Heroes Read Online Free Page A

scramble out of the alley and into the woods, his smell still heavy in the air, and we stumble around in the woods until nighttime, when we run across the remains of our platoon and learn that Jack Smith and Billy O’Brien are dead and Henry Johnson wounded, his chest ripped open by shrapnel, carried off somewhere behind the lines and we never see him again.
    The next day, the grenade blows my face away.
    • • •
    The morning sun slashes my eyelids and I blink at daylight spilling through the window. I have survived another night, endured the dreams and the memories again although I’m not sure anymore which are the dreams and which are the memories.
    My limbs are stiff and the raw places of my flesh sting but I grope from the bed, coughing, my throat filled with phlegm.
    Ignore it all, I tell myself, and count your blessings.
    You’re back in Frenchtown and your body is functioning. You have a nice dry place to stay and a mission to perform.
    And maybe this will be the day that Larry LaSalle will appear on the streets of Frenchtown and you will be able to carry out that mission.

 
    I tell myself that I will not visit the Wreck Center, that there is nothing to gain by going there just as the visit to Nicole’s house on Sixth Street brought back only loneliness and regret.
    Yet even as I acknowledge the futility of such visits, I am walking in the direction of the Wreck Center at the far end of Third Street, bending against the never-ending March wind.
    Then a hand grips my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks, and a voice whispers in my ear:
    “Land mine?”
    Turning, raising my eyes under the visor of the Red Sox cap, I find Arthur Rivier looking at me curiously. The curiosity is softened with sympathy.
    I shake my head, not deserving his sympathy.
    “Grenade, then?” he asks.
    My silence provides him with his answer and he murmurs: “Tough … tough …”
    His eyes are bleary and bloodshot and there’s no recognition of me in them, for which I am grateful.
    Before he enlisted in the army, Arthur Rivier had been a star first baseman for the Frenchtown Tigers and hit booming home runs over the fence at Cartier’s Field. I remember when he returned on furlough in his khaki uniform with the corporal’s stripes, along with the other servicemen home temporarily from the war. I wanted to be like them, these heroes, fighting the Japs and the Germans, going off to battles on land and sea. I was impatient to reach the age when I could join them in that great crusade for freedom.
    Arthur Rivier points to the entrance of the St. Jude Club and says: “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink …”
    The club is where the young men of Frenchtown gather to shoot pool and play poker and drink beerand wine and hold Saturday-night dances for their girlfriends after a long week in the comb and button shops. The rules require a member to be twenty-one years old before joining and every Frenchtown boy looks forward to that birthday.
    At my hesitation, Arthur says: “You deserve a good drink …”
    Inside, the club is crowded and smoke-filled, billiard balls clicking and everyone talking at once and a sudden blast of music from the jukebox, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me,” which I last heard on a radio in the English hospital.
    Familiar faces turn toward me. Big Boy Burgeron and Armand Telliere and Joe LaFontaine and some others, all of them veterans and survivors, ballplayers and shop workers who became fighting men in uniform.
    “Beer,” I answer, raising my voice above the din when Arthur asks me what I want to drink. I drank beer for the first time in the English hospital when Enrico bribed a male nurse on the late shift to bring us a few bottles. The beer was warm and bitter but at least a change from all the medicine I had to swallow every day.
    I gulp the beer now, lifting the scarf, as Arthur enters into a discussion with Big Boy Burgeronabout whether it would be better to become cops or