Chapter Twenty

“I had your baseball card. Still do if my mom hasn’t chucked out all my stuff.” The private is a skinny kid from Lowell, all freckles and brown hair so thin that his scalp shows through his buzz cut as if he didn’t have any hair at all.

“This war goes on much longer, that may be the only baseball card with my picture on it, so you’d better hope she hasn’t thrown it out. It’ll be a rare one.” Rick runs a cleaning cloth over the barrel of his carbine, a gesture faintly reminiscent of rubbing pine tar on his bat. The wind is picking up the higher up they go in the mountains and he’s glad that it’s summer, not winter; that’s for the mountain troops, not him. Rick is squad leader, and it’s his job to get this bunch of kids up and over the mountain to join their armored division as it collects these strung-out groups of five or six infantrymen slowly making their way along the narrow mountain trail. Sometimes the trail takes them into the woods; sometimes it leads them up toward the sky. Sometimes, like now, it meanders along a series of ledges, wide enough for only one at a time to pass. Above them, already ensconced, the German army. At midday, Rick could hear the sound of artillery bouncing off the other side of the mountain, the vertical assault beginning.

“You had good stats that last summer you played.” The kid is still chattering about ancient history. He won’t admit it, but Rick is flattered by the kid’s interest. Baseball was a lifetime ago. He’s even lost track of how the Braves are doing, struggling to field a decent team with old-timers and the increasingly rare player with a high draft number and no qualms about not enlisting. Sometimes Rick wonders if he’s still got it, his arm. He’s muscled up, that’s for sure, but does he still have the distance? The ability to put a small spherical object into an invisible box exactly where he wants it? It took years to develop that skill, and now it’s been years since he’s really used it, the little intersquad pickup games notwithstanding. He never throws his good stuff at amateurs; that would be like throwing a smokin’ fastball at a Little Leaguer.

“Okay, everybody up. Let’s move.” Rick puts an end to the conversation.

The ledge trail is like a ruffle along the bald side of the Italian mountain, dipping in and out as the contour of the hillside folds in on itself, then bells outward. There is a stark beauty to the view, looking down on the green of vegetation, up at the azure sky. Lone pine trees cling to the hillside, tenacious and scrawny.

When they finally meet up with their division, Rick is hoping that he’ll find a few letters waiting for him from Francesca. No, he knows that he will; she’s a faithful correspondent. Through her letters, he feels like he is there for every little bit of her day, from her distaste for chicory coffee to the gossip at the wire factory. He knows that, so far, her cousin Sid is all right, and her brothers, too. She has no news for him about Pax. Pax has been in this war for more than a year, almost two. The only thing they know is that if anything had happened to him, they would have been informed. So, as he writes in his letters back, no news is good news. Their dog is doing his duty, his bit. Secretly, Rick wonders how long before this streak of good luck will run out for those Francesca loves. Five loved ones in a war is not good odds. What talisman does she keep in order that they remain safe? As a ballplayer, Rick has seen plenty of superstitions acted out before every game: the same socks, turning three times around before leaving the locker room, never letting a wife say “good luck” before a game. His own game-day nod to Lady Luck was to slip a few dog hairs into his cap. Whatever other superstitious belief she might have, Rick knows that for Francesca, it’s mostly just prayer.

The trail rises and falls, rises again. The rocky hillside becomes sheer cliff, a hardened wall they keep to their right as the trail once again puts them on a narrow ledge. Rick wants to hurry his men through this all-too-exposed place.

It’s the skinny kid from Lowell who falls first, victim to a clean shot from the precipice above them. The rest hit the ground, crab-crawling their way to the relative safety of the rock wall, keeping arms and legs close so that the Germans have nothing to aim at from above. Rick cranes his neck to see what their options are. The next squad will arrive in no less than half an hour. To retreat from this narrow ledge will open them up as targets as surely as moving ahead would. They are pinned down.

Rick fingers a grenade dangling from his belt, unclips it. The rock face is maybe thirty feet high and angles back slightly. Baseball is geometry. He’s fired a ground-ball hit to the pitcher farther than that to get the double play. Slowly, Rick, keeping his back to the rock face, stands up. He has the grenade in his hand, and he tosses it gently, as if waiting for the catcher’s signs. He briefly wishes that he were a left-handed pitcher; this toss would be easier if he were. But he’s not. He’s a strong righty, accurate and unhittable. Rick pulls the pin, steps away from the rock face, and fires the grenade, putting just enough arc in it that the explosive should curve right into the Germans.

Instead of diving back against the safety of the wall, Rick waits, watching in horror as the grenade, subject to the immutable laws of gravity, falls back toward him, where it will blow them all off this ledge.

As if he’s watching a flyball coming his way, Rick instinctively reaches up to catch it.