The Naked and the Dead (88 page)

            Croft held his shoulder for a second. Martinez was shivering very slightly. "Are you okay, boy?" he asked.

            "Yeah, okay."

            "Well, now listen," Croft said. "When you get back, don't say anything to anybody till you see me. If the Lootenant is up, you just say to him nothing happened, do you understand?" Croft's mouth was numb, and he felt the powerful anxiety of disobeying an order. More than that, there was something else, unexpressed as yet. He exhaled his breath painfully.

            Martinez nodded, clenching and opening his fists to restore the sensitivity to his fingers. "I go now," he said, standing up.

            "You're a good boy, Japbait." It was eerie, whispering in the darkness. The bodies lying about them seemed dead.

            Martinez wrapped his rifle in his blanket to keep it dry, left it lying on his pack. "Okay, Sam." His voice quivered just slightly.

            "Okay, Japbait." Croft watched him talk for a few seconds to Hearn, and then move out of the hollow, dip into the kunai grass and bear off to the left, parallel to the great cliffs of the mountain. Croft rubbed his forearm reflectively and went back to his blanket, lay down, knowing he would not sleep until Martinez had returned.

            There it was before him again. You made a decision and backtracked on it and none of the problems was changed. Hearn shrugged wryly. If Martinez came back and reported no Japs in the pass, they would be moving forward in the morning. He scratched his armpit tenderly, staring down at the valley and the empty mournful hills about him. The wind soughed through the draws, drifted over the kunai grass, and whistled along the crests of the knolls, making a small murmur in its circuit like surf breaking a long distance away.

            It was a mistake, and he had played a curious deception with himself. It had been more than yielding to Croft, he had yielded to himself again, made it so complicated that he could never untangle the rationalization from what was valid. Tricks and tricks, more ways than one to skin a cat, and he had allowed it, knew that he would go forward in the morning if Martinez brought back a report of no Jap activity.

            When they finally got back to their bivouac, if they ever did, he could turn in his commission. That was the thing he could do, that would be honest, true to himself. Hearn rubbed his armpit again, sensing a reluctance. He didn't want to give up his commission, and that of course was part of the mechanism. You sweated through OCS, joked about the bars, were always contemptuous of them, and in time they grew to have an existence of their own, colored more than half your attitudes. After enough time went by it was like amputating an arm.

            He knew what would happen. He would be an enlisted man, a private, and the other enlisted men in whatever unit he would be assigned to would find out sooner or later that he had been an officer, and they would hate him for it, resent him, resent even the fact that he had resigned a commission, for it would mock their own ambitions conscious and unconscious. If he did this, it would be with open eyes; there would be nothing cleaner at the end of it, certainly nothing more pleasant. It would be lousy and painful, and probably the only discovery would be that he could fit into a fear ladder as well as anyone else.

            But there it was. He had been running away from fear, from vulnerability, from the admission that he was a man also and could be humbled. There was a saying, "It is better to be the hunted than the hunter," and that had a meaning for him now, a value.

            Mockingly, he could hear what Cummings would say to that. "'A nice sentiment, Robert, one of the nice lies for today, just like the lie about a rich man not going to heaven." And Cummings would laugh and say, "You know, Robert, it's only the rich who
do
go to heaven."

            Well, the hell with Cummings.. He had said that enough times in resentment, grudgingly, perhaps helplessly, but Cummings didn't know all the answers. If you granted him that man was a sonofabitch, then everything he said after that followed perfectly. The logic was inexorable.

            But the history wasn't. All right, all the great dreams had blunted and turned practical and corrupt, and the good things had often been done through bad motives, but still it had not all been bad, there had also been victories where there should have been defeats. The world, by all the logics, should have turned Fascist and it hadn't yet.

            For a moment there were a few sounds in the valley beneath him, and he picked up his rifle and stared into the shadows of the grass. It became quiet again. For some reason he was left depressed.

            It was a skinny enough hope, and all the pressures, all the machines, were squeezing men a little more; with every weapon the odds became a little more out of whack. Morality against bombs. Even the techniques of revolution were changed, were accomplished with armies against armies now, or not at all.

            If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.

            A plan for concerted action, comrades. He grinned sourly. There would always be another fifty, that wasn't the idea. It had no use. It was just something to keep you occupied, keep you happy. Tonight we strike at Generalissimo Cummings.

            Aaah, horseshit.

            There were no answers you could find, but perhaps there were epochs in history which had no answers. Rely on the blunder factor. Sit back and wait for the Fascists to louse it up.

            Only that wasn't enough, you couldn't do that. For whatever reason, you had to keep resisting. You had to do things like giving up a commission.

            Hearn and Quixote. Bourgeois liberals.

            Still, when he got back he would do that little thing. If he looked for the reasons they were probably lousy, but it was even lousier to lead men for obviously bad motives. It meant leaving the platoon to Croft, but if he stayed he would become another Croft.

            When things got really bad, maybe the political differences on the Left would be shelved.

            Drought season for anarchists.

            Martinez moved along for a few hundred yards through the tall grass, keeping well within the shadow of the cliffs. As he advanced, he awakened slowly, flexing his arms and pinching the back of his neck. He had been partially asleep while he had talked to Croft, or at least nothing that was said had any significance to him. He had understood the directions, the mission, he had known that Croft was telling him to do something and instinctively he obeyed, but he had not thought about the connotations. It had not seemed particularly dangerous or odd to be going out by himself at night into country he had never seen before.

            Now of course as his mind cleared it was becoming apparent to him. Damn fool thing? he wondered, and then dismissed it. If Croft had told him it was necessary, then obviously it was. His senses became alerted, his nerve ends poised. He moved forward with an effortless silent motion, placing his heel first on the ground, and then bringing his toes down gently, his body weaving through the grass to diminish the rustling. A man twenty yards away could not have been certain that anyone was approaching. And yet with this he did not go slowly; through experience, his feet seemed to paw the ground, avoiding stones or twigs, settling confidently, noiselessly. He was functioning more like an animal now than a man.

            He was frightened, but effectively so; he had no panic, and it left him intensely aware of everything he could see or feel. On the ship, in the assault boat that landed on Anopopei, a dozen times since, he had been close to hysteria, worth nothing at all, but that variety of fear had nothing to do with this. If he had had to endure one more artillery shelling he might have collapsed; his terror always expanded in a situation where he could do nothing to affect it, but now he was by himself, doing the thing he could perform better than any man he knew, and it supported him. All the successful reassuring connotations of other scouting missions he had made in the past year were stored beneath the surface of his thoughts.

            Martinez best man in recon, he said to himself with pride. Croft had told him this once, and he had never forgotten it.

            In twenty minutes he had reached the rock shelf where they had been ambushed. He squatted in the woods behind it and examined the ledge for several minutes before advancing again. And then behind the ledge he watched the field and the grove where the Japanese had fired at them. In the moonlight the field was a wan silver and the grove an impenetrable black-green far deeper than the blanched transparent shadows that surrounded it. Behind him and to his right he could feel the huge body of the mountain glowing oddly in the darkness like a vast monument illumined by spotlights.

            For perhaps five minutes he peered at the field and the grove, thinking of nothing at all, his eyes and ears the only part of him wholly alive. The tension with which he watched, the taut pressure in his chest was pleasurable, complete in itself, like a man in the first stages of drunkenness when he is content to feel only the symptoms of his intoxication. Martinez was holding his breath but he was unaware of it.

            Nothing moved at all. He heard no sounds besides the whispering of the grass. Slowly, almost leisurely, he slipped over the ledge and squatted in the field searching for a shadow in which he might hide. But there was no approach to the grove where he would not have to pass through the moonlight. Martinez debated for an instant, and then sprang to his feet, stood in complete view of the grove for a startling, terrifying second and then dropped to the ground again. No one fired. He would have taken them by surprise. The chances were likely that if there was anyone in the grove they would have been startled enough to fire upon him.

            Quietly, he stood up again and loped quickly across half the distance of the field, dropping behind a rock with a twisting sprawling motion. No answer, no fire. He ran another thirty yards, halted behind another rock. The borders of the grove were less than fifty feet away. He listened to his own breathing, watched the moonlight trace an oval of shadow beyond the rock. All his senses told him that there was no one in the grove, but it was too dangerous to trust them. He stood up for a full second, and then dropped down again. If they hadn't fired by now. . . He felt fatalistic about it. There was no way to cross an open field in the moonlight without being seen.

            Martinez glided across the rest of the distance separating him from the grove. Once inside the trees, he paused again, flattened himself against a trunk. Nothing was moving. He waited until his eyes became acclimated to the darkness and then he crept forward from tree to tree, separating the brush with his hands in his passage. After fifteen yards he came to a path and stopped, peering to left and right. Then he paced along it to the border of the grove again, halting before a small emplacement, into which he knelt. There had been a machine gun there several days before -- he reasoned this by the fact that the holes for the studs of the tripod were no damper than the surface of the emplacement. Besides, the machine gun had pointed toward the rock ledge; the Japanese would have used it that afternoon in the ambush if it had still been there.

            Slowly, cautiously, he examined the periphery of the grove. The Japanese had left, and by the number of empty ration cartons, the size of their latrine trench, he estimated that they must have made up a full platoon. Recon had run into much less than that; it could mean only that most of their platoon had been withdrawn a day or two before, and the men who had attacked them were a rear guard, who had retreated up the pass shortly afterward.

            Why?

            As if to answer him, he could hear faintly the sound of the artillery. It had been firing frequently all that day. Japs go back to help stop attack. This seemed reasonable, and yet he was perplexed. Somewhere farther up the pass there might or might not be some Japanese. Martinez shivered, holding the damp rotting cardboard wrapper of a ration in his hand. Somewhere. He had a vague rather frightening vision of soldiers moving in the darkness, stumbling from place to place. He would go groping into that. He shook his head like an animal bridling at an unexpected sensation. The silence and darkness of the grove were wearing upon him, eroding his courage. He had to move on.

            Martinez wiped his forehead. He was sweating and he realized with surprise that his shirt was quite wet and very chill. His tension had subsided for a moment or two, and it made him aware of his fatigue and the nervous shock of being awakened an hour or two after he had fallen asleep. The hamstrings of his thighs felt taut, quivered a little. He sighed. But he did not consider at all the idea of turning back.

            Carefully he followed the trail through the grove toward the pass. It extended for several hundred yards through brush and forest not quite thick enough to be jungle. Once his face brushed against a long flat leaf and a few insects darted in fright across his cheek. He flicked them off, his fingers moist with anxiety. But one of the insects held on to his fingers, and then began to slide up his forearm. Martinez flung it off, stood shivering in the darkness. For a few seconds everything was in balance; his will to move forward was frustrated by the irrational terror the insects had caused, the more concrete knowledge of the Japanese there must be ahead, and most of all by the increasing deadening weight of all this strange earth he must explore at night. He breathed deeply several times, moving his weight forward to his toes and then rocking back on his heels again. A dull sluggish breeze stirred the leaves slightly, caressed his face with a momentary breath of coolness. He could feel the perspiration coursing down his face in separate extended streams like the lines formed by tears.