The Sand Pebbles

by Richard McKenna

  “I didn’t mean kill her,” Crosley said.

  The old woman crept away. Tullio sprinkled powder on cotton and packed it in Holman’s mouth and put a clumsy battle dressing on the outside. Crosley and Bordelles found about a hundred tins of kerosene under the quilts. All the bedding in the place was piled on top of it. Maybe it was the old woman’s way of hiding it under the bed, Holman thought. She just wanted to help. He had a dull ache in his jaw. He felt as if he were one or two moves behind in a game he didn’t know how to play in the first place. The others were pulling the unpunctured cans out of the heap. Kerosene was slopping and spreading on the damp clay.

  “Take the good ones down and load them in that wupan,” Bordelles said.

  Tullio started down with two of them. A spatter of shots from the woods drove him jumping back.

  “They’ve circled around!” he said.

  “They’ll get our sampan!” Crosley was unslinging his BAR. “We’re cut off!”

  “Don’t get excited, men,” Bordelles said. “Farren and Franks are coming. They’ll take them in the rear.” His happy grin was gone, however. “Count your ammunition,” he said tautly. “We’ll have to go easy, now.”

  Crosley had only two magazines left. Holman had not used any of his. They refilled two magazines for Crosley from Holman’s and Tullio’s stock. “Wasting shells on pigs!” Tullio sniffed. “The other guys are coming,” Crosley said. “They couldn’t help but hear our fire. All them grenades.” “Of course they’re coming,” Bordelles said. He spread them out, to watch both gates. It was seeming longer than it was, Holman knew. From time to time bullets from the woods whined across the wall. Then, very far away, they heard the San Pablo’s siren going in short, screaming pulses. It was the emergency recall signal.

  They clustered around Bordelles at the front gate. “What if the other parties go back to the ship, now?” Tullio asked.

  “They won’t, if they heard our firing.”

  “If.” Crosley started and swore angrily. “That old woman!”

  “Find her!” Bordelles snapped.

  Hastily they searched the pens and shacks, but the old woman was gone. She would tell the pirates there were only four ocean devils trapped there and it would make them bold enough to attack. All of a sudden it was very bad.

  “I should’ve let her have it!” Crosley said bitterly. “The only good ones are dead ones.”

  “We’ll have to fight our way out of here before they can react,” Bordelles said.

  They all jumped to his crisp orders. They slashed the good cans with bayonets and they set fire to the kerosene and the soaked bedding. “Too bad these damned mud houses won’t burn!” Bordelles said. The fire caught and whooshed in a roaring column of flame and smoke. Crosley jumped out the gate and crouched and sprayed the woods blindly with bullets while the others ran down to the jetty. Then they fired, while Crosley ran to join them. They all crashed along the creek bank, careless of noise, and their sampan was where they had left it. In seconds they were in the sampan, Holman and Tullio both poling vigorously, and in a few minutes they were well out into the reed marsh. It had all run off very smoothly, like a drill.

  “Well done, men! Very well done!” Bordelles said.

  They were all grinning at each other, except Holman. Far behind them, the pirates were still shooting at nothing. Black smoke was billowing high above the trees back there, rolling, outfolding, shot through with red.

  “They’ll see that from the ship!” Crosley said proudly.

  They met Farren in the channel and the two sampans went back in company, shouting the story back and forth, and Red Dog yapped triumphantly. When they shifted to the ship’s boat at the hummock, they began being solicitous of Holman. They would not let him pole. He felt dizzy and nauseated and his jaw hurt badly. He was thirsty, and when he tried to drink from a canteen he spilled most of it. He kept thinking about ice-cold, very sweet lemonade.

  In the sick bay, Jennings fussed and clucked about Holman’s jaw. Holman could feel the ship getting underway, even as they hoisted the boats in. Jennings cleaned out Holman’s mouth with an alcohol swab and packed the jaw with medicated cotton and it hurt very much.

  “It looks pretty clean. I won’t probe,” Jennings decided. “We’re going straight to Changsha, and I’ll take you to the mission hospital for that. They have x-ray there.”

  Holman was sicklisted. He had to take a shower in the sickbay head and put on pajamas and turn into one of the sickbay bunks. He was glad to lie down. The Sand Pebbles began coming back to see how he was and to congratulate him. Both Lt. Collins and Bordelles stopped by with cheerful words. All the chiefs looked in. Even Po-han came up, full of admiration. Big Chew made beef broth and brought it up personally for Holman’s supper. Holman drank it through a bent glass tube and it was hot and rich and good. He winked at Big Chew and wished he could tell him that he appreciated the soup more than all the other attention he had been getting.

  In the evening the Sand Pebbles came back again, by twos and threes. They wanted Holman to have all the dope. General Tang was back in Changsha with some other warlord to help him, and they were pushing on down the river. They were supposed to be trying for Hankow also, and there was real fighting going on all along the lower Siang. For some reason Comyang was very excited about it and Waldhorn was glued to the radio receiver. All sorts of stuff was coming in coded and Bordelles would be up all night decoding it.

  “Clear out of here, you men!” Jennings said at last. “Can’t you see he can’t talk? He needs rest.”

  It was peaceful, alone in the dark. General Tang had been all right before, and they would be all right in that courtyard in Changsha. Holman drifted uneasily toward sleep. He had not liked all the attention and praise. He had not done anything in that fight, except to get wounded. But that made him the San Pablo’s walking battle scar, and that was what they were proud of. They did not give any more of a damn for Jake Holman than they ever had. Except for Burgoyne and Po-han, they did not even know Jake Holman.

  All next day they steamed across the lake. Holman was feverish and he slept most of the day. The ship buzzed with scuttlebutt. One of the new orders from Comyang was that gunboats could no longer shoot back when they were fired upon unless they could clearly see and identify who was shooting at them. But you could never see that. His shipmates came to cheer Holman and stayed to wrangle with each other. The new order meant they would just have to run out of range when they were fired upon, and the San Pablo would lose more face than it could stand losing. Half asleep on laudanum, Holman listened to them argue. Some thought it must be a mistake in decoding. Some thought it would be only for a day or two. Some thought Lt. Collins would just pretend to see the toofay and they would go on shooting back.

  “Not that Collins,” Harris said. “He thinks orders are sacred.”

  It was the nearest thing to a gripe about Lt. Collins that Holman had ever heard. The wrangling went on and on. No one could understand why Comyang was so worked up about Changsha. No one had ever heard before of the new warlord who was teamed up with General Tang. The new warlord’s name was Chiang Kai-shek.

  24

  They turned up the Siang channel early in the morning and at once began meeting junks headed downriver loaded with soldiers. Ordinary warlord troops seldom had flags around, but these junks had big flags. Being Chinese, they had to do it bass-ackward, as Farren said, and the flags were in the bow. They were bright red, with a blue field that held a white, serrated disk. No one had ever seen that flag before. The soldiers wore a strange green uniform. They seemed mostly scrawny kids, and they looked across from their junks to the San Pablo with bold, black, measuring eyes. They did not look at all like sloppy, hangdog, happy-go-lucky warlord soldiers.

  Quite often they sighted green troop columns marching north along the banks, with the new flag out ahead of every unit. The whole countryside seemed excited and moving, streaming northward toward Hankow. There was supposed to be a big battl
e going on at the foot of the lake.

  Twice before dinner the San Pablo was fired upon from ambush. Both times it was a low and deadly fusillade that smashed windows and drilled through the wooden superstructure. Both times Lt. Collins personally rang up flank speed and they ran out of range without shooting back. Holman felt weak but clear-headed and he dressed and went down to the crew’s compartment. Farren and several others were lashing mattresses across broken windows. Tullio was sweeping up glass. They were angry and ashamed.

  “He takes the wheel himself and makes everybody else on the bridge squat down behind the bulwarks,” Farren told Holman. “He keeps his face as blank as a flange.”

  “He don’t like it any better than we do,” Vincent said.

  None of Pappy Tung’s men would work on deck. Fortunately, the galley was included in the steel engine room and bridge portion of the superstructure, and Big Chew stayed on the job. Holman had his soup at the mess table with the others. Only about half of the crew sat down to the meal. They had barely started when more firing broke out.

  “Take cover! Clear port side! Clear port side!” Franks’ voice sounded from forward. “All guns, hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  Bells jangled below and the ship picked up speed. The men at Holman’s table looked at each other. Glass tinkled and bullets thudded into wood and mattresses. Duckbutt Randall, at Bronson’s table, took his plate aft to the nonrated men’s table, which was flanked by double-deck bunks.

  “Hell with it. Let’s eat chow,” Farren said.

  Holman worked on his soup. He was unpleasantly aware of the door open to the port side, just behind his back.

  “Them green soldiers are all toofay,” Restorff growled. “Them and their warlord with ’em. All toofay, by God!” His blunt, brown face was angry.

  “I don’t get them orders,” Farren said. “When we tuck in our tails and run, we’re just asking for more of it.”

  “We’ll get more,” Restorff said.

  “Prong orders!” Harris said. “Let’s shoot the bastards!”

  “These come right from Coolidge,” Red Dog said, from the other table.

  “Prong Coolidge! What’s he know about China?”

  Harris hurled his fork across the compartment. He went into a frenzy of cursing, tossing his white hair, scrawking his voice, bulging his outraged eyes, outdoing himself. He howled new and strange obscenities. The other Sand Pebbles forgot the bullets and listened with wondering admiration. Harris cursed Coolidge and China and missionaries and most of all the new warlord, whom he called, in a strangled, throat-tearing shout, that green-assed, baby-raping, mother-defiling Chancre Jack! The possibly accidental nickname delighted the Sand Pebbles. The cursing was almost as satisfying as a sixteen-inch salvo in among the ambushers. When Harris subsided at last, puffing, his craggy face a dull red, the firing had stopped. The San Pablo had run out of range again.

  “Arf! Arf! Arf!” Red Dog barked happily.

  “Chancre Jack,” Farren mused, with relish. “That’s his name, all right.”

  They ran a gantlet of bushwhacking rifle fire more or less all afternoon. Someone, afterward no one could remember who, coined a nickname for the hateful new flag: gearwheel flag, for the serrated white disk it bore as emblem. It was a good nickname, that could be growled deep in the throat. The last flurry of fire came only ten miles from Changsha itself.

  The San Pablo anchored in her regular place. There would be no liberty until Lt. Collins came back from the consulate. Changsha was swarming like an anthill. Green uniforms were everywhere along the bund. It was a weekday, but all the treaty business places had national flags flying above the company flags. They were almost lost in the great show of gearwheel flags along the top of the city wall. Changsha was a city of flags.

  A huge gearwheel flag floated from the top of the bund hotel. After sunset the hotel blazed with light and rang with music. Crosley turned the long glass on the roof garden and reported that they were all gearwheel officers up there, dancing with Chinese girls. Even some of the girls wore the green uniform. It was very gay and festive. A military band alternated playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

  It was a very cold homecoming for the Sand Pebbles.

  Lt. Collins came back, looking stern, and went straight to his cabin. Word came down that there would be no liberty until further notice. Red Dog came back with mail and the Sand Pebbles gathered around him in the compartment to hear the scuttlebutt.

  “The Red Candle’s closed,” he said. “They got Victor Shu in jail. They say he’s an enemy of the people.”

  That hit them hard. The missionaries had never been able to close the Red Candle. No one spoke for a moment.

  “Well, I guess the missionaries are all getting their guns over that,” Wilsey said at last, somberly.

  “I hear a lot of ’em favor the gearwheel, all right,” Red Dog said. “Damned if I know why, though. I hear the town’s full of missionary women and kids from upcountry. The gearwheels are raising hell with the missions upcountry.”

  “What doing?”

  “Taking ’em over for troop quarters,” Red Dog said.

  They were putting their horses in the churches, he went on. They tore out crosses and holy pictures and put up their gearwheel flag and pictures of Sun Yat-sen. All the people, missionaries included, had to come in and bow to the flags. They were doing the same thing in the heathen temples.

  “Well, but God damn it!” Farren said. “You’d think the biblebacks would be screaming for blood.”

  “They ain’t, though,” Red Dog said. “From what the clerk at the consulate told me, they’re the ones behind the no-shoot-back order.”

  The Sand Pebbles cursed and wrangled over that mystery until taps.

  After breakfast Holman had to go ashore with Jennings. When he took a dress white jumper out of his locker he found that a spent bullet had driven wood splinters into it, but the cloth was not harmed. The sampan coolie demanded a dollar and the rickshaw coolies on the bund wanted a dollar each to go to the mission hospital. It was far too much. The coolies would not bargain. They spat curses and turned their backs and an unfriendly crowd began to gather.

  “Hell with ’em, Doc,” Holman said. “Let’s walk.”

  They walked. The rickshaws in Changsha were no good, anyway. They had wooden wheels and hard rubber tires and no springs and all the important people rode in chairs. It was a pleasant morning for a walk. All the shops were open and the streets thronged and gearwheel troops were moving through. Holman was struck sharply by the difference. Warlord soldiers straggled on the march, slouching and slovenly and hung with strange gear such as teapots and umbrellas. Or they loitered along the streets with a sly, sullen, hangdog look that marked them more surely than their uniforms. The people feared and despised them. The people smiled and waved at the gearwheelers. Little boys ran shouting after them, clutching paper flags. The soldiers marched briskly along in step, fairly neat, heads up, and more often than not they were singing. Holman saw several girls swinging along in ranks with the soldiers.

  “They’re all just kids,” he said.

  “Cantonese all look like kids,” Jennings said. “It’s Malay blood.”

  Holman tried to place his feeling. He was feeling left out, he thought, wondering. He had not felt that, to care a damn about it, since years ago in Wellco, Nevada.

  The hospital was a big brick building with a Chinese roof. There were other brick walls and buildings and trees and neat green lawns and tennis courts and it was an extensive place. They had a gearwheel flag and a U.S. flag side by side over the main building. Inside it smelled of ether and iodoform, and people in white, most of them Chinese, were very busy. They all knew Jennings. It was strange to hear Doc Jennings called “Alfred.”

  After the x-ray Holman had to sit a long time alone with Chinese patients on a wooden bench in a passageway. A Chinese nurse had a desk at one end. People in white, and some in the ge
arwheel green, kept passing. They looked curiously at Holman. He felt like a strange specimen with his sailor suit and his bandaged jaw.

  Jennings came and led him to a small white side room and he sat in a dentist’s chair while a pretty Chinese nurse took off his bandage. He had whisker stubble under it. The doctor was a thin, fussy little man in a white gown. He studied the x-ray plate and asked Jennings how it happened. Jennings made it sound as if Holman had been storming the Halls of Montezuma, because that was how they were telling it on the ship. The doctor sniffed.

  “Chiang Kai-shek is going to do away with all that banditry and piracy,” he said. “There won’t be any excuse for gunboats being here.”

  “Who’ll keep Chiang in line, if we go?” Jennings asked.

  “You’re as bad as the oil company people, Alfred.” The doctor pressed fingers along Holman’s jaw. “Does that hurt, sailor?”

  “Little bit.”

  It hurt like hell. They had to put in a metal prop to help him keep his mouth wide enough open. The doctor was after a piece of metal with probe and forceps. He kept talking to Jennings about the new warlord. Sweat streamed down Holman’s face. The nurse kept wiping his forehead with gauze and the touch of her fingers helped him. The doctor was not feeling anything. He was just doing a job with tools.

  “Got it!” he said. He took the prop out of Holman’s mouth. “Rest a while,” he told Holman. “Rinse your mouth.”

  The nurse held a basin for him. Holman’s head cleared and he tried not to pant audibly. His calf muscles were trembling.

  “No, Chiang is not another warlord,” the doctor was telling Jennings. “China is becoming a nation, being newly-born as a nation, all around us. Can’t you feel it in the streets and see it in people’s faces?”

  “No,” Jennings said. “What’s China been all along, then?”

  “A geographical expression.” The doctor turned back to Holman. “This is what hit you,” he said. It was like a blunt tack. “What sort of guns do they shoot these in?” the doctor asked.