Angelos grabbed the butt, which protruded from his waistband, and slid the rifle out. The sight had caught him on the thigh and made the spot raw. Boyle took the rifle, loaded it with a pellet, and pumped it several times.
“My dad shot a rabbit out here with his pistol,” said Joe Recevo. “We ate the stew. My dad says there’s enough rabbit runnin’ around here to feed a family all year.”
“We ought to be able to see ’em good,” said Nicodemus. “Against this snow, I mean.”
Karras rubbed the back of his hand across his lips, wiped off snot that had dripped down from his nose. “They gotta come out for us to see them, though.”
“Good target practice for you, Jimmy,” said Recevo to Boyle, “for when you go to be a cop.”
“My uncle’s one,” said Boyle. “I’ll be one, don’t worry.”
“Maybe you’ll just end up washin’ off the slabs down at the morgue,” said Recevo, “like your old man. When he still had his job, that is.”
“I’ll be a cop,” said Boyle. The comment about his father hurt him deeply, but he bit on his lip and let it pass.
A rabbit dashed across the field. Boyle took aim, and missed.
They did not see another rabbit for some time. Joe Recevo pulled a rolled cigarette built of Bull Durham tobacco, which he had stolen from his father, out of his jacket. He lighted the cigarette with a straight match, and the tobacco went around the group. Soon they began to fire the rifle at birds and at trees, and when they became bored with that they fired the rifle at each other, the pellets bouncing off their heavy jackets and stinging at their legs. Then, while Billy Nicodemus held the rifle, a rabbit appeared from a hole at the beginning of the tree line, and Nicodemus aimed and fired. The rabbit fell over on its side.
They ran to where the rabbit had fallen, and stood grouped around it. The rabbit, brown with irregular white spots, lay there breathing heavily, one fading brown eye staring at the snow in front of it, the pellet embedded and showing behind the eye. They could see the heart beating in the rabbit’s chest.
“I didn’t mean to hurt it,” said Nicodemus.
“Gimme the rifle,” said Recevo. He took the rifle from Nicodemus, loaded a pellet into it, and pumped it ten times.
“I didn’t mean to,” said Nicodemus.
Recevo put the barrel to the rabbit’s head and pulled the trigger. The pellet made a steaming hole near the rabbit’s mouth. The rabbit kicked a little, its eye filming over.
“It’s still breathin’.” Perry Angelos spread his fingers wide. “What are we gonna do, Pete?”
“It ain’t dead,” Boyle said. “We ought to just kill it.”
“The joker who sold this rifle to us said it was just like a twenty-two,” said Recevo. “But this here is no twenty-two. A twenty-two woulda killed it.”
“Pete,” said Angelos, “you gotta do something.”
Karras took the rifle from Recevo’s hands. He raised it up, and smashed the butt down into the rabbit’s skull two times. He wiped the butt of the rifle off on the ground, leaving a chunky streak of red and brown in the snow. Then he slid the rifle inside the leg of his trousers.
Recevo smiled at Karras. Billy Nicodemus wiped a tear from his cheek as Karras looked away. A wind came through the woods, rustling the few leaves that remained.
“I’m gonna be late for dinner,” said Angelos.
“Come on, then,” said Karras. “We better be gettin’ home.”
They walked along the edge of the field toward the bridge. The sun behind the trees made crawling shadows at their feet.
Two
Leyte, The Philippines
1944
5
Peter Karras had the first man he ever killed in his sights for ten minutes before he managed to pull the trigger. The man was a sniper who had taken out a Marine in Karras’s unit, a private named Slocum from Apple Valley, Minnesota. Slocum had tried to bolt from his foxhole to the L-shaped trench that ran to the division’s 55mm gun, when the sniper’s slug caught him in the chest. A medic had gotten to Slocum and had begun to administer the morphine that would quiet him down. But Slocum’s lungs had rapidly begun to fill, and Slocum knew that he was done.
Karras noticed the sniper resting in the crook of a coconut palm at the edge of the jungle when the sun flashed off the sniper’s cartridge belt as he moved to reload, a quick wink of white light against the wall of green. Karras hefted his M-1, leaning out of his foxhole. He got the soldier in his sights.
A soldier, just like him. The uniform different, maybe — khaki, they called it, though it looked more to Karras like dirty yellow, the color of the mustard he had squeezed on the hot dogs at Griffith Stadium all his life — but a soldier, just like him, the difference a color of uniform.
The day, like every day, hung wet and hot. A drop of sweat snaked down from beneath Karras’s helmet and stung his eye.
Karras could remember watching war movies, working as an usher at the Hippodrome at 9th and K, after classes let out at Central High. Movies set in the first war, dogfight movies mostly, smiling, long-scarved flyboys with Errol Flynn moustaches whose women waited with patience and bright-eyed admiration on the ground. He always wondered, watching the pictures, what about the ones they shot down, the ones who wore the different uniform? Didn’t they laugh, too? Didn’t they have women who waited, who admired them and loved them too? Didn’t they have mothers who held them as babies once, too?
Karras knew that Slocum had a mother. Slocum had talked about his mother and her cooking constantly, until the other men in the unit had to walk away. Slocum, who was yelling abusively at the medic now, obscenities at first and then begging the medic to stay.
Karras took one hand off his rifle, and nervously fingered the checkered handle of his father’s Bowie knife, which he kept sheathed to this hip. The blade of the knife, double-edged stainless steel, could cut paper in midair; it was a knife to show off in times of boredom, one that the other men in the unit would talk about and admire. Dimitri Karras had burned his son’s initials into the handle before he shipped it overseas.
Peter Karras wiped at his face, then curled his finger back inside the trigger guard of his gun.
You could talk about Corregidor and Bataan, and all the things they had done, things too terrible to repeat. Well, we had done some bad things, too. Everything came out in the wash, and in the end it was just two groups of men fighting and killing over a piece of land that everyone but the dead would walk away from when the shooting was done.
This rifle sight’s a little low, thought Karras. He raised it up an inch.
Slocum, who had a mother, made choking sounds as he began to drown from the fluid filling his lungs. Did the man in the coconut palm have a mother? Slocum, who had spiky blond hair and rounded his vowels in a funny kind of way when he spoke, had a mother for sure. Slocum had described her in detail to Peter Karras, just the night before.
Karras squeezed the trigger on his M-1. The man in the coconut palm, who was no longer a man, fell to the ground and bounced one time.
6
Peter Karras always said that he chose the Marine Corps before the Army could choose him, and though he came to say it in a joking manner, he spoke the truth. His best friend Joe Recevo had gone to the Army early in the draft — Karras had listened to Recevo grouse about it all the way — and Billy Nicodemus had been shipped off to Europe in 1943. His other friends fared better: Jimmy Boyle managed to pull a Four-F on account of his bum ear, and Perry Angelos, who had completed his degree at Catholic University, drew desk duty with the Army Corps of Engineers. Karras was the last one left uncontacted, and knew that his time was near.