The Naked and the Dead (53 page)

            It swells into movement again, and through a friend he gets a job as an organizer for a union in an upstate city. There is a month of organizer's school, and then a winter of working in a factory, signing men up. And again the break. For after the majority is achieved and the union recognized, the leaders make a decision not to strike.

            Hearn, you don't understand, you can't afford to give a condemnation, you're just a dilettante in labor, and things that seem simple to you aren't.

            Well, what's the use of building up the union if we're not going to strike? This way it's just dues out of the pay envelopes.

            Listen, I know this outfit we're up against. If we strike they'll drop their recognition, fire the lot of us, and pull in a bunch of scabs, this's a mill town, don't forget.

            And we'll throw them right up against the NLRB.

            Sure, and after eight months there'll be a decision in our favor, and what the hell are the men going to do in the meantime?

            Then why have started the union, and given the men all that bullshit? Because of higher politics?

            You don't know enough about it to judge. The CIO would have been in here next year, Starkley's outfit, Red all the way through. You've got to build fences, you're being a kid about it, you want everything simple, do this and get that, well, I'll tell you it won't work that way, you got to build a fence around those boys.

            The editorship is out, and this too, and the others, he realizes. A dilettante skipping around sewers. Everything is crapped up, everything is phony, everything curdles when you touch it. It has not been the experience itself. There was the other thing, unfocused, the yearning for what?

            On an impulse he goes back to Chicago for a few weeks with his parents.

            Now, Bob, there's no use kidding around, you been out working and know what the goddam score is, you might as well come in with me, what with these war contracts with Europe, and the armies we're building I can use you, I'm getting so goddam big I don't even know all the damn factories I got a finger in, and it's gonna be getting bigger and bigger. I tell you it's different from the way it used to be when I was a kid, everything's tied up now, you know, it sorta gets out of hand, I get a funny feeling when I think of how big the whole works is, it's all consolidated, I can tell you. You're my son, and you're just like me, the only reason you been dicking around is there ain't anything big enough for you to get your teeth in.

            Maybe. And he wonders, feels the stirrings of the deeper urge. I want to think about it.

            Everything is lousy, so at least why not do it in a big way?

            He meets Sally Tendecker Randolph at a party, talks to her in a corner.

            Oh, sure, Bob, I'm domesticated now. Two children, and Don (a prep-school classmate) is putting on weight, you won't recognize him. It brings back memories looking at you.

            After the preliminaries they have a casual affair and he drifts around on the outskirts of her group for a month, and then two. (The few weeks have elongated.)

            An odd setup. They are nearly all married with one or two children and governesses and the children are sometimes seen at bedtime. There is a migratory party almost every night from house to house along Lake Shore Drive, and the wives and husbands are always mixed, always drunk. It is all done in a random, rather irritable kind of lust, and the petting is more frequent than the cuckolding.

            And once a week or so there is usually a nice public quarrel, or a drunken bathos which grates his spine.

            Now look, old man, Don Randolph says to him, you and Sally used to be great friends, maybe you are still by God I don't know (the drunken accusing stare) but the truth is Sally and I love each other, a great passion, I've been fooling around and I'm a dog, woman in our office, and Alec Johnson's wife, Beverly, you were there you saw us coming back in the car, stopped off at her house, oh God, wonderful, but I'm a dog, no moral fiber, and I'm. . . I'm. . . (starting to weep) Wonderful children, Sally's a bitch to them. He stands up, lumbers along the dance floor to separate Sally from her partner.

            Stop drinking.

            Go away, Don dear.

            The Randolphs are at it again, someone giggles. And the thing lurches in his head, and Hearn discovers he is drunk.

            You remember me, Bob, Sally says, you know what capabilities I have, what talent. I tell you there's nothing can stop me, but Don's impossible, he'd like to keep me in a rut, and my Lord he's perverted, the things I could tell you about him, and sullen, we went a month and a half one time without touching each other, and you know really he's no good in the business, my father much as told me that, it's just tied down with children and nothing really, you know nothing really I mean definite I can get my teeth into, if I were a man, and I have to make an appointment to get braces for Dorothy's teeth, and I'm always worried about cancer, you can't imagine what a deep worry that is for a woman, somehow I just don't keep up with things, once there was an Air Corps lieutenant, young but really very nice, very sweet, oh, but so naïve, you can't imagine how old I feel, I envy you, Bob, if I were a man.

            He knows this thing will not take either, the Lake Shore and conventions and entertaining men who bore him, the rigidity of an office, and eluding his mother's matches, transforming the
impulse
into carloads and contacts, the campaign contributions and representatives, senators, who are amenable, the Pullman cars, and the tennis courts, the absorption in golf, the particular hotels, and the odor of liquor and carpeting in a suite. Behind it there is the primal satisfaction, but he has learned too many other things on the way.

            New York again, and a job doing copy for a radio network, but this is a stopgap and he knows it. Rather abstractedly, without any deep feeling, he does a lot of work for Bundles for Britain, and follows the newspaper headlines of the advance on Moscow, thinks not very seriously of joining the party. At night sometimes he throws off his covers and lies naked on his bed feeling the late fall air eddy through the window, listening with a somber ache to the harbor sounds that float in on the fog. A month before Pearl Harbor he enlists in the Army.

            On the troop transport, which slips under the Golden Gate Bridge and heads out into the Pacific on a chill winter twilight two years later, he stands on deck and stares at San Francisco, fading away like dying logs in a fireplace. After a time he can see only the gaunt dark line of land still separating the water from the deepening night. The waves splash coldly against the hull.

            The new phase. In the old one he has looked and looked and butted his head against the wall of his own making.

            He ducks into a hatchway and lights a cigarette. There is the phrase "I'm seeking for something" but it gives the process an importance it doesn't really possess, he thinks. You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

            Somewhere in America now were the cities, and the refuse sitting on the steps, the electric lights and the obeisance to them.

            (All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the passion for movement like an ant nest suddenly jarred. How do you conceive your own death in all the marble vaults, the brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place?)

            It was disappearing now, the water washing almost completely over the land, the long vast night of the Pacific settling overhead. And there was the yearning toward the land that disappeared.

            Not love, not hate necessarily, but an emotion when he had expected none at all.

            Always there was the power that leaped at you, invited you.

            Hearn sighed, went out to the rail again. And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.

            A bunch of dispossessed. . . from the raucous stricken bosom of America.

12

            Minetta was sent to the Division Clearing Hospital after he had been wounded. It was very small. Eight squad tents, each with a capacity of twelve men, had been set up in a clearing near the shore. The tents were aligned in two rows of four, and around each tent a four-foot wall of sandbags had been erected. That was the extent of the hospital with the exception of a few extra tents at one end of the clearing which contained the field kitchen, the doctor's quarters, and the enlisted men working there.

            It was always quiet at the hospital. By midafternoon the air was heavy and the inside of the tents had become unbearably hot from the intense sun. Most of the patients drowsed uncomfortably murmuring in their sleep or groaning from their wounds. There was really very little to do. A few of the convalescents might play cards or read a magazine or at most take a shower in the center of the clearing where a gasoline drum filled with water had been fastened to the top of a platform made of coconut logs. There were also the three meals a day, and the morning round of the doctor.

            Minetta enjoyed himself at first. The wound he had received was hardly more than a scratch; it had laid open a few inches of his thigh, but the bullet had not been embedded and the bleeding had been moderate. He was able to walk with a slight limp an hour after he had been wounded. At the hospital he had been given a cot and some blankets, and he lay in bed comfortably and read magazines until dark. A doctor gave him a cursory examination, dressed his cut with sulfa powder, and left him alone until the next morning. Minetta felt weak and comfortable. He was suffering to a slight extent from shock, just enough to make him lassitudinous, but it kept him from thinking about the surprise and pain he had felt when the bullet had struck him. It was the first night in six weeks he had been able to sleep without being awakened for guard and the cot felt soft and luxurious in comparison to bedding on the ground. He awakened alert and cheerful. He played checkers with one of the men in his tent until the doctor came. There were only a few patients, and Minetta had a pleasant vague memory of talking to them the night before in the darkness. This is okay, Minetta decided. He hoped they would keep him in the hospital for a month, or perhaps evacuate him to another island. He began to tell himself that his wound was very serious.

            The doctor, however, glanced at his leg for a moment, replaced the dressing and told him, "You'll be able to leave by tomorrow."

            The information gave Minetta a pang. "You think so, sir?" he managed to say eagerly. He shifted his position on the cot, feigning some difficulty, and added, "Yeah, I'd like to get back to my buddies."

            "Well, you just take it easy," the doctor said, "and we'll see tomorrow morning." He jotted down something in his notebook, and went on to the next cot. The sonofabitch, Minetta told himself, I can hardly walk. As if to prove it, his leg began to ache a trifle, and he thought with bitterness, They don't care if you live or die here. All they want is to get you back where you can stop a bullet. He became sullen, and drowsed through the afternoon. They didn't even take stitches, he said once to himself.

            It began to rain toward evening, and he felt comfortable and secure beneath the tent. Boy, am I glad I don't have to be on guard tonight, he told himself. He listened to the downpour on the tent, and thought with pleasurable pity of the men in the platoon who would be awakened in their damp blankets to sit shivering in the muddy machine-gun hole while the rain penetrated their clothing. "Not for me," he said.

            But then he remembered what the doctor had said. It would be raining again tomorrow; it rained every day. He would be back working on the road or the beach, standing guard at night, perhaps going out on a patrol soon where he might be killed instead of wounded. He thought of how he had been caught on the beach, and he felt an acute surprise. It didn't seem possible that something as small as a bullet could have hurt him. The sounds of the firing, the emotions he had felt were returning to him, and he shuddered a little. It seemed unreal, the way a man's face may sometimes seem unreal if he gazes at it too long in the mirror. Minetta drew his blanket over his shoulder. They ain't getting me back tomorrow, he assured himself.

            In the morning, before the doctor came, Minetta took off his bandages and examined his wound. It was almost healed; the lips of the cut had come together and were filled with new pink flesh. They would certainly discharge him today. Minetta looked about him. The other men were occupied or sleeping, and with a quick motion he ripped open the gash again. It began to bleed, and he wrapped up the bandages with trembling fingers, feeling a guilty glee. Under the blanket he would rub his wound every few minutes to start the bleeding again. He felt a nervous impatience, waiting for the doctor to come. His thigh felt warm and sticky under the bandages, and Minetta turned to the man in the next cot. "My leg's bleeding," he said. "Those wounds are funny things."

            "Yeah."

            When the doctor examined him, Minetta was silent. "I see your wound's opened."

            "Yes, sir."

            The doctor looked at the bandage. "You haven't been touching it, have you?" he asked.

            "I don't think so, doc. Just started bleeding." He's on to me, Minetta decided. "Naw, it's okay, I'll be able to get back to my platoon today, won't I?" he pleaded.

            "You better wait another day, son. It shouldn't have opened that way." The doctor began dressing it again. "Let the bandage alone, this time," he said.

            "Yeah, why, sure, sir." He watched the doctor move on. Minetta was depressed. It's the last time I can pull that gag, he told himself.