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wing.”
    Weary scornfully bet Billy one time that he didn’t even know what a blood gutter was. Billy guessed that it was the drain in the bottom of the Iron Maiden, but that was wrong. A blood gutter, Billy learned, was the shallow groove in the side of the blade of a sword or bayonet.
    Weary told Billy about neat tortures he’d read about or seen in the movies or heard on the radio—about other neat tortures he himself had invented. One of the inventions was sticking a dentist’s drill into a guy’s ear. He asked Billy what he thought the worst form of execution was. Billy had no opinion. The correct answer turned out to be this: “You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert—see? He’s facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.” So it goes.

    Now, lying in the ditch with Billy and the scouts after having been shot at, Weary made Billy take avery close look at his trench knife. It wasn’t government issue. It was a present from his father. It had a ten-inch blade that was triangular in cross section. Its grip consisted of brass knuckles, was a chain of rings through which Weary slipped his stubby fingers. The rings weren’t simple. They bristled with spikes.
    Weary laid the spikes along Billy’s cheek, roweled the cheek with savagely affectionate restraint. “How’d you like to be hit with this—hm? Hmmmmmmmmm?” he wanted to know.
    “I wouldn’t,” said Billy.
    “Know why the blade’s triangular?”
    “No.”
    “Makes a wound that won’t close up.”
    “Oh.”
    “Makes a three-sided hole in a guy. You stick an ordinary knife in a guy—makes a slit. Right? A slit closes right up. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “Shit. What do you know? What the hell they teach in college?”
    “I wasn’t there very long,” said Billy, which was true. He had had only six months of college, and the college hadn’t been a regular college, either. It had been the night school of the Ilium School of Optometry.
    “Joe College,” said Weary scathingly.
    Billy shrugged.
    “There’s more to life than what you read in books,” said Weary. “You’ll find that out.”
    Billy made no reply to this, either, there in the ditch, since he didn’t want the conversation to go on any longer than necessary. He was dimly tempted to say, though, that he knew a thing or two about gore. Billy, after all, had contemplated torture and hideous wounds at the beginning and the end of nearly every day of his childhood. Billy had an extremely gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his little bedroom in Ilium. A military surgeon would have admired the clinical fidelity of the artist’s rendition of all Christ’s wounds—the spear wound, the thorn wounds, the holes that were made by the iron spikes. Billy’s Christ died horribly. He was pitiful.
    So it goes.

    Billy wasn’t a Catholic, even though he grew up with a ghastly crucifix on the wall. His father had no religion. His mother was a substitute organist for several churches around town. She took Billy with her whenever she played, taught him to play alittle, too. She said she was going to join a church as soon as she decided which one was right.
    She never
did
decide. She did develop a terrific hankering for a crucifix, though. And she bought one from a Santa Fe gift shop during a trip the little family made out West during the Great Depression. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
    And the crucifix went up on the wall of Billy Pilgrim.

    The two scouts, loving the walnut stocks of their rifles in the ditch, whispered that it was time to move out again. Ten minutes had gone by without anybody’s coming to see if they were hit or not, to finish them off. Whoever had shot was evidently far away and all alone.
    And the four crawled out of the ditch without drawing any more fire. They crawled into a forest like