by James Jones
He came over wearing a broad, easy grin.
“Pretty rough go, hunh, Fife? Pretty tough row to hoe for both of them.”
“Yeah,” Fife managed to get out in a small voice. He could not associate this heroic personage with the Doll he had used to know back in peacetime. Asshole or not, he had done all those things. And this put him as far away from Fife as if Fife had never met him before, or as if Doll came from another planet.
“I don’t know which was the worse really,” Doll said. “That leg wound probly hurt more right now, at the moment. But the throat wound’s liable to cause more serious trouble later on. Anyway, they both out of it.”
“Yeah,” Fife said gloomily. “If they don’t die of infection. Or get killed in an air raid before they get shipped out.”
“Hey! You sound pretty gloomy! Sure, I guess there always is that possibility.” Doll paused. “How you makin out in Jenks’s squad, Fife?” Both of them remembered Doll’s long, monumental fistfight with Jenks.
“All right,” Fife said guardedly.
Doll raised his eyebrow, his old prewar gesture. “Because you don’t seem very happy.’’
“Happy enough under the circumstances.”
“Old Jenks is kind of a cold fish. Or I always thought so, anyway,” Doll grinned. “Not an understanding guy.”
“I guess he’s a good enough squad leader,” Fife said guardedly. He wished Doll would go away and leave him alone.
“Then you’re happy in his squad?”
“It don’t make much difference whether I am or not, does it?”
“Because,” Doll went on. “Because I ain’t got no corporal in my squad, you know. A Pfc acting. But Band never made him for some reason. Don’t like him maybe? Anyway I thought if you weren’t happy in Jenks’s squad maybe I might put in a word to Band to get you transferred to mine. We’re a pretty leathery crew now—we ain’t green,—but I could help you out at first and show you a few things. The Welshman played a pretty dirty trick on you.” He suddenly wanted to put his arm around Fife, but refrained. “’Course I spose he couldn’t help it, since he didn’t know you was comin back.”
For the first time Fife’s eyes lit up a little. “Could you do that?” he asked. “Would you?”
“Well, sure,” Doll said. He was a little startled at the direction the conversation had taken him. But he could do it. And, now, he had every intention of it. “You want me to do it?”
“Yeah,” Fife said huskily, his eyes shining out suddenly from deep within his tormented face. “Yeah, I would.”
“Okay. I’ll go and see him and—” Doll hesitated. He had started to say: and come tell you what he says later. But that sounded too unsure, and as if he had to ask Band. Instead, he said: “—and come pick you up later.” He slapped Fife on the back.
They had reached the top now, where the rest of the company—in and out of their holes—were waiting for the news from the aid station. Fife watched Doll go off in the direction of the CP and then turned off toward 3d Platoon and his own squad—of which, he reminded himself, he was still second in command. A new, but deeprooted cynicism attacked him and told him not to get his hopes up. But he put it down, at least somewhat. It would be great to have someone to look after him and take care of him, somebody he could trust as a friend. He wouldn’t mind taking the orders of somebody like that. And Doll had done all those things. He knew infantry in-fighting well now, and could teach Fife the ropes. But more than that it was having somebody he could depend on, somebody who was a mentor and a protector and also a friend. Fife suddenly wondered what Doll would say if he knew about what had happened between himself and little Bead. He shuddered. Well, he was never going to tell anybody about that. Nobody in the world. Not even his wife, when he got married someday.
It was getting on toward dark. Fife sat on the edge of his hole and waited for Doll to come back and collect him. Naturally, he didn’t tell anybody. He was superstitious about hexing it, and too it would be too embarrassing if it didn’t come off. Not far away the taciturn closedfaced Jenks was assiduously and expressionlessly cleaning his rifle. Fife continued to sit. When the near dark had grown into full black night with only the farflung tropical starscape lighting it, he knew Doll wasn’t coming. Nobody dared leave his hole after dark. The new, deeprooted cynicism came back making him smile bitterly in the dark. Who knew why? Maybe Band said no. Or maybe he didn’t even go to Band even.
Fife settled himself in the mudslick bottom of his hole. In a way he ought to be glad. 2d Platoon had become the company troubleshooters. They were going to lead off in the attack tomorrow. Did he want to be in that? It was just that he did not appreciate the talkative Jenks. He did not sleep much. The one time he did drop off, the nightmare woke him with a cry which he automatically stifled before he was even fully awake.
Fife was not the only one who slept little. Up and down the line many others had the same hollow in the pit of the stomach, the same nervous tingling in the balls, and quiet conversations passed the time of night between holes while men smoked guardedly into cupped hands. They knew now that it was always like this the night before an attack. Skinny Culn had not been able to resist telling around the story of his little run-in with the new lieutenant Payne (who of course had immediately been nicknamed The Pain) and this was one of the more appreciated topics. Skinny’s self-quoted remark about not being paid feeling pay for feeling like flyers were paid flight pay for flying went from hole to hole with an appreciative snort until everyone in C-for-Charlie knew it. Everything considered it was as good a philosophy as any for this kind of life and everyone who heard it decided immediately to adopt it. Skinny’s other quote was also taken up: Whatever They say, I’m not a cog in a machine. It had been a thought, not a statement aloud to The Pain, but it said for everybody what they all felt fiercely and needed to believe. They took it to themselves, and applied it to their own particular situations, and they believed it. They were not cogs in a machine, whatever anybody said. Only one man looked into it deeper than that. And he didn’t look far, because he had troubles of his own.
Sgt John Bell was having another bad attack of malaria, and he was about to have a nightmare himself. His nightmare was not recurrent, like Fife’s. He had never had it before. And when it was over, he hoped he never had it again. The malaria had hit him shortly before dark. It went along slow for an hour or so. But when the chills, sweats and fever started to take him in their regular as clockwork intervals of ever rising intensity, he had gotten to thinking about his wife and her lover. And to speculating about what kind of a guy he was. Because he was sure she had one. Ever since that day in the grassy trough above the strongpoint when they had started to crawl. Nothing in her batch of warm, loving letters during the week off tended to make him think any differently. Sure, they were warm. But, in there between those lines, his hunger to see sexual hunger in her, through her letters, went completely unfed.
But what kind of guy? A civilian? Would she go with some local guy they had both known all their lives? Or a serviceman. Both Wright and Patterson Fields were right there outside Dayton. Officer? Enlisted man? There would be thousands of Air Corps guys crawling over Dayton, all hungry. He would certainly be a sensitive type, one who could honestly sympathize with her when she felt bad about what she was doing to John. The next thing Bell knew, that one word J-o-h-n was echoing down long high hollow sky corridors and he was in a maternity hospital delivery room. How he knew it was a maternity delivery room, he couldn’t say. Movies, maybe. But he recognized many objects. He was dressed in white gown, white cap and gauze mask. Then they wheeled Marty in. “You have to push,” the doctor said in a kindly tolerant voice as if to a child. “I’m pushing!” Marty cried in a child’s brave voice. “I’m pushing! I’m trying!” And she was. Her rectum had come out until it looked like a doughnut. Bell loved her. “But only when it hits you,” the doctor smiled. He was actually bored. Then he turned to Bell, hands held straight up from the elbows fingers spatula
te beside his face in the rubber gloves, speaking through the gauze. “We’re going to knock her out. She’s having a little trouble and I’m going to have to take it.” Bell could see he was smiling behind the gauze. “Nothing to worry about.” He turned back to the table where they had strapped her legs in the stirrups and her arms down and where the anesthetist now had her. Bell sat on a stool a few feet behind the doctor who sat on his own stool. Strangely, at least half his mind was occupied with showing the doctor he wasn’t going to faint. He also knew that he was dreaming.
The head came first, facedown. Deftly, the doctor turned it over and swabbed out the nostrils. Then he eased the shoulders out, twisting it sideways. When it was out to the waist it began to wail in a feeble voice and the doctor swabbed it some more, and it was then that Bell realized that it was black. Coal black. The doctor went on working happily, easing the hips out, the young nurse with her hair tied up hovering smiling at the presence of new life, and Bell sat aghast in horror, embarrassed, disbelieving, and strangely acquiescent, and watched the coal black baby come lasciviously the rest of the way out of the beautiful, beautifully white, shaved crotch of his wife.
The color contrast was strangely gorgeous, oddly satisfying, suddenly very sensual. And more bluntly painful than anything Bell had ever felt in his life.
Now it will stop, he thought, now it will stop and I and me we can both wake up. But it didn’t. And he had to stay there, watching, and trying to wake up and failing. How should he act? Bell looked down at it, still struggling feebly in its effort to escape being out in the cold, cold world living on its own. When he looked back up, both nurse and doctor were smiling at him expectantly. Marty was still out, still unconscious, on the table. So she couldn’t know yet. Had she suspected? The doctor began to work on her again, the finishing up work. The nurse was still smiling at Bell. The anesthetist was smiling at him too, from behind his bottles and gear. A new life had happened. What should he do, say? Had they none of them noticed that it was black? Or didn’t they care? Should he pretend? The worst thing was that he was sexually excited, sexually hot. And very embarrassed. But when he looked back down, he saw that it wasn’t black it was Japanese. He could tell because it wore a tiny, bent up Imperial Army forage cap, with a tiny, baby iron star.
Bell woke up with a ringing cry that he had not learned to smother like Fife had learned, because he wasn’t used to nightmares.
“I can’t see anything! I can’t see anything!” the awake sentry in the next hole cried in panic. “I can’t see anything!”
“Don’t shoot!” Beck called back, from further off. “Don’t shoot anyway! Wait! Don’t anybody fire!”
“It was me, it was me,” Bell mumbled to them, his ears burning red. He was covered in freezing sweat, and now he had a raging high fever. After a moment he rubbed his hand over his face. “I had a nightmare.”
“Well for fuck’s sake try and keep it to yourself,” the sentry called. “You scared the living shit out of me.”
Bell mumbled inaudibly, slid a little further down in the slippery hole bottom, and tried to compose himself. Every bone in his body ached monstrously and separately. His head felt as if it might actually begin to boil the blood passing through it at any moment. His hands were so weak he could not clench them into fists to save his life, and bright hot geometric patterns danced before his eyes in semi-delirium. All that was the fever. But the other remained too, and the horror it had brought. Feebly, because that was the only way his heated brain could think, Bell tried to analyze it. He could understand the Japanese part readily enough. Sure. But why a black baby? Neither he nor Marty had ever had any racial prejudices, or pro segregation ideas.
Searching through his feverish brain, Bell remembered something Marty had told him once, before they were married. They were walking across the campus in Columbus, returning from a rendezvous in the apartment of married friends who let them use it afternoons for their love making. It was early fall. The leaves had been turning fast, and were just beginning to fall. They had been holding hands as they walked. Marty had turned to him, eyes smiling coquettishly, and wearing a slight flush of confession, and had said suddenly: “I’d love to have a black baby. Once. Sometime.” The remark had thrilled Bell. Intuitively he understood exactly what she meant, and also why she’d said it. Though he couldn’t have put it into words, any more than she. It was, first, a crack in the face at social convention which they both hated. It was a compliment to him, also, that she would let him in on the inside of this particular fantasy. But there was more than that. And the only word for that part of it he could give, was the ‘sexual esthetic’ of it. He had been pleased she’d told him and at the same time furious with her. He had squeezed her hand and said: “Well, you’ll have to let me watch the conception of it.” And intuitively she had understood what he meant, too. She had colored deeply and said: “But I happen to be in love with you.” And they had turned in their tracks and gone back to the livingroom rug of the apartment, which was as far as they had gotten, even though both of them missed a class. They had been married that same year, he remembered. Or was it the next year? No, it was the next year.
Bell shifted in the wet hole, burning up with fever. Had that ancient exchange, lost and forgotten in the grabbag of memory, come back to plague him now? But why now and not before? Dull and halfclosed, his eyes stared at the forward rim of the slit trench, only slightly less dark than the surrounding blackness. He was willing to do anything in order not to go back to sleep and risk having that dream again. The whole thing was as clear, as real to him as if it had really, actually happened, only ten minutes ago. But why had he been sexually excited? Why that? Something licked at his mind lightly and he caught at it. The lascivious sensuality of knowing, of being sure, of having proof. Perhaps that was why so many men thinking of their wives, hated other races. Because nobody wanted to know he was cuckold. Everybody preferred the painful doubt to the sensual luxury of knowing for sure. But if the baby was another color, there was no—… Bell felt himself slipping into a waking daydreamnightmare of watching the conception of the black baby, and stopped himself in terror, and just in time.
And from that he learned something else. Or thought he did: what he might desire in masochistic fantasy, for the luxurious pain of knowing for sure, he could almost certainly kill her for, in the reality—simply because he could never admit to himself the desire he had, never, never. Suddenly he began to laugh, hysterically in the fever, but carefully stifling the sound. Cocks and cunts! Cocks and cunts! Who cared who fucked who? When he got himself stopped from laughing, he found to his surprise that he was crying, weeping. He could feel the malaria beginning to recede.
Naturally, he was glad when the next hole passed on the story about Skinny Culn and The Pain. Not only did the conversation keep him awake and away from that nightmare, it also helped him stop thinking. The philosophy? Sure, it was fine. Skinny’s philosophy of not feeling except for feeling pay. Bell snorted like the rest, and embraced it. But when the next hole passed him on the other quote, his mind balked and went blank. “Sure, sure,” he said automatically, “of course.” Not cogs in a machine? Not cogs in a machine? What did they think they were then? Their wanting and needing to believe that was pathetic, shocked him into re-examining the other one: the philosophy. And when he did, he found he saw it entirely differently. Not feel? Not feel? No feeling without Feeling Pay? No caring without Caring Pay? What was happening to them? And to himself? Bell’s watch read 3:05 on its luminous dial. Two hours to go, then.
The artillery began almost exactly at dawn. This time it continued for over two hours. 105s blasted The Sea Slug in its entirety, and the jungle immediately surrounding it. The 155s occupied themselves with the much bigger hill mass of The Giant Boiled Shrimp further on, and invisible from here. The 155 rounds arched shushing high overhead from invisible guns to invisible target. On The Sea Slug terrified, pathetic birds rose squawking in white clouds at every 105 jungle burst. The men of 1st
Battalion stood out in the open on the hill and watched the display, reluctantly waiting the order to move. When it came, they moved out along the same route the patrol had taken, C-for-Charlie (due to a request by Band) in the lead, with 2d Platoon as their spearhead.
It was still almost black night in the jungle. Only when they reached the blasted area around The Sea Slug did any light serious enough to see by filter down to them. 1st Platoon’s chopping work yesterday had done no good at all. They could not afford the time or attenuation of going single file now. Men scrambled along through the underbrush on both sides of the trail, tripping over vines and roots, getting their hands and faces scratched and torn, chopping with machetes when they had to. After a hundred yards of this everybody was so exhausted they had to stop and break.
It was when they reached the beginning of the blasted area that they received their first fire. There was now somewhat less than a hundred yards to go. It was amazing how slightly the artillery barrage had affected the jungle. There was a little more light, you could see a little further ahead, and there was some new looking deadfall. That was all. Sgt Beck had told off Doll’s squad to act as point squad of 2d Platoon, and Doll had immediately decided to take the point man position himself. It was Doll who stopped them when he saw the first blast signs.
Doll had in fact not gone to Lt Band at all the night before about Fife. On his way up to the CP he had suddenly found himself angry at Fife for the way Fife had somehow tricked him into offering to take him into the squad. He had had no intention of doing that when he first went over to Fife, but Fife had somehow conned him into it. If there was anything Doll did not like, it was being tricked or conned into something. He preferred an honest approach. Angrily, Doll had stopped off to talk to Skinny Culn for a minute. He of course did not mention Fife. When he left Culn’s hole, Doll was decided.