The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (15 page)

But I was still worried, and I said so out loud, in a spontaneous outburst. “Jesus! They’re putting him to death and he didn’t even kill anyone.”

Just as I spoke I wished I’d kept my mouth shut, for Isabel shot back from the kitchen: “He deserves worse than the electric chair for what he did. He killed her soul.”

The back of my neck prickled in warning. In our many disputes—a few of which had escalated perilously near out-and-out combat, though always falling just short of that—I had tried to assess the tonality of Isabel’s voice, learning that some subtle shift of timbre might indicate sudden antagonism toward me apart from the subject at hand. I listened for that tone now, on guard and a touch nervous, not wanting the discussion to turn nasty after our relatively cheerful détente. Her brisk retort to me seemed satisfactorily impersonal, and I might have left it there, dropping the matter. For a moment I really decided to press on, even though there was risk involved. Still, I hesitated, happily ingesting the strong good coffee, which blended in rich harmony with the taste of maple syrup. Terrific, I thought, bidding adieu once again to the Marine Corps’ glutinous powdered eggs. I had a mild surge of matutinal euphoria, a mood I would have liked to maintain. I changed my mind: no talk of Booker Mason. Over the hum of the electric fan the radio voice, a plummy drone, intoned the shipping news: arrivals and departures, traffic in and out of the World’s
Greatest Harbor. S.S.
General Henry McIntosh
, mixed cargo, bound for Buenos Aires. S.S.
Rio Douro
, pottery and cork, inbound from Lisbon. S.S.
Fairweather
, grain and leaf tobacco, bound for Rotterdam. S.S.
World Seamaster
, coal, bound for Le Havre (the voice pronounced it like a guy’s name, Harve). With syrup-sticky fingers I leafed my way through the front pages of the
New Yorker
, found the Hersey piece, and had picked up Mrs. Nakamura’s narrative when Isabel added: “They should take a nigra like that, before they kill him, and impale him with a hot poker like he did to that poor woman.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Isabel,” I blurted, “lay off it. The nigra was a monster. He should be put away somewhere to rot forever. But there’s a simple fact here. Yeah, the woman was raped, and that’s horrible. But she’s
alive!”
(I said “nigra” not in mockery of Isabel but because I too, like most educated denizens of the Tidewater, and the South in general, wasn’t vocally conditioned to say “knee-grow,” and so employed such a pronunciation naturally, in an attempt at respect; Isabel was too well-reared to have said “nigger,” the language’s most powerful secular blasphemy.) “I’m not entirely sure I don’t believe in the electric chair,” I went on. “It may be necessary. But it’s barbaric to
kill
a man for
rape
, no matter how awful the crime is!”

“You’re not a woman,” she replied bitterly. “You can have no idea of the lifelong trauma of such an act—it can destroy a woman, body and spirit.”

I refrained from responding about the obvious possibility of males being raped, a fact of life of which Isabel, as a nurse with E.R. know-how, must have been well-informed. Instead, ratcheting up the tension a bit, I found myself saying
irritably: “You mean
a fate worse than death?”
I paused for an instant to let the old bromide sink in, meanwhile becoming aware of
her
tension; working away at the dishes, she had paused midway in a wipe, her fingers trembling, and a flush had spread cross her broad ill-proportioned face, coming out in blotches. It was time to cajole her gently. “Really, you’re an educated lady. It doesn’t become someone of your intelligence to hang on to such an idea.”

On the edge of a reply she stopped, cocked an ear at the radio, and we both attended to the latest Booker Mason bulletin. It was more doom. Having exhausted all appeals, the condemned man’s attorney—speaking yesterday evening from the steps of the state capitol in Richmond—had entreated the legislators to use the tragedy of Booker Mason as a symbol for the need to repeal an inhuman law which made a travesty of the principles of justice enunciated by such great Virginians as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison …

“It’s just more garbage from that little New York Jew,” said Isabel in a flat exasperated tone. “He certainly loves the limelight.” Her remark, while fairly typical of her diction, was not as anti-Semitic as it sounded since Isabel was neither less nor more prone to bigotry than numberless nicely bred Virginia women of her place and time. She was far less anti-Jewish than madly pro-everything that Jews were not and that she was blessed enough to be: an alumna of Randolph-Macon Women’s College (which had enrolled only Anglo-Saxons) and a member of both the Episcopal Church and the Tidewater Garden Club, two sublimely Virginian and
goyish
institutions. In fact, giving her credit, which I honestly tried to do at every turn, I had noted that
from time to time she had spoken with some warmth of various local Jewish citizens whose names cropped up over the dinner table. She was a passionate churchgoer and devotee of the Gospels. Southern Baptists and other lower-class sects might have bred anti-Semites, but her brand of well-mannered Episcopalianism would have not permitted the vulgarity of overt prejudice concerning Jews. Thus, “that little New York Jew” was pretty innocuous, and not so much intolerant as ignorant since the New York Jew in question, Lou Rabinowitz (whose picture in the paper she had not seen, as I had), was actually well over six feet tall, towering above his spindly client Booker Mason, the rapist singled out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as the principal in a constitutional test case. He really did love the limelight, Lou Rabinowitz, with his cape, his ascot tie, and Barrymore profile, but he fascinated me, and as I followed him in the news I perceived that he was bent on turning the justice system of Virginia upside down.

“It’s not garbage!” I answered back, a little too loudly. “And so what if he loves the limelight! He’s trying to bring this dumb state into the twentieth century!” Rabinowitz’s incessantly spouted facts and statistics came pouring out of me. “Did you know, Isabel, that Virginia is one of just five states—all of them southern—that keep the death penalty for rape? And what about this! Did you know that over the years in Ole Virginny four hundred and seventy-five white men have been convicted of rape with
no
executions, while forty-eight colored rapists have gone to the fucking electric chair? It’s a fucking scandal!”

“Mind your language!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Daily life in the marines had been so
foul-mouthed that in the aftermath I had trouble curbing my tongue. “I’m sorry but I don’t think you understand, Isabel, how
medieval
it is to have such a law!”

Over her face there came a drawn and long-suffering expression I had come to know well. It usually foretold commentary that subtly burnished her own image. “By and large I’ve had nothing but the most cordial relationship with nigra men. The orderlies at the hospitals where I’ve served have been mostly hardworking, responsible men with whom I’ve worked side by side and to whom I’ve always made the gift of my trust!” (“Gift of my trust.”
Jesus!
I thought.) “But you must keep in mind that here in the South male nigras have had some kind of unnatural sexual need to dominate white females—”

“Oh for God’s sake,” I interrupted, aware that the situation was beginning to veer out of control. From my mouth flew a piece of French toast. Fearful that this morning we might, finally, be at each other’s throats, knowing that I’d better throttle back my accelerating rage, I nonetheless helplessly charged on. I threw my napkin down and rose to my feet, overturning the coffee cup
and
the syrup crock, simultaneously, catastrophically, spreading the dark unholy mess across the table. “This idea I just can’t bear! This idea in the head of every cretinous blonde in Dixie—that around the next corner lurks a rampaging black beast ready to get into her hot little twat—” I turned and fled.

But I was almost instantly aware of a need to salvage the situation. Standing on the screened-in front porch, pulse pounding and in the throes of hyperventilation, I realized I’d made a mistake. It was I, after all, who had flown off the handle, lost aplomb, and therefore lost the skirmish, and I
knew I’d have to make amends. And better now than even a few moments later. I whirled about and returned to the table, whispering my apologies as I clumsily helped her clean up the spill. “Paul, let’s just drop the subject,” she muttered. I sat down again and gloomily resumed chewing and reading. So I’d
lost
the skirmish. But I felt that neither of us had won or lost important points. We were at our customary tense stalemate.

Silently and, I thought, with a promptness that seemed a little too dutiful, she poured me a fresh cup of coffee. This I sipped with one hand while with the other I flattened the copy of the
New Yorker
and continued reading. I absorbed the early ordeals of Dr. Fujii, Father Kleinsorge, and Miss Toshiko Sasaki:
Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

The first chapter ended there. It was terrific stuff. Hersey’s writing was so chiseled, so detailed, and, in its laconically low-keyed way, so urgent that I had to force myself to stop, knowing I’d be able to savor the rest of the text later on in the day. I got up, uttered a “thank you” to Isabel that was a touch too polite (an unctuousness verging on parody that I really didn’t intend) and wandered back out onto the front porch again. The morning was breathless, windless, like the mouth of an oven. Over the vast expanse of the harbor
there was a curtain of hot shimmering haze. In the channel five or six freighters and tankers, looking like small model ships from this distance, moved sluggishly toward the sea. Far beyond them there was a battleship and the outlines of what appeared to be two heavy cruisers, anchored in the calm waters off the naval station. I couldn’t be sure but the big one, the leviathan, the battlewagon with its guns jutting in lethal profile, had the look of the
Missouri.
Hersey’s description had left me a little feverish, having tapped into some fragile ancient memory, and I was struck by an immediate association: only last year, less than a month after the ceiling fell on Miss Toshiko Sasaki, two of her midget countrymen, dressed ludicrously in top hats and full-dress suits and looking less like diplomats than undersized undertakers, had stood on the deck of that selfsame ship—the
Missouri
now riding on the far horizon—and signed papers ending the war that nearly ended the life of Paul Whitehurst …

I suddenly remembered how fucking scared I’d been, there on Saipan. I remembered the lagoon beach and the glorious sunsets sliding down over the Philippine Sea. I remembered, too, how the beach itself was still littered with the jagged metal junk from the American assault the previous summer, although with caution, pussyfooting among the rocks and debris, you could always find a decent enough spot for swimming. The tents of our company bivouac were laid out alongside a dusty road the Seabees had bulldozed through the coral after the marines and army troops had wrested the island from the Japs, months before we replacements arrived. A thousand miles northwest lay Okinawa,
and from that battle the wounded were being transferred from huge floating infirmaries with names like
Comfort
and
Mercy
to the naval hospital not far down the coast from our encampment. Along the road, night and day, a stream of ambulances came with their freight: the gravely hurt, the paralyzed and the amputees and the head trauma cases and the other wreckage from what turned out to be a mammoth land battle.

Actually, I’d just missed the battle. During the landing in April our division had been employed in a diversionary operation—a feint—off the southeast coast of the island. Our presence had been intended to draw the Japs off balance while our other two divisions went ashore (unopposed, as it turned out) on the western beaches. Then we steamed back to the safety, the calm, the virtual stateside coziness of Saipan. Here began to brew my desperate internal conflict. For while the warrior in me—the self-consciously ballsy kid who’d joined the marines for the glamour and danger—lamented not seeing action, there was another, more sensible part of myself that felt immense relief at this reprieve. And reprieve it was. For all of us knew that the invasion of Japan was in the offing and we’d be involved in no more feints or diversions. We’d be in the vanguard. For the first time, I was terribly afraid. And I was ashamed of my fear.

In the evenings we’d spend our last weary moments—our respite from hours of combat training—lolling around in our tents and watching with morbid fixation the parade of ambulances; our eyes tracked these dust-caked vans through a thick haze of cigarette smoke that rose and fell in bluish undulations. My
Pocket Book of Verse
, which I’d lugged around in my seabag all through my Marine Corps
career—from the V-12 unit at Duke to boot camp at Parris Island to Hawaii and, finally, Saipan—had bulged out and was close to decomposition in the humid air, but on these evenings I’d lie on my cot and read again from A. E. Housman and Swinburne and Omar Khayyám or some other moony fatalist or master of Weltschmerz, while the tropical dusk would grow murky blue and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” or a Tommy Dorsey tune, would sound faintly from a portable record player or radio, drawing forth from my breast a spasm of hopeless, cloying homesickness.

Then I’d get distracted by the ambulances. The cavalcade was hypnotic to watch and just as harrowing. There was a particular hummock of coral that caused the green vans to slow to a crawl, clashing gears as they shifted down. At first these passages over the coral had been uneventful, but the big bump became more ragged and worn away, and I still had the memory of one ambulance that stalled, then jerked back and forth, jostling its poor passenger until the voice from within screamed “Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!” again and again. I heard screams like this more than once. Poetry was no remedy for such a sound, and so I’d close the book and lie there in a numb trance, trying to shut out all thought, all thought of past or future, focusing on the tent’s plywood deck, where usually there was at least one huge greenish snail with a shell the size of a ping-pong ball propelling itself laboriously forward and trailing a wake of mucilaginous yellowish-white slime with the hue and consistency of semen. Great African snails they were called and they slid all over the island, numberless, like a second landing force; they woke us up at night and we actually heard them dragging, sibilantly, their tracks across the flooring, where they
collided against each other with a tiny report like the cracking open of walnuts.