You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  We had one day when it was cloudy and then thirty-six more days of rain. Everybody was covered with rashes, sores, blisters, bubbles, boils, and bites. Guys got tropical ulcers, dysentery, pneumonia, and scrub typhus. The skin under married guys’ rings got infected with fungus. Our toes turned black and looked fused. The medics called it jungle rot. The rule was that only a temperature over 103 moved you to the rear. The mud sucked the soles off our boots. Everybody just squatted or sat in the rain and shook. Guys with dysentery tried to stay on sloping ground.

  On the thirty-seventh day we got the news we were moving up. Doubek, sitting up to his neck in his flooded slit trench, cheered.

  “What do you think, we’re going somewhere where it isn’t raining?” Leo asked.

  “Who knows when it comes to this screwy country?” Doubek said.

  About sixty percent of us were still fit to walk somewhere. Everybody had given up on raingear a long time before. Nobody carried packs but a lot of guys stuffed C-ration cans into their hip pockets. On a little patch of high ground we dumped in a pile everything we wanted carried and the native in charge divided the loads among the bearers while we watched. When the rain was at its worst he sometimes cupped his hands around his mouth and chin and just drank.

  Our jumping-off point was apparently six miles away. The sooner we got there, the more time we’d have to hunker down and get a hot meal before moving forward.

  Most of the way we had to march alongside the trail, a knee-deep river of glue. Every so often you’d see guys working together to try and pull something loose from the middle of it, like it was flypaper.

  By an hour in we were stumbling along blind, just trying to keep our bodies focused on the next step. Other companies with nothing to do came out of their bivouacs to watch us go up the line. By two hours in, those of us in the back of the column started passing guys up front who’d fallen out. We’d started at first light and by nighttime we still weren’t there and a third of the unit was back behind us. For dinner they handed around boxes of cold canned hash and hard biscuits. When you took a spoon of hash the space in the tin filled with rainwater. Everybody slept where they came to a halt. The CO slogged around for a head count and figured we’d lost forty-five percent of those who’d been able to march. The next morning the major he reported to told him that we’d ended up with the best mark of the battalion.

  There were a lot of units around us, packed into not much space. I recognized the PFC who’d been dishing out the mail. While we were waiting, more and more of our stragglers stumbled in. A trail in front of us ran up a hill and disappeared. From the other side, even over the rain, we could hear the occasional small-arms fire. People were cleaning their guns as best they could and hoarding clips. A couple guys threw up and it washed away as soon as it hit the ground. I upended my helmet for a drink. While it filled I threw in a few halazone tablets just to be safe. “Think there are germs in this water?” I asked Leo.

  “About nine fucking million,” he said. He did this thing with his hand like he was wringing it in the rain to dry it off. The mud was so fine it outlined his fingerprints. He cupped his hands and splashed himself. Cleaning his face seemed to make him feel better.

  Twenty minutes, the CO announced. We were to be the first assault group. We didn’t know where we were headed besides that hill, but our platoon leaders apparently did.

  Everyone was sitting cross-legged with his rifle in his lap. The mess sergeant went around with a C-ration stack and guys took what they wanted for breakfast. I had a cold can of beans and sat there mashing them between my molars. Leo chewed on his thumb. We could see G for George, the battalion’s heavy-weapons company, trying to find stable spots on the slope for their mortars. Whatever we picked up—our spoons, our bloc clips, everything covered in mud—got even greasier from all the cleaning oil.

  We were National Guard recruits from Wisconsin. Our uniforms were rags, our boots sponges, our rifles waterlogged. We’d never been so tired in our lives. Everybody was sick. No one was talking. All of us were crouched over our weapons. I remembered how amazing it had been to think, when I first saw this place, that some of us were going to stay on it, dead.

  “Biggest drunk of your lives, all of it on me, once we’re off the line,” the CO called out. He and the lieutenant shared a little waterproof map and kept looking up the slope and then back at the map.

  “Drinks on the CO,” the lieutenant agreed. Our staff sergeants went from group to group, checking weapons and whacking shoulders.

  When I was a kid my dad was always off working for the CCC, mostly putting up power lines around the southern part of the state. He did some fence construction and tree planting, too. He was one of the oldest guys there. He worked forty hours a week for thirty dollars a month, with twenty-five of it sent home to the family. He had to wear a uniform and live in a camp during the week. He got up to a bugle at sunrise and only came home on weekends. He said the sign over the main gate read “We’re Here to Lick Old Man Depression.” “Lick him where?” he said when my mom quoted it to some friends they had over. She shushed him. After that he got a job building roads, but didn’t get home much more often. And one night around Christmastime he came home late with frostbite on his feet. Just a little bit, but he was still mad about it. I was seven and my brother was nine. Our dad was sitting with his feet in a pan of water while we sat there watching him. Our mom was somewhere else, staying out of the way. There were Christmas carols on the radio. He looked at us from top to bottom and bottom to top like he hadn’t found anything yet that looked the way it was supposed to.

  “What’s the matter?” my brother finally asked him. I was amazed he’d found the guts to do that.

  My dad sat there and didn’t say anything. We all listened to my mom empty the pan from under the icebox.

  “What’s the matter?” my brother asked again.

  “What’s the matter?” my dad said, exactly the same way. It made my brother tear up. One of the Christmas carols ended and another one started. Finally we couldn’t stand how he was looking at us. My brother left first, but I hung around for a minute, to see if it was just my brother or the both of us he hated.

  With five minutes left we were told we weren’t going yet. There was some softening up that was supposed to have happened ahead of our attack, but all we could hear was the rain and the kekekekek sound that the geckos made. Word was that the mortar shells were still stuck somewhere down the trail and nobody knew what was up with our artillery. We weren’t happy about waiting but were even less happy about going.

  “So what are you going to do about this Linda-and-your-brother thing?” Leo said. “I mean if you’re not dead.”

  My stomach was barely keeping itself together. I was taking deep breaths to help with that. “You know what I sometimes wonder?” I finally asked him. “How does she know so much about doing it? Where did that information come from?”

  “Oh,” Leo said, raising his hand, “I think I know.”

  While we sat there the CO told us we were headed for a foot track over the Owen Stanley Range through the Gap. This range was one of the steepest in the world and divided the island in half. The staff sergeants told us to dump anything nonessential because whatever we took was going to be on our backs the whole way. Doubek inverted his pack and it turned out he’d collected twenty-eight cans of sliced peaches. He figured he could carry six and started trying to eat the rest right there. “One thing the American Army’s never going to run out of,” Leo said, watching him. “Canned fruit.”

  We finally got the go-ahead even though the rain hadn’t let up and there’d been no artillery. “What happened to the softening up, sir?” Leo asked the CO as he passed our position.

  “The thinking now is that we’re going to take ’em by surprise,” the CO called back. He got everybody moving and we all climbed a preliminary hill, slipping and sliding. No one could keep his head up without losing his footing.

  At the top everyone was already bea
t, but on the other side of a little swale we could see our path climbing up into the clouds. The occasional scout was slithering down the slope in our direction. Where the trail went was cut off by the same clouds that were raining all over us.

  It took us about an hour to get organized at the base and ready to climb. Three porters were coming along to hump the extra ammunition until we came under fire. The CO let us rest for a half an hour and then got us going again. The slopes kept sliding out from under us and the porters got a bang over how bad we were at keeping our feet. In places where the mud was covered with leaves a guy would manage maybe one step before falling and taking the next three guys down with him. “Heads up” meant “Catch whoever’s sliding down at you.” We took breaks on our hands and knees with water streaming over our wrists.

  I started throwing up and tried to do it on the side of the trail. We passed abandoned emplacements so well camouflaged that a couple guys fell into them. A little farther up was a switchback and a curtain of jungle that came down like a wall. We came across some sulfa packs and morphine needles scattered in the mud. A boot.

  From below Leo tugged at my pant leg. “Hang back,” he said quietly. I stepped a foot and hand off the trail and rested, chest heaving, and let a couple guys go by. Leo stopped behind me.

  “How far’s this fucking thing go on?” Doubek panted, climbing past. He lifted his head to see and the jungle up above us went nuts. The wall of leaves jittered and blurred and the noise of all the fire at once was a pandemonium.

  Doubek’s shirt came alive from the inside and he spread-eagled out past me and pinwheeled down the slope, crashing through the undergrowth. His helmet sailed off in another direction. We all gripped the mud, hugging the slope. Leaves, sticks, bark, and splinters flew and spun, popping from trees. The noise sucked the air out of us. It stopped my ability to think. I was under a little lip of overhang with Leo below me. My boots kicked through a mat of stems. Thorns tore at my cheek. I was clawing and looking to burrow. Some guys were firing back but I wasn’t one of them. The firing went on and then it stopped in front of us and after a minute you could hear the CO screaming to cease fire.

  When the last of our guys did, the sound of the rain came back. And some whimpering and cursing. The CO and one of the staff sergeants shouted orders. Leo had to crawl up and over me before I could bring myself to move. He thought I was dead.

  “How is he?” the CO called up to him.

  “Untouched,” Leo called back down.

  “What about the other guys?” the CO wanted to know. I could see him twenty feet below us, one shoulder dug in, his outer arm cradling his carbine. Every so often he had to stick a heel back in the mud to keep from sliding. He meant the guys ahead of me. There’d been about six of them.

  Leo told him none of them was calling for a medic, which he took to be a bad sign.

  We could hear the clatter of new clips being fed into guns up above us.

  “Should we fall back, sir? Sir?” Leo called.

  “Form on me! Form on me!” a sergeant called out below.

  “Fall back?” the CO called. “What’s the problem? We ran into Japs?” I think he thought he was funny.

  We were flattened against the muck, the mud and rainwater pouring straight through our clothes.

  “Keep an eye out, you two,” the CO called. Then he called a meeting on the slope right below us: him and the lieutenant and a couple of the staff sergeants. He asked for suggestions. Nobody had any. Could we spread out? one of them finally asked. Could we provide any covering fire? Was there any room anywhere to maneuver?

  “This is depressing,” Leo finally said to me, after they’d all gone quiet.

  “That might be the one trouble spot, though,” we heard the CO venture to guess. “It could be that we only have to get past that.”

  “You all right?” Leo asked me. His nose was next to mine.

  “You guys watchin’?” the CO called.

  We both looked up at the switchback. Even in the rain the mists were creeping around the bottoms of the trees. We still hadn’t seen a Jap.

  “They’re not going to let us go back down, are they?” I asked Leo. I’d never been so cold in my life and started shivering the minute the shooting stopped. I hadn’t meant to be crying but I was.

  “Think of it this way,” Leo said. “Linda’ll be taken care of.”

  “Fuck this place,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he told me back.

  The third or fourth night we all drove around in Linda’s brother’s car, I’d walked over to her house but her mom said she was still getting dressed. I was welcome to wait, she told me, there in the parlor or out back with Glenn. Glenn was the older brother. Glenn it turned out was in the shed. “How’re you doin’,” I said to him.

  “What’s it look like I’m doing?” he said back.

  Stuff like that happened every single place I went. “Marble mouth,” my dad would say to my mom at the dinner table when I asked a question. “I understood him perfectly,” she sometimes said, but then he’d be mad at her the rest of the night.

  “Leave those alone,” Glenn said.

  I didn’t see what he was talking about. There wasn’t a lot of light in the shed. “You been trapping?” I asked when my eyes adjusted.

  “Those are cat skins,” he said. “I’m drying cat skins.”

  “Your brother’s drying cat skins,” I told Linda the first night we had the car to ourselves.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. And I decided it was the last time I’d ever bring up something that would make her move her hand away.

  “What do you think, your brother’s Mister Normal?” she asked.

  She told me I could ride in front with Glenn and we’d gotten a block from her house when she asked what my brother was up to. “Let’s go get him,” she said, before I answered.

  “Yeah, let’s go get the brother,” Glenn said.

  When we got to my house my brother was already sitting on the front steps. “Well, this is a surprise,” he said, and got in the back with Linda.

  “Eyes front, buddy,” Glenn said when I turned to look back at them. The whole way to the quarry, if I started to turn around he jiggled the steering wheel and we all rocked and swayed. Linda told him to stop and he told her it wasn’t him, it was me, so she told me to sit still.

  “I want to look at you,” I said.

  “That’s sweet,” my brother said.

  “It is,” Linda told him.

  When we got to the quarry, she said she had to pee.

  “I better go with you,” my brother told her. “It’s pretty dark out there.”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I can handle this myself.”

  She was gone a long time. I sat in the car with my brother and Glenn and thought of her poking around in the dark, feeling for a safe place.

  Glenn had his arm along the top of the seat so his fingers were at my shoulder. My brother whistled to himself the same two notes that went up and down, up and down.

  “What I wouldn’t give to be a little flower right now,” Glenn said.

  “Two little flowers,” my brother said.

  “I should go look for her,” I told them.

  They both snorted. “She knows this place better than we do,” Glenn said.

  “Or at least as well,” my brother told him.

  I tried a few sentences in my head and then said, “So you guys have been here before.”

  There was a pause like they were deciding who was going to answer.

  “We been here before,” my brother confirmed.

  Linda finally appeared out of the dark, wet-eyed, and opened the door and climbed in.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t I be in the back with you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, absolutely. Move, you,” she said to my brother.

  “Absolutely,” my brother said.

  “Absolutely,” Glenn sai
d.

  In the light when the car door opened again I could see Linda flinch.

  “We gotta give these two some time alone,” my brother told Glenn.

  “Absolutely,” Glenn said.

  “But first I have to show you something,” my brother said, meaning me.

  “Now?” I asked him. I had one foot in the backseat.

  “Don’t go now,” Linda said. She had her back to her door and was holding out some fingers to me.

  “C’mon, chief, this’ll only take a minute,” my brother said. “I need to ask you something.”

  “This doesn’t feel right,” I said.

  “It’ll feel right once you’re back,” my brother said. “Five minutes. Then we’ll clear out and it’s all you and her.”

  Linda had lowered her arm and was looking out the back.

  “Five minutes,” my brother repeated.

  I got out. He led me down a trail. I looked over my shoulder before we went around some rocks and saw Glenn opening his door.

  It wasn’t five minutes. It was more like twenty. What my brother wanted to ask was if I thought our dad was getting worse. If I thought he was drinking again. “I didn’t know he was drinking in the first place,” I told him. “You dragged me out here to tell me that?”

  Linda was alone in the car when we got back. “Where’s Glenn?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “How long have you been here by yourself?” I asked.

  “He just left,” she said.

  “I’ll go hunt him down,” my brother said. “You two behave while I’m gone.”

  I got in next to Linda but her face was wet and she didn’t shove over so half of me was still hanging out the open door. I braced myself with a foot in the dirt. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “What happened?”