Shame and the Captives (40 page)

It was afternoon by now. They pursued the hill's spine in this country of eroded, stone-scattered spines. Aoki was afflicted with a temptation to absolve the others of all duty. The further they went, the more wanly young they looked. They were not urgently hunted, that was it. The enemy had failed its duty of pursuit and fury. Couldn't Aoki say, “Take the risk. Give it up. We've missed the chance and the air's out of the balloon. Will they really shoot you? Young men with such wanly fresh faces, such increasingly bewildered eyes? If they do—a good farewell and an escape from this unreadable terrain. If not, go back to the pancakes. Go back, at least, to the mutton and rice.” He wondered again about the sort of army the enemy possessed. It did not send urgently and by thousands after its escapees,
but dispatched young ditherers and shitheads, who stumbled off to peep behind trees. The hills and pastures were not ruthlessly scoured by any force he had seen. Yesterday's encounter had been a jaunt, a children's outing. The young men might go. But he would stay out here, surely worth their while chasing, with the blood of the machine gunner and of the fellow with the seized pistol on his uniform.

There were definite reasons he should pursue his lonely search. He wanted to die for women's sake, though not in any romantic sense. He did not think of women as these young men, unrelieved of their juices, so often did. He had not overcome the normal problem of veterans in summoning the face and outline of his wife, whose pictures he'd lost. But Chinese women taken as revenge, and seen at times of berserk drunkenness and conquest, often recurred cruelly and with acid clarity. China had confused the focus of clear desire, had muddied love by offering supposed rewards—those of sexual rapine. In copulating for the Empire and the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, in driving home the lesson between the thighs of a dazed or screaming Chinese woman, he had become unfit for the higher fulfillment, the devotions of a monogamous bed. He had forgotten love's husbandry.

The party waited where they were. They were very tired. They watched a search plane drone above hills on the other side of the valley. It did not seem energetic. “They have contempt for us,” one of the young men decided. “They're mocking us by not trying to find us.”

And, Aoki could have said, there is the contempt this landscape, so empty of meaning, exudes. He had nearly given up movement, but at his suggestion they did move on through the huge stones and the tall trees until they saw a farmhouse below them.

Did it offer opportunities? And for what?

“Should we go down, Senior Sergeant?” one asked.

“Staying up here means nothing,” said another with a sullenness alien to military discipline.

“We'll go down to the fields, yes,” said Aoki, losing faith now in his
own orders about ridges. “As you say, Private, nothing to be lost going down there. Our prospects might lie down there.”

He guessed that serious hunts must be occurring elsewhere. There was activity in the air of that inert day, the occasional and distant sight of a plane. But its reverberations gave him no consolation. It was hard to maintain a martial soul when the enemy refused to present himself.

A
fter sleeping late on that Sunday morning, Beefy Cullen, perversely nicknamed for his extreme thinness, approached his clever son, Martin, who was doing trigonometry at the kitchen table. Mrs. Cullen was away, sitting with Mrs. Abercare in town and waiting for the coroner to release the colonel's body. Martin and his mother had been to Mass earlier that morning, transported in Mr. Doyle's car—the grazier whose property the Cullens lived on. Mr. Doyle had explained that he was carrying his shotgun in the trunk. He probably should have carried it inside the car, but he didn't want any accidents with it on the bumpy road and he doubted any escaped prisoner could outrun his Buick anyhow. Mrs. Doyle asked him with gentle whimsy if he was going to run over them, or run away from them.

“The first, if possible,” said Mr. Doyle, clean-shaven and with the gloss of sanctifying grace on his cheeks.

Two Knights of the Southern Cross, however—Catholic worthies of the town—patrolled the church ground with rifles that morning to ensure the congregation was not interfered with. Mrs. Abercare arrived with Mrs. Garner, who had become a temporary churchgoer to support the widow. Dr. Delaney preached on the tragedy—the incomprehensibility of it, God's mercy in sparing the town, and his feelings
for the bereaved. He had somehow sensed by former meetings that Mrs. Abercare would not welcome a specific mention and the resultant turning of eyes to her.

Now, Mass all done with, Martin was home working on his diagrams, which were as eternal as, or even more so, than the mysteries of faith. His father interrupted him by slowly expressing a decision to shave. Then, he said, they were going rabbiting.

“Are you up to a bit of common man's fun like that?” he challenged his son, jealous of the boy's cleverness and coming, unimaginable chances.

His son had indeed hoped to occupy the rest of the day with his scholastic ambitions—a long Honors English essay on Julius Caesar as its climax. The exegesis of Shakespeare's texts came naturally to him. It seemed to him that he had stumbled on them the way Keats had stumbled on Chapman's Homer, and he had evidence that he was a once-in-a-decade delight to his English teacher, and cherished that role.

“Isn't dusk the best time to go rabbiting?” he asked his father.

“Well, you never know what you'll find if you go about now. Run us up some of the mutton sandwiches, will you? Don't spare the pickles. And you can take the rifle.”

Martin got up resignedly and started working on mutton pickle sandwiches. He knew his father liked pickles and so did not skimp on them. He had always been an accommodating and obedient child, but he knew that if the sandwiches weren't up to scratch, it would be taken by his father as a sign of Martin's fatal bookishness, unworldliness, and awkwardness. Yet Martin was reaching an age when he'd begun to see as much of the pain as the malice behind his father's commands. In his soured ambitions, his father sometimes declared to Martin's mother that he was a failure in life and might as well shoot himself. This called up a pity, a tremble of love, in Martin, who wanted to enter the corrugated iron kitchen and enclose his father in his arms the way a three-year-old might dare to. Except that none
of them could imagine such a gesture, and it might well make things worse.

Beefy's cry always brought a pathetic response from his wife, who cherished him to the point where, for a second, Martin could feel jealousy as well as that awful, thwarted tenderness. At that point he was tempted to ask his mother, “Aren't I the clever one? Haven't I satisfied all you want?” He did not dare think of Beefy, the lover—of anything other than his mother's endurance, and her belief in the Church's version of marriage—as an explanation for what held her there, on Doyle's place in a rouseabout's cottage.

As his father finished shaving, Martin found ammunition in a drawer and fetched the rifle from the shed. It was a light, well-tooled, slim device. He kept it oiled because not to have done so would have produced the normal reaction. That's what he hated about the excursion. It had unsure motives in most regards, but the chance of parental mockery was certainly one of them. Did his father have a fantasy about running into some of the Japs from the camp? The idea had no attraction to Martin, but he knew Beefy had been starved of moments of glory.

They walked in silence towards the hill behind Doyle's, until his father called to him in a whimsical voice, “You've got the rifle loaded?”

Martin said yes.

“Well, if you see any really big rabbits, let me know.” Thus it was confirmed to Martin what this expedition was for. They were hunting prisoners. He could not think of anything more vain or alarming. His father had heard from someone that morning, possibly from one of his army mates who'd come through in a truck and who might have stopped at the gate and honked, that the escapees had no firearms. They were out in the bush without means of retaliation except for their well-established, legendary, hypnotic, and illimitable cunning.

“We're not going to shoot them, are we?” asked Martin.

“Depends on what they do,” said his father.

“I'm not going to shoot them. I'm going home.”

“Oh yes. Be a bloody pansy as usual.”

Thus Martin was stuck with him, as if the insult had its own magnetic field. Father and son crossed over the ridge and into their neighbors the Macintoshes' place, and sat on a log and ate sandwiches and drank the tea Martin had brought in a thermos. Martin ate his sandwich quickly, as if getting it down would speed up this silly expedition.

“You're hungry there, tiger,” said his father.

“Why do you want to look for the Japs?” the boy asked.

A glint, the desire of warrior conspiracy, entered his father's eye. His smile was narrow lipped. “It'd be good for both of us to get a bit of a reputation around this place. Everyone thinks I'm a boofhead and the rest think you're a ponce. Wouldn't you like to show them a thing or two? Take a few of the buggers in? That'd make people sit up a bit.”

Mr. Cullen assessed the trees at the end of Macintosh's paddock, where men might be concealed. He sifted the trees with his squinting, alert vision. Meanwhile, Martin felt sick. He didn't give a toss whether Gawell people thought he was a ponce; he did not intend to live amongst them long enough to incur their habitual contempt. He did not believe anyhow his father's story of achieving new value.

They finished lunch and rose and went through another wire fence, at least using the normal safety arrangements—one of them holding both guns as the other parted the barbed wire and slid through.

They crossed a badly eroded gully, a groin of dust, a wound in the earth of the kind the Department of Agriculture blamed on both the farmer and the drought—which had by coincidence ended in the summer the Japanese expressed their ambitions against the British and the Americans in unarguable ways. The Cullen men could not get round this gully and had to cross it, getting dust into their boots. Climbing out, Martin saw over the rim a burgundy-colored figure running uphill through the trees ahead. For some reason he was utterly unsurprised. Was this, he wondered, a sacrificial decoy from those hiding in the woods? His father spotted the figure too.

“Hey, look at that!” he cried out loudly, a man who was not frightened of his quarry.

The figure disappeared amongst the great rocks and tall eucalypts. Martin was riveted by the sight. It was like a permanent burn on his vision. The world was transformed now that he had seen the enemy of his people, the enemy of Keats and Shakespeare. That fleeting creature was his new objective and, to his own astonishment, he was ready to chase. He ran lithely ahead and found himself, still with reserves of oxygen, up high on the uneven ground, looking around and then downwards at his father, who seemed to be losing breath as he climbed, and losing certainty as well. A little regretfully, he waited for his father to catch up.

“We ought to be a bit more careful now,” Beefy panted. “I ought to send you back for help.”

“No,” said Martin, “I'm not going back.”

His father had seen it, too, that Martin was no longer led but had an equal part in the ambush. The flash of burgundy had altered the balance between them—Martin was in fact the leader; his father the offsider who must be persuaded along, his ambitions diminished. That figure, the Japanese one who had captivated Martin, had brought to Beefy Cullen the awareness that he was not a true hunter.

“We've spotted them,” said Beefy. “Now let's go down to Macintosh's place and call the army.”

“If we go that way,” Martin said, ignoring him and pointing out a screen of trees and rocks on the crest to their right, “we can come on them from the side.”

“You reckon?” his father asked. Mr. Cullen sounded fretful. They heard a yelp from above, designed to direct them.

“Maybe they are armed,” Beefy Cullen said.

“They aren't moving anymore,” said Martin, ignoring him.

“They're waiting. I think if we duck around those boulders we'll have them.”

He heard his father gasping and wished Beefy wanted to have
them as much as he did. Part of his brain asked why he hankered to find those helpless creatures up there, but chiefly his mind asserted they were not helpless. Would Julius Caesar be soft on them? Would Hamlet, who had finished off Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with such a light mind? The men up in those trees had the entire weight of a vicious empire behind them, and Caesar would have been merciless for his own sake and his people's. Gawell High School's English and Latin curriculum left him in no doubt.

Screened by long grass, Martin and his father came round the huge rocks, left—according to the geography teacher—by glaciers, and reached the spine of the ridge where trees and the huge boulders still shielded their quarry. A sudden wind began to blow and combed the grass through which they crept, Martin looking back to his father occasionally.

“What do you reckon now?” Beefy whispered, wanting guidance. Martin was no longer the ponce and the smartarse. There was only their common breath and the scene they were about to invade.

“One of us ought to go around the base there,” Martin told him, nodding to a huge boulder. “So I'll go round it to the right, and you climb up it and get on top.”

Beefy asked, “Do you want the shotgun? You'll be on the level with them.”

Martin raised his .22 rifle. “You can shoot anything up to sixty yards with this.”

He gave his father a hoist up to a crevice in the rock. As his father ascended, panting, Martin edged around the granite, almost stringing out the crazy, frightful joy of the seconds before confrontation. He had one round in the spout of his .22, but he knew it was a dominating shot.