The Convict and Other Stories by Burke James Lee

Author:Burke, James Lee [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Short Stories
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-09T05:00:00+00:00

WE BUILD CHURCHES, INC.

Across the frozen rice fields the brown North Korean hills were streaked with ice and pocked with craters from our 105s. It was cold and bright, and the concertina wire we had strung around our perimeter was half buried in the snow, looping in and out of the surface like an ugly snake that had been lopped into segments by a lawn mower. But we really weren’t worried about a frontal attack in that third week of November in 1950. We had killed communists by the thousands all the way across North Korea, bulldozing their bodies into trenches and packing the fill down with tanks, until they fled into the hills under a gray sky and hid like bandits. Then the winter swept down out of China across the Yalu, and the hills cracked clear and sharp, and our F-80s and B-25s bombed them twelve hours a day with napalm and phosphorus and incendiaries that generated so much heat in the soil that the barren slopes were still smoking the next morning.

Jason Bradford was seated with his back against the ditch, looking at a picture on the front page of Stars and Stripes. He had a blanket pulled up to his chin, and his mittened hands stuck out from under the blanket. The mitten on his right hand was cut away around the trigger finger. During the night his patrol had run into a North Korean listening post and had lost one marine to a potato masher that the Koreans had got away before the sergeant stitched them all over the hole. Jace’s eyes were red around the rims, and he kept fingering his cheek as though he had a toothache.

“Give me another hit of gin, Doc,” he said. “I’m going to get warm if I have to let the stuff eat down to my toenails.”

I took a bottle of codeine out of my pack and handed it to him.

“Cheers,” he said, and drank from the bottle’s lip, washing the codeine over his teeth and swallowing it with the pleasure a martini would give him. “Now, look at that picture. A picture like that is not an accident.”

A reporter from Stars and Stripes had been photographing an airborne squadron of B-25s, but when the picture was developed, the planes appeared only in the right-hand corner and the frame was filled with the head and shoulders of Jesus Christ.

“You see, I took a course in meteorology at Amherst, and those kinds of clouds don’t make a formation like that,” Jace said.

“That’s what they call an optical delusion,” the corporal sitting across from us said. He was a tall hillbilly boy from north Alabama named Willard Posey. He hated the Marine Corps for a different reason than the rest of us: the corps had sent him to Korea to fight for gooks, whom he considered inferior even to blacks.

“There’s a preacher on a radio station in Memphis that sells them things,” he said.

“Willard, my friend, the whole world is not like the hill country of north Alabama.

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