The Pistol (7 page)

The new detail Mast had been assigned to was not a permanent, or even a semi-permanent one, but was a one shot, a one day’s job.

Back in October and November, when Mast’s company had been building the pillboxes they now manned, across the highway from them a little farther down an engineer company had been blasting and digging a cave in the cliff. This cliff, of black volcanic rock, ran straight up ninety or a hundred feet, and was the shoulder of the mountain range behind it. At one time the mountain shoulder must have descended at this point to the sea, but now a shelf had been blasted out to give the highway passage around it. Down this cliff the highway descended steeply in a curve to come out onto the great flat hollow of the Kaneohe Valley. The strategists of the Hawaiian Department had chosen this spot to place a huge demolition of high explosives which when detonated would tumble the tip end of the mountain down over the highway and on down into the sea, to block the highway. That was the purpose of the cave the engineer company had blasted into the cliff in October. It was really one vast mine.

The strategy of this plan, as every man at Makapoo knew, centered around the fact that an enemy (which back in October had to remain nameless and amorphous but could now openly be called the Japanese) would probably attempt his main landings on the beaches of the Kaneohe Valley where the reefs were low and the beach was good. This highway here at Makapoo and the highway up over the much more famous Pali, which had been mined also, were the only two roads over the mountains into Honolulu, and if both roads were blown, the enemy would be bottled up in the Kaneohe Valley and forced to go north and around the mountains and come down the center of the island.

That was the strategy. However, the idea of leaving several tons of high explosive lying around ready to go off at any moment was disturbing to the strategists. In peacetime, they could not quite bring themselves to do this. There might even have been political repercussions, if they had. Also, it was not inconceivable that saboteurs might want to blow it up to aid the enemy. Such a demolition, once constructed and completed, became a physical fact, rather than a mere idea. And as an existing fact it could be equally as useful to the enemy as to the ones who built it, depending upon the tactical situation existing at the time. The demolition might easily, and suddenly, turn into its own opposite and become a danger rather than an aid.

So, for all of these reasons, the demolition had not been loaded back in peacetime. Then, when the attack came, and immediate invasion was expected, there were too many other things of pressing importance. So the big, empty, manmade cave had simply stood there, hollowly. And now, more than a month after the initial attack and confusion, someone had remembered it. The threat of immediate invasion was past, but the threat of future invasion in heavy force was not. So it had been decided at this late date to go ahead and load the demolition.

That was the detail Mast, along with a number of other men from Makapoo, was on that day. Trucks came from the underground vaults in the city loaded down with cases of high explosive. The small engineer detail at the cave, which could not possibly handle so much weight to be moved, had been instructed to get aid from Mast’s own lieutenant at Makapoo. So every man who could be spared at the larger infantry position, Mast among them, was sent to help unload the high explosive.

None of them from Makapoo had ever really seen the cave before. A four or five man detail of engineers under a young lieutenant had been placed there to guard it, although for what and from whom nobody knew, since the cave was totally empty except for its guards who when it rained wisely slept inside. So, not having been allowed inside it before, it was a treat to the men from Makapoo to get inside and look it over, even though the work of unloading was hard. For that matter, it was a treat to them to do anything: any detail, any job, any act that would get them outside that encircling, isolating wall of wire which they had built around themselves and which they had all come gradually to hate. So the cave was a double treat. That is, it was a treat to everyone but Mast who had seen his pistol on the hip of Corporal Winstock.

It was an exciting cave, going deep back into the mountain before it opened out into the magazine, its high vaulted ceiling echoing and at the same time muffling the sounds of the working men, reflecting back in the gloom the light from the engineers’ electric lanterns, while weird gnomelike shadows formed and moved grotesquely on the walls as the carriers themselves moved, an insane, mad, comically ironic parody of everything they did. Looking at those shadows would make even an uneducated man wonder about the seriousness of human endeavors, and it had that effect on almost all of them. But Mast hardly saw it at all. He was far too busy thinking about his pistol,
his
pistol, hanging there on Winstock’s hip, and what things he could do to go about getting it back.

The working party, consisting of fifteen men from the position plus the four or five engineers, moved back and forth trampingly, through the gloomy gallery between the bright sunlight and dust of the trucks outside and the lamplit magazine, two shuttling lines, one carrying the heavy cases, the other returning for a new load. By the end of the day, with a break for lunch, they had unloaded five truck loads of explosive and the stacks of cases in the magazine had grown steadily higher until the cave was nearly filled. Almost everyone had the same reaction, which was a mixture of awe and an expressed desire to be around, but not too close, if it was ever detonated. It would be quite a sight. Shortly before suppertime it was done, and then it was back inside that hated, hateful, self-constructed wall of wire, the gate of which the sentry closed and locked after them. The excursion was over.

During the course of the day Mast had garnered several gossips’ comments upon the appearance of his pistol on Winstock’s hip. Everybody knew about it, and the opinions ran all the way from the one that Winstock had bought it from Mast for an extraordinary sum, to the one that Winstock had won it from Mast for nothing by a single cut of the cards for the pistol against an even more fabulous sum. But it was clear that Winstock had told somebody, perhaps several, that he had bought it from Mast.

Mast himself neither confirmed nor denied any of these opinions and merely grinned knowingly, although he was raging inside. He still had not figured out how he was going to go about getting it back, unless he actually assaulted Winstock physically, a thing which he of course could not do in front of anyone since it was a court-martial offense. Court-martial offense or not, he was prepared to do even that, if he could get Winstock off to himself, because Mast felt he no longer owed Winstock the respect due a noncom. Mast was very emphatic about that. Winstock had already negated that respect himself, Mast felt righteously, when he had lied and cheated and used his rank as a noncom to get hold of the pistol by underhanded means. Mast was shocked and indignant when he thought about a noncom doing such a thing: A man who was a corporal was supposed to set an example of probity and integrity and inspire trust as a leader of men. Mast knew that were he himself a noncom, he would never do such a monstrous thing. He would take his duties and responsibilities far too seriously to do so. So Mast felt no compunction about hitting such a noncom. And besides, Winstock was smaller than Mast.

That evening after supper Mast approached the number two hole where a group had formed around two men who had guitars. He had seen both Winstock and his other enemy O’Brien there. Outside of talking, the guitar music and the singing that went with it (always provided the guitar players felt in the mood to play, of course) were about the only recreation left to those men who were no longer financially solvent enough to play poker.

Mast had already noted at evening chow that something had happened between Winstock and O’Brien. Winstock was still wearing the pistol, and it took only a few minutes to see that neither of them was speaking to the other. Lately, and for about a week before Winstock had pulled his lying, cheating, dishonest trick, the two men had been very chummy. But now whenever one of them said anything to anyone, the other always carefully turned his back or happened to be looking another way.

It was not hard to figure out that their coldness had something to do with the pistol. Mast suspected, from the way they’d had their heads together talking all the time for days, that O’Brien may have been in part responsible for the plot as to how to get it away from him. Possibly O’Brien had been going to buy it from Winstock after he got it, or more likely, since O’Brien was reputedly broke, he was to be given it in return for some favor or other. Only now that Winstock had it he was keeping it for himself. It had to be something of this sort.

The guitar session broke up soon, because once it was dark no more smoking was allowed out in the open. It was this that Mast had been waiting for. When Winstock, laughing and talking and with Mast’s pistol jouncing securely on his hip, left the group and went off up the hill toward his own home hole the number five hole, Mast waited a few seconds and then got up and followed him, aware of O’Brien’s pale green eyes, following
him.
He might not be able to whip O’Brien, but he was sure he could beat up Winstock.

“Winstock!” he called, climbing after him.

Other men were leaving the group too, spreading off toward their home holes or to get their blankets and go wherever it was they slept, some going down and some of them coming up this way through the deepening red dusk. So while Mast and Winstock were out of earshot they still were not strictly alone and out of sight. Mast made a mental note of this. Here would not be the place to fight him, where the court-martial offense could be seen.

“Well! Hello, Mast,” Corporal Winstock said in a friendly way. He was standing a little above Mast, up the hill, on an outcropping. “Ain’t seen you around in quite a spell. Not since they bust up our little detail, in fack.”

Mast simply stood, staring at him unbelievingly. Such lack of guilt seemed impossible.

“Well, what can I do for you, Mast?” Winstock said cheerfully. “Did you want somethin’?”

“What can you do for me? I want my pistol back. That’s what you can do for me.”

“You want
what?”
Winstock said, his eyebrows going up.

“I said I want my pistol back. And I want it back right now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Winstock said cheerfully. Through the deepening, almost blood-red dusk that was now nearly full night, he stared at Mast narrowly with his narrow little face.

“You don’t ’hunh?” Mast said grimly. “Do you deny that you took my pistol away from me—
on your authority as a corporal—
to turn in to the supply room?”

“What?” Winstock said cheerfully. “Oh, that. Sure. Sure I did. I told you I was sorry I had to do it. What more can I say? And why the hell should I deny it?”

“Do you deny that that pistol you’re wearing right now is the same pistol you took away from me?”

“Why, hell yes! Hell yes I deny it!” Winstock said, looking both indignant and surprised. “Oh, I see what’s bothering you. You think this here pistol is the same one I taken off of you, and that I kep’ it instead of turning it in like I said.” He shook his head somberly. “That’s a hell of a thing to accuse a man of, Mast, that’s all.”

“It just happens that I happen to know the serial number of that pistol I had,” Mast said, boring on grimly. “I memorized it. Do you want to let me look at this pistol and check its serial number?”

Shocked indignation flashed over Winstock’s face. “Why, hell no! Who the hell are you? To be checkin’ on me? You got no authority over me. You’ll just have to take my word for it that this ain’t your pistol, Mast.”

“Then where did you get it?” Mast demanded.

“It’s none of your business where I got it,” Winstock said, calm and cheerful once again. “But for your information, I bought it.”

“Bought it!” Mast jeered. “Where could you buy a pistol locked up on this beach position?”

“I bought it today off one of them engineer guys across the road.”

“How could you buy it today when I saw it on you bright and early this morning?”

“I bought it yesterday,” Winstock said unflinchingly.

Mast paused. He knew he was right, it was his pistol, he
knew
it, but from somewhere an element of doubt, a thought that Winstock might be telling the truth, might actually have turned Mast’s pistol in and bought this other one from an engineer, had seeped into his mind. Winstock
looked
so truthful. It emasculated Mast’s righteousness. And the element of doubt increased his already precipitate desperation.

“I could punch you in the head, Winstock,” he said recklessly, “and take it away from you and see the serial number for myself.”

“That’s a court-martial offense,” Winstock said immediately. “You’d be a fool to do it.” He looked around through the swiftly falling night and nodded. “All these guys around to see it.”

“I can wait till I get you by yourself.”

“Ha!” Winstock laughed, throwing back his head. “How you gonna ever get
anybody
by themself on this damn beach position? There’s only four hundred yards of it.”

Salvation! Salvation! Be saved! To be saved! The hope of survival! These words were running themselves over and over through Mast’s mind, a sort of documentary commentary in a professional announcer’s voice to his private movie of the Jap officer severing his body, as he stared at the man who had taken this salvation from him. For a desperate moment he thought of telling him the truth about how he had come into possession of the pistol, that there was a record of it after all. Then he thought of Musso’s endorsing visit, which proved the pistol his, and once again the face of the man from the 8th Field, from whom he had not bought it, rose up in his mind’s eye to confirm. He couldn’t tell him. To do that would be to lose the pistol forever.

“Look, Winstock,” he said flippantly. “I want to ask you something. Just for the record. Between us two. How can you equate—”