The Pistol (2 page)

In the Headquarters building upstairs outside the Colonel’s office, when Mast got there, everything was in an uproar. Officers were running all over the place, bumping into each other, getting in each other’s way. They all had the same numb, stupid, excited look the men in Mast’s company had had, the same look Mast could feel on his own face, and once again Mast was struck with that awareness that he was actually
seeing
history made.

When he finally saw the Adjutant coming out of the Old Man’s office, he reported to him and told him he was here.

“What? Oh,” the middle-aged first lieutenant said, looking numbly excited, as well as harassed. “Well, stick around. May have something for you to do. Messages or something.” He hurried off. Mast sat back down. What a way to spend the bombing of Hawaii. Outside the Jap fighters continued to scream over the quad, blasting. Inside, high-ranking officers continued to bump into each other in their hurry. And Mast sat.

It was some time after the attack was over, several hours, before the adjutant found time to release Mast and send him back to his company. They would not need him further. In the interim he had been sent out with a series of messages from the colonel to the various battalion and company commanders about moving out, and twice he was sent by the adjutant to the motor pool to find out what was holding the trucks up, but that was all.

Slowly Mast trudged back across the quad that was now swarming with activity. Not only had he missed almost all of the attack, but this release of the guard to take the field meant that he would have to turn in the pistol, and all Mast could think of was that if the Japs were landing (or
had
landed), what a wonderful personal defense weapon that pistol would be. Especially against those Samurai sabers of the officers, about which he had read so much. Because as soon as the other three men on guard reported back also, they would all be required to turn in their pistols for which they’d signed. Gloomily he kicked at a clod ahead of him that a Jap MG had churned up from the green.

When he got back to the company area the first thing Mast found out, however, from one of the disgruntled privates who had been detailed to help load the kitchen truck, was that the other three men from the company were staying behind. The entire Interior Regimental Guard with the sole exception of the orderly, which was himself of course, had been ordered to stay behind and continue their guarding duties until some provision for relieving them could be organized.

For a moment, as he heard this, Mast thought of just going on upstairs and hiding the pistol away in his full-field pack. It would certainly go unnoticed, perhaps for a long time, in this confusion. Perhaps forever. That was what he wanted to do. But what good would the pistol do him if the Japs were on the beaches and it was in his pack? Anyway, he thought with defeat, he had signed his name for it. And some essential of Mast’s childhood training, some inherent nervousness at the idea of going against authority, some guilt, and the shame of getting caught, refused to let him do what he desired. Now, if he hadn’t signed his name—Hell, it wasn’t even simple honesty, Mast raged at himself, it was just plain fear.

But he still couldn’t make himself do it. So instead he temporized. Still wearing the pistol and the other accouterments of guard duty, he went into the Orderly Room to report to the first sergeant, to see what might happen. Maybe the First wouldn’t even notice it.

“What? Oh,” First Sergeant Wycoff said, looking up with harassed eyes. He was behind his desk packing files and report books. “Released you? Well, turn in your gear and go upstairs and pack, Mast,” he said, not unkindly. “Field uniform, full-field pack, one barracks bag.”

“Yes, sir.” Mast’s spirits fell. He turned to go.

“And Mast,” First Sergeant Wycoff said sharply.

Mast turned around, his heart in his mouth from guilt. He was caught. “Sir?”

“Don’t worry about time,” the First Sergeant said bitterly, without even looking up. “There’ll be plenty of goddamned time for you to pack.” He slammed his Morning Report book into a musette bag.

“Yes, sir.”

Outside, Mast tried to analyze it. The First had told him to turn in his gear. Okay. That was obviously more or less an order. On the other hand, Wycoff had not mentioned the pistol specifically or even looked at it. But then perhaps that was because he always wore one himself when the company was in the field. In addition to his rifle, Mast remembered bitterly. Well, he couldn’t very well turn in the other stuff without the pistol. Reluctantly, loving the feel of the pistol on him and in his hand more now than ever before—especially when he thought about those Samurai sabers, Mast turned toward the supply room.

He was saved by the supply clerk. This soldier, a long, thin stringbean of an Italian Pfc who had been in the Army at least twelve years, was now in charge of another disgruntled detail drafted at random to load the supply truck, sitting in the street behind the kitchen truck. He only snarled.

“For God’s sake, Mast! Don’t bother me with a lousy pistol and brassard,” he screamed, shaking at Mast a .30-caliber watercooled he was carrying. “I got
important
things to do. Them goddam beaches are probably crawling with Jap infantry right now.”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” Mast said, and carefully veiled his surprised happiness under a look of hurt vanity.

Morally exonerated now, and relieved, although not without a certain nervousness at the thought of those beaches crawling with Jap infantry (crawling: like ants: all over you), he went upstairs to pack. The pistol still rode his hip heavily, a weight pregnant with compressed power, symbolic of an obscure personal safety. No wonder everybody wanted pistols. And he himself could not be held accountable for thievery: he had tried to give it back.

T
HE SECOND FLOOR SQUAD-ROOM
was alive with movement of men kneeling and straining at pack-straps, men stooping to stuff barracks bags with extra clothes. Moving out! As he rolled his own pack, Mast thought once again about packing the pistol away so no one would see it. If he did, maybe nobody would
ever
remember it. But if the Japs
were
on the beaches, already, he would want it immediately. And if the company dropped their packs going into action as they surely would, and the pistol was in his pack—. . .

Well aware that he was taking a real chance of eventually losing it back to the supply room, Mast decided to gamble and wear it anyway. What good would it do him, what protection, lying in a barracks bag or pack? Luckily it was a regulation holster and not the kind the MPs wore. All he had to do was unhook it off the web pistol belt, hook it into his rifle cartridge belt, and stuff the extra clips into the cartridge pockets above it. The brassard and lanyard he packed in the bottom of the barracks bag with the pistol belt. Then, wearing his tin hat with a jauntiness he did not entirely feel when he thought about what might be in store for them, Mast carted everything downstairs to the yard where the company was slowly forming. Sergeant Wycoff had certainly been right about the time. There was another full hour and a half to wait, and it was nearly three o’clock before the personnel trucks of the Regiment began to move.

On the way down to the beaches in the trucks Mast received only one comment on the pistol. A Private 1st Class in the same truck but from another platoon, a huge blue-jowled black Irishman of twenty-two named O’Brien, asked him enviously where did he get the pistol?

“That?” Mast said coolly, but with his mind working swiftly. “Oh, I’ve had that a long time. Bought it off a guy.”

O’Brien moved his big dark face inarticulately, wrinkling his broad forehead and moistening his lips, then flexed his hamlike hands a couple of times where they dangled from his knees. He stared at the holstered pistol hungrily, almost abjectly. Then he turned his huge dark head with the pale green eyes and stared off levelly from the back of the open truck with its hastily mounted MG on the cab roof, toward where the sea was. Mast had seen him engaged in some tremendous, almost Herculean fist fights since he had been in the company, but he did not look tough now. He turned back to Mast. “Want to sell it?” he said huskily.

“Sell it? Hell, no. That’s why I bought it.”

O’Brien reached one big-fingered hand up and unbuttoned his shirt pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Made some money on craps last night,” he said almost wistfully. “Give you fifty bucks for it.”

Mast was astonished, and did not think he had heard right. He had had no idea his new possession would be so valuable—not to anyone but himself. But there was O’Brien, and there was the money. Nobody else in the truck was paying any attention.

“No,” Mast said. “Nosir. I want it for myself.”

“Give you seventy,” O’Brien said quietly, almost beseechingly. “That’s all I got.”

“No dice. I told you. That’s why I bought it in the first place. So I could have it for myself.”

“Well, hell,” O’Brien said hopelessly, and slowly put his useless money back in the pocket and buttoned the flap. Unhappily he clutched his rifle, and out of the broad, dark, brooding face with its pale green eyes stared off in the direction of the sea again.

But that was the only comment. No one else noticed the pistol apparently, not even Mast’s own squad leader. They were all too concerned with thinking about what they might find on the beaches. Mast could not help feeling rather smugly sorry for O’Brien, somewhat the same feeling a man who knows he has salvation experiences for one who knows he has not; but Mast did not know what he could be expected to do. There was only one pistol. And through fate, or luck, and a series of strangely unforeseeable happenings, it had been given to him, not O’Brien.

Mast and O’Brien were not the only ones who kept looking off toward where the sea was. If the colonel knew that the Japanese forces had not landed, he might possibly have told the Company Commander. But if he had, the Company Commander had not seen fit to tell his troops. Perhaps the truth was that nobody knew. At any rate, the men in the truck did not. And as the convoy, moving by fits and starts, wound its way down off the high central plateau of the island, there were places between the hills where the men could get clear glimpses far away below them of the smoking shambles of Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field. The sight made them even more thoughtful. As far away as they could see, a mile-long line of trucks was worming its way down bumper to bumper, carrying them at a pace a man could walk, toward Honolulu and they knew not what else.

Actually, long before they ever reached the city everybody knew the Japanese had not landed. The word was shouted back from truck to truck, traveling far faster than the trucks themselves went forward. But the knowledge reassured nobody. If they didn’t land today, they would tomorrow, or the next day. And going through the city there was very little friendly response by the men in the trucks to the wildly cheering civilians who only so recently as last night had wanted nothing to do with soldiers except take their money.

The method in which the trucks had been loaded back at Schofield by Regimental Order was planned in advance so that the men and equipment for each beach position would be loaded all on the same truck, or trucks. Consequently, the little section of the miles-long convoy which was Mast’s company (whose sector ran from Wailupe east through Koko Head to Makapuu Head), having split off from the main trunk highway and made its way through the city on back roads, found itself alone out on Kamehameha Highway going east, its trucks peeling off one by one from the head of the column as it came abreast of their positions, until finally only four were left: the four trucks for the Company’s last and biggest position at Makapuu Point, one of which trucks was Mast’s. The effect was weird, if not downright enervating: From a huge, powerful convoy of unnumbered men and vehicles they had dwindled down to just four trucks, alone, moving along a deserted highway between the mountains and the sea and filled with thirty-five puny men and eighteen puny machine guns, all that was left, apparently, to fight the war alone against the entire might of the Imperial Japanese war machine. Or so, they felt. Mast could not help feeling a shiver, in spite of his pleasure over his new pistol.

Makapuu Head, and Point, was acknowledgedly the worst position in the company sector. For one thing, there were no civilian homes within miles, such as the majority of the company’s position had, and hence no civilians by whom to be admired, and from whom to bum food. For another, it was at the very extreme end of the company chow line and by the time the little weapons carriers that brought the food got to them, the food itself in the big aluminum pots was so cold the grease would be congealed on top of it. For a third, Makapoo (as they came at once to call it) was the only position in the company sector large enough to have a truly autonomous military organization; most of the positions had four, or five, or even seven, men and were run by a single sergeant or corporal; not Makapoo: it had thirty-five, its own private lieutenant, six sergeants, and at least four corporals. And, as every soldier knows, a sergeant who has an officer observing him does not act at all the same as a sergeant who is on his own.

For a fourth thing, Makapuu Point was the very hub and apex of what the Islanders preferred to call the ‘Windward’ side of Oahu. Jutting far out into the sea all by itself, there was nothing between it and San Francisco, and the wind that poured against the Pali and shot straight up, strongly enough to keep more than one would-be suicide from obtaining more than a couple of broken legs by a fall of more than a hundred feet, poured across it also, a living river of air, a tidal ocean of it. ‘Windward’ was a pretty lax term for such a wind, if you had to live in it without relief. And at Makapoo you were never free of it. It never ceased. Even in the pillboxes cut into the living rock in November, the wind seeped in like water and made chilling eddies of air among the shivering men who tried to sleep there.

And if these were not enough to earn Makapoo its title of ‘A-hole of the Universe,’ for a fifth thing, there was not a single building there to take shelter in; nor was there enough loose dirt on top the solid rock to drive a tentpeg into. This was the beach position Richard Mast, with his customary luck, had managed to get himself assigned to; and this was the beach position they scrambled out of the trucks that first day to try and make, first, militarily defensible, and then second, livable.