what’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know.” He walked to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He closed it without having gotten anything, came back to the living room, and said, “But he’d better not talk over this broadcast. So help me, if he interrupts the president—”
The doorknob turned and in came Lucius. He took off his fedora and brushed at the snow before he acknowledged either of them. Then the same with his overcoat. When he’d hung everything up and slapped his driving gloves against the end table to announce his presence, he shot his cuffs and said, “Let’s see what old Roosevelt’s got to say on this one.”
Ledford walked back to the kitchen and stared inside the refrigerator some more.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed Ledford?” Lucius Ball hollered. “Aren’t you on the clock in three hours?”
When the broadcast started, Rachel turned the volume knob as high as she ever had. She sat back down on the sofa with her knees pulled to her chest. Ledford poked at the fire, and Lucius stood with his arms crossed. His nose ran, and he sniffed hard every ten seconds.
The president’s words were carefully chosen, and his voice carried vengeance and sorrow. The three in the small room were as still as the congressmen who watched their man before them. There was a cough through the radio’s grate. There was a pop from the wet hickory in the fire.
Then Roosevelt said, “Always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.” Something had moved inside Ledford’s gut, and now it surged upward as the congressmen beat their hands together like they never had as one. “No matter how long it may take to overcome this premeditated invasion,” Roosevelt went on, “the American people in their righ teous might will win through to absolute victory.” The roar from the Philco caused Rachel’s eyes to tear, and her heart seemed, for a moment, to stop.
She knew before looking at him that Ledford was gone from her.
He hung the poker on the cast iron holder and slowly turned. His teeth were grit behind his lips and his nostrils flared wide. He looked to Lucius, who was dumbstruck, unable for once to speak his mind. “Mr. Ball,” Ledford said, “I quit.”
He put on his coat and told Rachel he’d ring her later. With his hand on the knob to leave, he stopped. She was crying on the sofa. Her father did not console her. He’d walked to the window and was watching the snow fall. It had picked up since earlier.
Ledford stood in the doorway and thought of their dance. Their song. He spoke her name and she looked up at him. He winked and was gone.
HE HAD JOINED THE Marine Corps.
On December 10th, Ledford had walked into the recruiting station with a birth certificate altered by a Mann Glass secretary for a fee of five dollars. In the station’s filthy bathroom he’d pissed in a test tube. Passed his physical. He was sent to Parris Island, South Carolina, where he found the weather utterly suitable to his demeanor. He watched the ocean any chance he got. He followed every syllable his drill instructor spat at him, as if the man was God himself. Ledford thrived on discipline. He got a reputation as a hard charger who didn’t shoot the breeze.
When the men were issued their 782 gear, Ledford felt that old, joyous feeling from childhood Christmases. He loved his M1, and in no time he could fieldstrip and reassemble it like most never would. He grew to love the strain of calisthenics, whether at 0500 or midnight under floodlights. Drills became second nature. Hand-to-hand combat with short blades, plunging fixed bayonets into dummies—these acts were honed to reflex.
Ledford earned the designation of Sharpshooter on the rifle range. Even at five hundred yards, his targets came back Swiss cheese.
He smoked and played hearts with the other men, finding a peace in card playing he’d never lose. He traded insults, dimes, and nickels most often with a hard Mac from Chicago named Erminio Bacigalupo.
Erm, they called him. Nobody could tell whether Ledford and Erm liked or hated each other. In truth, neither could the young men themselves.
Ledford wrote to Rachel twice a week.
Nights, he slept like the dead.
Once, drunk on his ass against the barracks wall, Ledford’s drill instructor, an old Devil Dog from Alabama, had let his guard down. He’d seen action in the Great War. “Enemy’ll break, but only if you cut him,” he said. Ledford and Erm were the only men in listening distance. “My CO taught me that. What you do is git inside their tent while they sleep in, cut one’s thoat and leave the other one to find him at sunup.” His words ran together. His eyes might have welled up. “Must’ve done four or five Kraut boys thataway at Belleau Wood.” He fell asleep, then woke up. He looked at Ledford and Erm like he’d never seen them before. “Take a picture, why don’t you, you sons of a fuckin whore,” he said. “It’ll last longer.”
In May, Ledford had boarded a troop train to San Francisco and seen the sights and then walked up the zigzag incline of the ten-thousand-ton transport ship. Aboard the Navy’s vessel, sleep came interrupted, just as it would in New Zealand and in Fiji. A knot formed in the intestines. On August 7th, that knot came up the windpipe and nearly choked Ledford as he jumped over the side of the landing craft into the surf. He waded to the mud-colored sand of what they were calling Beach Red. He crossed it at a jog with the rest of his battalion. They could scarcely believe the quiet. It unsettled Ledford, and as he came to the jungle’s edge, the knot broke loose, and he threw up the smallest bit of bile before swallowing it down again.
Back on the beach, palm trees grew as high as Mann Glass chimney stacks. They curled like fingers, waving the men inland with the wind.
This was Guadalcanal. The enemy was not to be found. Only silence. And in that silence, Ledford finally felt the weight of the last six months. He knew now what that time meant, what it had amounted to. Ledford was not Ledford any longer. He was just another Mac with an M1, First Marine Division, First Raider Battalion, B Company.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
MEN SAT SHIRTLESS, their backs against the vertical wood slats of the pagoda. Henderson Field was a flat, hot wasteland of a place. A wide cut airstrip in the middle of a jungled Pacific island. Nervous Marines walked around the pagoda, looking sideways at those without a helmet or a shirt, those able to enjoy their smokes and never look at the sky above them or the choked forest on all sides.
Like every other Marine, Ledford had become convinced that the Navy had left them on the island to die, that food and ammunition would never again be ample. By day, he repaired bomb craters left in the airstrip’s grass and dirt runways. He leaned on his shovel and smoked and shot the breeze. He looked at that camelback ridge of mountains in the distance. From far off, it reminded him of home. But at night, in the jungle camp, the mosquitoes reminded him of where he truly was, and so did the Japanese fliers in the blackness overhead, dropping 250-pound bombs within spitting distance.
It was a Tuesday. Lunchtime with rations running short. Ledford slept alone on the dirt with his helmet over his face. He was dog tired and bug-bitten, from inside his ears to between his toes. He sat up, took out his Ka-Bar, and cleaned his fingernails. A skinny boy with a pitiful beard walked over from the shade of the pagoda’s overhang. “Ledford? You tryin to fry yourself?” His name was McDonough and he was from Chalmette, Louisiana.
Ledford didn’t answer or look up from his fingernails.
“You want to get somethin to eat?” McDonough blinked his eyes at two-second intervals. He was seventeen years old.
“I’ll eat with you, McDonough,” Ledford said, “if you promise not to talk with your mouth full.”
But McDonough was one of the nervous ones, and when they sat down inside, he talked with his mouth full of canned fish and rice for ten minutes straight. “Ain’t had that sinus infection a day since