The Naked and the Dead (43 page)

            "Okay." Gallagher was silent, and Wilson decided to say something about it to Croft the next day, but in the morning Gallagher was solemn and quiet and he worked very hard on the road. Wilson kept his mouth shut.

            A day or two later the platoon was sent down to the beach on an unloading detail. Gallagher had received the final letter from his wife the preceding night and he had been trying to rouse enough courage to read it. He was moody and abstracted; he paid no attention to the conversation of the men in the truck, and soon after they came to the beach he wandered off by himself. They had been unloading crates of rations from a landing craft, and the dead weight of the box on his shoulder had irritated him dully. He dropped the load he was carrying, muttered, "Fug it," and began to walk away.

            Croft shouted after him, "Where you going?"

            "I don't know, I'll be back." He spoke without looking over his shoulder, and then as if to forestall any more questions, he began to jog through the sand. After he had gone a hundred yards, he felt suddenly tired, and he slowed to a walk. At a turn on the beach, he looked back disinterestedly at the men. There were several landing craft riding against the shore with their motors running, and two columns of men were filing between the supply dump and the boats. A haze was spreading over the sea almost obscuring the few freighters riding at anchor offshore. He walked around the bend, and saw a few squad tents just off the beach. The flaps were rolled and he could see several men lying on cots and talking to each other. Dully, he read the sign, "5279 Quartermaster Trucking Company." He sighed and continued to walk. Goddam quartermaster's got all the breaks, he told himself, but without any real bitterness.

            He passed by the strip of beach where Hennessey had been killed. It roused a mood of pity, and he halted to sift a handful of sand through his fingers. "Young kid, didn't even know what the fuggin score was," he thought. He remembered abruptly that when they had picked Hennessey up to move him farther away from the water, his helmet had fallen off. It had landed with a dull grating sound, and it spun once with a gritty noise in the sand. Guy's dead, and that's all he gets. He began to tremble as he remembered the letter in his shirt pocket. He had taken one look at the date, and he had known it would be the last one he would ever get. Maybe she wrote another one, he thought, and kicked some sand. He sat down, looked about him with the suspicious attitude of an animal about to eat in its lair, and then ripped open the flap. The sound tore at his nerves; he was beginning to feel the finality of each of his motions now. Abruptly, he realized the irony of pitying Hennessey. "I got my own fuggin troubles," he muttered. The sheets of paper felt pitifully flimsy in his hands.

            He reread the last paragraph when he had finished. "Roy, honey, this'll be the last letter I'll write for a coupel of days, the pain started just a little while ago, and Jamie went down to get Dr Newcome. I'm awful scared cawse he said I'm going to have a hard time, but dont worrie cawse everything will be alright, I know it. I wish you could be with me, you got to take awful good care of youeself cawse I would be afraide to be alone. I love you so much, honey."

            He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. He felt a dull ache, his forehead was burning. For several minutes he did not think of anything at all, and then he spat bitterly. Aaah, the fuggin women, that's all they know, love, I love you, honey, just want to hold a man down. He trembled again; he was remembering the frustrations and annoyances of his marriage for the first time in many months. All a woman wants is to get a man and then she goes to pot, to hell with it all. He was thinking of how wan Mary looked in the morning, and how the left side of her jaw would swell in sleep. Incidents, unpleasant fragments of their life churned turgidly in his brain like a pot of thick stew coming to a boil. She used to wear a tight hair net in the house, and always of course her habit of sitting around in a slip which had a frayed edge. Worst of all was something he had never quite admitted to himself; the walls of the bathroom were thin and he could hear the sounds she made. She had faded in the three years they had been married. She didn't take the right care of herself, he thought bitterly. At this moment he hated the memory of her, hated the suffering she had caused him in the past few weeks. Always that love-dove stuff, and they don't give a fug how they look. He spat again. Don't even have any. . . any manners. He meant "modesty." Gallagher thought of Mary's mother, who was fat and very dowdy and he felt an inarticulate rage at a variety of things -- at the very fact that she was so immense, at the lack of money that had made him live in a tiny drab apartment, at all the breaks he had never got, because his wife in dying had caused him so much pain. Never get a goddam thing. He thought of Hennessey and his mouth tightened. Get your head blown off. . . for what, for what? He lit a cigarette, and tossed the match away, looking at where it fell in the sand. Goddam Yids, fight a war for them. He thought of Goldstein. Bunch of fug-ups, lose a goddam gun, won't even take a drink when it's free. He lurched to his feet, and began to walk again. A dull pain and hatred beat through his head.

            On the beach giant kelp had washed ashore, and he walked down to the water's edge and looked at it. It was dark brown and very long, perhaps fifty feet, and its dark rubbery skin glistened like snakes, and gave him a jolt of horror. He was remembering the bodies in the cave. "What drunken bastards we were," he said. He was remorseful, or more correctly he generated remorse in himself because he felt he had done something bad. The kelp frightened him -- he walked away.

            After a few hundred yards, he sat down on the top of a dune which looked out to sea. A storm was coming up, and he felt suddenly cold; a great cloud perhaps thirty miles long, shaped like a flat fish and very dark, had covered most of the sky. A wind had sprung up and was lashing the sand in horizontal sheets along the beach. Gallagher sat there and waited for the rain that did not come. He was feeling pleasurably moody, he was enjoying the barrenness and brooding of the scene, the remote froth of the waves against the shore. Without quite realizing it, he began to draw a woman in the sand. She had great breasts and a narrow waist and very wide full hips. He looked at it soberly, and remembered that Mary was very ashamed of her tiny breasts. She had said once, "I wish they were big."

            "Why?"

            "I know you like them better that way."

            He had lied. "Naw, they're just right the way they are."

            An eddy of tenderness wound through him. She had been very small, and he thought of how she had seemed like a little girl to him at times, and how he had been amused at her seriousness. He laughed softly, and then abruptly, with no defenses raised, he realized that she was utterly dead and he would never see her any more. The knowledge flowed through him without resistance, like a torrent of water when a floodgate is lowered. He heard himself sob, and then was no longer conscious of the choking sounds of his anguish. He felt only a vast grief which mellowed him, dissolved the cysts of his bitterness and resentment and fear, and left him spent and weeping on the sand. The softer gentler memories of Mary were coming back to him; he recalled the sweltering liquid rhythms of their bodies against each other in heat and love, he felt dumbly the meaning of her smile when she handed him his lunch box as he went to work in the morning; he recalled the sad clinging tenderness they had felt for each other on the last night of his last furlough before he went overseas. They had gone on a moonlight excursion in Boston Harbor and he remembered with a pang how they had sat silent in the stern of the ship, holding each other's hands, and watching with a tender absorbed silence the turbulence of the wake. She was a good girl, he said to himself. He was thinking without quite phrasing it that no other person had ever understood him so fully, and he felt a secret relief as he realized that she had understood him and still loved him. This opened again the wound of all his loss, and he lay weeping bitterly for many minutes, unconscious of where he was, feeling nothing but the complete sorrow in his body. He would think of the last letter every now and then, and this would send him off into a new spasm of grief. He must have cried for almost an hour.

            At last he was spent, and he felt clean and gentle. For the first time he remembered that he had a child, and he wondered what it looked like and what its sex might be. It gave him a delicate joy for an instant, and he thought, If it's a boy, I'm gonna train him early. He'll be a pro baseball player, that's where the money is. His thoughts eddied away, and his mind became rested and empty. He looked moodily at the dense jungle behind him, and wondered how far he would have to walk back. The wind was still sweeping along the beach, and his emotions became vague and shifted about like vapors. He was sad again and thought of cold and lonely things like wind on a winter beach.

            It was a shame such a misfortune had to come to Gallagher, Roth thought. The men had taken an hour break from the unloading detail to eat their K rations, and Roth had gone for a stroll along the beach. He was thinking now of the way Gallagher had looked when he came back from his walk. His eyes had been very red, and Roth decided he had been crying. Still, he takes it well, Roth sighed to himself. He's an ignorant fellow, no education, he probably doesn't have so many feelings. Roth shook his head and continued to trudge through the sand. Absorbed in thought, his chin rested almost on his chest and it emphasized the misshapen humped appearance of his back.

            The great rain cloud that had spread over them that morning had blown away and the sun was very hot on his green fatigue cap. He stopped, and mopped his forehead. This tropical weather is uncertain, he told himself, very unhealthy, it's miasmal. His legs and arms ached from the labor of carrying the boxes from the boat to the dump, and he sighed. I'm too old for this kind of thing. It's all right for someone like Wilson or Ridges or even Goldstein, but it's not for me. A wry smile played over his mouth. I figured that Goldstein out wrong, he said to himself, for his height he's built very well, he's a strong fellow, but he's changed, I don't know what's the matter with him. He's very gloomy all the time, he's got a chip on his shoulder. There's been something the matter with him ever since that first squad came back from the front; it's the combat, I suppose, it makes changes in a man. But when I first met him he was such a cheerful fellow, a regular Pollyanna, I figured he could get along with anyone. First impressions, it doesn't pay to follow them. Someone like Brown, he's too sure of himself, he goes on first impressions, that's why he has it in for me. Just because I stayed on guard too long one night; if I'd tried to cut off a few minutes for myself, then he'd have a case, but this way I think he just has it in for me.

            Roth rubbed his nose and sighed. I could be friends with them but what do I have in common? They don't understand me and I don't understand them. To pal around you have to have a species of confidence I don't possess. If it hadn't been the depression when I got out of college. . . But what's the use of kidding myself, I'm not the aggressive type, I never would have been much of a success. You can kid yourself just so long. I can see it here in the Army, all they know is that I can't do as much manual labor as they can so they look down on me. They don't know what goes on inside my head, they don't care. What are finer thoughts to them, intellect? If they'd let me I could be a good friend to them, I'm mature. I've had experience, there're things I could tell them, but would they listen to me? Roth clicked his tongue in frustration. It's always been this way with me. Still, if I could get a job which fitted my qualifications, I could make a success of myself.

            He passed by the strip of beach where the kelp had washed ashore, and curious, he went over to examine it. Giant kelp, I should know something about that, it was my major only I've forgotten it all. The thought made him bitter. What's the use of all that education, when you can't even remember it? He looked down at the kelp, and held the head of one in his hand. It looks like a snake. Such a simple organism. It's got an anchor in its tail where it fastens onto a rock, and it's got a mouth at the top, and a connection between them. What could be simpler? A basic organism, brown algae, that's what it is, if I were to try it would all come back to me. Macrocystis something, that's what it was called, common name Devil's Shoelace, or is that something else? Macrocystis pyrifera, I remember we had a lecture on it. Maybe I should do something with my botany yet, it's only twelve years since I had it, I could refresh my memory and there'll be better jobs now in that. It's a fascinating subject.

            He dropped the head of the kelp. That's an unusual plant, I wish I could remember more about it. All those marine plants are well worth studying, plankton, green algae, brown algae, red algae, I'm surprised at how much I remember. I'll have to write Dora and ask her if she can find my botany notebooks, maybe I should start studying it again.

            He walked back, examining the seaweed and driftwood along the beach. All dead things, he thought, everything lives to die. Already I can feel it, I'm getting older, thirty-four, I'm probably through half my life already and what do I have to show for it? There's a Yiddish word for it, Goldstein would know. Still I'm not sorry I never learned any Yiddish, it's better to have modern folks the way I did.

            Oh, my shoulder aches, why don't they ever leave us alone for a day? In the distance Roth could see the men, and he felt a pinch of anxiety. Oh, they're all working again. They're all going to be making cracks and what can I tell them, that I was looking at some kelp? They wouldn't understand. Why didn't I think of coming back sooner?

            Wearily, timorously, Roth began to run.