At the end of the second hour, and three more miles, Culver was sobbing with exhaustion. He flopped down in the weeds, conscious now of a blister beginning at the bottom of his foot, as if it had been scraped by a razor.
Mannix was having trouble, too. This time when he came up, he was limping. He sat down silently and took off his shoe; Culver, gulping avidly at his canteen, watched him. Both of them were too winded to smoke, or to speak. They were sprawled beside some waterway—canal or stream; phosphorescent globes made a spooky glow among shaggy Spanish moss, and a rank and fetid odor bloomed in the darkness—not the swamp’s decay, Culver realized, but Mannix’s feet. “Look,” the Captain muttered suddenly, “that nail’s caught me right in the heel.” Culver peered down by the glare of Mannix’s flashlight to see on his heel a tiny hole, bleeding slightly, bruised about its perimeter and surrounded by a pasty white where the band-aid had been pulled away. “How’m I going to do it with that?” Mannix said.
“Try beating that nail down again.”
“I tried, but the point keeps coming out. I’d have to take the whole frigging shoe apart.”
“Can’t you put a piece of cloth over it or something?”
“I tried that, too, but it puts my foot off balance. It’s worse than the nail.” He paused. “Jesus Christ.”
“Look,” Culver said, “try taking this strip of belt and putting it over it.” They debated, operated, talked hurriedly, and neither of them was aware of the Colonel, who had walked over through the shadows and was standing beside them. “What’s the matter, Captain?” he said.
They looked up, startled. Hands hooked as usual—Culver wanted to say “characteristically”—in his belt, he stood serenely above them. In the yellow flashlight glow his face was red from exertion, still damp with sweat, but he appeared no more fatigued than a man who had sprinted a few yards to catch a bus. The faint smile hovered at the corners of his lips. Once more it was neither complacent nor superior but, if anything, almost benevolent, so that by the unnatural light, in which his delicate features became fiery red and again now, along the borders of his slim tapering fingers, nearly transparent, he looked still not so much the soldier but the priest in whom passion and faith had made an alloy, at last, of only the purest good intentions; above meanness or petty spite, he was leading a march to some humorless salvation, and his smile—his solicitous words, too —had at least a bleak sincerity.
“I got a nail in my shoe,” Mannix said.
The Colonel squatted down and inspected Mannix’s foot, cupping it almost tenderly in his hand. Mannix appeared to squirm at the Colonel’s touch. “That looks bad,” he said after a moment, “did you see the corpsman?”
“No, sir,” Mannix replied tensely, “I don’t think there’s anything can be done. Unless I had a new pair of boondockers.”
The Colonel ruminated, rubbing his chin, his other hand still holding the Captain’s foot. His eyes searched the dark reaches of the surrounding swamp, where now the rising moon had laid a tranquil silver dust. Frogs piped shrilly in the night, among the cypress and the shallows and closer now, by the road and the stagnant canal, along which danced shifting pinpoints of fire—cigarettes that rose and fell in the hidden fingers of exhausted men. “Well,” the Colonel finally said, “well—” and paused. Again the act: indecision before decision, the waiting. “Well,” he said, and paused again. The waiting. At that moment—in a wave that came up through his thirst, his throbbing lips, his numb sense of futility—Culver felt that he knew of no one on earth he had ever loathed so much before. And his fury was heightened by the knowledge that he did not hate the man—the Templeton with his shrewd friendly eyes and harmless swagger, that fatuous man whose attempt to convey some impression of a deep and subtle wisdom was almost endearing—not this man, but the Colonel, the marine: that was the one he despised. He didn’t hate him for himself, nor even for his brutal march. Bad as it was, there were no doubt worse ordeals; it was at least a peaceful landscape they had to cross. But he did hate him for his perverse and brainless gesture: squatting in the sand, gently, almost indecently now, stroking Mannix’s foot, he had too long been conditioned by the system to perform with grace a human act. Too ignorant to know that with this gesture—so nakedly human in the midst of a crazy, capricious punishment which he himself had imposed—he lacerated the Captain by his very touch. Then he spoke. Culver knew what he was going to say. Nothing could have been worse.
“Well,” he said, “maybe you’d better ride in on one of the trucks.”
If there had been ever the faintest possibility that Mannix would ride in, those words shattered it. Mannix drew his foot away abruptly, as if the Colonel’s hand were acid, or fire. “No, sir!” he said fiercely—too fiercely, the note of antagonism, now, was unmistakable— “No, sir! I’ll make this frigging march.” Furiously, he began to put on his shoe. The Colonel rose to his feet, hooked his thumbs in his belt and gazed carelessly down.
“I think you’re going to regret it,” he said, “with that foot of yours.”
The Captain got up, limping off toward his company, over his retreating shoulder shot back a short, clipped burst of words at the Colonel—whose eyeballs rolled white with astonishment when he heard them— and thereby joined the battle.
“Who cares what you think,” he said.
IV
Had the Colonel entertained any immediate notions of retribution, he held them off, for at a quarter past four that morning—halfway through the march, when the first green light of dawn streaked the sky—Culver still heard Mannix’s hoarse, ill-tempered voice, lashing his troops from the rear. For hours he had lost track of Mannix. As for the Colonel, the word had spread that he was no longer pacing the march but had gone somewhere to the rear and was walking there. In his misery, a wave of hope swelled up in Culver: if the Colonel had become fagged, and was walking no longer but sitting in his jeep somewhere, at least they’d all have the consolation of having succeeded while their leader failed. But it was a hope, Culver knew, that was ill-founded. He’d be back there slogging away. The bastard could outmarch twenty men, twenty raging Mannixes.