Over the next twenty-four hours, he had narrowly escaped Chinese patrols several times. Once, in broad daylight, they had passed within ten feet of the pile of leaves under which he had lain totally still. Scent deadeners had kept their dogs from pinpointing him, although his tracks kept the Chinese searching for him in the vicinity. All the while, his aching ankle had swollen and swollen. Finally, he had given up on trying to reach his cache, which was thirteen miles away.
Hart knocked on the front door of the ramshackle house. Through the grimy glass panes and thin curtains he saw that the foyer was dark. He gave the door another, louder rap. The curtain moved, and he heard feet thumping away. After a few moments Hart could see a much larger form approaching — the father — carrying a long, black shotgun in both hands.
“What the hell do you want?” the man asked through the door.
“I need help,” Hart said simply.
There was a long pause before the locks began to rattle. The muzzle of the double-barreled gun was the first thing he saw.
The man behind the shotgun surveyed Hart’s camouflage battle dress. “Jee-zus!” he exclaimed before jerking Hart inside and closing the door behind him. “You’re a soldier?”
“Captain James R. Hart, United States Army.”
“Who is it?” came his wife’s nervous voice from a dark doorway.
“Stay put!” the man ordered. He turned to Hart and asked with a thick Southern accent, “You an escaped POW or some-thin’?”
“No. I’m in the Special Forces. The Green Berets.”
“My-y-y lord! You’re one o’ them that’s been blowin’ everything up. The Chinese gotta be lookin’ for you all over! You cain’t stay here!”
The woman of the house must have heard everything. She appeared from out of the darkness with their two kids just behind. “Jo-o-oe!” she said. “He’s hurt!”
“Well, he cain’t stay here! It’s too dangerous!”
But she was already issuing orders to her kids, who ran off for medical supplies. “You come with me,” she said, putting her shoulder under his arm in lieu of his crude crutch. Hart hopped into-the kitchen and sat at the breakfast room table. He had walked for miles through the hills on the busted ankle, but when she began to unlace his combat boot the pain brought tears to his eyes.
The two children — the boy in his early teens and the girl a little older — were both clean. Hart was filthy, unshaven, and reeked. Both kids winced when they saw his purple, swollen ankle, but the woman gingerly laid his foot in her lap. She cleaned it with rubbing alcohol and a towel. The towel ended up black with accumulated grit. Hart was embarrassed by the poor state of his hygiene.
“You cain’t stay here,” repeated the agitated, forty-something father as he poured himself three inches of bourbon in a water glass. He downed the drink and exhaled noisily. “You cain’t put that kinda risk on me and my fam’ly.”
The mother didn’t look up or voice a word of objection, but her teenage son did. “We cain’t just put him outa the house!”
“Jimmy,” the woman chastised, but the boy was undaunted.
“No, ma’am!” he said to her, shaking his head. He turned to his father. “No, sir.” To Hart’s surprise, the father backed down. He poured himself another drink and took it and the shotgun into the darkened living room.
“The Chinese got the power goin’ again, but it’s been knocked out twice,” the mother said as she bent Hart’s ankle to and fro. “Was that your doin’?” He nodded once, and then gasped as she probed his swollen foot with her fingertips. “We need our electricity to last the winter. Cain’t raise these children like animals.”
“Why are you still here?” Hart asked.
“We live here!” the father shouted from the next room. “It’s our home!”
Hart searched the tight-lipped woman for her version, but he got nothing more from her expression than general disdain for her husband, Hart sensed, not Hart. He looked at the two kids.
“Dad got in trouble with…” the boy began.
“Jimmy!” his sister snapped.
In the silence that followed, the father returned still carrying his shotgun. “I ain’t got nothin’ against the Chinese,” he said. The two kids and their mother averted their gaze from Hart.
Hart lay in the bathtub immersed in water that had been hot but now was cool. He had dozed off several times, but his head had struck the tiled wall, waking him. He kept his ankle elevated as Mrs. Lipscomb had instructed.
He finally forced himself to rise. The pain was excruciating. Several times, he almost slipped and fell as he hopped on one foot. It took twenty minutes to dry himself and get dressed.
The hallway outside the bathroom was dark. Hart could hear the man arguing with his wife, and he hobbled toward the sound, but he came first to the boy’s open bedroom door.
“Hi,” the kid said from a desk where he drew pictures on a notepad.
“What’re you up to?” Hart asked.
“Working on my Chinese,” the boy replied.
Hart took a hop closer. Shiny poster paper contained blanks being filled in pencil with inexpert Chinese characters. The boy had made numerous erasures. “That’s homework?” Hart asked.
“Kinda,” the now defensive boy replied. “Soldiers handed these out at school. We’re s’posed to turn them in tomorrow.”
“It’s okay,” Hart reassured him as he put his green beret on his head, which had grown hair for the first time in years. “You gotta know your enemy and be smarter than him.”
The boy brightened. “Yeah!” He now wore a broad smile.
Hart moved on toward the raging argument in the family room, but along the way was another doorway from which peered the boy’s sister. The family seemed almost as lonely as Hart had been. She disappeared then returned with aluminum crutches. “You can have these,” she said. “I hurt my knee last year in PE.”
The crutches were far too short, but were adjustable and would be a great improvement over the tree limb. “I’m not gonna do ’em,” the girl said with a sneer.
“Do what?” Hart asked.
“My characters. My teacher says I’m gonna get an F, but I don’t care. There’s no chance I’ll even go to any college anyway.” Hart started to object — to insist that she could make it — till he realized that he was being naive. The Chinese would provide nothing more than technical schools for all but the very best and brightest.
“Don’t quit studying,” Hart said finally, succumbing to distant parental instincts.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re going to win this war,” Hart replied.
“Don’t be fillin’ the girl’s head with nonsense,” her father called down the hallway. “You can sleep in the storm cellar, but just for one night. You gotta leave tomorrow.”
Hart hobbled past the man’s wife for the rear door. “We’ll see,” she whispered to Hart.
The sun was hot despite the early hour. Its rays beat down onto the dusty roadside. One last gasp of heat from the blistering summer. Boot camp, Stephie thought. Fort Benning. God that had been hot. She had graduated from advanced infantry training only two months earlier. Two months ago! And high school. High school! Five months ago I was in high school!She railed at the lunacy of it all.