He had just about reached us when one of those unfortunate incidents of war happened. A Nimiipuu in the rifle pit on our far side caught his stealthy movement, must have thought he was the enemy sneaking up and shot him, bam, right in the head. Poker Joe happened to be wearing blue jeans that afternoon. Maybe the sharpshooter mistook them for soldier pants. I don’t know. I do know that the rifleman was devastated and wailed long into the night. No one blamed him; The People understood war and chance. But Poker Joe? What a loss for us all.

I doubt he knew what hit him. He slithered into the pit next to me, drenching me in his blood. I stood up, goodness knows why, and tried to get away from him and out of the pit. Hawk grabbed me and threw me down. “No, no, Liz,” he said. “Get the shells out of his shirt.”

I had to touch that dead man? Me? I barely could force myself to squish spiders and I was supposed to get shells out of a man’s shirt when the man’s head was mostly gone? I knew I couldn’t, but I knew Bright Star was going to start insisting.

I took a deep breath and turned him over. There was little left of his face except his chin and part of his jaw, but I ripped off his shirt and the shells tumbled out. A deck of cards tumbled out, too. The wind picked them up and they fluttered around the rifle pit before blowing away, a dead man’s hand. I know aces and eights were Wild Bill Hickok’s dead man’s hand, but not to me. It’s fifty-two cards exploding across a battlefield.

During a lull in the fighting – it didn’t sound like a lull to me – someone pulled Poker Joe from the pit. I tried not to look at the body, but it always seemed to be in the corner of my vision, no matter where I glanced.

The rain that started in the morning turned into snow by mid-afternoon. We didn’t dare move around to get warm, or build a fire. I shivered until I retched. To distract myself from the constant firing from the enemy, I thought about Phil and those silly adventure novels we pored over in Omaha. I was living one of those adventures that very afternoon, but there was no thrill. Shock settled over us in the rifle pit and we all stared at each other like mannequins in Wannamaker’s. Whenever he wasn’t firing Poker Joe’s rifle. Hawk leaned until his forehead rested on the earth mound we had dug, his eyes closed.