The Naked and the Dead (70 page)

            They came to another rapids which was too rocky, too swift, to be crossed on foot. Croft and Hearn discussed it for a minute, and then Croft clambered up the bank with Brown, hacked his way a few feet into the brush, and cut some thick vines which he tied together with large square knots. He started to tie one end about his waist. "I'm gonna take it across, Lootenant," he said.

            Hearn shook his head. Croft, effectively had been leading the patrol until now, but this was something he could do himself. "I'll take a whack at it, Sergeant."

            Croft shrugged.

            Hearn fastened the vine about his belt, and stepped out into the rapids. He was planning to carry the vine upstream, across to the other bank, where it could provide a life rope for the platoon. But it was much more difficult than he had expected. Hearn had left his pack and carbine with Croft, yet even unfettered the crossing was exceptionally demanding. He waded through the rapids, stumbling from rock to rock, slipping to his knees many times. Once he went under completely, rammed his shoulder against one of the stones, and came up gasping for air, faint from the pain. It took him almost three minutes to move fifty yards and when he reached the other bank he was exhausted. For thirty seconds he remained motionless, panting and coughing from the water he had swallowed. Then he stood up, 466

            lashed the vine about a tree, while Brown tied the other end to the roots of a sturdy bush.

            Croft was the first one across, carrying Hearn's pack and carbine besides his own. Slowly, one by one, the men struggled across the river, holding to the vine. Some of them lopped their pack straps about it, and pulled themselves along hand over hand, their legs thrashing in the surf of the rapids or floundering anxiously to fend themselves off the rocks. The water would have reached only to their thighs if they had been able to stand upright, but all of them were drenched by the time they reached the other bank. They collected in a little eddy ahead of the rapids, and sat in the water panting, enervated for the moment.

            "Jesus," one of them would mutter from time to time. The force of the rapids had been terrifying. Each of them as he had negotiated the line had expected secretly that he would be drowned.

            After a rest of ten minutes they began to march again. There were no more rapids for a time but the river was flowing down a chain of stone ledges, and every ten or fifteen yards they would have to climb a waist-high shelf, tread forward cautiously along a rock platform over which a few inches of water was flowing, and then scramble up to the next ledge. Almost all of them wet their guns at one time or another, and their grenades, wedged by the spoon handle into their cartridge belts, kept spilling out into the water. Every few seconds one of them would swear dully.

            The river became narrower. In some places the banks were not more than five yards apart, and the jungle overhead grew so close to the water that it brushed against their faces. They continued on for a quarter of a mile, squatting under the foliage and bellying over the ledges. Crossing the rapids had drained them, and most of the men were too weary to lift their legs. When they came to a new shelf of rock, they flopped their bodies over the edge and slid their legs up behind them with the motions of salmon laboring upstream for the spawning season. The river was dividing into its tributaries; every hundred yards a rill or tiny brook would trickle out of the jungle, and Croft would halt, examine it for a moment, and then move on again. After his solo across the rapids, Hearn had been content to let Croft manage the platoon again for a time. He plodded behind with the others, still unable to regain his wind.

            They came to a junction where the stream divided in two. Croft deliberated. In the jungle, unable to see the sun, it was impossible for anyone but Martinez or him to know in what direction they were traveling. Croft had noticed earlier that the larger trees leaned toward the northwest; he had checked it with his compass, and decided they had been wrenched that way in a hurricane when they were young. He accepted it as a reliable guide, and all that morning as they had moved up the river he had been noting the direction in which they marched. He guessed that they must be very close to the end of the jungle; they had walked more than three miles, and the river generally had moved toward the hills. But here it was impossible to determine which stream to follow; both veered off at an angle, and it was conceivable they might meander for miles through the jungle, parallel to the open hills. He and Martinez talked about it, and Martinez selected a tall tree off the stream and began to climb it.

            He clambered up by grasping the vines that circled about it, using the nodes of the trunk for his footholds. When he reached the highest fork, he crawled out on a limb, edging himself forward cautiously. High up, he halted and surveyed the terrain. The jungle spread beneath him in a green velvet nap. He could no longer see the river, but not more than half a mile away the jungle ended abruptly, and a progression of bare yellow hills mounted toward the distant slopes of Mount Anaka. Martinez drew out his compass, and determined the direction. He was feeling the satisfaction of doing a job at which he knew he was proficient.

            He climbed down, and talked to Croft and the Lieutenant. "We follow this one," he said, pointing to one of the tributaries, "maybe two-three hundred yard, then we cut trail. No river in the hill right there." He pointed toward the open country he had seen.

            "Okay, Japbait." Croft was pleased. The information had not surprised him.

            The platoon began marching again. The stream Martinez had chosen was very narrow, and the jungle closed over it almost completely. After a hundred yards they were forced to slough through the water on their hands and knees, ducking their heads to avoid the leaves and brambles that drooped into the stream. It became shortly no wider than a footpath and began shredding into many tiny runs of water which seeped from the rocks of the forest. Before they had gone a quarter of a mile, Croft decided to cut trail. The stream took a bend back toward the ocean, and it would be worthless to follow it any longer.

            "I'm gonna divide up the platoon for cutting trail," he told Hearn, "but I'm gonna leave us out of it, 'cause we'll have enough to do."

            Hearn was panting. He had no idea of what was customary on something like this, and he was too fatigued to care much. "Anything you say, Sergeant." Afterward he was a little worried. When you were with Croft, it was too easy to let him handle all the decisions.

            Croft took a sight with his compass in the direction he wanted to travel, and found a tree, in the brush about fifty yards away, which would be a good target. He gathered the platoon around him, and divided them into three teams of four. "We're gonna cut trail," he told them. "To start you can aim about ten yards to the left of that tree. Each team is gonna work about five minutes, and then get spelled ten. They ain't any reason why we gotta be all day doin' this, so let's not be fuggin-off. You can take ten before you start, and then, Brown, you begin it with your men."

            They had to slash a route through a quarter mile of dense brush, through vines and bushes and bamboo groves, around trees, and into the thickest brambles. It was slow, tedious work. Two men labored side by side, hacking with their machetes at the net of foliage, trampling underfoot what they could. They progressed at a rate of about two yards a minute, working quickly through a thinner patch of brush only to halt and chop inch by inch at a tangle of bamboo. It had taken them three hours to advance up the river, and by noon, after two more hours of hacking a trail, they had added only a couple of hundred yards. But they did not mind it; each man had to work only two or three minutes in a quarter hour, and they were shedding their fatigue. When they were not working they lay on the trail resting and joking. The fact that they had gone so far cheered them; they assumed instinctively the open hills would present no problems. After toiling through the muck and water of the stream, after being convinced so many times they would never reach its end, they were proud and pleased to have managed it, and for the first time some of them were optimistic about the success of the patrol.

            Roth and Minetta were wretched, however. Minetta was in poor condition from his week in the hospital, and Roth had never been very strong. The long march up the river had fagged them brutally; overtired, the rest periods did them little good and laboring on the trail was torture. After thirty seconds, after three or four slashes with his machete, Roth was unable to raise his arm. The machete felt heavy as an ax. He lifted it with both hands, dropped it feebly on the branch or vine before him. Every half minute, the knife slipped out of his sweating nerveless fingers and went clattering to the ground.

            Minetta's fingers had begun to blister and the handle of the machete rasped against his palm, rubbed sweat into all the sores on his hand. He would attack a bush violently and clumsily, forcing himself into a rage at its stubbornness, and then he would halt, winded, cursing between his sobs at the dank pappy mesh of verdure before him. He and Roth worked side by side, cramped together in the narrow aisle of the trail. In their exhaustion they often blundered against each other, and Minetta would swear with irritation. They disliked each other as intensely as they hated the jungle, the patrol, and Croft. Minetta brooded because Croft was not working; it became the crux of his bitterness. "It's easy enough for that goddam Croft to tell us what to do, but he ain't doin' it. I don't see him working his ass off," Minetta muttered. "If I was a platoon sergeant, I wouldn't treat the guys like that. I'd be right with them, working."

            Ridges and Goldstein were standing about five yards behind them. The four men made up one of the teams, and theoretically they were supposed to divide their five-minute shift. But after an hour or two, Goldstein and Ridges were working for three minutes and then four minutes. Watching Minetta and Roth hack with their machetes, Ridges was indignant. "Shoot," he would reprove them, "ain't you city fellers ever learned to use a little ol' knife like that?"

            Breathless, enraged, they would make no answer, and this would annoy Ridges more. He had a lively discernment of injustice toward other men and toward himself, and thought it was decidedly unfair for Goldstein and him to work more than the other pair. "Ah done the same work you done," he would complain, "Ah went up the same river you did, an' they ain't no reason 'tall why Gol'stein and me gotta be doin' all yore work."

            "Blow it out," Minetta shouted back.

            Croft had come up behind them. "What's the matter with you men?" he demanded.

            "Ain't nothin'," Ridges said after a pause. He gave his horsy guffaw. "Shoot, we jus' been talkin'." Although he was displeased with Minetta and Roth, he did not think of complaining to Croft. They were all part of the same team, and Ridges considered it heinous to complain about a man with whom he was working. "Ain't nothin' wrong," he repeated.

            "Listen, Minetta," Croft said with scorn, "if you an' Roth ain't the meanest wo'thless shiftless pair of bastards I ever had. You men better get your finger out of your ass." His voice, cold and perfectly enunciated, switched them like a birch branch.

            Minetta, if harried enough, was capable of surprising courage. He threw down his machete, and turned on Croft. "I don't see you working. It's pretty goddam easy. . ." He lost all idea of what he wanted to say, and repeated, "I don't see you working."

            Smart New York kid, Croft said to himself. He looked at him furiously for an instant. "Next river we come to, you can carry the Lieutenant's goddam pack across, and
you
won't have to work." He was enraged with himself for even answering, and he turned away for a moment. He had excluded himself from the labor of cutting trail because he had considered it necessary as platoon sergeant to reserve a little extra strength. Hearn had surprised him in crossing the rapids; when he had followed along the vine, he knew what an effort it had taken. And that had alerted him, worried him secretly. Croft knew he still controlled the platoon, but once Hearn gained some experience he was likely to take over the patrol.

            Croft really did not admit all this to himself. With his Army sense, he knew his resentment of Hearn was dangerous, and he also knew his motives on many little actions would not bear examination. He rarely questioned his reasons for doing anything, but now he sensed he could not search himself, and it made him furious. He strode up to Minetta and stared at him with rage. "Goddammit, man, you gonna keep bitchin'?"

            Minetta was afraid to answer. He stared back as long as he dared and then dropped his eyes. "Aaah, c'mon," he said to Roth. They picked up their machetes and continued to slash out the trail. Croft watched them for a few seconds and then turned and walked away, filing down the newly fashioned path to the platoon.

            Roth felt he was to blame for the incident. He had again the corrosive sense of failure that always dogged him. I'm no good at anything, he bleated to himself. He made a stroke with the machete and the impact snapped it out of his hand. "Ohh." Drearily, he bent down to pick it up.

            "You might just as well quit now," Ridges told him. He picked up one of the machetes they dropped, and began to work shoulder to shoulder with Goldstein. As Ridges slashed at the brush with stolid patient motions, his broad short body became less awkward, assumed a strong fluent grace. From the rear he looked like an animal fashioning its nest. He had a simple pride in his strength. As his powerful muscles tensed and relaxed, as the sweat laced his back, he was completely happy, absorbed in the toil, the smells of his body.

            Goldstein also found the work acceptable, took the same pleasure in the sure motions of his limbs, but his satisfaction was not so pure. It was cloyed with a prejudice Goldstein had against manual labor. That's the only kind of job I ever find, he told himself wistfully. He had sold newspapers, worked in a warehouse, become a welder, and it had always bothered him that he had never had an occupation where he could keep his hands clean. The prejudice was very deep, brewed out of all the memories and maxims of his childhood. He wavered between warmth and disdain at working well with Ridges. It's all right for Ridges, Goldstein told himself, he's a farmer, but I'd like something better. He had a mild self-pity at his fate. If I could have had an education, culture, I could have done something better with myself.