Ludovico continued, “How many Negroes are there in America, anyway? I thought they were all slaves and died. I think these men are Gurkhas who killed this boy's parents.”
That thought seemed to press the oxygen out of the room. Anything was possible. The woods outside Bornacchi were full of bandits, redshirts, partisans, bandits posing as partisans, communists, Brazilian soldiers, even the occasional Gurkha. Nothing was safe.
Ludovico nodded at the boy, who lay mute, his eyes still closed. “He's got to go.”
Renata's face tightened. “Where?”
“With the American imposters. Or whatever they are.”
“The boy stays.”
“It's my house.”
“I have a house, too,” Renata said grimly. She turned to Ettora. “What do you think?”
Ettora shrugged. “The devil is in him. He is possessed.”
Renata said, “There is a priest at Gallicano who will look at him. I'll take him there myself.”
“There is no priest at Gallicano, remember? He ran off.”
“Maybe he has come back.”
Ettora stared at Renata in amazement. There was a time, before the war, when the young respected their elders. They respected the old ways. Ettora would spin coins on a table and Renata would scream in delight. She took Renata's worms away by drawing a cross on her tummy and forehead with a silver coin and kissing her on the forehead. She would let Renata taste a little
vin di nugoli
made from the chestnut tree's fruit and watch her dance with joy. But now they didn't believe in the old ways. They liked the radio. And dancing. And jazz music. And priests who ran off.
“Do what you want,” Ettora said, clapping her hands in frustration as Renata, realizing her mistake, scurried about the room, busily warming the soup again. Ettora rummaged about among the items near the stove, rattling through the pots and pans till she found a spoon. She poured some chestnut flour onto the wooden plate, then grabbed the long spoon to beat the flour into finer bits. As she raised the spoon to beat the flour, her arm was frozen in midair by a loud banging on the door.
“C'mon,
signora!
Open up, baby!”
Ettora put down the spoon, and Renata opened the door. The three Italians backed into the living room to let the four Americans in. The giant one strode directly to the boy, who lay with his eyes closed. He leaned over him, his chin strap dangling down. He felt the boy's head and said something to the Spanish-speaking one. The Spanish-speaking one spoke to them.
“He's hot. You give him the medicine?”
Ettora grimaced. “He won't take it. The powder you gave is not as good as my medicine, anyway.”
The Spanish-speaking one translated, and the giant said something that Renata could not hear to the others. The three Italians, gathered in the living room, watched as a hushed argument ensued among the Americans who stood in the bedroom over the sleeping boy. Ludovico panicked, watching the floor creak and sag beneath the four men with his twenty-two rabbits underneath it. Renata glanced at him in disgust, saying nothing.
The argument lasted several minutes, the giant shaking his head while the lieutenant spoke to him. Finally, the four emerged from the bedroom and the Spanish-speaking one said, “We have to take him with us down the mountain to a hospital. Who knows the way?”
The three Italians were silent.
“I know the way,” Renata said.
Ludovico's face crinkled in alarm. “You must be losing your mind. There are Germans and mines everywhere. Besides, you won't get far in that.” He pointed out the window to the pouring rain. He didn't mention that the idea of his lovely daughter walking through the woods with four foreigners, American Negro foreigners or whatever kind of imposters they were, was unthinkable.
Renata ignored him. She spoke to Hector in Italian. “There might be a priest in Gallicano who can help him. That's not far.”
“He needs a doctor, not a priest,” Hector said.
“He's bewitched, and a priest can take the devil out of him.”
Hector laughed. Stamps, watching the exchange, demanded to know what was going on. Hector explained, and as he did, the giant Negro, who had come over to join them, peeled off and strode into the bedroom again. He hunched over the boy's bed. He shook the boy gently.
The three Italians watched in awe as the little boy awakened and opened his eyes wide in recognition. The giant held the boy's head gently and placed the sulfa powder on his tongue, then motioned with one of his huge paws for water. Renata handed him a flask. The boy drank, then vomited a little, then drank again.
“He would not eat,” Renata said helplessly.
“I wouldn't eat, either, if I lived here,” Bishop said. “Smells like cowbutt up in here.”
The giant one ignored them. Renata watched as he spoke softly to the boy. He had a voice that sounded like crushed gravel gently scraping across a cool dirt road. He rose, and with one hand, picked up the boy and laid him across his shoulder, the tiny boy settling against his bandoleer and rifle like a rag doll. The giant knelt and with one huge hand grasped a blanket off the bed and placed it tenderly over the boy's back. He crouched through the bedroom door and approached Stamps. “I'm ready to go, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Go where?” Stamps asked. “They say there ain't nowhere to go.”
“Then we got to go back the way we come,” Train said. He wanted it done now. He had slept ten hours. The boy was his responsibility, till he got rid of him. “He got to have parents someplace. Maybe they at division looking for 'im. Maybe division is looking for us.”
Bishop said, “Shit, they ain't looking for us. What the hell makes you think Nokes is looking for us? Hector tried the radio all night. Ain't nobody on it.”
Train strode from the room back into the tiny bedroom, placed the boy carefully on the bed, and sat down on the floor next to it. The room smelled funny, reminding him of something from home, but he couldn't remember what. With one long foot, he reached over and slowly, silently, nudged the door, closing it with his huge boot. He needed to think. He heard the others talking outside the door and shut them out of his mind. The boy had fallen asleep again. Train had never seen someone sleep so much.
Outside the door, the three soldiers and three Italians turned to Stamps, who again was undecided. He said to Hector, “Ask the old man if there's another way outta here where there's no Germans. Even if it's the wrong way. Maybe we can reach the Tenth Division. They're over in Ferrara, I think.”
Hector didn't like it. The Italians were scared dumb, and the best thing to do would be to lay low with them. They'd survived this long, he thought, but he complied and asked Ludovico if he could help them find another way out. The old man shook his head in response.
Stamps said, “Tell him we'll pay 'em. We got plenty of the funny money they use here.”
Ludovico continued to shake his head.
Hector sat and waited impatiently for Stamps to decide what to do next. Ettora poured the remaining chestnut flour into a bowl. Seeing the flour made Hector hungry. He decided there was no sense starving while Stamps cut his teeth on being a lieutenant. He produced a can of Spam. He had two left.
The Italians stared hungrily as Hector opened the can and the pungent smell of hash filled the room. Stamps saw Ettora watching. “Want some?”
She motioned to a pot of boiling water, and Hector dumped the hash into it.
From the next room, they heard singing. The sound of Train's voice made all of them stop. “That's beautiful,” Renata said.
Bishop rolled his eyes. It amazed him that someone as dense as Train could impress anyone, though he had to admit Train had a pretty singing voice. “That nigger could put Bessie Smith out of business,” he snorted. He tried the bedroom door. It was locked. He knocked on it. “Train,” he shouted to the door, “when you gets signed up for a big contract, remember my fourteen hundred yards of large, that's what you owe me. Fourteen hundred bucks. Not a penny less. Won't mean nothing to a rich man like you then.”
Train ignored Bishop and continued singing softly, his deep baritone voice rising.
Sitting at the table, Stamps sighed. “All right. We wait till tomorrow.” He spoke to Hector. “Tell the old man we wait till tomorrow and we need to eat. We can trade.”
Ludovico shook his head. “You should leave tonight,” he said. “There are Germans in the mountains behind here, between us and the Americans. If you go at night through the mountains, it's safer.”
Hector saw where it was going. The old man wanted them out of his hair. He didn't give a damn. Hector didn't need to translate his response for Stamps. “We don't know these mountains,” he said. “We need somebody to show us the way.”
“I don't know the way,” Ludovico said quickly.
Before Hector could translate, Renata spoke up again, in Italian. “I know the way.”
Ludovico stared at her, shocked. She looked at him, her eyes dull and hard. “I know the way through,” she repeated. Hector noted the tension between them. There was a game here, he decided. Something going on between father and daughter. He wanted to know nothing about it. Couldn't Stamps see that this woman was trying to make her daddy mad? And for what? To lead some coloreds through the woods? Who was she, Little Red Riding Hood? What was in it for her, anyway? Maybe she was a partisan. Or a Fascist. There were women Fascists, too. Maybe it was all a trap, a ploy to lead them to the German commanders outside the village. Hector would kill her then, if she did that, Stamps or no Stamps. He could see she liked Stamps, could see it from the moment they stepped in there the night before. Maybe it was all a ruse, her pretending to like Stamps so she could lead them all to a waiting SS squad out in the hills. A wave of shame suddenly made Hector blanch. He was glad he didn't love anybody. It was easier, safer, not to love somebody, not to have children and raise kids in this crummy world where a Puerto Rican wants to kill an innocent woman for doing nothing more than trying to help him. He was sick in his heart, sick of translating, sick of her, sick of all of them. He wanted to get out of the middle of it and go home.
He saw the room watching him and translated for Stamps. “She says she knows the way through and will take us.” He said it twice, to make sure Stamps understood.
Stamps looked at the slim beauty dressed in men's clothing staring at him. His heart began to pound. He couldn't help himself. She was beautiful, and brave, too. By God, he'd take it around the neck for that one, swing high from an oak tree just to have one night of setting his heavy soul against the soft caress of this woman. But to take her out into the open forest, in a furious rainstorm, and possibly have her death on his hands . . . He shook his head.
“We're going to lay low back at that dotty fella's house again and try this radio twenty-four hours more. Tomorrow, before daybreak, we'll try to get out.” He stood up. “Let's go.”
Stamps, Hector, and Bishop left, but Train stayed inside the bedroom. Ludovico closed the door behind them and watched their backs through the window until they had turned the corner. Then he turned to his daughter. She sat at the table, saying nothing. He motioned with his head to the bedroom. “If that big monster sleeps in my bed, I am sleeping in your house,” he said angrily. She shrugged.
In the next room, the boy lay in bed, his eyes closed, resting peacefully as the giant's deep singing voice washed over him. He felt like he was floating on clouds. He opened his eyes. There was no one in the room except the two of them.
“Where is your invisible castle?” the boy asked.
Train, sitting at his bedside in a crouch, stopped singing and leaned over. “Got no more chocolate, boy. Can't help you there.”
Train leaned forward and he and the boy stared at each other. All his life, for twenty-one years, Train realized, he'd never owned anything, and here this boy was offering him his heart. He could see it. No one had ever offered him anything in the world. The world was a confusing place. He remembered the day he was drafted. He was pulling a mule across Old Man Parson's field and his aunt Vera came out to him. She was visiting from Philadelphia. She said, “I'm gonna kill Jing-a-ling.”
Jing-a-ling was Train's cousin, whom they also called Sticky. Jing had started a reading business for the colored of Mt. Gilead, because the last colored who could read, Reverend Willard, had run off with a fourteen-year-old named Peaches. Jing couldn't read, either. In fact, the only words he could read were “pink” and “noodle” and “Cadillac,” but he told everyone it was about time the colored of Mt. Gilead started to do for theyself since the white man was always telling them what to do with his funny white dollars. Everyone agreed.
The colored of Mt. Gilead were getting their mules confiscated, going to jail for tax evasion, and getting evicted, ever since Jing started his business. It was a disaster, the letters piling onto Jing's kitchen table. But no one got suspicious, because Jing made a big score for an old man named Jumbo Dawson, who had gotten hit by a white man driving from New York to Florida. The white man broke Jumbo's leg in three places and punctured a lung. His lawyer wrote Jumbo three times offering a settlement, and each time Jing, who answered everyone's mail, sent a letter back to the man with a picture of the pretty brown girl from the
Jet
magazine centerfold and a pink Cadillac, because he thought the letter was from the Department of Motor Vehicles, since Jumbo had been trying to get his license for four years, ever since his wife ran off with a light-skinned Negro named Linwood, who had a car.