The Naked and the Dead (68 page)

            The sunset was magnificent with the intensity and brilliance that can be found only in the tropics. The entire sky was black with the impending rain except for a narrow ribbon along the horizon. The sun had already disappeared, but its reflection was compressed, channeled into a band of color where the sky met the water. The sunset made an arc along the water like the cove of a harbor, but a strange and illusory harbor, washed in a vivid spectrum of crimson and golden yellows and canary greens. There was a string of tiny clouds shaped like miniature plump sausages and they had become a royal stippled purple. After a time, the men had the impression they were staring at a fabulous island which could have existed only in their imagination. Each detail glowed, became quiveringly real. There was a beach whose sands were polished and golden, and on the false shore a grove of trees had turned a magnificent lavender-blue in the dusk. The beach was separate from everything they had ever known; it possessed every outcropping of rock, every curve of sand dune on a barren and gelid shore, but this beach was alive and quivering with warmth. Above the purple foliage the land rose in pink and violet dales, shading finally into the overcast above the harbor. The water before them, illumined by the sunset, had become the deep clear blue of the sky on a summer evening.

            It was a sensual isle, a Biblical land of ruby wines and golden sands and indigo trees. The men stared and stared. The island hovered before them like an Oriental monarch's conception of heaven, and they responded to it with an acute and terrible longing. It was a vision of all the beauty for which they had ever yearned, all the ecstasy they had ever sought. For a few minutes it dissolved the long dreary passage of the mute months in the jungle, without hope, without pride. If they had been alone they might have stretched out their arms to it.

            It could not last. Slowly, inevitably, the beach began to dissolve in the encompassing night. The golden sands grew faint, became gray-green, and darkened. The island sank into the water, and the tide of night washed over the rose and lavender hills. After a little while, there was only the gray-black ocean, the darkened sky, and the evil churning of the gray-white wake. Bits of phosphorescence swirled in the foam. The black dead ocean looked like a mirror of the night; it was cold, implicit with dread and death. The men felt it absorb them in a silent pervasive terror. They turned back to their cots, settled down for the night, and shuddered for a long while in their blankets.

            It began to rain. The boat churned and pushed through the darkness, wallowing only a hundred yards offshore. Over them all hung the quick fearful anticipation of the patrol ahead. The water washed mournfully against the sides of the boat.

2

            The platoon landed early the next morning on the back shore of Anopopei. The rain had halted during the night, and in the dawn the air was fresh and cool, the sunlight pleasant on the beach. The men lolled about on the sand for a few minutes, watching the assault craft back off from shore and start on its return journey. In five minutes the boat was a half mile away, but it seemed like much less, an easy swim across the bright glittering tropic water. The men stared at it wistfully, envying the pilots who by nightfall would return to a safe bivouac and hot food. That's the job to have, Minetta was thinking.

            The morning still possessed the new shining quality of a minted coin. The men were thrilled only slightly by the idea that they were on an unexplored shore. The jungle behind them looked essentially familiar; the beach, covered with fine delicate shells, was barren and isolated and would shimmer later in the heat, but now it seemed like every beach upon which they had ever landed. They sprawled about, smoking and laughing, waiting for the patrol to begin, perfectly content for the sun to dry their clothes.

            Hearn was feeling a little tense. In a few minutes they would begin a march over forty miles of strange country, the last ten through the Japanese rear. He turned to Croft and pointed again at the aerial map they had spread out between them on the sand. "It seems to me, Sergeant, the best way is to work up that river" -- he pointed to the mouth of a stream which debouched from the jungle a few hundred yards farther down the beach -- "as far as we can, and then cut trail till we reach the kunai grass."

            "Ain't no other way to do it far as I see," Croft said. Hearn was right, which annoyed him slightly. He rubbed his chin. "It's gonna take a lot more time than you figure, Lootenant."

            "Perhaps." Croft made him the least bit uneasy. He knew a lot, that was obvious, but you would have to ask him before he supplied any answers. Damn Southerner. He was like Clellan. Hearn flicked the map with his fingers. Already, he could feel the sand warming under his feet. "It's only two miles through the jungle."

            Croft nodded dourly. "You can't trust an aerial map. That little ol' stream might take us where we want to go, but you can't depend on it." He spat into the sand. "Only damn thing to do is start out, and see jus' what happens."

            "That's right," Hearn said, making his voice sharp. "Let's get started."

            Croft looked at the men. "Okay, troopers, let's get goin'."

            The men slung their packs again and wiggled their arms to settle the burden and ease the bite of the pack straps across their shoulders. In a minute or two they formed a straggling column and began to shuffle through the sand. When they reached the mouth of the stream, Hearn halted them. "Give them an idea of what we're doin'," he said to Croft.

            Croft shrugged, then spoke for a minute. "We're gonna head up this here river far as we can go, and you might just as well expect to get your asses wet. So if y'got any bitching to do, you might as well do it now." He hitched his pack a little higher on his shoulders. "They ain't supposed to be any Japs down this far, but that don' mean you're to walk like a bunch of goddam sheep looking at the ground. Let's try to keep our eyes open." He stared at them, examining each of their faces in turn, deriving a mild pleasure from the way most of them dropped their eyes. He paused for a moment, licking his tongue as if wondering whether there was something more to say. "Anything y'want to tell them, Lootenant?"

            Hearn fingered his carbine strap. "Yes, as a matter of fact there is." He squinted into the sun. "Men," he said casually, "I don't know any of you, and you don't know me. Maybe you don't want to know me." A few men snickered, and he grinned suddenly at them. "Anyway, I'm your baby, I've landed in your lap, and you've got me for better or worse. Personally, I think we're going to get along. I'll try to be fair, but you've got to remember that along about the time your tails are dragging and I give an order to move on, you're going to hate my guts. Okay, fine, but just don't forget that I'll be as bushed as any of you, and I'll be hating myself more." They laughed, and for a moment he had the orator's knowledge that they belonged to him. The satisfaction was strong, almost surprising in its force. Bill Hearn's son, sure enough, he thought. "All right, let's set out."

            Croft led the way, annoyed at Hearn's speech. It was wrong; a platoon leader didn't buddy. Hearn was going to screw them up with that kind of talk. Croft always despised a platoon leader who made efforts to have his men like him; he considered it womanish and impractical. Goddam platoon'll go to hell, he told himself.

            The river seemed deep in its middle, but along the banks a band of shallow water, perhaps fifteen yards wide, pebbled and rippled over the stones. The platoon set out in a single column of fourteen men. Overhead the jungle soon met in an archway, and by the time they passed the first bend in the stream it had become a tunnel whose walls were composed of foliage and whose roadbed was covered with slime. The sunlight filtered through a vast intricate web of leaves and fronds and vines and trees, until it absorbed the color of the jungle and became at last a green shimmering wash of velvet. The light eddied and shifted as though refracting through the intricate vaults of a cathedral; all about they were surrounded by the jungle, dark and murmurous. They were engulfed in sounds and smells, absorbed in the fatty compacted marrows of the jungle. The moist ferny odors, the rot and ordure, the wet pungent smell of growing things, filled their senses and loosed a stifled horror, close to nausea. "Goddam, it stinks," Red muttered. They had lived in the jungle for so long that they had forgotten its odor, but in the night, on the water, their nostrils had cleared; they had forgotten the oppression, the intense clammy weight of the air.

            "Smells like a nigger woman," Wilson announced.

            Brown guffawed nervously. "When the hell'd you ever have a nigger?" But he was troubled for a moment; the acute stench of fertility and decay loosed a fragile expectation.

            The stream wound its burrow into the jungle. Already they had forgotten how the mouth appeared in sunlight. Their ears were filled with the quick frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets. They sweated terribly; although they had marched only a few hundred yards, the languid air gave them no nourishment, and black stains of moisture spread on their uniforms wherever the pack straps made contact. In the early morning, the jungle was exuding its fog drip; about their legs the waist-high mists skittered apart for the passage of their bodies, and closed again sluggishly, leisurely, like a slug revolving in its cell. For the men at the point of the column every step demanded an inordinate effort of will. They shivered with revulsion, halted often to catch their breath. The jungle dripped wetly about them everywhere; the groves of bamboo trees grew down to the river edge, their lacy delicate foliage lost in the welter of vines and trees. The brush mounted on the tree trunks, grew over their heads; the black river silt embedded itself in the roots of the bushes and between the pebbles under their feet. The water trickled over the stream bank tinkling pleasantly, but it was lost in the harsh uprooted cries of the jungle birds, the thrumming of the insects.

            Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes, slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream. Their packs became heavy, their arms grew numb and their backs began to ache. Most of the men were carrying thirty pounds of rations and bedding, and with their two canteens of water, their ten clips of ammunition, their two or three grenades, their rifles and machetes, each of them had distributed almost sixty pounds of equipment over his body, the weight of a very heavy suitcase. Most of them became tired in walking the first few hundred yards; by the time they had gone perhaps half a mile they were weary and their breath was short; the weaker ones were beginning to have the sour flat taste of fatigue. The density of the jungle, the miasmal mists, the liquid rustlings, the badgering of the insects lost their first revulsion and terror. They were no longer so conscious of the foreboding wilderness before them; the vague unnamed stimulations and terrors of exploring this tunnel through the jungle became weaker, sank at last into the monotonous grinding demands of the march. Despite Croft's lecture, they began to walk with their heads down, looking at their feet.

            The river narrowed, and the ribbon of shallow water contracted to a strip along the bank, no wider than a footpath. They were beginning to climb. Already the stream had dropped from a few minor waterfalls, had churned over a short stretch of tumbled rocks. The pebbles underfoot slowly were replaced by river sand and then by mud. The men marched closer to the bank, and at last the foliage began to whip at them, obstructing their way. They proceeded much more slowly now.

            Around a turn they halted and surveyed the stretch ahead. The foliage grew into the water at this point, and Croft, after considering the problem, waded out to the center of the stream. Five yards from the shore he halted. The water was close to his waist, swirling powerfully about him. "We're gonna have to hold to the bank, Lootenant," he decided. He began to fight his way along the edge of the stream, holding to the foliage, the water covering his thighs. Laboriously the men followed him, strung out along the bank. They proceeded for the next few hundred yards by grasping the nearest bushes, yanking and tugging themselves up the stream against the current. Their rifles kept slipping off their shoulders, almost dipping into the water, and their feet sunk loathsomely in the river mud. Their shirts, from perspiration, became as wet as their trousers. Besides their fatigue and the dank moist air, they were sweating from anxiety. The stream had a force and a persistence which seemed alive; they felt something of the frenzy they would have known if an animal had been snarling at their feet. Their hands began to bleed from the thorns and the paper-edged leaves, and their packs hung heavy.

            They moved like this until the stream widened again, became shallower. Here the current was not so rapid, and they made better progress sloughing through the knee-deep water. After a few more turns, they came upon a broad flat rock about which the river curved, and Hearn called a break.

            The men flopped down, lying silent and motionless for several minutes. Hearn was a little worried; he could feel his heart beating with the clamor of early fatigue, and his hands trembled a little. Flat on his back, he peered over his chest at the quick rise and fall of his stomach. I'm in bad condition, he told himself. It was true. The next couple of days, particularly this first day, was going to be rough; he hadn't had any exercise in too long. But that would pick up; he knew his strength.

            And he was getting used to the tension of being point. Somehow it was harder to be the first man. Any number of times he had halted, wincing at an unsuspected noise or shuddering when some insect darted across his path. There had been a few huge spiders with bodies as big as walnuts, a leg spread as wide as his extended fingers. Those things got you; he had noticed that they bothered Martinez and Brown as well as himself. There was a special kind of fear when the ground was unexplored; each step farther into the jungle was difficult.