The Pistol (5 page)

The little weapons carrier apparently had only just stopped, because Musso had not even climbed out of it yet. As Mast watched from high up on the rocky point, the tiny figure of the tall, lanky, aging Italian unraveled its long legs from the seat well and ambled over to where the sentry at the gate in the wire was opening it. Unlatched, the two of them dragged aside the post fastened to the hanks of loose wire and accordion rolls which made up the gate, and the little weapons carrier followed Musso in, and then they yelled up the hill to the number one hole which in addition to its guns was used also for the young lieutenant’s command post.

Mast’s eyes followed Musso, almost hypnotized. He could not help seeing the Italian oldtimer as his personal and vindictive enemy. If Mast’s pistol was his savior, and his potential salvation, then Musso was Satan, the Devil, come to take it away. Mast could only hate him; viciously, bitterly, terrifiedly and with horror. On the other hand, Musso was a visitor to the position from the outside world beyond the wire, contact with which had been denied them except for the kitchen trucks, and Mast’s instinct was to rush up to him and shake his hand happily and ask him what news there was, how was it going in the Philippines? The two emotions pushed and shoved at each other inside Mast, battling each other over the no-man’s land of his body, while Mast himself only stood and stared, transfixed, hypnotized, by this Evil that was climbing the bill with long-legged strides toward the lieutenant’s hole, and at the same time there appeared in front of his face that other face of the man from the 8th Field Artillery talking cunningly and grinning slyly as he tried to milk another five dollars out of Mast for the pistol.

There was, of course, only one thing for him to do. That was to get out of sight and keep out of sight until Musso left. Re-enforcing this highly sensible decision, there was running through Mast’s mind still another picture, like a short strip of movie film being run over and over and over again without pause, and this was the antithetical filming of his salvation by pistol: the same Jap major was once again rushing down on him with the same bejeweled, gleaming, beautiful Samurai sword through the same jungle on the same unknown island, and the same Mast lay, alone, with the same wound, and missing the same lost rifle, only this time there was no pistol. As a result, as Mast watched the other Mast struggle up to a sitting position, the Jap major, leaping astraddle the wounded legs, his two-handed saber describing a flashing gleaming beautiful arc and striking just beside the neck, clove the sitting Mast splitting him in two to the waist as Mast had seen done to Chinese prisoners in news photos, and the still-living Mast looked down and with anguish watched one half of his own body fall away from the other half while Mast himself anguishedly watched him. Over and over the little film vignette entitled
Ordeal Without Pistol
ran itself through his mind without pause, and Mast stood hopelessly and watched himself divided by saber uncounted numbers of times.

But where was he to get out of sight? The quickest would be to go right back down into number six hole where he had just been relieved, but to do that would be to invite all kinds of suspicion. No man in his right mind would remain in one of these wretched holes and sit and chat with his relief after he had been relieved. The only other alternative was to go down to the number four hole, Mast’s home hole where all his gear was, and sit there on his barracks bag and hope no one called him.

It was an unsatisfactory alternative, but it was the only one. Of course he did not make it. Even if there had been enough time to get there without being seen, he had already sacrificed it by standing and staring at Musso and the picture of his, Mast’s, own frightful future. Long before he had climbed down to the entrance of the number four hole he was spotted by old Sergeant Pender, the chief noncom of the position, and called down to help unload the machine guns, as he had known he would be.

Reluctantly, miserably, but with no alternative left him now, Mast climbed down past the already lost security of the number four hole, which he looked at longingly, to where the five or six men who had been called out to help unload the guns were converging on the weapons carrier. As he scrambled down over the rough rocks, it seemed to Mast that all his life as far back as he could remember he had lived the life of a doomed and guilty man, for some obscure reason he had never been able to isolate, and that this was just one more classic example of it: These other five or six men, they had nothing to be frightened or afraid of or guilty about in going to help unload the carrier; only he, Mast, did. They could approach it happily or cheerfully or laughing or joking without guilty consciences; only he, Mast, could not. And almost every event that had happened to him in his life had been the same way, and never once had any of them been his own fault. Any more than this one now was his own fault: he had not stolen the pistol. Why this was so, Mast could not understand; but it always had been, and Mast could not help wondering with the apathy of despair, as he approached the weapons carrier down on the level ground, if it would continue to be so through the rest of his life, too. Must he always be doomed and guilty and if so, why? Mast wondered as he approached them.

It was an ordeal the like of which Mast hoped never to have to go through again in his life, that unloading. Musso did not recognize the pistol, in fact he apparently did not even see it, but that did not mean that at the very next moment he might not do so. So for the forty-five minutes it took to unload the two heavy guns from the little truck and carefully cart them and their tripods up the rough, rocky hillside and set them up in the holes to which they had been assigned, Mast existed in a state of suspense that all but unmanned him. As he first came up Musso grinned and said hello to him, and he said hello to Musso. There wasn’t much choice. And after that he tried always to unobtrusively keep someone or some thing between himself and Musso. Musso stood beside the truck with old Sergeant Pender, leaning on it and supervising everything and making sure they were careful not to drop or dent or scratch his precious new guns, and after they got them off the truck and began struggling up the treacherous slope with them, he followed them there too, doing the same thing. And to Mast’s eyes, which to Mast seemed to bulge and roll around giddily with this unbearable suspense, Musso with his thin, cynical, Italian old-soldier’s face was the living picture of Evil. To say that Mast hated him would be such an understatement as to lose all conveyance of meaning. Mast hated him viciously, murderously, with the white purity of Galahad and every fiber of his existence.

It was only some time, a full half hour at least, after Musso left, and after Mast himself had gone off by himself and sat with his head in his hands on a rock, that Mast was actually able to realize he still had his pistol after all. He was so shaken by his ordeal that, even when he did realize it, it did not mean anything. Finally, though, he was able to appreciate it: He had gone through the ordeal, and now his salvation was his.
Truly
his. His pistol was his, free and clear.

Obviously, the paper he had signed had been lost, perhaps in the packing and moving out from Schofield. Or maybe it had been lost after they got down here. But the requisition obviously had to be lost. And just as obviously, Musso himself had clearly forgotten all about it. Mast had walked right past him with it hanging on his hip and Musso had looked right at it and hadn’t noticed or remembered.

So his pistol was his, truly and actually his, perhaps for the first time. Once again the face of the man from the 8th Field Artillery from whom he had bought it, and the scene where he had bought it, and the conversation of the transaction itself, all unfolded itself in his mind. It was living proof that it was his, now; that he had bought it after all. When Mast raised his head from his hands, the whole world had taken on a different look, a new look, as if he had never seen it before, or as if it were sparkling cheerfully after a, clean, refreshing rain.

Mast’s salvation, Mast’s chance of surviving, Mast’s little margin of safety which riflemen without pistols did not have, just as machine gunners with pistols but without rifles did not have it either, was Mast’s again, really Mast’s. Now all he had to do was keep it. Keep it away from these maniacal wolves on this Makapoo beach position who wanted to take it from him.

T
HE NEXT ATTEMPT AGAINST
Mast’s pistol came ten days after the supply clerk Musso had visited them to bring the guns.

By now, almost three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, the initial invasion scare had tapered off and things had settled down at Makapoo considerably. Obviously if the Japanese were going to follow up their air attack with an immediate invasion, they would have done so within three weeks. Also, at Makapoo almost all of the heavy, basic barbed wire work had been completed and all that remained to be done were the small jobs of touching up and adding refinements here and there; and it was this fact that had to do with the, one might say, flanking attack against Mast’s pistol when it came.

Mast had been working, whenever he was not on post at the guns, with a large twelve-man detail under one of the buck sergeant squad leaders, putting up combinations of single- and double-apron wire around the three sides of the position that did not face the sea. This was one of the major wiring jobs, and on this detail also happened to be Mast’s old enemy O’Brien as well as another man, a thin-faced little corporal and assistant squad leader named Winstock, who, when he himself was not on post commanding one of the holes, was in charge of one half of the wire detail.

Because this was a major, and important, wiring job, each man’s time was staggered so that no matter who was on post at the machine guns during the day, there were still always twelve men available for the wire detail. As a result, Mast would often find himself working side by side with his old enemy O’Brien. Since O’Brien had tried to take Mast’s pistol himself, Mast and he had not spoken and avoided each other whenever possible. But O’Brien, in his deliberately buffoonish, obviously self-advancing way, had become quite friendly with Winstock on the detail. And after the heavy, basic work was completed and the large detail broken up, Mast was assigned to a smaller detail of four men under Winstock, which also included O’Brien, to do some of the touching-up work. That, really, was what became Mast’s undoing.

It was unbelievably hard work, that heavy, main labor of putting up double-apron and single-apron fence around the entire position. There were at least three hundred and fifty to four hundred yards of it to do, and just a few inches under the soil of all this ground was an almost solid sheet of rock. The screw-type iron pickets, standard in the Army since the trench warfare of the first World War in France, could no more be screwed into it than the wooden tentpegs for the infantry sheltertents could be driven into it. The long stretch of double-apron they had put up during the first days on the public beach below and at right angles to the rocky point of the position itself, had been satisfying, almost pleasant, rewarding work—even if the sea had washed it out twice before the sergeant in charge learned to put it back from the high tide mark. All that was needed there was an iron or wooden bar to thrust through the eye of the picket for leverage to screw it down in the firm, yielding sand, and the pickets, long and short, had gone up in long straight even lines satisfying to the eye and to the esthetic sense. That was wiring as the textbook drawings showed it.

But here, with the bedrock just beneath the surface, and thrusting up through it in so many places, the wiring work was tragic and foredoomed, not pleasing or satisfying at all, and infinitely more exhausting. But they got it done. Picks were delivered to them on the kitchen trucks, after being requisitioned on the field telephone, and where nothing else availed holes were dug for the pickets in the solid rock, then the broken rubble jammed back in around the picket’s screw. At other places cracks and fissures in the rock itself could be utilized and pickets could be wedged into them. The result was a straggly, unevenly spaced, often crooked line of wire and crazily tilted pickets, many of which would have pulled out or fallen over at the first healthy yank. And the weight of a falling human body would have uprooted at least three of the major, long pickets, to say nothing of the shorter anchor pickets.

Nevertheless, they did get it done. At an incredible cost in backbreaking labor. Mast would go to bed at night, if rolling up in two blankets and one shelterhalf in the never-ceasing wind could be called going to bed, unshaven, grimy, unwashed, fat rolls of dirt pressing distastefully up under all his fingernails and hardly able to stand the smell of his own body, with his arms and back aching dully and unceasingly like long-abscessed teeth, and knowing that in six hours he would be called to do a night guard stint. Sometimes he would wake up with both arms totally numb to the shoulders, so that if he were not careful, his own uncontrollable thumb would fall down and stick him in the eye. He was not alone in all this, either. However, knowing that he was not alone in his suffering did not make him any the less unhappy about it. And it was at such times that the feel of the pistol tucked in his belt was the greatest, if not the only comfort he had in living.

No one on the position, excepting only the young lieutenant of course, who could go into the company command post whenever he required, had had a shave or bath since the war had started. Locked-in in their own little island of barbed wire ironically constructed by themselves, cut off from the world entirely except for the daily three deliveries of their food and water, they grew steadily dirtier and more ratty-looking, and more depressed. With the tapering off of the threat of immediate invasion the solid unity its possibility had forced upon them slowly died, and irascibility flourished. It was not until the end of the third week that, freed now of the press of more militarily important matters, someone at the company CP thought of the idea of running a shuttle system of trucks in to the CP where there was running water, so that once-every two or three days each man could get in for a shower and a shave. It did a great deal for the morale at Makapoo. It did a great deal for the morale of all of the company’s isolated positions. But it was also the bathing shuttle system that proved to be Mast’s undoing with the pistol.