the ’52 campaign slogan all my friends were saying. “And I like old Blood and Guts, too!” I sashayed around her living room like the conqueror of Rome.
“I hate them all!” she screamed all of a sudden. “I hate Eisenhower and Truman and Patton and all the dirty bastards who send our men off to fight in God damned –” she stopped herself like she just remembered you don't swear in front of nine-year olds, but her eyes were red and wet. I stopped too. “I'm sorry,” she said, and she bent down to touch my face. My eyes went right past Jesus and down her blouse, and they widened at the glory of her chest. I never dared tell Rico what big ones she had, but maybe he knew from the beach. Any other lady, he’d say “Vavoom!” but not his aunt. She stood up and sniffled, then gave me a playful slap. Carlotta cried a lot.
Now me and Rico dodged a hail of machine-gun fire and headed for the low bushes on the far side of the open field. “Dibs on Audie Murphy!" I said.
“And I’m Emilio!” That was Rico's privilege, naturally. He’d rather’ve been his uncle than anybody, even Douglas McArthur. Across the field, we spied a woman hanging was on the back porch of her third-floor tenement. Sergeant Emilio pointed towards the Chinese machine-gun nest holding the high ground. “Heartbreak Hill,” he said. “We’re going to take it.”
I lay on my stomach, breathing heavily, looking through the binoculars formed by my thumbs and forefingers. Hot blood flowed down my face from a flesh wound. Sergeant Emilio took a bullet in the chest, and he rolled around in agony. But neither of us bellyached. Heroes don’t mind the pain.
I crouched over my wounded comrade, ignoring the sting of bullets that raked my back, and pulled him into the fort. It was a shady bubble inside the bushes, a wolves’ lair, a grizzly’s den, Al Capone’s hideout, a secret cave where we kept our C-rations and our ammo. This day, it was the only safe place between Pyongyang and Seoul.
Rico lay flat on his back and curled his tongue out like he had to scoop in the fresh air to refill his lungs. “Time for a smoke,” he said. “Gotta have a butt.” He stuck his hand in his pants pocket and pulled out a cigarette and a matchbook. The butt was all mashed from being in his pocket, and when he held it up it flopped on both ends like a dead worm.
"Auntie Carlotta will kill me if she finds out I stole one of her Fatimas," he said. He bent a match without removing it from the book, and scratched the sulfur head on the rough black strip. The cigarette was kind of straight in his mouth now. He took a deep drag and pumped the smoke out his nose.
"What's a Fatima?" I asked, thinking about Our Lady of Fatima.
Rico looked at me like he just couldn't figure me out sometimes. "Did your mother have any kids that lived?" he asked, and he handed me the cigarette. "This is a Fatima. Try it." I filled my mouth with a shallow drag because I was embarrassed to cough.
"Got to learn," he said. "If it all comes back out, you're not doing it right."
I was more interested in the rations we'd stored in a small hole and covered with leaves. The licorice cough drops, potato chips and half-eaten jawbreakers were still there in a paper bag, and black ants were crawling all over it. "Corporal Murphy!" You let the Chinks poison our food supply!" He brushed two ants off a chip and popped it in his mouth. "Want to hear a limerick?" he said, and didn't wait for my reply.
There was a French lady named Couture
Who thought no man could screw her.
Then along came a Chink
With a cast-iron dink
And bored a hole right through her.
I laughed, but I wondered if laughing at nasty words was a sin. I changed the subject and pointed straight up at the twin-engine Gooney Bird that seemed to lumber from cloud to cloud. "Enemy fighters twelve o'clock high!" Immediately I was at my anti-aircraft post, and now the clouds were puffs from the flak.
"Cease fire, soldier! You can't hit him 'cause he's one of ours," Sergeant Emilio said. I adjusted my binoculars. It was American all right, and now it was flying over the long row of enemy pill boxes.
"They're bombing enemy positions," I said. "They're softening up Pork Chop Hill."
Sarge put down his binoculars and gave me the kind of long, slow look that Mss Montague murdered third graders with. "Corporal, we got ten dead guys out in the field and you don't even know what hill we're fighting for? Pork Chop was yesterday! This is Heartbreak!"
It was a direct hit on my pride, and Sarge must've seen the pain in my face. "It's okay, Corporal," he said. "You're shell-shocked. It happens." Together we turned and faced Heartbreak Hill. "If we take this hill, we'll both get Medals of Honor," he said.
I nodded, but my attention was on the field where the grass bent over with the weight of the seeds that pulled down the long green stems. The summer before, the real Emilio had taught me and Rico how to make music with a blade of grass by putting it between our thumbs and blowing real hard. Next thing I knew, the grass was brown and flat and dead, and we were playing our last game of touch football before Emilio shipped out. Frankie's my brother, he was ten, he played. Emilio was a machinist before the Marines, and he'd always lifted weights. He could pick us all up at once, and sometimes we hiked him the ball and all three of us tried to catch him. Three against one was always tackle, except not really 'cause we never could bring him down. "I could drag you guys all the way to the end zone if I wanted to," he said, and the last time we played, on the last down, he did. We thought we had him for a safety, but he dragged us all the way down the field for a touchdown. Must've took ten minutes, and we laughed all the way. He still let us win.
I kept hoping Emilio would come home on furlough or something and he'd show us his medals. And he'd want to see how I could throw a spiral pass, because I couldn't do it the last time we played.
Sergeant Emilio's voice rang in my ears. "Cha-a-arge!" he said, and I followed. Our automatics swung back and forth and blazed a semicircle of death. We hit the dirt over and over as the commie bullets landed in harmless puffs of dust at our feet. We were outgunned, and this time it looked hopeless, even for us. Immediately, we were on our feet and running at top speed. We couldn't go in a straight line because of Mom's garden. She was growing tomatoes and cutworms, she said, and the garden was all lined out with sticks and string. So we zigged around it, and the smell of tomato leaves was in the hot, still air. We zagged around an old ice box with the door taken off so little kids wouldn't get closed inside. I ducked behind a nosed-up wheelbarrow and aimed my automatic up at the lady on the third floor as she clipped one last clothespin onto one last bra. My sound effects amazed me, the rapid-fire grunts starting behind the Adam's apple and tickling my tonsils as they drove the enemy from the ridge. The lady shook her head and went inside. Suddenly the enemy had retreated, and victory was ours.
"Rico! Eddie!" I heard Carlotta's thick accent calling us to lunch. In the wide alleyway, we smelled baking bread from Carlotta's kitchen window, and it pulled us both by the nose like in the cartoons where Bugs Bunny floats in the air toward the apple pie cooling on the sill.
At lunch, Carlotta went for her pack of Fatimas. I wondered if she knew one was missing, but she didn't say anything. I looked over at Rico, then reached for a slice of hot bread to go with the rice and bean soup. She saw me looking at a bottle of red wine sitting untouched on the table. "Barbera asciutto," she said, knowing I collected Italian phrases to annoy my uncle with. "A nice wine they have in Lake Maggiore, where I come from."
"Lake Maggiore," I said. "Isola Bella."
"You remember the name of my town?" She shouldn't have been surprised, she'd told me and Rico a dozen times before about where she grew up in northern Italy. She got up, pinched us both, and walked out to the yard under the canopy of grape vines. Me and Rico looked out, and she was talking with a neighbor over the back fence.
Rico poked me and crooked his finger, and I followed him to Carlotta and Emilio's bedroom. "Sh-h-h. Acqua in bocca," he said, his fingers to his lips. I felt I didn't belong there at all, that she would trust me not to spy on her. R
ico saw I was nervous. "It's from Emilio," he whispered, and we looked out the back window. Carlotta looked like she'd be a while. Rico handed me the letter. "Read it out loud," he said. "You read good."
March 10, it was dated.
"My darling Carlotta," I read, because that's how it started out. I turned and looked up at Rico, his chin was practically on my shoulder. "I hope it's not going to be mush," I said.
"Shut up and read," he said, so I did.
"Heavy guns woke us up at daybreak today. We've had a tough go for two weeks now, and have taken heavy casualties. It's been raining for two days, a cold and sloppy mess with sleet and snow mixed in. Everything I own is wet, and we're holed up on the side of this hill that is just rocks and mud and blown-up trees. My nose is running and my feet smell. (Don't you think it ought to be the other way around?) I share a tent with a guy named Rosenstein from New York. First Jew I ever met except our landlord. We had some hand-to-hand fighting and I picked up this dead Korean and threw him at somebody who was about to stick Rosenstein. My CO says something about me being up for a medal. I told him I already got a medal and I showed him Saint Christopher, who hasn't been off my neck a minute since we hit the beaches at Inchon. This whole thing is such a sorry business, I just want to come home." I wondered how he could say that. I'd have given a million bucks to trade places with him.
"Sometime last night I woke up and heard nothing but wind and rain blowing against my tent, and I imagined you and me in my sleeping bag, you'd fit nice and snug and we could pull the zipper and close out everybody but us. And then in the back seat of my old Chevy, you remember the night we never made it to dancing at the Totem Pole? And I said don't worry, you can't get pregnant the first time, and you looked at me with the melted butter look and said you didn't care?"
Rico poked me. "The first time what?" he said.
"The first time they kiss, I think. I don't know."
"My mind went through a million pictures last night, all love scenes from the movies, and they all starred you and me. I got so hard, and after awhile I could hear my own heavy breathing over everything else. This afternoon I'd better see the chaplain about confession."
"Hnh?" Rico said. I shrugged and bumped his chin.
"I got the shaving kit you sent me and the baseball card from Rico and his pal Eddie with the picture of Ted Williams on it."
"He got it!" Rico shouted in my ear, which hurt. I was proud, though, because we'd split the slab of gum and giving Emilio the card was my idea.
"Is it true the Splinter's coming over here with the Marines? Send over Marciano, too, and we'll get this job done quick. Momma and Poppa wrote too, and I got their letter today, so this has been a real good mail call day for me."
"What the hell you boys doing?" Carlotta stood at the bedroom door. Her hands were fists down at her sides and the mouth end of her cigarette was scrunched in her fingers and she was shaking like a volcano about to blow in a thousand directions. The letter slipped out of my hand. We were cornered. "You little sneaks! Reading my mail, you have no right!" I didn't see tears this time, just eyes narrowed close and teeth set together. "I'm gonna tell your mommas you never come here again. Now get out!" She knuckled me on the ear as I hurried past. She'd never done that before, and it hurt.
Outside, I tried to forget. Me and Rico, we dried our tears and got ready for battle in the alleyways of Rome like Audie Murphy did. On the sidewalk, two girls played hopscotch. I felt sorry for them. Rico went over to them and said something, and I moseyed to the back