The Ninth Wave (24 page)

The major spread his hands apart and waved them in arcs over the table.
"The big guy would scream and curse the little guy and finally the little
runt would crawl over the big guy. Then he'd pick the big guy up and
they'd start off down the trail again. You see, the big Jap couldn't
walk and the little Jap had been blinded. So between the two of them
they were trying to get back to the Jap area."
The young blond face looked around the table, making sure they understood.
He grinned and for some reason the others grinned back at him.
"Jesus, those birds have bowed legs naturally, but with that load
this little bastard's legs were so bent he was almost walking on his
knees. He'd stagger back and forth, bouncing off the trees and stumbling
around in the bush. With the big guy all this time banging him on the
head and cussing him out."
The major made zigzagging motions with his finger through the scum of
beer on the table.
"We followed 'em for about an hour and then I finally told the boys to
finish them off. One of the boys stepped out on the trail and yelled to
them and, by God, they both just about pissed their pants right there. The
big Jap looked back and then he started to shriek at the little Jap and
you should have seen that Nip take off. He started running down the
trail like a deer with the big Jap telling him when to jump over logs and
vines and damned if he didn't get going so fast they almost got away. He
was going so good at the last there that I began to think the little one
wasn't blind after all. Our BAR man finally stopped them with one burst."
The major cocked his arms into a rifle position and sighted along them,
making an expert clicking sound with his tongue.
"The little guy was blind all right. He had his head wrapped up in one
of his khaki leggins and there were two spots of blood where his eyes
should have been. But Jesus, he was a tough character."
The major looked down at the glasses on the table, quiet for a moment,
and then looked up grinning at the other officers . . .
. . . Mike turned around and saw that the priest had vanished from the
doorway. He walked slowly toward the open door.
The doors were thin and covered with shiny vanish, but the locks were
huge chunks of iron that looked heavy enough to rip the flimsy doors
from their hinges. Mike passed through the doorway and stood for a few
seconds in the dim vestibule. There were two small benches, covered with
red velvet which had been worn to white threads in the middle and only
around the edges remained thick and soft and red. There were two faded
pictures on the wall, which had crinkled. and shrunk in their frames. The
colors had thinned out into a smearing of browns and yellows. In one there
was still a faint ring of thorns visible and a blurred face underneath
it. The drops of blood that fell away from the ring of thorns were dark
and fresh as if they had been freshened over and over again.
Mike walked across the vestibule into the hall of the cathedral. As he
passed the font he caught a faint, stagnant odor as if all the hands
that had dipped into the font had each left a tiny smell behind.
Inside it was brighter but still so dim it was difficult to see the
length of the cathedral. The windows muted the rich hot sunlight into dull
laminated bands of light, in which countless motes swarmed in clouds. The
dull bands of light were just sufficient to see the hulk of the altar
and the long rows of pews. The statues along the walls leaned out into
the room, only their white plaster faces visible. The light caught the
white cheeks and the fullness of the lips so that the statues took on
a leering look.
Suddenly Mike was aware of a small boy sitting in one of the pews. The
boy stared over at Mike; picked at his nose, found something and wiped
it on the bottom of the pew. At the front of the cathedral Mike could see
a thick shadow caught in the loom of the candles and realized it must be
the boy's mother. Mike stood uneasily a moment, not sure what to do. In
the coolness of the cathedral he waited for something to happen, for
some change to occur within his head or his heart. He closed his eyes.
"God help me," he whispered softly. "I'm scared I might get killed. I'm
scared." He hesitated a moment. "Give me a sign."
He waited miserably a moment more. He ran his tongue over his teeth and
they felt large and solid and ended any possibility of a revelation. He
opened his eyes.
The boy was standing in front of him, staring upward into Mike's face.
"Gom, gom," the boy whispered, "Chewing gom, chom," He held out his hand.
Mike shook his head, The boy's lip lifted in a sneer, Mike hated him
and had an impulse to slap him,
The woman turned from the bank of candles and with a moist sniffle walked
quickly back down the aisle, As she reached the boy her arm shot out,
her hand fastened on the boy's shoulder like a claw, and without breaking
her stride she continued down the aisle. Her fat, corseted body creaked
as she walked and she gave Mike a look of suspicion,
Mike waited a few minutes, hoping the bands of light would soften or that
the figures would lose their agate-hard eyes and chalky faces and become
something else. He started back up the aisle, and as he went out the
door the tropical sunlight fell hot and solid across his eyes. He walked
to the edge of the courtyard and leaned against the stone wall to look
down upon the town of Nouméa. The boy and his mother were out of sight.
Mike looked around and was angry. He glared at the cathedral. He reached
in his back pocket and took out a half-pint bottle of Black and White
Scotch which he had bought from a sailor off an English destroyer. He
opened it and drank off half the bottle.
He turned toward the entrance of the cathedral. A young priest in a long
black habit stood on the steps, making a clucking sound with his tongue
and shaking his head at Mike. The priest's face was fat and round with
a youthful blandness. The skin along his chin was stretched and pink as
if he had just shaved. His neck went down into the habit with two small
rolls of fat left behind and bulging over the white collar. He raised
his hand in a graceful, Christlike gesture.
"Not on the ground of Jesus, my son," he said in a fine deep voice. "Do
not let us make a café of the consecrated ground."
His hand dropped to his chest where the other joined it and he locked
his fingers together so tightly that they puffed out red against the
whiteness of his hands. He looked down solemnly at Mike.
Mike looked away from the priest, down at his shoes, studying the mud
that had splashed up on his shoes in an even line. He looked up again
and the priest was still standing on the steps and Mike could see the
long falling lines of his skirt pressed flat and black. Suddenly Mike
felt the pores of his chest and shoulders popping and his shirt became
sticky against his flesh. Where the excitement had been a few minutes
before there was now a hot core of ferocity. The ferocity was automatic
and complete, as a flicked-on switch will flood a room with sudden light,
packing every corner, every angle and leaving no shadows, no dark spots.
"Go to hell, God damn you," Mike shouted. "You and your God-damned fake
church. Getting me up here and letting me shuffle around like something
was going to happen. I just came because I was scared; that was the
only reason. Just scared of getting killed or wounded maybe." Mike
felt excited and, somehow, liberated. "I just did it because people
in books are always going into churches and having things happen to
them. Well, nothing happened to me in your God-damned church. Nothing,
do you understand? I don't owe you a damned thing."
The priest's fat face contorted with surprise.
Mike drew his arm back carefully, snapped it forward and the little
green bottle left his hand and cut through the air toward the priest. The
bottle sailing through the air gave Mike a sudden delighted feeling.
At the last second the priest jumped aside in a great awkward spring. Even
while he was in the air, his face became red and angry and his large thin
mouth was forming words. The bottle smashed against the yellow stone of
the cathedral. The glass fragments sprayed into a heap and Mike watched
as the dark smear of Scotch ran in moist tendrils down the side of the
wall. He turned his head slowly and looked again at the priest.
"Oiseau de merde," the young priest hissed at Mike. His face was contorted
in sharp lines so that it no longer looked fat. His eyes bulged until
they popped ludicrously, the blue iris standing out wildly. The coloring
of his chin had disappeared in the red that crawled from his cheeks. It
was as if a mask had been clamped on his face; a mask with deep lines
and a thin angry austerity. It was a different face, strained and gaunt.
Mike looked at him with a long focusing stare. The hot core of ferocity
had disappeared, leaving him curiously relieved. This day would be like
any of the other days, he realized, another day stacked on the heap of
empty days.
"Oiseau de merde, oiseau de merde," the priest hissed. He was rigid with
excitement. The words beat in the air like a pattern, repeated until they
became a profane chant. To the chant the priest made a slow recessional.
feeling his way backward up the steps until he had almost disappeared in
the gloom of the vestibule. His fine deep voice continued to hiss out
faintly from the dark. It stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence
and the white face started to loom up out of the darkness as he walked
again toward Mike. His face became visible as he pushed out into the
sunlight. Putting one hand against the frame of the door, he looked
steadily down at Mike.
"The English of this is 'shit-bird,'" he said in a careful voice. "You
are a son of a shit-bird. Understand?"
Mike nodded his head and the priest's face dropped the hard mask and
the fat jovial lines reappeared; he seemed almost happy again. With a
satisfied look on his face he turned and walked into the darkness of
the cathedral with big steps. The day was gone now, Mike thought. Gone
with all the other identical, rounded, eventless days. The day would pack
neatly against the other days, like another saucer added to a huge stack.
It would become another twenty-four hours of time that flowed through
his mind and which only his wrist watch chopped into any pattern.
He plunged through the gateway and started down the hill. His knees were
relaxed and loose so that as he went down the steep hill he seemed to be
swarming down the path of cement. He rushed past the houses he had seen
from the hill and noted with a curious inverted pleasure that although
they had looked clean and spacious from the cathedral, actually they were
crowded and dirty, with streams of murky water running from them. As the
hill became steeper, his knees snapped and jolted as his limp body rushed
down the slope. The houses and small green trees whirled by pleasantly,
and he felt as if the snapping, whipping legs and the limp body had
nothing to do with his eyes and mind which looked at the trees and
houses casually.
"Hell with all of 'em," he said as he ran. "The church is just like
anything else. Just exactly, precisely, identically the same. And that
priest," he said with loathing. "Like all the rest; every single one
. . . the priest and everybody else. All of 'em."
He was running now, his arms weaving through the air in wild balancing
movements. He sped past a fat woman and one of his waving hands tipped a
bulky package protruding from her arms, ripping the package and sending
small yellow carrots in a shower, skidding along the sidewalk. He felt
he should stop to pick them up, but now it was more difficult to regain
control over his legs which were rushing him down the hill. He shouted
a sympathetic word to the fat woman over his shoulder.
The houses blended in a streak of doors and open windows and startled
faces. In some miraculous way his timing and muscular control had
become razor-fine, exact, split-second. His speeding legs missed the
small fireplugs, the sprawling children, the slippery stream of water,
the occasional street light. He ran smoothly past people walking up the
hill, everything fiashed by in blobs and whirls and it exhilarated him
because it was so easy and effortless.
Suddenly he burst out into the park at the foot of the hill. The
tempo of his speeding legs slowed down and his arms stopped the wild
balancing movements. For a moment it was difficult to walk slowly; he
felt earthbound and sluggish after the running. But as he began to walk
across the thin grass of the park, watching the crowds of idle sailors
and soldiers, he grinned and felt a secret satisfaction as if he had
eliminated some last tiny gnawing of doubt.
CHAPTER 15
The Pacific, 1945
To the shrill young yells of countless second lieutenants and the whirling
of mimeograph machines, the shuffling lines were pulled through San
Francisco, San Diego and Seattle. They were loaded into DC-4's, AKA's,
APC's, DD's, CL's, Liberty ships and Victory ships.
Sometimes the smooth routine would be interrupted, and then like a
rupture in the shining skin of a sausage the men would pour out into
San Francisco and the other towns. For a few wild and lost hours they
would invade the penny arcades and shoot toy machine guns or go to the
whorehouses where sweating middle-aged women would wriggle automatically
and pat the young boys on top of the head. Late at night they stuffed
food into their intoxicated throats, smashed the hamburgers and french
fries and sweet coffee and beer into their heaving stomachs. Then, as the
lemming instinct reasserted itself and as the liquor wore off, they would
ride buses, hitchhike, hire cabs, steal cars, walk, ride double on
motorcycle back to the camps and receiving ships where they could fall
back into the lines.
As the lines pushed across the Pacific they spread out into huge thick
waves. The waves of men pushed across the islands and over the seas and
through the air. Between them and the enemy, they kept a huge spongy
barrier. The barrier was made up of flights of PBY's and B-24's, stacks
of carrier planes, mountains of C-rations, hummocks of cigarettes, tons
of sixteen-inch shells, screens of destroyers, banks of neatly wrapped
bandages and haystacks of morphine syrettes. The barrier was also made
up of heaps of barbed wire, fleets of repair ships, floating dry docks,
refrigerators full of whole blood, flasks of yellow plasma, U.S.O.
shows, Red Cross canteens, stacks of books. By cautious and infinitely
careful maneuver the protective barrier was kept between the Americans
and the enemy.