The Naked and the Dead (80 page)

            "Well, then you men can start out right now," Hearn said. "The rest of us will. . ." He halted. What were they going to do? "We're going to stay here overnight. You can use the rest, I suppose. Tomorrow we'll find a way through the pass."

            Brown spoke up. "Lootenant, couldn't I have another four men for, say, the first hour and a half march with Wilson? We can cover more ground that way, so by tomorrow when we start out again we'll be away from the Japs."

            Hearn deliberated. "All right, but I want them back by dark." He looked around him, picked Polack and Minetta and Gallagher at random and then Wyman. "The rest of us will take up guard posts till they get back."

            He drew Brown aside, talked to him for a few minutes. "You know the way to the trail we cut through the jungle?"

            Brown nodded.

            "All right, follow it through to the beach, and then wait there for us. It'll take you about two days, or maybe a little more. We should return in three or at most four days. If the boat comes before we do, and Wilson is. . . is still alive, then go back right away, and have them send another boat out for us."

            "Okay, sir."

            Brown assembled the litter-bearers, had Wilson placed on the stretcher, and began to move off.

            There were only five men left in the hollow, the Lieutenant and Croft, Red and Roth and Martinez. They settled down, each alone on a knoll bordering their hollow, searching the valleys and hill-lines about them. They watched the litter-bearers progressing over the hills to the south, alternating their two teams every few minutes. In half an hour they were out of sight, and nothing remained but the hills, the mute mountain walls, and the late afternoon sky washing already into the golden hues of sunset. To the west, perhaps a mile away, there were Japanese bivouacked in the pass, and in front of them, high up, out of sight, was the top ridgeline of Mount Anaka. Each of them brooded, alone with his thoughts.

            By nightfall, Brown and Stanley, Ridges and Goldstein were left with Wilson. The extra litter-bearers had turned back an hour before dark, and Brown, after progressing a half mile farther, had decided to halt for the night. They settled in a tiny grove just below the saddle of two small hills, spread out their blankets in a circle around Wilson, and lay talking drowsily. Darkness came, and in the wood it was very dark. Agreeably tired, it was pleasant to curl into their bedding.

            The night wind was cool, rustling the leaves in the trees. It suggested rain, and the men mused idly of summer nights when they had sat on their porches at sundown, watching the rain clouds gather, feeling at ease because they were under cover. The idea set off a long stream of wistful recollections, of summer and the sounds of dance music on Saturday nights, the rapt air and the smell of foliage. It made them feel rich and mellow. They thought of things they had forgotten for months: the excitement of driving a car on a country road, the headlights painting a golden cylinder through the leaves; the tenderness and heat of love on a breathless night. They burrowed more deeply into their blankets.

            Wilson was becoming conscious again. He floated upward from one cloud of pain to another, groaning and mumbling unintelligibly. His belly ached terribly, and he made feeble efforts to draw his knees up to his chest. It felt as if someone were binding his ankles, and he wrenched himself into wakefulness, the sweat pocking his face.

            "Leggo of them, leggo of them, y' goddam sonofabitch, lea' my legs alone."

            He swore very loudly, and the men started from their reveries. Brown leaned over him, daubing the moistened end of his handkerchief over Wilson's lips. "Take it easy, Wilson," he said softly. "You got to keep quiet, boy, or you'll be stirrin' up the Japs."

            "Leggo, goddammit!" Wilson bawled. The shout exhausted him and he fell back on the stretcher. Dimly he felt himself bleeding again, and he drifted along the impressions it aroused, uncertain if he was swimming or if he had wet his pants. "Went and pissed in them," he mumbled, waiting for the hand to slap him. "Woodrow Wilson, you're a little ol' slob," some woman's voice was saying. He giggled, shying away from the blow. "Aw, Mommy, didn't mean to." He yelled the words, pleading, twitching on the stretcher as if avoiding a cuff.

            "Wilson, you got to keep quiet." Brown massaged his temples. "Just relax, boy, we're gonna take care of ya."

            "Yeah. . . yeah." Wilson dribbled a little blood out of his mouth and lay motionless, feeling it dry on his chin. "Rainin?"

            "Naw. Listen, boy, you got to keep quiet on account of the Japs."

            "Uh-huh." But the words corroded his stupor, and left him afraid. He was sinking again in the tall grass of the field, waiting for the Japanese to find him, and he began to blubber softly without realizing it, as if his weeping came from an excreta of his nerves. Ah gotta hold on. Only he could feel the blood pulsing out of his belly, trickling, searching for new stream beds along the muscular ravines of his groin to end at last in a pool between his thighs. Ah'm gonna die. He knew it; as if he had sight in his belly he formed an image of roiled and twisted flesh, curling about itself, writhing. It kept squeezing the blood out.

            "Looks like a pussy," he heard himself murmuring, only the words sounded with a roar.

            "Wilson, you got to shut up."

            The fear lapsed, became a vague disquiet, lulled by Brown's hand. This time, Wilson really whispered. "One damn thing Ah cain't figger out. Two in bed and wake up three, two in bed an' wake up three." He repeated it like a jingle. "What t'hell's one got to do with t'other; you jus' do your screwin' an' it comes out a kid." He wrinkled his face, partially from pain, and then relaxed again, sinking into the sensual fetid memories of a woman over him. Then the image blurred, and his vision faded into a series of concentric circles boring into his head with the delirium of ether. Ah gotta hold on. When they done op-per-rated on ya, an' ya got a hole in ya, y' cain't go to sleep. Pappy went to sleep an' he woke up dead. His mind swirled, plumbing back into his core, considering himself objectively as a man who was going to die. He fought against it, terrified, not really believing it, like a man who looks in a mirror and speaks, and cannot believe that the face he has seen really belongs to himself. He careened from one unexplored cavern into another, believing at last that he had heard his daughter saying, "Pappy went to sleep an' he woke up dead."

            "No!" Wilson shouted. "Where'd you git that idea, May?"

            "That's a cute girl you got," Brown said. "That her name, May?"

            Wilson heard him, made the long journey back. "Who's that?"

            "Brown. What's May look like?"

            "She's a goddam little hellion," Wilson said. "Smartest little bugger you'd ever want to see." Remotely, he felt his face twisting into a smile. "Ah tell ya, she can jus' twist me 'round, an' she knows it. She's one hell of a little girl."

            The pain in his belly became acute again, and he lay there panting, absorbed only in the racking demands of his body like a woman in childbirth. "Ohhhh," he groaned thickly.

            "You got any other kids?" Brown asked quickly. He massaged Wilson's forehead with slow tender motions as if he were soothing a child.

            But Wilson did not hear him. He was concerned only with his pain, and he fought against it numbly, almost hysterically, like a man grappling in the dark, pitching with his opponent down an endless flight of stairs. Protesting, whimpering from the pain, he reeled into unconsciousness, his mind seeming to revolve over and over beneath his closed eyelids.

            Brown continued to massage Wilson's forehead. In the darkness, Wilson's face seemed connected to him, an extension of his fingers. He swallowed once. An odd complex of emotions was working in Brown. Wilson's cries of pain, his shouts, had alerted Brown, made him worry about enemy patrols. It shattered the security of the grove, and reproduced the isolation of their position, the vast empty stretches of the hills around their little wood. He flinched unconsciously every time he heard an unexpected sound. But it was more than fear; he was keyed very high, and every quiver, every painful gesture of Wilson's body traveled intimately through Brown's fingers, through his arms, deep into his mind and heart. Without realizing it, he winced when Wilson winced. It was as if his brain had been washed clean of all the fatigue poisons of experience, the protecting calluses, the caustic salts, the cankers of memory. He was at once more vulnerable and less bitter. Something in the limitless darkness of the night, the tenuous protection of the grove, and the self-absorbed suffering of the wounded man beside him had combined to leave him naked, alone, a raw nerve responding to every wind and murmur that filtered into the wood from the bare gloomy hills in the blackness about them.

            "Just take it easy, boy," he whispered.

            All the lost things, the passions and ambitions of his childhood, the hopes that had curdled and turned to bile, swashed through him. Wilson's talk of his child loosed an old desire in Brown; for perhaps the first time since he had been married he wished he was a father, and the tenderness he felt for Wilson had little to do with the amused condescension with which he usually considered him; Wilson was not wholly real to him at this moment. He existed in this brief duration of Brown's mood as the body, the flesh, of Brown's longings. He was Brown's child, but he was also a concretion of all Brown's miseries and disappointments. For a few minutes he was more vital to Brown than any other man or woman had ever been.

            Only it could not last. It was as if Brown had awakened in the middle of the night, helpless in the energies his mind had released in sleep. In the transit to awareness, to wakefulness, he would be helpless for a time, tumbling in the wake of his dream, separated from all the experience, all the trivia that made his life recognizable and bearably blunted to himself. He would be uncovered, lost in the plain of darkness, containing within himself not only all of his history and all of the present in the ebbs and pulses of his body, but he would be the common denominator of all men and the animals behind them, waking blindly in the primordial forests. He was at that moment the man he might have been for good or for bad.

            But inevitably he climbs out of the sea, grasps in his vision the familiar bedposts, the paler rectangle of the window, smells the flat commonplace odors of his body, and the pit of anxiety and aliveness shrinks to its normal place, is almost forgotten. He begins to brood about his concerns for the coming day.

            So Brown thought about his wife, remembered her at first with longing and a flood of long-compressed love, and saw her face over his, her breasts nuzzling richly against his neck. But the unfamiliarity, the nakedness of his feeling was leaving him. He heard Goldstein and Ridges talking, felt the moistness of Wilson's forehead, and he was cast again into the worries and problems of the two days ahead. Seeing the bedpost, his heart clamped on the memory of his wife like a dog crunching a bone, and he pushed her away, immersed again in bitterness. Fooling around with anything that wears pants.

            He began to brood about the difficulties of carrying Wilson back. There was a strong residual fatigue in his body from the first two days of the patrol, and the hills ahead would be demanding, exhausting, now that their relief had returned to the platoon. He had a sharp preview of the next day's march. With only four of them to bear the litter, they would be working all the time without relief, and after fifteen minutes in the morning they would be cruelly tired, dragging on painfully, having to halt for rest every few minutes. Wilson weighed two hundred pounds, and when their packs were lashed to the stretcher, it would be easily three hundred pounds. Seventy-five pounds to a man. He shook his head. Through experience he knew how exhaustion broke him down, dissolved his will, and muddied his mind. He was the leader of this detail, and it was his duty to get them through, but he felt unsure of himself.

            The aftermath of all this -- his sympathy for Wilson, the purge he had felt, and then the return of his bitterness -- left him very honest with himself for a few minutes. He knew that he had wanted this detail because he was afraid of going on with the platoon, and he had to succeed here. A noncom ain't worth a goddam when he loses his nerve if he lets himself show it, Brown told himself. But it was more than that. Somehow he could slide through the months, perhaps the years ahead. They were in combat only a small part of the time really, and even then nothing might happen; his fear might not be noticed, nobody might be hurt because of it. If he did the rest of his work well enough it would be all right. After the Motome campaign was over, I was a hell of a lot better than Martinez for drilling and training, he thought.

            What he realized partially was that he was afraid of breaking up completely, of being inefficient even in garrison. I gotta get ahold of myself or I'll be losing my stripes. For a moment he wanted this; it seemed as if life would be so much easier if he had no worries and no responsibility; he rebelled against the tiresome demands of watching labor details to make sure the job was done well. He had begun to feel an increasing tension whenever an officer or Croft examined the work his squad had been doing.

            But he knew that he could never give up his sergeancy. I'm one man in ten, he told himself, they picked me 'cause I stood out. It was his bulwark against everything, his doubts of himself, the infidelities of his wife. He couldn't let go of that. And yet, he had added a further torment. He was bothered often by a secret guilt. If he wasn't good enough, he should be busted, and he was trying to conceal it. I gotta get Wilson back, he swore to himself. Something of the compassion he had felt for Wilson returned to him. There he is and he can't do a damn thing, he depends on me and I'm supposed to be able to do the job. The whole thing was very clear. It left him frightened, and he massaged Wilson's forehead gently, looking off into the darkness.