“Go to hell.”
“Don’t you curse at me!” It was then, as a rule, that pandemonium broke loose, at least in his father’s mind, a fierce, heroic scuffle that usually found Jackie Brennan tightly hugging a soldier around his torso so the fellow couldn’t freely swing and punch. Hector jumped in and he would be beseeching the man to ignore his father’s foul curses, the proprietor and a few regulars holding the other servicemen back until Hector could tug Jackie outside and hustle him quickly down the street and toward home. Nothing too serious ever happened, though after one night when the barkeep took a stray punch in the face, Jackie was ordered to stay away for a while, which he did, without even a private protest at home. Jackie knew he was liked well enough to be tolerated for such troubles, but not much more than that, and if he couldn’t help but be a nuisance when he drank, he took great pains to make up for it, buying drinks for all the fellows on his return and not forgetting a box of candies for the barkeep to give to his wife.
One night, Hector left for home by himself, telling his father he was tired. It was a slow night at the pub, foggy and damp, with no newcomers about for Jackie to sermonize or bet with for drinks.
“I never heard you say you were tired,” his father said to him, suspicion marking his voice. “Not a once in your life.”
“Well, I am,” Hector answered, lying to his father for the first and only time. “I just want to go home.”
“Go on, then,” Jackie said, waving Hector off from his customary place at the far end of the bar, clutching the handle of a mug of ale with his withered, child-sized hand. “And tell your mother not to wait up.”
Hector grumbled in assent, both he and his father knowing of course that his mother would be long asleep, being accustomed to her husband’s Friday-night foolery. Jackie only got sloshed this one night of the week, but never missed it, and his mother was glad that Hector went out with him.
As planned, though, Hector routed himself toward home by Patricia Cahill’s freshly painted bungalow and picket fence (done by his own hand), and seeing the parlor room light illuminated went directly to the back porch door, which she said she would leave unlocked if the twins were asleep. It was the spring of 1945 and the long war was still going and her husband was listed as MIA. She was a stunning raven-haired Black Irishwoman with sky-colored eyes and freckles on her little nose and a curve to her hips that made him think of a skillfully turned balustrade. He’d been fantasizing about her for days, and after school he’d stopped by to be paid but she was having a tea with a friend and told him to come after dark. He had known his father would never depart the pub so early, and that his mother would not be expecting him. The thought of lingering with her in her bed electrified him, the last block or so difficult for him to walk comfortably, his erection already straining his dungarees. He’d been with her once before (voraciously petting, if briefly, in her kitchen) but at that point she was the first mature woman he’d touched, and the give and savor of her body (not as firm as that of his sisters’ friends, nor as blandly scentless) was a revelation; he was drawn to the moist tang of her skin, the scant animal note at the nape of her neck, between her breasts.
It had already begun to rain, and when he entered the darkened screen porch he was suddenly afraid that he’d mistaken what she’d said to him earlier, but then the parlor light went out and she descended and wound about him like a silken cloak. She was warm and naked beneath her thin bathrobe. She knelt and had hardly put him in her mouth when he helplessly came. In embarrassment he crumpled and made to get away but she gripped him and said it’s okay as long as you do the same, and it was then, at her command, that he learned to swim the slant lightless depth, make his way instead by only treading.
Just before dawn he ran home in the steady rain to find a police cruiser parked in front of his house. All the lights were burning. He could see two of his sisters moving about upstairs. He went around back and heard his mother at the kitchen table telling the officers sipping the coffee she’d made that her husband and son had never not come home before. Could some drifters have rolled them and tied them up somewhere? Really, where could they have gone? It was too small a town. She didn’t have to tell the officers that Jackie Brennan had no mistress, for everybody in Ilion well knew he was an uxorious man whose infinite gratitude to his pretty wife for accepting his deformations sometimes also made him crazy when he drank, his imaginings usually centering on her infidelities (which were none), or else he’d be mopey, glum, and self-pitying. One of the policemen caught sight of Hector peering around the hedge and called out, his mother turning to see him. When he went inside, they asked where his father was and where he’d been after he left the pub but he couldn’t tell them about either thing, especially about Patricia Cahill, as one of the cops was her cousin. His mother kept asking him how he could leave his father to drink alone. Hector was silent, but was desperately worried now, too, and begged the officers that he might accompany them as they went to retrace his steps from the pub.
As he rode in the police car he felt a much purer shame than anything he might have felt with Patricia Cahill, and he began to cry; he knew he should have stayed with his father, as any decent son would, most of all if that father was Jackie Brennan. How many men craved such company of their sons, for whatever reason? With him gone missing, Hector suddenly understood what he in fact was for his father, and what he should always be: his ideal figure, a body supreme, his sturdiest hand, and foot, and liver. He would never leave him again. When they got to the pub, the officers and he walked in three directions, looking for any sign of him. Then he spotted his father’s porkpie hat at the head of an alleyway between two warehouses; the alleyway led down to an old dock on the canal. The end of the dock had clearly just collapsed, the splintered edges fresh and jagged. The high water was swirling off muddily, heavy with a current; the locks had been opened upstream.
“Could he swim?” asked the policeman, Patricia Cahill’s cousin.
Hector shook his head. Because of his handicaps his father had never learned how, and was otherwise naturally reluctant to show himself.
“I’ll call the dredger,” the other automatically said, his expression, on looking at Hector, one of instant regret.
“He’s not dead,” Hector said.
“We won’t be calling anyone yet,” Officer Cahill said. He was only slighter taller than Hector but he still patted him on the shoulder as if he were a young boy. “Don’t fret yet, Hector. I bet your pop’s just sleeping it off downstream.”
The next day the dredger was called. His body wasn’t found for nearly a week, and then not even by the riverman. It showed up finally in a canal lock miles away, clothesless and bloated and as shiny black as an inner tube, forever traumatizing some pleasure boaters down from Canada. Hector had to travel with local authorities and identify him for the family, his mother and sisters refusing to go. Hector was certain it was he, if only from the awesome gap between the corpse’s two front teeth; his father would spit great arcing streams of beer at company picnics, these wonderfully downy, foamy rainbows, to the delight of at least the men and children. It was no doubt Jackie Brennan’s finest talent. But at the undertaker’s, that jesting font lay stiffly open and empty, and even in the chilly locker the stench emanating from it and the rest of the body gripped Hector with an otherworldly ferocity, as might some beast of the underworld, its invisible claws lifting him straight off his feet.
HIS POOR FATHER WAS RIGHT, of course: he should never have gone to war. For a long time after Jackie’s death, Hector’s mother could not speak to him for his leaving his father that night, could hardly even look at him, and though she eventually showed love for him again, for the quiet years between Hiroshima and the surprise attack by Communists on a hitherto unknown city called Seoul, Hector was hoping for another war to break out. He sought a war not for the sake of fighting or killing anyone or defending his country, but for the selfish cause of punishing himself, and so proving his father right.
How easily his wish was granted. It was a brief incident, involving a prisoner, that changed everything, a situation probably not too distinctive or unusual. But it would hold a firm place in his memory. It was in his first tour of duty, early spring, 1951. They were in the foothills of the Taebaek Mountains, 150 kilometers northeast of Seoul. After the chaotic opening to the war, the initial Communist invasion, and the headlong ROK retreat to the very southern tip of the peninsula, and then the breakneck American counteroffensive pushing back all the way north to the Yalu River, which was the border with China, both sides were now engaged in what was in essence trench warfare, if in the hills. The struggle was over any given (and supposedly) strategic section of high ground, the shifting of territory measured in hundreds of meters, each hill identified by only a number (and if bloody enough, eventually a nickname). The fighting was mostly night attacks, with small-scale raids by American and ROK units, and then operations by the Communists, who were now almost all Chinese, regulars in the People’s Army, attacking often in mass, near-suicidal, waves, their aim to intimidate and overwhelm with seemingly inexhaustible numbers.
The prisoner was one of these. He was just a boy, in fact, fourteen or fifteen years old at most, his round moonface sprouted with only a few bristles of hair on his upper lip, his chin. Hector’s platoon had taken him prisoner after repelling an attack the night before, when the whole facing hillside cranked alive before dawn with rattles and whistles and clanging cowbells and the rabid shrieks of several thousand soldiers rushing forward in a mad pell-mell push, their burp guns alive, the sound of their feet on the dry snow like locusts devouring a field of corn. Flares were shot to illuminate the battleground, revealing that perhaps only half of the enemy was actually armed with rifles, the others bearing bayonets and sticks and even toy drums like the kind given away as prizes at fairs, the ten-cent variety with two strings with balls on the ends that one rotated to make a noise.
Their first wave overwhelmed all the forward foxholes but was cut down before it breached the main line; the next ones were successively less effective, and by the fourth wave the Chinese hardly made any noise on attacking and quickly retreated after a barrage of American fire. It was all over after that. By daybreak there were many hundreds of bodies marking the hillside, mostly Chinese, the most unsettling thing being that a number of the American soldiers in the forward foxholes were missing, only the dead ones left to be retrieved. The survivors had been spirited away as prisoners by the retreating swarm to a fate that was known among the men (via report and rumor and fearful imaginings) to feature unspeakable tortures and deprivations and a life sentence of hard labor somewhere deep in the mines of China.
It was under this mind-set that the boy soldier had been taken prisoner by others in Hector’s unit. Hector came upon them soon after he was captured. The boy was short, five foot four or so, and stalk-thin, not even a hundred pounds in his winter uniform, which had been stuffed tight with crumpled newspaper for insulation, ripped canvas tennis shoes on his sockless feet. He’d been found playing dead at the bottom of a foxhole and was beaten up badly by them, given an ugly shiner and a bloody nose and lip. One of his shoulders was dislocated. He had been found with a small brass horn, which a soldier named Zelenko now held in his gloved hand. The platoon leader, Lieutenant Bridger, was off being briefed at the field HQ. Zelenko and his buddies would have likely executed the prisoner right then, but an officer from another unit happened by and on seeing his condition reminded them that all prisoners were to be immediately processed for interrogation. They assented, but after the officer left, Zelenko said they should keep him a bit before transferring him up to field command; he was their first prisoner, after all. There were a handful of grunts from the platoon present, including Hector, who was off sitting on the icy ridge of the next foxhole. He disliked Zelenko, who was also from a small town in upstate New York, a carrot-haired loudmouth who was a dependable soldier but who had begun to subtly bully their tentative college-man lieutenant to send certain squads of men-Hector among them-on the night patrols. Hector didn’t mind the more dangerous missions, for someone had to go and he’d begun to accept that by fate or nature he was strangely, miraculously, impervious, but he didn’t like the idea that Zelenko’s whim should determine anyone else’s destiny.
With another soldier holding a rifle on the prisoner, Zelenko stepped up from behind him and placed the horn’s end right next to his ear and blew as hard as he could on it. The prisoner dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot in the temple, screaming and holding his ear.
“That’s for keeping us up every night with that crazy chink music,” Zelenko said, he himself wincing from the sharp blast. The others were wide-eyed, chuckling. The Chinese often played an eerie, atonal operatic music as well as a suite of popular Western songs and slick propaganda through the night on loudspeakers. The boy was crying silently now with his mouth agape, squeezing on his ear. He was in terrible pain. Zelenko pulled the boy back up on his feet. He was covering his ear, but Zelenko slapped his hand away.
“You’d think all these lousy chinks would be half deaf already,” Zelenko said, and then blew the horn hard into the same ear. “And that’s for Gomez.”
Gomez was his buddy, killed a week before. They’d found his body dumped on the bank of a frozen stream. He’d been tortured and then shot in the back of the head. Zelenko blew again. The boy crumpled to his knees, crying miserably, and Zelenko had his buddy, Morra, wire together his hands behind him so he couldn’t shield himself. Then he blew the horn again. He did it three more times, and with such vehemence that his face grew flushed, as if he’d inflated a roomful of party balloons. But on the last one the boy hardly flinched. The ear was dead. This angered Zelenko, and he struck the boy sharply with his pistol. The boy fell like a tablet of stone. Fresh blood pocked the snow beside his head where he lay. His narrow eyes were open, his lips moving slowly and mechanically but making no sound. Zelenko was leaning over him with the horn to start on the other side, balling his chewing gum to plug his own ears, when Hector suddenly rushed him, knocking him over, sending him sliding on his back a dozen feet down the hill.