The Liberators Read online

  I shove Zack away from me, pointing at his happy, sneaky mug.

  “You!” I bark. “You placed a bet? You … bet I would … what, man? What could you even …?”

  “Nicky, man, it’s all in fun. It don’t mean nothin’.”

  “What? What happened to loyalties? The buddy system?”

  I am accomplishing nothing more than making him laugh harder with every word I say.

  “The buddy system still holds, Nick, no matter what. That comes first. But, you could really help me out here. If you do find yourself going down, try and land on your left forearm. That’s all I’m saying. Think left. Think forearm.”

  It isn’t often in my life that a situation has left me speechless. Possibly never, in fact. And I’m not going to let this be the first.

  “Yeah,” I say, “well maybe I’ll just land on my neck and snap it, just to make sure you lose your money. Who’ll be laughing then?”

  It is, in reality, my first attempt to contribute a joke to the whole foolishness. Turns out it is the first thing that manages to bleed the laughter out of my pal altogether.

  “Don’t do that,” he says, gripping me bone-crushingly hard with one paw on each of my shoulders. He brings his face up close and hard enough to mine that for an instant I brace for the granddaddy of all headbutts. Though I would never expect him to do that in a million years, I am royally pleased when he doesn’t.

  “Okay,” I say, trying to match his grimness. “I won’t do that.”

  We turn our attention then, like everybody else, to the remarkable men busting their guts out over that brutal course. Klecko joins the roaring cheer as the third pair finish, staggering and tumbling across the finish line like a circus act.

  I know, like Zack knows, like we all know, as we cheer. That the whole bunch of us will be busting our guts out very shortly. It will be someplace at least an ocean away, and it will be for keeps.

  So I remind myself to knock it off with teasing Zachary Klecko or anybody else about broken necks and grisly deaths.

  When the time finally comes for couple number six to step up and give the people what they came for, the noise goes strangely down, almost subdued. Maybe there’s real money on the line. Maybe there’s genuine concern for my well-being all of a sudden. Maybe I should have thought of this before, but could be a lot of folks are really here to see my buddy put in an effort for the ages.

  Because he just well could.

  “What are you doing?” I say, when he makes as if he is going to be the one carried on the fireman’s shoulder for the first leg.

  “Let’s just get it out of the way, Nick. Everybody’s had their fun. Just take it slow and even, let your legs do everything, don’t mess up your back. Cruise, is all. If we lose a couple seconds to the other guys, I’ll have a chance to try and make ’em back up for us.”

  “No.”

  “No? Why?”

  “Because everybody came hoping to see me as the last act, and they shouldn’t be disappointed.”

  “Ah, now —”

  “And,” I say, retaking my rightful place as the senior member of this firm, “I’m planning on you laying down a fast time, so I can beat it.”

  He’s been bent half over like a marionette with its strings cut. But for this, he stands to attention.

  “Yeah?” he says, beaming.

  “Yeah,” I say, beaming, or wincing — somewhere in that range.

  “Let’s show these boys how buddies get the job done, then,” he says, and my response is sliced away by the vicious whistle. I jump up, go limp, and Klecko is already making tracks when he catches me on his shoulder, turns, and starts chewing that turf up like a racehorse.

  The crowd noise goes back up to the level of a roar, and I am in a unique position to take it all in as my stallion thunders over the first thirty yards of flat terrain. My whole body bucks and bounces while Klecko proves that it can be done, running this test and not just marching it. I cannot believe it myself at first, but when I look down at his feet he is managing it by doing that same old horsey-skip we all did as kids, pretending to be cowboys on wild mustangs in the schoolyard.

  Then I look at the crowd again, the guys. The noise is rowdy and it is real. Better than that, though, is the spirit of it.

  Baseball — the Eastern Shore League in particular — has taught me the difference between a crowd that is behind you and one that is not. Some towns with great baseball fans will clap for a nifty catch or a sharp stolen base even if it’s not the home team pulling it off. There are others, lots, that don’t feel that way at all. Like the fans of the rancid Federalsburg A’s, who, I am convinced, have all contracted rabies. That’s how they all act toward you: like rabid dogs. Unless you play for the A’s — and frankly, I’d rather have rabies.

  Point being, I know a crowd that shouts to beat you down from one that makes the biggest racket just to push you to show them what your best is. As I bumble along, backward and tilted sideways, from this big gang of loons, I know I’m not playing in front of the Federalsburg A’s crowd, is how I would put it.

  “So, how much would you say I weigh?” I ask, because what else do you do in a spot like this?

  “One seventy,” he says immediately. “Definitely not more than one seventy-three.”

  “Ah, precise. And you?”

  “Two hundred and twelve.”

  “Not a great ratio, really.”

  “Nick, I think you should probably save your breath, since you’ll need it later. For breathing.”

  “Yeah, right. Okay.”

  That would be the difference between my guy and a thoroughbred. They would have a lot in common, but the racehorse wouldn’t be calming the jockey down, or calling out “Duck!” as we approach a wire crossbar, or “Hop!” just before we clear the small, but deep, water hazard.

  As we approach the end of the course and all our peers cheer wildly for the new all-time record setter, I could not be more proud. Almost too proud to be worried about what’s coming next.

  He promises to talk me through every inch. Unfortunately, it’s the pounds, not the inches, that take me three mighty heaves to get the load balanced. “If you tell me it’s all in the legs, by the way, I’m going to dump you on your head.”

  “I was gonna say it’s all in the head, but I don’t want to know what you’ll say about that.”

  “That’s right,” I groan. “You don’t.”

  When I want to fall, Zack says he won’t allow it. When I want to surrender with dignity, just put him on his feet and let us walk together for the final forty yards, he growls in my ear, “Aren’t you better than this? The line is right there. If you quit on this, where else are you gonna quit?”

  My buddy is so infuriating, so full of authority in spite of hanging over my shoulder and basically speaking directly into my butt, that he all but drowns out any other sound.

  But eventually I hear it. The crowd, the guys. As I stagger down the stretch, not likely to break the record held by the guy I’m carrying, I start to hear the cheering. It is huge, like a wall or a wave of sound about to break right over us.

  And I realize it’s for me, for us, and I wish I didn’t, because it’s making me all sappy, all dopey emotional, just at the point where more people are looking at me, focused on just me, at the same time than ever before in my life.

  It also makes me stronger. Between that wave of noise in front and Klecko’s threats behind me, I get a new surge of energy and speed that picks me up, picks both of us up, and practically hurls us weightless over those last yards and over the finish line at some speed.

  My time is last, by a lot. I am mobbed at the finish just the same, by my pals, my comrades, and my buddy.

  I didn’t break any records. But I didn’t break any bones, either.

  We have come a long way during this adventure already. We are changed. The world is changed. People are slapping my back because Zachary Klecko is my friend, and who doesn’t love Zachary Klecko? After all this tim
e, I’ve suddenly become his sidekick.

  War, it upends everything. And we aren’t even in it yet.

  “I think I’m getting sprinkled with some of your stardust,” I say to my partner as we soak it all up.

  “Ah, I figured it was time,” he says.

  My goodness, but the Marines have already done so much for this man.

  We have jumped. Off of barrels, low rooftops, high treetops, and water towers. We jumped off a tower at the base in Lakehurst, New Jersey, that they said was built for the World’s Fair. We jumped onto beaches, into valleys, and over mountains. We jumped from a blimp, and we jumped at night into total blackness and faith.

  Now is it. The Show. We approach the drop zone, a fairly easy broad swath of green grass that will be devoured by cows tomorrow but is ours for right now. We are in our borrowed Army troop transport plane, which makes the occasion special enough, because it is already clear to us that the Army does not want to share or help us out in any way.

  But this is our graduation exam, after all.

  The fat tube of the body of the plane is lined on each side by a long bench, each of which is right now supporting a half dozen raw marine butts. There is a cable attached to a track that runs along the ceiling between the two rows of guys. When the call comes, we will stand up in line and each clip our pull cords to that rip wire. That way, when we jump, the rip wire will yank the cord, releasing our chutes, so we don’t have to even think. It’s always good when we don’t have to think.

  “Now!” the jump leader calls, and I get to my feet. I am number one in line, with Klecko right behind me. I stand at the edge of the hatch, wide-open to the elements and the land hundreds of feet below us. Just wide-open to it all.

  I reach back just after hooking on, and I bump him in the ribs with the side of my hand. He does something like the same to my back.

  “Go!” the man calls, and without hesitation, I do.

  There is nothing like it. The sensation — watching the world come up, foot by foot, to greet me — is untouchable. The world, on every horizon, is for me; it is all there for me. The green below, the blue-white above. The violent wind trying to blow me backward, to stuff me back into that plane, is thrilling beyond words. But it is not going to win. I am never going back no matter how hard it blows.

  I’ve known ever since I was a kid that flying was going to be everything, and it was going to be better than all other possibilities except for baseball.

  I am flying now, descending to an earth I am going to defend from every rotten threat that is trying to ruin her. My best buddy, the best guy in the world, is floating down to the same fate just ten seconds behind me. We can do this. We will not fail, come what may.

  I come down too fast and bang hard into the earth, ending the flight that was, if I’m honest, even a little better than baseball. But I land on bent knees, drop corkscrew to my right hip in the tall green grass, and don’t feel a thing. As I start reeling in my lines before the wind can catch my chute and drag me halfway to Japan, my buddy drops softly to the same grass forty or so yards away. He bends, twists, rolls, and springs back up. Textbook paramarine.

  As we haul in our lines, we look across the field toward each other. Hard to make out faces from that distance, but we know.

  We both very much know — we have earned our wings and a whole lot more along the way.

  What we do not know is where we are headed.

  We don’t know as we stand on the parade ground for the ceremony to have our wings pinned on our chests.

  We still don’t know as we ride the troop train cross-country all the way to San Diego and then board the troop ship that is going to take us to the war.

  Obviously we are headed for the Pacific Theater — that much we have known for weeks. But as we steam away from the San Diego naval base, there is still no official word as to the next stop for the six hundred and fifty men of our newly minted Second Marine Parachute Battalion.

  The oceangoing segment of the trip is to take eleven days. That’s a lot of time for calisthenics, lifeboat drills, arm wrestling contests, and card games, especially for a highly trained, highly excitable population of young marines floating toward a war zone. Hanging out over the edge of the top-deck rail and speculating eventually becomes the activity that consumes most of the guys’ time. That is certainly the case for Klecko and me.

  Because we are exceptionally clever leathernecks, we have come to a conclusion by around day six. It’s the same conclusion that the scuttlebutt around the ship has been putting out there for days already, but a guy shouldn’t just take scuttlebutt as fact necessarily unless he wants to wind up looking like a total rube from time to time.

  “Guadalcanal,” I say to Klecko, as we step out onto the deck to start walking our routine post-breakfast laps around the perimeter of the ship.

  “I’m out of any other guesses,” he says. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  The First Parachute Battalion has been there for two months already. Which is why we had first ruled it out. But as reports keep coming back about what a rotten slugfest Guadalcanal has become, with a lot of the eleven thousand marines of the initial landing going down killed in action or injured, it starts making more sense. Maybe it should have been our first guess all along, but what do we know about strategy, planning, troop deployment? We know guns, and what to do with them. We know, specifically, machine guns, as our assignments have made official. Because of a few points’ difference in our performances on the firing range, I’m rated as Sharpshooter, but Klecko scored in the class above me, which is Expert.

  And so we were designated a light machine gun firing team, Klecko as gunner and me as assistant gunner, as part of a ten-man squad within the Demolition Platoon. We are a team, within a team, within a team. Actually, I could carry that further on up and include several more teams that were within other teams that were within other teams.

  But however high up the chain you go, it still works its way down to the perfect two-man unit, the buddy system functioning just the way it should. Even if there is the minor hitch that maybe the order of ranking within our perfect two-man unit is not quite what I had figured on.

  Our second lap around the deck is disrupted when we’re stopped by a group of the more seasoned Navy guys who are permanent crew of the ship. They block our way, then silently hand over papers, one to each of us.

  Subpoena and Summons

  To Appear Before The Trusty Shellbacks

  Of The Court of King Neptune

  For Hearing, Verdict, and Sentencing

  Pertaining to Gross Violations

  of Conduct, Comportment, and

  Presentation Policies while Aboard This Vessel

  It looks official to me. The presenting party is a uniformly scowling bunch. They certainly appear serious enough. I look to Klecko, who is either still the sadly slow reader he was in high school or is going over it again out of disbelief. His frozen grimace suggests the latter.

  “Can I ask what this is about?” I say, as nervous as I have been at any time since joining up.

  “You may not,” one scowling sailor says.

  “It doesn’t even say when the hearing is,” Klecko says, as he scans worriedly through the document yet again.

  I look back at the guy who’d said I couldn’t ask.

  “So when is it?” I say. I am getting just about irritated enough not to care what might happen if I have to take it up a notch.

  The sailor calmly checks his watch. Then he looks up to the ship’s control tower, so I do, too. All I notice are the flags and radio locators whipping madly as the winds kick up under quickly darkening skies.

  He looks back at his watch. I look at him looking at his watch.

  “Y’know,” I snap, “this is getting just about —”

  “Three, two, one,” he says right over me. Then he looks up, grinning. “Now.”

  “Now?” Klecko spouts.

  Then we hear no words at all as the ship’s
horns blast a long, massive howl across the surface of the ocean that rides the wind and can probably be heard in Japan.

  When it’s done, the sailor and his henchmen part to wave us through.

  “Come, pollywogs, and take your sentence with good grace and cheer,” he says, ushering us out to the bow of the ship.

  “What kind of a sentence ever brought anybody good cheer?” Klecko says to me in a desperate whisper.

  “Don’t worry, buddy,” I say with a loud slap of his broad back that somewhere in my mind functions as a kind of warning to the sailors behind us. “We’ll weather it, whatever it is.”

  And weather it is just what we do. One hour later we are still out on the bow of the ship, in the midst of a driving, squally storm. We are mopping the deck, which — though a crazy thing to be doing at this moment in this weather — is not the crazy part. In fact, we are doing it topless, with bright green dyed hair and in tight-fitting, green sequined skirts that taper all the way down over our feet, which now resemble fins. It is tough to move in these things. Klecko falls twice trying to get around with his mop.

  We are mermaids, of course.

  The horn blast had signaled the moment when we crossed the equator, entering the Southern Hemisphere. There is a long naval tradition that there needs to be a “ceremony” marking the passage for every first-timer. Every “pollywog,” who then graduates from that immature, unformed, and uninitiated form of life.

  When we are finally allowed to come inside and waddle our way belowdecks, soaked to the flippers and shaking, we go straight to our quarters. It takes us an excruciating amount of time to make the relatively short, miserable journey, since we are bound to remain in “uniform” until we can get to the privacy of quarters. If we were seen changing by any unlucky seaman, thus destroying the precious mystery of the mermaid forever, there would be another Subpoena and Summons. And surely nobody wants that.