Better Times Than These (14 page)

Groutman was still beside him, grinning wildly and offering to take “the nigger” for five dollars. Brill declined the bet, but would have taken it if he could have had the nigger himself.

When the bell rang, Brill worked his way forward, but he was not yelling with the rest of the crowd.

Sharkey met the black soldier in the center of the ring, his chin tucked down on his chest and his elbows bent in tight on either side of his navel. The black man struck out with a frantic combination of punches that rained down on Sharkey’s gloves, leaving him virtually untouched, and he waded inside the taller fighter, pounding away at his belly, while the black man, unable to move away, slapped him frantically on the back of the head. The referee stepped in and Sharkey backed off, his chin still down on his chest, looking up at his towering opponent like a man peering over spectacles. The black fighter’s stomach had changed color, to a sort of deep purple, and he stopped some of his dancing and began to backpedal as Sharkey stalked him around the ring.

Kahn was yelling with the rest for Sharkey, who seemed to be almost everybody’s favorite except those from the black fighter’s own company.

“Knock him on his ass, sir; that’s it, sir, don’t let him get away,” Trunk was bawling, jabbing Kahn in the ribs.

“You see that Lieutenant Sharkey, sir? He’s gonna whip that motha—that motha can’t hit him,” Trunk shouted.

The yelling around Kahn became a dull roar from far away. Curiously, what he sensed most of all was the gentle rolling of the transport, imperceptible to most, because everyone now compensated automatically by shifting his weight every so often from one leg to the other. The sky above was very starry, but the ocean around them was black so that it was impossible to see even the water as the ship churned on into the night.

Kahn had a feeling, although he had absolutely no scientific way of knowing it, that the transport was now passing over one of the deeps; that five or six miles below them the bottom of the sea was so still, so dark, so calm, except for the jagged mountains and rocks and crevices where nothing lived—nothing with a brain, anyway—that it was totally unknowing of what was happening here above: that a transport ship with two thousand armed men, some of them fighting each other on the deck, was making its way across the chasm.

The right hand that stopped Sharkey was so fast only those on the edge of the ring saw it. It lashed out from the tall black soldier like a striking cobra, popping Sharkey’s head back the way a man’s head will pop back when it strikes a branch in the dark. It took several seconds for Sharkey to realize what had happened, that behind his mouth guard his front teeth had been smashed in by that mighty punch, which somehow was timed, accidentally or on purpose—he would never know—with the rolling of the ship. Both fighters backed away from each other for a moment; then Sharkey looked at the referee and raised his hand high into the air, realizing he could not continue this way.

As the referee held up the black man’s hand in victory, Kahn shoved his way toward Sharkey, who was stepping through the ropes, dripping blood from his broken mouth. He’d tongued the mouthpiece out gently, wondering what would come out with it. He knew that feeling no pain meant nothing now. The pain would come later, late at night in his bunk, and in the morning, but it was something he didn’t worry about now at all. His gums felt numb and mushy, as though they did not belong in his mouth anymore. Kahn caught Sharkey by the arm, and he and Donovan helped him through the crowd without speaking, and took him to his cabin.

Sharkey plopped down on his bottom bunk, his chest still heaving from the fight. Kahn went to his locker, took out a three-quarters-full bottle of the Cutty Sark and poured a glass full of it. Sharkey sat up and drank half of it down straightaway without a breather. He leaned on the edge of his bunk for nearly a minute, saying nothing, then went into the head and puked. Kahn was tempted to go in after him, but he sensed Sharkey preferred being alone. When he came out, Sharkey sat back down on the bunk and drank the rest of the Scotch in a gulp, swishing it in his bloody mouth an instant before swallowing, bulging out his big brown Jerry Colonna eyes and giving out a deep ahhhhhhhh.

“I shuda ta done difs,” he said with difficulty, feeling the smashed teeth tenderly with his fingers. “I mighta known thif would happen.”

“Ah, hell, what can you know—it was a lucky punch,” Kahn said.

“Yeaf, lucky—look at my goddamn teef. I gotta gem to a dentist,” Sharkey said painfully.

“We’ll be in Okinawa in two days. Take the bottle; just keep pouring, Shark,” Kahn said. “It was a lucky punch.”

The overhead lights in the nearly deserted troop quarters below cast a stark shadow on the floor of the dejected head of Pfc. Homer Crump, buried in his sore, bony hands. DiGeorgio and Spudhead Miter sat silently while Crump gurgled pathetic little sobs from the edge of his bunk.

“I tried,” Crump whimpered. “I couldn’t of tried no more.”

DiGeorgio and Spudhead exchanged glances each time Crump spoke. They had said everything they could say to make him feel better, and all they could do now was just stay here with him, although DiGeorgio thought he’d try one more time because he couldn’t stand to see Crump cry this way.

“You did the best you could, Crump; nobody could do no better than you did. The bastard was a pro—he wasn’t no amateur.”

“He wasn’t no pro—he just whipped me. He did it fair and square,” Crump said, raising his head for a moment.

“Look, Crump, you could’ve gotten him if they’d been more time—you had him in the second,” Spudhead injected.

“Shit, I know I did, I had him in the second. He was running away—he knew he was beat.”

“Hey, Crump, you want a Hershey Almond?” Spudhead asked brightly.

“Hell, no, I don’t want it. I don’t want nothin’. Just leave me be,” he said.

“Look, Crump,” DiGeorgio said, “we gonna be fighting fuckin’ gooks in a few weeks. Them bastards are gonna get their asses kicked. They gonna get the shit kicked outta them by us three. Screw that fight. In two weeks you’ll be laughing about that fuckin’ fight.”

“Hell I will, hell I will,” Crump said. “I shoulda beat him, beat him bad. I never lost a fight before—never lost one.”

“You didn’t lose that one tonight; you woulda had him down if there’d been more time,” Spudhead said.

“Yeah, that’s right,” DiGeorgio said. “If there’d been more time.”

13

T
he transport slipped in before dawn to the concrete piers of the Army Ship Terminal at Okinawa. Everyone knew they were to arrive sometime this day, but it didn’t occur to the men as they woke up that they might already be there. It took several minutes for someone to figure out that there was no rolling motion anymore, and no throb of engines. Practically everyone was on deck within minutes after they realized this, because they were excited to see land again. The transport would be here only a day, taking on fuel and supplies. Then it would steam out, and make a turn southward, two thousand more miles into the South China Sea and the land of the River Blindness.

Today they had been promised relief from the tedium of twenty days at sea. Provision had been made for their entertainment, and while most of them out of past experience did not expect much from it, they were nevertheless grateful for a chance to drink some beer and be on dry land again. The night before, Patch had announced over the loudspeaker system that they would be taken care of by the Okinawa Army Special Services people. Arrangements had been made for them to go to a local beach, where beer, box lunches and sports facilities would be provided. They could swim if they wished, in the nude, since the spot was remote.

From the deck of the ship the island was a pastiche of brilliant green, with darker, bluish-green hills in the background. It revealed no evidence of the bitter fighting two decades before.

“Jesus, the place is full of gooks,” said Madman Muntz, peering down at a cluster of brown-skinned Okinawans feverishly working on the docks.

“Yeah, lookit them shitheavers,” said DiGeorgio, who had joined Muntz and Spudhead and Sergeant Groutman at the rail. “Shit, I’ll bet they makin’ fifty cents an hour wrestlin’ those drums,” he said.

“Gooks ain’t worth fifty cents an hour,” Groutman said. “Gooks ain’t worth shit.”

Within an hour, brown military buses began taking the men off the transport. Officers and senior noncoms were permitted to go on their own, and when Bravo Company was put aboard the buses, the officers signed out and went down to wait in line for one of the tiny taxicabs standing at the dock. Kahn, Donovan, Inge and a lieutenant from Charlie Company went to the village of Nominui to find a bar. Brill joined Groutman to try to find a whore someone had told him about. Sharkey, headed for a dentist, got a lift up to Fort Buckner with Major Dunn, who wanted to try to call his wife, and Captain Thurlo, who had severe stomach pains.

The ride into Nominui took only a few minutes. They passed rice paddies and cane fields and lush bougainvillea and japonica and experienced a variety of smells that had not been smelled in weeks, and it was difficult to tell if they were smells peculiar to this part of the world or simply the normal smells of land. The trip would have been more comfortable had it not been for the bulk of ex-tackle Donovan squeezed into the tiny cab.

Kahn and his pals had been drinking in the Shan Wan Saloon since it had opened at 10:30
A.M.
Before that, they had each gotten a bath and a hand job at the “Geisha House” two doors down. The Shan Wan was about as out-of-the-way a place as a man could find, without really trying hard to get lost, so when Sergeant Trunk came bursting through the cheap plywood doors shortly after 2
P.M.
, the five officers were completely astonished that he had found them.

“Lieutenant Kahn, I been looking for you for an hour. The Old Man wants to see you,” Trunk said.

“What about? Sit down, Sergeant,” said Kahn, motioning for Trunk to pull up a chair.

“Well, the Old Man wants to see you about Captain Thurlo, I think. Sergeant Major told me to find you because Captain Thurlo has got appendicitis and he’s gonna have to be operated on. It wasn’t no seasickness after all—or anyway, he’s got appendicitis now, ’cause he’s up in the hospital at Fort Buckner, and you gonna have to be the CO, sir, I think.”

Kahn said nothing. He looked dumbly at Sergeant Trunk. Inge and Donovan exchanged glances at the new development in the hierarchy, and the lieutenant from Charlie Company drained his beer.

“But that ain’t all, sir; there’s something else,” Trunk said, leaning his fat head across the table, breathing a tobacco breath.

“What else?”

“It’s about the men, sir. There’s . . . a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” Kahn asked.

“I think you ought to come with me, Lieutenant—it’s better if you see it yourself.”

“What is it, Trunk? Nothing’s happened, has it?”

“Oh no, sir, nothing’s happened; it’s just, ah . . . where they’ve got them,” Trunk said. “Sergeant Dreyfuss is outside with a cab. It won’t take long,” he said.

“Yeah, okay, Trunk.” Kahn polished off his beer. “Hey, you guys, let me know where you’re gonna be if you’re not here, okay? I’ll catch my part of the check later.”

The three of them got into the tiny Japanese-made taxi and Trunk directed the driver to the main beach road.

“What’s this all about, Trunk?” Kahn asked irritably as the cab flew past the last of the city along the coast road. He was still trying to absorb his apparent new standing.

“If you don’t mind, sir, I’d like to wait and let you see for yourself. You gotta see the Old Man afterwards anyway.”

Fifteen minutes out of the city, the cab came to the first of the fenced-in compounds. It slowed, but Trunk motioned for the driver to go on. Inside the big chain-link fences, soldiers from the troop transport sat huddled in bunches, many of them with their fatigue blouses pulled up over their heads to keep out of the searing midday sun.

The compound fences reached all the way down from the road into the water, out about a hundred yards or so, so that the men could swim out waist deep but no further. They drove past dozens of idle volleyball nets, and every hundred yards or so there were thatch-roofed cabanas so packed with men they looked as if they would explode and collapse if anyone else was crammed in.

“The men want to go back to the ship, sir,” said Sergeant Dreyfuss, a tall black man from Chicago who rarely spoke. “It’s damn hot for them out here. The beer ran out in an hour, and they ate all the box lunches, too. The water’s full of jellyfish and it’s so hot they can’t swim. There’s not even any fresh water for them to drink.”

“Where are we?” Kahn asked.

“They’re about a quarter of a mile down,” Trunk said.

The compounds they passed reminded Kahn of prisoner-of-war camps. It might have been Treblinka, or Dachau.

“The Old Man know about this?” Kahn said.

“I think he’s been out here,” Trunk said. “Dreyfuss and me came out to go for a swim till we saw this. I went back to Buckner and ran into the Sergeant Major and he said Colonel Patch wants to find you ’cause of Captain Thurlo.”