THE CAPTAIN STUBBED out his cigarette. He was older than the men in Eddie’s troop, a lifetime military man with a lanky swagger and a prominent chin that gave him a resemblance to a movie actor of the day. Most of the soldiers liked him well enough, although he had a short temper and a habit of yelling inches from your face, so you could see his teeth, already yellowed from tobacco. Still, the Captain always promised he would “leave no one behind,” no matter what happened, and the men took comfort in that.
“Captain…” Eddie said again, still stunned.
“Affirmative.”
“Sir.”
“No need for that. But much obliged.”
“It’s been…You look…”
“Like the last time you saw me?” He grinned, then spat over the tree branch. He saw Eddie’s confused expression. “You’re right. Ain’t no reason to spit up here. You don’t get sick, either. Your breath is always the same. And the chow is incredible.”
Chow? Eddie didn’t get any of this. “Captain, look. There’s some mistake. I still don’t know why I’m here. I had a nothing life, see? I worked maintenance. I lived in the same apartment for years. I took care of rides, Ferris wheels, roller coasters, stupid little rocket ships. It was nothing to be proud of. I just kind of drifted. What I’m saying is…”
Eddie swallowed. “What am I doing here?”
The Captain looked at him with those glowing red eyes, and Eddie resisted asking the other question he now wondered after the Blue Man: Did he kill the Captain, too?
“You know, I’ve been wondering,” the Captain said, rubbing his chin. “The men from our unit—did they stay in touch? Willingham? Morton? Smitty? Did you ever see those guys?”
Eddie remembered the names. The truth was, they had not kept in touch. War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
“To be honest, sir, we all kind of fell out.” He shrugged. “Sorry.”
The Captain nodded as if he’d expected as much.
“And you? You went back to that fun park where we all promised to go if we got out alive? Free rides for all GIs? Two girls per guy in the Tunnel of Love? Isn’t that what you said?”
Eddie nearly smiled. That was what he’d said. What they’d all said. But when the war ended, nobody came.
“Yeah, I went back,” Eddie said.
“And?”
“And…I never left. I tried. I made plans…But this damn leg. I don’t know. Nothin’ worked out.”
Eddie shrugged. The Captain studied his face. His eyes narrowed. His voice lowered.
“You still juggle?” he asked.
“GO!…YOU GO!…YOU GO!”
The enemy soldiers screamed and poked them with bayonets. Eddie, Smitty, Morton, Rabozzo, and the Captain were herded down a steep hill, hands on their heads. Mortar shells exploded around them. Eddie saw a figure run through the trees, then fall in a clap of bullets.
He tried to take mental snapshots as they marched in the darkness—huts, roads, whatever he could make out—knowing such information would be precious for an escape. A plane roared in the distance, filling Eddie with a sudden, sickening wave of despair. It is the inner torture of every captured soldier, the short distance between freedom and seizure. If Eddie could only jump up and grab the wing of that plane, he could fly away from this mistake.
Instead, he and the others were bound at the wrists and ankles. They were dumped inside a bamboo barracks. The barracks sat on stilts above the muddy ground, and they remained there for days, weeks, months, forced to sleep on burlap sacks stuffed with straw. A clay jug served as their toilet. At night, the enemy guards would crawl under the hut and listen to their conversations. As time passed, they said less and less.
They grew thin and weak. Their ribs grew visible—even Rabozzo, who had been a chunky kid when he enlisted. Their food consisted of rice balls filled with salt and, once a day, some brownish broth with grass floating in it. One night, Eddie plucked a dead hornet from the bowl. It was missing its wings. The others stopped eating.
THEIR CAPTORS SEEMED unsure of what to do with them. In the evenings, they would enter with bayonets and wiggle their blades at the Americans’ noses, yelling in a foreign language, waiting for answers. It was never productive.
There were only four of them, near as Eddie could tell, and the Captain guessed that they, too, had drifted away from a larger unit and were, as often happens in real war, making it up day by day. Their faces were gaunt and bony, with dark nubs of hair. One looked too young to be a soldier. Another had the most crooked teeth Eddie had ever seen. The Captain called them Crazy One, Crazy Two, Crazy Three, and Crazy Four.
“We don’t want to know their names,” he said. “And we don’t want them knowing ours.”
Men adapt to captivity, some better than others. Morton, a skinny, chattering youth from Chicago, would fidget whenever he heard noises from outside, rubbing his chin and mumbling, “Oh, damn, oh damn, oh damn…” until the others told him to shut up. Smitty, a fireman’s son from Brooklyn, was quiet most of the time, but he often seemed to be swallowing something, his Adam’s apple loping up and down; Eddie later learned he was chewing on his tongue. Rabozzo, the young redheaded kid from Portland, Oregon, kept a poker face during the waking hours, but at night he often woke up screaming, “Not me! Not me!”
Eddie mostly seethed. He clenched a fist and slapped it into his palm, hours on end, knuckles to skin, like the anxious baseball player he had been in his youth. At night, he dreamed he was back at the pier, on the Derby Horse carousel, where five customers raced in circles until the bell rang. He was racing his buddies, or his brother, or Marguerite. But then the dream turned, and the four Crazies were on the adjacent ponies, poking at him, sneering.
Years of waiting at the pier—for a ride to finish, for the waves to pull back, for his father to speak to him—had trained Eddie in the art of patience. But he wanted out, and he wanted revenge. He ground his jaws and he slapped his palm and he thought about all the fights he’d been in back in his old neighborhood, the time he’d sent two kids to the hospital with a garbage can lid. He pictured what he’d do to these guards if they didn’t have guns.
Then one morning, the prisoners were awakened by screaming and flashing bayonets and the four Crazies had them up and bound and led down into a shaft. There was no light. The ground was cold. There were picks and shovels and metal buckets.
“It’s a goddamn coal mine,” Morton said.
FROM THAT DAY forward, Eddie and the others were forced to strip coal from the walls to help the enemy’s war effort. Some shoveled, some scraped, some carried pieces of slate and built triangles to hold up the ceiling. There were other prisoners there, too, foreigners who didn’t know English and who looked at Eddie with hollow eyes. Speaking was prohibited. One cup of water was given every few hours. The prisoners’ faces, by the end of the day, were hopelessly black, and their necks and shoulders throbbed from leaning over.
For the first few months of this captivity, Eddie went to sleep with Marguerite’s picture in his helmet propped up in front of him. He wasn’t much for praying, but he prayed just the same, making up the words and keeping count each night, saying, “Lord, I’ll give you these six days if you give me six days with her…I’ll give you these nine days if I get nine days with her…I’ll give you these sixteen days if I get sixteen days with her…”
Then, during the fourth month, something happened. Rabozzo developed an ugly skin rash and severe diarrhea. He couldn’t eat a thing. At night, he sweated through his filthy clothes until they were soaking wet. He soiled himself. There were no clean clothes to give him so he slept naked on the burlap, and the Captain placed his sack over him like a blanket.
The next day, down in the mine, Rabozzo could barely stand. The four Crazies showed no pity. When he slowed, they poked him with sticks to keep him scraping.
“Leave him be,” Eddie g
rowled.
Crazy Two, the most brutal of their captors, slammed Eddie with a bayonet butt. He went down, a shot of pain spreading between his shoulder blades. Rabozzo scraped a few more pieces of coal, then collapsed. Crazy Two screamed at him to get up.
“He’s sick!” Eddie yelled, struggling to his feet.
Crazy Two slammed him down again.
“Shut up, Eddie,” Morton whispered. “For your own good.”
Crazy Two leaned over Rabozzo. He pulled back his eyelids. Rabozzo moaned. Crazy Two made an exaggerated smile and cooed, as if dealing with a baby. He went, “Ahh,” and laughed. He laughed looking at all of them, making eye contact, making sure they were watching him. Then he pulled out his pistol, rammed it into Rabozzo’s ear, and shot him in the head.
Eddie felt his body rip in half. His eyes blurred and his brain went numb. The echo of the gunshot hung in the mine as Rabozzo’s face soaked into a spreading puddle of blood. Morton put his hands over his mouth. The Captain looked down. Nobody moved.
Crazy Two kicked black dirt over the body, then glared at Eddie and spat at his feet. He yelled something at Crazy Three and Crazy Four, both of whom seemed as stunned as the prisoners. For a moment, Crazy Three shook his head and mumbled, as if saying a prayer, his eyelids lowered and his lips moving furiously. But Crazy Two waved the gun and yelled again and Crazy Three and Crazy Four slowly lifted Rabozzo’s body by its feet and dragged it along the mine floor, leaving a trail of wet blood, which, in the darkness, looked like spilt oil. They dropped him against a wall, next to a pickax.
After that, Eddie stopped praying. He stopped counting days. He and the Captain spoke only of escaping before they all met the same fate. The Captain figured the enemy war effort was desperate, that was why they needed every half-dead prisoner to scrape coal. Each day in the mine there were fewer and fewer bodies. At night, Eddie heard bombing; it seemed to be getting closer. If things got too bad, the Captain figured, their captors would bail out, destroy everything. He had seen ditches dug beyond the prisoner barracks and large oil barrels positioned up the steep hill.
“The oil’s for burning the evidence,” the Captain whispered. “They’re digging our graves.”
THREE WEEKS LATER, under a hazy-mooned sky, Crazy Three was inside the barracks, standing guard. He had two large rocks, almost the size of bricks, which, in his boredom, he tried to juggle. He kept dropping them, picking them up, tossing them high, and dropping them again. Eddie, covered in black ash, looked up, annoyed at the thudding noise. He’d been trying to sleep. But now he lifted himself slowly. His vision cleared. He felt his nerves pricking to life.
“Captain…” he whispered. “You ready to move?”
The Captain raised his head. “What’re you thinking?”
“Them rocks.” Eddie nodded toward the guard.
“What about ‘em?” the Captain said.
“I can juggle,” Eddie whispered.
The Captain squinted. “What?”
But Eddie was already yelling at the guard, “Hey! Yo! You’re doing it wrong!”
He made a circular motion with his palms. “This way! You do it this way! Gimme!”
He held out his hands. “I can juggle. Gimme.”
Crazy Three looked at him cautiously. Of all the guards, Eddie felt, he had his best chance with this one. Crazy Three had occasionally sneaked the prisoners pieces of bread and tossed them through the small hut hole that served as a window. Eddie made the circular motion again and smiled. Crazy Three approached, stopped, went back for his bayonet, then walked the two rocks over to Eddie.
“Like this,” Eddie said, and he began to juggle effortlessly. He had learned when he was seven years old, from an Italian sideshow man who juggled six plates at once. Eddie had spent countless hours practicing on the boardwalk—pebbles, rubber balls, whatever he could find. It was no big deal. Most pier kids could juggle.
But now he worked the two rocks furiously, juggling them faster, impressing the guard. Then he stopped, held the rocks out, and said, “Get me another one.”
Crazy Three grunted.
“Three rocks, see?” Eddie held up three fingers. “Three.”
By now, Morton and Smitty were sitting up. The Captain was moving closer.
“Where are we going here?” Smitty mumbled.
“If I can get one more rock…” Eddie mumbled back.
Crazy Three opened the bamboo door and did what Eddie’d hoped he would do: He yelled for the others. Crazy One appeared with a fat rock and Crazy Two followed him in. Crazy Three thrust the rock at Eddie and yelled something. Then he stepped back, grinned at the others, and motioned for them to sit, as if to say, “Watch this.”
Eddie tossed the rocks into a rhythmic weave. Each one was as big as his palm. He sang a carnival tune. “Da, da-da-da daaaaa…” The guards laughed. Eddie laughed. The Captain laughed. Forced laughter, buying time.
“Get clo-ser,” Eddie sang, pretending the words were part of the melody. Morton and Smitty slid gently in, feigning interest.
The guards were enjoying the diversion. Their posture slackened. Eddie tried to swallow his breathing. Just a little longer. He threw one rock high into the air, then juggled the lower two, then caught the third, then did it again.
“Ahhh,” Crazy Three said, despite himself.
“You like that?” Eddie said. He was juggling faster now. He kept tossing one rock high and watching his captors’ eyes as they followed it into the air. He sang, “Da, da-da-da daaa,” then, “When I count to three,” then, “Da, da-da-da daaaa…” then, “Captain, the guy on the lefffft…”
Crazy Two frowned suspiciously, but Eddie smiled the way the jugglers back at Ruby Pier smiled when they were losing the audience. “Lookie here, lookie here, lookie here!” Eddie cooed. “Greatest show on earth, buddy boy!”
Eddie went faster, then counted, “One…two…” then tossed a rock much higher than before. The Crazies watched it rise.
“Now!” Eddie yelled. In mid-juggle he grabbed a rock and, like the good baseball pitcher he had always been, whipped it hard into the face of Crazy Two, breaking his nose. Eddie caught the second rock and threw it, left-handed, square into the chin of Crazy One, who fell back as the Captain jumped him, grabbing his bayonet. Crazy Three, momentarily frozen, reached for his pistol and fired wildly as Morton and Smitty tackled his legs. The door burst open and Crazy Four ran in, and Eddie threw the last rock at him and missed his head by inches, but as he ducked, the Captain was waiting against the wall with the bayonet, which he drove through Crazy Four’s rib cage so hard the two of them tumbled through the door. Eddie, powered by adrenaline, leaped on Crazy Two and pounded his face harder than he had ever pounded anyone back on Pitkin Avenue. He grabbed a loose rock and slammed it against his skull, again and again, until he looked at his hands and saw a hideous purplish goo that he realized was blood and skin and coal ash, mixed together—then he heard a gunshot and grabbed his head, smearing the goo on his temples. He looked up and saw Smitty standing over him, holding an enemy pistol. Crazy Two’s body went slack. He was bleeding from the chest.
“For Rabozzo,” Smitty mumbled.
Within minutes, all four guards were dead.
THE PRISONERS, THIN and barefoot and covered in blood, were running now for the steep hill. Eddie had expected gunfire, more guards to fight, but there was no one. The other huts were empty. In fact, the entire camp was empty. Eddie wondered how long it had been just the four Crazies and them.
“The rest probably took off when they heard the bombing,” the Captain whispered. “We’re the last group left.”
The oil barrels were pitched at the first rise of the hill. Less than 100 yards away was the entrance to the coal mine. There was a supply hut nearby and Morton made sure it was empty, then ran inside; he emerged with an armful of grenades, rifles, and two primitive-looking flamethrowers.
“Let’s burn it down,” he said.
Today Is Eddie’s Birthday
The c
ake reads “Good luck! Fight hard!” and on the side, along the vanilla-frosted edge, someone has added the words, “Come home soon,” in blue squiggly letters, but the “o-o-n” is squeezed together, so it reads more like “son” or “Come home son.”
Eddie’s mother has already cleaned and pressed the clothes he will wear the next day. She’s hung them on a hanger on his bedroom closet doorknob and put his one pair of dress shoes beneath them.
Eddie is in the kitchen, fooling with his young Romanian cousins, his hands behind his back as they try to punch his stomach. One points out the kitchen window at the Parisian Carousel, which is lit for the evening customers.
“Horses!” the child exclaims.
The front door opens and Eddie hears a voice that makes his heart jump, even now. He wonders if this is a weakness he shouldn’t be taking off to war.
“Hiya, Eddie,” Marguerite says.
And there she is, in the kitchen doorway, looking wonderful, and Eddie feels that familiar tickle in his chest. She brushes a bit of rainwater from her hair and smiles. She has a small box in her hands.
“I brought you something. For your birthday, and, well…for your leaving, too.”
She smiles again. Eddie wants to hug her so badly, he thinks he’ll burst. He doesn’t care what is in the box. He only wants to remember her holding it out for him. As always, with Marguerite, Eddie mostly wants to freeze time.
“This is swell,” he says.
She laughs. “You haven’t opened it yet.”
“Listen.” He moves closer. “Do you—”
“Eddie!” someone yells from the other room. “Come on and blow out the candles.”