He was lying in the hammock in the shade of the command post on the edge of the airstrip. The hammock was slung very close to the ground and he reached over and picked up a comic book and thumbed through it. He put the comic book down. For a moment he wondered if crapping was sexual. He decided it was partly and lit a cigarette, then reached over and with considerable effort hauled the headquarters book bag up into his lap.
He took out T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, dumped the book bag abruptly over the edge of the hammock, adjusted his gold rim glasses and opened the book:
To Con,
I never have, personally, formulated an opinion of Lawrence the man. But I think you will find this book of value tactically. I have. And I hope you enjoy it,
Ray Pearson, Col. USA
Niven turned the page. He began to read the dedication poem. Then he read:
“Death seemed my servant on the road!”
Then he read:
“Love, the way-weary, groped to your body,
our brief wage ours for the moment
Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon your substance”
He slammed the book shut. Island’s smelly rotten body loomed hugely in front of him, then he remembered the strafing attack and how their own planes had come back over and over and the horrible frustration of not being able to communicate with them, to tell them they were strafing their own troops.
It could happen anytime, he knew. They could have dropped a bomb on Danforth’s men instead of the village when they were attacking the body free. One bomb into Danforth’s men all bunched around that mortar could have wiped them out and it would have been his fault, Niven knew. He heard his heart pounding in his ears and he felt faint.
He should never have accepted the command. He was too young to take the responsibility of men dying. Con knew it was a fool thing but he hadn’t gotten his wire in time. He was afraid and he felt he was crapping in his pants but he couldn’t tell for sure. Suddenly he had the urge to be covered up with blankets and roll into a little ball and not move and not be able to think anything.
He couldn’t quit now. He couldn’t. It would be disastrous to turn the command over to Danforth. If the Indian got drunk he might get the whole outfit wiped out. The Kachins deserved better than that. Con was depending on him. The Colonel, too. There hadn’t been a Niven that had done one goddamn thing since his great-grandfather had made the fortune. He wasn’t going to be like them.
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. He could go out anytime. He was underweight and several times he had been offered the job of head radio man at base.
Supposing Con was killed. Who would take over? It would have to be him, he thought gallantly. It wasn’t his fault the goddam airforce strafed up the countryside. It wasn’t his fault Island wanted to make a hero out of himself. Hell no, it wasn’t.
If Con was killed they’d probably make him an officer. They’d have to make him one. He knew more than most goddam officers anyhow.
He visualized himself in the green blouse and pink pants with ribbons covering his chest. He began to hear march music and saw himself sitting in the back of a limousine riding down Fifth Avenue with the ticker tape flying just like the Flying Tigers. He saw the headlines: AMERICAN GUERRILLA RETURNS. His chest was filled. He didn’t want to be disturbed ever. The rhapsody played on and soon he fell asleep.
He had slept for fifteen minutes when Lau’rel woke him.
“I say, how’s the shits?” Lau’rel asked in his neat English accent.
“Soft. Real soft,” Niven unwound and got out of the hammock. “What time is it? Did the airdrop come yet?”
“It’s due now.”
“Reading Lawrence,” Lau’rel said picking up the book. “I never could get into it.”
“Morbid man. Real morbid.”
He thumbed the book for a moment, then put it down. “I want that patrol that’s going to the Road,” Lau’rel forced.
Niven hesitated, hands on hips, eyeing him.
“It’s a rough patrol,” Niven said.
“I know it. That’s why I want it.”
“You haven’t had too much experience. I’m sending it across the Road, you know. That’s rough crossing that Road.”
“I’ve got to have it, old man.”
Niven studied the handsome, grey haired Filipino, the tiny half-moon-scar white against his dark skin below his right eye.
“Trying to prove something?” Niven asked. He tried to ask it exactly the way he had heard Con ask it once.
“You might say that.”
“Would you object to taking Ringa?”
“Not at all.”
“All right,” Niven said as if granting a favor. “It’s your baby. Have dinner with me and we’ll go over it.”
Then they heard the big transports coming in, beginning to circle for the drops.
“Check the drop details for me will you, Lau’rel? I got to take a crap.”
“Glad to, old man.”
Niven began to unbuckle his belt. He was sure glad Lau’rel had snapped out of it. There wasn’t any sense in worrying about money the way he did. He was really stubborn; always denying that he worried about money. He was really damn pleasant when he wasn’t all wrapped up in those coffee plantations. Jesus, he didn’t look Filipino. More like one of those Spanish grandees, Niven thought.
He squatted down and waved to Ringa and the priest as they passed together nearby. Maybe he’d ask Lau’rel to go with him on his leave when Con came back. Old Con was living it up with those Maharajas in the mountains. I’ll bet he’s getting laid plenty, Niven thought. I should be with him. We’d have a ball.
Christ but his a-hole hurt. He felt like vomiting again. Then he was vomiting and crapping all at once and it was getting all over him.
CHAPTER XX
Carla had finished getting her things together. She paid a final visit to Danny’s bedside and told Doc Travis to call her if there was anything further she could do. Then with Con carrying her bag, his trench coat over her shoulders, they walked down the stairs and through the lobby now crowded with afternoon tea drinkers.
The cab was black, box shaped, with large immaculately polished windows, resembling an old electric car, Con thought, but two wheeled and pulled by two Nepalese in front and pushed by two from the rear, the interior upholstered in a rich grey velure.
Carla asked Con to open the window. She was starved for air, she said. Then with assorted grunts from the cabmen the carriage was set in motion.
It was grey, overcast but the air was crisp. Carla leaned back exhaustedly, staring numbly out the open window.
“It’s going to rain,” she said tiredly as if talking to no one in particular. Not even herself. She began to shiver.
“Shall I shut the window?” he asked.
“No, please. Let me have the air,” she said as if asking a favor.
He put his arm protectively around her. She looked at him for a second with glazed, tired eyes then yielded unresistingly, resting her head on his shoulder, feeling for an instant the bristle edge of his goatee on her forehead.
She felt weightless against him, shivering helplessly cradled there in his arm, the carriage moving forward with a rhythmic motion.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked as if she didn’t know what she were asking. Incoherently. Then she began to cry.
“Everything will be all right,” he patted. “You’re tired. Very tired.”
She trembled and cried and cried. Then she began to sob heavily, thoroughly; a tearless sob. He held her hard. He could feel her first tears warm and salty drying against his cheek. She was shaking uncontrollably and he was frightened that she would soon become hysterical. He stroked her hair and she settled down to a steady whimpering, and then the cab passed hollowly over the wooden bridge, the big wooden planks rumbling, she mumbling something unintelligible about the bridge, and then it g
rowing suddenly dark as they passed under the cover of the tall trees that overhung the narrow road.
The cab jolted to a halt in front of her cottage. They did not move from the seat. He never said a word but held her until she spent herself, almost half an hour. He thought he had never seen anyone cry like that. It was pathetic. Finally she calmed down and he dismissed the cab. He walked her inside where Rima, her ayah, eyed him distastefully, suspiciously, then took her mistress by the arm and led her from the living room. In a few minutes the ayah was back.
“My mistress said you shall wait,” she said coldly and vanished.
The studio living room was all rock and wooden beams and crammed bookshelves with large masculine furniture, a fresh fire blazing. Con helped himself to a brandy and walked over by the fireplace hearing above the banshee scream of a sudden gust of wind as it whipped through the treetops and out the window in the now half-dark he could see leaves spiralling upward in a whirlwind.
He half-closed his eyes and held his breath and suddenly he did not see out the window anymore but instead a gravel road with a lake on one side and a cornfield on the other and in the distance, straight ahead, a hill called Sugar Loaf. It was Fall up in Wisconsin, outside Oconomowoc, and the hay lay neatly trussed in stacks where the road curved temporarily away from the lake, then the road curving sharply back and there on the left the lake again and on the right a red barn, and beyond the barn and the pens a white house where Grandpa Fred Hastings lived. He was really his great uncle on his mother’s side he remembered but they had always called him Grandpa, probably, he thought now, because they never had a real Grandpa living.
It was odd he should remember now, he thought. How vividly he could picture how he and Grandpa Fred had fished for black bass in the old upper Nashota Lake near the Mission and how every time they passed the Mission Grandpa would tell him of the priest that was expelled for stealing. He must have heard that tale fifty times and he could hear the old man’s rasping voice now: Remember Con, don’t make no difference what people call themselves. You put three hundred of them together and you’re bound to find a son-of-a-bitch or two.
And he remembered, he was only eight or nine then, how he would sneak into the old man’s room in the afternoon when he was taking his nap and look, fascinated, at his false teeth in the glass of water next to his bed, and his big red moustache vibrating every time he snored. And how they had made bass lures together out of chicken and duck feathers out in the barn, and how the old man would get that sad, far-away look in his eyes and tell him about Andersonville Prison down in Georgia during the Civil War and how he never should have been in that prison because it was for privates and he was a corporal. And of the diarrhea, and stealing, and fighting amongst themselves. And of the dying. And the murder that was in men’s hearts. And that war was positive proof of what fools men really were: I don’t have to tell you, son. You’ll find out for yerself. Jes remember to beware of them officers, the high ranking officers especially. Cause officers aren’t really soldiers they’re politicians. And you’ll find out about politicians someday.
He sure could harangue about politicians, Con recalled nostalgically. Then he remembered how Grandma Bertha would call him aside and tell him not to believe all that bull the old man was slinging. And how his own mother would berate the old man for using ‘ain’t’ in front of Con and his sister or for swearing or wearing his suspenders to the dinner table. And how mad old Grandpa could make the women when he would refuse to go to church: Hell I know what heaven’s like. Don’t we Con, he would wink. That’s where a man goes bass fishing every day and gets his limit. I don’t have to listen to no hypocrite, the kind of man says he ain’t got no hankering for women ever, tell me what heaven’s like.
Con was grinning to himself. How plain he could see Grandpa now. How plainly he recalled that hot monsoon day in Rangoon when he was with his uncle, his father’s brother, and read the letter from his mother telling him that Grandpa had passed away. That letter had come the day before his twelfth birthday, he remembered. Yet somehow Con could never believe Grandpa was really dead. Not even when he got back to the States over a year later and went up to the farm for a weekend. Grandma Bertha had given him the old man’s bass lures then and those lures became the basis of the fine collection Con still had stored in the attic of his parents’ home outside Chicago.
Why after almost two years should he remember now? What reminded him, he wondered engrossed. And he did not hear Carla walk up.
“I thought you might like some tea,” she said.
Her eyes were red, her face pale and without makeup. She really looked like such a helpless child. “I thought I’d stay around until you went to sleep. You might have a hard time. I do when I’m wound,” he said gently.
“I don’t think I could sleep. Not right now,” she said forcing her voice not to quiver, holding tight to the composure she had regained.
She sat down on the couch. He brought her a drink and Rima came in with some tea and grass sandwiches. The brandy seemed to settle her, to bring a little color to her face and he insisted she have another.
“Shall I play a few records? It might relax you.”
She thought about it for a moment.
“Haydn. Play Haydn,” she said finally. “The Allegretto alla Zingarese. It’s marked Opus Twenty Number Four in the album leaf. He was such a thief that Haydn,” she laughed a small half-hysterical little laugh. “But it’s a good joke, stealing from the gypsies.”
From the laugh and the sound of her voice he thought the brandy had jolted her, made her a little drunk. He put the record on. With considerable effort she raised her fatigued legs up on the couch and resting her head on her knees stared blankly as if into a void.
“What’s a punji bush?” she asked finally, numbly, transfixed and motionless. “Danny was talking about it all last night.”
“I’ll tell you some time. It’s not nice.” He was sure the brandy had hit her now.
“I know it’s not nice. But tell me.”
It suddenly occurred to him that she didn’t have but the slightest trace of accent with her English and that was only barely discernible. She must have a fine ear, he thought.
He told her about the punjis. The four foot strips of bamboo that were sharpened to a point and baked so they became hard as steel and of how they would put four or five hundred of them on the down side of a trail protruding a couple of feet out of the ground but hidden completely by the jungle. And how they would station men up on the high ground above the trail and ambush the Japanese column; the Japs diving away and downhill from the fire, hanging themselves up on the punjis and not being able to pull themselves loose because of the splinters that had been roughed out below the point. It was very effective, he said. Very bad on Japanese morale. The Kachins had used it as a method of warfare for centuries.
He could tell she had listened intently but she had never moved or changed expression. He had the feeling that the whole idea of it had sickened her, had proved a point with her. Then it occurred to him that in telling it, in recalling all the punji-bushes he had taken part in, he hadn’t been moved at all. No wonder she often looks at me as if I were an animal, he thought. I didn’t feel a thing. Not a thing. Not even shame for not feeling.
“Who is Netung? Some God of theirs?”
“Nautaung?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“No. He’s an old man. A very unusual, very old man. Do you think you can sleep now?”
“I didn’t think he was alive. Danny didn’t speak of him as if he were alive.” She shifted her glazed eyes to him but for a second, her voice showing now for the first time a certain degree of density. “How old is old? Incapacitated old?”
“No. He’s very active. He’s a soldier. But other things too. I don’t know if anyone knows how old he really is.”
The music swelled to a crescendo. She lay back and rested against the pillows. Her forehead tautened quizzically as if she had difficulty thin
king.
“I think we are talking about different people,” she said.
“No. There is only one Nautaung. One and the same. Not two of him. Yet he is many in a way. I can’t explain that exactly but I know it’s true somehow.”
“That reminds me of a dream I had once,” she said staring at the ceiling, immobile. “I want to hear what you have to say about him. Then I will know if he’s the same,” she said with life in her voice, the voice of a little girl who was inquisitive.
Now he wasn’t sure if she was drunk or not: “Trying to describe him is difficult. It’s like trying to grasp a cloud. You reach for it and it’s gone. Even thinking about him is like that. But I’ll try.”
Then he felt the difference in himself. Parts of his body and that other thing outside him he did not know about became acutely sensitively keen as they always did when he remembered the old man. Then the odd feeling, the one he did not like, that feeling he always got because he couldn’t remember ever exactly what the old man looked like.
“He has a mountain,” Con said as if from a distance. “It is by far the highest mountain I have ever seen. I call it The Magic Mountain. It may be Annapurna or Everest or Khulhakangri for all I know of the geography of the Himalayas. But on the clearest day, approximately from where we fight, you can see it and it’s all white, pure white crystal-coned and solitary beyond anything that is solitary, unearthly white there against the blue and the white of the clouds that are a different white. And he believes that up there is where his father lives. And that the mountain is the source of all rivers and thus of life and will still be there long after men have left this earth. I do not know if that is where he believes we all begin and end, but he told me once that he and I would be up there together someday.
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