The Naked and the Dead (101 page)

            Wilson drank febrilely, the water splattering out of his mouth to trickle down his chin, wetting the collar of his shirt. "Oh,
man."
He drank lavishly, eagerly, his throat working with lust. "You're a good sonofabitch," he mumbled. Some water caught in his throat, and he coughed violently, wiping the blood from his chin with a nervous furtive motion. Ridges watched a droplet of it which Wilson had missed. Slowly it spread out over the moist surface of Wilson's cheek, faded through progressive shades of pink.

            "Y' think Ah'm gonna make it?" Wilson asked.

            "Shore." Ridges felt a shiver. A preacher had once given a sermon about the way a man resisted the fires of hell. "Y' cain't avoid it, you're gonna get caught if you're a sinner," he had said. Ridges was telling a lie now, but nevertheless he repeated it. "Shore you're gonna be awright, Wilson."

            "That's what Ah figgered."

            Goldstein put his palms against the ground, forced himself upward slowly. He wanted so very much to remain lying on the ground. "I suppose we ought to go," he said wistfully. They harnessed themselves again to the litter and trudged forward.

            "You're a good bunch of men, they ain't anybody better'n you two men."

            This shamed them. At the moment, still enmeshed in the first pangs of setting out again, they hated him.

            "It's all right," Goldstein said.

            "Naw, Ah mean it, they ain't any two men like you to be found in the whole fuggin platoon." He was silent, and they settled into the stupefaction of the march. Wilson was delirious for a while, and then sober again. His wound began to ache and he abused them, screaming once more with pain.

            Now it bothered Ridges more than Goldstein. He had not thought very much about the agony of the march; it was something he had assumed was natural, perhaps a little more extreme than any work he had ever done, but he had learned when he was very young that work was what a man did with most of his day and it was pointless to wish to do anything else. If it was uncomfortable, if it was painful, there was nothing you could do about it. He had been given the job and he was going to do it. But now for the first time he hated it genuinely. Perhaps there had been too many fatigue-products, perhaps the cumulative labor had dissolved and reshaped the structures of his mind, but in any case he was wretched with this work, and as a corollary he understood suddenly that he had always hated the drudgery of his farm work, the unending monotonous struggle against an arid unyielding soil.

            It was too much of a realization; he had to retreat from it. And that was not difficult. He was not accustomed to threshing out a solution with his mind, and now he was too blunted, too completely tired. The thought had come into his head, exploded, and shaken a great many patterns, but the smoke had cleared quickly, and there was nothing now but a vague uncomfortable sense of some wreckage, some change. A few minutes later he was merely uneasy; he knew he had thought something sacrilegious, but what it was he could not guess. He was fastened to his load again.

            But this was mixed with something else. He had not forgotten that he had given Wilson the water, and he remembered the way Wilson had said, "Ah'm burnin'." They were carrying a man who was already lost, and that meant something. He was made a little uneasy by the idea that they might be contaminated by him, but that really was not what bothered him. The ways of the Lord are dev'us. It meant something else; they were being taught by example or maybe they were paying for their own sins. Ridges did not work it out for himself, but it gave him a mixture of dread and the variety of exaltation that comes with too much fatigue. We gotta git him back. As with Brown, all the complexities and cross-purposes canceled out into that simple imperative. He lowered his head, and bulled on for another few yards.

            "Men, you might as well lea' me." A few tears worked out of Wilson's eyes. "They ain't no use y' killin' yourself for me." His fever was torturing him again, and it sent a leaden aching ecstasy through his body. He felt consumed with the desire to express something. "Y' gotta lea' me. Gowan ahead, men." Wilson clenched his fists. He wanted to give them a present, and he was frustrated. They were such good men. "Lea' me." It was plaintive, like a child weeping for something it will never get.

            Goldstein listened to him, tempted by the same inevitable suite of rationalizations that Stanley had followed. He wondered how to suggest it to Ridges, and was silent.

            Ridges mumbled. "You jus' shut up, Wilson. We ain't leavin' ya."

            And therefore Goldstein could not quit. He would not be the first one; he was a little afraid that Ridges then would bundle Wilson on his back and continue. He was bitter and thought of fainting. That he wouldn't do, but he was angry with Brown and Stanley for deserting them. They quit, why don't I quit? he wondered, and knew he wouldn't.

            "Jus' set me down an' gowan, men."

            "We'll git ya back," Ridges muttered. He too was playing with the idea of deserting Wilson, but he pushed it away in a spasm of disgust. If he left him it would be murder, an awful sin if he left a Christian to die. Ridges thought of the black mark it would be on his soul. Ever since he had been a child he had imagined his soul as a white object the size and shape of a football, lodged somewhere near his stomach. Each time he sinned an ineradicable black spot was inked onto the white soul, its size depending upon the enormity of the sin. At the time a man died, if the white football was more than half black he went to hell. Ridges was certain that the sin of leaving Wilson would cover at least a quarter of his soul.

            And Goldstein remembered his grandfather saying, "Yehuda Halevy wrote that Israel is the heart of all nations." He lunged along, carrying the litter through habit, not conscious of the torments of his body. His mind had turned inward; he could not have concentrated more intensely if he had been blind. He just followed Ridges without looking where they went.

            "Israel is the heart of all nations." It was the conscience and the raw exposed nerve; all emotion passed through it. But it was more than that; it was the heart that suffered whenever any part of the body was ill.

            And Wilson was the heart now. Goldstein did not say this to himself, he did not even think it, but the idea worked through him beneath the level of speech. He had suffered too much in these past two days; he had traversed all the first nauseas of fatigue, the stupors that followed, the exaltation close to fever. There were as many levels to pain as to pleasure. Once his will had forbidden him to collapse, Goldstein burrowed deeper and deeper through exhaustion and agony, never quite plumbing the pit of it. But he was in a stage now where all the banal proportions were gone. His eyes functioned enough for him to notice automatically where he walked; he heard and smelled isolated little events; he even felt some pain from his racked body; but all this was separate from him, like an object he might hold in his hand. His mind was both blunted and exposed, naked and stupefied. "The heart of all nations." But for a few hours, after two days and fifteen miles of staggering forward under a tropic sun, after an eternity of wrestling Wilson's body through an empty and alien land, this could be true for him. His senses dammed, his consciousness reeling, Goldstein fumbled through a hall of symbols. Wilson was the object he could not release. Goldstein was bound to him by a fear he did not understand. If he let him go, if he did not bring him back, then something was wrong, he would understand something terrible. The heart. If the heart died. . . but he lost the sequence in the muck of his labors. They were carrying him on and on, and he would not die. His stomach had been ripped apart, he had bled and shit, wallowed through the leaden swells of fever, endured all the tortures of the rough litter, the uneven ground, and still Wilson had not died. They still carried him. There was a meaning here and Goldstein lumbered after it, his mind pumping like the absurd legs of a man chasing a train he has missed.

            "Ah like to work, Ah ain't a goddam fug-off," Wilson mumbled. "If you're job, do goddam thing right, that's what Ah say." His breath was gurgling again out of his mouth. "Brown and Stanley. Brown and Stanley, shit!" He giggled feebly. "Little ol' bugger May when she's a kid, always crappin' her pants." He rambled through a cloudy memory of his daughter when she was an infant. "Smartest little devil." When she was two years old she would drop her faeces behind a door or in a closet. "Goddam, step in it, git dirty." He laughed, only it sounded more like a feeble wheeze. For an instant he recalled vividly his mixture of exasperation and merriment when he had discovered her leavings. "Goddam, Alice'd git mad."

            She had been angry when he had seen her in the hospital, angry again when they discovered he was sick. "Ah always say a dose ain't gonna hurt a man a goddam bit. What the hell's a lousy little dose? Ah had it five times an' it never came to a goddam thing." He stiffened on the litter and shouted as if arguing with someone. "Jus' get me some pyrdin whatever the hell y' call it." He twisted about, managed almost to prop himself on an elbow. "If goddam wound gits y' opened maybe Ah won' need the op-per-ration, jus' gits rid of all the pus." He retched emptily, watching through dimmed eyes the blood trickling and spattering out of his mouth onto the rubber fabric of the litter. It was so distant and yet it sent a shudder through him. "Whadeya say, Ridges, does it git rid of it?"

            But they hadn't heard him, and he watched the blood fall in droplets from his mouth and then lay back again moodily.

            "Ah'm gonna die."

            A shudder of fear, of resistance rippled through him. He could taste the blood in his mouth, and he began to tremble. "Goddammit, Ah ain't gonna die, Ah ain't gonna," he wept, choking on his sobs when some mucus clotted his throat. The sounds terrified him; he lay abruptly in the tall weeds, his blood sopping into the sun-warmed earth, the Japanese chattering beside him. "They're gonna git me, they're gonna git me," he shouted suddenly. "Jesus, men, don' lemme die."

            Ridges heard him this time, stopped lethargically, set the litter down, and unyoked himself from the pack straps. Like a drunk proceeding slowly and elaborately to unlock a door, Ridges moved over to Wilson's head, and knelt beside him.

            "They're gonna git me," Wilson moaned, his face contorted, his unconscious tears slinking out of his eye sockets, racing down his temples to become lost in the matted hair about his ears.

            Ridges bent over him, fingering numbly his own scraggly beard. "Wilson," he said hoarsely, a little imperatively.

            "Yeah?"

            "Wilson, they's still time to turn."

            "Wha. . . ?"

            Ridges had made up his mind. It might not be too late. Wilson might not yet be damned. "Y' gotta return to the Lord Jesus Christ."

            "Uh."

            Ridges shook him gently. "They's still time to turn," he said in a solemn mournful voice. Goldstein looked on blankly, vaguely resentful.

            "Y' can go to the Kingdom of Heaven." His voice was so deep that it was almost lost. The sounds quivered heavily in Wilson's head like the echo of a bass viol.

            "Uh-huh," Wilson mumbled.

            "Y' repentin'? Y' askin' forgiveness?"

            "Yeah?" Wilson breathed. Who was talking to him, who was bothering him? If he would agree they would let him alone. "Yeah," he mumbled again.

            A few tears mounted in Ridge's eyes. He felt exalted. Maw told me 'bout a sinner was caught on the deathbed, he thought. He had never forgotten her story, but he had never imagined that he too would do something so wonderful.

            "Git out, y' goddam Japs."

            Ridges started. Had Wilson forgotten his conversion already? But Ridges did not dare to admit this. If Wilson repented and then threw it away, his punishment would be doubly awful. No man would ever dare that.

            "You jus' 'member what you said," Ridges muttered almost fiercely.
"Jus' watch yourself, man."

            Afraid to listen any longer, he stood up, went to the head of the litter, rearranged the blanket over Wilson's feet, and then worked the strap over his neck and under his armpits. In a moment, after Goldstein was ready, they moved on.

            They reached the jungle after an hour's march, and Ridges left Goldstein with the stretcher, and explored to his right until he found the trail the platoon had cut four days earlier. It was only a few hundred yards away. Ridges felt a feeble glow of pleasure that he had been so accurate. Actually he had done it almost instinctively. Permanent bivouacs, roads through the jungle, stretches of beach always confused him; they always looked the same, but in the hills he could travel with a sure and easy sense.

            He returned to Goldstein, and they set out again, reaching the trail in a few minutes. The foliage had sprung up again considerably since it had been cut, and the floor of the path was muddy from the rains. They blundered along, slipping frequently, their thickened feet finding no hold in the slick mud. If they had been less tired, they might have noticed the difference; the fact that the sun no longer beat on them would have been noted with pleasure, and conversely the uncertain footing, the sluggish resistance of the bushes and vines and thorns would have angered them. But they hardly detected all that. By now they knew there was no way to carry the stretcher without travail, and the individual circumstances that obstructed them had no force.

            Still they progressed even more slowly. The trail had been cut no wider than the breadth of a man's shoulders, and the litter became lodged in several places. Once or twice there was no way at all to carry Wilson through, and Ridges would lift him off, drape him over his shoulder and lumber forward until the trail widened. Goldstein would follow with the stretcher.