Matterhorn

by Karl Marlantes

  The nurse grabbed for Mellas’s tag, not really looking at him. “I’m all right,” he said. “Those guys over there are a lot worse off than I am.”

  “You let me run triage, Marine.” She looked up at his bandages. She had a coarse, red face, small eyes that seemed sleep-deprived, and heavy eyebrows. She wore her hair in two short stiff pigtails. “Most likely to survive go first,” she said. Mellas realized that the idea was to maximize the number of men who could return to combat.

  “What’s this?” she asked, pointing at Vancouver’s sword.

  “It’s a friend of mine’s.”

  “All weapons, Marine,” she said, motioning for the sword.

  “I’m a lieutenant.”

  “Sor-ry,” came the sarcastic reply. “Look, Lieutenant. I’m busy. All weapons—even stupid souvenirs.”

  “The fuck it’s a souvenir.”

  “What did you say, Marine? You know you’re talking to a lieutenant in the United States Navy, don’t you?” That rank was the equivalent of a Marine captain.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mellas gave her a sloppy nonregulation salute, his hand curved over limply. “How do I know I’ll get it back?” he asked, still holding the salute, waiting for her to return it.

  The nurse glared at him. Then she shouted over her shoulder, “Bell, take this man’s weapon.”

  “I told you—”

  “You obey orders, Lieutenant, or I’ll have your ass on report.” She moved off to the next man, reading his medevac tag, writing on her clipboard.

  Bell, a hospital corpsman, came over and took the sword. He looked at it appraisingly.

  “How do I know I’ll get it back?” Mellas asked again.

  “You pick it up when you get orders back ashore, sir.”

  “I want a receipt.”

  “Sir, you’re holding up the process. We got Twenty-Fourth Marines in the shit and—”

  “I’m in the Twenty-Fourth Marines. I want a fucking receipt.”

  “We don’t have any receipt forms for swords, Lieutenant. It’ll go with the rifles. It’ll be all right.”

  “I’ve had three of my men pay for their goddamn rifles because some fucker in the Navy sold them to the gooks. I want a receipt and I want it now.”

  Bell looked around for help. He spotted the nurse and went over to her. Mellas saw her set her lips tight, then say something to Bell. Bell returned. “You’ll have to wait, sir. The lieutenant says she’s busy.”

  When the last stretcher disappeared inside the ship, the nurse walked over toward Mellas, holding herself rigid. “Now what’s the problem, Lieutenant?”

  “Ma’am, the lieutenant would like a receipt for the lieutenant’s weapon, ma’am.”

  “A receipt. I see.” She looked down at her clipboard. “Mellas, Second Lieutenant, Bravo Company, First Battalion Twenty-Fourth Marine Regiment. Correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mellas replied.

  “I’m going to issue you a direct order, Second Lieutenant Mellas, with HM-1 Bell as a witness. If the order isn’t obeyed, I’m going to place you under arrest for disobeying a direct order. Is that perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mellas said tightly.

  “Lieutenant Mellas, give your weapon, that sword, to HM-1 Bell and get your ass down to the officers’ ward. If you’re not moving in ten seconds I’m placing you under arrest. As it is, I’m putting you on report for disrupting triage.”

  Mellas knew when the machinery had him. He gave Bell the sword.

  In the officers’ ward another corpsman collected Mellas’s reeking uniform, but Mellas wouldn’t let him take the boots. He tied them to the end of the bed and glared at the corpsman. When he felt the boots were safe, he found a basin, filled it with warm water, and with a deep sigh put both feet into it. Sometime later he was brought back to reality by the voice of another corpsman. “Debriding, Lieutenant,” he said. Mellas reluctantly removed his feet from the basin.

  They put him on a gurney and wheeled him deeper inside the ship. There they gave him a local anesthetic and he watched them pick metal, dirt, and cloth from his legs, snip off dead flesh, then clean and rebandage the shrapnel wounds. “The rest will come out on its own,” the surgeon said, already looking at the next problem on the list, wiping his hands. A corpsman wheeled Mellas back to his bed. He had to wake Mellas up to get him into it.

  He jerked awake, his heart pounding, upon hearing his name. He took a gulp of air and searched frantically for danger with his good eye. A nurse with red hair whose name tag read “Elsked, K. E.” was standing over him. Like the triage nurse, she wore the twin bars of a Navy lieutenant. She was curt. “You’re due in the operating room in five minutes, Lieutenant.” She looked at his bandaged legs. “Can you walk or do you need help?”

  “Whatever’s efficient,” Mellas answered. He crawled out of the bed and walked, his legs stiff. She led the way down the passage, turning occasionally to see how far behind he was.

  Mellas watched her every move, noticing her hips and the outline of her bra strap beneath the crisp white synthetic material of her dress. He longed to catch up to her and touch her, make contact with someone soft, someone who smelled clean and fresh, someone warm. He wanted to talk to someone who knew how he felt, who could talk to the lost, lonely part of him. He wanted a woman.

  The nurse directed two corpsmen to arrange Mellas on an operating table. She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Mellas regretted being sent to this place, where his sudden flood of longing had no possibility of fulfillment. She thinks all I want to do is stick it in her, he thought bitterly. Of course I do, but there’s so much more. He laughed aloud.

  “What’s so funny?” one of the corpsmen asked, moving a huge machine that hung from a track overhead. He positioned it carefully over Mellas’s face.

  “Between the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, falls the shadow,” Mellas said. He attempted a smile.

  The red-haired nurse turned to look at him intently.

  They held him down by the shoulders and an older doctor came in. He peered into Mellas’s eye and injected a local anesthetic next to it. The nurse washed the eye, cleaning out the dirt and powder that had mixed with the ointment that Fredrickson had shoved into it. A piece of shrapnel had laid open Mellas’s eyelid. Another piece had gone into the skin just above the bridge of his nose, stopping against the skull. Mellas was tense with fear of what was coming. He looked up at a large black machine on tracks above him. It had large thick glass lenses and a stainless steel needle about six inches long that narrowed to a very fine point. The machine started to glow through the lenses, which magnified the doctor’s eyes, peering back at him. Then the lenses covered the brilliant light, and the light seemed to penetrate Mellas’s brain. The steel needle came out of the haze of light, and the doctor moved dials that moved the needle. The redheaded nurse’s hands pressed down on Mellas’s forehead and chest. The needle went into Mellas’s eye. He held on to the gurney and tried not to scream.

  Bit by bit, the chips and flakes of the defective hand grenade were picked from Mellas’s eye. Then the surgeon put two stitches in the eyelid.

  “You’re incredibly lucky, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. He was already pulling off his mask. “Two of those slivers were just microns from severing the optic nerve. You’d have lost your eye.” He pushed the machine back. “You won’t see normally for a week or so. Keep a patch on it for a while, but you’ll be able to return to your unit in about a week.” He turned and began washing his hands. Mellas felt as if he’d just been notified of his own hanging.

  He was wheeled back and he slept.

  When Mellas awoke he climbed out of the stiff sheets and hobbled to the passageway. The cold steel beneath his feet vibrated from the ship’s engines. He hailed a passing corpsman and asked where the enlisted men were. He was pointed in the right direction and limped off. He found Jackson in a ward with about a dozen other wounded Marines, all hooked up to IV bottles. Jackson was awake, staring at the wall, propped up against the headboard with a blanket over his legs. There were no bumps at the end of the blanket.

  Mellas s
uddenly didn’t want Jackson to see him. He wanted to walk away and blot Jackson from his mind.

  A corpsman came up to Mellas. “Can I help you, uh . . .”

  “Lieutenant,” Mellas finished for him. “I’d like to see one of my men.”

  “Sir, we’re not supposed to have visitors except between fourteen and sixteen hundred hours. These guys are still pretty critical.”

  Mellas looked at the corpsman. “Doc, he was my radioman.”

  “If one of the fucking nurses comes in, I ain’t covering for you,” the man said and stepped aside.

  Mellas approached the bed. Jackson turned his head slightly, then looked away.

  “Hi, Jackson. How you doing?”

  “How the fuck you think?”

  Mellas took a breath and nodded his head. He didn’t know what to say. It was clear that Jackson didn’t want to see him.

  “Look, Lieutenant, just get the fuck out of here.”

  Other Marines, who’d been half-listening from nearby beds, went back to reading or fiddling with the tie strings on their light blue pajamas.

  Mellas, also in pajamas, standing alone, felt suddenly naked. He seemed to be a petitioner at Jackson’s stumps. “Jackson?”

  Jackson turned his head again, looking coolly at Mellas.

  “Jackson, I . . .” Mellas tried to keep some dignity, not wanting to break down in front of everyone. “Jackson, I’m sorry it happened to you.”

  Jackson turned back to the bulkhead. Then his lips started to quiver. “I lost my legs,” he said, his voice shaking. He started to moan. “I lost my legs.” He turned to Mellas. “Who’s going to fuck someone with no legs?” His voice rose and he broke down completely. “Who’s going to fuck a goddamned watermelon?”

  Mellas backed away a couple of steps, shaking his head, feeling he’d done something wrong for still being whole, for having collapsed, for letting Jackson do the hole-checks. He wanted forgiveness, but there was none. Jackson was now thrashing back and forth, shouting. Corpsmen rushed to hold him down, and one shot a needle into his thigh. “You better get out of here, Lieutenant,” the corpsman said.

  Mellas limped into the passageway. He listened to Jackson’s muffled screaming until the drug took effect; then he walked slowly back to the officers’ ward.

  He slept and slept, waking up only for meals. When he finally had enough courage to visit Jackson again, he found someone else in the bed. Jackson had been flown to Japan.

  Between bandage changes Mellas took long showers, ignoring the Navy’s plea to take short ones. Then he slept some more. He occasionally saw the nurse from triage. They studiously avoided each other. He also saw the red-haired nurse coming into and out of the ward. He couldn’t help watching her. To his displeasure, she seemed to be on good terms with the triage nurse.

  He tried to engage the red-haired nurse in conversation, but it was clear that she was on duty and had little time for it. She was polite and would occasionally give him a warm smile after checking on his eye. Soon they were having short conversations. He found out she, too, was from a small town, but in New Hampshire, and that they both used to like to pick blackberries. Although he was grateful for the brief conversations, what he wanted was to have her enfold him in her arms and hold him so tightly that it would be as if they had crawled inside each other. It wasn’t to be.

  Within a couple of days his wounds were no longer bleeding and he was asked if he wanted to eat his meals in the officers’ mess. He accepted.

  He walked hesitantly into the polished wooden interior wearing his old boots, fresh jungle utilities, and a gold second lieutenant’s bar on one collar. Filipino mess men were putting the final touches on tablecloths. The tables were set with gleaming silver and white china. Mellas looked down at his scarred boots against the carpeted deck. One of the Filipinos motioned him toward a table for eight with four lighted candles as a centerpiece. He sat down. The chairs around the table filled with nurses, seven in all.

  Mellas’s heart hammered with joy at sitting next to these women. He tried to contain his excitement by rubbing his hands over the tablecloth. Several of the nurses tried to talk with him, but he couldn’t respond intelligently. He was struck dumb. All he could do was stuff food in his mouth, look at them, and laugh. They were talking about commissaries in Manila and Sasebo, and about leaves in Taipei or Kuala Lumpur. Some made innuendos about male officers while the others giggled.

  Mellas wanted to touch them. He wanted to reach out across the table and put his hand over their hearts and on their breasts. He wanted to put his head on their shoulders, smell their skin, and absorb their femininity.

  But they were older than he was, and they outranked him. They were also uncomfortable, assuming that he was horny. This was true, but it was not the whole story. Eventually their talk among themselves became less awkward, eddying around and over him, ignoring the problems and opportunities caused by the fact that they were women and he was a man. Finally they made their excuses and left Mellas alone. The Filipino stewards cleared the tables. One brought him fresh coffee.

  He saw someone getting up from a chair across the room. It was the red-haired nurse. She seemed to hesitate, then walked over to Mellas’s table.

  “Mind if I sit down?” she asked.

  “Please do,” Mellas answered. He tried to think of a joke about the empty chairs around him but couldn’t.

  “How’s the eye?” She sat down and leaned closer to him, inspecting the bandage.

  “OK.”

  “You like coffee, huh?” she asked. She smiled warmly. She had let down her hair from where it usually sat on the top of her head. It reached almost to her shoulders.

  Mellas opened up like a flower. He found himself telling her every detail of how to make coffee with C-4 explosives. They both talked about home, about growing up in small towns. She kidded him about paraphrasing Eliot just before the eye operation, but then she said, “Somehow I felt that I was the shadow.”

  Mellas cleared his throat and scraped his boots on the rug beneath his chair. “Well, not exactly. I mean you were part of it. You really want to know?”

  “Sure.” She smiled as if to say, We’re all grown-ups here.

  “Out in the bush,” he said, “it’s first the bang and then the whimper. Then you end up here and it’s all whimper and no bang.” He immediately regretted this attempt at being clever.

  “Not so funny,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Mellas said. “Sorry.” He paused. “I just get tired of being politely treated like a sex offender.”

  “You think we don’t get tired of every kid that comes mooning in here out of the jungle, desperate for it?”

  “‘It’ being sex.”

  “I didn’t think it was necessary for me to spell it out for you.”

  “No, I can spell real good. Listen. S-E-X. Right?”

  She smiled sarcastically. “Clever.”

  “Yeah. Clever.” He looked at his coffee mug. “It’s what every red-blooded American tiger wants, isn’t it?” He cocked his head, looking at her. He saw Williams, slung from a pole. “It’s only natural, right?”

  “Sure,” the nurse said, not unkindly.

  The calm, kind way she said “sure” made Mellas realize he was talking with an actual human being who cared. It defused his anger at being perceived as a threat and at his own failure to tell her that he just wanted to make friends. He stared at his mug.

  She sat back and looked at him somewhat quizzically.

  “They know they can’t have s-e-x because enlisted men don’t fuck officers,” Mellas said. “Maybe all they want is someone to be a woman around them instead of fake men with fake-men talk. They just want a real woman to smile at them and talk to them as though they were real people instead of animals.”

  “You’d see it differently if you were in our shoes,” she said.

  “And you’d see it differently if you were in ours,” Mellas replied.

  “There it is,” she said. She looked him in the eye and smiled warmly. “Look, I wasn’t trying to be prissy.” He noticed that her own eyes were green.
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  Mellas could see that she was trying to connect with him. He melted and smiled back.

  “You’ve got to understand what we do here,” she said. She started to reach her hand toward him on the table, but checked it and put both hands on her coffee cup instead. “We fix weapons.” She shrugged. “Right now you’re a broken guidance system for forty rifles, three machine guns, a bunch of mortars, several artillery batteries, three calibers of naval guns, and four kinds of attack aircraft. Our job is to get you fixed and back in action as fast as we can.”

  “I know. I just don’t feel very much like a weapon right now.”

  “How often do you think I feel like a mechanic?” she shot back. Then she softened. “It’s not why I became a nurse.” She put her palms to the sides of her forehead and rested her elbows on the table. “I do get so tired of it all.” She looked up at him, no longer a Navy nurse, just an exhausted young woman. “There’s too many kids coming on board,” she finally said. “They’re lonesome. They’re in pain. They’re scared of dying.” She paused. “We can only patch the bodies. For all the other”—she searched for a word—“stuff, well, we try to keep our distance. It isn’t easy.”

  “There it is,” Mellas said. She was stirring up all the feelings he’d had when the meal started. He was afraid he’d say something wrong and she would leave, so he said nothing.

  She broke the silence. “They’re sending you back to the bush, aren’t they?”

  Mellas nodded.

  She sighed. “It’s like I do my job well, and the result is sending you back to combat.”

  “Kind of a bind.”

  “Nothing like going back to the bush.”

  Mellas smiled at her again. He felt understood. He felt that he could talk with her.