A Pigeon and a Boy Read Online Free

had led him and which I wished to avoid. “We left the monastery and went looking around; we thought we might find one of our own among all the bodies outside. First we found a dead platoon commander, his guts spilled out on the ground, and then we found him. Someone shouted, ‘Hey look, the Baby is dead.’ God, just saying ‘the Baby is dead’ makes me shake all over.”
    “Did you see him, too?”
    “Yes, I just told you that, and I told you that earlier, too, but you don’t want to hear it, or else you want to hear it again and again. I saw him lying in that shed near the monastery, between where the grass and the swings are today”
    “Inside the shed?”
    “Half in, half out.”
    Apparently he saw the horror in my eyes and hastened to make himself clear. “I mean, don’t misunderstand me. His body was whole, not like that just sounded. The wall of the shed was half destroyed and he was lying with his legs inside it, but from the waist up he was outside. There was a machine gun lying next to him—a tommy gun—and lots of gardening tools, and if you’re interested, then I’ll tell you his face was whole and at peace, and his eyes were open and looking upward. That was the worst part of it: they were full of life, and they were watching. You know what I was thinking about then? Not what I’m thinking about now I thought, Where the hell did the Baby get a tommy gun! We were fighting with shitty old Stens that never stopped jamming, and
he’d
been given a tommy gun? Forty-five caliber—a bullet that no matter where it hits you, you’re dead! Now do you understand why it was easier for me back then than it is now? That’s the way it is when you’re young. I couldn’t figure out how it was that he’d been given a tommy gun and we hadn’t.”
    I could no longer be sure what had brought this on, what had given birth to this outpouring: the words, the drink, me, the images in his mind. What had really happened there and what had been conceived in his memory?
    “We’d been given green American battle dress, leftovers from World War II. Where the insignias and ranks had once been, the green was darker. Do you believe the bullshit I can still remember, and yet I can’t remember some of the important stuff? Anyway, he was lying there in battle dress that had once belonged to an American sergeant about twice his size, and when we picked him up his arms fell to the sides andthe battle dress opened and we saw that his pants—excuse me for telling you this—his pants had been cut open from the belt to almost the knee and peeled back to both sides, and everything was bloody and wounded and hanging out.”
    Suddenly the American thrust out his arm. “Here,” he said as his hand grasped my right hip, then slipped around to my lower back and remained there. “The bullet went in here and came out here …” His hand slid to the front and pressed lightly, and I did not know what to do with the strength of the repulsion, and the pleasantness, I was feeling.
    “Maybe there was more than one bullet, maybe it was a whole round, because his, his … what do you call it, I’ve forgotten the word in Hebrew … his hip, yes, his hip was just gone, completely exposed, and there were such quantities of blood, and his thigh was shredded, all the bones jutting out. I think he managed to cut open his pants but didn’t get a chance to treat his wounds and so he wound up lying there like that until he died.”
    “What about the pigeons?” I asked.
    He removed his hand. Grief and relief mingled one with the other. “The little dovecote he carried on his back had been shattered to pieces, and there were two dead pigeons on the floor. The third one was gone; that was apparently the one I told you about when we were there today” To my great distress, he began to hum the tune to a song I had heard my mother sing many times:
To silence the cannon yields / In abandoned killing fields.
He said, “And it was a beautiful,