You Think That's Bad (12 page)

With five minutes left we were told we weren't going yet. There was some softening up that was supposed to have happened ahead of our attack, but all we could hear was the rain and the
kekekekek
sound that the geckos made. Word was that the mortar shells were still stuck somewhere down the trail and nobody knew what was up with our artillery. We weren't happy about waiting but were even less happy about going.

“So what are you going to do about this Linda-and-your-brother thing?” Leo said. “I mean if you're not dead.”

My stomach was barely keeping itself together. I was taking deep breaths to help with that. “You know what I sometimes wonder?” I finally asked him. “How does she know so much about doing it? Where did that information come from?”

“Oh,” Leo said, raising his hand, “I think
I
know.”

While we sat there the CO told us we were headed for a foot track over the Owen Stanley Range through the Gap. This range was one of the steepest in the world and divided the island in half. The staff sergeants told us to dump anything nonessential because whatever we took was going to be on our backs the whole way. Doubek inverted his pack and it turned out he'd collected twenty-eight cans of sliced peaches. He figured he could carry six and started trying to eat the rest right there. “One thing the American Army's never going to run out of,” Leo said, watching him. “Canned fruit.”

We finally got the go-ahead even though the rain hadn't let up
and there'd been no artillery. “What happened to the softening up, sir?” Leo asked the CO as he passed our position.

“The thinking now is that we're going to take 'em by surprise,” the CO called back. He got everybody moving and we all climbed a preliminary hill, slipping and sliding. No one could keep his head up without losing his footing.

At the top everyone was already beat, but on the other side of a little swale we could see our path climbing up into the clouds. The occasional scout was slithering down the slope in our direction. Where the trail went was cut off by the same clouds that were raining all over us.

It took us about an hour to get organized at the base and ready to climb. Three porters were coming along to hump the extra ammunition until we came under fire. The CO let us rest for a half an hour and then got us going again. The slopes kept sliding out from under us and the porters got a bang over how bad we were at keeping our feet. In places where the mud was covered with leaves a guy would manage maybe one step before falling and taking the next three guys down with him. “Heads up” meant “Catch whoever's sliding down at you.” We took breaks on our hands and knees with water streaming over our wrists.

I started throwing up and tried to do it on the side of the trail. We passed abandoned emplacements so well camouflaged that a couple guys fell into them. A little farther up was a switchback and a curtain of jungle that came down like a wall. We came across some sulfa packs and morphine needles scattered in the mud. A boot.

From below Leo tugged at my pant leg. “Hang back,” he said quietly. I stepped a foot and hand off the trail and rested, chest heaving, and let a couple guys go by. Leo stopped behind me.

“How far's this fucking thing go on?” Doubek panted, climbing past. He lifted his head to see and the jungle up above us went nuts. The wall of leaves jittered and blurred and the noise of all the fire at once was a pandemonium.

Doubek's shirt came alive from the inside and he spread-eagled
out past me and pinwheeled down the slope, crashing through the undergrowth. His helmet sailed off in another direction. We all gripped the mud, hugging the slope. Leaves, sticks, bark, and splinters flew and spun, popping from trees. The noise sucked the air out of us. It stopped my ability to think. I was under a little lip of overhang with Leo below me. My boots kicked through a mat of stems. Thorns tore at my cheek. I was clawing and looking to burrow. Some guys were firing back but I wasn't one of them. The firing went on and then it stopped in front of us and after a minute you could hear the CO screaming to cease fire.

When the last of our guys did, the sound of the rain came back. And some whimpering and cursing. The CO and one of the staff sergeants shouted orders. Leo had to crawl up and over me before I could bring myself to move. He thought I was dead.

“How is he?” the CO called up to him.

“Untouched,” Leo called back down.

“What about the other guys?” the CO wanted to know. I could see him twenty feet below us, one shoulder dug in, his outer arm cradling his carbine. Every so often he had to stick a heel back in the mud to keep from sliding. He meant the guys ahead of me. There'd been about six of them.

Leo told him none of them was calling for a medic, which he took to be a bad sign.

We could hear the clatter of new clips being fed into guns up above us.

“Should we fall back, sir? Sir?” Leo called.

“Form on me! Form on me!” a sergeant called out below.

“Fall
back
?” the CO called. “What's the problem? We ran into Japs?” I think he thought he was funny.

We were flattened against the muck, the mud and rainwater pouring straight through our clothes.

“Keep an eye out, you two,” the CO called. Then he called a meeting on the slope right below us: him and the lieutenant and a couple of the staff sergeants. He asked for suggestions. Nobody had any. Could we spread out? one of them finally asked. Could we
provide any covering fire? Was there any room anywhere to maneuver?

“This is depressing,” Leo finally said to me, after they'd all gone quiet.

“That might be the one trouble spot, though,” we heard the CO venture to guess. “It could be that we only have to get past that.”

“You all right?” Leo asked me. His nose was next to mine.

“You guys
watchin'
?” the CO called.

We both looked up at the switchback. Even in the rain the mists were creeping around the bottoms of the trees. We still hadn't seen a Jap.

“They're not going to let us go back down, are they?” I asked Leo. I'd never been so cold in my life and started shivering the minute the shooting stopped. I hadn't meant to be crying but I was.

“Think of it this way,” Leo said. “Linda'll be taken care of.”

“
Fuck
this place,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he told me back.

The third or fourth night we all drove around in Linda's brother's car, I'd walked over to her house but her mom said she was still getting dressed. I was welcome to wait, she told me, there in the parlor or out back with Glenn. Glenn was the older brother. Glenn it turned out was in the shed. “How're you doin',” I said to him.

“What's it
look
like I'm doing?” he said back.

Stuff like that happened every single place I went. “Marble mouth,” my dad would say to my mom at the dinner table when I asked a question. “I understood him perfectly,” she sometimes said, but then he'd be mad at
her
the rest of the night.

“Leave those alone,” Glenn said.

I didn't see what he was talking about. There wasn't a lot of light in the shed. “You been
trapping
?” I asked when my eyes adjusted.

“Those are cat skins,” he said. “I'm drying cat skins.”

“Your brother's drying cat skins,” I told Linda the first night we had the car to ourselves.

“What are you
talking
about?” she said. And I decided it was the last time I'd ever bring up something that would make her move her hand away.

“What do you think,
your
brother's Mister Normal?” she asked.

She told me I could ride in front with Glenn and we'd gotten a block from her house when she asked what my brother was up to. “Let's go get him,” she said, before I answered.

“Yeah, let's go get the brother,” Glenn said.

When we got to my house my brother was already sitting on the front steps. “Well, this is a surprise,” he said, and got in the back with Linda.

“Eyes front, buddy,” Glenn said when I turned to look back at them. The whole way to the quarry, if I started to turn around he jiggled the steering wheel and we all rocked and swayed. Linda told him to stop and he told her it wasn't him, it was me, so she told
me
to sit still.

“I want to look at you,” I said.

“That's sweet,” my brother said.

“It is,” Linda told him.

When we got to the quarry, she said she had to pee.

“I better go with you,” my brother told her. “It's pretty dark out there.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I can handle this myself.”

She was gone a long time. I sat in the car with my brother and Glenn and thought of her poking around in the dark, feeling for a safe place.

Glenn had his arm along the top of the seat so his fingers were at my shoulder. My brother whistled to himself the same two notes that went up and down, up and down.

“What I wouldn't give to be a little flower right now,” Glenn said.

“Two little flowers,” my brother said.

“I should go look for her,” I told them.

They both snorted. “She knows this place better than we do,” Glenn said.

“Or at least as well,” my brother told him.

I tried a few sentences in my head and then said, “So you guys have been here before.”

There was a pause like they were deciding who was going to answer.

“We been here before,” my brother confirmed.

Linda finally appeared out of the dark, wet-eyed, and opened the door and climbed in.

“You okay?” I said.

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Shouldn't
I
be in the back with you?” I asked.

“Yeah, absolutely.
Move
, you,” she said to my brother.

“Absolutely,” my brother said.

“Absolutely,” Glenn said.

In the light when the car door opened again I could see Linda flinch.

“We gotta give these two some time alone,” my brother told Glenn.

“Absolutely,” Glenn said.

“But first I have to show you something,” my brother said, meaning me.

“Now?” I asked him. I had one foot in the backseat.

“Don't go now,” Linda said. She had her back to her door and was holding out some fingers to me.

“C'mon, chief, this'll only take a minute,” my brother said. “I need to
ask
you something.”

“This doesn't feel right,” I said.

“It'll feel right once you're back,” my brother said. “Five minutes. Then we'll clear out and it's all you and her.”

Linda had lowered her arm and was looking out the back.

“
Five minutes
,” my brother repeated.

I got out. He led me down a trail. I looked over my shoulder before we went around some rocks and saw Glenn opening his door.

It wasn't five minutes. It was more like twenty. What my brother wanted to ask was if I thought our dad was getting worse. If I thought he was drinking again. “I didn't know he was drinking in the first place,” I told him. “You dragged me out here to tell me that?”

Linda was alone in the car when we got back. “Where's Glenn?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said.

“How long have you been here by yourself?” I asked.

“He just left,” she said.

“I'll go hunt him down,” my brother said. “You two behave while I'm gone.”

I got in next to Linda but her face was wet and she didn't shove over so half of me was still hanging out the open door. I braced myself with a foot in the dirt. “What's the matter?” I asked. “What happened?”

She nodded and smiled and wiped her eyes and said she was okay, that sometimes she got happy and sad at the same time. I was going to ask her again what happened but she scooched over and patted the seat where she'd just been and told me to shut the door. She brought her face closer and wiped her mouth with her fingertips and said, “Do something for me. Show me how much you want to kiss me.”

“What are you
sad
about?” I asked her later.

“If I thought you really wanted to know, I'd tell you,” she finally whispered. And we lay there for a little while, me holding on to her, her holding on to me.

“See what I mean?” she finally said.

“Why do you think Linda was crying tonight?” I asked my brother after they dropped us off. He and Glenn had given us a half hour, then hopped in the front seat and driven off without even asking us if we were ready.

It looked like the question bothered him and I had to ask him again before he answered me. “I think she feels lucky to be with you,” he said.

“I don't think that's it,” I told him.

“Don't you feel lucky to be with her?” he asked.

I do
, I thought that night, lying there in bed.
I do
, I thought, every miserable night on the troop ship, and in the slit trenches, and listening to Leo talking to himself as soon as he thought I'd fallen asleep.

We waited the rest of the afternoon for the artillery support. I spent an hour watching rainwater pour off vines and creepers alongside the trail. In the rain we only knew the sun had gone down when we realized we couldn't make out each other's expressions. Word came up the line to dig in, so Leo slid back below me to his old spot and started going at it with his entrenching tool. He was always the first man in the company to finish his hole. He had it easier than I did because he was shaking less and was more off to the side. With all the water coming down the trail it was like rerouting a waterfall. By the time I was finished I was sheltered enough from the main flow that it missed my head and shoulders.

The rain started to let up and every so often the clouds and mist cleared and I could see black peaks high above us. I'd shake and then settle down, shake and settle back down.