The Thin Red Line Page 8

  Bead did not answer but stumped off sourly in his customary slump-backed gait.

  “You just can’t treat them decent,” Fife said.

  “Better come along,” Doll said. He raised his lip and his eyebrow. “No tellin what we may run into or find.”

  “I guess not.” Fife grinned. “Duty, you know.” But he was glad to get out of it so easily.

  Doll raised his eyebrow and his lip further. “Fuck duties!” he said from the side of his mouth looking very cynical and knowledgeable. He turned and marched off.

  “Have fun!” Fife called after him cynically. But once having decided he regretted that he was not with them as he watched them move off in the rain.

  The coconut trees ended just beyond the edge of the bivouac. Beyond them there was nothing except flat open ground all the way to the jungle. Across this open space the distant green wall looked even more menacing than it had from within the groves. At the edge of the trees the men stopped to look at it. Then, still without raincoats but so soaked now they no longer thought about that, they approached the high wall of jungle curiously and gingerly in the rain. Rolls of mud formed on their feet, and they kept kicking them off.

  They had all read about it for months now in the papers, this jungle. Now they were seeing it at first hand.

  At first they only skirted it, cautiously. From a distance they made a funny sight: groups of wet men in the rain, moving skittishly up and down along the jungle edge, bending and looking and peering in here and there. It really was a wall; a wall of leaves; meaty green leaves jostling and elbowing each other, with hardly a minute opening anywhere between them. Peering at them Big Queen felt you might almost expect one of them to bite back at you if you shoved it. Spreading these—finally—and stepping through, taking the plunge as it were, they found themselves immediately enveloped in a deep gloom.

  Here the rain did not fall. It was stopped high above by that roof of green shingles. From there it dripped down slowly, leaf to leaf, or ran down the stems and branches. Despite the heaviness of the downpour which now purred loudly in their ears from just outside, here there was only a low rustle of slow occasional dripping. Everything else was supremely quiet.

  As their eyes adjusted, they became able to see huge vines and creepers hanging in great festooning arcs, many of them larger than young trees at home. Giant treetrunks towered straight up, far above their heads to the roof, their thin bladelike roots often higher than a man’s head. Every-where, every-thing, was wet. The ground itself was either bare dirt, slippery, slick, with wet; or else impenetrable tangles of deadfall. Here and there a few stunted straggly bushes struggled to maintain an almost lightless life. And saplings, totally branchless with only a few leaves at the top and hardly bigger around than the width of a pocketknife, strained to stretch themselves up, up, always up, to that closed roof and closed corporation a hundred feet above, where they could at least compete, before they strangled here below. Some of them that were no bigger around than the base of a whiskey shotglass had already attained a height equal to twice that of a tall man. And in all of this, nothing moved. And there was no sound save the rustle of the dripping moisture.

  The men who had slipped through the protecting wall and come in here to see, stood rooted before the enormity their adjusting eyes disclosed. This was more than they had bargained for. Whatever else you could call this teeming verdure you certainly could not call it civilized. And as civilized men, it made them fearful. The toughest barroom brawler among them was fearful. Gradually, as they continued to stand without moving, vague, faint sounds began to make themselves heard again. High up in the foliage leaves rustled or a branch vibrated and there would be a twitter or a mad, raucous shout as some invisible bird moved. On the ground a bush would shake furtively as some minute animal moved away. And yet they saw nothing.

  By entering the jungle they had been as suddenly and completely cut off from the bivouac and the company as if they had closed a door between two rooms. The suddenness and completeness of the shutting off dismayed them all. But by peering out between the leaves they could see the tall brown tents still standing among the white shafts of the cocopalms in the rain: see the distant greenclad figures still moving casually and securely about among them. This sight reassured them. They decided to go on.

  Big Corporal Queen moved along with them saying nothing, or at least very little. Queen was aware of a strong reluctance to be separated from the others. This jungle wasn’t his meat. Back at the bivouac in the pouring rain Queen had been in his element and exultant. He had snorted and grinned and rubbed the rain into himself and his chest and clothes, and laughed loudly at the more reluctant ones who looked like drowned cats. Rain was something he knew about. Back home he had worked for a while as a hand on a ranch; he had been caught out in many a summer rainstorm, been forced to ride all day in them. He hadn’t liked it then; but when he remembered it now, he remembered it as though he had liked it, that it was manly, that it showed great endurance and strength. But this jungle was something else again. The indignant thought kept coming back to him that no American would ever let his woodlot get into any such condition as this.

  Big Queen would not have admitted this mild fear of his to anyone, and in fact he did not actually admit it to himself. Instead he changed it around, made it acceptable, by saying to himself that he was on unfamiliar ground here and naturally would be uneasy until he learned his way around. But it could not have anything to do with fear because Big Queen had a reputation to maintain.

  Big (just over six feet, with a 56-inch chest and arms and legs to match) and exceptionally strong even for this size Big Queen was one of the sights of the organization; a myth had grown up around him in C-for-Charlie company. And once Queen discovered it (he was rather slow about certain things which concerned himself) he had—with a strange welcoming sense of having at last found his identity—done everything he could to live up to it. Searched for, the origins of this myth would almost certainly be found among an amorphous collection of small men in the outfit, men who adored and longed for a size and strength they themselves would never have, and who in their admiration had let their creative imaginations run away with them. Whatever its source, it was now established as fact rather than myth, and believed by nearly everybody including Queen, that Big Queen was invincible both in heart and physique.

  His reputation imposed certain obligations on Queen. For example, he must never do anything that even remotely resembled bullying. He no longer had fights, principally because nobody cared to argue with him. But there was more to it than that because he himself could no longer argue either. Not without looking like a bully imposing his opinions by force. He no longer expressed his opinion in discussions unless it was something of really great importance to him. Such as President Roosevelt whom he worshipped; or Catholics whom he hated and feared. And then he voiced it quietly and without insistence.

  Remembering how to act required a great deal of Queen’s time and energy. He found himself having to think almost all the time. It tired him. And it was only when dealing with feats of strength and endurance that he any longer could let himself go and act without thinking. Sometimes he longed for them.

  Right now he had another problem. Another obligation imposed by his reputation was that he must never seem to be scared. Thus he found himself in a position where he was forced to clump ahead through this damned undergrowth with an impassive face for the benefit of the others, while at the same time his imagination was cramming every footfall with all sorts of horrible results. Having an important reputation was sometimes harder than people thought. Terrible things.

  Snakes, for instance. They had been told there weren’t any poisonous snakes on Guadalcanal. But Queen had acquired a more than healthy respect for rattlesnakes during his two years out in northwest Texas. His snakefear if anything was more unhealthy than healthy, carrying with it an almost uncontrollable tendency to freeze into a panicstricken target. And in the jungle his imagination
kept presenting him over and over with a picture of his own shod, leggin’d foot falling heavily on a coiled mass of muscular life which would erupt into a writhing, clattering, jawpopping viciousness squirming under his boot, capable of striking completely through the canvas leggin, or through the shoe leather itself for that matter. He knew them. He had killed at least a hundred of them during his two years out there on that ranch, most of which had not bothered him. Only twice had he come upon them close enough to be struck at. All the others had merely lain there, coiled and suspicious, watching him beadily, tasting him with those forked tongues, while he got his pistol out. He hated them. And the fact that the Army said there weren’t any here didn’t prove it; he had never seen a more likely looking place for them.

  Thus equipped, Big Queen lumbered on skirting the tangles of deadfall, hoping nobody could read from his face what he was thinking, silently cursing his imagination and wishing he did not have any, remembering the snakes of his past.

  It was just then, about twenty yards in, that somebody discovered the bloodstained shirt. The man raised a shout and stopped. Instinctively they had spaced themselves out at five yard intervals as if in a skirmish line, although nobody had unslung his rifle. Now they converged. As they congregated the finder simply stood, a surprised look on his face, and pointed to a spot between two narrow, shoulderhigh roots of one of the huge trees. The rest clustered around and peered excitedly. Queen, having been the far right end of the line, was one of the last to arrive.

  Another of the last to arrive was Private Bell, the former Engineer officer from the Philippines. He had been near Big Queen on the right. Heavily muscled himself, Bell nevertheless looked frail alongside Big Queen. Bell, however, was no stranger to jungles. After four months of living in the Philippine jungle (without wife) that eerie, other-planet look common to all jungles held no new emotional experiences for Bell. He had come along, taciturn and retiring, keeping his own counsel as was his way, more for purposes of botanical comparison than anything else; and he had none of the trepidity or excited compulsion to look, to see, which afflicted the others. It was an interesting thing which Bell had noted before about the American Army that wherever they went, and no matter what dangers they expected to encounter, they went prepared to look and, if possible, to record. At least a third of every outfit carried cameras, lens filters and light meters tucked away somewhere. The fighting tourists, Bell called them. They were always prepared to record their experiences for their children, even though they might be dead before they could have any. Bell himself, painful as the memory was for him—and for that very reason—wanted to see the similarities between this jungle and his own so-well-remembered one (without wife) of the Philippines. It was as predictable—and in his memory as exquisitely painful—as he had expected. But when he came up to the group and looked down at the cause of the excitement, he was on the same unfamiliar ground as the rest. He, like them, had never before seen material remains of a man killed in infantry combat.

  It had taken sharp eyes to spot it. A crumpled ball of khaki the same color as the dirt lay at the apex of the angle of the roots. It did not look as if someone had deliberately deposited it there, but more as though somebody had stripped it off, wadded it and flung it—either the wearer himself or someone looking after him—and it happened to land there. A crusty, black stain camouflaged it even further into the jungle floor.

  There was a spate of pointless, rather nonsensical comment, all of it oddly breathless, excited.

  “Where you think he got it?”

  “Is it American?”

  “Fuck yes it’s American. The Japs don’t wear khaki like that.”

  There was a peculiar tone of sexual excitement, sexual morbidity, in all of the voices—almost as if they were voyeurs behind a mirror watching a man in the act of coitus; as though in looking openly at the evidence of this unknown man’s pain and fear they were unwillingly perhaps but nonetheless uncontrollably seducing him.

  “That’s chino! That’s not even Marine khaki! That’s Army chino!” A hollow voice.

  “Well, the Americal Division’s here. Maybe he’s one of them.”

  “Whoever he was he was hit pretty bad,” Queen said. It was the first time he had spoken. Queen felt curiously, but strongly, ashamed of himself for looking at the hurt man’s shirt, and for the nervous excitation which possessed him in doing it.

  “Wonder just where it did hit him?” A guilty voice, this one; trying to sound offhand.

  It was the second time this had been mentioned. One of the men nearest it—not the finder—leaned down silently and picked it up with thumb and forefinger as if afraid he might catch a terrible disease from it.

  “Here,” he said, and looked pleadingly at the man next to him.

  Between them they stretched it out, turned it around, turned it back—strangely like two lady clerks in a dress shop holding up a new model for prospective buyers. From within the group there was a sudden high constrained hysterical giggle.

  “Now this here’s from our new Spring-of-’43 collection, just out. Fits any type a figure. Wouldja like to try it for size?”

  Nobody acknowledged the remark. The giggler subsided. The two men turned the shirt back and forth a few more times while the others looked in silence.

  Like so many of the shirts they had all seen here it was without sleeves. It was not entirely sleeveless however, like some. The sleeves had been lopped off halfway up the upper arm, then meticulously shredded to the shoulder seam with either a very sharp knife or a razorblade to look like the oldfashioned buckskin fringe of the plainsmen.

  The sight gave Big Queen, who had owned and worn a buckskin jacket during his two years as a hand, a peculiarly painful twinge. A twinge of odd loneliness—and of something else. It was that American love of cowboy fringe. It brought Queen closer in understanding to this other, unknown man that Queen liked to be. It was such a ridiculous, boyish gesture; and, intuitively, Queen understood it all too well. Much better than he wanted to understand it consciously. Because the gesture hadn’t worked. It hadn’t protected him at all. That much was obvious.

  The bullet had entered at the bottom of the flat plane of the pectoral muscle just above the nipple and had struck bone and keyholed downward, coming out flatways below the left shoulder-blade. There was not much blood around the neat hole in the front. Most of it was on the back. The fringewearer had been very unlucky. Had the bullet caromed upward it might have missed the lung. As it was, it had torn its way down and out through the center of it, moving flat instead of by the point and thus insuring even greater tissue damage.

  Once again the two men, after pausing, turned the shirt back and forth a few times, its wet homemade fringe fluttering heavily. Still nobody said anything.

  Bell, peering between the helmeted heads of the two men in front of him, blinked suddenly as if struck in the face by a sea wave while swimming. Quite without preparation he had found himself staring at a horrible, halucinatory double-image of himself and that shirt. He was both standing upright wearing that pierced, lifesoaked shirt and at the same time lying pierced and lifesoaked himself on the ground after having flung it away from him, while somewhere up behind him out of eye range he could nevertheless see a weird, transcendental image of his wife Marty’s head and shoulders superimposed among the foliage gloom of the trees looking down at the two images sadly. The blink did not help. The images did not go away. Oh, I’m sorry, he clearly heard her voice say. In an infinitely, exquisitely sad tone. I’m so sorry. So sorry for you. It was said with all of that vitality and force-of-life lifeforce Marty had so much of in her. Go away! he frantically wanted to shout at her. It isn’t real anyway! Go away! Don’t make it real! Don’t look! Do not pass Go! Do not collect two hundred dollars! But he could no longer even blink, let alone shout. Oh, I am sorry, she called down to him, really and truly so sorry. And Bell knew without thinking it, without daring to think it, that half of her sorrow was because she knew as well as he that that po
werful, perpetually affirming, female force for life that was in her would require her to go on living, even when she might not want to; require her to go on needing to be loved by a male, another male, even when she might have preferred not. It was in her, that female puissance; was her nature; as unstoppable as water running downhill. So sorry, John. So sorry for you. It faded away softly in the dripping jungle gloom, infinitely sad. Frantically, in a sheer terror at having to face sheer terror, Bell forced his eyes to blink. Then he blinked them wildly several more times. Perhaps seeing the jungle again today, after the Philippines, after so long?…But the most terrifying of all was that Bell knew, again without daring to think it, that if he had been alone at this moment he would have found himself wearing an erection. Out of his pain, out of the agony of his knowledge, the surety of his intuition, he would have had a full sexual erection. This at least trebled his terror. Again he blinked; desperately, this time. The two men were once again holding the shirt, that death shirt, and still not a soul had spoken a word.

  “Well, what’ll I do with it?” the man who first had picked it up said.

  As if released from his responsibility by these first words spoken into the bellying silence, the second man immediately let go and stepped back. His half of the soggy, muddy shirt fell heavily toward the first man. The first man straightened his arm out, so the shirt would not touch him, and continued to hold it. And there it dangled, like some forever windless flag symbolic of the darker, nether side of patriotism.

  “Well I mean it don’t seem right—…” he began, and stopped. The end of the statement trailed off into conjecture.

  “What do you mean it don’t seem right?” Queen demanded in a suddenly furious, almost squeaky voice. He managed to pull it down into its normal deepness before finishing: “what don’t seem right?”

  Nobody answered.

  “It’s only a shirt, ain’t it? It ain’t the guy who was in it, is it? Whatta you want to do? Take it back to the compny? What’ll you do with it there? Bury it? Or give it to Storm to clean stoves with?”