Free Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers Page B

wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet, and the weather was already cold in New York. I imagined the brothers hustling down Lenox Avenue trying to get away from the wind. Howard, a guy I used to play ball with, crossed my mind. He was somebody I could write to. He’d probably write back. Three years before, he had pulled a robbery in midtown and been sent up to a prison in Stormville, New York. I had written to him the whole time he was up there. He used to tell me how much he appreciated the letters. Maybe he would answer my letters from Nam.
    Mail call was hard when you didn’t get any mail. I thought that what I needed was to have something more in the World than I had. I remembered what Lobel had said about the starlet, but it was silly. I needed something real. It didn’t even have to be something that was going on at the time, a plan for when I got back would have been fine. I couldn’t think of anything and felt depressed.
    An image of the VC we had killed flashed through my mind. I wondered if he had a family? Had he been out on a patrol? When did he know he was going to die?
    What was worse than thinking about him dead was the way we looked at him. At least we had cared for Jenkins, had trembled when he died. He was one of us, an American, a human. But the dead Vietnamese soldier, his body sprawled out in the mud, was no longer a human being. He was a thing, a trophy. I wondered if I could become a trophy.
    “We won.” Walowick came in after the volleyball game and sat on the edge of the bunk. “They’re paying us off in beer.”
    “Way to go,” I said.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Seeing that dead gook mess you up some?”
    “A little,” I said. “Maybe even more than Jenkins.”
    “Who’s Jenkins?”
    “He was the guy — ” I couldn’t believe that Walowick didn’t know who I was talking about. He had been on the patrol when Jenkins was killed. I looked into his face, and I saw that he was for real. “Jenkins was the guy I came in with. He stepped on a mine.”
    “Oh, yeah. Sorry about him,” Walowick said. “You play chess?”
    “A little, you got a set?”
    Walowick went to get his chess set, and Jamal came back in. He had a clipboard and he put it in front of me. He pointed to a figure. It read “3.” I looked at the column it was in and it was listed “Confirmed Kills.” I looked up at Jamal, but he was already on his way out.
    “You know, that guy is a little…” Walowick held his hand out, palm down, and turned it from side to side.
    “It takes all kinds,” I said. Walowick had put the chessboard on a box, and we started setting up the pieces.
    “How many VC were killed today?” I asked.
    “One, I guess,” Walowick said.
    “The report said three,” I said.
    “You shoot a VC, and they take the bodies and run off with them,” Walowick said. “That’s so you never know how many are killed. You can’t even find shells when they shoot at you. They take those, too.”
    “Then how do you know how many were killed?”
    “Long as it’s them and not us,” he said. “Take the white pieces.”
    As soon as I crossed Manhattan Avenue I knew something was up. The street was quiet except for a radio that blared from behind a window with its shade pulled down. I stopped on the comer and looked down the street. A small girl, too young to be out past eleven, came out of a hallway and peered around a mail collection box.
    “The Rovers down there,” she said.
    “Who?”
    “The Rovers,” she repeated. “They’re from Brooklyn. They looking for somebody.”
    I wasn’t about to go down the street. I had heard too many stories about gangs looking for someone who they had to “deal” with. A lot of them were getting out of the gang thing and into a Black Pride thing, but the gangs were still there.
    A car, I hadn’t noticed it before, had eased onto the block. Suddenly it picked up speed, wheels squealing, lurching from one side of the narrow street to the other. The Rovers came