Whipple's Castle (36 page)

The lieutenant was out of his mind. He stared, screaming, at Talley. “You're dead! You're dead! Soldier, you're a dead man! Get down here, you dumb shit! Get down here! Jesus Christ Almighty get
down
here!” He pointed to the ground in front of him. Talley didn't move, so Wood punched him in the back and pushed him up. Talley stood up and walked down the planks toward the lieutenant. The butt of his rifle hit the bottom plank, and for a moment it tilted forward and pointed at the lieutenant, who gave out a deep, hoarse bellow before he regained his speech.

“Give me your bayonet! Your bayonet!” Finally Talley seemed to understand. With some difficulty he drew his bayonet from its scabbard. The lieutenant grabbed it and Talley's rifle, fixed the bayonet to the rifle, walked a few yards along the bank and jammed the rifle, bayonet first, into the dirt. “You know what that means?” Talley looked at him through his GI lenses. “That's you!” The lieutenant pointed to the ground. Water poured down his face, and the whole chest of his fatigues was dark and wet. “You're dead! You're in the ground! There's dirt up your ass!”

Talley seemed to watch.

“Now I'll tell you what you're going to do.” The lieutenant marched back and stood in front of Talley. “See that shed over there?” He pointed to a small, unpainted shed not ten yards away. “Do you see it? Can you find it?” Talley seemed to nod. “In that shed is a spade. I want you to go to that shed, open the door, get that spade and bring it back here. Is that clear?” Talley's long face seemed to signify that he'd understood. He turned toward the shed.

The 3rd Platoon had reassembled on the grandstand, and the lieutenant turned toward them. “Welcome back. Welcome back.”

Talley had reached the shed. The door was held by a padlock hasp with a stick jammed through it. Talley studied this. Then he seemed to have figured it out, and to Wood it seemed a good sign, somehow, that Talley, a soldier in his squad, could figure out the business of the stick; if he pulled it out, the hasp could then open. Perhaps some memory of childhood came to help him, but he did pull out the stick, open the hasp and pull the door open.

The roof and back of the shed blew off. When the smoke and dust drifted away, Talley stood there holding the door.

“You're dead!” the lieutenant yelled. “You're deadl Your guts are strung around your neck!”

Talley turned slowly and began to come back.

“Soldier, I gave you an order! I believe I told you there was a spade in that building. I want you to turn around and get that spade, and then I want you to go to the place over there where your rifle is stuck in the ground, and I want you to dig your grave. You are a casualty. You are dead! You are a zombie!”

Talley got the spade from the ruins of the shed and began to dig his grave. It was to be six feet long, two feet wide, and keep going down. He wasn't to pay any attention to any small noises he might hear while he was at it, either, because he was dead.

There were noises. Dynamite caps, nitrostarch, percussion grenades, antitank grenades, Bangalore torpedoes, a mine that caused the air in the gulley to change to solid matter that rose slowly up and over. The ground beneath the stand trembled, and mud came down to splotch their helmet liners. Sixty-millimeter mortar shells could double as grenades if they were armed by pounding their rear ends down on the table hard enough. The Mad Bomber spaced and mounted his explosions as though he conducted some mad, apocalyptic orchestra, and his joy in his crescendoes registered on his face; it softened toward them in their appreciation of his virtuosity. They breathed the exciting fumes of cordite and fear. Pickett vomited, thinly, without losing his teeth, on his legging and shoe, and was too excited to be ashamed.

And yet the explosions were too close to have any depth in their reverberations. They were only deafening and mean in the final snap, and produced only smoke and dirt. The Mad Bomber grew arm-weary at last, and almost disconsolately gave them a ten-minute break so they might stretch and smoke. They were still incredulous; it seemed possible to get used to the noise. This was what they could hardly believe. Pop Stefan gazed, scratching the poison oak on his skinny ribs, his eyes as always slightly askew. Even Talley was given a ten-minute break in the digging of his grave, and he sat on the pile of dirt he'd made, staring at nothing that caused any movement of his dull eyes.

Perrone and Quillen admired the way Wood had plucked the grenade from Talley's lap. “You sure enough saved old Talley's ass,” Quillen said.

“
Marrone!”
Perrone said. “I was taking care of Number One, man. I flew through the blue like a big-ass bird.”

Wood thought: If I hadn't done it, nobody would have done it. Nobody at all. That grenade would have cleaned the meat off Talley's pelvis, and Talley would be dead.

So Talley would be dead, and his little mouth with its sweet, hurt, vacant expression, his grayish fingers that were always a little grubby at the knuckles, as though his mother had never shown him how to wash his hands properly—all would become the weird gray meat that is a corpse. It would be too much like the snuffing out of some small, patient animal, like a mouse or even a toad, the sort of animal he always seemed to come upon when it was in the clutches of a cat or a snake, in that most important, dramatic process of dying. Yet it died with a calm face, almost as though it were used to dying. It seemed to care less than the observer.

Soon Sergeant Garbanks came to get them, and the Mad Bomber told him what Talley had done. Talley's grave was about two feet deep, and the Mad Bomber told him to lie down in it. Talley slowly and obediently lay down into the red dirt.

“God!” the Mad Bomber said to Sergeant Garbanks. “Why don't we just cover him up and save all the trouble later?”

The platoon gathered around to see Talley in his grave. Sergeant Garbanks kicked some dirt in on Talley, who looked up at him with a dim expression.

“Save a hell of a lot of time and money, sir,” Sergeant Garbanks said.

A tear was seen to crawl down Talley's temple toward his ear.

“What do you say, soldier?” the Mad Bomber said. “Aren't you all comfy in that nice warm hole? The big, bad grenades can't get you, and the nasty machine guns, and the naughty eighty-eights. Wouldn't you rather just say your prayers now and go beddie-bye?”

Wood felt hatred, just a twinge of it; it was not a common emotion in him, he knew, and he discovered that it was almost exhilarating.

“Cat got your tongue?” the Mad Bomber asked. “Oh, maybe you're just making up your mind? Now, over on the table I've got a forty-five, and if you take my advice and call it quits and no harm done, I'll go get my pistol belt and I'll just quick as a wink put you out of your misery. How about it?”

“No,” Talley said faintly.

“What did you say, soldier?”

“No.”

“No,
what?
”

“No sir.”

The Mad Bomber looked at heaven. “Holy God Almighty,” he said, “be on our side, ‘cause we'll need You!”

Wood examined the Mad Bomber, and Sergeant Garbanks, who would always act as foil for the insignia of authority. This, he saw clearly, was the only humor of power.

Talley was induced to rise from the dead, and they left the Mad Bomber. They were taken through a booby-trapped barracks where, statistically, they were all killed. The only real casualty was, satisfyingly, Sergeant Garbanks, who got a blood blister as big as a dime on the palm of his hand when one firecracker went off as he probed for another one's detonator.

They had learned very little, it seemed to Wood, but perhaps it was a hard subject to teach to people who were that scared.

 

The next day, on the rifle range, Pop Stefan went mad and broke his rifle stock. Wood didn't see it because the squad had been separated and he was in the butts, raising and lowering targets and taping bullet holes. He got the story from several witnesses, including Pop Stefan a few days later when he was allowed to visit him in the violent ward. The other witnesses said Pop Stefan had, in front of Lieutenant Knobloch, picked up his rifle by the barrel and smashed it down on the ground, breaking the stock at the pistol grip.

“Lieutenant Knobloch shit,” Perrone said.

Stefan told him more of the details. They sat on a wooden bench in a narrow dirt courtyard between the one-story violent ward and a high fence with several strands of barbed wire along its top. From narrow windows just below the eaves of the violent ward came violent sounds—screams, moans and laughter.

“I can't stand it much longer, Wood,” Stefan said. “I can't eat, I can't sleep. I'm the only one in there who isn't a raving maniac.” He did look tired and sick. His skin was grayish, and his chin and neck, the only parts that had tanned, because of the shade of his helmet liner, looked leatherish and sickly. His gray eyes were bloodshot, and those smears of red were the brightest places on his face.

“I have to do everything,” he said. “Those medics make me do everything. I have to feed and shave those crazy people, and they spit at me and try to grab the razor. There's one that always tries to grab me by the testicles, even.”

There weren't any wooden seats on the toilets, Stefan told him, just the cold ceramic stone, because the men would tear them up to use them for weapons. One of them had pried loose a tile from the latrine floor and cut his wrists and throat. Stefan had to clean up all the blood. Some befouled their beds, and some tried to make ropes out of their blankets. One sneaked up and urinated on Stefan's bunk.

“I told the medics I wasn't crazy, so they make me do everything,” Stefan said plaintively. “Wood, I've got to get out of here soon.”

But what had happened on the range? Wood asked. Stefan told him in his dry, matter-of-fact, old man's voice. He seemed unaware, as always, of what might be ludicrous, and he made no special effort to convince.

“I forgot my gas-cylinder plug again. Jeeze, Wood, I don't know what it is about that gas-plug thing, but I can't seem to remember to screw it back in there.”

He'd gone on the range without his gas-cylinder lock screw, and discovered its absence the first time he fired; the sound was funny, hollow, and a great cloud of blue smoke came out of the rifle. A range officer came running along behind the firing line, chewed him out and sent him back two hundred yards to the ordnance shack to get a gas-cylinder lock screw. The ordnance shack didn't have a spare gas-cylinder lock screw, so he came back to find Lieutenant Knobloch, who was yellow-faced and perhaps dizzy in the head from Atabrine. Lieutenant Knobloch told him to get down on his belly and finish that target. “But,” Stefan said, and Lieutenant Knobloch said, “Listen, soldier, give me no buts.” Then Lieutenant Knobloch left. Thus began what seemed no comedy of orders to Stefan. He fired blue smoke, and back came the range officer.

“You tell those ordnance people they better goddam well give you a gas-cylinder lock screw or they'll hear from me! Now git!”

But Stefan was, of course, unfit to carry any such threat, so he returned from the ordnance shack without a gas-cylinder lock screw. He found Lieutenant Knobloch, yellower in the face than ever. “Shoot that goddam rahfle,” Lieutenant Knobloch said, “or I'll have your ass.” Then he left. Stefan shot, and the range officer saw the cloud.

Could this have happened so many times? Wood wondered. Yes, it could, of course it could. Stefan remembered speaking to the extremely unfriendly ordnance sergeant three, maybe even four times. When he returned from what was to be his last trip to the ordnance shack, Lieutenant Knobloch abused him for the last time, saying that this time it would be a summary court-martial, and Stefan broke his rifle in two.

“I'm not crazy, Wood,” he said. “I'm really not. I saw a doctor but he wouldn't let me tell what happened. He said he knew all about it already. My shoulder kept twitching, and that was all he was interested in. He asked me why it twitched—you know how it does sometimes. I said I didn't know why, and all he did was nod.”

Wood had to leave because it was time for Stefan to feed the patients. Before he left, Stefan gave him a letter for Lenore and made him promise to see her and reinforce the lie in the letter—that he'd sprained his back and was in the hospital. “I think I did sprain it a little,” he said seriously.

“I'll do what I can, but I don't know just what I can do,” Wood said.

“Please hurry,” Stefan said. “Please, Wood. Hurry up and do something.”

Wood hitched a ride on a ton-and-a-half back to the 3rd Battalion area. While waiting for the mess hall to open he read the bulletin board, then turned to find Captain Harry T. Jones standing beside him. The captain returned his salute and asked him to come into the orderly room.

“Well?” he said. “Have you made up your mind?”

“Yes sir. I've decided not to take the OCS Boards.”

“
Not to?”

“Yes sir.”

“Listen, Whipple. I want you should change your mind.”

Wood started to speak, but the captain braced and said, “At ease!” He stared at Wood for a moment, controlling his anger. “All right, then. Why not?”

“I don't want the responsibility, sir.”

“Don't give me that crap! You take to responsibility like a goddam duck takes to water. You think we're all blind? You've been mothering that squad of yours—that collection of hind-tit, bad-luck yardbirds—like you were their goddam fairy godfather. Lieutenant Warmbuck told me, for Christ's sake, you even saved Talley's life. You thought you were, anyway—that grenade was fake. You thought fast and you acted. You know your men, such as they are. You knew Talley'd never get that grenade away. Don't tell me you don't want responsibility.”

“I'm tired of it,” Wood said. “I've been responsible all my life, it seems like, and I don't want any more of it than I've got.”