The Naked and the Dead (11 page)

            There was Lieutenant Colonel Webber, a short fat Dutchman, with a perpetual stupid good-natured grin which he interrupted only to ladle some food into his mouth. He was in command of the engineer section of the division, reputedly a capable officer, but Hearn had never heard him say anything, had never seen him do anything except eat with ferocious and maddening relish whatever slop had been delivered to them that day out of the endless cans.

            Across the table from Webber were the "twins," Major Binner, the Adjutant General, and Colonel Newton, the Regimental Commander of the 460th. They were both tall thin mournful-looking men, with prematurely gray hair, long faces, and silver-rimmed eyeglasses. They looked like preachers, and they also rarely spoke. Major Binner had given evidence one night at supper of a religious disposition; for ten minutes he had conducted a monologue with appropriate references to chapter and verse in the Bible, but this was the only thing which distinguished him to Hearn. Colonel Newton was a painfully shy man with excellent manners, a West Pointer. Rumor claimed he had never had a woman in his life -- since this was in the jungle of the South Pacific, Hearn had never had an opportunity to observe the Colonel's defection at first hand. But the Colonel was beneath his manners an extremely fussy man who nagged his officers in a mild voice, and was reputed never to have had a thought which was not granted him first by the General.

            These three should have been harmless; Hearn had never spoken to them, and they had done him no harm but he loathed them by now with the particular venom that a familiar and ugly piece of furniture assumes in time. They annoyed him because they were part of the same table which held Lieutenant Colonel Conn, Major Dalleson and Major Hobart.

            "By God," Conn was saying now, "it's a damn shame that Congress hasn't slapped them down long ago. When it comes to
them
they pussyfoot around as if they were the Good Lord himself, but try and get an extra tank, try and get it." Conn was small, quite old, with a wrinkled face, and little eyes set a trifle vacantly under his forehead as though they did not function together. He was almost bald with a patina of gray hair above his neck and over his ears, and his nose was large, inflamed, and veined with blue filaments. He drank a great deal and held it well; the only sign was the hoarse thick authority of his voice.

            Hearn sighed and poured some lukewarm water from a gray enamel pitcher into his cup. The sweat was lolling doubtfully under his chin, uncertain whether to run down his neck or drip off the edge of his jaw. Caustically, Hearn's chin smarted as he rubbed the perspiration onto the forearm of his sleeve. About him, through the tent, conversation flickered at the various tables.

            "That girl had what it takes. Oh, brother, Ed'll tell you."

            "But why can't we lay that net through Paragon Red Easy?"

            Would the meal never end? Hearn looked up again, saw the General staring at him for an instant.

            "Goddam shame," Dalleson was muttering.

            "I tell you we ought to string them up, every last mother's son of them." That would be Hobart.

            Hobart, Dalleson and Conn. Three variations on the same theme. Regular Army first sergeants, now field officers; they were all the same, Hearn told himself. He derived a mild amusement from picturing what would happen if he were to tell them to shut up. Hobart was easy. Hobart would gasp and then pull his rank. Dalleson would probably invite him outside. But what would Conn do? Conn was the problem. Conn was the b.s. artist from way back. If there was anything you had done, he had done it too. When he wasn't mouthing politics, he was your friend, the fatherly friend.

            Hearn left him for a moment, and reconsidered Dalleson. There was only one possibility for Dalleson, and that was for him to get enraged and want to fight. He was too big to do anything else, even bigger than Hearn, and his red face, his bull neck, his broken nose, could express either mirth or rage or bewilderment, the bewilderment always a transitory thing until he realized what was demanded of him. He looked like a professional football player. Dalleson was no problem; he even had potentialities for being a good man.

            Hobart was easy too; the Great American Bully. Hobart was the only one who had not been a Regular Army first sergeant, but almost as good, he had been a bank clerk or the manager of a chain store branch. With a lieutenancy in the National Guard. He was what you would expect; he never disagreed with anyone above him and never listened to his subordinates. Yet he wanted to be liked by both. He blustered and cajoled, was always the good guy for the first fifteen minutes you knew him, with the rutted gross patois of the American Legion-Rotary-Chamber of Commerce, and afterward distrusted you with the innate, insecure and blinding arrogance of his stamp. He was plump and cherubic with sullen pouting cheeks and a thin little mouth.

            Hearn had never doubted these impressions for a moment. Dalleson, Conn and Hobart were always lumped together. He saw the differences, actually disliked Dalleson a little less than the others, recognized the distinctions in their features, their abilities, and yet they were equated in the sweep of his contempt. They had three things in common, and Hearn threw out all the other divergences. They were first of all red-faced, and Hearn's father, a very successful mid-western capitalist, had always been florid. Secondly, they all had tight thin little mouths, a personal prejudice of his, and third, worst of all, none of them for even an instant had ever doubted anything they had ever said or done.

            Several people had at one time or another made it a point to tell Hearn that he liked men only in the abstract and never in the particular, a cliché of course, an oversimplification, but not without casual truth. He despised the six field officers at the adjacent table because no matter how much they might hate kikes, niggers, Russians, limeys, micks, they loved one another, tampered gleefully with each other's wives at home, got drunk together without worrying about dropping their guard, went joyously through their income-bracket equivalents of shooting up a whorehouse on Saturday night. By their very existence they had warped the finest minds, the most brilliant talents of Hearn's generation into something sick, more insular than the Conn-Dalleson-Hobarts. You always ended by catering to them, or burrowing fearfully into the little rathole still allowed.

            And the heat by now had banked itself in the tent, was almost licking at his body. The mutter, the clatter of tinware against tinware rasped like a file against his brain. A mess orderly scurried by, putting a bowl of canned peaches on each of the tables.

            "You take that fellow. . ." Conn mentioned a famous labor leader. "Now, I know for a fact, by God --" his red nose wagging mulishly behind his point -- "that he's got a nigger woman for a mistress."

            Dalleson clucked. "Jesus, think of that."

            "I've heard on good authority that he's even had a couple of tan little bastards off of her, but that I ain't going to vouch for. All I can tell you is that all the time he's pushing through these bills to make the nigger a King Jesus, he's doin' it for good reason. That woman is runnin' the whole labor movement, the whole country including the President is being influenced every time she wiggles her slit."

            The labial interpretation of history.

            Hearn heard the sharp cold accents of his own speech coming out of his chest. "Colonel, how do you know all that?" Beneath the table his legs were weak with anger.

            Conn turned to Hearn in surprise, stared at him across the six feet separating their chairs, the perspiration tatted lavishly in big droplets on his red pocked nose. He was doubtful for a moment, uncertain whether the question was friendly or not, obviously bothered by the minor breach of discipline involved. "What do you mean, how do I know, Hearn?" he asked.

            Hearn paused, trying to keep it within bounds. He was aware abruptly that most of the officers in the tent were staring at them. "I don't think you know too much about it, Colonel."

            "You don't, eh, you don't, huh. I know a hell of a sight more about those labor bastards than you do."

            Hobart jumped in. "It's awright to go around screwing niggers and living with them." He laughed, seeking for approbation. "Perfectly all right, isn't it?"

            "I don't see how you know so much about it, Colonel Conn," Hearn said again. The thing was taking the form he had dreaded. Another exchange or two and he would have his choice of crawfishing or taking his punishment.

            His earlier question was answered. When Conn was caught, he only pushed it a little further. "You can shut your mouth, Hearn. If I'm saying something I know what I'm talking about."

            And like an echo, Dalleson getting in: "We know you're pretty goddam smart, Hearn." An approving titter flickered through the tent. They all did dislike him then, Hearn realized. He had known it and yet there was the trace of a pang. The Lieutenant beside him was sitting stiff, tensed, his elbow removed a careful inch from Hearn's.

            He had pushed himself into this position, and the only thing to do was to carry it off. Alloyed with the outraged beating of his heart was fear and a detached, almost mild concern with what would happen to him. A court-martial perhaps?

            As he spoke he felt a pride in the precision of his voice. "I was thinking, Colonel, that since you do know so much about it, you must have found out peeking through keyholes."

            A few startled laughs answered him and Conn's face expanded with rage. The red of his nose extended slowly out to his cheeks, his forehead, the blue veins startling now, a cluster of purple roots which held his choler. He was obviously searching for speech like a player who has dropped a ball and runs in frantic circles trying to locate it. When he spoke it would be terrible. Even Webber had stopped eating.

            "Gentlemen,
please!"

            It was the General calling across the length of the tent. "I won't have any more of this."

            It silenced them all, cast a hush through the tent in which even the clacking of the tableware was muted, and then the reaction set in with a chorus of whispers and small exclamations, an uncomfortable self-conscious return to the food before them. Hearn was furious with himself, disgusted by the relief he had felt when the General intervened.

            Father dependence.

            Beneath the surface of his thoughts he had known, he realized now, that the General would protect him, and an old confused emotion caught him again, resentment and yet something else, something not so genuine.

            Conn, Dalleson and Hobart were glaring at him, a trio of ferocious marionettes. He brought his spoon up, champed at the remote sweet pulp of the canned peach which mingled so imperfectly with the nervous bile in his throat, the hot sour turmoil of his stomach. After a moment he clanked the spoon down, and sat staring at the table. Conn and Dalleson were talking self-consciously now like people who know they are being listened to by strangers on a bus or train. He heard a fragment or two, something about their work for the afternoon.

            At least Conn would be having indigestion too.

            The General stood up quietly, and walked out of the tent. It gave permission for the rest of them to leave. Conn's eyes met Hearn's for a moment and they both looked away in embarrassment. After a minute or so, Hearn slid off the bench, and strolled outside. His clothing was completely wet, the air caressing against it like cool water.

            He lit a cigarette and strolled irritably through the bivouac, halting when he reached the barbed wire, and then pacing back underneath the coconut trees, staring morosely at the scattered clusters of dark-green pup tents. When he had completed the circuit, he clambered down the bluff that led to the beach, and walked along through the sand, kicking abstractedly at pieces of discarded equipment still left from invasion day. A few trucks motored by, and a detail of men shuffled in file through the sand carrying shovels against their shoulders. Out in the water a few freighters were anchored, yawing lazily in the midday heat. Over to his left a landing craft was approaching a supply dump.

            Hearn finished the cigarette and nodded curtly to an officer passing by. The nod was returned, but after a doubtful pause. He was going to be in for it now, there was no getting away from that. Conn was a bloody fool, but he had been a bigger ass. It was the old pattern; when he could take something no longer he flared up, but that was weakness in itself. And yet he could not bear this continual paradox in which he and the other officers lived. It had been different in the States; the messes were separate, the living quarters were separate, and if you made a mistake it didn't count. But out here, they slept in cots a few feet away from men who slept on the ground; they were served meals, bad enough in themselves, but nevertheless served on plates while the others ate on their haunches after standing in line in the sun. It was even more than that; ten miles away men were being killed, and that had different moral demands than when men were killed three thousand miles away. No matter how many times he might walk through the bivouac area, the feeling was there. The ugly green of the jungle beginning just a few yards beyond the barbed wire, the delicate traceries of the coconut trees against the sky, the sick yellow pulpy look of everything; all of them combined to feed his disgust. He trudged up the bluff again, and stood looking about the area at the scattered array of big tents and little ones, at the trucks and jeeps clustered together in the motor pool, the file of soldiers in green sloppy fatigues still filing through for chow. Men had had time to clear the ground of the worst bushes and roots, to establish a few grudged yards out of the appalling rifeness of the terrain. But up ahead, bedded down in the jungle, the front-line troops could not clear it away because they did not halt more than a day or two, and it would be dangerous to expose themselves. They slept with mud and insects and worms while the officers bitched because there were no paper napkins and the chow could stand improvement.