The Last One Left (29 page)

He heard the rain coming, moving across the mangroves, hissing more loudly as it approached. It was a good rain for ten minutes, leaving the air washed clean when it ended.

He told himself that it was no good. She had gotten a little better and now she was worse. It went that way a lot of times. They’d get hit bad, so bad it wouldn’t look as if there was any point in trying to
get them back to the field hospital. The corpsman would plug up the holes as best he could, put on plenty of sulfa powder, squeeze those ampules into the casualty’s arm. Before the morphine took hold, they’d sometimes brighten right up, ask for a butt maybe, look around, and then all of a sudden they’d go. Just like that. Life filled a man up, and when it went out, he sagged like a kid’s balloon losing a part of its air. But slower. The dead would just dwindle and flatten, and their uniforms would look too big; and if the outfit had been saddled up without a break for a few days, the whiskers would look artificial, little wires poked neat and careful through the silent skin. Every dead knew it couldn’t happen to him. Even if the whole platoon was wiped out, he’d be the one left. It’s what they had to think or they wouldn’t be there at all, and if they were, you couldn’t get them to keep moving. If any one of them ever knew his odds were no better and no worse than anybody else, then how in hell could you get him to take the point? How could you get anybody to work their way along a hedgerow close enough to lob grenades into a machine-gun position with a good field of fire? After a while you got to understand that it was exactly the same with the krauts, and they could do the things they did, the damned fine soldiering, because theirs was just the same dream, each one of them accepting the idea of a wound, maybe a bad one, and pain that could be bad, but not accepting that final listening-look some of them got and the shrinking down into a still thing smaller than the clothes it had worn. If you kept them on the move too long, then the ones who had all their springs and strings pulled a little tighter than the others; they would start to figure it all out, start to know that what kind of luck was coming up for them, good or bad, had not a damn thing to do with who they were, or what they thought, or how they felt. Then they had to make do with the idea of being nothing. Just something moving and breathing in a bad place. That’s when they’d
flatten out and try to work their way down into the safe, black, warm ground and never stand up again. They gave it a word. Combat fatigue. What it really was was the knowing of it, finding out you were some kind of a bug, killing other bugs, and if God paid any attention at all, it was more like he’d look down and shake his big sad head and say, “What the
hell
are they up to now?”

Right there toward the end, he thought, before they busted my head, I had me some workers. Ever’ one had been through the mill, got over believing he could depend on some kind of magic, knew that the onliest way to have any personal luck was to give it a chance to work by being as quick, smart and sly as a weasel. Slide like a snake through every little fold in the ground. Bust every place that even smelled like a sniper would like it. Ears to hear the incoming mail before it made any sound at all, like a dog whistle. But I was losing them too. One at a time. Something always happens you can’t count on. And then I lost myself. Knew I was getting hit. Glad it didn’t hurt. Felt like somebody hitting you with a stocking full of sand. Sort of a jar, and then a warm running feeling where the hole was. And then it just winked out. Like back in the rest area when the movie film would break. All of a sudden nothing except a white light on a white screen.

And that boy upstairs there, that fresh meat from the repple depple, he never had time to get smart.…

Corpo knuckled his eyes and shook his head in a familiar disgust with himself. Sergeant, if you’re getting so you can’t tell a pretty little girl from a dumb recruit, them candy people are sure to God going to haul you off in the funny wagon.

He crawled out of the cramped forward section of the Muñequita and straighted up on deck, snuffing the clean night. Wrap her up and tote her down here and use this fine boat and run her down to the city pier. Or wait a bit, do all you can, then make her up a nice box out of the good boards you’ve been saving, pretty her up, say the
words, and bury her deep and neat and quiet. And take this fine boat out on the first misty night and let it loose with the tide moving out.

It could have happened by now, he thought. He went up and moved close to the bed, sat tirelessly a-squat on his heels, reached and laid the back of his forefinger against her forehead. It felt so unexpectedly cool he was certain it had happened, then the breath caught in her throat in a half-snore. She coughed, sighed, turned onto her side, her back toward him.

“Cain’t quite make up your mind to live or die, huh?” he whispered. “If you’re making a choice, Missy, living is better, hear?”

He thought of going back to the bunk aboard the white boat, but he had the feeling that if he left her, something that was hovering over her might pounce. He stretched out on the floor beside the bed, and awoke in first light, feeling a little bit stiff and sore. She was still cool to the touch, and he leaned over her face and snuffed at her, nostrils wide. That sick-smell was almost gone, that soury new-bread smell. He went fishing and came back and she was still asleep. He fixed breakfast and then ate it all himself when he could not wake her up enough to eat it. This was her heaviest sleep of all, and when it lasted through midday it began to worry him.

He had his back to her, and he was patching a hole in a window screen when she started yelling so loudly he nearly went through the window. He spun and saw her sitting straight up and trying to squirm back away from something. “No!” she yelled. “Oh God, no! Please! Please! Get away from me! No!”

He trotted to her, wiping his hands on khakied thighs, and grasped her shoulders and tried to ease her back down onto the pillow, saying, “Now there, Missy. Nothing after you. Everything is fine, Miss Leila. Just having a bad dream there, Missy.”

And all of a sudden he realized that those wide green eyes were staring directly at him, wide scared, wondering eyes, and her lips were sucked white. He released her and stepped back.

She knew it was another part of a dream, exceptionally vivid, trapped in some kind of a terrible shacky place in some kind of a jungle, with some huge weird type staring at her, scary pale eyes, and that dent in his forehead so deep it made her stomach turn over. She willed herself to wake up, willed the man and the shack to fade away.

“Are you awake now for sure, Missy?” he asked.

She closed her eyes and opened them to an undeniable reality which, if it were a dream, was more carefully detailed than any she had ever had. Yet, she thought, if I am ill, maybe a dream could be like this.

“Missy?”

“Awake? I don’t know. I can hear my own voice. I’m awake I guess. But nothing makes any sense.”

“You had the fevers, Miss Leila.”

“I feel kind of vague and floaty,” she said. She pushed a sleeve up to scratch her arm, sensed a strangeness about it, looked at her arm, and felt a sudden wild alarm. “What’s
happened
to me! I’m like a skeleton! What’s
happening?
”

“Now don’t you be scared. Please don’t you be scared. You’re doing real fine, Miss Leila. You’re a-looking real good today.”

“Who are you?”

“Why, I’m Sergeant Corpo, Missy.”

She looked slowly around the room. “Why am I here? What
is
this crazy place? Where is it?”

“Well, this is my place. I built this place. This is my island. Everybody calls it Sergeant’s Island. I’ve been here a
long
time. The Lieutenant fixed it so I can stay on here for good.”

“What are we close to, Sergeant? Are we near Nassau?”

“Nassau? That’s a good piece from here. The closest place, where I buy supplies, that would be Broward Beach, twenty minute run to the south in my skiff.”

“Florida!”

“It surely is.”

She lay back abruptly, thin forearm across her eyes. He thought she was going to sleep. She said, “Sergeant?”

“Yes, Missy.”

“You’ve got to help me. I don’t know what questions to ask. You’ve got to just tell me why I’m here, and what this is all about. Please.”

He came closer and sat on his heels by the bed. “Missy, it was Sunday morning, early, real misty morning, and I was wading the flats to the north of my island, and you like to scared me half to death, come floating right up to me in a big pretty boat, line dragging from the bow, weed tangled in it. There you were laying on the deck when I took a look, jaybird naked, excuse me, and sunburned terrible bad, and that big open place on your head I had such a time sewing up nice.”

She took her arm away, stared at him, then lifted her hand and reached unerringly to the healing wound and touched it tenderly with her fingertips. It felt alien to her, a great thickened clumsy welt, with a dull inner pain when she touched it. How in the wide world, she thought, would I happen to be drifting around naked in a boat in Florida? It has to be some kind of a complicated joke. Or a plot.

“What kind of a boat?”

“New and nice, Miss Leila. Blue and white color. Kind of a greeny-blue hull, white topsides, twin stern-drive engines, name Muñequita registered out of Brownsville, Texas, but it’s got a Florida number and a seal on the bow.”

He seemed so very anxious to please and reassure, but there was an oddness about his eyes that made her wary. “When did this happen, Sergeant? When did you find me?”

She saw him press both fists against his forehead, then rise and wander aimlessly, go over and start looking through bits of paper fastened to a post which supported a crude beam. He turned toward her and with a shy smile and hopeless gesture said, “Near as I can make it out, it had to be last Sunday. That means this is Thursday. And that would make it the twenty-sixth of May.”

She felt her mouth go dry, and she went back into the confusing corridors of memory, searching for a date. She found a Friday she knew. The sixth day of May. Twenty days gone without a trace! She could remember the day clearly. They were at anchor at Southwest Allen’s Cay in the Exumas. The island was a long oval barrier of sand and rock enclosing a broad anchorage with but two good entrances for a boat of the draft of the Muñeca, one to the east and one to the west, almost opposite each other. A long still day, dazzlingly bright. But not one of the good days, because Carolyn had been whining at Mister Bix again. She had wanted to go further down the Exumas, and Captain Garry had figured out how far they could go and still get back to Nassau again on the tenth for some kind of business meeting Mister Bix had. But then she had changed her mind and decided she wanted to get back to Nassau sooner. She had apparently agreed to staying at the anchorage another day and a half or two days and arrive back at Nassau on Sunday, and then she had begun complaining about the heat, a rash on her throat, running out of the good sun lotion, a stone bruise on her foot.

By then the pattern had become familiar. Carrie’s pattern. It set up the usual side effects. Carolyn would be poisonously and damagingly sweet to Stella, ignore her husband completely, and flirt quite openly with Captain Staniker. Bix, suffering rejection, would take every chance to stomp on his son Roger’s pride, pointing out everything
Roger seemed incompetent to do, from catching a fish to making a drink. Roger would go about with the stiff-mouthed look of someone fighting tears of helplessness. Mary Jane Staniker would keep her head down and go about her chores with a scuttling look. Staniker, by making an extra effort to be protective and gentle with Stella, would inadvertently add to Carolyn’s sour mood. And Leila would make an extra effort to stay out of everybody’s way. She was in awe of Carolyn’s special talent to make six other adults as miserable as herself.

In the morning Carrie had Staniker launch and rig the little sailing dinghy, and she went off alone, up and down the protected waters in the light air, managing to look rigidly discontented as far as the eye could see. Mister Bix and Captain Staniker went off in the Muñequita to troll on the Atlantic side, Bix making it clear that Roger would be an unwelcome nuisance to take along. Leila had put her writing materials in a plastic bag and swum ashore. She went to a pebbly beach at the south end of the island where the slope of rock and scrub growth behind her concealed the anchorage where the Muñeca lay. As she sat with her bare back against a smooth and comfortable slant of stone, she could see Stel on her plastic float-board paddling slowly back and forth over a coral reef, looking down through the little glass porthole. She finished another two pages of a letter to Jonathan, thinking she would probably add more before mailing it from Nassau.

The heat of the sun finally made her uncomfortable enough to think of getting back into the water. Stella came paddling to the beach and came walking ashore, carrying the light foam board under her arm.

Stella limped badly. She had been Leila’s friend for years. Leila had realized in the very beginning with this strange, shy girl that any kind of special consideration made her become remote. So she had treated her as if there was no handicap. And, indeed, there was far
less of one than Stella believed. Leila knew the history of it. It had been a difficult delivery. The nerves of the left leg had been damaged. By the time the specialists had achieved a sufficient regeneration to give her the use of it, the leg was smaller around and shorter than the other leg, and it would never be very strong. Both legs were pretty, slender, shapely. They did not match. That was all. Her figure was very good. She had a delicate and sensitive face, lovely eyes which seldom looked directly at anyone. She had a dark, brooding look, and only the very few who knew her as well as Leila knew the quickness of the hidden humor, the taste for the absurd.

Only once on the cruise had Leila made an effort to comfort Stel. Carolyn, one night at dinner, had been exceptionally, cleverly vicious. She talked about bringing “poor Stel” out of herself. She seemed incapable of saying her name without adding the “poor,” and she would jump to Stel’s assistance when she least needed it. Leila awoke in the night in the cabin she shared with Stel to hear the smothered sound of weeping. So she had stepped over to the adjoining bunk and slid in with her and held her. Stel had been rigid at first, and then had softened and clung and wept herself out. It had made Stel strange toward her for the next few days, but then they had found their way back to the casual warmth they knew best.