The Ninth Wave (19 page)

The car started up the soaring concrete ramps that led to the Golden Gate
Bridge approach. The traffic thickened as cars swept in off the various
approaches, melted into a stream of cars. The fog lights made everyone's
skin turn yellow and coarse; in some peculiar cosmetic fashion seemed
to underline every facial gesture.
Connie jerked her head, stared at Mike and her eyes were already bulging,
as if she sensed what would come. Mike fought down the doubt, kept his
voice steady.
"And the biggest lie, the easiest one, is all that crap about committing
suicide when this hard world gets too much for you," Mike said. "You've
just heard about Schopenhauer someplace and use that as a smart little
argument to entertain yourself and the other rummies."
"You're wrong. That's the part I believe the most," Allbright said. He
leaned forward to see across Connie and his face was working, lips
quivering. "That's what I really believe."
"Prove it," Mike said softly.
They came to the toll plaza, Mike paid and they drove on.
There was a sudden stillness in the car, broken only by the whirr of
tires on the concrete of the bridge. The other cars pulled away from
them and they were moving by themselves. The red cables of the bridge
came thickly down out of the high fog, the supporting wires hung tautly
and the blackness below the bridge was so solid, so endless, so deep
that it seemed to hold up the structure.
"Prove it?" Allbright asked. He grinned fiercely, defiantly and then, as
if some inner thought had gripped him, his face went smooth and flat.
"How?" he said in a distant voice.
"The only way you can prove something like that is by doing it," Mike
said. "There are some questions which only allow of one answer. This is
one. There is only one way to prove it." Mike paused for a moment and
then went on in a more jovial tone. "When I think of all that crap you
were handing out in that bar. God, I have to laugh. You were really a
kick. Tap any one of those rummies on the shoulder and ask him to talk and
he would have given just the same kind of a song and dance that you did."
"I don't know about them," Allbright said in a voice that would'have been
a scream if it had not been so shrill and thin. "But I wasn't lying. I was
telling the truth."
"Mike, will you stop this?" Connie said and her voice was pleading.
In the bar, Allbright's face had been round, fattening, relaxed and
soft. Now it seemed as if the flesh had melted from his face. His
cheekbones stood out, his jaw muscles were taut. Under the yellow light
there was something skull-like and gaunt about him. As they moved toward
the center of the bridge, the fog began to thicken. The bridge appeared
insubstantial, tattered by white fog. Far away, the blobs of rear lights
wavered and grew dim. Their car was alone, suspended in the fog.
"I don't have to prove that I'm not afraid to commit suicide," Allbright
said. "If I know it inside," and he tapped his chest, "that is enough." On
his forehead small yellow lumps appeared, shook as the car moved and then
resolved themselves into drops of sweat as they dropped off his chin.
"Sure, sure," Mike said and he laughed.
"I'll prove it, god damn it," Allbright shouted. Mike jammed on the brakes
and the car stopped. The next wave of cars had not yet approached. They
were alone.
"O.K.," Mike said. He turned the engine off.
In a sudden silence they could hear drops of water falling from the
superstructure of the bridge. They hit with a sharp resonant sound. A
lower, more basic, massive sound came from below where the ocean pushed
against the cement casements of the bridge, sighed through the kelp,
came with a muffled sound against the rocks. Connie was sitting with her
head back and her fists pressed against her eyes making a tiny gurgling
sound of fear deep in her throat.
Allbright ran his hand across the glass window and left long smears of
sweat. He pressed his face against the window and stared out. "O.K.?" he
asked and stepped out of the car. Connie took her hands away from her eyes.
Allbright put his hands on the low railing. He looked back at Mike and
then climbed over the rail, turned and faced the car, holding tightly
to the railing with his hands. Behind him there were the blurred misty
lights of ships in the bay.
"See, I told you I wasn't afraid," Allbright said. He laughed shrilly
and started to climb back over the railing onto the bridge. He hesitated
a moment and hung with one hand, with the easy grace of an athlete. Then
he threw his leg over the railing and started to climb back.
"What does that prove?" Mike asked.
"It proves I would do it if I wanted to," Allbright said.
"It proves nothing," Mike said.
Allbright hesitated with one leg over the railing, his face suddenly working
like that of a small child on the edge of crying. It was a look of despair.
Slowly he put his leg back on the outside of the railing. Mike looked
across Connie at Allbright. A spatter of condensed drops came down out
of the night.
"Come on, rummie," Mike said. "Get back in the car. We'll drive you back
to the Last Chance."
Allbright stared very hard at the open door of the automobile, as if they
were at the end of a far tunnel His tongue ran over his lips once. Then
he crouched down, let his hands go and with his legs gave himself a
powerful push. His body sailed away into the night, neatly poised like
that of a diver, the fingers and toes pointed.
Mike started the car. He looked over at Connie. She was coiled up on
the seat. Her eyes bulged and her throat and lips worked spasmodically
as if she were screaming, but no sound came from her lips. Silently,
desperately, she was being hysterical.
CHAPTER 11
The Pacific, 1942
The war started at a very precise moment in time. It did not start at
the moment when Lieutenant Commander Teretsuka of the Imperial Japanese
Navy wheeled his plane over Oahu and looked down at the beautiful green,
black and white geometry of Pearl Harbor. It did not start when he began
his long, chattering power glide toward Battleship Row and the earth
rearranged itself below him and the hills fell away. It began when the
U.S.S. Arizona grew from a speck and filled the middle distance and then
dominated the world and Lieutenant Commander Teretsuka pressed the button
on his stick. The steel toggles on the torpedo jerked apart. The great
shiny cylinder fell away from the plane and curved toward the water. The
plane bounced upward as it was released of the load.
The war was well begun as he looked over his shoulder and with a great
surging ecstasy saw the explosion as the torpedo hit the side of the
U.S.S. Arizona. The towers on the battleship jerked suddenly; guns and
lockers and fragments of steel and chunks of men gushed upward into
the sky; turning clumsily at first and then forming a huge flowerlike
pattern and descending slowly to earth. Lieutenant Commander Teretsuka
looked at the pink and black cloud and was gripped by a pleasure that
was almost too much to accommodate.
Then it ended for Lieutenant Commander Teretsuka, for he let his plane
go too low in the pleasure of watching the flower of steel and fire
and he crashed into the pineapple fields in the hills beyond Pearl
Harbor. The crash tore his head off and sent it rolling among the almost
ripe pineapples and his head lay there with a toothy grin, his eyes locked
open. When they came to look at the wreck of his plane they hardly noticed
his head for it looked very much like the pineapples. Pineapples have
a thatch like hair on top, and when they are ripening they are almost
the color of skin, especially if the skin is yellow and Asiatic. But
the big red ants that crawled among the pineapples knew. They tried his
head once or twice and found it not sweet and then after that they split
their columns as they went past his head and by some fundamental and
oceanic discipline none of them sampled the head again as they went by.
Of all the men that died in the war, this man was the luckiest. He died
in certain victory, without the mud and sweat of the war, as a hero of
his people, without doubts, beyond despair, with a picture of Nagoya and
a sweet slant-eyed girl in his wallet, with a venereal chancre almost
healed on his thigh, as an officer in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Probably
as his head separated from its third vertebra and flew through the air
with the severed blood vessels redly pumping there was a split beautiful
second in which he was aware of his luck and as his head bumped through
the pineapples he must have been almost satisfied. But in any case the
head stopped rolling and stared up at the beautiful blue sky above Oahu,
which at this season of the year is ringed around with white packed
clouds of an incredible purity.
Back in the States, by a lemminglike instinct, the anonymous faces,
by the millions, began to appear in front of recruiting offices and
draft boards. While mothers pressed whitely against sofas and held
handkerchiefs drenched in spirits of ammonia against their noses, the
young anonymous faces fell into lines. They thought that the lines led
to something like Paree filled with lascivious girls who weren't afraid
to try a new position, or lines of jolly young men swinging down a road
and singing a song and standing shoulder to shoulder as they marched
toward a frightened enemy. Some thought the line led to the seat of a
plane that careened through the sky alone and met the enemy in single
combat or the bridge of a destroyer with a fur-lined collar against your
neck and a sextant in. your hand.
Some thought the lines led to the inside of a big hulking tank with a
huge gun that swung ominously in a circle and was controlled by cool,
collected men riding on leather seats. Some, a very few, were afraid
that the lines led to death.
The lines passed through the recruiting offices and the draft boards.
The civilian clothes were shucked off and khaki clothes put on and,
somehow, the men in the lines looked smaller, more identical. The lines
thickened. The men from all over America began to push across the country;
into boot camps, AA schools, tank schools, radar schools, sound schools,
language schools, obstacle courses, short-arm inspections, rifle
inspections, teeth inspections, yard-bird details, mess-cook details,
officer-club details, and details. The huge system ground away at them.
They responded to bugles, bo'sun whistles, loudspeakers, sergeant's
voices, notices on bulletin boards, general quarters alarms, air raid
alarms, warning whistles, "hands off your cocks, pull up your socks,"
"now hear this," reveille, retreat, fifteen copies of mimeographed orders.
They left their barracks in platoons, and their camps in companies, and the
lines spilled onto the trains and buses in regiments and brigades. By
some senseless and enormous magnetism they were attracted to the two
seaboards. The lines thickened and grew until they were the size of
divisions and corps and armies and they went onto the ships in that
manner.
The men hung their faces from windows or pressed them against portholes:
the white pimply faces of men who had once been frycooks and turned ham
and brown pads of pancakes in pools of hot grease; men who had been
mechanics and whose fingers had never been free of dirt before; the
bland faces of insurance office clerks who, late at night, secretly
sewed tucks into their rough jackets so that the cloth hung in clever
swoops down from stuffed shoulders to trim waists; farm-boys, cowboys,
bell-boys, college-boys, pin-boys and boys. And occasionally a man.
But as the lines whirled by, there was something very much the same about
them. It was as if the machine that stamped out the identical mess trays
and the identical salutes and identical clothes had also taken a lick at
the men. The old men looked younger and the boys looked like men so that
there was an agelessness about all of them. The starchy diet made for a
roundness of face in all of them. The situation made for an identical
look of suspicion. The system made them walk and stand the same. When
seen in a line they looked like the same man endlessly reproduced, each
waiting with an identical degree of patience to be told to march again.
So, too late, they learned that the lines really led to Fort Ord, Quantico,
Camp Roberts, San Diego, Corpus Christi, Fort Bragg, Maxwell Field, Newport,
and after that to North Africa, Oahu, London, and India. The lines also
led to D-Day, H-Hour, M-Minute, S-Second and Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima,
Omaha Beach, Cassino, Tarawa and, always, Blue Beach and Red Beach. The
lines also led to dysentery, jungle rot, gun-shot wounds in the head,
fungus in the ear, athlete's foot, the trots, a sulfa cure for clap,
malaria, elephantiasis, and constipation. Occasionally the lines led
to hot babes in Sydney who knew no new position, cold babes in London
that did, the Pink House in Nouméa, a gig-gig in some Filipino shack,
the great profligate screwing on Rennell Island, the restrained and
modest screwing on Princes Street in Edinburgh, and the happy love in
the Statler Hotel, Washington, D.C. The lines also led to mountains of
paper work, ALNAVS, revised Tables of Organization, changes in manuals,
promotions, demotions, alterations in design of the 105 howitzer or 40
mm. or the operation of a steam system.
Sometimes the lines led to the wild second when the soldier could see
panic in the second lieutenant's face and knew that the whole thing could
be organized just so far and it was all about to come apart; or a second
of marvelous clarity when the man in front of a skirmish line turned
around with a slow regretful look on his face and like a gray expanding
worm his brains bulged out of a black, precise hole in his forehead and
blood ran from his ears; or the moment when a Betty slices down out of
a beautiful Solomon sky and like a black lovely mote grows in size and
cuts through the white puffs of clouds, getting so large that it covers
the horizon and then crashes into the ship.
Very occasionally, much less often than you would expect, the lines led
to a grave in coral so porous that the smaller crabs snuggle in with you;
or a grave in the steel compartment of a sunken ship where your bones
slowly shed their flesh and float in the water to be moved only by tiny
eddies of the sea; or a grave on the beach at Guadalcanal where they put
you in a long trench with fifty other men and a Tennessee Negro smoking
a cigar drives a bulldozer which neatly pushes sand over the whole lot
of you; or a grave in the rusty red carcass of a tank.