Dog Tags (17 page)

“Three of them just died,” Kinsella said. “They just lay down and died.”

“Force them,” I said. “Humiliate them. Go for the balls.”

We kept a few more alive. What for?

In early March a social event, a dizzying week. First haircuts, the men sheared, suddenly children, gangling, morons. Then Ou-yang sent for me. He trembled with courteous effort but finally guffawed. “I must parade you all. You will look like a, a, a field of
melons
.”

I smiled sheepishly. Samson, shorn, hot with embarrassment, uneasy, squirming and not tragic at all. Disproportion, chagrin. Vast ears. Dying bums with lice.

“I have some extremely
good
news,” Ou-yang said.

I believed nothing and only waited.

Ou-yang's hand rose, a magician's swoop, and a necklace glittered and dangled.

“My dog tags.” I was full of wonder.

“And,” Ou-yang declaimed, “a box of cigarettes, and a bag of dried peas. And very soon there will be soybeans for your men. Protein.”

Dried peas. Soybeans. I tamed a rush of tears.

“So,” I told Kinsella, “I patched him up. No idea who he was,” and I added awkwardly, perturbed, unquiet, “under duress.”

Kinsella was silent and severe.

“It seems he was a political officer, young, rising, God knows, important, brilliant. So I got a reward. And my dog tags back.”

Kinsella's hand waited. I dropped the necklace into it. He read, nodded, returned it; I looped it into place, a debutante, pearls. “My bunch come first,” I said, “but there's these left over.” Kinsella took the box, sniffed at it, offered; I declined. He fished at his waistband and produced matches; he lit a cigarette pensively, inhaled, blew smoke, a reverie, jets from his nose. He smiled. “God damn.”

“You're trading with the enemy.”

“The hell I am. They owe us a damn sight more than this.”

“That's something else. He says there's soybeans coming.”

“Soybeans.” He inhaled again, smiled again. I thought again of newsreels.

“Soybeans are full of good stuff,” I said. “Protein.”

“Soybeans are for cattle.”

“That's us,” I said. “Also, this weather's good. Maybe we've hit bottom. Maybe it gets better now.”

“Maybe,” Kinsella said. “Maybe it's time to crack out of here.”

“Right,” I said.

We mashed the dried peas in boiling water for Scafa and Cuttis, and I fed them, more useful now, a man with a purpose. I slept with the cloth bag—the peas might last a week—and awoke the first night when Sunderman's hand brushed my face. I didn't know it was Sunderman until I jumped for the bulb, shouting, and scared them all. They scurried and panicked and we lined them up and Trez found the bag in Sunderman's pants. We all stood around quietly, no one moving much or offering suggestions. They were waiting for me to be an officer, but I did not feel at all like an officer. I felt feverish and I tried, made an honest effort (man of the world, doctor, Jew) to do something about the prickles and surges of pure rage, of lunacy almost, that rose and fell; I was trembling inside, and I looked miserably from man to man and probably I would have left Sunderman to them. But Sunderman was also insane and bolted for the door. I grabbed him, a mad dog now, the old corporal; I pushed him off and hit him on the mouth. He caught me on the temple with a right hand and I drove inside it, both arms pumping, to the ribs, the belly, and when he crouched I drew off and hit him where the jaw meets the neck, under the ear, and he went down sideways and slid to the dirt floor. “Pig,” I panted, “pig,” and the word meant everything. He was conscious and lay there sobbing. The men observed him almost without interest. Trezevant poked at him, big toe to his butt, and said, “All right now. It's over.” Sunderman sat up crying, snuffling, four years old, and much—of manhood, passion, hope, resolution—drained out of me. I felt it go. I was very tired. I retrieved my bag of peas and went back to my patch of floor, and lay on my back, and knew that there would be no escape, and that this was the war we had all feared always, the war that would never end. Soon I was crying too. In the morning Scafa was dead.

Kinsella accepted the dog tags and said, “I hear you struck an enlisted man.”

“Several times.” The warm spell persisted, and the snow was almost gone; bits of green seemed to shout from the earth, and I no longer cared.

“Why?”

“He stole food. Food for the sick.”

“You can't maintain discipline by striking enlisted men.”

“There is no discipline.”

“Yes there is,” Kinsella said, “and it's the only hope.”

That was unanswerable.

“Don't do it again,” he said.

“Yessir.”

“How many dead now?”

“Two in my hut. About one in four, all around, maybe one in three.”

“God damn,” he said. “But it's warmer. Dysentery?”

“My two were. Plenty of that, and pneumonia and scurvy and wounds still open.”

“It's inhuman,” he said. “And no soybeans yet.”

“I quit,” I said, and left him. On my way back to the hut I saw a weed, a plain ordinary green weed, the kind with flat leaves and many veins, and I pulled it up and gave it to Trezevant by way of valedictory. “Put it in the pot,” I said. “Tell them to find weeds, any kind, and put them in the pot.” Then I lay down and did not rise. Trez tried to force-feed me and I pulled rank. “Don't lay a hand on me.” On the fourth day, sure enough, I yearned for ice water. Or soda water, what Jacob called Vichy. I saw bottles of it, glistening ranks of bottles on beds of ice, sweating bottles, billions of bubbles. I rolled over and lay face down. I thought of Carol, but her face was misty. “Enough,” I said.

I dreamed. I dreamed of a school of fish, a bed of oysters: I was under water with a sack, hovering, slithering, drifting, one floating foot set uncertainly after another in the swirling blue murk; I was harvesting sea cucumbers, greens, greens; and sea slugs, protein, protein. I swept a dozen oysters into my sack, and fish followed, silvery fish with blue and yellow stripes and long fragile trailing fins, and then I saw a hole in the sack and all was lost, no air now. I thrashed, and woke.

Later Kinsella came and said, “Benny, we got sick people. Get up out of there.” I made no answer. He stormed and hollered; I heard him, miles away, but I was tired, and tugged the jacket over my head and closed my eyes.

Kinsella ripped the jacket away, pulled me up, and slapped me hard. I smiled faintly and fell back. I knew what he was doing and I approved; he was a good man, a fine fellow, but no. I was at the bottom of the sea and would not rise. I sank into the mud, and my heartbeat slowed. “Oh get up,” he said, snarled, “get up.” Soon I would die. We were all dying. I would die in three or four weeks. I wished Kinsella would shut up and go away.

His face was close to mine, and I could feel his breath. “Get up,” he whispered. “You god damn yellow kike, get up.”

Dimly, deeply, I knew his purpose; dimly, deeply, I knew him for my friend, my rock, my major; but I shot up from the floor of the sea, broached with a shriek, and struck for the throat. He slammed me against the wall and agony boiled through me, he had broken me, no air, I tried to shout; my lungs filled, sweet, sweet, salvation! and I wept, and wept, and Kinsella was cradling me and saying it's all right Benny, it's all right Benny, god damn them, it's all right Benny, the soybeans are here. And then he said, this Cuchulainn, a most astonishing thing, and most fiercely he said it. “Man,” he said, “remember you weren't born a Jew for nothing.”

12

Gabol sat round-shouldered on a mess table, feet swinging, countenance engaging, red hair wholesome: painted silos, Sunday school. “How does it feel, in a bunch like this?”

Behind a desk Cornelius scowled: progressive education, group therapy, communism. Parsons observed. Captain Fontaine, stocky, caracul-haired, chewed a cigar. He had been introduced as a legal officer and Benny had thought, Good, I'll sue. “We've been living in a bunch for some time,” a Negro lieutenant said. Grown men tittered.

Gabol said, “None of you knows any of the others. Or did before. That right?”

Murmurs. That was right.

“No notes,” Gabol said. “Feel free.”

A lanky man asked, “What's that feel like?” A corporal.

Another voice: “How about some beer?”

“No beer.” Gabol smiled. “Not till you get your weight back.”

Ex-prisoners, they shrugged, wry. More interrogations. They would reach home and their wives would interrogate them.

“Nobody with anything to say? I assume you're glad to be here.”

“Food's better,” someone said.

“Just talk about whatever you like,” Gabol said.

A man yawned. Another blew smoke audibly, whoosh.

Gabol's smile faded. Sour Cornelius puckered.

At the third meeting Cornelius said, “What the hell is the matter with you people? You act like we were the Chinese.”

“Haw,” someone said.

Benny grinned.

“What's funny?” Cornelius asked.

“Nothing,” Benny said.

Cornelius said to Gabol, “This is silly.”

“Doctor Beer,” Gabol said, “what was the worst time?”

Benny studied his classmates. Gently cynical, experts, jungle-fighters interviewed by a girl from a magazine.

“For me it was the first April,” Benny said, “when I stopped being busy and had time to cave in. And then about the first October when we knew there'd be no peace.”

“That's the truth,” the lanky man said. “That's when I turned in my card and went back to sleep.”

“That's when a good many made trouble,” Cornelius said. “Those Christmas broadcasts.”

“What did you think we were doing?” Gabol asked.

No one spoke. Gabol turned to Benny.

Benny shrugged.

“What did the Chinese say?”

They all looked at Benny.

“Why are you looking at me?”

“We heard,” someone said.

“What'd you hear?”

“No hard feelings,” the man said. “We all took what we could.”

“The hell we did,” Benny said. “I could have had chicken every Sunday.”

“But you didn't,” Cornelius said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Benny shrugged.

“Is that right?” The Negro lieutenant asked. “You didn't?”

“That's right,” Benny said.

“Must have done something,” the lieutenant said. “Heard your name here and there.”

“I doctored.”

“Well then.”

“I'd do it again.”

“You would, hey,” the lieutenant said.

“Damn right,” the lanky man said. “Long as you ain't an animal you can hold out. Long as you know who you are.”

“I'll think about that,” the lieutenant said.

“You knew what you were,” the lanky man said. “Didn't you now.”

“That's a real good point,” the lieutenant said. “My apologies, doc.”

“Forget it,” Benny said.

The lieutenant said, “No, I think I'll try to remember it.”

Benny smiled briefly.

“Thing to do,” the lanky corporal drawled at Cornelius, “is put us in a little room for three days and wake us at two in the morning and not give us food, and like that.”

The men laughed.

Cornelius sighed. Parsons and Fontaine were impassive.

The ship shuddered; engines labored faintly.

Gabol said, “Ve haff vays to make you talk.”

An explosion of laughter, murmurs, show biz. Gabol beamed and jiggled his red brows.

A small man spoke, a little dark man with a Roman nose. “Tell you why I didn't,” he said. “I was a cook. I didn't even belong there.”

“Nobody belonged there,” the lieutenant said.

“I didn't because my captain told me not to,” another said. “That man was a real son of a bitch.”

“You were all told not to,” Cornelius said. “But a third of you did. Not you men, but in general.”

“Nobody was getting us out of there,” someone said.

“No
news
,” someone said. “Far as we knew it was for life.”

Murmurs, approval, nods, grunts.

The lanky corporal said, “Hell, the Chinese told us there was lieutenant-colonels cutting records. And on movies.”

“That was a long time, dad,” someone said. “Two years. And two years by the Yalu is not like two years in the officers' club with beer and pussy.”

“Yay ho,” someone said.

The corporal again: “The Chinese said you used gas and germs. Did you?”

“Of course not,” Cornelius said.

Again the breath, the gentle wash, of disbelief.

“Wish you had,” the lanky man said. “Got us out of there quicker.”

Fontaine spoke for the first time, in a deep rumble. “Suppose we pointed to a man, right now, and said he'd collaborated. How would you feel about him?”

They chewed on it. The lanky corporal spoke. He was blond and slow, a cowboy's face, handsome, wide jaw. “Might not want him to marry my daughter, but I'd pass him a cup of coffee.”

“How about me?” the lieutenant asked him.

The corporal grinned. “Got no daughter.” The prisoners laughed. Gabol smiled.

“Tell you what you're up against,” Benny said. Cornelius squinted, heeding. “What they used to call solidarity. Spend a couple of years in prison. Then ask us.”

Approval again, grunts, a council of braves.

“Oh for God's sake,” Gabol said. “Help us so this doesn't happen again.”

The lieutenant asked politely, “Already planning the next war?”

After a silence a man said, “Solidarity hell. I wouldn't pass him a cup of coffee.” He too was a corporal, older, in his thirties, and there were deep lines on his face, sad pouches. “They came for me in the middle of the night. Lots of times. And they put me in a little room for a couple of days. No can, even, a bare floor. And a hundred times they sent for me right before chow, and let me go right after chow. And I never got no mail. And I watched them tear up what letters they let me write. And not only me.”