The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (3 page)

“Suzie, I’ve
told
you—” the colonel began.

Blankenship moved toward the door. “That’s all right, Mrs. Wilhoite, I was just going.”

“Suzie, I’ve told you—”

“Webby, I
have
to get the eleven o’clock ferry, and I’ve
got
to have some money if I’m to see the caterers and do all those things—”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Wilhoite,” Blankenship murmured, squeezing by.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she went on, “but I do have—Oh, Mr. Blankenship, you
are
coming to the party, aren’t you?”

“Which party is that, Mrs. Wilhoite?”

“Which
one
? The
Thanksgiving
party, of course, tomorrow night. You are Mr. Blankenship, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, then quickly: “I mean yes, I’m coming, and I am Mr. Blankenship.”

She gave a small bright laugh, which he found himself echoing, rather foolishly, with a faint grin. “Oh good,” she said. “So many of you officers we never see, and I always get you confused with that—what’s his name?—Lieutenant—”

“Darling,” the colonel put in, “if you’re going to make that ferry—”

She turned and Blankenship slid away, pulling on his gloves. Outside the building, a cold damp blast of air struck him; he shivered, slanting his eyes toward the sky. It had become suddenly dim. Eclipse-like, a luminous corona surrounded the sun, and a shifting rack of mist, outriders of those great gray clouds which all morning had mounted to the north, brought a stiff wind and the promise of snow. The asphalt expanse of ground was deserted, except for a dozen gray prisoners in the distance, marching dejectedly in column and guarded by a lone marine. Against the advancing overcast the buildings, the brick towers and battlements, seemed to take on a sudden baronial and oppressive splendor; here and there lights winked on, though it was nearly noon. There was something in the scene hinting too much at the final white onset of winter; to Blankenship, with the climate of the tropics still steaming in his blood, it was touched by a vague sense of menace. Quickly descending the steps, he hurried toward his blockhouse, passing clumps of prisoners, pinched with cold, who arranged themselves in frozen and panicky attention when he approached. Yet as he muttered the usual “As you were,” he gave the prisoners hardly a glance, beset as he was with the same troubled feeling of anger and impotence he had had in the colonel’s office, which he had thought a breath of cold air might cure, but hadn’t.

Nor was it only the escape now, although as he thought of the escape again another pang of failure came like the quick blow of a fist at the pit of his stomach, when he remembered how in the boat at dawn, rounding a point of
rocks—pistol unlimbered and feet braced against the spray-drenched gunwales and with the siren roaring in his ears like the ascending demented howls of souls chained in hell—he had thought, in one final and illusory moment of self-deception, that he had spotted those bastards. He had not, of course. What had appeared to be, in that fraudulent and compromising light, a boat had turned out to be nothing but a cardboard box heaved over some ship’s side. It had not been the quarry which he felt at that instant he would have literally sacrificed a leg or an arm to capture, but a maddening piece of driftage upon which the words
HORMEL FINE SOUPS
had been written and which, with its mirage-like deceit, gave him a second’s furious resolve to strangle the manufacturer of both soup and box. For he felt he had been tricked in the race at every turn. It was as if those yardbirds had been handicapped two lengths instead of the one length that was fair and just, and to this excessive advantage had been added the ultimate merciless ridicule of cunningly strewn debris, like soup boxes, in the wake of their victory. He had been tricked, all right, and as he strode toward the blockhouse entry he felt suddenly so abortively hollow and outmaneuvered that the feeling was close to exhaustion. Something else troubled him, too—something he knew he
should
be worrying about—but this, whatever it was, he banished from his mind when, at the entry to the blockhouse, he saw the look on Sergeant Mulcahy’s face and knew that more trouble was in the air.

Mulcahy’s chronically jaundiced expression was only in part due to the sourness of his nature, for he was still recovering from malaria. He was gaunt, ugly, with a crooked nose—a regular with fifteen years’ service. His contempt for
the prisoners was both artless and profound. It was based simply, as he had expressed it to Blankenship, on the fact that the convicts, whom he referred to categorically as “skunks,” had all been experiencing blissful sexual connections in New York or Chicago while he was “out contracting the jungle rot.” He might have been a bully, except that his spleen had become so enfeebled by malaria and general world-and war-weariness that his only cruelty was an occasional drowsy prod or poke. “A little goosin’ don’t hurt ’em none,” he had said to Blankenship, but it was something which now and then he had to be called down on. At this moment his dilapidated, sulfurous face wore a look of the plainest disgust.

“What’s up?” Blankenship said.

“Ah, there’s some guy here thinks he’s top dog.”

“New man?” The gate swung open slowly, eased to behind Blankenship with a pneumatic hiss.

“Did you get those two birds this morning, Gunner?”

Mulcahy’s irrelevance, together with the renewed reminder of his failure, so annoyed him that he turned and snapped: “I
said
, goddammit, Mulcahy, is he a new man?”

Mulcahy drooped. “Yes, sir. Five days piss and punk.”

“For what?”

“Fighting. He just come in from B Company. Colonel had him up for office hours this morning.”

Blankenship entered the office, a corner room with enormous barred windows, while Mulcahy shambled in behind. “So what’s the trouble, then?” he said, sitting down. “What cell’s he assigned to?”

“Fifteen, sir. Well, Gunner, he just wouldn’t cooperate. This skunk comes in here with a bunch of smart-guy crap,
saying how much he didn’t like the smell in here and all and how it ‘irritated’ him—that’s the word he used, Gunner, I swear to God—to have an outside cell where there was no view and only blower ventilation, and all. He was just running off at the mouth, that’s all. I mean I never saw such a smart son of a bitch—”

“So—” Blankenship, staring Mulcahy down, felt the blood rushing to his eyes in anger, and saw the sergeant’s freckled, sallow face sheepishly begin to crumble. “So—” he repeated.

“Well, Gunner, it was just a little tap right over the eye—”

“Goddammit
, Mulcahy!” His fist thumped hard, painfully, on the desk, in a fury made thrice potent by the events of the morning. “I told you to keep your goddam Irish paws off these prisoners—”

“Gunner, I swear before God—” Protectively, Mulcahy rolled back his bleary yellow eyes. “It didn’t even make a br—draw blood,” he stammered. “I put a—”

“Quiet!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve told you for the last time. You lay hands on these birds anymore and I’ll have you up before the colonel in two seconds. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” he said glumly.

“O.K. Now go get that man and bring him here.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“And give me that club,” he added, holding out his hand. “Some of you people are so goddam Asiatic you’d beat your own grandmother.”

Mulcahy exited in gangling, clumsy haste. Blankenship
sank back in his chair, calmer now, faintly ashamed at his outburst, and reflecting that, after all and in spite of everything, Mulcahy was a good marine, and likable even if he was stunningly ignorant. But as he slumped slowly back, anticipating a few seconds’ rest—perhaps a catnap, even, to clear from his mind the morning’s tension—the siren, howling for the midday count, went off above him. It was a sound which, being so familiar, should not have disturbed him, but now in his frustration and weariness the noise seemed to pour through the walls in wildly ascending and racking gusts and, reaching its crescendo, to probe into his eardrums like lancets. One window was cracked open; he got up, scattering papers, and slammed it down. As he turned again, he noticed that his hands were trembling—a phenomenon so rare and strange that it caused him a fleeting sense of panic. Perhaps it was only a cold coming on, perhaps a recurrence of his malaria. He walked toward the wash basin, meaning to inspect his eyes in the mirror, but at this moment there was a knock. The door opened; as it did, the siren ceased its clamor, falling swiftly earthward in a remorseful sullen groan.

“This here is the man, Gunner,” said Mulcahy.

Blankenship sat down, shooed Mulcahy out, and looked up to meet the prisoner’s gaze.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“McFee.”

For a moment Blankenship said nothing, for there was something familiar about this man; he was certain he had seen him before. This certainty was in itself curious enough, since few prisoners had memorable faces but only drab achromatic promontories upon which noses, mouths, and
ears were struck like gray and similar shapes of putty. What was more striking now was the man’s expression. That, too, Blankenship recalled, from wherever and whenever it was: an aspect at first glance no different, in its wan sun-sheltered anonymity, from all the rest of the prisoners, yet swiftly and hauntingly unique—intelligence, perhaps? Perhaps no more than something in his level blue eyes which seemed halfway between scorn and defiance. Then Blankenship remembered: the face floating toward him through cigarette smoke and a confusion of laughter, a voice—“Drink, sir?”—too straightforward to be insolent yet touched with a whisper of mockery, and a parting smile, finally—like the one he wore now—that was not so much a smile as a smirk, expressing some mysterious and inner satisfaction. Of course. He had seen this man months before, working as a waiter at the only one of the colonel’s parties he had ever been to.

“Look, McFee,” he said at length, “I don’t know what kind of language you’ve been getting away with over at the colonel’s quarters, but over here when you’re asked your name you give your
full
name and you give your serial number and you say
sir.
Do you understand that? Now let’s
have
it.”

“McFee, Lawrence M., 180611.” There was a pause, one which though somehow avoiding disrespect still flirted perilously with the notion of contempt, and the
“sir”
came only a cagey half second before the crucial, unbearable instant. It was odd, bold, and Blankenship felt a surge of anger, not so much at this behavior as at the fact that he himself suddenly felt, here among two thousand spineless and craven snobs, a sneaking admiration for such talented
arrogance. He continued to gaze at McFee. It was a young face—twenty-five or twenty-six, he judged—with features usually described as “clean-cut,” and unshrinking blue eyes. Without his miserable denims he might have been taken for a college football star, for he was big and broad-shouldered, and even standing now at attention he had all the relaxed, supercilious grace of a campus athlete.

“What’s the matter with you, McFee? The duty sergeant told me you’ve been giving him a hard time.”

“He tried to strong-arm me.”

“Mulcahy told me you were beating your gums about the accommodations we’ve got over here.”

“I was,” he said calmly. “They stink. I said so and your fucking gorilla clobbered me.”

This outspoken audacity so took him aback that Blankenship rose from where he was sitting, strolled to a spot within a foot of McFee, and propped himself on the edge of the desk. “They do, do they? They stink, huh?” As he spoke, confused and casting about for words, he was aware that he was managing to control his voice—a remarkable fact considering the fury he felt rising at this man’s insolence, and which was not so much directed at the insolence itself but at the cool, even fearless self-possession with which he assumed it. Now he was so close to McFee that he could feel the warm steady breathing that crossed the short space of air between them and was aware, for the first time, of the round welt on McFee’s forehead where, indeed, Mulcahy must have swatted him. The welt was an inconsequential blob of swollen pinkish flesh, but it was nonetheless a visible and now accusatory brand, a tiny ensign of oppression and illegal abuse. For the moment it gave McFee
a slight but telling advantage, and it aggravated Blankenship’s silent fury.

He had never had a prisoner face up to him before. Because it baffled him he stalled briefly for time, and altered his tack. “What did you want to get caught fighting for, McFee? You had a nice soft job in the colonel’s house. Now you’ll just be another one of the bums. You must have had a pretty good confinement record to have gotten such a nice job. What are you, a swabjockey?”

“I wish the fuck I was.”

“You a hooligan?”

“I’m a marine,” he said, with a trace of bitterness, and also of disdain. He stood there steadfast and massive, with his irritating animal grace and with his breath coming warmly and steadily from the set contemptuous smile on his lips. Along with his anger, Blankenship felt a chilly shiver of excitement, as if he had received a personal and even physical challenge from this defiance. And although both his conscience and regulations forbade him to, he felt now, too, an irresistible desire to bait and goad—something he’d never lower himself to do with an ordinary prisoner.

“You’re
not
a marine, McFee,” he said quietly, “not anymore. You’re a yardbird. A bum. Didn’t you know that?” He paused, while for a second, in an attempt to stare each other down, their eyes met hot and unwavering. “You’re swill. Slop. You’re not any more of a marine than Shirley Temple. You’re lower than whale shit on the bottom of the sea. You know the saying, don’t you, McFee?” Yet while he spoke he felt a mild mean twinge, as if he were degrading not McFee but himself by using all the stale worn-out obscenities employed numbingly and twenty-four hours a day by every
beef-witted sergeant on the island. And staring at McFee while he said them, seeing the look of contempt widen, enlarge, lines of amusement springing into his eyes, Blankenship halted, then said, “What did you do, McFee? Desert? Like all the rest of these patriotic citizens?”