I started throwing up and tried to do it on the side of the trail. We passed abandoned emplacements so well camouflaged that a couple guys fell into them. A little farther up was a switchback and a curtain of jungle that came down like a wall. We came across some sulfa packs and morphine needles scattered in the mud. A boot.
From below Leo tugged at my pant leg. “Hang back,” he said quietly. I stepped a foot and hand off the trail and rested, chest heaving, and let a couple guys go by. Leo stopped behind me.
“How far’s this fucking thing go on?” Doubek panted, climbing past. He lifted his head to see and the jungle up above us went nuts. The wall of leaves jittered and blurred and the noise of all the fire at once was a pandemonium.
Doubek’s shirt came alive from the inside and he spread-eagled out past me and pinwheeled down the slope, crashing through the undergrowth. His helmet sailed off in another direction. We all gripped the mud, hugging the slope. Leaves, sticks, bark, and splinters flew and spun, popping from trees. The noise sucked the air out of us. It stopped my ability to think. I was under a little lip of overhang with Leo below me. My boots kicked through a mat of stems. Thorns tore at my cheek. I was clawing and looking to burrow. Some guys were firing back but I wasn’t one of them. The firing went on and then it stopped in front of us and after a minute you could hear the CO screaming to cease fire.
When the last of our guys did, the sound of the rain came back. And some whimpering and cursing. The CO and one of the staff sergeants shouted orders. Leo had to crawl up and over me before I could bring myself to move. He thought I was dead.
“How is he?” the CO called up to him.
“Untouched,” Leo called back down.
“What about the other guys?” the CO wanted to know. I could see him twenty feet below us, one shoulder dug in, his outer arm cradling his carbine. Every so often he had to stick a heel back in the mud to keep from sliding. He meant the guys ahead of me. There’d been about six of them.
Leo told him none of them was calling for a medic, which he took to be a bad sign.
We could hear the clatter of new clips being fed into guns up above us.
“Should we fall back, sir? Sir?” Leo called.
“Form on me! Form on me!” a sergeant called out below.
“Fall back?” the CO called. “What’s the problem? We ran into Japs?” I think he thought he was funny.
We were flattened against the muck, the mud and rainwater pouring straight through our clothes.
“Keep an eye out, you two,” the CO called. Then he called a meeting on the slope right below us: him and the lieutenant and a couple of the staff sergeants. He asked for suggestions. Nobody had any. Could we spread out? one of them finally asked. Could we provide any covering fire? Was there any room anywhere to maneuver?
“This is depressing,” Leo finally said to me, after they’d all gone quiet.
“That might be the one trouble spot, though,” we heard the CO venture to guess. “It could be that we only have to get past that.”
“You all right?” Leo asked me. His nose was next to mine.
“You guys watchin’?” the CO called.
We both looked up at the switchback. Even in the rain the mists were creeping around the bottoms of the trees. We still hadn’t seen a Jap.
“They’re not going to let us go back down, are they?” I asked Leo. I’d never been so cold in my life and started shivering the minute the shooting stopped. I hadn’t meant to be crying but I was.
“Think of it this way,” Leo said. “Linda’ll be taken care of.”
“Fuck this place,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he told me back.
The third or fourth night we all drove around in Linda’s brother’s car, I’d walked over to her house but her mom said she was still getting dressed. I was welcome to wait, she told me, there in the parlor or out back with Glenn. Glenn was the older brother. Glenn it turned out was in the shed. “How’re you doin’,” I said to him.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” he said back.
Stuff like that happened every single place I went. “Marble mouth,” my dad would say to my mom at the dinner table when I asked a question. “I understood him perfectly,” she sometimes said, but then he’d be mad at her the rest of the night.
“Leave those alone,” Glenn said.
I didn’t see what he was talking about. There wasn’t a lot of light in the shed. “You been trapping?” I asked when my eyes adjusted.
“Those are cat skins,” he said. “I’m drying cat skins.”
“Your brother’s drying cat skins,” I told Linda the first night we had the car to ourselves.
“What are you talking about?” she said. And I decided it was the last time I’d ever bring up something that would make her move her hand away.
“What do you think, your brother’s Mister Normal?” she asked.
She told me I could ride in front with Glenn and we’d gotten a block from her house when she asked what my brother was up to. “Let’s go get him,” she said, before I answered.
“Yeah, let’s go get the brother,” Glenn said.
When we got to my house my brother was already sitting on the front steps. “Well, this is a surprise,” he said, and got in the back with Linda.
“Eyes front, buddy,” Glenn said when I turned to look back at them. The whole way to the quarry, if I started to turn around he jiggled the steering wheel and we all rocked and swayed. Linda told him to stop and he told her it wasn’t him, it was me, so she told me to sit still.
“I want to look at you,” I said.
“That’s sweet,” my brother said.
“It is,” Linda told him.
When we got to the quarry, she said she had to pee.
“I better go with you,” my brother told her. “It’s pretty dark out there.”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I can handle this myself.”
She was gone a long time. I sat in the car with my brother and Glenn and thought of her poking around in the dark, feeling for a safe place.
Glenn had his arm along the top of the seat so his fingers were at my shoulder. My brother whistled to himself the same two notes that went up and down, up and down.
“What I wouldn’t give to be a little flower right now,” Glenn said.
“Two little flowers,” my brother said.
“I should go look for her,” I told them.
They both snorted. “She knows this place better than we do,” Glenn said.
“Or at least as well,” my brother told him.
I tried a few sentences in my head and then said, “So you guys have been here before.”
There was a pause like they were deciding who was going to answer.
“We been here before,” my brother confirmed.
Linda finally appeared out of the dark, wet-eyed, and opened the door and climbed in.
“You okay?” I said.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Shouldn’t I be in the back with you?” I asked.
“Yeah, absolutely. Move, you,” she said to my brother.
“Absolutely,” my brother said.
“Absolutely,” Glenn said.
In the light when the car door opened again I could see Linda flinch.
“We gotta give these two some time alone,” my brother told Glenn.
“Absolutely,” Glenn said.
“But first I have to show you something,” my brother said, meaning me.
“Now?” I asked him. I had one foot in the backseat.