The Naked and the Dead (32 page)

            "Where's the fuggin Japs?" Gallagher asked.

            "Oh, they's miles away," Wilson assured him. "This yere's where we pushed them back."

            Gallagher sniffed. "I can smell them already," he announced.

            "Oh, yeah," Wilson said. "I hear they's lots of them round here."

            The road passed through a coconut grove and then extended into a field of kunai grass. Gradually, as they walked they had become aware of a familiar stench rising from the plain on either side of them. It was a smell of decay not exactly sweet but a good deal like ordure leavened with garbage and the foul odor of a swamp. The smell varied in intensity and quality; sometimes it struck their noses with the acute loathsome scent of rotting potatoes, and sometimes it was more like the lair of a skunk.

            "Jesus," Red swore. He stepped around the dead body of a Japanese soldier that lay crushed on the road.

            In the coconut groves at the edge of the field, the trees were stripped of leaves and their trunks appeared black or brown as if they had withered from drought. Most of them had their branches sheared away, and they stood solitary and naked like a row of pilings on a sand flat when the tide is out. There was nothing green left in the groves.

            All over the landscape were the black silhouettes of burnt tanks; somehow they blended into the wreckage of trees and the circles of black charred grass so that they were camouflaged as in the child's picture-game where the faces of famous men are concealed in the leaves of trees. A litter of wreckage lay all over the field. There were the dead bodies of Japanese soldiers everywhere, and in one place on a small ridge, where the Japanese had entrenched themselves for a few hours, the artillery had torn great crumpled holes in the earth.

            The men wandered through the field, which was perhaps a quarter mile long. In the grass they could see the twisted bodies of a few dead men, and they lay very far from repose, their bodies frozen in the midst of an intense contortion. They skirted around them, and continued to stroll down the road. A few yards away a destroyed Japanese half-track and an American tank had careened on their sides, leaning against each other like old houses ready to totter. They had burned together, and they looked black and crippled. The bodies of the Japanese had not been carried away, and the driver of the halftrack had almost fallen out of his seat. His head was crushed from his ear to his jaw and it lay sodden on the runningboard of the vehicle as if it were a beanbag. One of his legs was thrust tensely through the shattered glass of the windshield and the other one, which had been lopped off at the thigh, lay at right angles to his head. It seemed to have a separate existence from him.

            Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away. He had a great hole in his intestines, which bunched out in a thick white cluster like the congested petals of a sea flower. The flesh of his belly was very red and his hands in their death throe had encircled the wound. He looked as if he were calling attention to it. He had an anonymous pleasant face with small snubbed features, and he seemed quite rested in death. His legs and buttocks had swollen so that they stretched his pants until they were the skin-tight trousers of a Napoleonic dandy. Somehow he looked like a doll whose stuffing had broken forth.

            At an angle to him lay a third soldier, who had received a terrible wound in his chest. His thighs and torso had been burned in escaping from the half-track, and he was stretched out on his back with his legs separated and his knees raised. The singed cloth of his uniform had rotted away and it exposed his scorched genitals. They had burned down to tiny stumps but the ash of his pubic hair still remained like a tight clump of steel wool.

            Wilson poked about the wreckage, and then sighed. "They done stripped 'em all of souvenirs," he said.

            Gallagher swayed back and forth drunkenly. "Who did? Who the fug did? Wilson, you're a goddam liar. You stole all the souvenirs."

            Wilson ignored him. "It's a damn shame's all Ah can say when a bunch of men like us is risking our ass for a whole goddam week, and they ain't even any souvenirs left." His voice trailed off bitterly. "Goddam shame," he repeated to himself.

            Martinez prodded with his shoe the genitals of the charred corpse. The genitals collapsed with a small crispy sound as if he had stuck his finger into a coil of cigar ash. He felt a trace of pleasure, which was lost in the gloominess he now felt. This liquor had made him despondent and the walk had intensified this; he felt no horror nor any fear at the bodies; his own terror of death had no relation to the smells and the cruel shapes into which physical death could force a body. He could not have said why he was gloomy, but he had to fasten it upon something. He resented the money he had spent for the whisky, and for the past half hour he had been trying to calculate how long it would take him to replace that money with his pay.

            Red leaned against the half-track. He was feeling dizzy and he extended his arm over the metal tread guard. His hand closed on a piece of pulpy fruit and he dropped it hastily. The fruit was red and looked like a pear, but he had never seen anything like it before. "Where the hell this come from?" he asked thickly.

            "That's Jap food," Wilson said.

            "Where'd they get it?"

            "Ah don' know," Wilson shrugged. He kicked it aside. A touch of fear penetrated through Red's drunkenness. For an instant he thought of Hennessey. "Well, Wilson, where the fug is the souvenirs?" he asked bitterly.

            "Men, you jus' got to follow me," Wilson said.

            They wandered away from the vehicles and made a little exploration off the side of the road on the ridge where the Japanese had entrenched themselves. Once there had been foxholes and dugouts pocking the entire surface of this shallow hill, but the artillery had collapsed most of these. The dirt walls were half caved in like a sand hole on the beach after the children have deserted it and people tread over its edges. There were dead Japanese lying all about this ridge, perhaps twenty or thirty men scattered in groups of two and three and four. Littered among them were thousands of small pieces of rubble, and a strong intense smell close to that of burning garbage arose from the ridge. There were rations rotting and boxes of equipment half emptied, their contents spilling out. There were mangled packs and rusted rifles and shoes and canteens and bits of rotting flesh strewn everywhere over the blasted earth. On the ridge there was not an area of five square yards which did not have some refuse. The debris was scattered everywhere in thousands of chaotic items. The Japanese had been dead for a week, and they had swollen to the dimensions of very obese men with enormous legs and bellies, and buttocks which split their clothing. They had turned green and purple and the maggots festered in their wounds and covered their feet.

            Each maggot was about a half inch long and it looked like a slug except that it was the color of a fish's belly. The maggots covered the dead bodies the way bees cluster over the head of a beekeeper. It was impossible to see any longer where the wounds had been, for the maggots covered every bit of ruptured flesh and crawled sluggishly over all the minor sores on the corpse. Gallagher watched drunkenly while a train of maggots filed into the gaping mouth of the dead man. Somehow he expected the maggots to make some sound, and their rapt noiseless feeding angered him. The stench was acute and flies lusted over the corpses.

            "Goddam flies," he muttered. He walked around a body and picked up a small paper carton which was lying on the ground. The cardboard was sodden and fell apart in his hands; he picked out a few tiny vials which contained a dark liquid, and looked morosely at them for a few seconds. "What are these?" he asked. No one answered, and after a moment he threw them to the ground again. "What I want to know is where the fug is the souvenirs?"

            Wilson was trying to remove the bolt from a rusted rifle. "Ah'm gonna get me one of them sammerigh swords one of these days," he announced. He prodded a corpse with the butt of the Japanese rifle, and made a face. "Goddam carrion, that's all we are, men, goddam carrion." A few ribs were protruding from the cadaverous chest and in the late afternoon light they had a silver sheen. The exposed flesh had turned a sickly brown-green. "Look jus' like a shoulder o' lamb," Wilson stated. He sighed again, and began to wander off down the ridge. There were a few natural caves on the reverse slope, and in one of them were a half dozen dead men piled over many boxes and crates. "Hey, men," Wilson yelled, "Ah found ya somethin'." He was proud of himself. The drunken taunts of the others had hurt his feelings. "If ol' Wilson tell ya that he get somethin', then he do it."

            A truck went rumbling down the road toward the forward bivouac areas. Wilson waved childishly, and then squatted on his haunches and peered into the cave. The others had come up beside him, and they all examined the cave. "They's a bunch of foot lockers down there, men."

            "They're just crates," Red said.

            "Tha's what Ah mean," Wilson told him. "We empty them, an' then we got foot-lockers to take back with us."

            Red swore. "If you want a crate you can get it back at headquarters company."

            "Aw, no," Wilson told him, "those crates we got are jus' old shoddy. These yere are built way a box should be built."

            Red looked again. "I'm fugged if I'm going to tote a box all the way back."

            Martinez wandered off a few yards. He had noticed a corpse whose open mouth was filled with gold teeth, and fascinated he kept turning around to look at it. He stood over the body and looked down at the teeth. There were at least six or seven which seemed to be of solid gold, and Martinez darted a quick look back at the other men, who were going into the cave.

            He was filled suddenly with a lust for the gold teeth. He could hear the men thrashing about in the cave, swearing thickly to one another, and despite himself he looked down again at the gaping mouth of the cadaver. No good to him, he told himself. Tensely he was trying to estimate how much the teeth were worth. Thirty dollar, maybe, he told himself.

            He turned away, and then came back. The battlefield was very silent, and he could hear nothing for a moment but the intent buzzing silence of the flies on the ridge. Down below in the valley everything stank, and the wreckage of mutilated men and vehicles was scattered everywhere. It looked like a junk yard, rust-red and black with an occasional patch of green grass. Martinez shook his head, Everything stink. A discarded rifle was lying at his feet, and without thinking he picked it up, and smashed the butt of it against the cadaver's mouth. It made a sound like an ax thudding into a wet rotten log. He lifted the rifle and smashed it down again. The teeth spattered loose. Some landed on the ground and a few lay scattered over the crushed jaw of the corpse. Martinez picked up four or five gold ones in a frenzy and dropped them in his pocket. He was sweating terribly, and his anxiety seemed to course through his body with the pumping of his heart. He took a few deep breaths, and gradually it subsided. He was feeling a mixture of guilt and glee, and he thought of a time in his childhood when he had stolen a few pennies from his mother's purse. "Goddam," he said. He wondered idly when he could sell the teeth. The opened battered mouth of the corpse bothered him, and he turned the body over with his foot. A school of maggots was uncovered, and he shivered. For some reason, he was very frightened, and he turned and went back to the men in the cave.

            The cave was small and the air in it was dank and oppressive. The men were sweating heavily, and yet the air seemed cold. The bodies were heaped over the boxes like bags of flour, and when they would try to move one the maggots would scatter like a school of minnows. Inside was a disordered rubble of fragments, black charred objects, rusted scraps of metal, shell fragments, a few broken boxes of mortar shells, a few mounds of gray ash like the kind found in trash barrels; there was even just a little bit of a dead body, a charred shinbone jutting from a mound of dirt and ash. The stench had the intensity and delirium of ether.

            "We ain't gonna get a goddam box," Red said. He was feeling sick, and his back had begun to ache inordinately from the effort it took to shift the bodies with his fingertips.

            "Let's quit this mess," Gallagher said. The sunlight at the mouth of the cave seemed astringent.

            "Men, you ain't gonna quit now, are ya?" Wilson pleaded. He was determined to bring back a box.

            The sweat ran into Martinez's eyes. He was irritable and impatient. "We go back now, huh?" he suggested.

            Wilson threw a body aside, and then stepped back with an exclamation. He had uncovered a snake, which moved its head slowly from side to side over the top of one of the boxes. The men all drew away with a murmur of fear and flattened against the opposite wall of the cave. Red pressed the safety on his gun, and drew a bead slowly on the head of the snake. His hands were wavering, and he watched the flat eyes of the snake with absorption. "Don' miss," Wilson whispered.

            The sound of the shot bounded from wall to wall with the over-pouring clamor of an artillery piece. The snake's head disappeared into a mash of pulp, and its body quivered frenetically for many seconds. The men watched intently, awe-struck, their ears deafened by the noise of Red's gun. "Let's get out of here," Gallagher cried.

            They stumbled over one another in their sudden frenzy to get out. All of them had an acute panic. Wilson mopped his face and breathed deeply of the air outside the hole. "Ah guess that's one box Ah'll never get," he said casually. Actually, he was feeling very tired, and his restlessness had spent itself temporarily. "Ah guess we might as well get on back," he said.