The Surrendered

But then she could breathe; he’d plucked her up from the mud by her shirt, ripping a sleeve at the shoulder. She hit him in the chest and tried to scratch his eyes but in a flash he struck her back; when she came to she was lying in the shade of a rusted truck carcass that had been pushed off the road, some thirty meters from where they had been. The side of her face stung. But her shirt was still on, and her trousers were as well, and the American was sitting on the metal frame of the seats, torn out of the truck cab, chewing on a stalk of hay. She began to crawl away and was trying to get up on her feet when he rattled a yellow object in his hand; it was a pack of Chiclets. He tossed it at her feet and before she could open the end fold of the flat box, her mouth watered so fulsomely that she had to cough before she could stuff in all the pieces. Their hard shells cracked and then burst with sweetness.

“Take it easy, sister,” he said. He told her his name, and asked hers.

She knew English well enough that she could have answered him, but the deliciousness of the mass was so overwhelming she couldn’t help but swallow, the sticky strings of it catching at the back of her throat. She gagged, reaching into her mouth with her fingers, and then finally threw it up. When she picked up the shiny clot from the dirt to try to eat it again, he told her there was food where he was going. Other children, too. It was an orphanage, in fact, ten kilometers ahead. He had risen and stepped up onto the embanked road, his rucksack hitched over his shoulder. She could come with him if she liked.

She waited until he was well down the road, a full fifty meters ahead of her, before she began to trail him. She was chewing the gum again, now gristly with dirt. He turned and saw that she was following him and beckoned her forward with a wave as he walked slowly in reverse. She slowed as well to keep her distance, stopping when he stopped. He shook his head and resumed his march. But then a sudden swirling wind kicked up dust into the dry, hot air, swathing him in an obscuring cloud, and for a moment her heart skipped wildly with the fear that he was gone. Or wholly imaginary. But the dust cleared and his form became visible again, and she quickened her stride to follow him.

THREE

WAR IS A STERN TEACHER, his father would sometimes say to him, quoting Thucydides, the sodden, light-boned man slung over Hector’s shoulder in their typical end-of-Friday-night lurch. Hector always helped him limp home from the workingman’s pub in their town of Ilion, New York, the normally sweet Jackie Bre

“What did I say?”

Hector would repeat it, flatly and dryly.

“Good. Never go to war, son. Please never do.”

By the end of those evenings, with his father loaded up on the rye he had won on bets taken against Hector in drinking bouts, he would have to gird him all the way home, his father’s breath earthy and spiced with the cheroots he smoked all night and the pickled pearl onions he popped like almonds, both of which he swore counteracted the liquor.

His father might sing a protest ballad like “The Dying Rebel,” but on particularly long nights he grew sweaty and pain-faced and had to stop a couple times to retch into the gutter or the thickets of some Remington Arms Company manager’s manicured boxwood hedge, and then in mumbles berate Hector for his “righteous silence,” or for the “boyish piety” of his soberness. But by the time their footfalls played on the sagging plank steps of the Bre

“Okay, Da, tell me.”

“Because a man wants a son for a son, and has no use for a champion.”

After reading the epic in school, Hector pointed out to him that his namesake was killed, his city doomed to ruin, his father eventually slaughtered as well.

“No matter, boy,” his father told him. “They tell us stories not to live by but to change. Make our own. Look at you. You’ll live forever, anyone with eyes can see that. Just never go to war.”

Jackie Bre

But there was a limit to that view, and it came at the pub; after Jackie Bre

The servicemen would raucously accept and make room for him while the regulars miserably eyed one another and Hector, wise to what would happen next. Hector would sit on the periphery until his father cajoled him to come in the circle when the mugs of beer went round, with Jackie serially playing prosperous gentleman, the boastful older brother, and, finally, the knowing comrade in arms. But he had other agendas.

“It’s thirst-making work, defending our land. The noblest calling.”

“You got that, mister!”

It was at this point that Hector would tug on his father’s sleeve, though to no avail.

“But what I wish, my good lads, is that we’d do just that, instead of getting involved in every minor dispute on the far side of the planet.”

“You calling Pearl Harbor a minor dispute?” one of the servicemen replied. “Last I checked, it was a dirty ambush by those rat Japs, where a couple thousand of our guys got it.”

“Rat Japs indeed!” Jackie Bre

“Precious few of us bother to look at the bigger picture. Did the Japanese intend to conquer us? Do they still? I very much doubt it. Look at our capacity for producing arms, right here in our small town, and then multiply that by thousands. They know they can’t compete with us over the long run. So they attempt a single, stu