The Naked and the Dead (40 page)

            "Yeah, it sure is."

            "Makes you think," the assistant said.

            After the midday meal, Gallagher was sitting in his tent when Croft called him. "What is it?" Gallagher asked.

            "The chaplain wants to see you," Croft said.

            "What about?"

            "I don't know," Croft shrugged. "Why don't you go see him? We'll be gone when you get back, so you'll have perimeter guard for the afternoon."

            Gallagher walked through the bivouac and stopped at the chaplain's tent. His heart was beating quickly, and he was trying to suppress the hope he was feeling. Before they had landed on Anopopei, he had asked the chaplain if he needed another assistant, and the chaplain had promised to consider him. To Gallagher it meant getting out of combat, and he had allowed himself to dream about the possibility several times.

            "Good afternoon, Father Leary," he said. "I heard you wanted to see me." His voice was polite and uncomfortable, and he was perspiring from the effort of having to watch his profanity.

            "Sit down, Gallagher." Father Leary was a tall slim middle-aged man with light hair, and a caressing voice.

            "What is it, Father?"

            "Go ahead and smoke, son." Father Leary lit a cigarette for him. "You get much mail from home, Gallagher?"

            "My wife writes to me every day, almost, Father. She's gonna be having a baby any day now."

            "Yes." Father Leary was silent; he fingered his lip, and then sat down abruptly. He put his hand on Gallagher's knee. "Son, I have some pretty bad news for you."

            Gallagher felt a chill. "What is it, Father?"

            "You know, son, there're a lot of things which are difficult to understand. You just have to believe that it's right, and that there's a good reason for it, that God understands and sees and does what is best, even if we don't understand right away."

            Gallagher was ill at ease and then abruptly frantic. All kinds of wild thoughts passed through his mind. He blurted out, "My wife didn't leave me, did she?" He felt shame as soon as he had spoken.

            "No, son, but there has been a death."

            "My mother?"

            Father Leary shook his head. "Not your parents."

            Gallagher thought his child had died in birth. He felt a quick passage of relief. That ain't so bad, went through his mind. For an instant he wondered again dumbly if Father Leary had called him in to give him the job as chaplain's assistant.

            "No, son, I'm afraid it was your wife."

            The words passed through Gallagher numbly. He sat there without any response, without thinking of anything at all. An insect buzzed in through the folded flaps of the tent, and he watched it. "Wha-a-a-at?" he asked.

            "Your wife died in childbirth, Gallagher." Father Leary looked away. "They were able to save your child, though."

            "Mary wasn't very big," Gallagher said. The word "dead" formed for him, and because it now had only one meaning to him, he saw Mary quivering and twitching like the Japanese soldier who had been killed in the draw. He began to shiver uncontrollably. "Dead," he said. The word had no sense. He sat there very numb; his thoughts had retreated into some deep secure closet of his mind and the words of the chaplain fell abstractly on the anesthetized surface of his brain. For a few seconds he felt as if he were hearing a story about someone else in which he was not very interested. Oddly, the only thing he told himself was that he had to look alert to impress the chaplain. "Ohhhhhh," he said at last.

            "The information they gave me was very slight, but I'll give you the details when I hear them, son. It's terribly hard to be so far away from home, and be unable to see your beloved ones for a last time."

            "Yeah, it's hard, Father," Gallagher said automatically. Like the rising of the dawn, Gallagher was slowly becoming able to distinguish the objects about him, and understand the news he had heard. His mind was telling him something bad had happened, and he thought, I hope Mary don't worry over the news. He realized suddenly that Mary would not be worrying, and before the contradiction, he retreated; he gazed dully at the wood of the chair upon which the chaplain was sitting. He felt as if he were in a church, and mechanically he looked at his hands and tried to assume a serious expression.

            "Life goes on. It's not without meaning that your child was saved. If you wish, I'll inquire for you as to who will take care of her. Perhaps we can arrange a furlough for you."

            Gallagher's spirits rose. He would be seeing his wife. But Mary was dead; this time his mind did not retreat quite so far. He sat there thinking of how pleasant the sunlight had been that morning as he climbed on the truck, and dumbly he understood that he wanted to go back to that moment.

            "Son, you've got to have courage."

            "Yes, Father." Gallagher stood up. He could not feel the soles of his feet, and when he rubbed his mouth it felt swollen and alien under his fingers. He had a moment of panic, and he thought of the snake in the cave. I bet a fuggin Yid was the doctor, he said to himself, and then forgot the thought. It left him with a pleasant glow of righteousness, however. "Well, thanks, Father," he said.

            "Go to your tent, son, and lie down," Father Leary said.

            "Okay, Father." Gallagher walked through the bivouac area. It was almost deserted now that the men were out on detail, and this gave him a secure feeling of isolation. He came to his tent, dropped in the hole, and stretched out on his blanket. He was feeling nothing except an extreme weariness. His head ached and he wondered idly if he should take an atabrine tablet from his jungle aid kit. Maybe I got malaria, he said to himself. He remembered the expression on Mary's face in the first days of their marriage when she would set a plate down before him with food upon it. Her wrists were very slim and he could see again the golden hairs on her forearm.

            "I bet a fuggin Yid was the doctor," he said aloud. The sound startled him, and he rolled over on his back. He was becoming angry as he thought about it, and once or twice he muttered, "The Yid killed her." It relieved the tension he was feeling. He felt a joyful self-pity, and he let it flow through him for several minutes. His shirt was wet, and every few seconds he would grind his teeth because the tension on his jaws pleased him.

            He felt suddenly clammy, and with a rush he began really to understand that his wife was dead. He felt an awful pain and longing which mounted in his chest until he began to weep. The sounds became noticeable to him after a minute or two, and he stopped, a little terrified, for they seemed remote from him. It was as if he had a coating of insulation about all his feelings, and the insulation could be shed for only a moment or two, before his pain drew it about him again.

            He began to think of the dead soldiers in the draw, only his mind pictured Mary consecutively in each of the postures their bodies had assumed. He began to shiver again, and an intense feeling of horror and nausea and fear spread through him. He clenched the blanket in his hand and muttered without realizing what he said, "I ain't gone to confession for too long." He became acutely conscious of the odor of his clothing. I stink, I need a bath, he thought. The idea began to bother him, and he thought of going down to the stream and stripping his clothing. He got out of the tent and felt too weak to walk the hundred yards, so he stopped outside Red's tent and filled a helmet from a jerrican of water. When he set the helmet on the ground it tipped and the water slopped over his feet. He took off his shirt, filled the helmet again, and poured the water over his neck. It felt cold and jarring, and he shuddered. Without thinking, he put on his shirt again, and stumbled back to his tent, where he lay without thinking anything for half an hour. The heat of the sun was oppressive on the rubber fabric of the poncho, and he became drowsy, and slept at last. In his slumber, his body would twitch from time to time.

The Time Machine:

GALLAGHER

THE REVOLUTIONARY REVERSED

           
A short man with a bunched wiry body that gave the impression of being gnarled and sour. His face was small and ugly, pocked with the scars of a severe acne which had left his skin lumpy, spotted with swatches of purple-red. Perhaps it was the color of his face, or it might have been the shape of his long Irish nose, which slanted resentfully to one side, but he always looked wroth. Yet he was only twenty-four.

            In South Boston and Dorchester and Roxbury the gray wooden houses parade for miles in a file of drabness and desolation and waste. The streetcars jangle through a wilderness of cobblestone and sapless wood; the brick is old and powders under your fingertips if you rub it vigorously. All colors are lost in the predominating gray; the faces of the people have assumed it at last. There are no Jews or Italians or Irish -- their features have blurred in an anonymous mortar which has rendered them homogeneous and dusty. It is in their speech. They all talk with the same depressing harsh arid tongue. "If I had a caah, I'd show it some caaer, I mean some caaer, I wouldn't paaark it just anywhaah."

            It was founded by burghers and is ruled by bourgeois; everything flows on glabrous surfaces, everything is fine in Boston to read the newspapers, which are all the same, everything is okay in politics because the political parties are the same. Everybody belongs to the middle class, everybody down to the bums who drowse and retch on the subway that goes to Maverick Square in East Boston at two A.M. on Saturday night. Somewhere they must have protested against going into the mortar but it is all lost now.

            There is a deadening regularity and a sullen vicious temper that rides underneath the surface, the glabrous surface of the Boston
Herald
and
Post
and
Traveler
and
Daily Record
and
Boston-American,
it erupts in the drunks who splatter the subways more completely than the drunks of any other city, it skitters around Scollay Square, where lust is always sordid and Sodom copulates in garbage. It even moves in the traffic, which is snarled and sullen and frenetic, and it rides the brow when the kids are beaten up in the alleyways, and the synagogues and cemeteries are fouled with language and symbol, "The fuggin kikes" and the cross or swastika. "I am distressed to hear of it," says Governor Curley, Saltonstall, Tobin.

            The kids have gang fights with stones and sticks and knuckle-bands; in the winter the snowballs are packed with rocks. It is of course harmless, a mere tapping of the healthycompetitiveinstinct.

            Hey, Gallagheh, Lefty Finkelstein's gang is gonna fight us.

            Sonsofbitches, let's get them. (Fear is something alien to the gang, stored far down in his stomach.) I been layin' for him.

            Get Packy and Al and Fingers, we're gonna clean up the Yids.

            What time we staat?

            What the fug you caaeh? Ya yella?

            Who's yella. I'm gonna get me my bat.

            (On the way he passes a synagogue. "Ya yella?" He spits on it.) Hey, Whitey, I'm givin' it one for good luck.

            Hey, Gallagheh, the kids yell.

            Watch out for your old man when he's got a bag on.

            In the house his mother winces at sounds and walks on tiptoe. His old man sits at the round table in the living-dining room, and grabs the yellow lace cover and crushes it in his big mitts. Then he spreads it out on the table again.

            Goddam, sure a man has. . . Sonofabitch. Hey, PEG!

            What is it, Will?

            His father massages his nose and chin. Cut out the goddam mousing around, walk like a woman goddammit.

            Yes, Will?

            That's all goddammit, get away.

            When your old man's as big a sonofabitch as Will Gallagher, you leave him alone when he's got a bag on. But you watch him so one of his mitts don't catch you on the side of the mouth.

            He sits stolid by the round table, and beats his fist down once or twice. He looks at the walls. (The brown pictures which once were green of shepherd girls in a wooded valley. They came off a calendar.) GODDAM PLACE.

            The triptych on the whatnot shudders as he bangs the table. Will, don't drink so much.

            SHUT UP! Shut your stupid mouth. He lumbers to his feet and staggers to the wall. The glass over the shepherd girl splatters as he throws it to the floor. He sprawls on the shabby gray-brown sofa, looks at the gray shiny nap of the carpet where it has worn through. Work your ass off, FOR WHAT?

            His wife tries to slip the bottle off the table. LEAVE IT THERE! Will, maybe you can get something else.

            Yeah. . . yeah. Have you whining I need a little this, a little that. Grocers butchers. Just let me break me back wrestling that truck around. Something ELSE. I'm stuck, I'm in a hole. GET THAT BOTTLE DOWN.

            He stands up, lurches toward her, and strikes her. She slips to the floor and lies there without moving, uttering a dull passionless whimpering. (A slim woman, drab now.)

            CUT OUT THE GODDAM NOISE! He looks at her dumbly, mops his nose again and rumbles toward the door. Get out of the way, Roy. At the door he stumbles, sighs, and then goes pitching down the street into the night.

            Gallagher looks at his mother. He is empty, close to weeping. Here, Ma. He helps her up. She begins to cry loudly, and numbly he supports her.

            Ya keep your mouth shut when the old man's got a bag on, he thinks.

            Later, he goes up to his room, and reads a book he drew from the library. King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. Boy-wise, he dreams of women in. . . lavender dresses he picks.