Fort McCoy is, at first glimpse, a sprawling and busy place, somehow regimented and chaotic at the same time. I remember that Lynette’s older brother was sent here for training, but if he is still here I cannot imagine finding him in this cauldron of humanity. On the bus, the Army recruiter informed us that, in addition to its function as an Army training center, Fort McCoy is presently housing a large number of German and Japanese POWs. And until last year, he said, the place also served as an enemy alien internment camp. The phrase gives me chills, but then it occurs to me that Akiko Kobayashi and her family were among those considered enemy aliens under President Roosevelt’s executive order, and that they may well have been imprisoned here before being shipped off to some other camp. I am still eager to go to war and to fight for the cause of freedom, and I am sure that Nicholas feels likewise, but all of a sudden the reality of war is looking to be a lot more complicated than the idea of it.
As for the POWs who are now being housed somewhere here at Fort McCoy – after our visit to the old Sheboygan County Hospital for the Insane, I suppose it should not have surprised me to know that enemy war prisoners are being held in such unlikely places as Wisconsin USA, far from the battlefield. But the thought of sharing this place with Germans and Japs, this place where Nicholas and I and so many other young men will be trained to kill Germans and Japs, seems almost too bizarre.
We have made some new friends on the bus, and after disembarking we mostly wander around together in a huddle, like bewildered schoolchildren on a field trip to the big city. After a few minutes, a small, muscular man dressed in fatigues approaches us and welcomes us with a tight smile. His name, he tells us, is Sergeant Hawkins, and he will be overseeing our initial training. His eyes have a fierce blue color, and he speaks with a low, leathery voice that suggests he has experienced his share of combat and has trained and dispatched to war more young men than he can count. Then he asks each of us our names, nodding as we speak, as if he is committing each name to memory and associating it with a face – and although having just met Sergeant Hawkins, I have no doubts about his capability to do so.
Questions? he asks, when the roll call is complete. To no one’s surprise, there are none.
If not, I’ll take you to your bunks so you can unpack your things and enjoy a few minutes of R&R.
As we are walking across the base, a recruit appears suddenly behind us. I notice that he has a patch of dried blood on his chin. Enjoy it, boys, he says in a low voice. Your lives will never be the same again. Then he trots away. Nicholas and I exchange an uneasy look.
Over the next few days, I come to understand what the recruit with blood on his chin was warning us about. When our bus arrived at Fort McCoy, we were a bunch of farm boys and city boys, students and busboys and clerks and mechanics, athletes and bookworms, Catholics and Baptists and Episcopalians and Jews, skinny and plump, good-looking and plain-featured and downright homely. The first order of business is to get us all looking and behaving pretty much the same. You would think that this would be easier for a twin, since Nicholas and I grew up never experiencing individuality. But losing your sense of identity is a disorienting business whatever your biology or family history is. After claiming our bunks and quickly unpacking our things, we are led to a long wooden building where we are instructed by a bored young clerk who does not bother identifying himself to strip and exchange our clothes for a pair of fatigues. I leave with two full pairs of uniforms, an overcoat, and two pairs of boots. The pants are a size too large at the waist and an inch too long at the ankles, but I see that I am not the only one with an ill-fitting uniform, and someone behind me whispers that maybe we can expect to grow into our baggy clothes.
After being outfitted, we are marched to another building where each of us is issued one respirator, one rifle, and one bayonet. No instructions on their use. Instructions and demonstrations will follow, I suppose. The respirator is an especially menacing piece of equipment. It looks like something you would strap onto your face before going deep-sea diving, which obviously is not its intended use. I hold it up for Nicholas’ comment, but he simply shakes his head.
Finally, we return to the bunkhouse to deposit our new possessions. We have a few minutes to sit on our bunks and silently collect our thoughts before a fresh-faced recruit in fatigues appears and directs us to line up at the door, and we make our way single file to a small structure with a rounded tin roof halfway across the base. Nicholas is ahead of me in line, with several young men between us, and although I can easily see him, I feel the separation in a way I have not felt before. At the door of the hut, we remake ourselves into an orderly line and stand quietly. After a few men have gone inside, I notice a man staggering out from a side door. He stands for a minute, staring up at the sky as if he has never seen sunshine before. Then he runs one hand over his head and I see that his hair has been shaved down almost to the skull. He turns and gives us an embarrassed look and then straightens himself and heads back in the direction of the bunkhouse. I have never been particularly vain when it comes to my hair, have never thought about it one way or the other, but I am not thrilled at the thought of having it shaved off so completely and unceremoniously. But I realize that this is the United States Army, and that we are here to be made into a unit, which apparently means losing anything that distinguishes and identifies us as individuals.
Nicholas and I had claimed the same bunk upon arrival, me on the top and him on the bottom, and I had looked forward to resuming our whispered late night conversations after lights out. But when Sergeant Hawkins discovers that we are twins, he separates us. Nicholas is moved to a bunk near the back of the building, and I am paired with a recruit from Milwaukee named Noah Aaronson. Aaronson seems just as disgruntled as I am, but neither of us is inclined to ask Sergeant Hawkins why the move was necessary.
If you guys had bunked next to each other instead of top-and-bottom, Hawk wouldn’t have cared, Aaronson whispers, when we have a moment alone. And they wouldn’t have moved me.
Aaronson has not been at Fort McCoy any longer than I have, but I notice that he has already started using what I presume is the Seargeant’s camp epithet. Hawk. And it makes sense. The man’s nose is slightly misshapen, as if the bone were broken in a fight, and when he fixes his sights on you, you feel almost like you are his prey.
I apologize to Aaronson, tell him that Nicholas and I had no idea that we were doing anything wrong when we tossed our bags onto what we thought would be our personal bunks.
Aaronson is quiet for a minute. When he speaks, his voice is softer. You didn’t do anything wrong, Pappas. There’s a million rules here you don’t know about, and before we leave they’ll make up a million more.
We talk that night, Aaronson and I, and I realize that I miss Nicholas a little less than before. I think I also understand why Hawk did what he did, separating the two of us, forcing together two young men who appear to have little in common but who will have to quickly come to know everything about each other, to rely on each other, to one day possibly put their lives in each other’s hands.
I also realize that, for the first time in my life, I am deeply responsible for more than just myself. Boot Camp is an endless series of drills and trials, and if I fall short in one exercise or another, everyone in my unit will suffer the same punishment – an extra half-hour of kitchen duty, one more lap around the camp, another thirty pushups. I make the mistake of quitting on myself once – stopping to massage a cramp in my thigh during our morning workout, rather than running through the pain – and I promise myself that it will never happen again.
Speaking of Boot Camp, I have not yet learned, after a week, how basic training acquired the name. Aaronson thinks it is because the drill sergeants can give recruits a boot in the behind for every small offense, or for no offense at all, but Aaronson says a lot of things. Except sleeping, we do everything in our boots – marching, calisthenics, cleaning our weapons, eating, loading and unloading delivery trucks, KP. But that hardly seems like a reason to name the experience Boot Camp. Nicholas’ bunkmate, a scrawny Sicilian named Nico, answers the question with one of his own.
You ever heard of Boot Hill? Nico says one evening at chow.
Nicholas gives him a weary look. What about it? Is this place where we’re all going to be buried?
Nico shrugs. I’m just saying. Boot Camp. Boot Hill.
So the mystery remains.
We are into our third week of training when I start to feel my body hardening and my muscles becoming less sore. Until now, every day has been a new agony. I flop down on my bunk dead tired and wake up bone weary. But Boot Camp is like a battle between your body and your mind, and it seems there is a point at which your mind simply stops resisting and surrenders to the pain. I think I am reaching that point now.
The one aspect of basic training that I find difficult to master is weaponry. Several of the guys in the unit grew up hunting deer or turkey or geese or rabbits – whatever wild animal you can kill and clean and eat – with their fathers and grandfathers. Papa never hunted and never owned a gun, so when it comes to target practice, Nicholas and I are both out of our element. Even cleaning a rifle feels dangerous to me. One of the recruits, a kid named Red Mullin from Iron County, has noticed my uneasiness and he seems determined to help me overcome it, in his own way. His own way involves loading and unloading his rifle with his eyes closed, clicking the safety on and off with the big toe of his left foot, and other stunts that are making me all the more uncomfortable. Of course, none of this is an acceptable part of basic training, and Red Mullin is always careful to conduct his demonstration when Hawk and the other officers are not around. Reporting him would quickly end the practice, but in Boot Camp, at Fort McCoy, that is not even an option.
One night after lights out, Aaronson confides to me that his least favorite task is digging foxholes, which we have to do with little folding shovels that look like something you might have taken to the beach when you were a kid. For some reason, digging foxholes is something Hawk requires us to do every other day, and after the holes are dug he walks around with his hands behind his back inspecting each one, kicking dirt into the holes that don’t make the grade. I do not much enjoy it either, although there are plenty of worse tasks in my book.
Aaronson notices that I do not enthusiastically concur. What? You like digging holes with tiny shovels?
I tell him I do not care for it, but at least you cannot accidentally shoot yourself with a tiny shovel.
Jesus Christ, Pappas. Are you going to be scared of handling rifles forever? Maybe you’re in the wrong service. Maybe you should be learning flag signals, or how to use a periscope.
That’s occurred to me, I tell Aaronson honestly. But what’s so terrible about digging holes? Why is that the worst thing there is?
For a moment, Aaronson doesn’t answer. Finally, he looks at me and shakes his head. It’s like I’m digging my own grave. German soldiers, you know – they invade a village and round up all the men and tell them to start digging, and when the holes are deep enough they shoot the men in the back of the head so they fall straight into the holes. So they just dug their own graves. That’s what I feel like I’m doing, with these tiny shovels that take forever.
Thus far, the days have been mostly warm and dry. But as September draws to an end, the weather takes a turn. I wake on a Thursday morning and hear rain pounding down on the roof of the bunkhouse. I snuggle in, thinking for the briefest moment that I have been blessed with a rain day. But then I remember that I have enlisted in the United States Army, and that I am in boot camp, and that this is merely an opportunity for Hawk to put us through the paces in fields of mud and muck, which is no doubt something he has been eager for.
We dress and assemble outside. The weather is even worse than I had feared. The temperature has dropped at least fifteen degrees overnight, and a sharp wind is blowing the rain almost horizontally. Nicholas and I make eye contact from across the clearing. Strangely, he has a faint smile on his face, which I recognize at once, and I realize this day will be a test that he has been anticipating just as fervently as Hawk. Nicholas and I, despite everything profound and biological that we share, will make for very different soldiers.
The day unfolds pretty much as I expected it would. We sling our packs onto our backs and march in single file to the open field on the far side of the base. It has been raining hard since early morning, and the path is already thick with black mud. My boots come down with a spongy squish and up with an arduous suck. I am near the back of the line, so I am walking in the soupy footprints of about three dozen other suffering souls. When we finally reach the field, Hawk directs us to form three rows, and each row in turn drops to their stomachs and crawls across the mud, our faces just an inch or two above the soaking ground. Near the finish line, several rolls of barbed wire have been stretched across the field, about eighteen inches above the ground. One of the boys is called out for occasionally rising to his hands and knees rather than worming all the way across the field on his belly, as we have been drilled to do. Hawk yells that, if the kid crawled like that in combat, he could expect to get a haircut from the neck up, which evokes a few uneasy laughs. Then he turns and glares at us as a group and tells us that, before we are finished with boot camp, we will be making this crawl with actual machine guns firing over our heads. No one laughs at that. Hawk makes the kid go back and do it right, while the rest of us glumly watch, glad to be spectators for a few minutes and relieved that we had apparently demonstrated the skill of crawling, which most of us thought that we had mastered in our infancies.
Hawk sends us scrabbling back and forth across the field a few times. The pack on my back feels heavier with each trip. Nicholas is no longer smiling, but I can see that he is grimly determined to prove something – to himself, I believe, more than Hawk. As for me, I am determined only to survive the day without collapsing or being called out. Finally, Hawk orders us all to reassemble in a single-file line, and then he sends us trotting off on the first of four circuits of Fort McCoy. He runs alongside us, showing us that he can keep us while occasionally barking at us to pick up the pace. On the third lap, I am breathing so hard it feels like my lungs are about to explode. The rain had not eased up, and it seems as if I am inhaling more water than air. Can an eighteen-year-old have a heart attack? The terrible thought strikes me that I might be the first to collapse. But I find some untapped reservoir of strength, and my legs keep moving as if they are under their own power. I fix my eyes on the bouncing pack of the kid in front of me, and I think about Mama and Papa back at the Atheneum. The restaurant has not yet opened. Mama is standing behind the counter with the cash register drawer open, and she is counting and double-counting ones and fives and tens and twenties, ready for whatever lunch crowd there may be today. Papa is in the kitchen, watching rice boil and browning ground lamb in one of his big pans before stuffing grape leaves.
One day into our fourth week of training, I witness an event that gives me something new to worry about, an altogether new danger.
That morning, we are issued grenades for something called throwing practice. Hawk calls them fragmentation bombs, and he makes sure we understand that they are not toys. They are live grenades, and if we mishandle them they will do exactly what explosive are designed to do. I hold out my grenade at arm’s length, as if that extra distance would make any difference. The device resembles a small metal pineapple with a metal ring on the side for your finger. Holding it, a strange urge comes over me to put my finger into the ring. I resist, of course, but the impulse itself scares me as much as the grenade itself. Red Mullin is standing next to me and I see that he is holding his grenade almost casually, as you might hold a potato before peeling it – another Army experience that has become commonplace to everyone in the unit.
We are all holding our grenades – getting familiar with the feel of them, I suppose is the idea – when someone behind me asks why throwing practice requires a live explosive. I turn around but I cannot make out who asked the question.
To my surprise, Hawk smiles. Because you’re training for war, son. You aren’t trying out for shortstop on your Little League team back home. I’m sure you can throw a baseball. You need to show me you can aim and toss a grenade knowing that if you fuck up, you might end up with one less arm.
One less arm. I look around, and I can tell that I am not the only one on whom this image makes an impact.
We are led to an open area, and another officer spends a good deal of time explaining the safe handling of grenades – a lecture, it seems to me, that would have been better coming before the grenades were issued. A fragmentation bomb will not explode, the man insists, until it is armed. And it is not armed until you arm it by pulling the pin. He puts his finger into the ring of his grenade to demonstrate. The intention, I know, is to reassure us about the safety of these practice grenades. But I cannot shed the image of a detached arm.
Finally, we are instructed to form a line. Nicholas is just ahead of me. We talk in the low voice we always use when we want no one else to overhear us. We talk about everything except the devices we are holding in our hands. Nicholas has received another letter from Lynette Markey, telling him about life back in Sheboygan. Lynette was a year behind us, so she is now a senior in high school. Some of the boys in her class have enlisted, so the boy-girl ratio has gotten out of balance. The downtown hardware store is now open only on weekends, because the manager could not find enough employable young men to work. The Atheneum seems to be doing OK. Since Nicholas has left, Lynette has made a point to drop by every Saturday, have lunch and talk to Mama. There seem to be fewer customers than before, but if Mama is worried she does not show it. Lynette writes to my brother every other day, like clockwork. Nicholas conveys the news, but he does not share the actual letters with me and I do not ask to see them. He writes back whenever he hears from Lynette, although I am sure that his letters are much more terse. Aside from the fact that there is not much idle time at Fort McCoy, the news is just not that interesting. We march with packs on our backs, we run with packs on our backs, we exercise, we aim and shoot our rifles, we clean our rifles, we wash pots and pans in the mess hall, we eat boiled meat and boiled beans and reconstituted potatoes and then wash our plates and forks in boiling water. We sleep and think about home and about the war.
I have received one letter, my first week of training, from Father Gregory. It was unexpected, and I did not bother sharing it with Nicholas. In the letter, Father Gregory talked about how God has a special purpose for me, and how He will protect me when I am at war, and how the good parishioners of St. Spyridon will say special prayers every Sunday for the young men of Sheboygan who have volunteered to fight the Good Fight. It embarrassed me to read the letter and I did not reply. Since then, Mama’s letters are the only ones I get. I know how she struggles putting sentences together on paper, and her letters are always short and usually repetitive. But she writes almost every day, separate letters to both Nicholas and me, and it makes me feel warm just seeing her handwriting. So I write back when I can, struggling in my own way to say what I want to say.
Nicholas and I are getting close to the front of the line. A kid named Mick Washburn is now up, fumbling with his grenade. Hawk barks at him to stop fidgeting, to hold the thing tight. Washburn looks at him and nods. He knows what to do. He transfers the grenade to his left hand, he inserts the index finger of his right hand into the ring, he pulls the pin, and he suddenly drops the grenade on the ground, as if it had burned him. He looks at Hawk. Washburn’s eyes are huge. He looks down at the grenade, begins to bend down. Hawk yells at him to kick the thing away. It all happens so fast, no one has time to move away, which is what we all should have done. Washburn gives the grenade a feeble kick with the toe of his boot, and a second later it explodes. He and the kid behind him in line go down. Hawk too.
Grenades, we had learned, are called fragmentation bombs because when they are detonated their outer casing is designed to burst into small pieces of shrapnel, which become projectiles, which are intended to wound or kill the enemy. Mick Washburn is closest to the grenade when it detonates, so his legs absorb much of the shrapnel. Helpless, we all watch him writhing on the ground, his pants shredded and his bare legs visible and bloody. Washburn’s body partly shielded the kid behind him, but the kid still takes a hit in his face and chest. Hawk also takes an indirect hit, and it collapses him like a puppet whose strings have been cut. He is now lying on his back, holding his right knee. His right pants leg, what is left of it, is black with blood. It seems as if a long time passes, but it must be only a few seconds before a medic appears, and then another one, and they get to work treating the injuries. The medics are very calm and very professional, in a way that makes me wonder if they have treated worse wounds, maybe in battle.
I see that Nicholas, who was slightly closer than I was to the blast, has a small spot of blood on his forehead, which he does not seem to notice. I wipe it off and he looks at me, dazed. Actually, everyone is a little dazed, except for the medics and Hawk, who is now crawling over to look at Washburn. Washburn is howling so much, it almost feels reassuring to know that he is apparently not in danger of dying – although I am sure this is the end of his basic training, and any aspirations he had of fighting in the war.
Hawk reappears after spending the night at Station Hospital on the base, acting almost as if nothing has happened, apart from a limp that he tries gamely to mask. Mick Washburn, we are told, was taken to the hospital in La Crosse, over on the Minnesota border. Nothing is said about the rest of us resuming training in the art of throwing grenades. If training does continue, I hope that the Washburn incident will persuade the brass to use something other than live explosives – although I have seen that the military is very stubborn about giving up its traditions, however dangerous and nonsensical they might seem.
Before the end of the week, I notice that flyers have been nailed on doors and posts around the base announcing a USO-sponsored dance on Saturday night. This will be the first social event that Nicholas and I have experienced at Fort McCoy, and a rare opportunity to meet and mix with girls. I know that Nicholas will have some misgivings about dancing with someone other than Lynette, and that he will probably do battle with his conscience over how much detail to share in his next letter. There is no girl in Sheboygan with whom I am exchanging letters, so I am not confronting the same ethical dilemma.
The dance will be held in the mess hall, which has been cleared of its tables and chairs and has been decorated hastily with red, white and blue bunting. A temporary stage has been constructed in the back of the room. When we arrive, a small band dressed in dark tuxedos is setting up and tuning their instruments.
Red Mullin is leading our little entourage, and he stops short and surveys the place. Where’s the girls? he asks no one in particular. I was told there’d be females. I think we’ve been hoodwinked, boys.
Aaronson lays a hand on Red Mullin’s shoulder. Hold it together, Red. I hear they’re busing ‘em in from Sparta and Tomah. They’ll be here.
Aaronson is right. A few minutes before seven o’clock, a school bus pulls through the gate and stops in front of the mess hall. The door opens and a couple of dozen young women file out, all of them neatly dressed, their hair perfectly arranged, their faces betraying the same nervousness most of the guys, I am sure, are feeling.
I hope this ain’t all of them, says Red Mullin, loud and tactlessly.
Aaronson tells him to zip it, but I know what Red was saying was that a couple of dozen young women will not suffice for the crush of awaiting young men. Fortunately, the first bus is followed by three more, each of them packed with more pretty Wisconsin girls than I have ever seen in one place at one time. It has been a long time since I have seen any femininity at all, aside from the older and middle-aged women who work in the laundry and the mess hall. The thought of slow dancing with any one of them makes my heart beat a little faster. I look at Nicholas, who is standing by himself behind a cluster of guys. He is fiddling with the cuffs of his shirts, watching the young women emerge and, to my surprise, he actually looks happy.
When the music starts, I stand back for a few minutes, observing as the guys descend, picking off the prettiest girls first. Nicholas seems content, for now, to watch. Finally, I work up the courage to approach a young woman in a yellow flowery dress, her dark hair cut in a short bob. She is standing at the refreshment table with two other girls, all of them trying to look bored. After a moment, she turns as if she is just now noticing me, gives me a once-over and smiles shyly. I ask her if she wants to dance before we can introduce ourselves, which is probably improper etiquette, but she nods and follows me out to the dance floor.
Between songs, we talk. Her name is Jean, and she is a high school senior at Sparta. She wants to get a job and live in Chicago when she graduates, but her father is in the Navy and her mother is working at a jewelry store and struggling to raise Jean and a younger sister, so Jean knows that Chicago will have to be a dream deferred, unless the war ends and her father returns. I tell her that I am a twin and that Nicholas and I will probably be sent to Europe when we graduate from boot camp. I look around the room, hoping to point out my brother, but I cannot spot him.
After two dance numbers, Jean gives me a stiff hug and returns to the refreshment table where one of her friends is still idling.
Any luck? Red Mullin has quietly sidled up behind me. He gives me a sly wink.
She was pretty nice, I say.
It looks as if Red wants to tell me about his date, but I don’t ask and he shrugs. The night is young, he says.
Hawk and a few other officers are circling the room. I had thought that the days of chaperoned dances ended at high school, but I suppose that, as long as there are young men mixing with young women, there will always be chaperones. And rather than watching for signs of trouble, they seem to be here to make sure that even the wallflowers have their chance to bloom, that no one will leave the dance feeling blue and alone.
So I do my part, dancing with Jean and two other girls – a redhead named Patricia who for some reason insists on clutching her purse in front of her, like a shield, throughout our one slow dance, and a girl named Florence who wears her brown hair in a giant beehive and talks with a southern accent that, to me, sounds affected. I feel no spark of intrigue or romance, and I am sure that Jean and Patricia and Florence feel likewise. But simply holding a young woman in my arms for a few minutes makes me happy, and it leaves me strangely nostalgic for a life that I have barely started living.
After, I learn that Nicholas danced with only one partner – a seventeen-year-old girl named Bethany who lives on a farm in southern Monroe County. Somehow, I am not surprised. Nicholas misses Lynette. I know that he is loyal to her, and I am sure that he and Bethany will never see each other again. But dancing with one girl rather than three is somehow consistent with Nicholas’ character – as if cheating on Bethany with some other partner would equate to cheating on Lynette. But I tend to overthink things.
On the morning of the first day of our last week of basic training, Hawk takes us out for another round of weaponry training. I have become more competent with a rifle, although I would not say that I feel comfortable yet handling one. I am not sure that I ever will, which certainly does not bode well for future combat. Red Mullin has continued to encourage me, demonstrating how to disassemble and clean and reassemble the rifle, how to position it against my shoulder, how to use the scope, how to anticipate where a moving target will be when the bullet strikes, how to minimize the kickback. This morning, he tells me that we are going to shoot a groundhog or two. I think about this obsessively all through training. I have no great love for groundhogs, but I have never shot and killed a living, innocent creature and could live a happy life never having done so. But we have a free hour after weapons training concludes, and I obediently follow Red across the field to a wooded area near the camp perimeter.
The little bastards are all over the place, Red tells me. Just get your weapon ready and stand still and wait.
I wait, hoping that the groundhogs are sleeping and choose to stay in their burrows. I have no idea whether or not the little bastards are nocturnal.
Three or four minutes pass. Red Mullin begins impatiently shifting his weight back and forth, from one leg to the other. He mutters something I cannot make out. A short time later, he raises his rifle and aims at a dirt mound on the edge of the clearing, twenty-five or thirty feet away. Whatever drew his attention has escaped mine.
He’s going to come out of that hole, Red predicts. Get ready.
I raise the rifle, studying the target area. Nothing moves. Then, suddenly, something does. Red Mullin yells and fires at the same time. I am not sure what happens next, but my gun has gone off and my left foot is throbbing.
Red drops his rifle, gapes at me. His eyes are huge. What the hell, Pappas!
I look at him. I look down at my foot.
You shot yourself, Pappas. What the hell!
He stands there for a moment, and then he turns and sprints off. My foot is now in such pain it will not support my weight, and I collapse. The boot on my left foot is shredded. I unlace it and try removing it, but the pain is too much and I fall back on the ground. For a moment, I think I am going to pass out. I look back, and the first person I see is Nicholas. He is running toward me, Red Mullin and Hawk and a half-dozen other guys a few steps behind him.
I’m sorry, I say. I don’t know who I’m speaking to and I don’t know what else to say, so I repeat the words, again and again. Nicholas has propped me up and is sitting behind me. I can feel his body shivering, and that makes me even more scared. Hawk is loosening the laces of my boot. I close my eyes. He gives the boot a quick tug and it pops off. Then he pulls off what is left of my sock. I count the toes and see that they are all there, but the top of the foot is a bloody, pulpy mess.
We’re bringing the stretcher out, Hawk says. Stay calm, Pappas.
Then a voice I don’t recognize, from behind me. You know, Pappas, there are easier ways, if you wanted out.
I feel Nicholas stiffen. Shut up, McNulty. He didn’t mean to do it.
Red Mullin is standing behind Hawk, looking ashen.
Then the voice again. McNulty. You almost made it, Pappas. A few more days. You almost made it.