The Naked and the Dead (36 page)

            "I was in Washington about a year and a half ago," Conn said in his whisky voice.

            They were off. Hearn sighed to himself, and eased himself slowly down on the sand, letting his head touch the ground, exposing his chest to the sun. Its heat was palpable, and he could feel the sun boring through his eyelids, exciting his retina into blind and angry circles of red. From the jungle a dank sulphurous breeze was exuded from time to time like the draft from an oven when the door is opened.

            Hearn sat up again, folded his forearms over his hairy knees, and stared about the beach. Some of the officers who had come down with them were swimming now, and a few others were playing bridge on a blanket inside the shade of a peripheral coconut tree which leaned over the beach. About a hundred yards away on a small sand spit there was the occasional sharp ineffectual pop of a carbine as Major Dalleson threw a pebble into the air and fired at it. The water had deepened in color from its almost transparent early-morning blue to a deep violet, and the sun glittered over it like the reflections from a rainy pavement at night. About a mile to the right a lone landing craft was chugging leisurely in toward shore after having transferred a load of supplies from one of the freighters anchored out in the water.

            Sunday at the beach. It was a little incredible. If you added a few striped beach umbrellas, the average quota of women and children, this would be indistinguishable from any of the more exclusive beaches at which his family had bathed one summer or another. Perhaps a sailboat should be substituted for the landing craft, and Dalleson could be fishing instead of shooting pebbles, but it was really close enough. Completely incredible. Out of decency, perhaps, they had retreated for this beach party to the extreme tip of the peninsula, twenty-five miles from the base where the front-line troops were patrolling this Sunday morning against the Toyaku Line. Go, my children, and God bless you, the General had said in effect. And of course the guards along the road, and the detail of quartermaster troops who were bivouacked on the beach and were responsible this morning for patrolling the fringes of the jungle near where they were bathing would hate them for it, and as Cummings had said, would fear them even more.

            He shouldn't have come along, Hearn decided. Yet the headquarters bivouac would have been deadly this morning with most of the officers gone. The General would want to talk to him, and it was important to stay away from the General now. Besides, he had to admit it was pleasant here. It had been a long time since he had felt the sun's heat relaxing his body, absorbing and melting his tensions.

            "The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety," the General had said.

            Then twentieth-century man was also a sunbather. Very neat. Hearn kneaded a stiffened cake of sand into powder between his fingers.

            "Oh, I have to tell you this," Dove was saying now. "We had a party once at Fischler's place in the Wardman Park Hotel, Lieutenant Commander Fischler, an old sidekick of my brother's at Cornell, hell of a swell fellow and knew a lot of VIPs, that's how he got the room in the Wardman Park, but he gave this party, and in the middle of it he started wandering around pouring a couple of drops of liquor in everybody's hair. Good for dandruff, he kept saying. Oh, it was wonderful." Dove giggled remembering it.

            "Yeah?" Conn said. "Yeah?"

            Hearn stared at Dove. Lieutenant (sg) Dove, USNR. A Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect ass-hole. He was six feet two and weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds, with straight ash-blond hair cut close, and a clean pleasant vacuous face. He looked more like a Harvard clubman, varsity crew.

            Conn fingered the red bulb of his nose, and said in his husky assured voice, "That's right, many's the good time I've had in Washington. Brigadier General Caldwell and Major General Simmons -- do you know them? -- old friends of mine. And there was that Navy feller, Rear Admiral Tannache, got to be good friends with him too. Damn fine man, he was a good officer." Conn surveyed his paunch, which projected in sharp curved lines just beneath his shorts, like a football inflated inside him. "We've had some wild times between us. That Caldwell is hell on wheels when it comes to women. We've had some times between us would singe your back hair."

            "Oh, we had lots of that too," Dove inserted eagerly. "I couldn't go back to Washington with Jane, because there're so many girls there, if I should meet one of them with her, well, it wouldn't be so good. Jane's a hell of a swell kid, wonderful wife, but you know she takes her church seriously, and she'd be awfully upset."

            Lieutenant (sg) Dove. He had been assigned to the division as an interpreter at almost the same time Hearn had come in, and with amazing, with startling naïveté he had announced very carefully to everyone that his rank was equivalent to captain in the Army, and that the responsibilities of a lieutenant sg were greater than those of a major or a lieutenant colonel in the Army. He had told the officers this in officers' mess on Motome and had been loved accordingly. Conn had not spoken to him for a week. But to the impedimenta that kept true love apart, or the poem went something like that. In any case, they were delighted with each other now. Hearn remembered Dove's saying to him once when he first came to the division, "You know, really, Hearn, you can appreciate this because you're an educated man like me, but do you know there's sort of a coarser element in the officers in the Army. The Navy's more careful." Apparently, Dove had made the sublime effort; he accepted Conn now.

            They all accepted one another in time, with of course all the gossip requisite to acceptance. Dekes under the skin. Even Conn and he had made up. They hated each other, of course, but that was conveniently forgotten. A week after their quarrel he had passed Conn in the G-2 tent, and Conn had cleared his throat forcibly and said, "Looks like it's gonna be cooler today."

            "Yes," Hearn had said.

            "I got a lot of work today, I appreciate it cooler," Conn had added, and after that they made a point of nodding to each other. Today on the beach he had been talking to Dove, and Conn had come over.

            "Yes, sir," Conn repeated, "many's the party we've had. You talk about that whisky and dandruff gag, what was his name, Fischler, any relation to Commodore Fischler?"

            "I don't think so."

            "The Commodore's a good friend of mine. Anyway I remember one time when Caldwell got a woman over and by God if she didn't drink her liquor in. . ."

            "Lord, you'd think she'd burn herself to death," Dove exclaimed.

            "Not her. That was her specialty. Caldwell almost bust a gut laughing. He liked his good time, Caldwell."

            Dove was visibly shocked. "I can't say I've ever seen anything like that. God, isn't it disgusting, you're out in the open air like this, and the chaplain's probably giving his services now."

            "Well, we really shouldn't be talking like this on Sunday," Conn agreed, "but what the hell, we're all men." He lit a cigarette, and speared the match in the sand. The crack of Dalleson's carbine sounded again, and a few shouts came from the water where some officers were having a water fight in the shallow surf. "I've made a study of parties," Conn said, "and there's just two ingredients to have a good one, enough to drink and some willing slits. Ready, willing, and able."

            Hearn squinted along the sand. You could reduce it probably to four kinds of parties. There were the ones that made the newspaper society columns with the senators and the important representatives, the industrialists, the high brass, the foreign dignitaries, even his father had gone to one of them once, and been miserable no doubt. But then they all were miserable there. It was the highest flowering of an industrial capitalist culture, and a good time was segregate from the social forms, the power swappings, the highly elaborated weather talk. Everyone hated everyone else as a matter of course, for if they came to do business they found they could not, and if they came as snobs bearing gifts they were contemptuous of the men who had the power and lacked the conventional aptitudes.

            There were the hotel parties with field officers and congenital lower-level brass, the American Legion -- Washington Extension, and big small-business men with nice factories in Indiana, and call girls. A desperate boredom always lay over those things until they got drunk, and then they all had a wonderful time, and went back with refreshed loins and new Pullman tales to their desks in Washington and Indiana. Sometimes, if you could get a hold of a representative who was a regular guy he would come along, and your business would be consummated with a couple of drunken bear hugs, a sentimental cognition that everybody was a hell of a good guy, and a call girl yelling into your ear, "Break it up, honey, break it up." His father had never mentioned it, but of course he had gone to that kind of party too.

            There were the parties his own friends gave, with the quiet sustained drinking and essential joylessness. All the American college intellectuals, the ones who weren't sick, with their clear logical voices, their good manners, their kindness, their tact and their miserable, dreary and lucid intelligences. They were all in government now, or they wore bars and had hush-hush jobs, and they talked of Roger who had been lost on some OSS mission, or they analyzed politics, sometimes hopefully, sometimes sadly, with a detached and helpless and intrinsically superior attitude. There was good wit, incisive but always peripheral information, and the dry dejuiced hopelessness of all of them with their rational desiccated minds and their wistful contemplation of lusts and evils they would never understand with their bodies. William Blake angels, gray and clear, hovering over horseshit.

            And Dove's parties. But of course they were common to San Francisco and Chicago and Los Angeles and New York at times. The American Legion -- Washington Extension, Junior Auxiliary. Only with something more. Give it credit. In a proper light with proper glasses, these parties were sometimes magical and sad, festooned with all the echoes of all the trains that had brought them there, all the advance awarenesses of the great hollow stations that would bear them away again, And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated English attitude which was completely phony. It came from books they had never read, and movies they shouldn't have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseas. Its origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfields. But nevertheless they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with them. And they did magical things like pouring whisky on each other's hair, or setting mattresses afire, or grabbing hats on the fly from the heads of established businessmen. Of all the parties those were perhaps the best, but he had come to them too old.

            ". . . and damn if we didn't find out she had hair growing clear up her belly," Conn said, finishing a story.

            Dove laughed. "If Jane knew the things I've done."

            Their talk had ended by revolting him. He was becoming a prude, Hearn decided. He was disgusted and there wasn't sufficient cause for it. Slowly he extended his arms and legs, lowered himself gradually to the ground, feeling the muscle tension in his stomach. There had been an instant when he was tempted to hug Conn and Dove with his arms, and rather deliberately knock their heads together. All right, he was tough. But there had been too many thoughts like that lately, in officers' mess, the time he wanted to strike the General, or just now. It was the trouble with being a big man. He raised his head and stared across the bulk of his body, pinching the roll of fat that had started on his belly. Under the hair that covered his chest his flesh had become white. Five years more, ten at most, and he might be having to buy it from women. When a big man's body started going, it fell apart quickly.

            Hearn shrugged. Then he'd end up like Conn and to hell with it. He'd buy it and talk about it, and it was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of women who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.

            "She looked at it, and she said, 'Major' -- I was a major then -- 'what are they gonna do next? White ones, silver ones, gold ones, they'll probably be puttin' the American flag on 'em.' " Conn laughed and spat a little phlegm into the sand.

            Why didn't they quit? Hearn rolled over on his belly, and felt the sun warming his body to its core. He'd be needing a woman soon, and short of ferrying to the next island, a couple of hundred miles away, where there were supposed to be native women, he was going to find little comfort.

            "Hey," he said abruptly to Conn and Dove, "if you can't bring a whorehouse in, how about letting the women go for a while?"

            "Beginning to get you down?" Conn asked with a smile.

            "It's brutal," Hearn said, imitating Dove. He lit a cigarette, shaking the sand out of the pack.

            Dove looked at him, tried another gambit. "Say, I was thinking before, Hearn, is your father's name William?"

            "Yeah."

            "We had a William Hearn who was a Deke about twenty-five years ago; could it be him?"