Better Times Than These (12 page)

Kahn really didn’t know what to do. He was more worried about his own ass for letting the men out of the troop room. He was hoping Patch might not find out he had started it, because of the confusion of the storm. But if he did, Kahn figured he might just as well have been the one who threw over the life ring, because Patch was going to deal with him worse, if he found out he had let the men go up.

In a corner of the room Major Greaves, the Brigade Chaplain, was praying with a half-dozen men. Kahn could not hear what was being said, but the sober expression on the minister’s swarthy face made him feel uncomfortable, because it looked to Kahn as though the chaplain were calling in all his chits with the Big Fellow upstairs.

Brill was herding men into the dining room and making them sit at tables by the door. He came up to Kahn again.

“Hey, Kahn, you want me to send somebody back downstairs to guard the gear they left out? They didn’t have time to put it in the lockers before we got out of there. They’re afraid somebody might start stealing stuff.”

Kahn looked at Brill as if he had just asked permission to start a bingo game. “Christ, Brill, I don’t give a damn. Do whatever you want to do.”

Jesus—how do you like that? Kahn thought. Worrying about some fucking cameras and stuff—as though people didn’t have anything better to do in a typhoon than sneak around and steal things. Brill actually seemed to be enjoying this. He didn’t have enough sense to be scared; he didn’t share the terrible aloneness on this puny man-made cork. Brill really was strange, Kahn thought, but so far, thank God, he had been harmless—though there was an undercurrent of meanness in Brill that Kahn didn’t like at all.

And Brill, who had just assigned Pfc. Peach to go down and guard the Bravo Company gear, was thinking that Kahn was probably going to fold up the first time they stepped into some shit, because anyone so obviously rattled by a storm was going to be petrified in a firefight. So what, with the damned storm? You couldn’t avoid it—and you couldn’t attack it—and you sure as hell couldn’t go persuade it. So either it was going to get you or it wasn’t. In fact, Brill was exhilarated by the storm. He didn’t share Kahn’s sense of aloneness in it, because he had been alone most of his life—at home, and when his parents divorced, and in the military schools, and every place else—including the Army. The storm actually made him feel less lonely, because the cattle he was in charge of were looking for someone to turn to, and whom else would they turn to but their leader, Brill? Instead of making him feel alone, the storm gave Brill something to do, and in a strange way, he was grateful for it—as he was for the war they would soon be in.

The first Patch heard of Four/Seven’s release was when Captain Kennemer panted up to the bridge with the news that “some people have gone up to the lounges.” Asking around, Kennemer had been informed that the Navy had moved them up because of the violence of the storm, and this news came as a great relief to Patch, because it had been getting plainer and plainer that his measures hadn’t worked. If the storm conveniently let him off the hook, it was indeed a fortuitous happening, no matter how bad it was otherwise.

Patch instructed Kennemer to tell the officers that the men were to remain in the lounges and dining areas inside, and under no circumstances roam around the ship—which was about as necessary as telling even the dumbest among them not to stand in front of a howitzer when it was being fired. Patch himself decided to remain on the bridge with the Navy in case his assistance or authority was needed in dealing with any problems.

The Captain was feverishly engrossed in controlling the ship, and nodded without expression when the call came in about Pfc. Peach, the man Brill had sent down to guard the gear in the troop quarters. He turned to Patch, who had been sitting pinch-faced on a small bench on the bridge, feeling a little queasy.

“Colonel, one of your men has been hurt. You might want to check on him. He fell down the Number Two companionway just midships outside the enlisted men’s lounge.”

“Thank you, I certainly will. Is he hurt bad?” Patch said.

“We don’t know yet. The doctor is with him now—he may have broken something. He shouldn’t have been on those stairs in this weather.”

Again Patch shrank from the disapproval of the Navy Captain. Resentfully, he started down the corridor toward the stairwell.

By the time he got to the spot, they already had Pfc. Peach strapped to a litter. He was a smallish pale man anyway, and the shock of his shattered hipbone had turned his face a ghostly white. He was bleating like a sheep. They had cut away his trousers and undershorts, and Patch could see the jagged white bone of the upper thigh sticking out through the skin.

A sailor in a white corpsman’s jacket was holding a bloody compress just below the wound as they carried Peach away, still bleating, toward the sick bay. Patch and the doctor walked behind.

“I’m gonna have to do something pretty quick about that boy, but I don’t know how in hell I can, with the ship bouncing like this—I just don’t know,” the doctor said.

“We’ve got our own medical people aboard,” Patch said. “Can we give you any help?”

“Yes, tell your orthopedics man I can use him—or at least, he can use me . . . and for God’s sake, try to keep these men out of the companionways in this weather,” the doctor said, turning into the sick bay, leaving Patch alone in the writhing corridor with only the straining cantations of the engines and the distant bleating of Private Peach.

Damn that little bastard, Patch thought, looking after the doctor. Damn his nerve to say that to me. Patch couldn’t figure out at the moment whom he was most mad at, the insolent Navy doctor or Peach, who had caused the trouble in the first place. What a fool thing to try to negotiate stairs in this stuff. And now one less man in the field . . . Besides, Patch thought, he was probably going down there to steal something anyway.

The fiercest part of the typhoon raged through the night and into early morning. There were times everyone truly believed the ship could not stand being dropped into the hollow of another swell. Each time the transport’s bow would rise, its cargo of frightened men would brace themselves, stomach muscles tightened, jaws clamped together, chins lowered to their chests as if they were passengers on an elevator broken free in its shaft. Chaplain Greaves continued to pray, and his congregation increased tenfold.

Each time the sea caught the ship up on a crest, there was a terrifying tremor from stem to stern, as though the transport were a patient in an asylum being given an electric-shock treatment, followed by a roller-coaster plunge down into the water with a terrific roar. This went on for hours, but none of the men ever got used to it, and many of their secret prayers dealt only with the hope of getting through the night, leaving the rest to further Providence.

A sickly pink dawn brought a slackened wind and an end to the rain, and it signaled that the typhoon itself had passed over. What remained was mountainous seas, higher even than the bridge of the ship, some of them cresting with a great rush of foam and roar of dirty-looking water. But the swells had a definite direction now instead of the chaotic raving at the height of the storm, which gave a predictable and less frightening cadence to the rising and falling of the ship. On the slopes of some of these waves, exhausted gulls and terns bobbed crazily, flying up at the onslaught of a breaker and screeching mightily before settling back down again.

By late afternoon the seas had subsided a little, and down in sick bay the doctor informed the bridge that they were ready to reassemble Pfc. Peach’s smashed bones. This was necessary so that the helmsman would turn the transport directly into the waves—a course that would increase the pounding, but negate the rolling which had prevented them from operating up to now. As the ship began to pound once more, the relief of the men cooped up in the lounges and dining room turned to anguish, since again no one had bothered to tell them the reason, and they were not enough attuned to the sea to figure it out for themselves.

Earlier, Kahn allowed some of Bravo Company to return to the troop quarters to look after their personal belongings. They reported back that several packs and duffel bags had been gone through and things had been stolen out of them.

12

S
harkey signed himself up for the boxing matches mainly to get out of his confinement to quarters following the laundry incident.

“You’re crazy. You’ll get brained. Don’t do it,” Kahn told him, secretly wishing he’d had the guts to sign up too.

“I’m so ugly already it wouldn’t make any difference. Anyway, I gotta get outta here. I’m getting cabin fever,” Sharkey replied.

Four days after the storm, Crump had been leaning on the fantail watching a school of flying fish when he noticed the laundry floating past. At first he thought he was merely observing the flotsam of the sea: green, shapeless blobs streaming past the stern and into the wake. Then he looked down and saw a huge stream of water gushing from a port in the ship’s side about ten feet above the waterline, every so often disgorging a fatigue blouse or trousers. Crump looked back curiously along this line of clothing, which stretched as far as he could see into the distance. At that moment a sailor happened to be walking past, and Crump stopped him and pointed out the phenomenon. The sailor’s face contorted into a mask of horror, and he dashed off down the deck and disappeared into a companionway. A few minutes later the flow of water and laundry ceased.

No one, not even Sharkey, ever found out how it had happened, but someone had apparently turned a wrong valve, causing the laundry of four hundred men to be systematically discharged into the Pacific. The transport steamed on, however, a destination to reach and a schedule to meet, clothing or no.

Sharkey had been nowhere near the laundry when the mishap occurred, but this did not stop Patch from punishing him, since the Laundry Officer was theoretically responsible for everything that went on in his domain. He was confined to quarters for a week except to attend to his laundry duties and eat meals. After four days of lying in his bunk, Sharkey would have done almost anything to get out.

“I want to see the fights anyway,” Sharkey said good-naturedly. “I’ll have a firsthand view.”

“You’re nuts,” Kahn told him again. “Don’t do it.”

Actually, Kahn had relished Sharkey’s misfortune in the laundry room as poetic justice for the prank he and Donovan had played on him a week earlier. The two of them had conspired to start a rumor that a sub was following the transport, and within a few hours this news had become so rampant that Kahn, as Rumors Control Officer, was forced to embarrass himself by checking it out with the Navy command and make a contrary announcement over the loudspeaker system.

A week after the storm the sea swells were still running high, but Patch, sensing that the troops were restless and needed to blow off steam, announced there would be fights. On his crossing to Korea, there had also been fights, but Patch had not entered them because he hadn’t liked the possibility of getting knocked on his ass by an enlisted man. Now, fifteen years later, he wasn’t troubled by it, having decided it was a healthy thing occasionally for his officers and men to engage in this kind of athletic activity. At first he toyed with the idea of restricting the bouts to enlisted men, but later decided to open them to anyone willing to fight.

The response was overwhelming—over a hundred men signed up, and the sergeants in charge spent the afternoon weighing and pairing them against each other. A ring had been erected on the bridge deck, consisting of thick canvas mats laid on the deck and wrapped around four corner posts. Sharkey was fighting light-heavyweight class—in the eighth three-round bout—against a man from Charlie Company, Second Battalion. Sharkey was five feet eight inches tall, one hundred eighty pounds, and had done some boxing at West Point, but seemed like a man better designed to withstand punches than to deliver them, considering his limited reach. He ate lunch but decided against the evening meal, not wishing to hamper himself with a full belly in case he took a punch there.

Crump had also decided to enter the boxing matches, to the astonishment of DiGeorgio and Spudhead and others who believed it would have been the farthest thing from his mind. When they were convinced he wasn’t kidding, they offered to second for him, and after a while everyone became caught up in the idea of the fights.

Crump hadn’t been in a real fight since the time he’d whipped another boy in a Mississippi schoolyard. His mother had been furious because he’d torn his trousers at the knees, and he had spent the next weekend at home, pickling pole beans. Somewhere in the back of Crump’s bony head, he knew his decision to fight had something to do with his mother’s not being here now to get after him, because all of his life, even before his father had died, she had gotten after him for something. The only thing Crump missed about his mother was her cooking. Ever since he could remember, Crump had looked forward to supper at home, with pot roasts and mashed potatoes, home-grown peas and beans, hams, yams, corned beef and cabbage, pork chops with applesauce and beets, and corn bread and fried chicken—she as big as a house, he as thin as a rail. Crump couldn’t keep his mind off it, this great mother-cooking, and whenever he got a chance he talked about it as though this would make his dream meals come true.