You Think That's Bad (10 page)

At least the Japs were lying low, too. I had a palm-frond bush hat but even through that the sun beat on my head like a mallet.

The first paragraph was all about how good it was to hear I was okay. It made her whole day easier, apparently. The second said “To answer your question, no, I didn't see your brother when he was home on leave.” But he'd already written that she had. And then he'd left it at that.

“Get out of the
sun
, Foss,” the CO called.

One of the guys who'd passed out came to and staggered back to his tent. The other guy just lay there. The guy behind me got handed a Christmas package, but whatever was in it was smashed flat and melted besides. He picked over it standing in the truck cab's shadow.

The PFC dishing out the mail was clearly hacked off that he had to do it right there on the trail. There was one good patch of shade from a clump of coconut palms and no one was budging out of it to let him park his truck. He called a name and if someone didn't answer right away he pitched the letter or package over the side and went on to the next one. He was wearing a bush helmet and on the back of it someone had drawn a woman with her legs spread and written “Your Mother Says Hi” across the brim.

The third paragraph went on to something else as though that was the end of it. So-and-so said such-and-such about a friend of hers, could I believe that?

“What do you need, a road map?” my friend Leo said when I asked him about it.

“What?” I asked, like I already knew. “What do you think you think is going on?”

“What do I
think
I think is going on?” he asked, and the rest of Dog Company, a little ways farther off the trail, laughed. We'd heard that Baker and Fox Companies had been bombed with daisy cutters the night before, so we were working on two-man slit
trenches, and in the close quarters entrenching tools kept whipping by people's ears. “I think the two of them spend a lot of time agreeing on what a great guy you are. I think it makes them sad for you and they cry together in their beer. And then I think he's sticking his dick in her.”

“What's wrong with
him
?” our staff sergeant asked Leo while we redug our slit trenches the next morning. As if everybody else was the picture of contentment. If it rained at all during the night we lost like a foot and a half of depth to the mud.

“He's jealous of his brother,” Leo told him.

“His brother better-lookin' than him?” the staff sergeant asked, amused.

“I've seen knotholes better-lookin' than him,” Leo told him.

“Why would he think it was about looks?” I asked him later.

“Why wouldn't he think I was jealous of something else?”

“Where the heck is
chow
?” Leo wondered. Guys were milling around the bivouac, waiting. You could always tell when a hot meal was late, because everybody started acting like zoo animals.

We were the Second Battalion, 126th Infantry, 32nd Division, Michigan and Wisconsin National Guard, here in New Guinea all of fourteen days and—leave it to the Army—apparently the spearhead of General MacArthur's upcoming drive to dislodge what everyone agreed were two divisions of the world's most fearsome jungle fighters from one of the world's most impenetrable jungles.

Two of us hadn't hit puberty yet. Three of us couldn't see without our glasses, and our hygiene officer couldn't see
with
them. Before this, only one of the Wisconsin guys had been out of the state. We were fifteen miles from the nearest hut and a hundred and fifty from the nearest civilization, in the form of the mostly uninhabited northeastern Australian coast. We were ten thousand miles from home.

We'd trained in South Carolina, which didn't prepare us much for jungle fighting but did its bit in getting us ready for the humidity. Any number of us couldn't keep up during the double-time drills, which meant we had to run around the entire battalion area
three times with knapsacks full of grenades. At one point our unit was first in the entire camp in hospitalizations.

We just weren't crackerjack soldiers. Guys who panicked every morning about climbing into full field dress and getting their beds made in time for reveille and inspection started sleeping already dressed and under their beds. We were each scored on particular skills and then all classified as riflemen anyway and herded onto transports and shipped out. Once we got through the Panama Canal the ships were under orders to never stop moving, so anybody who fell overboard would have to take care of himself. We slept in the holds in canvas hammocks slung in tiers of four from the support beams. The top slot was so close to the metal ceiling that if you tried to see your feet you cracked your head. Everything smelled of socks or farts or armpit. Weapons were stowed in baggage racks and anything else got dumped on the floor. In the exact middle of the trip everyone was issued five dollars, a huge morale builder with the dice and card players. Some guys slept on deck because of the smell or because they figured they'd have a better shot of getting off if the boat was torpedoed. Like that would've mattered: all the cargo was high explosives. The whole stern hold was mostly gasoline in seventy-gallon drums.

We had one fifty-caliber mounted aft for protection. If we'd been attacked by three guys in a motor launch, we would've been A-OK.

We were only in Australia a week when we were told to pack up for New Guinea. We were playing baseball with some Kiwis when we heard. Leo was in the batter's box when they called the game. He dropped his bat in the dirt and said, “Shit. I can hit this guy.”

When we got within range of the coast, the smell of everything rotting was so strong that we could pick it up before the shore was even in sight. “What
is
that?” Leo asked. We were all hanging on the cable railings. “That's the jungle,” one of the LCT pilots told him. “What's
wrong
with it?” Leo asked, and the guy laughed. It was like you could taste the germs in the air. Nobody on deck wanted to open his mouth.

It took our pathfinders an hour just to locate the trailhead that supposedly led inland. If you stepped five yards into the wall of leaves, you disappeared completely. All the barracks bags had to be left behind for the hump, so we carried only our weapons and ammo, knives, quinine tablets, mosquito lotion, canteens, and canvas water buckets. Everything else was left to the bearers. Our first night was spent in an old Aussie camp that was mostly a supply dump, camouflaged. Since Leo and I couldn't sleep we watched the natives file in carrying everything on poles on their shoulders. They looked scrawny, but judging by the loads they were plenty strong. I tried out some sign language on one. “You need something?” the guy asked when I finished.

They made their own pile and then went off the trail to sleep by themselves. Fifteen of them took like three steps and disappeared. Leo fell asleep too, finally. Then it was just me, listening to the bugs.

I got Leo's advice about everything. He was older, twenty-one, and had been in the Army for three years and Dog Company for two. We'd been friends since stateside. Or at least we'd gone off on passes together. He liked to say I spent the whole war surprised. Sometimes he enlarged it to life instead of just the war. “You know I ain't got a single friend?” he told me, like it had just hit him, the night we came ashore.

“What do you mean?” I asked him. “You got me.”

“Yeah, that's right,” he said after a minute, looking at me. Then he let it go.

The week we met he asked if I was a virgin, and when I told him no that's how Linda came up. He said, “So you've really done everything with her?” and for some reason I told him about all four nights. This was on the chow line and at one point I looked up and the guy ladling out the creamed chipped beef had just frozen in mid-pour. “You did all that?” Leo asked as we found a table. And I told him yes. Because I had.

Linda was in my high-school geography class and my brother was two years ahead. We all drove around in her older brother's car and argued about whether Mineral Point was the deadest place in Wisconsin or the deadest place on earth. We did our drinking at the turnoff for the abandoned quarry and her brother always said you could do human sacrifice there and nobody would find it for a year and a half. One night after I got my permit he let us have the car and we drove out there thinking about what he'd told us. “I want to show you something,” she said in this low voice once I'd turned off the headlights, then took my head with one hand and leaned me over and kissed me as if she was looking for something really carefully with her mouth and it was all the same to her if she never found it. “Like this,” she whispered a few times, showing me how to make it even better.

“I think I need to show you something else,” she whispered later, and pushed me back again and unbuckled my pants and pulled them down past my hips. She brought her head down to where my pants were. “Where's your brother?” she asked, like she was making conversation.

“I don't know,” I said, not even sure how I managed to say that. “What're you
doing
?” I asked her, holding her shoulders and her hair.

She laughed a little and let me go. I could feel the wetness and the cold air. “Mmm,” she said, and the warmth came all around me again.

I didn't know what to say. “Would you
marry
me?” I finally called out, with my eyes closed, and she laughed again.

The next time we went back I got protection from my brother and we did everything else. The third time I pushed her up against her door and she started making noises, too.

“Why'd you ask about my brother when we were out here that other night?” I said afterwards, when we were just resting.

“When?” she wanted to know. “With my brother?”

I had my face on her shoulder and she had a foot up on the dash. “No, alone,” I told her.

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't remember.” She sighed and shifted around and pulled me with her. The car seat underneath us felt soaked.

“So how'd it go, sport?” my brother asked when I got back. “Don't even tell me. I can see.”

“So I hear you guys are going steady,” he told me the next day after school.

“Where'd you get that?” I asked, though I was happy to hear it. “Linda wants to know all about you,” he said.

“Why doesn't she ask me?” I said. She'd given me a wave in geography, then disappeared with her friends at the bell.

“I guess because she wants the truth,” he said.

“So what'd you tell her?” I asked.

“What do you think?” he said. “That she jumped the wrong Foss.”

“What're you boys talking about?” our mom said, coming into the kitchen. She had a bowl of hard-boiled eggs to slice and she was going to line the bottom of her vegetable pie with them.

“Your son's talking about his new hobby,” my brother said.

“Sounds like he's talking about a girl,” our mom told him, shelling the eggs into a bowl.

“Where did you find time to talk to her?” I asked him.

“I like to think I don't wait for life to come to me,” he said, hefting one of the peeled eggs and dropping it back into the bowl.

“Which one did you just touch?” our mom demanded.

“All of them,” he said. He used both hands to smooth back his hair.

“She's my girl,” I reminded him. “I'm the one who just told
you
that,” he said.

“So you
are
talking about a girl,” our mom said. “What's her name?”

The cat wandered into the room and nosed at his dish. He sat down and we watched his tail do a few slow curls.

“I guess it's none of my business,” she finally said to herself after looking back and forth at the two of us.

“Your mom's funny,” Linda told me the next time we were alone.

“How do you know
that
?” I asked her. I put her brother's keys up under the sun visor so they wouldn't jingle when we moved around the steering wheel. I had a little pillow she'd brought for the armrest on the door, and the car was making ticking noises in the quiet.

“I have my sources,” she said, smoothing her cheek along mine.

“How often do you
see
my brother?” I asked.

“Every single minute of every single day,” she murmured. Then she asked if I could do something for her, and explained what it was. While she waited for me to register what she was talking about, she pointed out that one part of me really wanted to, anyway.

It rained for a full day and everything that could come crawling up out of a hole did: mosquitoes, sand flies, black flies, and leeches. Leo went to clean out his mess kit and found a spider in the bowl clenched like a fist. Nothing got put on without first having been shaken and reshaken. Most mornings something fell out and we all did the stamping dance before it got away.

We took to using smoke pots and head nets for the mosquitoes. But then we couldn't eat. On one side of the trail the ants were so small that the only kind of netting that could keep them out would have also kept out the air. Ticks clustered in the pinch points in our clothes. In one slit trench, what we thought was smoke one morning turned out to be a cloud of fleas. Little pelletlike bugs even got into the C-rations. Cockroaches ate the glue in the field manuals. Termites collapsed the CO's field table and cot. We were told to splash or make noise when crossing the creek, because the aborigines said it was happy with crocodiles. By that, we were told, they meant lousy with them.

“So
noise
scares crocodiles?” Leo wanted to know while they were telling us this.

“No, not really,” the guy giving the briefing confessed.

Some guys were so bored and hot that they sat in the water anyway. “I'm hoping one comes by,” Doubek, our radioman, said when we teased him about it. “Crocodile takes a piece of this ass, I got my ticket home.”