The Naked and the Dead (14 page)

            Subsequently the General had service company of the 460th bivouacking on the other side of the road from them. He knew that unless there was a disastrous retreat he would not have to move this bivouac for the rest of the campaign, and slowly, as time permitted, he began to build it up. A field shower was built for the officers, and the mess tents were erected, and squad tents were set up once again for the division staff offices. The ground through the bivouac was trimmed each morning, gravel walks were laid along the paths, and the motor pool had a culvert built of empty gasoline drums at the entrance to the road.

            These elaborations gave Cummings a constant pleasure. No matter how many times he had seen it, the slow improvement of a bivouac was always satisfying. By the time his pivoting operation was a week old, he felt as if he had erected a small village. During the day there was constant activity with men working on improvements in the bivouac area, and trucks constantly moving in and out of the motor pools. On the other side of the road the maintenance shops were in operation in service company, and in the somnolent afternoons in the jungle he could hear their machine tools grinding. His own bivouac had been enlarged several times and by now the barbed wire around the perimeter enclosed an ellipse of earth almost two hundred yards long and more than half as wide, and in the area were over a hundred pup tents, a dozen pyramidal and squad tents, a row of twenty fly tents in which his officers were housed, three latrines, two field kitchens, over forty trucks and jeeps, and almost three hundred men.

            Recon was a very small part of all this. With the five new replacements, the platoon had a total strength of fourteen men, and their arc of the bivouac consisted of seven pup tents extended in ten-yard intervals along a section of the perimeter. At night two men in the platoon would be awake at any hour, sitting in the two machine-gun emplacements that faced past the barbed wire toward the jungle; in the daytime the perimeter would be virtually deserted, with only one man left behind as the rest of the platoon went out to work on the road. Five weeks had gone by since invasion day, and with the exception of a few routine security patrols around the new bivouac, the platoon had seen no activity. It was approaching the rainy season, and it grew hotter each day, more trying to work on the road. By the time they had been in the new bivouac for a week, many of the men, including some of the veterans of the Motome campaign, were wishing for combat again.

            After evening chow Red had washed up, and moved over to Wilson and Gallagher's tent. All day it had been extremely hot and sultry, even more unbearable than the days and nights before it, and Red was feeling irritable. The day, like every other day, had been spent working on the road.

            Gallagher and Wilson were sprawled in their tent, smoking quietly without talking. "Whateya say, Red?" Wilson drawled at last.

            Red wiped his forehead. "That kid Wyman! It used to be bad enough bunkin' with a Boy Scout like Toglio, but that kid Wyman. . ." He snorted. "They're gonna be sendin' 'em overseas soon with a sugar tit."

            "Yeah, the platoon seems all topside-bottom since we got the replacements," Wilson complained. He sighed, and ran the sleeve of his fatigue shirt over his chin, which was moist with perspiration. "Weather's fixin' to act up," he said quietly.

            "More fuggin rain," Gallagher snorted.

            Dark slated clouds were washing the eastern sky and mounting thunderheads in the north and south. The air was leaden and moist, hanging limp without a murmur. Even the coconut trees seemed swollen and expectant, their leaves drooping languidly over and raw chopped earth of the bivouac.

            "That corduroy we put in is gonna be washed out," Gallagher said. Red looked out across the area and scowled. The tents were sagging, and appeared gloomy and somber although the sun was still shining with a dull red glow in the west.

            "Just so we don't get our tails wet," Red said.

            He debated for a moment whether to go back to his tent and deepen the rain trench, which had almost overflowed in the previous night's downpour, and then he shrugged. It was about time Wyman learned how to do it. He crouched and dropped into the hole in which Gallagher and Wilson were resting now. It was a hole about two feet deep and about as wide and long as a double bed. Wilson and Gallagher slept side by side in it with two blankets between them and the earth. Overhead they had anchored a ridgepole of bamboo on two uprights, had draped their combined ponchos over it, and staked the ends to the ground on each side of the hole. It was possible to kneel inside the tent without bumping one's head against the ridgepole, but not even an eight-year-old child could have stood in it. From outside, the shelter appeared to be no more than two feet above the level of the ground. This tent was typical of almost all the pup tents in the bivouac.

            Red lay down between them, and stared out at the obtuse triangle of sky and jungle visible from the head of the tent. They had dug the hole to fit their bodies, and Red's long legs dangled over the rain trench at the entrance. When the rain blew in the open end, it collected in the trench, which was lower than any other part of the hole. Now it was still muddy.

            "Next time you men dig a tent right, so a guy can get in it," Red said. He guffawed.

            "If you men don' like it, get the hell out," Gallagher grumbled.

            "That's your Boston hospitality," Red said.

            "Yeah, we got no place for fuggin bums," Gallagher kidded heavily. The purple lumps on his face looked swollen and putrefactive in the dull light.

            Wilson giggled. "Ah say only thing worse'n a damyankee is a fella from Boston."

            "They wouldn't let
you
in a town where you had to wear some fuggin shoes," Gallagher snorted. He lit a cigarette and turned over on his stomach. "Got to know how to read and write if you want to come north," he said.

            Wilson was a little hurt. "Listen, boy," he told him, "Ah may not be able to read eve'thin' so good, but they ain't a thing Ah cain't do if Ah set mah mind to't." There had been that time, he was thinking, when Willy Perkins had bought the first washing machine in town, and when it had gone on the bum, he'd taken it all apart and then fixed it. "They ain't a thing Ah cain't fix if it's piece of machinery," he said. He took off his glasses and wiped the perspiration from them with a corner of his handkerchief. "Once Ah remember there was a fella in town who had an English bicycle. American one wa'n't good 'nough for him. He lost some of the ball bearin's out of it, and they wa'n' none Ah could get to fit, so Ah jus' took an American ball-bearin' ring, and fit it to't." He pointed one of his thick fingers at Gallagher and added, "Rode as good after Ah fixed it as it ever did."

            "Pretty clever," Gallagher sneered. "In Boston you could get any kind of ball bearing you wanted."

            "A man's better if he can do without at times," Wilson muttered.

            Red snickered. "I don't see where you're such a damn sight better doing without your pussy." They all laughed. "That's somep'n a man should never do without," Wilson admitted. He rubbed his hand reflectively against one of the earthen walls of the hole. "In Boston," Gallagher said, "if one of your buddies gets a piece, he lets you know about it." Immediately afterward he felt ashamed. He made a mental note to remember what he had just said when he went to Chaplain Hogan for confession. The resolution made him feel better. He was always forgetting the bad things he had done when he did go to confession. Sometimes when he would be trying to collect his bad thoughts before he saw Father Hogan, he could not remember any of them, and he would have to go in and say only, "Father, I have blasphemed."

            Mary knew so little about him, Gallagher thought. She didn't even know the way he swore. But that was just a bad habit he had picked up in the Army, Gallagher told himself. He had used bad language before when he was with the gang, but that didn't count. He was just a kid then. He had never sworn when a woman was around.

            Gallagher began to think of the gang. What a good bunch of guys they were, he told himself with pride. There had been the time they passed out pamphlets to get McCarthy elected in Roxbury. He had even made a speech afterward, saying that his victory was due to his loyal cohorts. And there was the time they had made that raid into Dorchester, and had taught the Yids a lesson. They had picked one kid about eleven who was coming home from school and they had surrounded him, and Whitey Lydon had asked, "What the hell are ya?" The kid had trembled and said, "I don't know." "You're a mockey," Whitey had told him, "that's what you are, a fuggin mockey." He had held the kid by his shirt, and said, "Now, what areya?"

            "I'm a mockey," the kid had said. He was about to cry.

            "All right," Lydon had told him, "spell it. Spell 'mockey.' "

            The kid had stammered, "M-o-c-c-i."

            What a roar that had been, Gallagher thought. M-o-c-c-i. The dumb kid had been so afraid he must have crapped his pants. The goddam Yids. Gallagher remembered how Lydon had got on the police force. What a break that had been for him; with a little luck he could have got a job like that too. But of all the work he had done in his spare time for the Democratic Club, he hadn't got anything for it. What was wrong? He wanted to do big things. He would even have got a job in the post office if it hadn't been for that Alderman Shapiro and his fuggin nephew Abie or Jakie. Gallagher felt a deep resentment. There was always something to beat him. He felt his mute anger growing, and because it gave him a rich satisfaction to say it, he burst out suddenly, "I see we got a couple of fuggin Yids in the platoon."

            "Yeah," Red said. He knew one of Gallagher's tirades was beginning and it bored him. "Yeah," he sighed, "they're sonsofbitches just like the rest of us."

            Gallagher turned on him. "They only been in one week and already they're lousin' up the platoon."

            "Ah don't know," Wilson murmured; "that Roth ain't much good, but the other fellow, that Goldstein or Goldberg or whatever the hell his name is, he ain't a bad boy. Ah was workin' with him today, and we got to talkin' about the best way to lay down a corduroy."

            "I wouldn't trust a fuggin one of them," Gallagher said fiercely.

            Red yawned and drew his feet up. "It's beginning to rain," he said.

            A few drops were pattering on the tent. The sky was a unique color; it had the leaden-greenish surface of stained glass, but there was a sheen, too, as though an intense light were shining on the other side of the pane. "It's gonna rain like a sonofabitch," he said. He lay back again. "You guys got your tent anchored okay?"

            "Ah reckon so," Wilson said. A soldier went running by outside, and the sound of his footsteps evoked a moody spirit in Red. It was the old sound, a man trying to get under cover before a storm. He sighed again. "All I ever done my whole life was get a wet ass," he muttered.

            "You know," Wilson said, "ol' Stanley is really feelin' his piss now that he's in for corporal. Ah heard him tellin' one of the replacements all about the Motome invasion. 'It was rough,' Stanley said." Wilson chuckled. "Ah was glad to hear that Stanley thought so, 'cause Ah hadn't made up mah mind about it."

            Gallagher spat. "Stanley ain't gonna give me any of his crap."

            "Yeah," Red said. Gallagher and Wilson still believed he had been afraid to fight Stanley. To hell with them. When he had heard that Stanley was going to make corporal he had been amused and contemptuous; it had seemed just right. Stanley
would
be noncom material. "More men get to heaven by sucking first at the other end," he mumbled to himself.

            Only it wasn't that simple. He realized abruptly that he had wanted to be chosen for corporal. He almost laughed aloud, a little bitterly, as if there would never be an end to the surprises in himself. The Army's got me, he thought. It was the old trap. First they made you afraid, and then they let you sew on ribbons. He would have turned it down if they had asked him. . . only he would have got a bang out of turning it down.

            Some lightning flashed nearby, and a few seconds later the thunder seemed to explode overhead. "Man, that was close," Wilson said.

            The sky was almost black now with the impending storm. Red lay back again. All his life he'd been turning down the stripes, and now. . . He tapped his hand several times on his chest, slowly, almost mournfully. He had always lived his life in himself, able to carry his belongings on his back. "The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable." It was an old axiom of his, but this once it was without much solace. He was running down. He had been a loner for a long, long time.

            "The rain's starting," Gallagher said.

            A vicious wind lashed at the tents. The rain came on softly, tapped against the rubber fabric of the shelter, and then began to drive harder. In only a few seconds it became furious with pellets like hail. The tents began to bend and strain. A few bursts of thunder sounded in the distance, and then a cloud shattered overhead.

            The men in the tent winced. This would be no ordinary storm.

            Wilson reached up and braced his weight against the ridgepole. "Goddam," he muttered, "that wind could cut a man's head off." The foliage beyond the barbed wire had already assumed a beaten look as if a herd of animals had trampled upon it. Wilson peered out for an instant and shook his head. The bivouac area was invisible, a void of green across which the rain streamed, beating upon the subdued grass and shrubs. The wind was tremendous. Wilson remained on his knees, feeling the violence of it dumbly. Although he had ducked back from the opening in the tent, his face was completely wet. There was no way to keep out the water which dripped quickly through every rip and seam of the tent fabric and blew in through the entrance like successive waves of surf. The rain trench had filled already, was flowing over onto their bedding. Gallagher gathered up their blankets, and the three men squatted under the flapping ponchos, trying to hold them down, and failing miserably in the attempt to keep their feet dry. Outside the water had risen in great puddles which kept spreading and sending out tentacles like enormous amoeba absorbing the earth. "Goddam, goddam," Wilson said.