When his country entered the war, Eddie woke up early one rainy morning, shaved, combed back his hair, and enlisted. Others were fighting. He would, too.
His mother did not want him to go. His father, when informed of the news, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly.
“When?” was all he asked.
Since he’d never fired an actual rifle, Eddie began to practice at the shooting arcade at Ruby Pier. You paid a nickel and the machine hummed and you squeezed the trigger and fired metal slugs at pictures of jungle animals, a lion or a giraffe. Eddie went every evening, after running the brake levers at the Li’l Folks Miniature Railway. Ruby Pier had added a number of new, smaller attractions, because roller coasters, after the Depression, had become too expensive. The Miniature Railway was pretty much just that, the train cars no higher than a grown man’s thigh.
Eddie, before enlisting, had been working to save money to study engineering. That was his goal—he wanted to build things, even if his brother, Joe, kept saying, “C’mon, Eddie, you aren’t smart enough for that.”
But once the war started, pier business dropped. Most of Eddie’s customers now were women alone with children, their fathers gone to fight. Sometimes the children asked Eddie to lift them over his head, and when Eddie complied, he saw the mothers’ sad smiles: He guessed it was the right lift but the wrong pair of arms. Soon, Eddie figured, he would join those distant men, and his life of greasing tracks and running brake levers would be over. War was his call to manhood. Maybe someone would miss him, too.
On one of those final nights, Eddie was bent over the small arcade rifle, firing with deep concentration. Pang! Pang! He tried to imagine actually shooting at the enemy. Pang! Would they make a noise when he shot them—Pang!–or would they just go down, like the lions and giraffes?
Pang! Pang!
“Practicing to kill, are ya, lad?”
Mickey Shea was standing behind Eddie. His hair was the color of French vanilla ice cream, wet with sweat, and his face was red from whatever he’d been drinking. Eddie shrugged and returned to his shooting. Pang! Another hit. Pang! Another.
“Hmmph,” Mickey grunted.
Eddie wished Mickey would go away and let him work on his aim. He could feel the old drunk behind him. He could hear his labored breathing, the nasal hissing in and out, like a bike tire being inflated by a pump.
Eddie kept shooting. Suddenly, he felt a painful grip on his shoulder.
“Listen to me, lad.” Mickey’s voice was a low growl. “War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it, you hear? No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don’t think about who you’re shootin’ or killin’ or why, y’hear me? You want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think.”
He squeezed even harder.
“It’s the thinking that gets you killed.”
Eddie turned and stared at Mickey. Mickey slapped him hard on the cheek and Eddie instinctively raised his fist to retaliate. But Mickey belched and wobbled backward. Then he looked at Eddie as if he were going to cry. The mechanical gun stopped humming. Eddie’s nickel was up.
Young men go to war, sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. A few days later, Eddie packed a duffel bag and left the pier behind.
The rain stopped. Eddie, shivering and wet beneath the banyan tree, exhaled a long, hard breath. He pulled the vines apart and saw the rifle and helmet still stuck in the ground. He remembered why soldiers did this: It marked the graves of their dead.
He crawled out on his knees. Off in the distance, below a small ridge, were the remains of a village, bombed and burnt into little more than rubble. For a moment, Eddie stared, his mouth slightly open, his eyes bringing the scene into tighter focus. Then his chest tightened like a man who’d just had bad news broken. This place. He knew it. It had haunted his dreams. “Smallpox,” a voice suddenly said.
Eddie spun.
“Smallpox. Typhoid. Tetanus. Yellow fever.”
It came from above, somewhere in the tree.
“I never did find out what yellow fever was. Hell. I never met anyone who had it.”
The voice was strong, with a slight Southern drawl and gravelly edges, like a man who’d been yelling for hours.
“I got all those shots for all those diseases and I died here anyhow, healthy as a horse.”
The tree shook. Some small fruit fell in front of Eddie.
“How you like them apples?” the voice said.
Eddie stood up and cleared his throat.
“Come out,” he said.
“Come up,” the voice said.
And Eddie was in the tree, near the top, which was as tall as an office building. His legs straddled a large limb and the earth below seemed a long drop away. Through the smaller branches and thick fig leaves, Eddie could make out the shadowy figure of a man in army fatigues, sitting back against the tree trunk. His face was covered with a coal black substance. His eyes glowed red like tiny bulbs.
Eddie swallowed hard.
“Captain?” he whispered. “Is that you?”
They had served together in the army. The Captain was Eddie’s commanding officer. They fought in the Philippines and they parted in the Philippines and Eddie had never seen him again. He had heard he’d died in combat.
A wisp of cigarette smoke appeared.
“They explained the rules to you, soldier?”
Eddie looked down. He saw the earth far below, yet he knew he could not fall.
“I’m dead,” he said.
“You got that much right.”
“And you’re dead.”
“Got that right, too.”
“And you’re … my second person?”
The Captain held up his cigarette. He smiled as if to say, “Can you believe you get to smoke up here?” Then he took a long drag and blew out a small white cloud.
“Betcha didn’t expect me, huh?”
Eddie learned many things during the war. He learned to ride atop a tank. He learned to shave with cold water in his helmet. He learned to be careful when shooting from a foxhole, lest he hit a tree and wound himself with deflected shrapnel.
He learned to smoke. He learned to march. He learned to cross a rope bridge while carrying, all at once, an overcoat, a radio, a carbine, a gas mask, a tripod for a machine gun, a backpack, and several bandoliers on his shoulder. He learned how to drink the worst coffee he’d ever tasted.
He learned a few words in a few foreign languages. He learned to spit a great distance. He learned the nervous cheer of a soldier’s first survived combat, when the men slap each other and smile as if it’s over—We can go home now!–and he learned the sinking depression of a soldier’s second combat, when he realizes the fighting does not stop at one battle, there is more and more after that.
He learned to whistle through his teeth. He learned to sleep on rocky earth. He learned that scabies are itchy little mites that burrow into your skin, especially if you’ve worn the same filthy clothes for a week. He learned a man’s bones really do look white when they burst through the skin.