They faced each other in the lotus position. Two sets of eyes, remarkably similar, stared into one another. Burgess was oblivious to the buzzing insects and the sounds of the makeshift prison camp. He was in a sort of long field, the early morning mist tinted yellow by a sun which refused to dissolve it, refused to burn it away. The sergeant beyond the wire was not even in existence.
"He cain't hear you, Sarge," the guard said. The guard had seen it enough to grow bored with it. "Him and the Jap're in another world."
"I'll 'nother world him," the sergeant said. "Let me through that gate."
The guard opened the gate and the sergeant came through swiftly. Malicious. It was the rising of the flies from the two meditating men that arrested him. He paused beside the shoulder of the Marine corporal. His left hand held the sling of the carbine so that it would not slip from his right shoulder. The right hand hovered. When he brought it down, it was softly.
"Burgess," he said as though he were awakening a child from sleep. "Burgess, the captain wants you."
Burgess did not move.
"C'mon, Jie-reen, off-and-on, off your ass and on your feet."
He shook Burgess hard, this time, alarmed by the deadweight feel of the shoulder. He almost expected rigor mortis. Burgess blinked. He pinched at the bridge of his nose. The Japanese prisoner blinked, also. Slowly, like coming out of bed two hours early, they unwound themselves. They stood.
The sergeant was already at the gate. Irritated, he turned and watched them bow to one another. The Marine was in utilities, in violation of orders because he was not under arms. The prisoner was in a white loincloth, scrawny and benign out of battle dress. When they bowed, they placed their palms against their thighs. The sergeant thought it was a lot of crap.
"Report to the CP on the double," he said.
"Aye-aye, Sergeant," Burgess said.
"And where's your God-damned rifle?"
"Didn't think it was smart to be meditating with prisoners and carrying one of them new Garands with enough rounds to wipe out all the guards, Sergeant."
"Don't get salty with me, you redskin coonass son-of-a-bitch," the sergeant said.
"Aye-aye, Sergeant," Burgess said. It was the one reply that got no complaints. The sergeant had it in for Burgess.
"Thought you redskins signed on to talk to each other and fool the nips, not to talk to the nips and make fools out of us."
"My people have lost their language," Burgess said. The sergeant knew it; he was just blowing off steam.
"Well, there's another coonass transferred in from B Company. I got him in your hole. Mebbe you can talk that dirty French together."
Burgess did not reply. French was not his language, either, nor were the Cajuns his people.
"Well, get your ass to your hole and get your gun," the sergeant said. Reference to a Marine's weapon as his 'gun' was an insult. Again, Burgess did not rise to the bait. "I don't want the captain to see how God damn easy my men disobey my orders."
"Aye-aye, Sergeant."
"Move!"
Burgess trotted to the edge of the jungle but inside the leafy curtain he slowed to a walk in silence. He smelled coffee from the perimeter. It was so thick the Japanese could hone in a tracer round on it. The perimeter wasn't a secret, anyway. The Japanese knew well enough where they were. Only the firepower of the semi-automatic Garands kept them out, nothing else. The Garands were issued in the trenches to replace the bolt-action Springfields.
The Cajun, a shave-tail by the unused look of his utilities, had a Browning Automatic Rifle, bipod attached. Burgess hoped the Frenchman knew how to use it; there'd be plenty of use for it pretty soon. Burgess coughed. The Cajun jumped, reached for the BAR. He could have been reaching for his sixteen-gauge in a duck blind, he looked so much the Cajun.
"Take it easy. I'm Burgess."
"Bonjour, bonjour. Je m'appelle Alton Breaux, Te parle français, cher?"
"No. I don't speak French," Burgess said coldly.
"Mais, you not from sout' Lousana, you?"
"Yeah, I'm from South Louisiana," Burgess said, saddling up. "Prairie Landing. An Englishman name of Col. Gerard Sellers set up a town there, taught us English."
"Oui, oui. Ainh.. .Yes, yes. Prairie Landing I know, yes. An' they got beaucoup 'Cadien there, yes."
"Not on the Reservation," Burgess said, setting the helmet liner. "I got to go. Captain's waiting."
"Oui, oui. D'accord. Ainh .. .Go on, cher," the Cajun said, as though he were giving permission. Burgess was used to that attitude.
There was a new Marine guarding the CP. He didn't recognize Burgess so Burgess had to wait for him to get the okay. Captain Rogers was studying a chart.
"Corporal Burgess reporting, sir," he said, by that time it had become no more than a Vaudeville routine.
He was under arms, so he had to wear his helmet, so he had to give a hand salute. Captain Rogers barely looked at him as he flicked two fingers to his forehead, returning the salute and releasing Burgess. Burgess snapped the salute 'to', as they said, and remained at attention.
"At ease, Corporal," Captain Rogers said. "Sit down. I'll be with you in a minute."
Burgess sat in the severe wooden chair. He balanced the Garand on its butt between his knees. With a compass and protractor, Captain Rogers measured something and made marks on the chart. Then he studied them with an intensity mixed of the mathematic and the artistic. Finally, he dropped the instruments to the page and leaned back wearily in his chair. He rubbed his eyes then looked at him.
"How's it going in the compound?"
"Fine, sir."
"Learn anything?"
"It's funny, sir, but I find I can read it better than I can speak it."
"I mean about troop strength or position," the captain said.
"No, sir. They won't talk. You could cut their ...."
"I thought maybe since you were so friendly ...." The captain let the thought die and Burgess did not revive it. "I guess not. I suppose you can see we're a little desperate."
"They're not like ... uh … us, sir. They have a different idea about duty."
"Tell me something I don't know, Corporal," the captain said. He got up and walked to a corner and picked up a Japanese rifle. Butt toward Burgess, he banged it to the desk atop the papers and maps and charts. "Take a look at this."
Burgess had seen Japanese rifles before; but, out of military courtesy, he picked it up, worked the bolt, looked it over.
"See anything funny?"
"Sir?"
"It's a thirty-one caliber. They can use our captured ammunition but we can't use theirs. Devilish little yellow bastards, aren't they?" Burgess said nothing. "And that bore is some kind of chromium alloy. Almost indestructible. You could fire a million rounds with that bore and still have lands and grooves."
Because he knew the captain wanted him to, Burgess opened the breech and checked the bore. The bore was shiny, clean. He closed the breech and released the pin. The captain took the rifle and put it back in the corner.
"Need something to read?" he asked, sitting again.
"Sir?"
The captain tossed a little black, leather-bound book toward him. Burgess thumbed through the thin rice paper pages. The writing was beautiful handwritten Japanese.
"G-One had it translated. Wouldn't let us have a copy, of course, but said it was a lot of personal crap and nothing strategic. Look through it and see what you come up with. I can tell you we need some information. When they come down that valley, they're going to come with everything they got. All we got is the Garands and Lewis Burwell Puller and I'm not sure even ol' Chesty can pull this one off. I told him about you and he handed over the book. So your name is known to the most famous Marine who ever lived."
"Thank you, sir," Burgess said, although he felt it was a dubious distinction.
"Well, go on ahead, son. See what you can carve out of that chicken scratch."
Burgess slipped the book into the inside pocket of his utility jacket. He stood to attention, snapped a salute. Still comfortable in his chair, the captain flicked him one of those minimal salutes. Burgess about-faced and took two strides toward the door before the captain halted him again.
"I understand you're praying with them," he said when Burgess had turned around.
"I'm learning Zen, sir," Burgess said.
"What?"
"Zen Buddhism. It's ... it was invented for soldiers, sort of a shortcut to enlightenment ... uh … helps your concentration. It's not a religion like we're used to thinking of religion, sir. Not candles and Mass and stuff like that."
"Hell … certainly not. The sons of bitches don't even know how to shit in a toilet. That's the ticket, Corporal. Learn as much about the slimy little devils as you can. The better for us to blast them all back to hell."
"Aye-aye, sir," Burgess said, but still the captain did not dismiss him.
"You got a good head on your shoulders, son. We get out of this tight place, get out from between the rock and the hard place, the devil and the deep, blue sea … I'm recommending you for language school. Marines got to think as well as fight, you know."
"Yes, sir!"
Still the captain paused.
"Well, get on back to your hole," he said as though he had considered telling him something but then rejected it. "We might have company pretty soon."
"Aye-aye, sir," Burgess said and this time made it past the tent flap.
He hurried back through the jungle to the perimeter. The Cajun was persistent about talking but Burgess finally froze him to silence. He wanted to use all the available light to decipher the vertical columns. After the usual ritualistic beginning, the diary read, 'I do not understand the Americans. They bring in great machines to clear away the jungle, fighting nature around them more fiercely than they fight the children of the Emperor. We sons of Nippon, however, use the jungle as an ally, almost as a lover ....'
He read until nightfall. Then he tucked the book into the inside shirt pocket and ate a cold supper of K-rations. The Cajun was smoking; but he was doing it properly, below the parapet.
"And that Japanese, how you learn, you, ainh?" he asked.
Burgess shrugged. He swallowed.
"I like it," he said.
"Hainh! Américain, she hard enough for me, yes cher. And you, you talk Américain, Inyun and Japanese? Po-yie, your poor brains they gone to fry, yes, them."
"I don't speak our language," Burgess said. "Your people killed it."
He could not see the reaction on his face in the darkness, but the cigarette glowed brightly twice with inhaling before the Cajun spoke again.
"And you don' think the Américain, the French they do not kill, them, right now, yes?" he said. It was a question, but one of those questions they use as a statement.
Burgess felt ashamed. All that he had learned that year pointed to the immutability of all life, the universality of experience. And yet, he still clung tenaciously to his own particular lifetime's struggles, bitterness.
"At least you got to go to public school," he said, despite the lofty reverie.
"Me, I finish fourt' grade," the Cajun said.
"I had to go to Catholic school. We were even segregated from the segregated. Couldn't even use public buses. I had to walk five miles each way, rain or shine."
"Oui, oui," the Cajun said, "but look what a man you made, you."
Burgess knew that to be the highest Cajun praise. He loosened up.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Pas rien," the Cajun said. He snubbed the cigarette out in the sand-mud embankment. Burgess smelled the 6-12 as the Cajun applied it to face, neck, hands. The jungle was filled with bloodsuckers. "Worse than what we got at home, yeah, us."
Burgess smiled in the darkness.
"My people lived forever in the Atchafalaya. Where are you from?"
"Rouen."
"That's not far from Prairie Landing."
"No, she close, her."
"We live with the mosquitoes, too."
"An' don' forget the snakes, no, cher?"
They both laughed.
"What a wonderful country," Burgess said.
"Pays de Bon Dieu," the Cajun said, and, of course, Burgess understood. He leaned forward to tell him of the tales his grandmother told of the Basin before the protection levees choked it off and caused the siltation. But the Cajun touched his arm. "Shhh. Tais-toi. Something, he out there, oui."
"It's just the jungle," Burgess said, but he was whispering.
"Non, non. Son les soldats. Ainh .. .the Japonais ..."
Burgess was shaking his head when the flare lit up. He, the combat-experienced Marine, was still shaking his head while the green Marine Cajun was already firing bursts of five or six rounds into the advancing figures already close up on them. Grenade range.
Burgess pulled pins and tossed them out; and all around them were ammo growls and screams of machineguns, bazookas, rifle-fire and blasts of satchel charges and more grenades. And the screams of the wounded and the dying. Burgess fired the Garand. The star cluster flare died in the black heavens but another took its place. The mortars were working now, H.E.-light bursting in the jungle, sending long, dark flashing shadows against the curlicue spiraling white-light shrapnel.
The battle cries of the Japanese seemed to choke Burgess. A bullet burned his cheek. Another slammed into his helmet and sent it spinning from his head. But otherwise he was not hit.
"Aaayyeeeiiiii! ! !"
Burgess grabbed the Cajun by the shoulder, turned the blood-spattered face to him in the light of the tracers, flares, grenade flash explosions. He saw him going into shock, felt a bloody gouge at his neck as the stump of arm tried to cleave to Burgess by splintered bone.
"My hand, he gone," the Cajun said, then lapsed into unconsciousness.
Quickly, Burgess tied the sling of a bandoleer around the stump. He tightened it with a stick to stop the blood. Then he grabbed the BAR, put in a clip, pulled back the bolt.
"Banzai! Banzai!"
The cries were all around him. He had to bring the muzzle up, heavy from the bipod, to fire at the kimono-ed, blade flashing men who charged his post like Samurais. Three of them. He blasted two. The third cut into his shoulder. The leaders cut, his left arm useless. He tried to train the BAR with one hand, like a pistol. But he could not lift the muzzle. He saw the sharp sword blade swish down upon him.
Then he saw nothing. He only heard the voice. The voice was very familiar but he could not quite put the right face to it.
"Osh Ha'tchna. Osh Ha'tchna. Come. Canst thou not recognize Deer-goes-to-water? Osh Ha'tchna. Come. It is the time of thy Full Dark Night. Long enough to linger on the Earth Plane. Thy people, the Men-Altogether-Red await thee, White Flower and the others. All of the others. From the beginning of time until the end. We would not abandon thee."
He saw him, then, the great impatient warrior Deer-goes-to-water. Magnificent, he was, broad chest and muscled shoulders. And the others behind him in the boats upon Grand Lake, a pristine lake not filled with silt.
"There was a battle," he said, the memories of the incarnations still jumbled by death.
"A great battle," Deer-goes-to-water said. "All of us are very proud. Such a warrior has the Turkey-Buzzard Man become. Come, Osh Ha'tchna, thy great people await thee."
"Yes," he said and stepped into the boat. The boat glided onward through the lake, breaking the surface with ever-widening ripples. White Flower was on the barge of the Great Chief. She smiled and held her hands to him. Above, their God, the Noon-Day Sun, smiled powerful, merciful, benign.