Tales of the South Pacific (13 page)

One night Charlesworth and I followed Tony to the cave. "Fry, goddam it," the skipper began. "You've got me doing it, too!"

"What?"

"This coastwatcher. Damn it all, Fry. I wish we knew what had happened to that chap." The men sat on boxes in the end of the cave toward the bay.

"I don't know," Tony said. "But the courage of the man fascinates me. Up there. Alone. Hunted. Japs getting closer every day. God, Charlesworth, it gets under my skin."

"Same way with me," the skipper said. "His name comes up at the damnedest times. Take yesterday. I was down at the water front showing some of the bushboys how to store empty gas drums. One of them was from Malaita. I got to talking with him. Found out who this Basil is that Anderson referred to one morning."

You did?" Fry asked eagerly.

Yes, he's a murderer of some sort. There was a German trader over on his island. Fellow named Kesperson. Apparently quite a character. Used to beat the boys up a good deal. This chap Basil killed him one day- Then hid in the bush. Well, you know how natives are. Always know things first. When word got around that Anderson was to be a coastwatcher this Basil appears out of the jungle and wants to go along. Anderson took him."

That's what I don't understand, skipper," Fry commented. "The things Anderson does don't add up to an ordinary man. Why would a good man like that come out here in the first place? How does he have the courage?"

Fry's insidious questions haunted me that night. Why do good men do anything? How does any man have the courage to go to war? I thought of the dead Japs bobbing upon the shorelines of The Slot. Even some of them had been good men. And might be again, if they could be left alone on their farms. And there was bloody Savo with its good men. All the men rotting in Iron Bottom Bay were good men, too. The young men from the Vincennes, the lean Australians from the Canberra, the cooks from the Astoria, and those four pilots I knew so well... they were good men. How did they have the courage to prowl off strange islands at night and die without cursing and whimpers? How did they have the courage?

And I hated Tony Fry for having raised such questions. I wanted to shout at him, "Damn it all! Why don't you get out of the cave? Why don't you take your whiskey bottles and your lazy ways and go back to Noumea?"

But as these words sprang to my lips I looked across the cave at Tony and Charlesworth. Only a small light was burning. It threw shadows about the faces of the two men. They leaned toward one another in the semi-darkness. They were talking of the coastwatcher. Tony was speaking: "I think of him up there pursued by Japs. And us safe in the cave."

And then I understood. Each man I knew had a cave somewhere, a hidden refuge from war. For some it was love for wives and kids back home. That was the unassailable retreat. When bad food and Jap shells and the awful tropic diseases attacked, there was the cave of love. There a man found refuge. For others the cave consisted of jobs waiting, a farm to run, a business to establish, a tavern on the corner of Eighth and Vine. For still others the cave was whiskey, or wild nights in the Pink House at Noumea, or heroism beyond the call of valor. When war became too terrible or too lonely or too bitter, men fled into their caves, sweated it out, and came back ready for another day or another battle.

For Tony and Charlesworth their cave was the contemplation of another man's courage. They dared not look at one another and say, "Hell! Our luck isn't going to hold out much longer." They couldn't say, "Even PT Boats get it sooner or later." They dared not acknowledge, "I don't think I could handle another trip like that one, fellow."

No, they couldn't talk like that. Instead they sat in the cave and wondered about the Remittance Man. Why was he silent? Had the Japs got him? And every word they said was directed inward at themselves. The Englishman's great courage in those critical days of The Slot buoyed their equal courage. Like all of us on Tulagi, Tony and Charlesworth knew that if the coastwatcher could keep going on Bougainvillea, they could keep going in the PT's.

Then one morning, while Tony sat in the cave twisting the silent dials, orders came transferring him to Noumea. He packed one parachute bag. "An old sea captain once told me," he said at lunch, "to travel light. Never more than twenty-five pieces of luggage. A clean shirt and twenty-four bottles of whiskey!"

At this moment there was a peremptory interruption. It was Lazars. "Come right away!" he shouted. "The Remittance Man."

The coastwatcher was already speaking when we reached the cave. "... and I judge it has been a great victory because only a few ships straggled back. Congratulations, Americans. I am sorry I failed you during the critical days. I trust you know why. The Nips are upon us. This time they have us trapped. My wife is here. A few faithful boys have stayed with us. I wish to record the names of these brave friends. Basil and Lenato from Malaita. Jerome from Choiseul. Morris and his wife Ngana from Bougainvillea. I could not wish for a stauncher crew. I do not think I could have had a better..."

There was a shattering sound. It could have been a rifle. Then another and another. The Remittance Man spoke no more. In his place came the hissing voice of one horrible in frustration: "American peoper! You die!"

For a moment it was quiet in the cave. Then Fry leaped to his feet and looked distractedly at Charlesworth. "No! No!" he cried. He returned to the silent radio. "No!" he insisted, hammering it with his fist. He swung around and grabbed Charlesworth by the arm. "I'm going over to see Kester," he said in mumbling words.

Fry! There's nothing you can do," the skipper assured him.

Do? We can get that man out of Bougainvillea!"

Don't be carried away by this thing, Fry," Charlesworth reasoned quietly. "The man's dead and that's that."

Dead?" Tony shouted. "Don't you believe it!" He ran out of the cave and started down the hill.

Fry!" Charlesworth cried. "You can't go over to Guadal. You have no orders for that." Tony stopped amid the flowers of the old English garden. He looked back at Charlesworth in disgust and then ran on down the hill.

We were unprepared for what happened next. Months later Admiral Kester explained about the submarine. He said, "When Fry broke into my shack I didn't know what to think. He was like a madman. But as I listened to him I said, 'This boy's talking my language.' A brave man was in trouble. Up in the jungle. Some damn fools wanted to try to help him. I thought, 'That's what keeps the Navy young. What's it matter if this fool gets himself killed. He's got the right idea.' So there was a sub headed north on routine relief. The skipper would try anything. I told him to take Fry and the Fiji volunteer along." The admiral knocked the ashes out of his pipe as he told me about it. "It's that go-to-hell spirit you like about Tony Fry. He has it."

The sub rolled into Tulagi Bay that afternoon. The giant Fiji scout stayed close to Tony as they came ashore. Whenever we asked the Fiji questions about the trip into the jungle he would pat his kinky hair and say in Oxford accents, "Ah, yes! Ah, yes!" He was shy and afraid of us, even though he stood six-feet-seven.

I dragged my gear down to the shore and saw the submariners, the way they stood aloof and silent, watching their pigboat with loving eyes. They are alone in the Navy. I admired the PT boys. And I often wondered how the aviators had the courage to go out day after day, and I forgave their boasting. But the submariners! In the entire fleet they stand apart.

Charlesworth joined us, too. About dusk he and Fry went to the PT line and hauled out a few carbines. They gave me one. We boarded the sub and headed north. In the pigboat Tony was like the mainspring of a watch when the release is jammed. Tense, tight-packed, he sweated. Salt perspiration dripped from his eyebrows. He was lost in his own perplexing thoughts.

We submerged before dawn. This was my first trip down into the compressed, clicking, bee-hive world of the submariners. I never got used to the strange noises. A head of steam pounding through the pipes above my face would make me shudder and gasp for air. Even Charlesworth had trouble with his collar, which wasn't buttoned.

At midnight we put into a twisting cove south of Kieta on the north shore of Bougainvillea. I expected a grim silence, ominous with overhanging trees along the dark shore. Instead men clanked about the pigboat, dropped a small rubber boat overboard, and swore at one another. "Ah, yes!" the Fiji mused. "This is the place. We were here four weeks ago. No danger here." He went ashore in the first boatload.

While we waited for the rubber boat to return, the submariners argued as to who would go along with us as riflemen. This critical question had not been discussed on the way north. Inured to greater dangers than any jungle could hold, the submariners gathered in the blue light of a passageway and matched coins. Three groups of three played odd-man-out. Losers couldn't go.

"Good hunting," one of the unlucky submariners called as we climbed into the boat. "Sounds like a damned fool business to me. The guy's dead, ain't he?" He went below.

Ashore the Fiji had found his path. We went inland half a mile and waited for the dawn. It came quietly, like a purposeful cat stealing home after a night's adventure. Great trees with vine-ropes woven between them fought the sun to keep it out of the jungle. Stray birds, distant and lonely, shot through the trees, darting from one ray of light to another. In time a dim haze seeped through the vast canopy above us. The gloomy twilight of daytime filled the jungle.

As we struggled toward the hills we could see no more than a few feet into the dense growth. No man who has not seen the twisting lianas, the drooping parasites, the orchids, and the dim passages can know what the jungle is like, how oppressive and foreboding. A submariner dropped back to help me with my pack. "How do guys from Kansas and Iowa fight in this crap?" he asked. He went eight steps ahead of me, and I could not see him, nor hear him, nor find any trace that a human had ever stood where I then stood. The men from Kansas and Iowa, I don't know how they cleaned up one jungle after another.

The path became steeper. I grew more tired, but Tony hurried on. We were dripping. Sweat ran down the bones at the base of my wrist and trickled off my fingers. My face was wet with small rivulets rising from the springs of sweat in my hair. No breath of air moved in the sweltering jungle, and I kept saying to myself, "For a man already dead!"

The Fiji leaned his great shoulders forward and listened. "We are almost there," he said softly, like an English actor in a murder mystery. The pigboat boys grinned and fingered their carbines. The jungle path became a trail. The lianas were cut away. Some coconut husks lay by the side of a charred fire. We knew we were near a village of pretensions.

Fry pushed ahead of the Fiji. He relaxed his grip upon the carbine and dragged it along by the strap. He hurried forward.

"There it is!" he cried in a hoarse whisper. He started to run. The Fiji reached forward and grabbed him, like a mother saving an eager child. The giant Negro crept ahead to study the low huts. Inch by inch we edged into the village square. We could see no one. Only the hot sun was there. A submariner, nineteen years old, started to laugh.

"Gosh!" he cried. "Nobody here!" We all began to laugh.

And then I saw it! The line of skulls! I could not speak. I raised my arm to point, but my hand froze in half-raised position. One by one the laughing men saw the grim palisades, each pole with a human head on top. I was first to turn away and saw that Fry was poking his carbine into an empty hut.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Here's where he was. This was his hut!"

"Tony!" I cried. My voice burst from me as if it had a will of its own.

"What do you know?" Tony called out from the hut. "Here's the guy's stuff! I wouldn't be surprised if he..."

Fry rejoined us, carrying part of a radio set. The bright sun blinded him for a moment. Then he saw my face, and the row of skulls. He dropped his carbine and the rheostat. "No!" he roared. "God! No!" He rushed across the sun-drenched square. He rushed to the fifteen poles and clutched each one in turn. The middle, thickest and most prominent, bore the sign: "American Marine You Die."

Charlesworth and I crossed to the skull-crowned palisades. I remember two things. Fry's face was composed, even relaxed. He studied the middle pole with complete detachment. Then I saw why! Up the pole, across the Jap sign, and on up to the withering head streamed a line of jungle ants. They were giving the Remittance Man their ancient jungle burial.

Charlesworth's jaw grew tense. I knew he was thinking, "When I get a Jap..." I can't remember what I thought, something about, "This is the end of war..." At any rate, my soliloquy was blasted by an astonished cry from a submariner.

The skulls had shocked us. What we now saw left us horrified and shaken. For moving from the jungle was a native with elephantiasis. He was so crippled that he, of all the natives, could not flee at our approach.

I say he moved. It would be more proper to say that he crawled, pushing a rude wheelbarrow before him. In the barrow rested his scrotum, a monstrous growth that otherwise would drag along the ground. His glands were diseased. In a few years his scrotum had grown until it weighed more than seventy pounds and tied him a prisoner to his barrow.

We stepped back in horror as he approached. For not only did he have this monstrous affliction, but over the rest of his body growths the size of golf balls protruded. There must have been fifty of them. He, knowing of old our apprehensions, smiled. Tony Fry, alone among us, went forward to greet him and help him into the shade. The man dropped his barrow handles and shook hands with Tony. Fry felt the knobs and inwardly winced. To the man he made no sign. "You talk-talk 'long me?" Tony asked. The man spoke a few words of Pidgin.

Fry gave the man cigarettes and candy. He broke out some cloth, too, and threw it across the wheelbarrow. Without thinking, he placed his right foot on the barrow, too, and talked earnestly with the crippled native.

All that steaming midday, with the sun blazing overhead, Tony asked questions, questions, and got back fragments of answers in Pidgin. "Japoni come many time. Take Maries. Take banan'. Take young girls. Kill missi. One day white man come. Two bockis. Black string. There! There! There! Chief want to kill white man like Japoni say. Now chief he pinis. That one. That he skull.