man thinking along entirely different lines, jolted back into the here and now against his will. “Oh, move out. No, no. You’re not. I mean, you can’t. The road’s blocked. Gone, really.”
The captain started pacing back and forth, looking at the patients as if, by sheer willpower, he could somehow get them off of their stretchers, off of his hands.
“I can’t have you stay here,” he said, almost to himself. “Any one of these men calls out, in their sleep even, and the game’s up. The Jerries could be anywhere, we could be surrounded right now and not know it.”
He stopped pacing.
“But you said the road was blocked?” Grandpa asked. “For how long? I mean, how long until they clear it?”
“They? There—there is no ‘they,’ pops,” the captain stammered. “I’m it. I mean, we’re in a fucking big hole right now.” He took off his helmet and ran his hand through his fair hair, his voice rising despite himself. “I mean, somehow they just fucking slammed right through the middle of our guys, I guess. I don’t get it. Hell, I hope we’re holding on to it somewhere, at the edges maybe, but not here—the line’s completely gone. No one’s supposed to be here, I mean, not us, not anymore. There will be no ‘they’ coming—unless it’s the Germans. And if they’re coming . . .” His voice trailed off as he replaced his helmet slowly.
Jo tried to think of what Queenie would do. She wouldn’t have liked this rough soldier any more than Jo did, but Queenie could be so good at saying the right thing at the right time. Queenie could have bucked him up—bucked them all up—with some cock-and-bull about how she was sure the enemy would pass to their south completely, or if not, how she was confident they could manage nicely right where they were, with her and the doctor taking care of the wounded while the brave, outmanned captain protected them all.
She looked at the captain, his eyes now covered with his free hand, lost in thought, his rifle pointing impotently toward the ground. She tried to feel inside like Queenie would have felt, tried to cue the glorious background music of her mind the way she used to be able to do. Jo could be indomitable too. She could whip herself up into becoming indomitable, precisely because people like Queenie existed and would always exist in the United States of America and anywhere else in the world she sent her citizens to defend freedom. She would prove that right was right—despite Dresden, don’t even think of Dresden, Dresden couldn’t really have happened—and justice would reign. Jo might not live to see it herself, but this war was almost ended. And in the end, goodness would prevail.
Although they ached, Jo drew back her tired shoulders and painfully straightened her spine, coming to attention, coming to life, for the first time in a long time. The captain shook himself all over like a terrier, as if he had just made up his mind about something, and turned toward the flap.
“Captain,” Grandpa asked in passing, turning back toward one of the men on the cots. “What blocked the road?”
“Hmm?” The captain seemed genuinely confused for a moment, as if he had already explained a crucial point that had not been comprehended. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? The medical convoy. They got strafed. We got there all right, in the end, but everyone was dead.”
“The men were all dead,” Jo corrected him, smiling nervously, walking toward him now, her stomach dropping, picturing the burning ambulances, upside down, piled up on the side of the obliterated road. But in her mind’s eye, the nurses were still racing from fallen soldier to fallen soldier like they always had, like they always would, Queenie at their lead, her face covered in soot, her towel come loose and her dark hair messy around her face in the whipping wind, looking wild and beautiful and radiant in the red of the fires burning about her, calling out for the girls to rally round her and smiling. “All the patients were lost. The drivers.”
The captain looked at Jo as if she were a little girl, a very stupid and tiresome girl who asked senseless questions of a man in a hurry. In his vacant eyes was something that could have been mistaken for pity but was in fact a most profound sense of irritation. Only with great effort did he suppress the second word of his intended sentence; simply repeating, instead, the single word, “Everyone.” Then he pushed aside the tent flap and stepped out into the night.
2
Kay Elliott
May 1942, Malinta Tunnel, Corregidor
Kay was running, she had always been running, she was running now. What she was running toward was death—dark, suffocating death with no air and no light and no hope—but the thing she was running from was worse. Down the hill she ran, chest pounding, her fitted skirt impeding her flight, limiting her strides, digging into her thighs with each step; she had never gone so fast, she had to go faster, she could never go fast enough. The rough grass and vines lashed angrily at her bare legs as she sped
by; they were crisscrossed with blood. Behind her a monkey—or a man—started screaming. An enormous explosion went off in the jungle, then another, its heat searing the back of her neck where it was exposed between collar and victory curls that were somehow, ridiculously, still pinned in place. Sweat poured down her face, the sunlight catching on her wet eyelashes, distorting her vision. A terrifying noise was pounding in her ears, a sickening sound she could hear above the monkey’s cruel laughter and the ammunition dumps igniting behind her, the sound of someone gasping for breath and crying and gasping again. Her neck aching from her crazy pulse, she realized the noise was coming from herself. The monkeys swung from vine to vine above her, in front of her, mocking her—or were they scared too, escaping from the holocaust of their home? Another blast came, stronger than the last one, knocking her into the air like a long-jumper, legs turning in empty space—and then the jungle came crashing down in a myriad of small colored blocks. Black snakes floated up into the sky with her, dancing; trees burst into a million splinters of glass that hung suspended in the air. When she tried to scream she found there was no air left in her lungs. She was dead.
And then she woke up. When she opened her eyes it was hard to tell that she was alive, that the utter darkness she found herself in was any different from complete annihilation. She sat up, her forehead painfully grazing the curve of the tunnel wall where it sloped down near her top bunk—and then, with a despair greater than Persephone’s, she realized she was still in Hades. Only here they called it Malinta. She hated Malinta with a hatred more powerful and suffocating than the air it forced her to breathe. Malinta. Linta—Tagalog for “leeches.” Ma—“full of.” She would have preferred the long corridors of this tunnel be filled with those bloodsucking parasites instead of the horrors that really awaited her; would rather they sap the life out of her than have the stench and the filth and the slow inevitability of death do it instead.
Somewhere far above her she could hear a rumble as the vast mountain shook, its reverberations finally reaching her in its necrotic bowels. Carved deep into the solid rock, their impenetrable stronghold, their unassailable fortress, was about to fall. They had surrendered to the Japanese twenty-four hours ago. It was over—why did they keep bombing, bombing, and bombing them, as they had for weeks now? Death surely awaited them outside—rape first, maybe, for the women, followed by starvation; if they were lucky, maybe a quick bullet to the head, instead—but she felt it would almost be worth it if she could take just one breath of fresh air first.
The smell of the tunnel was insufferable. Since April they had been trapped down here like rats—she had thought at first, with her claustrophobia, that she wouldn’t last the first night, that the air would give out. She had survived, but still, the air was largely the same as when they had first sealed themselves up in this living tomb. The stench from the lateral where they had butchered the starved mules; the accumulated diesel fumes from the ambulances that sped down the halls; the stink of urine and vomit and rot rising off of a thousand hospital beds—that was the air they breathed in, choked on, expelled gagging, breathed in again. This was the air they slept in, ate in, tried to think in, the air they cried in and spat out, sick, their mouths tasting like metal. And no matter how foul and putrid and used up the air became, their bodies forced them to breathe it in again, against their will. She remembered how their head surgeon—she had liked him, really liked him, a decent fellow from New England, all Adam’s apple and freckles, with a young wife back home and their first baby on the way—had gone stir-crazy suddenly one day, escaped from their grasp, and, ignoring their cries to stop, opened the door to the tunnel and stepped outside—only to be shot instantly.
After that, the Japanese had allowed nurses and officers “twenty minutes outside each day.” At first, they couldn’t believe it; the very thought of feeling the Pacific breezes again, of feeling the sun on their faces, even for a short time, filled them with hope . . . but then there was the horror of what they saw. Not just the bloated body of their fellow surgeon but the hundreds of other dead and decaying bodies, flies rising off of them in swarms, rodents feasting on their sunburned flesh, an endless carpet of carnage along the road leading up to Malinta. Military dead sprawled alongside civilian men, women, and children, the refugees who had fled to the Americans, to the last safe place, but had arrived after the great door had been shut. All had been bombed mercilessly by their aggressors, and now their rotting bodies filled the air with a reek worse than the tunnel’s filthiest recesses. Kay had seen the black, rotted face of a baby looking up at her with missing eyes, still strapped to its dead mother in an incongruously beautiful orange wrap. Kay had thrown up, cursing the Japanese for their brutality, cursing herself for still being alive. This, then, was the generosity of the Japanese; this was the demoralizing purpose of their twenty minutes of freedom. When the Japanese refused the Americans’ request to bury the dead—stating that anyone attempting it would soon join their ranks—the great gate was closed and barred. Kay never ventured outside again. She would rather die.
She was about to get her wish.
Kay didn’t need to dress after climbing down from her bunk; she was already dressed in the same nurse’s uniform she had put on (she shook her head at the very thought) back in 1941. Another explosion went off somewhere above them; the compression sucking her skirt around her legs, the change in pressure playing with her ears; she had to swivel her jaw to clear them. She walked toward the hospital laterals, where hundreds upon hundreds of cots were filled with wounded soldiers, lined up and growing smaller in the lamplight like some gruesome study in perspective. On her way she passed two ensigns fumbling with their telegraph equipment in the heat and glare of a huge standing lamp, adjusting knobs and tugging on wires. Kay, who had worked in a telegraph office summers back home in Mount Carmel, could make out, “They are coming stop say good-bye for me stop.”
Stop. She felt the thought that her life was about to stop, that the world outside of Malinta could somehow be even more “nasty, brutish, and short” than her existence within it, should have filled her with terror, but it didn’t. Something must be wrong with me, she thought sluggishly, then shrugged. There was so much wrong with her that it was best it would all be ending soon; she was—life was—beyond redemption.
Her patients, the ones who had still been alive that morning when she got there—she had had to call in the orderlies to remove the corpses stuck to the cots with their own blood—were scared; word of the surrender had reached them. They pulled off rings, stuffing them into her hands, giving her explicit instructions. Give this to Pamela Murphy, Reading, Pennsylvania . . . to Eloise Drew, Rapid City, South Dakota . . . Tell her to sell the farm . . . to marry again . . . to name him Hank . . . to remember me . . . to forget me . . . Tell her that I love her. Kay nodded soothingly as they spoke, the countless names and places, the frenzied list of last wishes passing through her consciousness unheard. What did these men think would happen to their nurses? That the Japanese would send them home, unscathed, laden like pawnshops with their silver scapular medals, gold watches, and a hundred class rings?
She never knew how she made it through that day. How she found the last bit of compassion and humanity she thought had been driven out of her—found it and passed it along to these men. But she did. Perhaps it was because she and the other nurses, no matter how harrowing their own fate might soon be at the hands of the enemy, knew with a cold certainty that this was the last day on earth for these men. The Japanese did not take injured prisoners of war, prisoners who could not stand and walk and march. So Kay and the other nurses promised a thousand empty promises, with a thousand empty smiles—that she would go to Jersey City after the war, that she would comfort a grieving mother, that she would look up an old friend, an uncle, a sister, a lover. She would tell a brother he was forgiven, and admit to Rosie that the baby was his after all. That the money was hidden behind Lucia di Lammermoor in the study . . . that the will was in the pantry, bu
ried in the flour . . . that the key to the safe was in the old hollow oak, the one in the middle of the lower pasture, right next to the stream. She promised a thousand, senseless, useless things she would never do and could never remember, promised them on her word of honor; she heard without hearing the flotsam of a thousand, unfinished lives, the things they had not said and had not done and now would never say or do. She tirelessly changed bandages as if it mattered, as if there would even be time for them to soak through again, to begin to harbor infection. She gave out the remaining doses of medicine, of sulfa, of whatever they had left—this was mortuary care, not nursing. She gave everything out, everything but the tiny glass vials of morphine.
These she took. She and the other nurses, at the end of their graveyard shift, took all they could and, in the dreary light of their dormitory lateral, pinned them up in their victory rolls. The vials were small, transparent, fragile; carefully, they helped each other secure them inside their blond, black, auburn curls. “Make ’em good and tight, girls,” they told each other grimly, just as their head nurse had told them last year, jokingly, “Eat up your biscuits, girls, for when the Japs take you prisoner.” They had laughed at that impossibility and passed up the buttery rolls, already full from their lavish meals, supplemented by the never-ending supply of tropical fish and fruits and fatty nuts. They’d been worried about fitting into their evening dresses for the embassy gala, the officers’ dance, the nurses’ ball. Kay thought of the biscuits now and tears rolled down her sallow cheeks.
The Fire by Night Page 3
