“Sorry I asked,” Corpo mumbled, and spiced the fish generously, added water and powdered milk and set it to boil. When he looked over at her, she was on her feet, tottering feebly across the rough flooring, her hands held out for balance. He dropped the spoon and hastened toward her.
“Did anyone see Jonathan?” she asked in a higher voice than usual, thin, plaintive — a little-girl voice. “Did anyone see Jonathan? I have to talk to Jonathan. It’s about Mrs. Staniker. It’s about Mrs. Mary Jane Staniker. She scared me awful. Her hair is wound up in the fan. Her face is like plums and her tongue is sticking way out and her eyes are bugging way out and her lips are like sausages. I got to find Jonathan. I thought it was firecrackers. For a joke. Jonathan!”
He caught her by the wrist as she started to run. She wheeled toward him, and he knew that she saw him. She looked at him, and her eyes were different. They saw him. They went wide. She stared down at herself, looked wildly around the room, and then began screaming and screaming and trying to yank free of his grasp. She was much stronger and wirier than he could have guessed. He tried to keep her from hurting herself. In her struggles she fell, and kept trying to crawl away from him, her screams dwindling to tiny rasping squeaks. Suddenly she seemed to faint. He put her back in the bed. She lay on her back, snoring softly, her mouth sagging open. She felt hot again.
After he had stared at her for a little while, he looked until he found his mirror and propped it in its place on the two nails over the sink. He studied himself for a long time, slowly combing the beard with his fingers. He looked around the room.
“Damn, damn, damn,” he said softly, and went to the box where he thought there was a good chance he would find the razor and the soap stick and the little scissors he’d need to chop it short enough to shave and to chop his hair close enough to grease it and comb it.
That Wednesday night, down on the port bunk aboard the Muñequita, Corpo felt mildly disconsolate. Nice how much of that chowder he’d gotten down her, and she’d cooled off some. But she’d been talking to a mess of people he’d never even heard of before, waving her hands some, giggling and smiling and bobbing her head. And he’d wanted her to look right at him once more and see there was nothing to be so scared of. Think he was a wild man or something. A good beard keeps the bugs off. Man had a right to shave or not shave. But she hadn’t been able to see him. She was looking past him mostly, making him feel as if there was a room full of people behind him. “My name is Leila Jane Boylston and I am eleven years old, and I like tennis and swimming best,” she had said in her little-girl voice.
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.