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It was a testimony to the goodwill of churchgoing and God-fearing neighboring women that they brought her plates of food, swept the floors, washed her linen, and would have bathed her too, except her pride and their sensitivity forbade it. They knew that the woman they were helping despised them all, so they didn’t even have to say out loud what they understood to be true: that the Lord Works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform.

K
orea
.

You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there. You can’t describe the bleak landscape because you never saw it. First let me tell you about cold. I mean cold. More than freezing, Korea cold hurts, clings like a kind of glue you can’t peel off
.

Battle is scary, yeah, but it’s alive. Orders, gut-quickening, covering buddies, killing—clear, no deep thinking needed. Waiting is the hard part. Hours and hours pass while you are doing whatever you can to cut through the cold, flat days. Worst of all is solitary guard duty. How many times can you take off your gloves to see if your fingernails are going black or check your Browning? Your eyes and ears are trained to see or hear movement. Is that sound the Mongolians? They are way worse than the North Koreans. The Mongols never
quit; never stop. When you think they are dead they turn over and shoot you in the groin. Even if you’re wrong and they’re as dead as a dopehead’s eyes it’s worth the waste of ammo to make sure
.

There I was, hour after hour, leaning on a makeshift wall. Nothing to see but a quiet village far below, its thatched roofs mimicking the naked hills beyond, a tight cluster of frozen bamboo sticking up through snow at my left. That’s where we dumped our garbage. I stayed alert as best I could, listening, watching for any sign of sloe eyes or padded hats. Most of the time nothing moved. But one afternoon I heard a thin crackling in the bamboo stands. A single something was moving. I knew it wasn’t the enemy—they never came in ones—so I figured it was a tiger. Word was they roamed up in the hills, but nobody had seen one. Then I saw the bamboo part, low to the ground. A dog, maybe? No. It was a child’s hand sticking out and patting the ground. I remember smiling. Reminded me of Cee and me trying to steal peaches off the ground under Miss Robinson’s tree, sneaking, crawling, being as quiet as we could so she wouldn’t see us and grab a belt. I didn’t even try to run the girl off that first time, so she came back almost every day, pushing through bamboo to scavenge our trash. I saw her face only once. Mostly I just watched her hand moving between the stalks to paw garbage. Each time she came it was as welcome as watching a bird feed her young or a hen scratching
,
scratching dirt for the worm she knew for sure was buried there
.

Sometimes her hand was successful right away, and snatched a piece of garbage in a blink. Other times the fingers just stretched, patting, searching for something, anything, to eat. Like a tiny starfish—left-handed, like me. I’ve watched raccoons more choosy raiding trash cans. She wasn’t picky. Anything not metal, glass, or paper was food to her. She relied not on her eyes but on her fingertips alone to find nourishment. K-ration refuse, scraps from packages sent with love from Mom full of crumbling brownies, cookies, fruit. An orange, soft now and blackened with rot, lies just beyond her fingers. She fumbles for it. My relief guard comes over, sees her hand and shakes his head smiling. As he approaches her she raises up and in what looks like a hurried, even automatic, gesture she says something in Korean. Sounds like “Yum-yum.”

She smiles, reaches for the soldier’s crotch, touches it. It surprises him. Yum-yum? As soon as I look away from her hand to her face, see the two missing teeth, the fall of black hair above eager eyes, he blows her away. Only the hand remains in the trash, clutching its treasure, a spotted, rotting orange
.

Every civilian I ever met in that country would (and did) die to defend their children. Parents threw themselves in front of their kids without a pause. Still, I knew there were
a few corrupt ones who were not content with the usual girls for sale and took to marketing children
.

Thinking back on it now, I think the guard felt more than disgust. I think he felt tempted and that is what he had to kill
.

Yum-yum
.

T
he
Georgian
boasted a country-ham-and-red-gravy breakfast. Frank got to the station early to reserve a coach seat. He gave the ticket lady a twenty-dollar bill and she gave him three pennies’ change. At three-thirty in the afternoon he boarded and settled into the reclining seat. In the half hour until the train pulled out of the station, Frank released the haunting images always ready to dance before his eyes.

Mike in his arms again thrashing, jerking, while Frank yelled at him. “Stay here, man. Come on. Stay with me.” Then whispering, “Please, please.” When Mike opened his mouth to speak, Frank leaned in close and heard his friend say, “Smart, Smart. Don’t tell Mama.” Later, when Stuff asked what he said, Frank lied. “He said, ‘Kill the fuckers.’ ” By the time medics got there, the urine on Mike’s pants had frozen and Frank had had
to beat away pairs of black birds, aggressive as bombers, from his friend’s body. It changed him. What died in his arms gave a grotesque life to his childhood. They were Lotus boys who had known each other before they were toilet-trained, fled Texas the same way, disbelieving the unbelievable malignance of strangers. As children they had chased after straying cows, made themselves a ballpark in the woods, shared Lucky Strikes, fumbled and giggled their way into sex. As teens they made use of Mrs. K., the hairdresser, who, depending on her mood, helped them hone their sexual skills. They argued, fought, laughed, mocked, and loved one another without ever having to say so.

Frank had not been brave before. He had simply done what he was told and what was necessary. He even felt nervous after a kill. Now he was reckless, lunatic, firing, dodging the scattered parts of men. The begging, the howling for help he could not hear clearly until an F-51 dropped its load on the enemies’ nest. In the post-blast silence the pleas wafted like the sound of a cheap cello coming from a chute of cattle smelling their blood-soaked future. Now, with Mike gone, he was brave, whatever that meant. There were not enough dead gooks or Chinks in the world to satisfy him. The copper smell of blood no longer sickened him; it gave him appetite. Weeks later, after Red was pulverized, blood seeped from Stuff’s blasted arm. Frank helped Stuff locate the arm twenty
feet away half buried in the snow. Those two, Stuff and Red, were especially close. “Neck” was dropped from Red’s nickname because, hating northerners more than them, he preferred to associate with the three Georgia boys—Stuff most of all. Now they were meat.

Frank had waited, oblivious of receding gunfire, until the medics left and the grave unit arrived. There was too little left of Red to warrant the space of a whole stretcher, so he shared his remains with another’s. Stuff had gotten a whole stretcher to himself, though, and holding his severed arm in the connected one he lay on the stretcher and died on it before the agony got to his brain.

Afterward, for months on end, Frank kept thinking, “But I know them. I know them and they know me.” If he heard a joke Mike would love, he would turn his head to tell it to him—then a nanosecond of embarrassment before realizing he wasn’t there. And never again would he hear that loud laugh, or watch him entertain whole barracks with raunchy jokes and imitations of movie stars. Sometimes, long after he’d been discharged, he would see Stuff’s profile in a car stopped in traffic until the heart jump of sorrow announced his mistake. Abrupt, unregulated memories put a watery shine in his eyes. For months only alcohol dispersed his best friends, the hovering dead he could no longer hear, talk to, or laugh with.

But before that, before the deaths of his homeys, he had witnessed the other one. The scavenging child clutching
an orange, smiling, then saying, “Yum-yum,” before the guard blew her head off.

Sitting on the train to Atlanta, Frank suddenly realized that those memories, powerful as they were, did not crush him anymore or throw him into paralyzing despair. He could recall every detail, every sorrow, without needing alcohol to steady him. Was this the fruit of sobriety?

Just after dawn outside Chattanooga the train slowed, then stopped, for no apparent reason. It soon became clear that something needed repair and it might take an hour, maybe more. A few coach passengers moaned, others took advantage and against the instructions of the conductor stepped outside to stretch their legs. Sleeping-car passengers woke and called for coffee. Those in club cars ordered food and more drinks. The part of the track where the train had halted ran alongside a peanut farm, but one could see a feed-store sign two or three hundred yards beyond. Frank, restless but not irritable, strolled toward the feed store. It was closed at that hour, but next to it a small shop was open to sell soda pop, Wonder bread, tobacco, and other products local folk craved. Bing Crosby’s “Don’t Fence Me In” crackled through a radio’s weak reception. The woman behind the counter was in a wheelchair but, quick as a hummingbird, glided to the freezer and extracted the can of Dr Pepper Frank asked for. He paid, winked at her, got a glare in return, then went outside to drink. The young sun was blazing and there was
little standing to cast a shadow or provide shade, only the feed store, the shop, and one shambling broke-down house across the road. A brand-new Cadillac, gilded in sunlight, was parked in front. Frank crossed the road to admire the car. Its taillights were slivers like shark fins. Its windshield stretched wide above the hood. As he got closer he heard voices—women’s voices—cursing and grunting behind the house. He walked down the side toward the squeals, expecting to see some male aggressor showing off. But there on the ground were two women fighting. Rolling around, punching, kicking the air, they beat each other in the dirt. Their hair and clothes were in disarray. The surprise to Frank was a man standing near them, picking his teeth and watching. He turned when Frank approached. He was a big man with flat, bored eyes.

“What the fuck you lookin’ at?” He didn’t remove the toothpick.

Frank froze. The big man came right up to him and shoved his chest. Twice. Frank dropped his Dr Pepper and swung hard at the man, who, lacking agility like so many really big men, fell immediately. Frank leaped on the prone body and began to punch his face, eager to ram that toothpick into his throat. The thrill that came with each blow was wonderfully familiar. Unable to stop and unwilling to, Frank kept going even though the big man was unconscious. The women stopped clawing each other and pulled at Frank’s collar.

“Stop!” they screamed. “You’re killing him! You motherfucker, get off him!”

Frank paused and turned to look at the big man’s rescuers. One bent down to cradle the man’s head. The other wiped blood from her nose and called the big man’s name. “Sonny. Sonny. Oh, honey.” Then she dropped to her knees and tried to revive her pimp. Her blouse was torn down the back. It was a bright yellow.

Frank stood and, massaging his knuckles, moved quickly, half running, half loping back to the train. He was either ignored or not seen by the repair crew. Inside the door to the coach section a porter eyed his bloodstained hands and dusty clothes but said nothing. Fortunately, the toilet was near the entrance so Frank could catch his breath and clean up before walking down the aisle. Once seated, Frank wondered at the excitement, the wild joy the fight had given him. It was unlike the rage that had accompanied killing in Korea. Those sprees were fierce but mindless, anonymous. This violence was personal in its delight. Good, he thought. He might need that thrill to claim his sister.