Going After Cacciato Read Online Free PDF Page A

flowers, new tongues and new times and all roads connecting toward Paris. Yes, it could be done.
    He imagined it. He imagined the many dangers of the march: treachery and deceit at every turn, disease, thirst, jungle beasts crouching in ambush; but, yes, he also imagined the good times ahead, the sting of aloneness, the great new quiet, new leanness and knowledge and wisdom. The rains would end. The trails would go dry, the sun would show, and, yes, there would be changing foliage and seasons and great expanses of silence, and songs, and pretty girls sleeping in straw huts, and, where the road ended, Paris.
    The odds were poison, but it could be done.
    He might even have tried himself. With courage, he thought, he might even have joined in, and that was the one sorry thing about it, the sad thing: He might have.
       Then in the dark it rained.
    “The AWOL bag,” Oscar whispered from beneath his poncho.“There’s the weirdness. Where in hell did he come up with the AWOL bag?”
    “Your imagination.” It was Eddie’s voice, deeper than the others.
    “No, man, I saw it.”
    “You say you saw it.”
    “I saw it. Black vinyl, white stitching. I speak truth, I saw it.”
    Quiet beaten by rain. Shifting sounds in the night, men rolling.
    Then Eddie’s voice, disbelieving: “Nobody. Not even the C. Nobody uses them bags to go AWOL. It’s not done.”
    “Tell it to Cacciato.”
    “It’s not
done.
”
       And later, as if a mask had been peeled off, the rain ended and the sky cleared and Paul Berlin woke to see stars.
    They were in their familiar places. It wasn’t so cold. He lay on his back and counted the stars and named those that he knew, named the constellations and the valleys of the moon. He’d learned the names from his father. Guideposts, his father had once said along the Des Moines River, or maybe in Wisconsin. Anyway—guideposts, he’d said, so that no matter where in the world you are, anywhere, you know the spot, you can trace it, place it by latitude and longitude. It was just too bad. Dumb and crazy and, now, very sad. He should’ve kept going. Should’ve left the trails, waded through streams to rinse away the scent, buried his feces, swung from the trees branch to branch. Should’ve slept through the days and run through the nights. Because it might have been done.
       Toward dawn he saw Cacciato’s breakfast fire. It gave the grassy hill a moving quality, and the sadness seemed durable.
    The others woke in groups. They ate cold rations, packed up, watched the sky light itself in patches. Stink played with the safety catch on his rifle, a clicking noise like the morning cricket.
    “Let’s do it,” the lieutenant said.
    And Eddie and Oscar and Harold Murphy crept off toward the south. Doc and the lieutenant waited five minutes and then began circling west to block a retreat. Stink Harris and Paul Berlin stayed where they were.
    Waiting, trying to imagine a rightful but still happy ending, Paul Berlin found himself pretending, in a wishful sort of way, that before long the war would reach a climax beyond which everything else would seem bland and commonplace. A point at which he could stop being afraid. Where all the bad things, the painful and grotesque and ugly things, would give way to something better. He pretended he had crossed that threshold.
    He wasn’t dreaming, or imagining; just pretending. Figuring how it would be, if it were.
    When the sky was half-light, Doc and the lieutenant fired a red flare that streaked high over Cacciato’s grassy hill, hung there, then exploded like a starburst at the start of a celebration. Cacciato Day, October something in the year 1968, the Year of the Pig.
    In the trees at the southern slope of the hill Oscar and Eddie and Harold Murphy each fired red flares to signal their advance.
    Stink hurried into the weeds and came back buttoning up his trousers. He was excited and very happy. Deftly, he released the bolt on his weapon and let it slam