Last night, an ugly thing happened. Homer, the wool-hat, shot another Jap and I do not know now what will happen. We had had peace for many weeks with one or two of the Japs coming out of the jungle in the middle of the night to take the food we left out for them. I suspect they understood the truce and the arrangement and were willing to let it stand so long as we were here, all of us together, on this godforsaken island. The second poor Jap Homer got right through the heart so that he was only able to run a few steps before he fell on his face and died. The shot roused me and I was the first to find him lying face down in the moonlight on the white sand darkened by a small pool of blood. Scattered around him lay some three-year-old tins of soup and baked beans. He was about the same age as the first Jap, and having been alive only a moment or two before, he did not have the horrible, grinning, half-decayed, inhuman look of the other. The Sergeant turned him over, and as he did so a great and weary sigh seemed to emerge from the dead body as the air was pressed out of the lungs. Under the flashlight the face seemed like that of a little boy, like those Japanese babies with cropped hair, or like a cheap Japanese doll. He had the long body and the short strong muscular legs of a peasant
The Sergeant said, "He's dead all right!" Then he turned to Homer. "What'd you shoot him for? The poor bastard wasn't doing anybody any harm."
Homer said, "He ran at me and hit me! I shot him in self-defense."
The Sergeant said, "What'd he hit you with a can of soup?"
"He tried to jump on my back. I was smart and shook him off."
The Sergeant scowled and I knew that suddenly the ferocious temper was about to give way. It was only a question of seconds.
"I suppose," the Sergeant said, "he climbed you with his arms full of canned goods." He kicked away one of the scattered cans.
Homer, the wool-hat, began to whine. "What are you pickin' on me for? You ought to be thankful I kin shoot. He mighta killed all of us."
"That poor little bastard with nothin' to kill us with but Campbell's soup!" Then a sudden thought occurred to him. "Wait a minute," he said and bent down and turned the flashlight full on the shattered chest of the dead Jap. After a second he straightened up and said, "You shot him in the back, you white trash sonofabitch! You shot that poor starving little bastard in the back when he was goin' away with his arms full of groceries. He was trustin' us and you shot him in the back. I oughta kill you... that's what I ought to do... you and your goddamn squirrel shootin'. I suppose you learned that on one of your famous nigger hunts. I can't kill you but I'm sure gonna beat hell outa you."
With that he smashed his fist straight into Homer's face and Homer began to yell. It didn't last long for Al and I, with the help of Meyer, managed to drag the Sergeant off and quiet him. If we hadn't been there he might have killed Homer. I knew it wasn't only the fact that he had shot a defenseless man in the back which enraged the Sergeant. It was much more than that. It was all the things Homer was, the way he thought, his evil stupid prejudiced mind, his physical dirtiness. The whole flood welled up and burst.
The blood was streaming down Homer's face and he was blubbering again and whining, "Jeezl I'll get you for that! I'll get you if it's the last thing I do... you goddamn nigger lover!"
"Shut up!" I said. "Go and wash your face. I'll take care of this later."
The Sergeant ignored him and ordered Al and Meyer to go and get a shovel and the jeep. None of us wanted the dead Jap lying around there all night. Left alone with me, the Sergeant said suddenly, "What a bunch of damned fools we are standin' out here in the moonlight. If there is any more Japs and they've got a grenade or a gun they could fix us all and quick like sittin' birds!"
But if they hadn't fixed us by now it wasn't likely they'd fix us before we got the body down on the beach sand and buried, so we went along with our work. Maybe there weren't any more Japs. Maybe there had been only two of them and after the first was killed this poor little bastard had been left alone, hiding in the Jungle by day and coming out by night to pick up what we left out for him, living off the handouts we gave him. On the sand where we left the canned goods there had never been more than one set of footprints, very neat, coming and going. The sky was turning pink over the lagoon by the time the boys had finished their task and I fell asleep at last.
The tacit truce with the hidden Japs had been a helpful thing for our nerves, but it had served to soften very little the tension and monotony which grew steadily worse. The "going-over" of Homer by the Sergeant had indicated how quickly violence and hatred and perhaps even murder could flare up. And now the truce with the Japs had been violated and we could not know what to expect.
In the morning the Sergeant came to me and said, "Maybe we'd better take the guns away from Homer altogether. He's a nasiy piece of goods. Hell always find an excuse for what he wants to do."
We talked of such a procedure for a time, but I pointed out that if we did that, it would increase the guard duty for the other boys. This would be unfair, and it may have been that this was exactly what Homer was playing for... If you couldn't put him on guard duty he could sleep all night. You couldn't punish him by putting him on kitchen police or making him permanent cook because nobody would eat after him. You always kept thinking of the black women and their yaws which you couldn't keep him away from. He was crafty enough. I sometimes wondered why he had not managed long before now to get himself thrown out of the Army altogether. Certainly if there had been any way of throwing him off the island we would have done so long ago.
In the end we agreed that by constantly threatening him with punishment we might keep him in order and make him pull his own weight something he avoided doing whenever possible. That appeared to be the only kind of treatment he understood.
Just as we finished talking, an Army plane buzzed us and dropped a bag of mail, the first we had had in nearly a month. There were two books for me sent by Enid and a letter. It was not very interesting, mostly gossip and household matters, but for the first time it seemed to me to come out of a strange, remote, and utterly foreign world, and at first this alarmed me. Perhaps I thought, "I'm becoming a beachcomber." On consideration the prospect did not displease me. It might even be a solution to go on when the war was over, wandering from island to island in the Pacific. I could even be quite a luxurious beachcomber with the money I could arrange to have sent me. I discovered suddenly that I actually did not dislike even this lonely forgotten existence I was leading. It was monotonous, but there was more peace in it than I had ever known and in a negative sense I was happy, perhaps because the writing has occupied so much of my time and given me a sense of satisfaction.
When I had torn up Enid's letter there was no reason to preserve its emptiness I left the hut to walk down to the beach for a late-morning swim, and as I passed one of the great clumps of dying mangrove isolated by the coral sand, I heard the sound of sobbing. It was a desperate heartbreaking land of sobbing and I felt forced to investigate it.
In the midst of the mangrove clump I found Meyer lying on his face. I bent down to him, thinking that at last his nerves had broken, and asked him what the matter was and whether I could help him in any way, but he could not answer me at first After a little he sat up, looking ashamed, and rubbed the sleeve of his shirt across his eyes, but he still could not speak. His body was shaking like that of a child who has been crying violently and cannot stop sobbing.
I persuaded him to return to my hut, and there, seated on my bed, he managed to get control of himself and talk with some degree of coherence.
He had had a letter from home telling him that his mother was dying of cancer and could not live until he could get back. She had been ill for a long time but would do nothing about it until it was too late. His sister had written at once, but she said the doctor did not expect the mother to live more than a few days and the letter had already been two weeks on the way. That was all, and now Meyer sat on the edge of my bed staring into space and answering me politely enough if I asked him a question but otherwise behaving as if he were dazed.
I did manage to find out some things of importance that he was an only son. The only other child was a sister older than himself. And I discovered how profound is the Jewish sense of family and how closely knit are the ties among orthodox Jews like himself. And I came to understand why it was that he was always so silent. Here on this island, surrounded only by Gentiles, he felt completely uprooted and perhaps more lonely than any of us, for it was not only America or even Brooklyn for which he was homesick but for the close tight little circle of Jewish relatives and friends a citadel from which ne had seldom made a sortie into the world outside. So closed had it been, so conventional in its ancient ghetto traditions and its religious orthodoxy, that he was in truth a foreigner not only to Brooklyn but to everything which was commonplace in American life to the rest of us. I had lived all my life in the world of Crescent City and Oalcdale and AI, the big farm boy, in the open country of Kansas. The Sergeant was at home anywhere save in circles which socially or intellectually were above him. Even Homer, the wool-hat, had some traditions in common with the rest of us. But poor Meyer was a stranger. There had never been anyone to whom he could turn, no one who would understand his world or what he felt about his family. With Homer and even at times with the Sergeant he was constantly reminded that he was not only a stranger but a Jew. And now this tragic news. He had every reason for hiding in the jungle to sob his heart out.
I tried to get through to him, but I am afraid I was not very successful. I shall go on working at it, for if I can only get him to talk it will make things easier. It is one of the tragedies of the Jew, perhaps the greatest of the many tragedies .which the Jew has borne, that persecution and segregation have exaggerated his human traits out of all proportion and often to the point of caricature. It has made too many Jews into extreme introverts or extreme extroverts. It has made neurotics and psychiatrists or kibitzers and gangsters. Meyer was the extreme introvert who in order to exist needed that familiar small world in which his wife and his mother and his baby possessed an importance which few Gentiles will ever understand.
I said to him, "Look, Meyer, whenever you want to talk, come in here and talk... about anything at all. I always have time. I haven't got anything else to do."
He answered me without looking up from the floor, yes, sir. Thank you."
I'll make a superhuman effort to get a plane for you, but there's no use kidding ourselves. There isn't enough time and it would have to be an amphibious number. You understand that, don t you?"
His thin little body shook suddenly with a sob beyond his control. "Yes, sir. I understand it." Then he sat up and looked at me for the first time out of the great brown liquid eyes, speaking with the grotesque accent that comes out of some parts of Brooklyn. "It don't make things any easier." His body shook again and he said, "You see, I was a baby when my mother came from Poland. They had a hard time. She used to do any kind of work and go without food for my sake. She wanted to get ahead. She made me go on to school wlien I could have gone to work to lielp her. And now... shell be gone..." His voice trailed off and his head slipped down between his hands and he stared at the floor.
Presently I said, "Look. You don't want to go back to the barracks now. You stay here. Lie down on the cot. Cry your heart out if it does you any good and try to go to sleep. Sleep can do wonderful things. It's like morphine. Ill go and try to get a radio message through. YouVe a right to go home even if it's too late. Ill do everything I can."
He sat up erect once more but looking down at the bed in a strange way as if he could not bring himself to be so presumptuous as to lie on the bed of an officer.
"Go on," I said. Tim going to get the Sergeant to try and send a message." Then I left because I knew that as long as I was there he would not lie down.
As I walked across the white sands to the Sergeant's hut I felt depressed and frustrated that I could not get through to a fellow human being, that there should be so many intangible but impassable barriers between us. I was troubled too because the radio had been working badly for a long time and the parts which the Sergeant had requested had not been forwarded or had not arrived. It was the kind of thing which happens in the Army to forgotten men like ourselves.
When I walked into the Sergeant's hut I found him tinkering with the transmitter.
"Got it working?" I asked him.
He answered me without looking up. "Hell, no!" he said. "This time I think it's out for good. I've patched it up for the last time."
I grinned. That kind of leaves us isolated," I said.
He slammed the coil of wire lie had in his hands on the floor and began to swear. It was a magnificent performance in which he employed about every four-letter word known to the English vocabulary of filth. Because it was so passionate and magnificent, the words he used did not seem dirty. He finished up by saying,
"Once I get out of this Army, I'll stay away from it as far as possible."
"The trouble is," I said, "that wars and armies are out of date."
Then I told him about Meyer, and as he listened he seemed to melt. When I finished he said, "The poor little sonofabitch!" and after a moment's silence he said, "He's a funny little guy. I can't like or dislike him. He don't seem human sometimes... he's so goddamn quiet," adding, "Well have to get the transmitter fixed somehow and try and get a plane down here."
I was thinking ahead of him and said, "If he gets out you know what it means, don't you?"
"No, what?"
"The chances are they wouldn't let any of the rest of us off for weeks or months. They won't send any replacements out here and they won't let us cut down the post to three men."
A deep scowl came over his face. "Hell, I never thought of that! Hell!" This time he had not enough profanity left to relieve his feeling. He picked up the tool kit that was lying beside him and threw it, with all his immense strength against the side of the hut. The case smashed apart and the tools flew in all directions.
I said, "Do you think you can fix the thing up for a last time?"
He was silent for a moment and then in a very quiet voice he said, "I can do my best. That poor little bastard hasn't got anything in the world but his mother, his wife, and his kid!" Then slowly he began to pick up the scattered tools, saying, "I'll get Al in to help. Sometimes he's got smart ideas. He's smarter with tools than I am."
"Thanks," I said. "You're a good boy."
As I went out the door I heard him saying, "Tell that to the marines!"
I went into the jungle along the path that led toward the fuzzy-wuzzy village. I didn't want to disturb Meyer and there wasn't anywhere to go but down to the beach or along the path. The air smelled of growth and desolation, of dampness, of birth and decay and of growth feeding upon decay. I wondered whether the Sergeant would really try to repair the transmitter and get to the outside world. If they could send a plane in, it meant that Meyer would go out and the Sergeant would be left behind, denied what he wanted most in all the world escape and some women and some excitement. There were many things he could do. If he allowed the transmitter to go unrepaired for a few days it would be too late to do any good so far as Meyer was concerned. The Army didn't send you halfway round the world simply to attend a funeral or to get consolation from the surviving relatives. The only hope of getting leave for Meyer was that we could get through quickly enough while there was still, by some miracle, a chance of sending him home while his mother was alive. Even then it would depend on the kind of man the officer at Kinoko was. But, of course, the whole thing really depended upon the Sergeant himself. It was for him to choose to sacrifice the thing he wanted most in Me at the moment.
I walked nearly as far as the jungle village, near enough to see the huts raised high on stilts with the skinny pigs and mangy dogs foraging underneath among the garbage and excrement. I could smell it from a great distance, a smell of filth and heat and disease that was perhaps worse than the smell of the dead Jap. Then I turned back.
On my return I went instinctively down to the beach for a swim, as if to rid myself of any trace of that horrible smell, and then returned to iny own hut.
Meyer was lying on his back, his head a little on one side. The dark skin of his cheeks was wet with tears, but he was asleep. Leaving him undisturbed I went over to the Sergeant's hut, and as I reached the door I heard him testing the transmitter. Al was beside him. Both of them were dripping with sweat. I stood in the doorway listening, and presently my shadow, falling across the floor, attracted the Sergeant's attention. He went on sending out his signal and listening and without speaking he grinned and nodded his head, and then presently it came clear and he called me.
We had managed to get Kinoko, but both transmission and reception were weak and blurred. When I got the commanding officer I managed with great difficulty to tell him the whole story. It was a maddening business. I believed that if I could have talked to him directly or even clearly over the transmitter I could have fixed things for Meyer, but how can you make a case to a strange officer you have never seen when you are five hundred miles away talking in waves which alternately roar and recede into silence interrupted by a steady crackle of explosions?
Finally I did get the stoiy across and presently I got back the answer through the maddening silences and static uproar.
It was no good. They hadn't seen a seaplane at Kinoko in three weeks and did not know when they would see another. That was the end of it.
All the time I had been talking, the Sergeant and Al listened with strained faces, and before I cut off communications they had already divined the answer. When I turned to them the Sergeant said, "It's a goddamn shame!"
I wanted to hug him, but I only put my hand on the huge shoulders and said, "Well, anyway, you did all you could." He looked up at me and I added, "And that was plenty!"
And plenty it was. It had been his first turn at leave from this maddening godforsaken spot and he had been willing to sacrifice it although he need never have done so. A leave meant nothing much to me one way or another. In fact I didn't want it until Td finished the writing I was doing and even after that I felt no strong desire to go back into the world, but the Sergeant was different. He lived by his senses to eat and drink and make love. As I walked back to my own hut I felt better than I had felt for a long time, for I had, witnessed self-sacrifice and something approaching heroism.
Meyer slept until nearly dark, and when finally he awakened I told him as gently as possible the bad news. When he heard it lie did not cry. Behind him for generations there was a kind of stoicism which manifested itself once the first anguish had passed.
Quietly he said, "Thank you, Captain. I know you've done everything you could."
"It's the Sergeant you must thank," I said. "He was willing to give up his leave for you."
"I know that, sir," said Meyer. "Maybe some day I can do something for him."
"You'd better get something to eat," I said. "Al is cooking tonight. Usually he has something good."
"I don't feel hungry."
"Try to eat anyway." I put my arm around his shoulders. "There isn't any use saying anything except maybe that we're all for you."
"Thanks, sir."
I watched him walk across the sand and it was the walk of a man moving in a trance, and suddenly a fantastic thought came into my mind "What if it had been my mother?" but the thought left me numb and without reaction. I knew that at first I would feel a shock and perhaps remember one or two happy moments in my youth which were connected with her and after that I would feel nothing at all save perhaps the relief that I should not have to see her again. It would be like hearing the news that a public institution had collapsed and died. For a second I felt an anguish of envy for poor little Meyer that he had a humble Jewish mother instead of a prominent do-gooding public character.
That night Meyer did not come to mess but lay on his cot in the darkness of the hut he shared with Homer, the wool-hat. On hearing the news the latter made no comment at all or even displayed any interest.
After supper the Sergeant and Al and I went down to the beach with the net the two of them had made of unraveled rope and caught a few small fish which we cooked when we returned after dark, and after that I left them and came back to my typewriter to set down in my journal what had happened during the day. When that was finished I turned back again to the biography, working late because I was writing about Mary Baeburn whom I had loved and who had taught me what love could s be, and for a little time I managed to recapture in memory something of that glow which had illuminated all that brief part of my existence.
Very late it must have been nearly one in the morning the sound of a footstep in the doorway startled me and I thought at once of the Japs that Homer might have stirred up. But in the moonlight I saw that it was Homer himself, his gun slung across his shoulder.
The sight of him always depressed me, but I managed to say, "Yes, Homer."
He said, "Kin you come with me, Captain? I wanta show you something."
"What?"
"I cain't tell you. I gotta show you."
"Is it important?"
"Uh-huk."
It might be important or it might not and with Homer you could never tell. His standards of importance were peculiar. I had finished writing for the night and so I went with him. He led the way, walking a little in advance of me across the white sand that sparkled in the moonlight, in the direction of the Sergeant's hut. There he stopped by the open doorway and motioned with one hand. The moonlight was brilliant and I suddenly saw the swollen eye the Sergeant had given him the night before for killing the poor Jap. As I stepped up beside him he turned on the electric torch, throwing the beam against the roof of the hut so that the inside was illuminated by a diffuse light.
"Look," he whispered, pointing toward the mosquito netting that covered the two Army cots placed side by side on which slept the Sergeant and Al. "Look," he repeated in a low voice, "Did you see?"
What I saw was the Sergeant's heavy figure on one cot and the tall body of the Kansas farm boy on the other. I couldn't understand what Homer, the wool-hat, was talking about until he snickered and then I noticed that one of the Sergeant's arms was thrown outward and across the body of Al.
I turned quickly away from the doorway lest one of them should waken and see me there as if I had been spying on them.
"Come," I said sharply to the wool-hat, and when we were a good distance from the doorway I said, "What were you trying to show me? Are you crazy?"
He didn't answer but merely snickered again and I have seldom heard a filthier sound.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
He snickered a third time and said, "I tried to tell you a long time ago something was goin' on."
For a moment I could not find words and then when I found them I managed somehow to hold them in, for if I had spoken I would have said worse things than I said to him on the night he vomited after shooting at the first Jap. As an officer I could not say to him what I wanted to, nor as an officer could I beat him up. Presently when I had gained control of myself I said, "I think I know what you're trying to say... I think I know what you're trying to do. You're a damned nasty piece of goods and don't ever do anything like that again. You'd damned well better behave yourself from here on out!"
He muttered, "I thought I was doin' what was right."
Again a wave of rage swept over me and again I held my tongue and my fists. I said, "Those are two of the best guys in the world. You keep your filth and your dirty black women to yourself." Then he snickered again and I felt as if suddenly I had been contaminated by the mere sound, as if he had smirched me with some of his own physical filth. I managed to say, "Now get back to your post and don't do any more shooting or I'll take that damned, gun away from you for good." He stood there silent in the moonlight. "You heard me," I repeated. "Get going!"
He looked toward me, suddenly thrusting out his thin neck in a gesture which seemed like the peck of an angiy buzzard. His back was to the moon and his face in the shadow so that I could not see his expression, but I knew that it was one of murderous hatred for the Sergeant, for Al, but most of all for myself.
When he had gone I thought, "We've all got to get out of here before something terrible happens!"
Back in my hut I lay awake for a long time, disturbed and worrying about many things, among them the tragedy of Meyer, which was only one among thousands caused by an idiotic war, and the tragedy of Homer and his hatreds. What did they come from? Why should he be burdened by this intangible mess of perverted ideas and hatreds and standards? What could you do to help someone like him? Nothing that I could discover, lying there awake in the moonlit darkness. And the Sergeant and Al. What Homer had tried to pin on them seemed immensely unimportant, perhaps even touching. There were limits by which the starved affection or even the starved sensuality of people should not and could not be tested. Half asleep I seemed to see a balance. On the one side were the Sergeant and Al, sweating their hearts out to repair the radio transmitter so that Meyer had one chance in a thousand of seeing his mother alive, and on the other was the dead Jap shot in the back by Homer to sharpen his eye in practice as a squirrel shooter. As I feE asleep one thought posed itself in my fading consciousness that ignorance and the cruelty arising from it were the most evil of all the evil manifestations of man.
