The Naked and the Dead (47 page)

            "But I'm not obliged to give them to you. And I damn sure won't. If y' want Spam, that I can give you, and not a penny out of your pocket. But for these little extras, I suggest that you wait till a Navy ship appears again. I don't have any truck with this selling of myonize." He scribbled something on the requisition. "If ye'll take this down into hold number two, ye'll get your whisky. If I didn't have to give you that, I wouldn't."

            "Well, thank you, Kerrigan."

            "Any time, Lieutenant, any time."

            Hearn paced down the corridor, his eyes glittering. The ship rolled on a swell and he lurched into a bulkhead, smacking his hand painfully against the metal to break the impact. Then he halted, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and mouth again.

            He'd be damned if he'd go back without the supplies. Kerrigan's smile angered him again, and with an effort he forced himself to grin. This was getting out of hand; Kerrigan after all had had style, was amusing. There were other ways to get the supplies, and he'd get them. He wasn't going to face the General and have to give explanations.

            He came to hold No. 2 and descended the ladder to the refrigerator vaults. To the man on duty, he handed the requisition.

            "Just five cases of whisky, huh?"

            Hearn massaged his chin. A jungle sore had formed near the cleft and it smarted. "How about getting the rest of that, Jack?" he said abruptly.

            "Can't. Kerrigan crossed it off."

            "It's worth ten pounds to you if you give me that stuff."

            The seaman was a small man with a worried face. "I can't get away with that. What if Kerrigan sees me loading it on?"

            "He's in his office doing some work. He won't be out."

            "I can't take the chance, Lieutenant. It would show up in inventory."

            Hearn scratched his head. He could feel a heat rash forming on his back. "Look, let's get in the refrigerator vault. I want to cool off." They opened one of the huge doors, and stood inside talking, surrounded by turkeys and hams on hooks and crates of Coca-Cola. One of the turkeys had some meat exposed, and Hearn picked off a few slivers of white flesh and ate them as he spoke. "You know damn well it isn't going to show up in inventory," Hearn improvised. "I've worked with things like this, Jack. You can't account for food."

            "I don't know, Lieutenant."

            "You mean to tell me Kerrigan's never been down here to pick up a little food for himself?"

            "Well, it's a risky business giving it to you."

            "How about twelve pounds?"

            The seaman deliberated. "Maybe for fifteen?"

            He had him now. "Twelve's my price," Hearn barked. "I'm not bargaining."

            "All right, I'll take a chance."

            "Good boy." Hearn pulled off another piece of turkey and ate it with relish. "You get the crates separated, and I'll find my men and have them bring it up."

            "All right, Lieutenant, but let's do it fast, okay?"

            Hearn went on top, leaned over the rail, and shouted to the three-man detail on his landing barge to come aboard. After they had climbed the scramble net, Hearn led them below to the hold, and they each picked up a carton and carried it to the deck. After three trips everything had been brought up, the whisky, the canned chicken, and all the condiments, and in a few minutes it was loaded in the crane net and lowered into the barge. Hearn paid the seaman his twelve pounds. "Come on, men, let's get going," he shouted. Now that it was over, he was worried that Kerrigan might appear on deck and discover his transaction. They clambered down into the barge, and Hearn dragged a tarpaulin over the supplies.

            As they were about to back off, he saw Kerrigan looking down at them from the rail. "If ye don't mind, Lieutenant," Kerrigan bawled, "I'd like to have a look at what ye're taking away."

            Hearn grinned. "Start the motors," he called to the helmsman, and then looked up blankly at Kerrigan. "Too late, man," he shouted. But the motors coughed, sputtered and died. And Kerrigan, seeing this, began to climb over the side.

           
"Start those motors,"
Hearn shouted furiously. He glared at the, helmsman.
"Get going!"

            The motor sputtered again, caught momentarily, lapsed, and then steadied. From the stern the propeller wake became steady. Kerrigan was halfway down the scramble net. "All right, let's go!" Hearn shouted.

            The barge backed off slowly, leaving Kerrigan stranded foolishly in the middle of the net. A few of the seamen looking over the side laughed at him as he started to climb back to the deck. "So long, Kerrigan!" Hearn shouted. He was gleeful. "Goddam, man," he said to the helmsman, "that was a hell of a time to have the motors go back on you." The landing craft was bouncing steadily as it overtook the waves riding toward shore. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant."

            "Okay." He felt relaxed, extremely relaxed, in comparison to the tension he had sustained when they were loading the food, and with surprise he noticed how wet his clothing had become. Some spray was washing over the forward ramp, and Hearn stood in the supply well, and let it patter down upon him. Overhead, the sun was breaking through the clouds, the overcast retreating wispily before it like paper curling away from a flame. He mopped his forehead once more, felt his collar gathered like a sodden rope around his neck.

            Well, twelve pounds was not bad. Hearn grinned. Kerrigan would have charged him at least fifteen pounds for those supplies, perhaps twenty. That seaman had been an ass, and the General was an ass too. Cummings had expected him to come back with only the whisky. Of course. Yesterday Horton had been talking about a purser. "That sonofabitch won't co-operate at all," Horton had said. And the purser was Kerrigan.

            The General had sent him out on a special detail to buy some extras for officers' mess when clearly it was a job for one of the officers in Horton's section. Somehow he had sensed the General's motive, he must have, otherwise why would he have gone to the trouble of bribing the seaman or become so angry when Kerrigan had given him lip? So the General was having an effect on him. Hearn sat down on the tarpaulin covering the supplies, took off his shirt, swabbed his wet body with it, and then, holding it dourly in his hand, he lit a cigarette.

            After the boat landed, Hearn had the supplies transferred to a weapons carrier, and rode back with his detail. He reached the bivouac before noon, and dropped in at the General's tent to report, savoring the idea of disappointing Cummings, but the General was not there. Hearn sat down on a foot locker, and surveyed the tent distastefully. Nothing in it had been altered since early morning when Clellan had worked on it, and in the sunlight that glanced through the open flaps the tent was rectangular and unfriendly with all the corners squared, and no sign that anyone ever lived in it. The floor was spotless, the blankets were drawn tautly over the General's mattress, the desk was uncluttered. Hearn sighed, felt a vague uneasiness stirring in him. Ever since that
particular
night.

            The General was putting the screws on him. The things Cummings gave him to do could be done easily enough, but there was always a special brand of humiliation in them. The General knew him in some ways better than he knew himself, Hearn realized. If he had a job he would do it, even if it meant being a bastard about it, but each time he was a bastard it was a little easier to be one the next time. Cute enough. That business with Kerrigan this morning was taking on another aspect. When you looked at it coldly it amounted to bribing a man, sneaking out some supplies and sweating until you got away.

            On another level it was the sort of deal his father might have pulled. "Every man has his price, there's more ways than one to skin a cat." Oh, there were enough platitudes to cover it, but the General was showing him that he wasn't superior to the platitudes either. It had been the recreation tent all over again with fifty, perhaps a hundred variations.

            "You forget, Robert, there's such a thing as papal dispensation." All right, now there was no dispensation. He was merely a second lieutenant, squeezed by all the pressures above and beneath him, no more capable than any of the other officers of maintaining his own course with a little dignity, a little restraint. After it went on long enough the reactions would become automatic, fear-inspired. Somehow you never did win when you were with the General. Even on that night of the chess game it was he who had felt sick, not Cummings; it was he who had lain on his cot and dredged his memory for all the silt and cankers.

            "Are you junior officers getting your liquor supplies?" What the hell had he meant by that? On an impulse Hearn opened the General's liquor closet, and examined the opened bottles. Almost every night Cummings could be counted on to drink an inch or two of Scotch, and with a curious niggardliness he would mark the level of the bottle with a pencil before he put it away. Hearn had noticed this with amusement, found it an interesting little quirk in all the contradictions of the General.

            But today the liquor level on his bottle of Scotch was at least two and a half inches below the last pencil mark. Cummings had seen that this morning, had rebuked him for drinking it. "Are you junior officers getting your liquor supplies?" Only, that was absurd. Cummings would know better than that.

            It could have been Clellan.
Possibly.
But it was unlikely Clellan would jeopardize a sinecure like general's orderly merely for a drink. And besides, Clellan was shrewd enough to mark the liquor level himself if he wanted to take a nip.

            Suddenly, Hearn had an image of Cummings sitting in his tent the night before, about to go to bed, examining thoughtfully the label of his whisky bottle. He might even pick up his pencil, deliberate a moment or two, and then he would leave the bottle unmarked, return it to the closet. What had his face looked like at that moment?

            This, now, was not funny. Not after the recreation tent and the flowers and Kerrigan. Until this little episode, he could consider the General's antics as pranks that spewed out of twisted and intense hungers. It had been in a way like the probing banter between friends. But
this
was vicious. And frightening, a little. With all his concerns, with all the pressures upon him, Cummings had had time to concoct these schemes, release a little of the greater frustration he was feeling.

            And that basically was what their relationship had always been, Hearn understood at this moment. He had been the pet, the dog, to the master, coddled and curried, thrown sweetmeats until he had had the presumption to bite the master once. And since then he had been tormented with the particular absorbed sadism that most men could generate only toward an animal. He was a diversion for the General, and he resented it deeply with a cold speechless anger that came to some extent from the knowledge that he had acquiesced in the dog-role, had even had the dog's dreams, carefully submerged, of someday equaling the master. And Cummings had probably understood even that, had been amused.

            He remembered a story Cummings had told him about an employee in the War Department who had been discharged after some Communist documents had been planted in his desk.

            "I'm surprised it worked," Hearn had said. "You say everybody knew the man was harmless."

            "Those things always work, Robert. You can't begin to imagine how effective the Big Lie is. Your average man never dares suspect that the men in power have all the nasty impulses he has, except they're more effective about carrying them out. Besides, there's never a man who can swear to his own innocence. We're all guilty, that's the truth. This particular fellow began to wonder if perhaps he had belonged to the party. Why do you think Hitler was able to stay unmolested so long? The diplomat mentality at its poorest just couldn't believe that he wasn't playing the old game with some new wrinkles. It took an outside observer like you or me to see that he was the interpreter of twentieth-century man."

            Certainly Cummings would have been perfectly capable of planting those documents if he had thought it necessary. Just as he had finagled the whisky label. And he was not going to become a chess piece for the General to direct. No doubt Cummings saw him now as a diversion.

            Hearn stared around the tent. It would be a pleasure to wait for the General and tell him that he had brought back the supplies successfully, but it was a tainted pleasure and Cummings would be quite aware of it. "Had to extend yourself a bit, didn't you, Robert?" he might say. Hearn lit a cigarette, and walked over to the wastebasket to drop the match.

            There it was, that instinctive reaction,
don't drop a match on the General's floor.
He paused. There was a limit to how far he could let the General prod him.

            The clean floor. If you looked at it clearly without the aura of military mumbo-jumbo, it became absurd, perverted, a revolting idea.

            He dropped the match near the General's foot locker, and then with his heart beating stupidly, he threw his cigarette carefully onto the middle of the General's spotless floor, ground his heel down brutally upon it, and stood looking at it with amazement and a troubled pride.

            Let Cummings see that. Let him.

            In the G-1 tent the air had become stifling by midday. Major Binner wiped his steel-rimmed glasses, coughed dolefully, and removed a trickle of sweat from the corner of his neat temple. "This is a serious thing, Sergeant," he said quietly.

            "Yes, sir, I know."

            Major Binner glanced at the General for a moment. Then he drummed on his desk and looked at the enlisted man who was standing at attention before him. A few steps away, near one of the corner poles, Cummings paced a small circle back and forth.