“Such awful news,” Eddie s mother says. “Not at a birthday.”

She turns the dial until the small box offers music, an orchestra playing a swing melody, and she smiles and hums along. Then she comes over to Eddie, who is slouched in his chair, picking at the last pieces of cake. She removes her apron, folds it over a chair, and lifts Eddie by the hands.

“Show me how you danced with your new friend,” she says.

“Aw, Ma.”

“Come on.”

Eddie stands as if being led to his execution. His brother smirks. But his mother, with her pretty, round face, keeps humming and stepping back and forth, until Eddie falls into a dance step with her.

“Daaa daa deeee,” she sings with the melody, “… when you’re with meeee … da da … the stars, and the moon … the da … da … da … in June …”

They move around the living room until Eddie breaks down and laughs. He is already taller than his mother by a good six inches, yet she twirls him with ease.

“So,” she whispers, “you like this girl?”

Eddie loses a step.

“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m happy for you.”

They spin to the table, and Eddie s mother grabs Joe and pulls him up.

“Now you two dance,” she says.

“With him?”

“Ma!”

But she insists and they relent, and soon Joe and Eddie are laughing and stumbling into each other. They join hands and move, swooping up and down in exaggerated circles. Around and around the table they go, to their mother’s delight, as the clarinets lead the radio melody and the Romanian cousins clap along and the final wisps of grilled steak evaporate into the party air.

Eddie felt his feet touch ground. The sky was changing again, from cobalt blue to charcoal gray, and Eddie was surrounded now by fallen trees and blackened rubble. He grabbed his arms, shoulders, thighs, and calves. He felt stronger than before, but when he tried to touch his toes, he could no longer do so. The limberness was gone. No more childish rubbery sensation. Every muscle he had was as tight as piano wire.

He looked around at the lifeless terrain. On a nearby hill lay a busted wagon and the rotting bones of an animal. Eddie felt a hot wind whip across his face. The sky exploded to a flaming yellow.

And once again, Eddie ran.

He ran differently now, in the hard measured steps of a soldier. He heard thunder—or something like thunder, explosions, or bomb blasts—and he instinctively fell to the ground, landed on his stomach, and pulled himself along by his forearms. The sky burst open and gushed rain, a thick, brownish downpour. Eddie lowered his head and crawled along in the mud, spitting away the dirty water that gathered around his lips.

Finally he felt his head brush against something solid. He looked up to see a rifle dug into the ground, with a helmet sitting atop it and a set of dog tags hanging from the grip. Blinking through the rain, he fingered the dog tags, then scrambled backward wildly into a porous wall of stringy vines that hung from a massive banyan tree. He dove into their darkness. He pulled his knees into a crouch. He tried to catch his breath. Fear had found him, even in heaven.

The name on the dog tags was his.

Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.

When his country entered the war, Eddie woke up early one rainy morning, shaved, combed back his hair, and enlisted. Others were fighting. He would, too.

His mother did not want him to go. His father, when informed of the news, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly.

“When?” was all he asked.

Since he’d never fired an actual rifle, Eddie began to practice at the shooting arcade at Ruby Pier. You paid a nickel and the machine hummed and you squeezed the trigger and fired metal slugs at pictures of jungle animals, a lion or a giraffe. Eddie went every evening, after running the brake levers at the Li’l Folks Miniature Railway. Ruby Pier had added a number of new, smaller attractions, because roller coasters, after the Depression, had become too expensive. The Miniature Railway was pretty much just that, the train cars no higher than a grown man’s thigh.

Eddie, before enlisting, had been working to save money to study engineering. That was his goal—he wanted to build things, even if his brother, Joe, kept saying, “C’mon, Eddie, you aren’t smart enough for that.”

But once the war started, pier business dropped. Most of Eddie’s customers now were women alone with children, their fathers gone to fight. Sometimes the children asked Eddie to lift them over his head, and when Eddie complied, he saw the mothers’ sad smiles: He guessed it was the right lift but the wrong pair of arms. Soon, Eddie figured, he would join those distant men, and his life of greasing tracks and running brake levers would be over. War was his call to manhood. Maybe someone would miss him, too.

On one of those final nights, Eddie was bent over the small arcade rifle, firing with deep concentration. Pang! Pang! He tried to imagine actually shooting at the enemy. Pang! Would they make a noise when he shot them—Pang!–or would they just go down, like the lions and giraffes?

Pang! Pang!

“Practicing to kill, are ya, lad?”

Mickey Shea was standing behind Eddie. His hair was the color of French vanilla ice cream, wet with sweat, and his face was red from whatever he’d been drinking. Eddie shrugged and returned to his shooting. Pang! Another hit. Pang! Another.

“Hmmph,” Mickey grunted.

Eddie wished Mickey would go away and let him work on his aim. He could feel the old drunk behind him. He could hear his labored breathing, the nasal hissing in and out, like a bike tire being inflated by a pump.

Eddie kept shooting. Suddenly, he felt a painful grip on his shoulder.

“Listen to me, lad.” Mickey’s voice was a low growl. “War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it, you hear? No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don’t think about who you’re shootin’ or killin’ or why, y’hear me? You want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think.”

He squeezed even harder.

“It’s the thinking that gets you killed.”

Eddie turned and stared at Mickey. Mickey slapped him hard on the cheek and Eddie instinctively raised his fist to retaliate. But Mickey belched and wobbled backward. Then he looked at Eddie as if he were going to cry. The mechanical gun stopped humming. Eddie’s nickel was up.

Young men go to war, sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. A few days later, Eddie packed a duffel bag and left the pier behind.

The rain stopped. Eddie, shivering and wet beneath the banyan tree, exhaled a long, hard breath. He pulled the vines apart and saw the rifle and helmet still stuck in the ground. He remembered why soldiers did this: It marked the graves of their dead.

He crawled out on his knees. Off in the distance, below a small ridge, were the remains of a village, bombed and burnt into little more than rubble. For a moment, Eddie stared, his mouth slightly open, his eyes bringing the scene into tighter focus. Then his chest tightened like a man who’d just had bad news broken. This place. He knew it. It had haunted his dreams. “Smallpox,” a voice suddenly said.

Eddie spun.

“Smallpox. Typhoid. Tetanus. Yellow fever.”

It came from above, somewhere in the tree.

“I never did find out what yellow fever was. Hell. I never met anyone who had it.”

The voice was strong, with a slight Southern drawl and gravelly edges, like a man who’d been yelling for hours.