Bang! You’re Dead! Ray Bradbury

Bang! You’re Dead!

Johnny choir came like the spring lambs over the green Italian hills, gamboling at the game of war.

He leaped a line of bullets as if it were the hedge fronting his Iowa home. He ducked and dodged; a pedestrian in war traffic. Most of all, he laughed and was indefatigable as some khaki kangaroo, forever hopping.

Bullets, mortar shells and shrapnel were only rumors in the air to Johnny. They were not true.
He moved with long-legged strides near San Vittore, froze, pointed his gun, fingered the trigger, cried, “Bang! I gotcha!” and watched a German fall with a red orchid pinned to one lapel.

Then Johnny jigged again, to escape the answering machine gun blast.
An artillery shell approached. Johnny twisted, crying, “Missed!”
It did. It missed, like always.

Private Smith followed in Johnny’s wake. Only Smith traveled on his thin-muscled stomach, face sweaty and juju’d with Italian mud. Smith crawled, ran, fell, got up again, and never let those enemy bullets near him. Frequently he yelled angrily at Johnny:
“Lie down, you dumb egg! They’ll gut you!”

But Johnny danced on to the metal music of bullets like new, bright hummingbirds on the air. While Smith crawled earthworm-wise taking each kilometer, Johnny catapulted toward the enemy, giggling. Tall as the sky, loud as a bazooka gun! Smith broke out a ration of cold sweat just watching the kid.

Germans screamed and ran away from Johnny. When they saw his limbs flourished in a kind of classical St. Vitus—while bullets whistled under his earlobes, between his knees and betwixt thumb and forefinger—German morale disintegrated. They fled wildly!

Laughing heartily, Johnny Choir sat down, pulled out a chocolate ration and teethed on it, while Smith came inching up. Johnny glimpsed the crawling figure’s exposed rump, and inquired, “Smith?”

The anonymous rump went down, a familiar thin face came up. “Yeah.” Firing had ceased in the area. They were alone and safe. Smith wiped dirt from his chin. “Honest to God, I get the weemies watching you. You gallop around like a kid in the rain. Only it’s the wrong kind of rain.”
“I’ll duck,” said Johnny, munching.

He had a big handsome face with blue child eyes captured in innocent wonder in it, and small pink child lips. His shorn hair resembled the blond stubble of a clothes brush. Now immersed deeply in the enjoyment of candy, he had forgotten war.

“I duck,” he explained again.
A thousand times Smith’d heard that excuse. It was too simple an explanation. God had a hand in this somewhere, Smith was certain. Johnny had probably been dunked in holy water. Bullets detoured around him, not daring to touch. Yeah. That was it. Smith laughed musingly.

“What happens if you forget to duck, Johnny?”
Johnny replied “I play dead.”

“YOU—” said Smith, blinking, staring, “—you play dead. Uh-huh.” He exhaled slowly. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”
Johnny threw away the candy wrapper. “I been thinking. It’s almost my turn to play dead, isn’t it? Everybody’s done it, except me. It’s only fair I take my turn. Everybody’s been so decent about it, I think I’ll play dead today.”

Smith found that his hands were shaking. His appetite was gone, too. “Now what do you want to talk that way for?” he argued.
“I’m tired,” said Johnny simply.

“Take a nap, then. You’re the damnedest one for snoozing. Take a nap.”

Johnny considered that with a pout. Then he arranged himself on the grass in the shape of a fried shrimp. “All right, Private Smith. If you say so.”
Smith consulted his watch. “You got twenty minutes. Snooze fast. We’ll be moving up as soon as the captain shows. And we don’t want him finding you asleep.”

But Johnny was already deep in soft dreams. Smith looked at him with wonder and envy. God, what a guy. Sleeping in the middle of hell. Smith had to stay, watching over him. It wouldn’t do to have some stray German sniping Johnny while he couldn’t duck. Strangest damn thing he ever knew . . .

A soldier ran heavily up, panting. “Hi, Smith!”
Smith recognized the soldier, uneasily. “Oh, it’s you, Melter . . .”
“Somebody wounded?” Melter was big, too, but off-center with his fat and too high and hoarse with his voice. “Oh, it’s Johnny Choir. Dead?”
“Taking a nap.”

Melter gaped. “A nap? For cripes sake, that infant! That moron!”
Smith said, quietly, “Moron, hell. He just brushed the Heinies off this rise with one hand. I saw them throw a thousand rounds at Johnny, a thousand rounds, mind you, and Johnny slipped through it like a knife through warm ribs.”

Melter’s pink face looked worried. “What makes him tick, anyway?”

Smith shrugged. “As far as I can figure, he thinks this is all a game. He never grew up. He’s got a big body with a kid’s mind in it. He doesn’t take war serious. He thinks we’re all playing at this.”

Melter swore. “Don’t I wish we were.” He eyed Johnny jealously. “I’ve watched him before, running like a fool, and he’s still alive. Him and that shimmy of his, and yelling, ‘Missed me!’ like a kid, and yelling, ‘Gotcha’ when he shot a Heinie. How do you explain that?”

Johnny turned in his sleep, and his lips fumbled with words. A couple came out, soft, easy. “Mom! Hey, Mom! You there? Mom? You there, Mom?”
Smith reached over to take Johnny’s hand. Johnny squeezed it in his sleep, saying with a little smile, “Oh, Mom.”
“So now,” said Smith, “after all this, I’m a mother.”

They stayed there, the three of them, for all of three minutes, silent. Melter finally cleared his throat, nervously. “Some—somebody ought to tell Johnny about the facts of life. Death is real, and war is real, and bullets can knock out your guts. Let’s tell him when he wakes up.”

Smith laid Johnny’s hand aside. He pointed at Melter, and his face got paler and harder with each word. “Look now, don’t come around here with your philosophy! What’s bad for you ain’t bad for him! Let him dream his dreams, if he wants.

I been with him since boot-camp, watching over him like a brother. I know. There’s only one thing that keeps him in one piece, and that’s thinking the things he thinks, believing that war is fun and we’re all kids! And if you so much as flip your lip, I’ll drop you in the Gagliano River with anchors on.”
“Okay, okay, don’t get tough. I only thought—”

Smith stood up. “You thought. You thought! Why, damn you, I can see the stinking look on your face! You’d like to see Johnny dead. You’re yellow jealous, that’s what! Well, now look—” He made a sweep of his arm furiously. “—you keep away!

From now on, you romp on the other side of any hill we’re on! I don’t want you running off at the mouth! Now, get the hell out of here!”

Melter’s fat face was red as Italian vino. He held his gun hard. His fingers itched the butt end of it. “It ain’t fair,” he replied tightly, hoarsely. “It ain’t fair to us that he gets by. It ain’t fair he lives while we die. What you expect, me to love him? Ha! When I gotta die, he lives, so I should kiss him? I don’t work that way!”

Melter strode off, his back stiff and working funny, his neck like a ramrod, his fingers tight fists, his strides short and jolting.
Smith watched him. There I go with my big mouth, he thought. I should have stroked him nice. Now, maybe he tells the captain, and the captain turns Johnny over to the psychiatric ward for observation. Then maybe they trundle him back to the States and I lose my best friend. God, Smith, you lummox! Why ain’t you got lock-jaw?

Johnny was waking up, rubbing eyes with big farmer-boy knuckles, tongue exploring the outer reaches of his chin for stray particles of ration chocolate.
They went over another hill together, Johnny Choir and Private Smith.

Johnny dancing in his special way, always ahead. Smith wisely but not happily bringing up the rear; afraid where Johnny was never afraid, careful where Johnny always splurged, groaning while Johnny was laughing into enemy fire. . . .
“Johnny!”

It was inevitable. As Smith felt the machine-gun bullet enter his right side, just above the hip, felt pain hammer, pound, wallop through him under tremendous striking impact, felt blood running in pulses through suddenly slippery, numb fingers, smelled his own blood like some nightmare chemical, he knew it was inevitable.
He yelled again.
“Johnny!”

Johnny stopped. He came running back, grinning. He put away his grin when he saw Smith lying there giving a blood transfusion to the body of the Earth.
“Hey, Private Smith, what’s this about?” he asked.

“I’m—I’m playing wounded,” said Smith on one elbow, not looking up, sucking in air, blowing it out. “You—go on ahead, Johnny, and don’t mind me.”
Johnny looked like a kid told to stand in the corner.

“Hey. That’s not fair. You should’ve told me, and I could play wounded, too. I’ll get too far ahead and you won’t be able to catch up.”
Smith forced a sick smile, weak and pale, and the blood pumped. “You were always too far ahead of me anyway, Johnny. Even if I ran in circles around you, I could never catch up.”
That was too subtle for Johnny, who gave forth with a confused scowl. “I thought you were my pal, Smith?”

“Sure. Sure I am, Johnny. I am.” Smith coughed. “Sure. But, you see, I just sudden-like found out I was tired. It came on me quick, you see. No time to tell you. So I’m playing wounded.”
Johnny brightened, crouching down. “I’ll play wounded, too.”
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