The Naked and the Dead (96 page)

            Now, as he thought of it, he felt some anxiety for a moment, wished he had been kinder as if that would allay his own fate. Nah, he thought, that's superstitious. It hasn't got anything to do with this. He wondered if Croft perhaps felt the same way when he was cruel, but that was ridiculous. It's something in the past, forget it, he told himself. But he was afraid.

            And Wyman was thinking of a football game he had played once on a sandlot. It had been the team on his block against the team from another one, and he had been playing tackle. In the second half his legs had given out and he had a humiliating memory of the opposing runners cutting through his position almost at will while he had dragged himself unwillingly through each play. He had wanted to quit and there were no substitutes. They had lost by several touchdowns but there had been a kid on his team who had never given up. Almost every play that kid had been in on the tackles, yelling encouragement, getting angrier and angrier at every advance the other team made.

            He just wasn't like that, Wyman decided. He wasn't the hero type, and he realized it with a suddenness and a completeness which would have crushed him months before. Now it only made him wistful. He would never understand men like Croft; he only wanted to keep out of the way of them. But still, what made them tick? he wondered. What were they always going for?

            "I hate this damn mountain," he said to Roth.

            "Likewise." Roth sighed again. The mountain was so open, so high. Even when he lay on his back he could not see the top of it. It just reared above him, ridge beyond ridge, and higher up it seemed made entirely of rock. He had hated the jungle, had started with terror every time an insect crawled over him or a bird chattered suddenly in the brush. He had never been able to see anything, and it had been rife with so many foul odors which choked his nostrils. There had seemed no room to breathe, and yet now he wished he was back in the jungle. It was so secure in contrast to these naked ridges, these gaunt alien vaults of stone and sky. They would keep going up and up and there was no safety in it. The jungle was filled with all kinds of dangers but they did not seem so severe now; at least he was used to them. But here, one misstep and it would be death. It was better to live in a cellar than to walk a tightrope. Roth plucked angrily at the grass again. Why didn't Croft turn back? What could he hope to gain?

            Martinez's body ached. He was feeling a reaction from the previous night, and all morning as they had worked up the mountain he had plodded along, wretched with anxiety, his limbs trembling, his body wet with perspiration. His mind had played a few necessary tricks on him; the connection between his reconnaissance and Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.

            Toiling up the first slopes of the mountain, Martinez brooded about the Japanese soldier he had killed. He could see his face clearly, far more vividly now in the cruel dazzle of the morning sun than he had the night before, and in his memory he traced over every motion the Jap had made. Once again Martinez could feel the blood trickling over his fingers, leaving them sticky. He examined his hand, and with a pang of horror discovered a dried black thread of blood in the webbing between two of his fingers. He grunted with disgust and the excessive fear one feels in crushing an insect. Ahrr. And immediately afterward he could see the Jap picking his nose.

           
He was to blame.

            For what? They were on the mountain now, and if he didn't. . . if he hadn't. . . No kill Jap, go back to beach, he told himself. But that made no sense either, and his anxiety prickled along his back. He gave up the effort to think and trudged along in the middle of the platoon, finding no release in the exertion of the ascent. The more tired he felt the tauter his nerves became. His limbs had the heavy painful sensitivity of a man in fever.

            In the break he flopped down beside Polack and Gallagher. There was something he wanted to talk to them about, but he was not quite sure what it could be.

            Polack was grinning at him. "Whadeya say, scout?"

            "Oh, nothing," he said in a low voice. He never knew what to answer to "Whadeya say?" and it always made him uneasy.

            "They ought to give ya the day off," Polack said.

            "Yah." He had been a poor scout the night before, he had done everything wrong. If he hadn't killed the Jap -- that was the keystone of all his mistakes. He could not have named them, but he was convinced that he had made many mistakes.

            "Nothin' happened, huh?" Gallagher asked.

            Martinez shrugged, saw Polack looking at the dried blood on his hand. It would look like dirt, but he found himself saying, "Japs in the pass, I kill one." He felt relieved.

            "Huh?" Polack said, "what's the score? That looey told us the pass was empty."

            Martinez shrugged again. "Damn fool. He argue with Croft, say pass empty, after I come back, see Japs. Croft tell him Martinez good man, know what he see but Looey he don't want to listen, stubborn damn fool."

            Gallagher spat. "Ya had to knock off a Jap and he didn't believe it?"

            Martinez nodded, believing this was the truth now. "I listen them talk, man damn fool, I don't say nothing, Croft tell him." The entire sequence was confused in his mind. He could not have sworn to it, but at that moment he felt he remembered Croft and Hearn arguing, Hearn saying that they must go through the pass and Croft disagreeing. "Croft tell me keep my mouth shut when he talk to Hearn, know Hearn damn fool."

            Gallagher shook his head unbelievingly. "What a dumb stubborn fug that looey was. Well, he got it."

            "Yeah, he got it," Polack said. This was all mixed up. If a guy is told there's Japs in the pass, and he decides just like that there ain't any. . . That was a little bit too dumb. Polack didn't know. He felt an annoying frustration as if there were something under his finger, something he could point to. He felt unaccountably angry.

            "So ya had to knock off a Jap," Gallagher said with a grudged admiration.

            Martinez nodded. He had murdered a man, and if he were to die now, be killed on the mountain or on the other side of it, he would be lost with a mortal sin. "Yes, I kill him," he said, feeling even now a trace of sustaining pride. "Sneak up back of him and
cahoootz
. . ." He made a ripping sound. "And the Jap is . . ." Martinez snapped his fingers.

            Polack laughed. "Takes moxie, you know. You're okay, Japbait."

            He ducked his head shyly accepting the praise. He was hovering between merriment and depression when he remembered the gold teeth he had smashed out of the corpse's jaw on the battlefield, and he was marooned suddenly in a blanket of misery and fear. That sin he had not confessed and now this one too. His first emotion was bitterness. It seemed unfair that there should be no chaplain nearby who could save him. For just a moment Martinez thought of sneaking away from the platoon and heading back across the hills to the beach, where he could return safely and be confessed. But immediately afterward he knew it was impossible.

            And he realized why he had dropped down beside Polack and Gallagher. They were Catholics and they could understand this. He was so deeply absorbed in his mood that he assumed instinctively they were feeling the same way. "You know," he said, "we get hit, pop off, no priest."

            The words lashed Gallagher like a wet towel. "Yeah, yeah, that's right," he mumbled, caught up suddenly in a train of fear and unpleasant anticipation. He pictured automatically the postures of all the men in the platoon who had been wounded or killed, capped it off by seeing himself bleeding on the ground. The mountain yawed shiveringly above them, and Gallagher was filled with dread. He wondered for a moment if Mary had received absolution, was convinced she hadn't, and felt a little resentful toward her. Her sin would be visited on him. But that was dissipated immediately in remorse at thinking unkindly of someone who was dead. At this instant he was not thinking of her as his dead wife.

            The stupor, the stoicism with which he had protected himself on the patrol so far was rapidly dissolving. He hated Martinez at this second for having said what he did. He had never quite allowed himself to state this fear before on the patrol. "Just like the fuggin Army," he said furiously, and again he felt guilty for having used an obscenity.

            "What're you gettin' your balls in an uproar?" Polack asked.

            "No priest," Martinez said eagerly. Polack had spoken with such assurance that Martinez was certain he had some answer, some escape from the aisles of the catechism.

            "You think it ain't important?" Gallagher asked.

            "Listen, you want to know somethin?" Polack said. "You don't got to worry about that stuff. It's all a lousy racket."

            They were appalled. Gallagher peeked instinctively over his shoulder at the mountain. Both he and Martinez wished they were not sitting with Polack. "What are you, a fuggin atheist?" This time the profanity did not matter. Gallagher was thinking that it was true the Italians and Polacks always made the worst Catholics.

            "You believe that crap?" Polack asked. "Listen, I been t'rough the mill, I know what the score is. It's just a goddam good racket for makin' money."

            Martinez tried not to listen.

            Polack was riding his anger. A long-repressed hostility was coming out, and with it a sustaining bravado, for he also was afraid. He felt as if he were taunting a guy like Lefty Rizzo. "You're a Mex, and you're Irish, you get some benefits outa the goddam thing. The Polacks they don't get a damn thing. You ever hear of a Polack cardinal in America? Naw. I oughta know, I got a sister a nun." He thought of her for an instant, was bothered again by the sensation of something he could not understand. He looked at Martinez. What was the score? "I'm goddamned if they tie the can to me," he said, not quite sure what he meant, to what he referred. He was terribly angry. "If you know what the hell's goin' on, you're a sucker if you just sit around and let 'em do it to ya," he said furiously.

            "You don't know what you're talking about," Gallagher muttered.

            "Come on, men, get your packs on." It was Croft again. Polack looked around, startled, shook his head as Croft left. "Yeah, up the mountain, c'mon, c'mon," he jeered. His hands were trembling a little with rage.

            Their conversation was truncated there, but each of them was troubled as they marched.

            For the rest of the morning, the platoon clambered up the ridge. It seemed endless. They passed along rockly ledges, up knife-edged slopes of kunai grass so steep that they climbed by clutching at the roots as though they were ascending a ladder. They passed through a forest which straddled the ridge and sheered down to the floor of the gullies beneath them. They went farther and farther up until their limbs were trembling and their packs felt like hundred-pound bags of flour. And each time they came to a minor peak they were certain the crest of the mountain was near, and all they saw instead was another half mile of torturous ridge which abutted still another crest. Croft warned them. Several times during the morning, he stopped and said, "You men might jus' as well realize right now that the goddam mountain's pretty big, an' you ain't gettin' to the top in a hurry." They listened to him, but they could not believe him. It was too painful to climb without the supporting notion that their labors would be over soon.

            At noon they reached the end of the ridge and had a shock. It dropped for several hundred feet of precipitous rocks into a valley of stone set in the middle of the mountain, and beyond it the center of Mount Anaka rose far above them, ascending as high as they could see in tier upon tier of forest and clay and jungle and rock, rising vertiginously for what seemed like thousands and thousands of feet. They could not even glimpse the peak; it was lost in a coronet of clouds.

            "Jesus, have we got to climb
that?"
one of the men panted.

            Croft stared uneasily at them. It was too obviously an expression of the way they all felt. He was tired himself, almost as tired as he had been, and he knew he would have to drive them every yard upward. "We're gonna eat a ration here, and then we're gonna go on. You men understand that?"

            There was a subdued muttering again. He sat down on a boulder and stared in the direction from which they had come. Miles away he could see the yellow hills where they had been ambushed, and where someplace now Brown and his litter detail must be traveling. Far off he could see the fringe of jungle that bordered the island and beyond it the sea from which they had come. It was all wilderness; there seemed no one, nothing alive in any of it. The war on the other side of the mountain was remote at this moment.

            Behind him Mount Anaka bored into his back as if it were a human thing. He turned around and stared at it soberly, feeling again the crude inarticulate thrill it always gave him. He was going to climb it; he swore it to himself.

            But all around him he could feel the pressure of the men. He knew that none of them liked him, and he hardly cared, but now they hated him and he could feel it as almost a leaden oppression in the air.

           
And they had to get up.
If they failed, then the thing he had done with Hearn was wrong, and he had been bucking the Army, simply disobeying an order. Croft was troubled. He would have to carry the platoon virtually on his back and it was going to be very difficult. He spat, and slit the end off a cardboard K ration. As with everything else, he did this neatly, expertly.