Waddy kept Paul’s glass, sipping from it, until Wolkowicz returned with a fresh drink for him—not a boilermaker, but three fingers of Scotch whisky, neat. Waddy tossed off the Scotch and gave Paul back his soda water.
“What I think you ought to do, Paul,” he said, “is verweile doch. It’s not too late to get out of the Marines. They’ll just get you killed, you know. That’s what Marine second lieutenants are for—to show the troops how to die.”
Waddy put an arm around Paul’s shoulders and his other arm around Wolkowicz’s shoulders and drew them close. A few drops of whisky dribbled out of his glass and stained the shoulder of Wolkowicz’s uniform.
“Force Jessup,” Waddy whispered. “I want you for Force Jessup. Isn’t Elliott your godfather? He can fix us up.”
“Force Jessup, Waddy? What’s that?”
“Crack outfit, soon to go into action—expert killers, linguists, very advanced in woodcraft. Wolkowicz will do the shooting, you’ll do the German poetry, and I’ll do the leading. Stealth and cunning behind the Jap lines, that’s our game. Much better than hitting the beach with a bunch of pimply Marines on some godforsaken atoll.”
Alice joined the group and took Waddy by the arm. “Supper is ready,” she said. “I want you to sit with me, Waddy.” She led her brother away.
Wolkowicz, holding Waddy’s dirty glass in his hand, watched him go. His eyes were as colorless as rain.
After dinner, in another room, Wolkowicz examined an old spinet. It was a lovely instrument: rosewood case, ivory keys the color of candle flame.
“Someone always plays the spinet on Christmas,” Alice said. “It’s more than two hundred years old. The first Hubbards brought it up from Connecticut on an oxcart. Have you ever heard a spinet?”
“Yes, I have,” Wolkowicz replied.
“Really? Most people haven’t. There are quills inside that pluck the strings.”
Wolkowicz touched a key and a note sounded.
“Time for the gifts, but you must play for us later,” Alice said.
Elliott handed out the packages. Paul got the last gift under the tree, a long tube wrapped in white paper.
“You may want to open that when you’re alone,” Hubbard said.
“I’ll do it now.”
Paul left the room, taking his present with him, and walked through the house. Some of the rooms were heated by stoves and fireplaces; others were not. The house was made of pine and hemlock, wide boards whipsawed from huge virgin trees, and it murmured and squeaked as it moved in the winter wind; it had a scent like no other house: old lumber that had captured two hundred years of weather, wax, sachet, and woodsmoke.
The bedroom Paul used had been Hubbard’s room, and the walls were hung with photographs of Hubbard’s dead mother and father. Paul had added pictures of Hubbard and Lori and Paulus and Hilde. There was a large drawing of Berwick and a shelf of Hubbard’s books, bound in blue goatskin. Alone in this room, Paul unwrapped the tube, removed the picture it contained, and spread it out on the bed. It was Zaentz’s drawing of Lori in her pregnancy, a smiling girl, carrying him within her body. Lori had been younger than he was now when this drawing was made.
The latch lifted. Paul heard the door open and turned around. Hubbard had joined him. Paul held out the drawing and Hubbard took one edge of it while Paul held the other.
“How did you get it back?” he asked.
“It’s not the original,” Hubbard said. “Zaentz did this from memory. He lives in New York now.”
“From memory? It’s exactly the same.”
“Yes. Just as I remember the two of you.”
They went downstairs together through the cold house. The strains of the spinet, quavering like an old voice, grew louder as they opened door after latched door and drew closer to the old parlor. They paused and listened to the music. The player finished the piece and in the silence Hubbard and Paul once again heard the wind, also like an aged voice.
“I’ve always felt, when I find myself alone in this house,” Hubbard said, “that they’re all here, the Hubbards and the Mahicans, all of them.”
“Only the Hubbards?”
“Only the dead. Not your mother, Paul.” Hubbard paused. It was very cold in this room, which had no stove or fireplace, and his breath was visible. “She is alive,” Hubbard said.
On the other side of the door, the player struck the keys of the spinet again. Paul lifted the latch. The room beyond was dim, lit by one small lamp and a few candles.
Barney Wolkowicz, drab army blouse wrinkled across his broad laborer’s back, his thick hairy fingers spanning the keyboard, was playing a Bach fugue. The notes were so lovely, and so perfectly struck, that it seemed to Paul that they ought to be visible in the flickering warm atmosphere of the room.
Hubbard stood stock-still, his eyes fixed on Wolkowicz. When the last note had been played, he put his arm around Paul’s shoulders.
“You see?” he whispered, as if it could just as well have been Lori who smiled at them from the spinet, instead of Wolkowicz; and indeed it was just as likely that Paul’s mother should have come back to them, as young and lovely as she was in Zaentz’s drawing, as that this ugly man should have such music in him.
Wolkowicz
One
— 1 —
Captain Wadsworth Jessup was obsessed by elephants. He lay on a hilltop in Burma above the Shweli River, gazing through binoculars at an outpost of the 56th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army. Half a mile away, in a clearing in the dense rain forest, the Japanese were building a fortified position for a light tank at the junction of two trails. Three elephants worked steadily, piling huge logs around a pit gouged out of the bright brown earth.
“There, my dear Barnabas,” said Waddy Jessup, “are Force Jessup’s elephants.”
Barney Wolkowicz crouched on the spongy floor of the jungle next to Waddy. Twenty Kachin tribesmen, the men of Force Jessup, as Waddy called this band of guerrilla fighters operating behind the Japanese lines, were deployed in the undergrowth. Some of the Kachins, slim cheery men hardly larger than American grammar school boys, were armed with muzzle-loading fowling pieces; Waddy had heard that these weapons were highly prized by the Kachins because it was easy to make ammunition for them, and he had brought along a half-dozen when he and Wolkowicz had parachuted into Burma a month earlier.
Waddy himself was armed with a Thompson submachine gun and a samurai sword he had bought from one of the Kachins. He wore an Australian bush hat and a Yale track shirt. The Japanese were all around them in thousands; bands of Kachin guerrillas led by American and British officers harassed the Japanese; Communist bandits struck at the enemy from camps just across the border in the Yunnan Province of China. Waddy was feverishly excited by the atmosphere of danger and murder. Since landing in Burma he had talked in a British accent, calling Wolkowicz “my dear Barnabas” and treating him like a manservant.
The rain forest was a stinking green haze in which the human eye could see no more than twenty feet. Anything might lie in wait, silent and murderous, beyond the impenetrable curtain of vegetation six paces away. The Kachin tribesmen were brave and well trained. Under Waddy’s command, however, they had seen little action. No longer did Waddy prowl the narrow trails that threaded through the rain forest. On his first patrol, he had marched around a bend in a trail and come under fire from a Japanese machine-gun position. Three of his Kachins had been killed. As a squad of bowlegged Japanese soldiers rushed down the trail, dropping every few paces to fire their rifles, Waddy had led his patrol into the forest, ordering Wolkowicz to cover the retreat with fire from a Browning automatic rifle.
Wolkowicz drove off the enemy. Then, his ammunition exhausted, he fell back into the trees, expecting to find the rest of Force Jessup waiting for him. But the others, Waddy and his Kachins, had vanished. Wolkowicz was alone. He had rations for one day and water for half a day. He carried a compass, but no map. Only Waddy, the commander, carried maps; this minimized the pos
sibility of their falling into enemy hands and revealing the secret location of Force Jessup’s base.
Nevertheless, Wolkowicz found his way home. When he arrived at the base, starving and dehydrated, three days later, he found Waddy Jessup seated on a chair in front of his hut, drinking tea.
“Back at last?” Waddy said to his exhausted second-in-command. “Never mind. Have some tea. Sit down. I’ve been ruminating, my dear Barnabas. There’s a lesson in our last action. One really can’t beat the Jap by letting him kill you. The Jap sets up his machine gun, shakes out his riflemen, and waits for the impetuous white man to blunder into his hail of lead. No, no, hot for Force Jessup.”
Thereafter, Waddy led his Kachins on several long patrols, moving foot by foot through the jungle, shunning the trails. It was hot, hard, fruitless work. Often the Kachins had to cut a passage through the bush with machetes.
The Kachin headman had an unpronounceable name. Waddy called him N.S., short for Noble Savage. N.S. did not understand Waddy’s tactics. Each night, after the force made camp, the headman demanded to know when Waddy intended to attack the Japanese. “The Japs are on the trails,” the headman said. “We must get back on the trails.”
Waddy would listen, a pleasant smile on his lips, affectionate mockery in his eyes. But he would not go near the trails. Finally, the Kachins threatened to take their arms and join another band that saw more action. It was then that Waddy had revealed his plan to capture elephants.
“Elephants?” Wolkowicz had said. “What the fuck for?”
Waddy gave him a pitying glance. “Let me explain, my dear Barnabas,” he said. “How does Force Jessup move? Through the jungle. What is the main impediment to moving through the jungle? Why, the jungle itself. If, however, we had elephants, we could flatten the jungle and move through it at will.”
Waddy unrolled a map and weighted it down with his samurai sword, Japanese strongpoints along the jungle trails were marked on the sweat-stained paper in red pencil.
“Look here,” Waddy said. “We know the Jap has a machine gun dug in here, aiming south. The Jap wants us to march north, around this bend in the trail, into the muzzle of his gun. Instead, we follow our elephants up the trail to this point, just before the bend. Then we nip into the jungle and, moving with amazing swiftness and stealth, cut across the bend and strike the enemy from behind. Then we melt back into the jungle. If the Jap follows, we lie up and wait and wipe him out.”
Waddy straightened his back and peered into the expressionless faces of Wolkowicz and those of the Kachin headman. “Brilliant but simple,” he said.
“Captain,” Wolkowicz said, “do you know how to ride an elephant?”
“I’ve been riding all my life. But I won’t be riding them. We’ll liberate their bloody mahouts along with the elephants.”
Now, on the hilltop above the Shweli River, Waddy wriggled backward into the jungle and handed his binoculars to the Kachin who carried them for him. He cut a map of the enemy camp into the dirt with the tip of his sword and briefed Force Jessup on his plan of attack. It was a model of simplicity and aggressiveness.
“I count twelve Japs on foot, three in the tank,’ Waddy said, carving out the positions. “The tank must be neutralized before they can get it into action. It’s inside the log position the elephants built. We have to keep it there. Barnabas, you are our demolition expert, so you and this splendid-looking Buddhist will go in first, wiggling on your bellies, and plant charges in the treads and under the tank. When you hear a burst of Thompson fire, at precisely 2300 hours, blow it up. Then start shooting. I’ll be coming in from the river with half the force while old N.S. charges down the trail from the rear with the rest of the troops, cutting off the Jap’s retreat. Do not, repeat do not shoot the elephants. Kill all fifteen Japs and cut off their dinguses.”
“What about taking some prisoners?” Wolkowicz said.
“My dear Barnabas, it’s elephants we’re after, not apes. We have apes.”
Waddy, rolling up his map, grinned at Wolkowicz. “Hit the line for dear old Kent State,” he said. Wolkowicz was a graduate of Kent State College in Ohio; he had majored in music. These facts deeply amused Waddy Jessup. In the falling twilight, Wolkowicz could read the word Yale on the chest of Waddy’s blue track jersey. He turned away and rummaged in a pack for explosive and detonators.
— 2 —
In seven hours of hacking and marching, Force Jessup covered the half-mile of jungle between the hilltop and the Japanese outpost. Wolkowicz and the Kachin, laden with explosive, wire, and weapons, began crawling toward the Japanese emplacement at 2130 hours. By 2215, they had dragged themselves about fifty yards, moving a fraction of an inch at a time, and were only ten yards or so from the logs.
The tank’s turret was a darker silhouette against the black night. Even now, three hours after the sun had gone down, the temperature was at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Sweat seeped from Wolkowicz’s crawling body. He had been soaking wet with perspiration ever since he struggled out of his parachute harness, two minutes after hitting the ground in Burma. This disgusting body that he inhabited in the jungle, slippery with its own fluids like an intestine turned inside out, did not seem to be his own. He was wracked with dysentery. He had had to stop several times during the crawl to relieve himself. Between bowel movements, he had a tendency to break wind. The noise worried him. He was afraid it would arouse the Japanese. An excruciating cramp began just behind the base of his penis and spread, growing stronger with every second it lasted and every inch it traveled up his entrails. He rolled over on his back and pressed his buttocks into the dirt, squeezing the cheeks together to muffle the explosive sound of escaping gas.
In thirty minutes, he covered the ten paces that had separated him from the rear end of the tank. He could see the metal glistening in the dark and smell the oil on the machine. He put up a hand and touched warm steel, then felt the treads of the tank. One of the Japanese was inside. Another was on guard in the turret. Where was the third? Wolkowicz farted powerfully, and the remaining member of the tank crew, standing six feet away yet utterly invisible, laughed. Wolkowicz thought, He’ll smell me. But the sentry did not stir again.
Wolkowicz took off his pack and got out the TNT and the detonators. Doing this simple thing in absolute silence, doing it so slowly that he could not possibly betray his position by even the flicker of a movement, required the use of every cell in Wolkowicz’s brain and the control of every nerve in his body. He wedged the TNT between the tread of the tank and the bogie wheel, and inserted a detonator.
Then, crawling again, he moved away from the tank, paying out wire as he went. He had lost track of the Kachin who had crept into the outpost with him. Then he heard a gasp, not loud, like air being let out of a bicycle tire. Wolkowicz froze. Someone was crawling along the ground toward him. Wolkowicz drew his .45 automatic from its shoulder holster and waited. When the crawling man was six inches away, Wolkowicz recognized him: it was his Kachin comrade. The Kachin, his grin white in the ink of the jungle night, thrust his knife, reeking with the blood of the Japanese sentry whose throat he had just cut, under Wolkowicz’s nose.
At precisely 2300 hours, Waddy Jessup fired a burst of tracer ammunition from his tommy gun into the Japanese outpost. Wolkowicz twisted the handle on his detonator box, and while Waddy’s weapon was still emptying lazily into the darkness, the charge under the Japanese tank went off. The explosion looked like three cans of paint, red and yellow and white, smashing one after the other against the black wall of the night. The ammunition inside the tank went off in a series of shattering explosions and the tank burst into flames. In the jittery light, Wolkowicz could see Kachins leaping about, firing their weapons. Japanese soldiers scooted like rodents through the firelight and were cut down by bullets. The elephants trumpeted, shrieks of outrage amid the hoarse coughs of the heavy American weapons and the titter of a Japanese light machine gun. Wolkowicz heard no human voices.
Abruptly, as if someone ha
d turned off a loud radio, the firing stopped. In the firelight, the Kachins were working, teeth and knives flashing, on the stripped corpses of the Japanese. The elephants, still trumpeting, threw themselves against the chains wrapped around their front legs. Their mahouts danced around them, shouting what Wolkowicz supposed were reassurances. A chain broke and the end whipped a mahout across the kidneys, folding his body back on his spine like a strip of cardboard. The elephant dashed down the trail, away from the burning tank, dragging his clanking chain behind him.
Waddy Jessup stepped out of the darkness at the edge of the outpost, waving his samurai sword.
“Stop the elephant!” he cried in Kachin. “You three men, fetch me that elephant!”
The Kachins, busy with their mutilation of the dead, paid no attention to him. Waddy didn’t really seem to expect them to. He walked over to a little group of them and watched them as they butchered the dead, his jaunty smile fixed to his lips. There had been no sign of Waddy up to this point, and Wolkowicz had wondered, fleetingly, if he might have been killed or wounded; now he suspected that Waddy had lain hidden in the darkness until the firefight was over: there was something false in the captain’s nonchalance. Wolkowicz approached him.
“Ah, the mad bomber,” Waddy said, looking Wolkowicz up and down. “Good show, Barnabas. Let’s have a look at our elephants.”
“I think we ought to clear out of here, Captain.”
“Do you really, wojjig?” Waddy said. He turned on his heel and strode across the beaten dirt of the track toward the elephants.
One of the beasts lay on the ground, weakly lifting its trunk, then letting it fall. Blood oozed from a row of wounds in the elephant’s side; the animal had been machine-gunned. The remaining elephant stood over the fallen animal, nudging its body gently with its face. The two trunks touched and intertwined. The unwounded elephant uttered a mournful trumpet note.
“Bad luck,” Waddy said, gripping the shoulder of a weeping mahout. “Is this elephant going to die?”
The Last Supper Page 10