The voices were clearer. They inched over a hump of earth and there were three of them huddled together, jabbering in blunt whispers, and they stopped and neither of them breathed.
The first shell hit in a whoop of earth. It fell behind them, closer to their lines, and another followed it before the sky literally exploded in a chorus of flares and muzzle flash. He raised himself up to break and the Chinese yelled. Jimmy pulled him down, and his carbine slammed against his chest and took his breath away. Rifle fire threw dirt up in splatters
in front of them and the Chinese were up and running toward them. Jimmy was suddenly on his feet, but he lay on his side, unable to move. The first Chinese swung a rifle butt at Jimmy’s chin but he ducked it and then came up with his knife and plunged it into the man’s belly. The dead Chinese dropped and rolled heavily into him and the man’s face inches from his own shocked him to his feet. There were explosions behind them and he could hear the hillside clatter with the cascade of dirt and rock and stones. The barrage was deafening. In the flash of light he could make the dim line of hordes approaching from the opposite side of the valley behind the crash of shells and the rattle of machine-gun fire from their troops. It looked like the entire Chinese and North Korean armies were advancing behind their artillery. Jimmy crouched and moved forward and he followed in the same crouch. He saw the silhouette of a man coming at them. There was a snap of rifle fire from the encroaching troops and the man’s head exploded when a bullet hit, spraying him with grey gore, blood, and bone, and the dead man crashed into him and they both fell to the ground. He tried to wrestle him off but it was Jimmy who pulled him to his feet and he stood there with his knife in his free hand, looking down at another Chinese soldier beside the others. Jimmy had killed him. His throat was sliced in a hard line, and he thought he could see bone in the flare light.
“Fuck. Come on!” Jimmy yelled.
He gathered himself and they turned and ran back toward their lines, zigzagging crazily while shells ripped out craters all around them and spewed dirt and rock that ricocheted off their helmets. He could hear shrapnel buzz by his head. Rifle fire kicked up earth at their feet. They ran mightily and when Jimmy grunted and slammed into the ground he stopped and
turned and found himself standing in a dark pond of blood. He fell down beside Jimmy. Bullets strafed over them. There was artillery fire from their side now. He pulled Jimmy close to him. The blood made purple mud around him. He pulled him closer and dragged him to the cover of small boulders. There was a hole in Jimmy’s back and a larger one where the bullet had come out of his gut. He leaned against a boulder and held his friend to his chest.
He heard Chinese voices. They yelled out in broken English.
He tried to move the two of them closer to the shelter of the boulders. Jimmy started to scream and he clapped a hand over his mouth. Jimmy stared at him wild-eyed and crazy. Thrashing. The booming of artillery was everywhere. Jimmy was manic with pain. He held him as tight as he could with one arm, immobilized by the fear thudding in his chest. For now the Chinese had no idea where they were. But if Jimmy screamed he would give their position away. He eased his knife out with his free hand. He rolled Jimmy onto his back and pressed his knee to his chest to pin him. Jimmy tried to grab at him, punch him. He could feel his mouth working under the palm of his hand. His eyes were wide, the whites of them like twin moons. Panicked. He took the knife and held it under his ribcage and Jimmy stopped, his body going perfectly still as he stared at him over the rim of his hand. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again there was peace there and he nodded at him. The knife went in almost on its own and he twisted it like he was trained to do and leaned forward cheek to cheek with Jimmy and heard his last breath ease out of him.
The barrage rammed into the earth and he could feel it shake underneath him and when he rose to run he looked back down at his friend, bullets flying overhead, and he
turned and ran half-crouched under the flare of lights, the whistle of shells and shrapnel and the screams of men dying above him on the hills, and he ran screaming and weeping into the breech of his own private war.
“I didn’t wanna die and I sure didn’t wanna die by torture neither. When I got back I told them Jimmy was killed by a Chinese patrol. I was never so scared in my life,” his father said. “They never found his body. Me, I took to drinking after that. Drank so bad they drummed me out dishonourable pretty quick. They said it was because my friend had been killed and it was. I just never told no one it was me killed him. I was eighteen years old. I hung on to it all this time.”
The fire had burned away and they could see the stars in the thick purple swaddle of the sky. It was calm. There was an edge to the air that spoke of frost and in the chill stillness of it they could hear creatures moving in the bush. A thin scrim of clouds plowed over the lip of mountain and they watched it moving by the light of the stars winking out and then emerging again. When he stirred the coals of the fire, then added kindling and larger sticks, the blaze crackled to life and he saw the gaunt shape of his father. He was mostly hollow and the fingers that curled around the edge of the blanket were thin and angled by sharp thrusts of knuckle, the veins on the backs of his hands black in the firelight so that it seemed to the kid as if he were held together by rivers of coal.
“Musta been hard,” the kid said. “Carrying Jimmy all this time.”
His father shivered in one long, trembling wave that racked his body. He helped him stretch full out on the ground and
when he got him laid out he stuck a few pieces of birch on the embers and waited while they caught and then added more to them. The fire stoked up well and he could feel the heat of it on his face and he rolled up his mackinaw and placed it under his father’s head. He felt his father’s brow but he couldn’t tell what was fever or the heat of the blaze now. He got the canteen and lifted his father’s head and held the canteen to his lips and slowly poured. Some of the water dribbled down from the corners of his father’s mouth but he managed to swallow some until he coughed it up, the coughs nearly bending him double. When the coughs settled they tried it again and he took it and held it down.
“They’re in us,” his father said after a moment. He spoke low now, as if it took all the strength in him to form the words and push them out. “The stars are in us.” His father swallowed dryly again and the kid could hear the rasp of his tongue on his palate and the rough clutch of his throat. He pulled the blanket up around his neck and hunched in upon himself more and his father trembled and there was nothing the kid could do but wait it out.
He’d twitch now and then. Eventually he calmed and his breath evened again. Now and then the kid would reach out and heave another chunk of wood on the fire. He gazed upward. The stars arranged themselves into shapes and suggestions and he felt the pull of them like a calling away and he looked deeper into the beaded bowl of the night and saw a multitude of possible worlds hung there, suspended against time itself, and he closed his eyes and tried to feel them inside of himself but all he felt was empty. He reached over and arranged the blanket around his father again, felt the lank bone of his upper arm, his fingers, soon to return to the earth,
and he sat and watched him, the clouds of their breaths mingling in the frosted air.
“Jimmy probably would’ve died anyway,” the kid said.
“There’s no knowin’ that.”
“Better off thinkin’ that than feeling like a coward all your life.”
His father stared down at the ground. When he looked up at the kid again it was bitter and angry and the kid just looked back at him flatly.
“You’re hard, Frank. You get that way being out here so much?”
The kid looked out across the valley and then started to roll a smoke. When he licked the gummed edge he eyed his father, who watched him warily. He maintained the look while he lit up and when he exhaled the smoke he let his gaze drift out over the valley again.
“Ain’t no trickery out here. No lies. I come to prefer it,” he said.
“Christ. You’re sixteen.”
“Gotta be a special age to brook no bullshit?”
“Not especially. You’re still hard though.”
“At least I never felt like no coward.”
“You never been in a war, Frank.”
“Not one of my own leastways.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means I’m still livin’ the one you never finished.”
“Jesus.”
The kid pitched the butt into the fire and got up and stalked off to the rim of the ridge. He stood there watching the sky like a purple stain over the dark humps and crags of the valley and the mountains around it. There was a churning
in his gut he didn’t like. It made him feel angry and he didn’t like anger. He turned and walked back to the fire and sat poking at it with a stick.
His father coughed into his hand. Then he looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “You figure you might be able to forgive me, Frank?”
“I ain’t the one that has to.”
“I mean about Jimmy.”
“I mean about him too.”
The kid strode into the bush and returned with an armload of wood. His father lay on his side, clutching his arms about himself and shivering. He used the wood to build a reflector to angle the heat toward his father. The wind dropped, and he could taste far-off snow. He sat close to the fire, warming himself while his father dozed, shivering and feverish. He sat and smoked and watched his father sleep. “War’s nearly over,” he said.
THE BREEZE WAS CHILLY
in the dawn and he stoked the embers of the fire and lay in fresh wood. The flames climbed and drove the chill off and soon his father raised his head. Clouds skimmed above them. There was pale sunlight on the shoulders of the mountains.
“You need a hit of that medicine or the hooch?” the kid asked.
“Some of both. Yeah,” his father said.
The kid rose and retrieved the bottles. He held them while his father took some of the liquid in his mouth. Both times he fought to swallow. There was a wild shake to his hands. It seemed a struggle for him to hold a cigarette. He held it out to the kid, who pitched it into the fire. They sat there without talking. A hawk soared over the treetops and the horse skittered.
“There’s a stream back down a ways,” the kid said. “I gotta get some food. I won’t be long.”
He got no answer so he led the horse back down the trail. The morning was brilliant and the walk energized him. The horse smelled the water and she made him walk quicker to the stream. She drank and when she’d had her fill he tied her to a tree and walked along the rocky shore. He refilled the canteen and studied the water. There were trout in the stream. They were sluggish from the cold of the water and he speared them easily with the knife that he’d lashed to a stout sapling with his bootlaces. He gutted and cleaned them and used a hank of willow threaded through their gills to carry them back up the ridge. His father had sunk into the effect of the medicine. The kid set the fish on sticks leaned over the fire to cook. Then he walked and stooped though the trees to scout mushrooms. He found a big thrust of chicken mushrooms and he skewered them on sticks and went back to set them over the fire alongside the fish. He settled down to watch the fire and turn the sticks. When everything was cooked he polished off the trout and most of the mushrooms. His father would never eat. The shakes were on him hard and sweat poured down his face. Even when his shakes stopped he quivered and his breath was raspy in his throat. The kid could see his eyeballs rolling crazily under their lids. When he reached out to touch him
his father convulsed so violently the kid thought he lifted off the ground. His father curled into a tight ball and clutched his arms about himself. The kid got the bottles and knelt beside him and put a hand on his ribs. He could feel the rails of them beneath his palm.
“Ya best have some of this,” he said.
“N-n-no h-h-h-hooch,” his father said.
“Ya sure?” the kid asked. “Ya ain’t good.”
“Sh-sh-sh-sure.”
The kid managed to roll him onto his back again and straighten his legs. Then he lifted his head and held the bottle of medicine to his father’s mouth and watched him wrestle with taking in a few mouthfuls. He let him have as much as he wanted. His father paused and sucked back more. The kid marvelled at the strength of the concoction as he watched his father’s face settle and then the racking convulsions ease into shivers until his body quieted and his breathing became regular again. When he was sure that he would be okay the kid laid his father’s head back down and tucked the blanket close around him and tried to steady his own breathing. It was a long while before his father moved onto his side and stared at the kid without raising his cheek off the ground.
The kid untied his knife from the sapling and began to whittle away at one of the sticks he’d cooked the mushrooms on. He shaved the bark clean in long strokes and set them in the fire and sharpened one end and poked at the embers with it then reached over and added a fresh piece of wood.
“There’s one more thing,” his father said.
“My mother,” the kid said quietly, looking into the fire.
His father was quiet so long he turned to see if he’d passed out. But he was still looking at him sombrely. He
blinked slowly and drew a deep breath. “The old man never told ya nothing?”
“Said he figured that’d be your job. Said it was yer’s to do but he’d do it if it come to it.”
“Like I said, I owe you. This at the least.”
The kid kept whittling away at the stick. “Now yer backed into a corner so ya gotta. How’m I gonna know yer not lyin’ just so ya can feel like ya done somethin’ proper and good at the last?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
The kid laid the knife in his lap. “I got no idea whether ya would or ya wouldn’t.”
“I couldn’t lie about her. I tried to lie to myself a lotta years. Tried to tell myself it was some other way than it was.” He raised himself painfully up on one elbow and grimaced. “Guess I figured I might drink it away. Idea never did work worth a damn.”