The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom Read Free Book Online Page A

Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
    "To be honest, sir, we all kind of fell out." He shrugged, "Sorry."
    The Captain nodded as if he'd expected as much.
    "And you? You went back to that fun park where we all promised to go if we got out alive? Free rides for all GIs? Two girls per guy in the Tunnel of Love? Isn't that what you said?"
    Eddie nearly smiled. That was what he'd said. What they'd all said.
    But when the war ended, nobody came.
    "Yeah, I went back," Eddie said.
    "And?"
    "And . . . I never left. I tried. I made plans. . . . But this damn leg. I don't know. Nothin' worked out."
    Eddie shrugged. The Captain studied his face. His eyes narrowed. His voice lowered.
    "You still juggle?" he asked.

    G O! . . . YOU GO! . . . YOU GO!"

    39
    The enemy soldiers screamed and poked them with bayonets. Eddie, Smitty, Morton, Rabozzo, and the Captain were herded down a steep hill, hands on their heads. Mortar shells exploded around them. Eddie saw a figure run through the trees, then fall in a clap of bullets.
    He tried to take mental snapshots as they marched in the darkness—
    huts, roads, whatever he could make out—knowing such information would be precious for an escape. A plane roared in the distance, filling Eddie with a sudden, sickening wave of despair. It is the inner torture of every captured soldier, the short distance between freedom and seizure.
    If Eddie could only jump up and grab the wing of that plane, he could fly away from this mistake.
    Instead, he and the others were bound at the wrists and ankles. They were dumped inside a bamboo barracks. The barracks sat on stilts above the muddy ground, and they remained there for days, weeks, months, forced to sleep on burlap sacks stuffed with straw. A clay jug served as their toilet. At night, the enemy guards would crawl under the hut and listen to their conversations. As time passed, they said less and less.
    They grew thin and weak. Their ribs grew visible—even Rabozzo, who had been a chunky kid when he enlisted. Their food consisted of rice balls filled with salt and, once a day, some brownish broth with grass floating in it. One night, Eddie plucked a dead hornet from the bowl. It was missing its wings. The others stopped eating.

    T HEIR CAPTORS SEEMED unsure of what to do with them. In the evenings, they would enter with bayonets and wiggle their blades at the Americans' noses, yelling in a foreign language, waiting for answers. It was never productive.
    There were only four of them, near as Eddie could tell and the Captain guessed that they, too, had drifted away from a larger unit and were, as often happens in real war, making it up day by day. Their faces were gaunt and bony with dark nubs of hair. One looked too young to be a soldier. Another had the most crooked teeth Eddie had ever seen. The Captain called them Crazy One, Crazy Two, Crazy Three, and Crazy Four.
    "We don't want to know their names," he said. "And we don't want them knowing ours."
    Men adapt to captivity, some better than others. Morton, a skinny, chattering youth from Chicago, would fidget whenever he heard noises from outside, rubbing his chin and mumbling, "Oh, damn, oh damn, oh 40
    damn . . ." until the others told him to shut up. Smitty, a fireman's son from Brooklyn, was quiet most of the time, but he often seemed to be swallowing something, his Adam's apple loping up and down; Eddie later learned he was chewing on his tongue. Rabozzo, the young redheaded kid from Portland, Oregon, kept a poker face during the waking hours, but at night he often woke up screaming, "Not me! Not me!"
    Eddie mostly seethed. He clenched a fist and slapped it into his palm, hours on end, knuckles to skin, like the anxious baseball player he had been in his youth. At night, he dreamed he was back at the pier, on the Derby Horse carousel, where five customers raced in circles until the bell rang. He was racing his buddies, or his brother, or Marguerite. But then the dream turned, and the four Crazies