bet some of us got running. I'm wagering my tinned biscuits that tomorrow night the gooks will come across the river for us. Tyler and Sims are betting their chocolate bars it's tonight, and ol’ Parsons has put his toilet paper on the line that we'll get evacuated before the gooks can start anything serious. What you say, you in?”
“I'll think about it.”
“Don't think too long. Clock's ticking.”
Hollis looked out at the wild grass and reeds. His stare crossed the river; he scanned the Naktong's western side, letting his gaze travel the shoreline. Green strands of waterweed rippled off the banks like ribbons, waving along the brown undulating surface. Soon McCreedy had risen, propping himself next to Hollis, gazing beyond the sandbags, bitterly saying, “Damn river has gone down again. Wonder how shallow the stupid thing is by now.”
“Can't say for certain,” said Hollis, “but it's pretty shallow. On this side the water is probably waist high, but on the other side I've heard it's deeper.”
McCreedy sighed needlessly as Hollis spoke, then responded with: “Sure, sure, you're a real reliable source of information, aren't you? I suppose you've waded that river dozens of times yourself, you fuckin’ pecker- wood.”
Even after everything they had been through at the front — when cynicism, sarcasm, and profanity had flavored the collective tongue — Hollis was taken aback by the harshness of McCreedy's words. He kept silent for a few seconds, still staring ahead before glancing at the smirking, brutish face hovering beside him, saying, “That's what I heard, all right? I couldn't care less if you believe it or not.” Just then he wanted to be anywhere else but near McCreedy. “Honestly, I really don't give a damn!” Without thinking, he turned around, moving unsteadily to leave the post. Except his exit wasn't allowed, at least not yet: for he was promptly grabbed from behind and, loosing hold of his rifle, thrown sideways against the sandbags — where McCreedy managed, while wearing the same smirk, to deftly pin his shoulders back with clenching fingers and an arm bracing his chest. “Let go,” was all Hollis could muster, his heart racing, his body incapable of resisting the weight pushing into him. “You'd better let go.”
McCreedy sighed a couple of times, deeply, finally saying, “You're one queer customer, you know it?” Hollis blinked impassively, barely suppressing the fear and anger he was feeling, and lowered his gaze. “How come you don't like me, huh?” The smirk became a straight, tapering line; he brought a hand under Hollis's chin and forced his head up until they were eye to eye: “I thought we was buddies, right? What'd Creed ever do to you?”
Then, for once, Hollis registered something like hurt in McCreedy's voice, a perplexed tone betraying vulnerability. But there was nothing he wished to explain, nor had he completely grasped his inherent aversion for McCreedy. He thought: You expect me to laugh at your dumb jokes when I don't want to laugh. You want me to agree with you when I don't agree with you. You decided I was your friend when I didn't want to know you. I always hear you talking, and you talk too loud and too damn much. I've seen the things you've done. You put pennies on the dead. You have no shame or regrets about anything, and I just don't like you. You're not worth fighting for. “What the hell difference does it make?” he said, shaking himself free at the very moment McCreedy eased the bracing arm off of him. “Let go of me!”
“Suit yourself,” said McCreedy, drumming fingertips on Hollis's neck, “ ‘cept I won't be watching out for you once the shit hits the fan, okay?” Then, patting the fingers to the stuffed breast pocket of Hollis's shirt, he added: “Anyway, if you're deserting me here, I'd best get a little compensation, otherwise I'll have to report you, and we don't want that, do we?” He gave Hollis a sly wink, extracting a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket and, the smirk reemerging, transferred it to his own shirt pocket. “I guess we're almost even — ”
By then Hollis was sweating heavily, his skin glistening in the twilight. Slipping around McCreedy, he stooped for his rifle, taking it with a trembling hand, and kept going, aware of the hard stare trailing him. At last escaping the listening post, he felt his hot heart pumping underneath the fatigues — as if his chest had absorbed some of the sweltering, radiant heat of the bright summer day and was releasing it back into the night. He continued along a narrow dirt path — away from the listening post, beyond the orchard — until arriving at the high grass and tall reeds which now camouflaged him. Once cloaked at the river's edge, he grew mad at himself for having been bullied so easily, for not standing his ground any better than he had done. Thereafter, he entertained fantasies of killing McCreedy, of lobbing a grenade at the listening post or demanding his cigarettes be returned before opening fire. But the long night eventually mellowed his anger, subduing it with immediate concerns: the possibility of enemy attack, his own survival.
How baffling, Hollis later considered, that that brief confrontation at the listening post had upset him more than the grand-scale violence and ruin he had witnessed since No Gun Ri. How vexing that such an insignificant yet personal affront could outrage him more than the sight of an infant being shot in its mother's arm, or of a fellow Garryowen blown apart. Except, he reminded himself, nothing made much sense there. Everything was misplaced, thrown out of kilter. Nothing there was exactly as it should be — and he had ended up in the middle of it, cast alone among crickets, mindful of the river and the nearby listening post he could no longer see.
The dawn preamble had commenced fading the stars, and at first light, faint yellow and blue, gave vague form to the reeds and grass, the shorelines and trees. Hollis inhaled the air, which felt cooler and smelled sweeter than it had during the interminable night. Already the crickets were lessening their volume, the chirps punctuated by longer and longer intervals of silence; soon the morning became extremely calm — the water flowed almost noiselessly, the whir of insects and the occasional rustle of nocturnal creatures had ceased — although the environment alongside the river was still dangerous, more so now with sunrise. The canopy of darkness turned luminous, and overhead the cloudless, transparent sky was tinged with color. Then glowing cloud billows began swirling up behind the mountain ranges, and the sloping hillsides were becoming green and golden.
Hollis brushed aside the reeds in front of his face, peering cautiously round him. But it wasn't the western shore ultimately drawing his attention, nor that of a solitary crow gliding downward to the rice paddy, releasing a caw which was echoed by something else unseen; rather, he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, just up the trail from where he had come last night. Turning his head, he let the reeds sway back into place, adjusting his stare with the wavering of stems.
The listening post was now visible — some twenty yards away, much closer than Hollis had estimated — and McCreedy had emerged past its sandbags and dirt, M1 in hand, scrutinizing the area while half circling the dying pine tree, putting the grayish trunk between his body and the Naktong, shielding himself there. Upon leaning the rifle against the tree, McCreedy undid his pants, tugging his penis out through the fly, and, as the sun angled a ray within inches of his boots, started urinating on the ground, exposing himself in the way he had once warned Schubert never to do (yet he was nothing if not cavalier regarding his own safety, unflinching in the belief that the pennies in his pockets would keep him secure). When finished, he didn't fasten his pants, but instead left his dribbling penis open to view while fishing a cigarette from a pocket, eyes darting here and there, careful not to let his guard lapse and, perhaps, also searching for the whereabouts of Hollis. Behind him sunlight crept along the river, stunning the banks.
Then with McCreedy's exhalation of smoke, the previous evening's anger and humiliation stirred inside Hollis like bile. No damn good, he thought. Worthless. Lifting the semiautomatic, easing the barrel through the reeds, he fixed the sights — the smoldering cigarette, the head in profile, the muscular neck — taking careful aim: McCreedy's right hand slid into his fly, bringing his penis with it, doing so while lowering himself, back pressed against the tree, legs set akimbo; puffing on the cigarette, the heedful gaze now cast toward the crotch of his uniform, McCreedy's right hand squirmed around within the pants, making a wrenching motion which bulged and gyrated beneath the fabric. Hollis, too, suddenly felt an unexpected charge of arousal mixing incongruously with his desire for revenge, the extreme sensation becoming heightened with the spasmodic jolting of McCreedy's boots, the acceleration of motion underneath the uniform — even while he steadied the rifle, finding McCreedy weaker and more assailable than he had ever seen him previously. You'd never know what hit you, he told himself. You'd be gone like that.
And as if it had been impelled from his own mind, a single shot burst forward, terminating the morning calm and stunning the hearing in Hollis's left ear; then, simultaneously, down the length of the rifle he saw McCreedy transfigured into the autonomous, undeniable world of the dead: the round struck him at the neck, ripping apart a jugular vein — splitting bark after passing through him, cracking the trunk of the pine tree — and briefly jettisoned blood up and out like a geyser, giving the illusion of McCreedy's head having just exploded, accompanied by a fine red mist which shimmered for a moment in the air before dissipating into the cascading sunlight. With his head violently jerked to one side and the neck partially severed, the weight of McCreedy's helmet pulled him over, slumping his left shoulder and torso to the ground, raising his bent right knee a few inches — his hand now
