“Yer too stupid though. Ain’t he? He’s too stupid.” This from the shorter again. The man was practically hopping on his toes with excitement.

Ray was preparing to tell them that he was leaving anyway, that he would pack up and leave that moment if only to avoid a fight of such numbers and such odds, but this last had set his teeth hard together in his mouth. He squared his shoulders against the whole of it. “Shut your goddamn mouth,” he said.

“We heard you had a temper on you,” he said.

“Just leave me alone,” Ray said. “Just leave me the hell alone.”

“Too late for that,” the shorter said. “What you gonna do, Jap?” The short one swung the rifle around so that it pointed at him.

He almost laughed then at the absurdity of his situation, that he would come through all of it—the unsettlement of the camps, the fire and terror of the war—and was now here, in the orange light of a campfire upon a ridge which he had come to think of as his and Helen’s, their place together upon which he had ranged over the secret geography of her body.

“I don’t like you pointing that at me,” Ray said quietly, his voice steady, although there was a trembling inside of him. That it would come to this. That it ever could have.

“I don’t give a rat shit,” the short one said, then added, as if a nursery rhyme: “Jap shit, rat shit.”

“Christ, Tuck,” the tall man said, his head shaking quickly in disgust. “Let’s just get this done.”

There was no more talking. The two men held their rifles on him as the tall man tied his hands behind his back with a length of coarse rope. When the knot was finished the tall man gave a whistle and the fourth man appeared from the darkness. It was he who gave the first blow, leaning in and calling him a dirty Jap and then striking again. For a time Ray tried to remain standing but it was too much and when he fell to the grass it was as if he were a pillar of ash come crumbling into the rain. That it was cool against his face was a blessing, for the blows continued and they were too many to count: his face exploding in agony, his thighs, his back, his neck, his chest, even his bound wrists. Their fists; then their boots.

“Point is, Jap,” someone whispered in his ear, “you’d best clear out or we’ll finish the job.”

“We ought just finish,” another said.

“I ain’t a murderer,” the first voice said. “Anyway, that’s not what we got paid for.”

“She’s just a girl,” the other said. “She don’t know what she wants.”