The Ninth Wave Page 20

  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 st
eps. 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.

  Sometimes the barrier was made up of subtle unseen things. Things like the ghostly ping of the sonar gear as it echoed through the water, probing for the enemy. Or like the strange stabbings of the radar gear which reproduced on a black scope the luminous worms which were enemy ships and airplanes. Or the IFF gear which mechanically and endlessly sent out a signal, "identify friend or foe." Or the "Fox schedule" which filled the air of the world with a ceaseless pattern of dots and dashes and which, like a bodyless intelligence, directed the movements of the long anonymous lines of men.

  Only at a few times and in a few spots did the lines of khaki become separated from their protective barrier. When it did, the edge of the khaki wave suddenly exploded in bloody sticky froth. Then Marines screamed insanely on reefs a quarter mile at sea and their broken bodies sank reluctantly into the water. Then soldiers watched objects like rocks soar out of the jungle at them and lie sputtering at their feet for a moment until the objects exploded and sent hot grenade fragments shredding through kidneys, muscle and eyeballs. Then enemy task forces maneuvered through the blackest night, probing one another with radar, and, finally cutting the night with slow-traveling projectiles which smashed steel ships into indecent hulks. Then men in a B-24 watched a Messerschmitt knife sharply through the sky, roll slowly on its side and then suddenly the leading edge of the Messerschmitt wing would crackle with fire and the machine gun slugs would tear the bomber to pieces, and with a giant whoosh of gasoline burning it would be gone -- with nothing left but falling shreds.

  Most of the time the great mobile protective barrier of equipment and organization was there, but when it wore thin or disappeared, the pimply faced fry-cooks, the truck drivers, the insurance clerks, the college boys and the men all stood beside their guns and watched Japanese swarm in hopping bowlegged crowds toward them or stared at Geman tanks which moved fast across a grey landscape. Some of the men stayed and held their fingers down on the trigger or dropped the shell in the mortar or trained the gun, but others stood perfectly still, caught in the ecstasy of complete and absolute fear.

  The B-29 streaked down the long runway barely stirring up a swirl of dust off the face of the clean concrete and finally lifted into the golden California air. The plane flew over the hump of the ocean to Hawaii and here it overtook the most backward part of the khaki wave. Here men were living an almost normal life with highballs and almost white girls and almost good whisky and almost normal weather. The plane fueled and the crew ate Spam sandwiches and gulped ice water. The plane streaked down another clean aseptic runway and headed for Johnston Island and then touched at Kwajalein, Guam and finally Saipan. The B-29 flew over the stretched-out middle part of the khaki wave, where men sweated over typewriters and stacked boxes and painted ships and scraped tennis courts at officers' clubs and made showers out of tin cans. Here was where the khaki and material wave was the thickest; where the gear was heaped in mountains and armies of men slowly loaded, shifted, loaded, unloaded and reloaded the mountains of equipment. This was equidistant between the normality of the rear and the madness of the forward, unprotected fringe. And because the pressures here were the most equal the men were the unhappiest.

  The B-29 passed over the backward part of the wave and got almost to the edges where the bloody froth was exploding and surging again. But the plane stopped short of the fringe and waited for a few days.

  Two weeks before, a cruiser had left San Francisco and crawled across the ocean. Ahead of it pushed three destroyers that paced and tracked and doubled back in a scientifically determined erraticness. The tropic sea was hot and flat and only the horizon looked hazy and soft with puffed clouds. On the cruiser a special Marine guard stood endlessly in front of a locked up compart
ment. The Marines stood stone-faced on watch and when relieved laughed carelessly at the questions of the sailors to hide the fact that they too did not know what they were guarding.

  Finally, days after the plane had landed at Saipan, the cruiser anchored in the harbor at Guam. Now, suddenly, the ship was covered with cheerful young scientists in new unwrinkled khakis. They were able to pass through the cordon of Marines. These men knew nothing of military courtesy or relative ranks and they pushed captains and colonels aside to fondle the boxes, and behind their glasses their eyes glistened moistly and their voices rose in sharp strained instructions as the boxes were lowered over the side. The scientists climbed on the trucks with the boxes and hugged them occasionally in a curious excess of excitement. They clapped one another on the shoulders and usual cautious barriers between them were melted for a while. On the cruiser the sailors and Marines watched the excited scientists take the boxes and crates away.

  "Well, Jesus Christ, they're only boxes," one said. Yeah, Jesus Christ, the rest of the crew thought before they began to spray the ship with salt water and clean up again.