The Pistol (3 page)

The first week of both of these attempts was hectic, what with the Japanese expected every day, and also ridiculous. It consisted mainly (after having first got the MGs set up in their proper fields of fire in the pillboxes) of putting up all day barbed wire which far more often than not the sea washed away, of standing guard half the night, and of having one’s shelterhalf and two blankets blown off of one during the rest of the night by the wind. There was consequently very little sleep. No matter how tightly and carefully a man might wrap up, the wind, testing here, trying there, eventually would find a loose corner somewhere with which to begin its endless and seemingly diabolical tug of war. There was not room enough for most of the men to sleep ‘indoors,’ if the rock floors of the pillboxes could be called that, and most of them had to lie down outside on the stony ground in the full force of the wind. No one had thought to try to provide sleeping shelter for the men.

But even all of this discomfort, together with the excitement of the anticipated invasion and the bad news about the Philippines, did not stir up half as much interest at Makapoo as Mast’s loose pistol, once it became known generally that he had it. Everybody wanted it. In the first five days after the attack Mast had no less than seven separate offers to buy it, as well as two nocturnal attempts to steal it from him as he slept. He could not remember having had so much attention since he first came into this company over a year ago.

Quite plainly O’Brien had talked about it. About this free-floating, unrecorded pistol loose at Makapoo in Mast’s hands. Out of his hunger for it, plus his lack of success in getting hold of it, O’Brien had talked about it to somebody, if not everybody. How else would anyone know? And Mast began to realize his error in having lied about it and said he’d bought it. He had done that out of sheer instinct, and because he did not want it brought to the attention of the supply room that he still had it; and after two years in the Army Mast was cynically suspicious that there existed more than one man who would go to the supply room and tell, just simply because he himself did not have one. And for the purpose he had used it, the lie had sufficed. The supply room apparently was still totally unaware it had a pistol missing. But in succeeding, the lie had created other problems. It had, in effect, thrown the possession of Mast’s pistol open to the field: anyone who had it, owned it.

Actually, Mast was willing to accept possession of his pistol under those circumstances, or any other circumstances. Having worn and cared for it those days since the attack had made it his in a peculiar way that he could not possibly have felt that Sunday when he knew he had to turn it back in twenty-four hours. And from there, it was only one step to believing that he
had
bought it after all, the only logical step to take, in fact. He knew of course that somewhere there existed a paper with his signature on it saying that he owed God, or the Army, one pistol. And while the knowledge registered with him, it also somehow did not register. He
had
bought it. He could even, when pressed, remember the face of the man from the 8th Field Artillery who had sold it to him. So in one way the pistol had become what everyone believed it was. And Mast was prepared to defend it on those terms. From any source of jeopardy.

The offers to buy it ranged in price from twenty dollars to sixty dollars, none as high as the seventy dollars O’Brien had offered him under the stress of that first day. O’Brien himself was out of the bidding now, having lost nearly all of his seventy dollars in a poker game in one of the pillboxes. Poker was just about the only recreational facility left them now, and since it was clear that money was not going to be of use to any of them for some time to come, almost everybody who had any cash played; and the young lieutenant in charge of the position was powerless to stop it. And usually, whenever anyone won a wad of money, the first thing they did was go to Mast and make an offer for his pistol. Mast, naturally, refused them all.

As for the two attempts to steal it, Mast was lucky in being able to circumvent them both. The first occurred on the third night after the attack. Up to then Mast had been used to sleeping with his cartridge belt, and the holstered pistol, under his head for a sort of makeshift pillow and he woke up from a fitful sleep in the unceasing ear-beating wind to feel his belt, with the pistol on it, being stealthily withdrawn from under his head. He made a grab for it, caught it and yanked, and retained his pistol. But when he raised up to look, all he could see in the moonless darkness was the retreating back of a crouched running figure, its footfalls silent because of the loudly buffeting wind. After that, he decided to sleep with his belt on, around his waist. And after someone, whose retreating back he could also see but not identify, tried two nights later to sneak the pistol out of its holster while he again slept, he slept after that with the pistol itself tucked into his waist belt under his buttoned-down shirt and zippered field jacket while still wearing the riflebelt outside. This made for difficult sleeping, but then sleeping at Makapoo was difficult at best, and he didn’t care. Now that he had his pistol he meant to keep it.

It was interesting to speculate upon just why everyone was so desirous of possessing this particular pistol, and Mast did speculate on it, a little. Everybody had always wanted pistols, of course, but this was somehow becoming a different thing, he felt. But he was so busy working all day long, trying to sleep at night, and above all trying to keep and protect his pistol, that he really had very little time left to speculate on anything.

Certainly, a lot of it had to do with the fact that it was free, unattached. All the members of the machine-gun platoon at Makapoo carried pistols too, but theirs had been assigned to them and so nobody tried to steal them. It was pointless, because the serial numbers were registered to them. But because Mast had bought his (Had he? Yes! He had. He distinctly had.), instead of signing a requisition for it, it was unrecorded and therefore anyone who could come into possession of it would own it.

And yet, despite that very strong point, there seemed to be something else, something Mast, certainly, could not put his finger on. Everybody seemed to be getting frantic to possess his pistol. And Mast was unable to account for it, or understand it.

All Mast knew was the feeling that the pistol gave him. And that was that it comforted him. As he lay rolled up in his two blankets and one shelterhalf at night with the rocky ground jabbing him in the ribs or flanks and the wind buffeting his head and ears, or as he worked his arms numb to the shoulder all day long at the never-ending job of putting up recalcitrant barbed wire, it comforted him. Thy rod and thy staff. Perhaps he had no staff—unless you could call his rifle that—but he had a ‘rod.’ And it would be his salvation. One day it would save him. The sense of personal defensive safety that it gave him was tremendous. He could even picture the scene: lying wounded, and alone, his rifle lost, himself unable to walk, and a Jap major bearing down on him with a drawn saber to split him in half, then his pistol would save him. The world was rocketing to hell in a bucket, but if he could only hold onto his pistol, remain in possession of the promise of salvation its beautiful blue-steel bullet-charged weight offered him, he could be saved.

T
HE FIRST OPEN ATTEMPT,
as distinguished from the nocturnal tries at stealing it, came from the same big, dark, inarticulate Irishman, O’Brien, who had tried to buy the pistol from Mast in the truck. It happened one night when Mast and he were on guard duty together a week after the attack. The tension brought on by the anticipated invasion still had not slacked off by then.

It was, of course, mandatory that at least one man should be awake at all times in each pillbox, or ‘hole,’ as they quickly came to be called, staring out over the darkling sea below the cliff in an eye-cracking effort to see Japanese landing craft where there were none. But in addition to these safeguards, because of the construction of the position and its vulnerability from the land side, a system of walking posts had been set up around the perimeter.

O’Brien, on this particular night, being from another ‘hole,’ happened to have the post adjoining Mast’s, and during their two hours on post they met at the ends of their walkings and would stand for a while and talk in the chill, buffeting wind. It was during one of these meetings that they both thought they heard a sound, as of a stone falling, above the pummeling of the wind.

“What was that?” Mast whispered. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” O’Brien whispered back. “Yeah, I heard it.”

They both had crouched down and now they listened a while longer but they heard nothing else. There was no moon and it was pitch black and impossible to see, but they both knew what was in front of them. The bare rock where they walked post went on perhaps ten yards in front of them, at which point there was a fence separating the rocky point from a field of thin soil and sparse grass owned by a white industrialist but operated for him by an industrious, silent Japanese man as a cattle feeding field. Just beyond the fence to the left the rock of the point rose steeply to what higher up became the top of a small mountain, while the field sloped away, far down to the highway on their right.

“It sounded like it came from right in there,” Mast whispered, the wind whipping his words away, and pointed to the spot where the rock began to rise above them.

“Yeah,” O’Brien whispered, not too encouragingly. “It sure did.”

They listened some more.

“Well, what are we going to do?” Mast whispered finally.

“I don’t know,” O’Brien whispered. “What do you think we ought to do?”

Mast was astonished. Big, tough O’Brien whom he had seen engaged in so many heroic-sized fistfights asking
him
what to do. He was considerably flattered. “Well, we can’t just go back to walking post without investigating it,” he whispered toughly, and drew his pistol. “Don’t you think?” he added.

“I guess so,” O’Brien said without enthusiasm. “But how’ll we do it?”

Quietly Mast drew back the slide of the pistol and let it scoop a shell up into the empty chamber into firing position. He put it on safety.

“You be careful of that damned thing, Mast,” O’Brien whispered nervously.

“I will,” Mast promised, and noted that he was holding it rather gingerly himself. No one on the position was allowed to carry a weapon with a round actually loaded in the chamber, only in the clip or magazine. And Mast couldn’t help feeling guilty as if he were doing something wrong by loading it. “Maybe it’s only a cow?” he added as an afterthought.

“Nah,” O’Brien whispered. “They come and took all five of them cows outta there a week ago.”

“Then I’ll have to take a look,” Mast said toughly, but he nonetheless felt the same uneasy, vague nervousness he had felt the day of the attack and his back muscles had begun to twitch again. But he wasn’t going to let O’Brien know that. “You cover me from here with your rifle. You got one in it?”

“No.”

“Well, put one in. And for God’s sake be careful with it. For God’s sake don’t shoot
me
.”

In the deep dark, their faces only a few inches apart, and in spite of the evident nervousness on O’Brien’s face, Mast could see a sudden, very subtle hint of craftiness come into the Irishman’s pale green eyes.

“Tell you what,” O’Brien whispered. “You gimme the pistol and let me go over and look and you cover me with your rifle.”

Alarm for his pistol tingled all through Mast spontaneously, automatically. “Oh, no,” he said quickly. “No. I don’t mind. I’ll do it.”

“But I’m a lot bigger than you. And stronger.”

“That doesn’t matter as long as I got my pistol. Now look, you cover me. And for God’s sake don’t shoot me. I may be gone quite a while, so if you don’t hear from me don’t worry or shoot or anything.”

“Don’t worry, old pal,” O’Brien whispered. “I’ll be right here backing you up you get in any kind of trouble.”

It made Mast feel very warm toward him, and as he crawled off feeling quite brave, if a little nervous, he heard the quiet sound of the Springfield rifle bolt being withdrawn and levering a shell up into it.

Actually, it all came to nothing. At the fence, expecting to be shot in the face at any moment, Mast made himself stand up to climb it wishing now that he had let O’Brien borrow the pistol and do it. After that he crawled around in the field for perhaps five minutes being whipped in the face by the dried grass stems and getting seeds in his nose while his clothes got soaked from the dew. He saw nothing and heard nothing. Finally, he stood up, cautiously at first, and then walked back openly to the fence feeling foolish but still worried about O’Brien shooting him.

“It’s me!” he called in a hoarse whisper. “For God’s sake don’t shoot me, now.”

“Come on,” O’Brien called softly.

It was Mast’s first experience in combat against an enemy, if it could actually be called that, and he felt he had conducted himself very well. Even if it had turned out there wasn’t any enemy. He also felt a great warmth of friendship for O’Brien, having shared this experience with him.

“What’d you find?” O’Brien said when he got back. He was still crouched down with his rifle.

“Nothing,” Mast said in a normal voice. “It must have been just a piece of loose rock that fell off.”

O’Brien unloaded his piece and stood up. He laughed, still a little nervously, and slapped Mast on the back heavily. “I don’t mind tellin’ ya it sure made me nervous.”

“Me too,” Mast grinned warmly.

“But a pistol like that’s perfect for that kind of a job,” O’Brien said enviously.

“Sure is.” Mast released the clip from it and then ejected the live shell in the chamber into the palm of his other hand, always an awkward procedure.

“Here, let me help you,” O’Brien offered. “I’ll hold it while you put the round back in the clip.”

“Sure,” Mast grinned and handed him the pistol. And that was when it happened. When Mast looked up from replacing the shell in the clip and held out his hand, it was to find O’Brien standing two paces off with the pistol stuck in his belt.