motionless inside his blood-soaked pants, his boots no longer twitching with pleasure.
Indistinct voices began yelling from the apple orchard. A whistle blew on a hillside. Serves you right, Hollis might have thought, had McCreedy's impromptu demise not confounded him so, robbing his breath, making him senseless. You weren't really that special, you had it coming. But his finger hadn't been at the trigger; he hadn't fired, nor had he truly planned on vengeance: he simply wanted his cigarettes returned. In his left temple, a pulse started pounding against his brain. “In God we trust,” he whispered with the lowest of sound, regaining himself, apprehending then that the lethal shot had been discharged within feet of where he was hiding: “time flies, rest in peace, peace be with you, peace on earth.” Someone tore through the overgrowth several meters behind him, a hunched figure obscured by reeds and bolting for the shore. “Good will toward men, one for all and all for one — ”
What happened immediately thereafter would forever exist in Hollis's memory as a mostly bleared, unfocused event, meshed with sparse flashes of clarity. Without thinking twice, he scrambled from the reeds, uttering words which didn't reach the air, and, McCreedy's tilted corpse burned like an after-image, rushed along the bank, chasing a small figure in a mustard-drab uniform. His boots twisted in sand, across rocks and stones — that much he remembered — yet he couldn't recall if he had fired first, knocking the North Korean soldier to the sand, or if, in fact, the boy had tripped and, with Hollis drawing near, the M1 poised, rolled over, squeezing off a haphazard shot which still hit its intended target. Regardless, they had quickly exchanged fire, striking each other at close range: five rounds from the semiautomatic M1, a single round from a Japanese-made bolt-action rifle. And then, in what had seemed like the fleeting passage of mere seconds, it was all finished; the war had concluded for him, McCreedy, and a young North Korean whose name or short-lived history he would never know.
Subsequently, Hollis scoffed while watching cowboy movies or TV police dramas, frowning whenever a character was struck by a bullet and seized their chest, staggering dramatically, grimacing, and, all of the sudden, collapsing. His personal understanding of being shot was quite different; for he had remained standing on the bank, staring at the dying sniper who lay faceup at his feet, the Japanese-made rifle cast aside. Where did you come from? he wondered. Why didn't I hear you any earlier, or you me? The boy gasped like a stranded fish trying to breathe and oozed red foam between quivering lips and then, producing a slight gurgling noise, stopped living: the brown eyes reflected the sky; the face was round, smooth, hairless; although stained with blood, the mouth and chin were untouched; the coarse black hair was groomed, cropped short; there was a mole on the right cheek, a mole on the left earlobe; the hands were slender, the fingers long and unadorned, the fingernails dirty; the torso was a mess, the uniform oily and glistening with sanguine fluid — the five shots having struck millimeters apart, punching a fist-size hole in the narrow chest; the boy appeared younger than twenty, older than fifteen.
Fueled by adrenaline and panting hard, Hollis glanced at the Japanese rifle and noticed his left leg, saw the blood cascading from a massive gash in his fatigues, wetting everything below his knee. “Son of a bitch,” he said, his voice less enraged than irritated. “Goddamnit.” Like a waterfall, he thought. Like a crimson waterfall, pooling in the sand around his boot. But he didn't stagger about on the bank or use a hand to cover his injury, nor did he panic or feel anything other than numbness; instead, he promptly used the rifle like a crutch, pushing its butt into the ground and gripping its barrel for support as he sat himself in front of the boy, extending his sodden leg outward, waiting to be helped. Presently, he lay down on the sand, filling his view with a pure expanse of blue ether, and all at once his body grew perceptibly lighter — a point of fraction, as if an unknowable part of himself had risen up, escaping the riverside, choosing to stay in Korea even while the rest of him was bound to be rescued.
With his consciousness now ebbing, he heard a burst of machine-gun fire from the apple orchard and a single explosion somewhere else, perhaps across the river. He had the impression that major combat was resuming, although he didn't trust his ears anymore. “In God we trust,” he began again, “times flies,” but was unable to continue. Later, when he reflected on it, the conclusion of the incident seemed anticlimactic to him, because he was strangely at peace, somewhat relieved; the resentment and anger he had harbored toward McCreedy had been eradicated — and rather than transfer those emotions to the boy, it was an odd kind of gratitude he experienced instead, especially since he had survived circumstances which should have easily killed him. Then just as a wounded animal or insect might die quietly in its own environment, so had the boy. But Hollis had never belonged there, and, as such, he wouldn't allow himself to expire beside the Naktong; he wouldn't rot on the shore or get sent floating downstream: two lives may have been claimed at dawn, yet his life was about to begin anew; that was how he felt. Conceiving this to be his outcome, he closed his eyes. He heard the sound of multiple footsteps approaching, pounding the rocks and pebbles and sand — and, he knew, they were coming to save him, to carry him away from the river and, hopefully, ship him home alive.
14
When did Hollis awake again, buoyed in a sanctuary of whiteness? When did he open his eyes again, perceiving his surroundings through a drug-laced filter, believing then that everything charitable in the world — every-thing benevolent, clean, and restoring — was pure white? And how often had he woke, straining his groggy mind for answers he had already been told? No, he hadn't gone to heaven, nor was he somewhere in Korea: “I can't be dead, right?”
“Far from it, dear,” she had said, hovering above him like an angel in her spotless white attire — an indistinct navy nurse resting gloved hands upon his body. “You're at Yokosuka,” she ‘d revealed, her soft voice saturated with comfort, assurance. “You're safe now.” She had bathed him that night, dabbing and wiping his skin with a sponge. She had shaved his chin, throat, and cheeks; she had made his skin glow. With the aid of a corpsman, she had put white pajamas on him, and then she had rolled him in a wheelchair to a ward with wooden floors and white walls, bringing him to a bunk amid a row of other bunks — where wounded soldiers slept, their uniforms now pajamas. He had wanted to know her name, her full name; she had repeated it more than once — yet he had still forgotten it and her face, remembering only the white of her clothing and the soothing touch of her covered hands. After administering his painkillers and tucking him in, she had asked if he wanted anything. “Milk,” he'd heard himself say — and she had obliged, leaving him and, minutes later, returning with a tall glass of milk which grew warm on his bedside table, staying there because he had already drifted off again, falling asleep in white sheets. But what was her name? And how long — he wondered now — since he had arrived at the hospital in Japan?
His mind worked backward from that first night. He had been awake when the ambulance brought him to Naval Hospital Yokosuka, half conscious while a pair of Japanese orderlies pushed him on a gurney, sailing him down corridors which seemed endless. Sometime before that, he had stirred elsewhere — not at the naval hospital, not anywhere he had recognized — glancing around at what looked like a vision of hell, a living tableau of infirmity: a large, open ward packed with cots and men, everyone draped in brown blankets. The ward reeked of sickness, of blood and urine and human waste. A moaning, anguished cacophony of voices called for a medic, the same plea echoed from cot to cot. Then he comprehended his own pain, surging underneath the blanket that covered him, pulsing within his body like a fever. Pulling the blanket up to his chest, he saw that the left pants leg of his uniform had been cut away at the hip; the flesh between his left thigh and kneecap was bandaged thickly, a watermelon- size dressing sprouting tubes which coiled past the foot of the cot and disappeared. He tried wriggling his toes, but nothing moved. “Medic!” he shouted, the pain suddenly overtaking him. “Medic — ” and then he was gone once more.
A hand had slapped his face and he came to, his body aching horribly. “Stay awake, private,” someone was telling him. “You stay with us, all righty?” He wasn't dead; this wasn't heaven. He was being carried on a stretcher, taken up a ramp and brought inside a cargo plane, where the hold was lined with rack after rack of stretcher cases, where those who could walk — heads bandaged, arms wrapped — had to settle for benches, their shoulders pressed against one another.
“Come on, kid! Stay with us! You're doing fine!”
Someone had slapped him. There was the odor of feces.
“Oh, for Christ's sake, this one here shit his self!”
A medic put a blanket over him. His throat was dry. Where was he then? Canvas bulkheads, dark and bloodstained — racks of injured soldiers: an ambulance bouncing along a dirt roadway, jostling its occupants while heading to an aid station. He was sweating but felt cold, and he had soiled himself. With each hard bump of the ambulance, the pain shot through him, becoming so much larger and more consuming than his wound, rushing to
