Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke
He walked back and forth in front of us, his eyes bright, his hand rubbing the top of the ventilated barrel. His face was as tight and flat as a shingle, and when one man slowed in his digging he jabbed the gun hard into his neck. Some of the prisoners said Kwong had been a train brakeman in North Korea before the war and that all of his family had been killed in the first American bombings. So he enjoyed his work with Americans. And now he was at his best, in his broken English, with the loading lever on the magazine pulled all the way back.
“Deep. No smell later,” he said.
We were down two feet, the mud and broken ice piled around us. I was sweating inside my clothes, and strange sounds lifted in chorus and disappeared in my mind. The wind polished the snow smooth in front of me, rolling small crystals across Kwong’s boots. His leather laces were tied in knots across the metal eyes. The sleet had stopped, and the shadow of my body and the extended shovel moved about as a separate, broken self on the pile of dirt and ice that grew larger on the edge of my hole.
“I ain’t going to buy it like this,” O.J. said. “I ain’t going to do the work for these bastards.”
“You dig deep,” Kwong said.
“You dig it.”
“Pick up shovel,” Kwong said.
“Fuck you, slope.” O.J. breathed rapidly, and the moisture from his nose froze on his lip.
“All stand, then.”
“Mother of God, he’s going to do it,” Bertie said.
The sun broke from behind a cloud, the first hard yellow light I had seen since I had come to the camp. My eyes blinked against the glaring whiteness of the compound and the hills. The ice on the barbed wire glittered in the light, and the hundreds of prisoners watching us beyond the fence stared upward at the sky in unison, their wan faces covered with sunshine. The stiff outlines of the buildings in the compound leaped at me and receded, and then Kwong turned his burp gun sideways so that the first burst and recoil would carry the spray of bullets across all five of us.
“You stand!”
We got to our feet slowly, our clothes steaming in the reflected warmth of the sun, and stood motionless in front of our graves. My body shook and I wanted to urinate, and my eyes couldn’t look directly at the muzzle of his burp gun. I choked in my throat on a clot of blood and gagged on my hand. Joe Bob’s face was drawn tight against the bone, and Bertie was shaking uncontrollably. O.J.’s arms were stiff by his sides, his hands balled into fists, and there were spots of color on the back of his neck. The Turk’s heavy shoulders were bent, his ragged mouth hung open, and the blood and phlegm on his chin dripped on the front of his coat.
“You want talk Ding now?” Kwong said, and smiled at us.
No one spoke. The line of men behind the fence was silent, immobile, some of their heads turned away.
“Who first?”
“Do it, you goddamn bastard!” O.J. shouted. Then his eyes watered and he stared at his feet.
“You first, then, cocksuck.” Kwong raised the burp gun to his shoulder and aimed into O.J.’s face, his eyes bright over the barrel, a spot of saliva in the corner of his mouth. He waited seconds while O.J.’s breath trembled in his throat, then suddenly he swung the gun on its strap and began firing from the waist into the Turk. The first burst caught him in the stomach and chest, and he was knocked backward by the impact into the grave with his arms and legs outspread. The quilted padding in his coat exploded with holes, and one bullet struck him in the chin and blew out the back of his head. His black eyes were dead and frozen with surprise before he hit the ground, and a piece of broken tooth stuck to his lower lip. Kwong stepped to the edge of the grave and emptied his gun, blowing the face and groin apart while the brass shells ejected into the snow. When the chamber locked open he pulled the pan off, inserted a fresh one in its place, and slid back the loading lever with his thumb. The other two guards began to kick snow and dirt from the edge of the grave on top of the Turk’s body.
“You next, Corpsman. But you kneel.”
The wire fence and the empty faces behind it, the wooden shacks, the yellow brick building where it had all begun, Kwong’s squat body and the hills and the brilliance of the snow in the sunlight began to spin around me as though my vision couldn’t hold one object in place. My knees went weak and I felt excrement running down my buttocks. The wind spun clouds of powdered snow into the light.
Kwong shoved me backward into the hole, then leaned over me and pushed the gun barrel into my face. His nostrils were wide and clotted with mucus in the cold.
“You suck. We give you boiled egg,” he said.
I clinched my hands and put my arms over my face. There were crystals of snow, like pieces of glass, in my eyes, and he brought his boot heel down into my stomach and forced the barrel against my teeth. My bowels gave loose entirely, a warm rush across my genitals and thighs, and my heart twisted violently in my chest.
“Good-bye, prick. You no stink so bad later,” and he pulled the trigger.
The chamber snapped empty, a metallic clack that sent all the air rushing out of my lungs.
Kwong and the other two guards were laughing, their faces split in hideous grins under their fur caps. Their bodies seemed to shimmer in the brilliant light. Kwong pushed his boot softly into my groin, pinching downward with the toe.
“I put new clip in and we do again. Each time you guess.”
He spoke to one of the other guards, who handed him a second pan, then he pulled the empty one loose from his burp gun and held them both behind his back.
“Which hand you like, Corpsman?”
“You fucking chink. Get it done!” Joe Bob said.
The guard who had given Kwong the pan struck him back and forth across the face with his open hand. Joe Bob’s arms hung at his sides while his head twisted and his skin rang and discolored with each slap.
“I pick for you, then,” Kwong said, and he dropped one pan into the snow and snapped the second one into place.
He stood above me, his gun balanced on its strap against his waist, and we went through it again, except this time I curled into a ball like a child, my hands over my face, a sickening odor rising from my clothes, and when the firing pin hit the empty chamber I vomited a thick yellow residue of millet and fish heads out of my stomach.
Then I heard Ding speak in Chinese through the megaphone on the far side of the fence. Kwong’s boots stepped backward, and I saw the shadow of his burp gun swinging loose from his body. But I couldn’t move. My heart thundered against my chest, my body was drained of any further physical resistance, and I kept my face pressed into the wetness of my coat sleeves.
“You lucky. All go to hole now. Another time we have class.”
I heard Joe Bob, Bertie, and O.J. crunch past me, but I still couldn’t lift my head. The other two guards picked me up from the grave by my coat and threw me headlong into the snow. The crystals of ice burned on my face and in my eyes. I got to my feet slowly and stood in a bent position, the compound and the hills shrinking away in the distance and then leaping toward me out of the sunlight. I tried to stand erect, and an electric pain burst through the small of my back and rushed upward into my head. Excrement dripped down my calves into the snow. I looked over at the half-covered body of the Turk in his shallow grave. One glaring eye was exposed through the snow, and his curled fingers extended up as though he wanted to touch his toes. In seconds it seemed that the others were already far ahead of me, crunching silently between the guards toward the far end of the compound. Kwong pushed me forward between the shoulder blades with his hand, and I stumbled along in the slick, wet tracks of the others, tripping on my bootlaces, to the square of barbed wire and row of holes and sewer grates where Ding put the reactionaries.
One of the guards opened the gate and used an ice hook to pull the grates off four holes. Three occupied holes were still covered with tarpaulins from the night before, the creased canvas heavy and stiff with new snow. Ding pushed me forward with his burp gun at port arms into the first ho
“You can play with prick when you get cold tonight,” he said.
The hole was eight feet deep and four feet wide, and the mud walls were covered with a dirty film of ice. The inside of the steel helmet was encrusted and foul from the other men who had used it, and the sour smell of urine had soaked into the floor. I heard the grates dropped heavily into place on the other three holes, then the guards moved away in the snow and chained the wire gate shut.
I spent the next six weeks there, although I lost any concept of time after the first three days. We were each given two blankets, and at night the guards marched a progressive into the wire square, and he emptied out our helmets and handed down our food pans before they covered the grates with the tarpaulins. We had to sleep in a sitting position or with our feet propped up against the wall, and there was always a hard pain in my spine, and sometimes at night I dreamed that I was in a chair car on a train and if I could just stretch my legs out in the right direction the pain would go away. Then I would wake with the blankets twisted around me, the small of my back burning, and I would stand in the darkness until my knees went weak.
During the day we would talk to each other by speaking upward through the iron slits, then our necks would become tired or there wouldn’t be anything else to say, and each of us would fall back into his silent fantasies on the floor of the hole. The wounds in my legs had festered and small pieces of lead rose with the pus to the surface of the skin, and many times I slipped off into feverish, distorted scenes that lasted until I heard the ice hook strike the grate at nightfall. Sometimes my eyes stayed fixed on the pattern of iron over my head and the distant, checkered clouds, as though I were staring upward out of a tunnel, and then I would be fifteen years old again in a winter cornfield, the sun bright on the withered stalks, with the single-shot twelve-gauge against my shoulder and a cottontail racing across the dry rows. I aimed just in front of his head and squeezed off the trigger, and when the gun roared in my ears I knew that I had hit him clean, without destroying any of the meat, and that night Cap would deep-fry him in egg batter and flour for supper. Then I would be back in the Shooting Gallery, and I’d feel the heavy weight of the stretcher in both palms while the potato mashers exploded in our wire and the B.A.R. man searched frantically in the bottom of the ditch for another magazine. The wounded Marine on the stretcher stared up at me, his eyes full of terror, as I stumbled forward with his weight over the empty ammunition boxes, then the burp guns raked the ditch and knocked men like piles of rags into the walls, and I dropped him and ran. But in one heart-rushing second I saw the expression of helplessness and betrayal in his eyes, and in my feverish dream I wanted to go back and close his eyes with my fingers and tell him that we were all going to buy it, they had already overrun us, and there was nowhere I could have taken him.
Each day I saw the Shooting Gallery again, sometimes in an entirely different way from previously, and the faces of the men in the ditch became confused; their screams when they were hit and their death cries often sounded like a distant band out of tune with itself, and I tried to go back to the winter cornfield and the smell of oak wood burning in the smokehouse and the rabbit racing toward the blackjack thicket. I knew that if I just held that field in the center of my mind, or the smokehouse with a shallow depression in the ground under one wall where my father used to push in the oak logs, I could keep everything intact and in its proper place and I wouldn’t let Ding or Kwong make me admit that I was guilty of a wounded Marine’s death.
Then on a bright, sun-spangled day I would look up through the slits at the drifting clouds and briefly realize, with a sick feeling in my chest, that they didn’t care about the Marine, they only wanted me to inform on Ramos and the Negro sergeant, and eventually I might begin to cry in my sleep, as Bertie sometimes did, and one morning ask Kwong to take me into Ding’s office. I heard the voices of other men from our shack farther down the row of holes, and Joe Bob whispered hoarsely up through his grate one day that the World War II paratrooper had been machine-gunned and buried next to the Turk. The temperature began to go above freezing in the mid-afternoon, the melted snow ticked into the bottom of the hole, and the reek from the helmet and my own body often made me sick when I tried to eat my bean cakes. My hair and beard were matted with mud and the thick residue of fish heads that I licked from the bottom of my food pan, and my yellow fingernails had grown out like a dead person’s. My ribs felt like strips of wood to my touch, and although I had masturbated my first week in the hole, creating geisha girls under me, with their toy, pale faces and sloe eyes, I couldn’t hold the image of a woman in my mind more than a few seconds. Then on a wet morning, with the fog lying close against the ground, I heard the ice hook click against the sewer grates and the hushed voices of O.J. and Bertie as the guards helped them out of their holes.
A day later I was still hoping that they would return. It was too easy now to bang on the grate with my food pan and shout for Kwong to pull me out. Whatever I told Ding now wouldn’t have any effect on Ramos and the sergeant, I thought, and it was insane to die for men who possibly were already dead themselves. As the fog rolled over me and drifted through the iron slits I went through all the ethical arguments about surrender, and I discovered that there were dozens of ways to justify any human act, even dishonor. I thought of my grandfather, who had fought the most dangerous man in Texas, and I wondered what he would do if he were here now instead of me. I saw the flashes of Wes Hardin’s revolver, and his murderous, drunken eyes, and my grandfather standing in the open barn door with the Winchester in his hands. Then Hardin wheeled his horse and charged, his fingers tangled in the mane, the shotgun banging against the saddle, and Old Hack leaped forward and swung his rifle barrel down with both hands into the side of Hardin’s head. But his wars had been fought in a different time, between equally armed men, under hot skies and in dusty Texas streets, and death or victory came in a matter of seconds. He hadn’t lived in an age when lunatics locked men in filthy holes and turned them into self-hating creatures that were sickened with their own smell.
So that night, at feeding time, I knew that Old Hack would understand when I held up my hand silently to the progressive and he pulled me over the edge of the hole on my stomach.
I was the eighth man to inform. The Australian died in the hole, and it took another week for Ding to break the three remaining men from our shack. Then on a dripping, gray morning we all stood at the wire and watched Ramos and the Negro sergeant executed and their bodies thrown into an open latrine.
CHAPTER 9
IT WAS DARK as Rie and I drove through the sloping hills toward the Valley. Her face was soft in the glow of the dashboard, and she rubbed one hand on my shoulder.
“You’ve kept all that inside you for fifteen years?” she said quietly.
“There aren’t a lot of other places to put it.”
“You weren’t to blame for their deaths. The others had already informed.”
“That’s the strange thing about a certain type of guilt. When you try to confess it and draw the whips across your own back, there’s always someone there to tell you that you’re really not guilty of anything. Dixon came back from China a year after the war, and I testified against him at his court-martial. But I didn’t care what happened to him anymore. I only wanted to confess before some type of authority and be exposed publicly for cowardice. Each time that I tried to tell them I had informed, I was told to answer the questions directly and they disregarded anything else I had to say. After they gave Dixon five years, officers shook my hand and wished me luck in law school.”
“What happened to the others?”
“Bertie died of beriberi before the truce. O.J. married an Indian girl and was swelling like a balloon with beer fat, and Joe Bob bought a pool hall in Baton Rouge. Four others from the shack testified against Dixon, and the afternoon that
She slipped her arm across my chest and kissed me behind the ear, and I felt her wet eyelashes against my skin. I wanted her again, more strongly than I had ever wanted a woman in my life, and I pressed the accelerator down and the rolling highway raced toward me in the headlights. We dropped down into the Valley, and I saw the Rio Grande under the moon and the candlelit windows of the adobe houses on the far side. She pressed her breasts close to me, rubbing her curly hair against my cheek, and I turned onto the main highway toward my motel.
I woke early the next morning and leaned over her and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Her sunburned hair was spread on the pillow, and without opening her eyes she put her arms around my neck and pulled me down on top of her. Her body was warm with sleep, and she widened her thighs and ran her hands down my back and moved her lips across my cheek. She breathed softly in my ear, touching the lobe with her tongue, and each time she pressed her stomach into me I felt my skin burn. Then my eyes were closed and I felt my body go weak, the heat gathering like a flame in my loins, and I tried to rise on my elbows and hold it back, but she held her breasts tight against my chest and she tightened her thighs around me and ran her fingers up my neck into my hair.
“Do it now, Hack, and then we’ll do it again and again and again.”
She stretched out her legs and flattened her stomach, and then the flame grew more intense and went out of me in a long heart-beating rush.