North Chungchong Province, South Korea

JULY 28, 1950

Corporal Robert Leavitt

24th Infantry Division

Mashuhyo, mashuhyo. The girl is talking in the dark. She’s come back; it must be nearly dawn. Drink, she whispers. The word in her language is sibilant and hushed, like the sluice of water in the stream none of them can reach. She lies near him, pressing the dripping fabric of her shirt to his mouth. It tastes salty and black. He thinks the words or says them. No, she tells him in Korean, the water is pink. There are so many bodies in the water. She squeezes the wet cloth against his lips, his teeth, touching his tongue with the bloody water. He thinks he moves, pushing her away, but he only opens his hand. She drops her forehead onto his palm and a pulse in her temple beats like a minnow holding still. The day before he left Louisville, he gave Lola his mother’s little derringer, the pearl-handled pistol she kept out of sight beside the cash register. She’d never had to use it but she kept it loaded. The musicians and junkies took drugs that made them crazy, and the drunks and merchant seamen got mean late at night if they hadn’t found women. She was always alone, closing up. The old man was always out. Bobby was out by then too, an underage teenager haunting clubs that let him sit in with bands, pick up what he could. Ma, he asked her, do you even know how to use that gun? Does it work? Sure it works, she said, it’s just you have to aim for the head, or a knee if you’re stopping someone running. You ever fired it? Bobby asked. How hard can it be, she said. I told the man I wanted a lady’s pistol, small, no kickback, something I could put in a purse. And why would you do that, Ma, put it in a purse. I might want to take a trip, she said. He didn’t worry about her at night. The grocery didn’t sell liquor or even beer. It was the safest place in Philly at 10:00 p.m. Waitresses and women and cops, bus drivers going off shift. He talked her into taking the derringer upstairs with her after closing up. To keep it safe, he said, suppose someone broke in, despite the iron grates she slid across the doors and windows. They’d open the register and see the gun, more use than cash and day-old bread. Really, he wanted her to have it in case the old man showed up loaded and Bobby wasn’t home yet. It was what he feared. Long ago he’d taken sides, become her partner, but when she did die, alone on the floor in quiet he could only imagine, he ceded all territory. There was no territory without her. He’d hated the store for the shabby continual way it imprisoned both of them, he’d wanted out, but he hadn’t protected her, he wasn’t there. Blood clot in her brain, they said, wouldn’t have mattered. It mattered to him. He wouldn’t let anyone move her things. When he left a few weeks later, all he took from her room was the derringer.

He’d thought he was a man at sixteen; he felt free, unencumbered, capable. He’d been with girls for years and found women, always, easily, but he stayed clear of commitments and was somehow loyal to his mother’s aloneness, to her life and death, without ever thinking of her, until Lola. Mother may I. Lola knew, almost by instinct, who he was. Something in her was that alone. They began to tell each other why, with their bodies and words. Lying in bed, smoking cigarettes, talking for hours. The postwar army was a good job, a start, and there were no emergencies. They had their whole lives to plan.

He joked that his mother’s gun was a wedding present. He wasn’t worried about Lola, with her girls and Onslow close by, not worried for her safety, he said. Not worried, the phrase itself, was a shadow, a dark tug inside him. Every woman should have a firearm, he told Lola, for her own protection. It was your mother’s, Lola said. That’s why I’ll keep it for you. She touched the pearl handle to her face and held the derringer on the flat of her palm, like jewelry, an object. It was just the length of her hand. Leavitt sees her hand, and the old woman’s hand, holding his service revolver. The two images are startlingly clear: one picture superimposed on the other. The soft flat of a woman’s hand, the guns, the angle and attitude of support the same, but the bigger gun dwarfed the old woman’s small palm, and the barrel shone in the dark. Your weapon is your life. Basic had drilled the phrase into him. He heard the girl pleading. Let him stay with them. And the old woman listened to her, took her own life instead. All their lives, if she’d given the troops an excuse to say the refugees were armed. Or maybe it didn’t matter, had no bearing. Command had sealed the tunnels, treated the refugees as combatants from the beginning.

He can’t see the girl, the boy, but he feels them against him, as though constant physical contact is their only safety, all that’s real in the dark.

He’s with them and he’ll stay with them.

He’ll never get out. None of them will. What he sees is wobbly, unreal. What’s real is inside him, not outside. He sees, he can still see, along a tunnel, stone and cracked concrete. It’s Lola’s picture of an arch into a tunnel, the walls curved, turning like faces he should have recognized, the arch, the stones and the wide river beside, not this place, this stream running bloody and small, feeding him, wetting his face. He hears the girl whispering against his hand, every syllable distinct, a rush and cadence of words. He’s not speaking, can’t speak, and she thinks he can’t hear her, but he recognizes the words of a Buddhist chant having to do with journeys, purification.

There’s movement outside, a groaning of wheels and heavy equipment. He hears her reach for the boy. She lies down behind Leavitt and pulls him against her, with the child between them.

Sound stops, as though by some agreement or mutual sense. Leavitt hears the click of the searchlights come on. Impossible, but he hears it. They’re powerful circular searchlights on wheels, each the size of an airplane engine; the North Koreans use them in battle and now the Americans use them too. The lights are in position at either end of the tunnel and their white beams cross midway. The American units have lit the tunnel and they’re going to fire until no one’s moving.

He feels the girl behind him, holding the child. Leavitt feels her mouth on the back of his neck, silently forming syllables. It’s now, he can feel it. His baby is born, deep inside him where the pain throbs. It’s all wrong and it’s true, his legs are dead and his guts are torn apart but his spine opens up like a star. He can feel Lola split apart, the baby fighting her, tearing his way. The girl’s arm tightens across Leavitt. She holds the boy motionless and pulls Leavitt tighter against them, against the tunnel wall. He draws back, into her hard thin limitless chest, inside her embrace.

The bodies are lit and white in the arched space. Those still alive draw closer to one another; mothers lie down to shield their children. Light pours through them and over them like an avalanche. He can’t see but he can hear acutely, in slow deliberate measure, the sound of the machine guns turning on their pivots. He hears, surrounding them on all sides, a deepening pressure, an approaching density, like the roar of a vast train so wide and heavy it can fall forever, a barrage of fire to scream over and through them so hard and long it will pull the war into nothingness with it.

When the pounding begins the white light on his face goes blue. Look inside, he tells his son, inside is where you really are. He wants to lift his baby away from this beautiful deadly world. The planes always come, he wants to say, like planets on rotation, a timed bloodletting with different excuses. Part of a long music. Don’t look, only listen. His son is born. Leavitt feels him turn in the salt and the blood, squalling and screaming in the close hot wet. Stop screaming, Leavitt tells him. Never scream. They’ll find you. Stay still. Listen. You can’t come with me now. Breathe, breathe. Take your turn.