The Ninth Wave Read online

  "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, secre
tly 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.

  One thing to which all the lines led was boredom and the men and boys learned to subdivide and measure the boredom and by their ingenuity to reduce it to manageable fragments. On a hot day a drop of sweat falls from a sailor's jaw and drops to the deck. As it sizzles on the hot iron he wonders how much of his kidneys and brain and muscle and genitals and intestines the drop of sweat contains and his mind spins off on the pointless conjecture for an hour. Even after the drop of sweat is a ring of whitish salt, he is still tracing out the fantastic mathematics. That was one way to subdivide the boredom.

  Another was gambling. Shooting craps in the crew's quarters against a bulkhead with someone holding a battlelamp up for a light and the dice spinning so small and white that it was like looking down a microscope at them. Or poker in the officers' club for white chips that cost five bucks apiece. All the gambling had one thing in common: the grinding, luxurious, wonderful hatred that everyone felt when the winner put out his hand to rake in the winnings. The smothering feeling of losing was almost as satisfying as the wild sensation of winning.

  Another way to cut the boredom was to eat. The Quartermaster Corps thinks the soldiers got fat because the food was high in calories, but they were wrong. They got fat because eating is a way to pass the time. They ate hamburgers, meat loaf, sweet corn, dried eggs, canned bacon, evaporated milk, thick slices of bread, canned butter, black coffee, pork chops, K-rations, canned hash, french toast, horse cock, canned turkey, green beans, white beans, kidney beans, jam. During the midwatch they brought up fried sandwiches made of peanut butter and canned ham. On leave they went to the U.S.O. and ate doughnuts, sugared, glazed and coconut, and drank coffee. During the day they drank Coca-Cola, ate salami sandwiches and potato chips. Before, in every war, men had starved to death, but in this war no one was hungry; their eyes bulged from eating. In the Solomons, they used to stack the boxes of food so high that the bottom couple layers would disappear into the mud. The soldiers hated the cooks for a reason: they were the only men they depended on.

  And so the long lines led into the gray mists of boredom and the fattening foods, and, very occasionally, death. The lines moved like many-legged worms, senselessly, planlessly, formlessly.

  CHAPTER 12

  In the Sunshine and Under Grapes

  Behind the low adobe house of the Burtons was a stretch of very green lawn. The vineyards began just at the far edge of the lawn. The Italian and Mexican workmen had built a bower at the edge of the vineyard and trained the live vines over the structure. Clumps of grapes hung down into the bower; great dusty purple grapes, bursting at the stem with juice and each grape nourishing a small cloud of flies.

  Connie and Mike were married in St. Helena in the summer of 1942. They were married in the bower with the guests standing behind them on the lawn. The Episcopalian minister was a short fat man and he said the ceremony in a dreamy voice, listening with his head cocked as if someone else were performing the ceremony. From an inner patio came the sound of corks popping out of champagne bottles.

  Mike was wearing an ensign's uniform and Hank stood beside him in a rented white dinner jacket and black pants with a strip down the side. Hank was drunk, but Mike was the only one who knew. Hank got up at six that morning and went to the patio where champagne was cooling in big tubs of ice and brought back three bottles. By noon he had drunk all three of them.

  Behind Connie, Mr. Burton was standing. His lips were stained purple and this made his teeth very white by contrast. He was wearing a very white linen suit and he wavered slightly in the heat.

  Mike raised his eyes from the minister's face and looked out past the bower. The vineyard climbed steeply up a hill that shimmered in heat, was twisted by heatwaves. Around the main root of each vine was a heap of brown stones that collected heat during the day and kept the ground warm during the night. Toward the brow of the hill the families of the Mexican and Italian workers stood, looking down on the ceremony. Beyond them a single great white cloud slowly changed form, like marble suddenly become liquid.

  The minister, finishing the last words of the ceremony, smiled at Mike and Connie. As Mike turned to kiss Connie he had an elongated, squeezed-off view of Mrs. Burton. She was a big woman, expensively dressed. She was bent forward, her dry eyes peering intently over her handkerchief, waiting for Mike to kiss Connie. Then, as Mike pressed his lips against Connie's mouth, the rigid, mutely protesting figure of Mrs. Burton vanished.

  The guests moved through the patio, drinking cold champagne from the Burton winery. At a large table, smoked turkeys and king salmon were being sliced onto plates.

  "I'm sorry your family couldn't be here," Mrs. Burton said to Mike.

  "Me too," Mike said. "But I told you they wouldn't be interested. I sent them all invitations, but they didn't come. I told you they wouldn't."

  Mrs. Burton smiled thinly and turned away.

  When Connie had written her parents about her engagement, they had asked Mike to visit them for a weekend. The first afternoon they had gone for a walk to a cave where some of the wine was stored for aging. />
  Mr. Burton had walked briskly through the vineyard. He was a startlingly handsome man with a very narrow waist and big shoulders. His fingers plucked at the vines, came away with a grape and he popped the dripping pulp into his mouth as he held the dusty skin in his fingers. He chewed the grapes carefully and spit the seeds out only when he had made some comment on the quality of the grape.

  "Pinot noir grape," he had said. "Best grape in the world. Makes a fine rich wine. These are getting a little thin, though. Probably because the summer's not as hot as it should be."

  Mr. Buron drank wine all day long. He started with a little glass of claret before breakfast and then, for the rest of the day, he drank constantly. He drank his own wines and those of his competitors. He drank wines from France and Germany and Italy. With each fresh wine he made some remark, but Mike soon realized that this was a sort of ritual that he expected of himself, and Mr. Burton nor anyone else really paid any attention to the comments. The remarks were made to justify the drinking. No one expected them to make sense, especially by afternoon.