The Naked and the Dead (106 page)

            Minetta tried to add up all the angles. He wouldn't be able to run again, but then who the hell wanted to run anyway? And as for dancing, the way they had these artificial limbs he could put on a wooden foot, and still hold his own. Oh, this was okay, this could work.

            For a moment he was uneasy. Did it make any difference which foot it was? He was a leftie and maybe it'd be better to shoot the right foot, or were they both the same? He thought of asking Polack, and immediately dropped the idea. This kind of thing he'd have to play alone. In a couple of weeks, on a day when nothing was doing, he could take care of that little detail. He'd be in the hospital for a while, for three months, six months, but then. . . He lit a cigarette and watched the clouds dissolve into one another, feeling agreeably sorry for himself because he was going to have to lose a foot and it was not his fault.

            Red picked at a sore on his hand, examining maternally the ridges and creases of his knuckles. There was no kidding himself any longer. His kidneys were shot, his legs would begin to break down soon, all through his body he could feel the damage the patrol had caused. Probably it had taken things out of him he would never be able to put back again. Well, it was the old men who got it, MacPherson on Motome, and then Wilson, it was probably fair enough. And there was always the chance of getting hit and coming out of it with a million-dollar wound. What difference did it make anyway? Once a man turned yellow. . . He coughed, lying flat on his back, the phlegm gagging him slightly. It took an effort of will to prop himself on his elbow and hawk the sputum out onto the floor of the boat.

            "Hey, Jack," one of the pilots on the stern hatch yelled, "keep the boat clean. We don't want to scrub it after you guys."

            "Aaah, blow it out," Polack shouted.

            Croft called from his bunk, "Let's cut out that spittin', men."

            There were no answers. Red nodded to himself. It was there, all right; he had waited a little anxiously for Croft to say something, had been relieved when Croft had not scolded him by name.

            The bums in the flophouse who cringed when they were sober and cursed when they were drunk.

            You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.

            He had to depend on other men, he needed other men now, and he didn't know how to go about it. Deep within him were the first nebulae of an idea, but he could not phrase it. If they all stuck together. . .

            Aaah, fug. All they knew was to cut each other's throats. There were no answers, there wasn't even any pride a man could have at the end. Now, if he had Lois. For an instant he hovered over the idea of writing her a letter, starting it up again, and then he threw it away. The least you could do was back out like a man. And there was the thought that maybe she'd tell him to go to hell. He coughed once more and spat into his hand, holding it numbly for several seconds before he wiped it surreptitiously on the canvas of his bunk. Let the boat pilot try to wash that out. And he smiled wryly, shamefully, at the satisfaction it gave him.

            The sneak. Well, he'd been everything else in his time.

            And Goldstein lay on his bunk with his arms under his head and thought dreamily about his wife and child. All the bitterness and frustration of losing Wilson had been tucked away in his brain, encysted temporarily by the stupor that had followed. He had slept for a day and a half, and the journey with the litter seemed remote. He even liked Brown and Stanley because they were a little uneasy with him and seemed afraid to bother him. He had a buddy too. There was an understanding between Ridges and him. The day they had spent on the beach waiting for the rest of the platoon had not been unpleasant. And automatically they had selected bunks next to each other when they got on the boat.

            He had his moments of rebellion. The goy friend he got was a goy -- a peasant, an outcast himself. He
would
get somebody like that. But he was ashamed for thinking this, with almost the shame he felt whenever a random caustic thought about his wife slipped through his head. It ended by his being defiant. For a friend he had an illiterate, but so what? Ridges was a good man. There was something enduring about him. The salt of the earth, Goldstein told himself.

            The boat wallowed along about a mile offshore. As the afternoon wore by the men began to move about a little, and stare over the side. The island skidded by slowly, always impenetrable, always green and opaque with the jungle skirting the water. They passed a small peninsula which they had noticed on the trip out, and some of them began to calculate how long it would be before they reached the bivouac. Polack climbed up on the rear hatch where the pilot was steering the boat and rested under the canvas canopy. The sun shifted over the water, reflecting brightly from each ripple, and the air held a subtle bouquet of vegetation and ocean.

            "Jeez, it's nice out here," Polack said to the driver.

            The man grunted. His feelings were hurt because the platoon had been spitting in the boat.

            "Aaah, what's eatin' ya, Jack?" Polack asked.

            "You were one of the wise guys who was giving me some lip before."

            Polack shrugged. "Aaah, listen, Jack, you don' wanta take an attitude like that. We been t'rough a lot, our nerves are up in the air."

            "Yeah, I guess you did have a rough go."

            "Sure." Polack yawned. "Tomorrow they'll have our ass out on patrol, you watch."

            "It's only mopping up."

            "Where do ya get that stuff, moppin' up?"

            The pilot looked at him. "Jesus, I forgot you men were out on patrol for six days. Hell, man, the whole fuggin campaign blew sky high. We killed Toyaku. In another week there won't be but ten Japs left."

            "Wha. . . ?"

            "Yeah. We got their supply dump. We're slaughtering them. I saw that Toyaku Line myself yesterday. They had concrete machine-gun emplacements. Fire lanes. Every damn thing."

            Polack swore. "The whole thing's over, huh?"

            "Just about."

            "And we broke our ass for nothin'."

            The pilot grinned. "Higher strategy."

            Polack climbed down after a while and told the men. It all seemed perfectly fitting to them. They laughed sourly, turned over in their bunks, and stared at the side bulkhead. But soon they realized that if the campaign was over they would be out of combat for a few months at least. It confused them, irritated them, they didn't know whether the news pleased them or not. The patrol should have been worth something. In their fatigue this conflict brought them close to hysteria and then shifted them over to mirth.

            "Hey, you know," Wyman piped, "before we went I heard a rumor they're going to send the division to Australia to make MPs out of us."

            "Yeah, MPs." They roared at this. "Wyman, they're sendin' us home."

            "Recon's gonna be personal bodyguard for the General."

            "MacArthur is gonna have us build him another house at Hollandia."

            "We're gonna be Red Cross girls," Polack shouted.

            "They're puttin' the division on permanent KP."

            Everything mixed in them. The boat, which had been almost silent, quivered from the men's laughter. Their voices, hoarse, trembling with mirth and anger, carried for a long distance over the water. Each time one of them said anything, it provoked new spasms of laughter. Even Croft was brought into it.

            "Hey,
Sergeant,
I'm gonna be a cook, I hate to leave ya."

            "Aaah, get the hell out, you're a bunch of goddam women," Croft drawled.

            And this seemed funniest of all. They held weakly onto the stanchions of their bunks. "Do I have to leave now, Sergeant? There's a lot of water," Polack bawled. It rushed through them in a succession of confused waves like water ripples spreading out from a stone only to be balked by other wavelets formed by another stone. Every time someone opened his mouth they roared again, wild hysterical laughter, close to tears. The boat shook from it.

            It died down slowly, erupted again several times like fire licking out from under a blanket, and finally wore itself out. There was nothing left but their spent bodies and the mild pleasure they found in releasing the tension upon their cheek muscles, soothing the ache of laughter in their chests, wiping their freshened eyes. And it was replaced by the flat extensive depression which overlay everything.

            Polack tried to revive it again by singing but only a few of them joined him.

           
"Roll me over

            In the clover.

            Roll me over,

            Lay me down

            And do it again.

           
Ha' past three

           
I had her on my knee.

           
Lay me down,

           
Roll me over,

           
Do it again.

           
Roll me over in the clover. . ."

            Their voices piped out feebly, lost in the flat placid washes of the blue sea. Their boat chugged along, the motors almost smothering the sound.

           
"Ha' past four

            I had her on the floor.

            Lay me down,

            Roll me over,

            Do it again."

            Croft got out of his bunk and peered over the side, staring moodily at the water. He had not been told the date on which the campaign had been won, and he made the error of assuming it was the day they had failed on the mountain. If they had been able to climb it, the campaign would have depended upon them. He did not even question this. It was a bitter certainty in his mind. His jaw muscles quivered as he spat over the side.

           
"Ha' past five

            We began to jive. . ."

            They sang as if they were playing chimes, Polack and Red and Minetta, gathered together at the stern. At every pause Polack would blow out his cheeks and go "Waah-waaaah," like a trumpet when it is fanned with a mute. Gradually it was catching the others. "Where's Wilson?" one of them shouted, and they all stopped for a moment. They had heard the news of his death but it hadn't registered. And suddenly he was dead. They understood it. The knowledge shocked them, loosed the familiar unreality of war and death, and the song wavered over a syllable or two. "I'm gonna miss that old sonofabitch," Polack said.

            "C'mon, let's keep going," Red muttered. Guys came and guys went, and after a while you didn't even remember their names.

            "Roll me
over
in the clover."

            They passed a bend in the island and saw Mount Anaka in the distance. It looked immense. "Boy, did we climb that?" Wyman asked.

            Some of them scrambled up the side, pointing out slopes of the mountain to each other, arguing whether they had climbed each particular ridge. They had a startled pride in themselves. "It's a big sonofabitch."

            "We did okay to go as far as we did."

            That was the main sentiment. Already they were thinking how they would tell it to their buddies in other platoons.

            "We just got lost in the shuffle. Everybody's gonna have a story to tell."

            "Yeah."

            And that pleased them too. The final sustaining ironies.

            The song was still going on.

           
"Ha' past six

            I had her doin' tricks.

            Lay me down,

            Roll me over,

            Do it again."

            Croft stared at the mountain. The inviolate elephant brooding over the jungle and the paltry hills.

            It was pure and remote. In the late afternoon sunlight it was velvet green and rock blue and the brown of light earth, made of another material than the fetid jungle before it.

            The old torment burned in him again. A stream of wordless impulses beat in his throat and he had again the familiar and inexplicable tension the mountain always furnished him. To climb that.

            He had failed, and it hurt him vitally. His frustration was loose again. He would never have another opportunity to climb it. And yet he was wondering if he could have succeeded. Once more he was feeling the anxiety and terror the mountain had roused on the rock stairway. If he had gone alone, the fatigue of the other men would not have slowed him but he would not have had their company, and he realized suddenly that he could not have gone without them. The empty hills would have eroded any man's courage.

           
Ha' past seven

           
She thought she was in heaven. . .

            In a few hours they would be back, pitching their pup tents in the darkness, getting a canteen cup of hot coffee, perhaps. And tomorrow the endless routine of harsh eventless days would begin once more. Already the patrol was unfamiliar, unbelievable, and yet the bivouac before them also was unreal. In transit everything in the Army was unreal. They sang to make a little noise.

            ". . .
roll me over