The Naked and the Dead (91 page)

            A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.

            At the ledge that faced the first grove he had stood up casually, had been about to motion the others to follow him, when the Jap machine gun fired. He toppled back among the men gathered behind the shelf.

            The shock was acute. For ten or twenty seconds the men in the platoon did nothing, squeezed themselves into the defilade of the rock, their arms covering their heads, while the Japanese rifles, the machine gun lashed above them.

            Croft reacted first, poked his rifle through a gap in the rocks and fired rapidly at the grove, listening dumbly to the flat pinging sound of his empty clip as it popped out of his rifle. Beside him, Red and Polack had recovered enough to stand up and fire back. Croft felt a deep release; at that moment his body was light. "Come on, men, get some fire back," he bawled. His mind was working quickly. There were only a few men in the grove, probably not even a squad, or they would have waited for the whole platoon to show itself. This way, they wanted to frighten them off.

            Well, that was all right. He wasn't going to hang around here. Croft stared for a moment at the Lieutenant. Hearn was lying on his back, the blood spurting softly from his wound, covering his face and body slowly and inevitably. Croft felt a sense of relief again. No longer was there that confusion, that momentary internal pause before he gave an order.

            The skirmish continued for a few minutes, and the rifles and machine gun were silent in the grove. Croft ducked down again behind the shelf. A little frantically, the men were crawling away from the ledge.

            "Hold it," he called out. "Let's get out of here the right way. Gallagher! Roth! You stay here with me, keep up some fire, The rest of you get around that knoll. Martinez, you take them" -- he pointed to the hillock behind them -- "when you get there, open up on the grove, and we'll pull out and join you." He stood up for a moment, squeezed off a few rounds from a new clip, and then ducked again as the Jap machine gun answered. "All right, now get going!"

            They crawled away, and several minutes later Croft heard them firing behind him. "Come on," he whispered to Gallagher and Roth. They started off, sliding on their bellies for the first fifty feet and then running from a crouched position. Roth caught a glimpse of Hearn as he crawled by, and for an instant his legs went weak and he gasped rather emptily. "Oh." It passed through him in a bout of faintness, and then he began crawling and then running. "Terrible," he muttered.

            Croft joined the others behind the hill. "All right, men, let's haul ass. We're gonna head right along next to the cliffs, and we ain't gonna hang around for no one." He took the lead in the column and they moved out rapidly, jogging for several hundred yards at a time before slowing to a walk, and then after a few paces beginning to trot again. In an hour they moved five miles over the hills and through the tall grass, never pausing, never slowing down for the stragglers.

            Roth forgot quickly about the Lieutenant, as did the others. The shock of the second ambush was blunted in the rigors of their retreat. They thought of nothing but the breathless clamor in their chests, the trembling of their overworked legs. When Croft finally called a halt they flopped on the ground numbly, not even caring if the Japs were pursuing them. At that moment if they had been attacked they would probably have lain there dumb.

            Croft alone was standing. He spoke slowly, his chest heaving, but his speech distinct. "We're gonna take a little break." He stared disdainfully at them, noting the stupor with which they listened to him. "Since you men are all so goddam pooped, I'll stand guard." Most of them had hardly heard him, and those who did gathered no sense from his words. They just lay there passive.

            Slowly they recuperated, their breath becoming normal, their legs regaining some strength. But still the ambush and the march had drained them. The morning sun was high enough by now to be unpleasantly hot and they sweltered, lying on their bellies and watching the perspiration drip from their faces onto their forearms. Minetta retched up the dry sour lumps of his breakfast ration.

            As they recovered, the Lieutenant's death bothered them only slightly. It had been too abrupt, too disconnected for them to feel very much, and now that he was gone they found it difficult to believe he had ever been with the platoon. Wyman crawled over to Red and lay down beside him, plucking idly at a few tufts of grass. Occasionally he would bite on one and then spit it out.

            "That was funny," he said at last. It was pleasant to be lying there, knowing that in an hour they would turn back. A small filtrate of the terror he had felt in the ambush worked through him for a moment.

            "Yeah," Red muttered. And now the Lieutenant. He could see Hearn scowling when he had refused the offer to be a noncom. His mind skated on the brittlest ice, and he had a vague sense of oppression as if there was something he could not afford to face, something that was going to come up again.

            "The Lootenant was a good guy," Wyman blurted suddenly. The words shocked him deeply. For the first time he bridged the distance between his few contacts with Hearn and the last glimpse he had had of him, the bloody meaningless corpse. "A good guy," he repeated doubtfully, feeling his way around the edge of the terror this caused.

            "They ain't a fuggin one of those officers is worth a goddam," Red swore. His exhausted limbs twitched nervously from his anger.

            "Oh, I don't know, there's all kinds of guys. . ." Wyman protested gently. He was still trying to bridge the sound of the Lieutenant's voice with the color of his blood.

            "I wouldn't spit on the best one of them," Minetta said furiously. A mild superstition about not saying anything bad about the dead troubled him, but he repressed it defiantly. "I ain't afraid of saying what I think. They're all bastards." Under his high forehead, Minetta's eyes looked large, excited. "If it took him being knocked off for us to go back, then I'll settle for that." They had sent him out, they didn't give a goddam, but who could he fight against? "Aaaah." He lit a cigarette, puffed cautiously at it, for the smoke roiled his stomach.

            "Who says we're going back?" Polack asked.

            "That looey did," Wyman said.

            Red snorted. "Yeah, the Looey." He rolled over on his stomach.

            Polack picked his nose. "Y'wanta bet we ain't knocking off?" There was something screwy about the whole setup, screwy as hell. That Croft, what a baby. A hood. It was the kind of guy you needed, a sonofabitch.

            "Aw," Wyman said vaguely. For an instant he thought of the girl who had stopped writing letters to him. He didn't even care if she was alive or dead now. What did it matter? He stared up at the mountain, and hoped they would turn back. Had Croft said anything about it?

            As if to answer him, Croft sauntered toward them from his guard post. "All right, you men, let's get movin'."

            "We going back, Sergeant?" Wyman asked.

            "Don't gimme any of your goddam lip, Wyman, we're gonna try the mountain." A low shocked chorus, grumbling and resentful, answered him. "Any one of you men got something to say about it?"

            "Why the hell don't we go back, Croft?" Red asked.

            '"Cause that ain't what they sent us out to do." Croft hovered about an intense rage. He would not be balked now. For an instant he was tempted to raise his rifle and blast it at Valsen's head. He felt himself compressing his jaws. "Come on, you men, you want the Japs to be waitin' for ya again?"

            Gallagher glared at him. "That lootenant said we're goin' back."

            "I'm in charge of this platoon now." He stared at them, besting them with his eyes. One by one they stood up, hoisted their packs sullenly. They were a little numb. This was a shock which left them passive. "Aah, fug him," Croft heard one of them mutter, and he grinned to himself, lashed them with his tongue. "You bunch of women!"

            They were all standing now, all ready. "Let's go," he said quietly.

            The platoon moved out slowly in the midmorning sun. After a few hundred yards they were tired again, and plodded along encased in a stupor. They had never really believed the patrol would end so easily. Croft led them on a route parallel to the cliffs of the mountain and toward the east. After twenty minutes they came to the first rent in the great bluffs of the mountain's base. A deep ravine slanted upward for several hundred feet to the first ridge, its red clay walls refracting brightly the heat of the sun. Without a word Croft turned toward it and the platoon began to climb the mountain. There were eight men left now.

            "You know that Croft," Polack said to Wyman, "he's an idealist, that's what the fug he is." The big word pleased him for a moment and then was lost in the labor of scrambling up the burning clay floor of the ravine. Something screwy. He'd have to pump Martinez.

            Wyman could see the Lieutenant again. A process which had been working in him since the ambush came to a focus. Before he could think, for he was very afraid of Polack's derision, he mumbled, "Listen, Polack, you think there's a God?"

            Polack grinned, worked his hands under his pack straps to ease the chafing. "If there is, he sure is a sonofabitch."

            "Oh, don't say that."

            Painfully, the platoon continued to ascend the ravine.

The Time Machine:

POLACK CZIENWICZ

GIMME A GIMMICK AND I'LL MOVE THE WORLD

           
The lewd mobile mouth, the three upper teeth missing on the left side of his face. . . perhaps twenty-one years old, but his eyes were shrewd, bawdy, and when he laughed his skin was wizened and tough like the skin of a middle-aged man. With his hooked broken nose, his long pointed jaw, which slanted back to his receded gums, Minetta thought he looked like a cartoon of Uncle Sam. Yet he felt uncomfortable with him; secretly he was afraid to match his knowledge against Polack's.

            The lock on the downstairs door is broken of course, and the mailboxes have been looted long ago; the hinges that remain are rusting off. It smells like a urinal in the hallway; the dirty tile of the entrance has absorbed the odors of the leaking pipes, the cabbage and garlic, the grease traps in the plumbing, which no longer work. On your way up the stairs you must lean toward the wall, for the banister is broken and yaws over undependably like the carcass of a ship rotting on the sands. In the gray angles where the walls meet the floor you can watch the mice ambling through the dust, the pure and erratic motion of the cockroaches out for a stroll.

            The air shaft that connects the bathrooms from floor to floor is filling up with trash and an occasional discharge of garbage. When it reaches the second story the janitor will set fire to it.

            Improvised incinerator.

            The house is exactly like every other one on the block and the square mile surrounding it.

            Casimir ("Polack") Czienwicz, age of nine, wakes up in the morning and scratches his head, sits up on the pile of quilting spread out upon the floor, and looks at the stove in the center of the room, which has gone out. There are three other children besides himself sleeping there, and he rolls over, pretends he is still asleep. Soon his sister Mary will be waking, moving about and dressing, and he wants to watch her.

            Outside the wind is begging against the windowpanes, slinking between the cracks to slide freely along the floor.

            Jesus, it's cold, he mutters to his brother sleeping beside him.

            She up yet? (The brother is eleven.)

            Soon. He holds his finger against his lips.

            Mary rises shivering, pokes at the stove abstractedly, and pulls her cotton slip down about her shoulders, letting the nightgown fall as the slip travels down her body. The two boys catch a glimpse of bare flesh, giggle quietly in their beds.

            What are you looking at, Steve? she shouts.

            Haw, I saw ya, I saw ya.

            You didn't.

            I did.

            He has put out his hand to stop Steve too late. Casimir shakes his head in disgust, mature disgust. Wha'd ya go and do that for, now ya ruined it.

            Aaah, shut up.

            You dope, Steve.

            Steve takes a poke at him, but Casimir has ducked, is darting about the room, avoiding him. Stop it, Steve, Mary screams.

            Cut it out, cut it out, Polack yells.

            The father, a huge heavy man, has come in from the other room, wearing only his pants. You kids stop it, he shouts in Polish. Seeing Steve he cuffs him. Don't look at the girl.

            Casimir did it first.

            I di'n't, I di'n't.

            Leave Casimir alone. He cuffs Steve again, his hands still smelling from the cattle blood in the stockyards.

            I'll get ya, Steve whispers later.

            Awwww. But Casimir grins to himself. He knows Steve will forget, and if he doesn't there will be a way to escape. There always is.

            In the classroom everybody is shouting.

            Who put gum on the seats, who put the gum on?

            Miss Marsden looks ready to cry. Quiet, children, quiet please. John, you and Louis can start cleaning it up.

            Why do we have to, teacher, we didn't put the gum on?

            I'll help, teacher, Casimir says.

            All right, Casimir, that's a good boy.

            The little girls are snuffling their noses, looking about with interest now and indignation. Casimir did it, they whisper, Casimir did it.