Chapter 8
Well, anyway he had a boat. It was lying there on the beach and now I had to do something with it. It was my alibi: if I didn’t want the boat, why had I done what I had done? I became aware I was still holding the piece of wire in my hands and impulsively I threw it away; it sailed end over end and disappeared in the jungle. Then I dragged the boat down the shingled beach, taking care not to tear the rubber bottom on the rocks. When I pushed it out into shallow water and had one leg cocked up to get in I realized I had forgotten the paddle, and I had to beach the boat again and go look for it. It was dark now and it took me a while to find it. I thrashed around in the bushes, and finally my hand fell across it wedged neatly under a rock. I was annoyed with myself for forgetting the paddle and I made a deliberate effort to do things unhurriedly and calmly. This time I pushed the boat out into the water and somewhat ungracefully fell into it, holding the paddle in one hand. I didn’t look behind me into the clearing.
The boat was rudimentary, a small oval rubber doughnut not quite as large as a bathtub. I hadn’t examined it very well in the dark but I had the impression it was already losing air. When I prodded it with my finger the depression stayed in the rubber for a while and then gradually dimpled out. Under my legs I could feel the water tippling against the thin rubber skin. I started paddling. With each stroke the boat swung in a half circle, and I had to change hands and paddle on the other side to straighten it out. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t sure where I was going anyhow. The thing was to think about each problem as it came. For the time being I concentrated on learning how to row a round boat with one paddle.
I was beginning to get the trick. I came out from the shelter of the islet and the boat caught the breeze and started drifting down to the west. Later, I knew I would have to start working across the wind, toward the beach where I had seen the ships. This would be the hard part, but for the time being I drifted.
In the open channel the breeze was stronger and there were a few white caps. The sky was still overcast; the sea itself was invisible in the dark and the whitecaps ran along scratching lines of foam into the black surface. Now and then I paddled a few strokes, leaving small clots of phosphorescence in the sea behind me like footprints. Then I would hold the paddle across my knees and rest, making a stroke once in a while to keep the boat headed in the right direction.
Across the sound the usual air raid was beginning; there were flashes on the horizon and once in a while pink tracers rose up toward the cloudbank. I tried to make out the shape of the island against the sky but it was too dark. The clouds were lower now and it was beginning to rain; I heard the intermittent patter of the first drops striking the sea. As each drop fell it left a small pinpoint of phosphorescence that glowed for an instant and then dissolved. The islets behind me were invisible, and I could make out the land I was steering for only by the occasional flickering of orange light. Once for a long time there were no flashes and I rested on my paddle and waited, my eyes fixed on the gloom to the south. Then in absolute silence a line of pink dots came out of the jungle and rose up toward the clouds. It was still a long way off; I hadn’t made much progress. There was a half-inch of tepid water in the bottom of the boat now. I couldn’t tell whether the boat was leaking or whether it was from the rain. Through the thin rubber I could feel the surge of the sea lifting and settling under my legs.
The next time I stopped to rest I thought I could make out something on the horizon, a jagged uneven line to the south where the land was supposed to be. But the shape, whatever it was, was not the land because it was moving to the left under the clouds. Finally I made out that it was a line of ships in column: three, then four, then five. As I watched, the line began to telescope into itself and merged into a single narrow lump; the column had turned and was coming toward me. The ships made no sound and showed no lights. They were only a set of shapeless spots that moved sideways, blurred together into a single clot, and then gradually grew larger.
They were coming on fast, and it occurred to me that I was directly in their path and they might run over me in the dark without seeing me. I turned the boat and began paddling to the right, rather uncertainly because I wasn’t sure which way the ships would pass. They came on rapidly until they were perhaps a mile off, while I splashed clumsily with the paddle. Then the lump separated abruptly into individual ships; the column had turned again. Two, three, four, five: they detached themselves and began moving swiftly to the right. They went by me only a quarter of a mile away, long black shadows like holes in the darkness. They were the same destroyers I had seen that morning across the sound; I recognized the high bulk of the bridge and the two funnels set well forward. For a while after they were gone I could hear the hissing and crushing of their wakes in the darkness. A few minutes later from downwind there was a series of rapid white flashes and the jagged arpeggio of gunfire. No answer; the ships were firing at nothing, at ghosts. It was raining harder now, and the clouds had lowered until here and there they hung down almost to the water in long black streamers. A few minutes later I heard the gunfire again, this time farther away.
I couldn’t see the island anymore because of the clouds and I had lost my bearings, but I was less interested now in getting to the beach than I was in staying out of the way of this vague thing that I sensed forming all around me in the dark. But I couldn’t see anything anyhow and there wasn’t much point in paddling; my hands were getting raw from the salt water and the boat was deflating. It was developing a crease in the middle like a comic lawn chair about to fold up. I laid the paddle across the boat and rested. An inch of water sloshed in the bottom now against my thighs.
For a half an hour I drifted, listening to the thump and rattle of the distant battle. I could tell the boat was turning as it drifted, because the sound of the gunfire seemed to move around me in a circle. I couldn’t tell whether the boat was still losing air. When I lay on my back it seemed fairly rigid, then when I sat up to paddle it would buckle in the middle again. To the west it was still raining and the clouds hung down in inky festoons. It was from this direction now that the sound of gunfire came; I couldn’t see the flashes anymore but as I watched I began to make out a kind of pinkish glow in the clouds. It came and went, diffuse: a pink nucleus surrounded by a kind of smokey halo. The whole cloud bank reflected the pink, as thought something was burning and illuminating the clouds from inside. Then the glow faded, and I lost sight of it for a long time.
When it came out of the clouds again it was much nearer; I could see bright spots of flame reflected on the smoke and once in a while something black underneath, the outline of whatever it was that was burning. It was perhaps a mile or so away. The gunfire had stopped now and the only sound was the crisp patter of falling rain. Now and then there was a gurgle of water from the bottom of my boat. I was sleepy and it seemed to me I has been on the water for several hours.
Bleeding pink smoke, the shape came on slowly in the rain. I knew I either had to get out of the way or start paddling toward it, but I couldn’t make up my mind which to do, and the longer I thought about it the less reason there seemed to be for doing anything. I was in a curious apathetic state, as though I were half drugged, and I wasn’t thinking very clearly. The only thing I felt was a kind of exasperation that this new complication should come along and force me to make more decisions, at a time when it was hard for me to think anyhow and above all I wanted things to be simple and uncomplicated. It seemed vaguely odd to me that the shape should keep burning like that in the rain, and that it should keep coming towards me as though pulled by some invisible force. There was no sign of life on it and it made no sound. It was only a few hundred yards away now, moving toward me so slowly that it broke no ridge of foam before it. There was something uncanny about the burning shadow that came on without a sound, hardly disturbing the surface of the sea, and a queer notion struck me that everyone on board was dead or that they had abandoned it and left it to drift. I knew I should probably start shouting at it or paddle towards it, but it seemed to me that if there was anybody on board they would be just as likely to start firing at me as to throw me a line, and anyhow they had problems of their own without stopping to pick up people who were floating around naked in the dark. All this was not really thinking but just little pieces of logic coming unstuck in the glue in my head. In any case the bow was coming straight at me and only a hundred yards away, and in a minute or two I would have to glue my thought processes together and decide what to do about it. But the bright glow of the fire hypnotized me in the way that you can be hypnotized by staring at a candle flame, and I just sat and watched the burning shape come on.
Then, unexpectedly, there was a flash of light and a deafening crash. At first I was half blinded by the glare and I couldn’t understand what it was; I thought the ship had blown up or been struck by lightning. Then I grasped what had happened: somehow, burning and half sunk, the destroyer had crazily fired off its gun into the clouds. After a long time the sound echoed off the land, then silence. I couldn’t get it out of my head there was nobody aboard, perhaps it was simply that the flames had reached the guns and set off the charges. But a few seconds later they fired again. It was closer now and the sound was splitting and acute, a blow of physical violence in the eardrums. This time as the echo died away there was an answering crack of gunfire in the distance, and beyond the destroyer a cluster of white columns sprang through the sea and then sank away again. I felt the concussion through the rubber bottom of the boat.
For a moment I was not aware of any danger. The shells began falling more thickly and there were heavy shocks from underwater. The surface of the sea was shattered; I felt a lurch and the boat sagged and settled. Under my fingers the inflated rubber withered, and the water began to rise over my legs. Then for the first time, when I felt the boat softening and settling under me, I was conscious of the sensation of fear, a kind of coppery constriction in my throat and chest. I turned sideways and fell into the water, with a muddled idea of swimming away from the ship. But something held me and I couldn’t move my feet; the wet rubber skin of the boat was tangled around my legs. With my face half underwater I fought against that clinging rubber as though it were a physical enemy. I was hardly aware of the falling shells or the noise around me anymore; my whole consciousness was dominated by a panic of this wet slippery animal that held me by the ankles and wanted to drown me. At last I kicked it loose and floated weakly, panting. Then I became aware for the first time that something around me had changed.
There was an odd silence, or rather the quality of the sound had altered. The sea was covered with a layer of sticky oil burning here and there in patches. At first I couldn’t find the destroyer, and when I finally caught sight of it I hardly recognized it. In the few seconds I had been struggling with the boat it had been completely shattered: superstructure twisted, mast and funnels collapsed, the whole bulk leaning tiredly to one side. There was a confused din of sounds, and I realized that for some time I had been hearing voices yelling the same word over and over in a kind of chant. “Rage, rage, rage, rage!” It was inexplicable and uncanny. I felt that if I could understand this one word I would finally grasp the meaning of what was happening, that it was the key that would explain the whole senseless chaos of noise, pain, the stench of fuel oil. Rage, rage. At what? At death, at God? At the enemy out there in the dark that nobody had seen? But the yelling bore no relation to any reality I knew or could comprehend; it was the chant of maniacs.
“Range! Range!”
And then finally I understood my mistake; the phones were knocked out and the gun crews were shouting for the range to the target so they could go on firing. And yet this seemed to me even stranger and more incomprehensible, than men who were being burned should cling so doggedly to their technical tasks, that what they should cry out for in their final passion was a number to crank onto a gunsight. The yelling came out of a different world, a world where I didn’t belong, a world where men felt different courages and despairs and were moved by emotions that were inexplicable to me. In the confusion of the battle, half-choked by oil and deafened by the noise, I listened to the voices and thought how strange it was that I had finally found human beings who believed in something beyond preserving and cherishing their own selfish existences.
Finally a voice on the bridge heard them and yelled something back. But the voice was interrupted almost immediately by the shattering crash of the guns. The firing went on raggedly and intermittently. In between the explosions there were confused voices: “Go ahead, take it, don’t wait for them.” “... target.” “Are you on? Goddam it, are you on?” Then there was a direct hit on the top of the bridge, scattering debris and burning fragments, and the whole surface of the sea seemed to spring up convulsively around me.
I was surrounded by continuous din, water, noise, blackness. I sank and turned slowly somewhere under the surface, beaten on all sides by the thud of concussions. This time I knew I had to stay under for a long time and I fought to keep from rising, my lungs pounding and the blackness mounting to my head. At last the thudding stopped. When I came up to the air again everything was so strange that it might have been a hallucination. There was no gunfire and everything was silent. The forward end of the destroyer had disappeared and only a few feet away from me the enormous bulk of the stern was slowly rising up and capsizing. Ponderously the propellers and then then keel rose out of the water, and the black shape went on turning like some enormous and precise machine. Men in orange jackets were clinging to it and dropping off one by one into the sea. Two feet away from me a startling apparition rose out of the water; an oil-blackened face with two white surprised eyes. It hung there mutely for an instant and then disappeared in the smoke. The oil in the water was burning all around me, and it was only by beating with my hands that I could keep it away from my face.
The broken stern was still turning slowly on its axis. An odd shape sank towards me through the flames, four-petaled with a curved arching shadow over it. It was a moment before I grasped was it was: a propeller with its curved guard, upside down and out in the air where a propeller should never be. As the hull turned the curved bar of the guard came slowly downward. I stretched for it but it was still too high; it was a stupid and irrational impulse but my strength was almost gone and I was sick from the oil and I felt I had to hold on to something solid, at least for a few seconds until my strength came back. The next time, lunging up out of the water, I reached it and gripped it with both hands.
I couldn’t let go. A spasm raced through the palms of my hands, and I hung for an interminable moment while the skin loosened like wet paint and slid off onto the metal. I felt the glow of the hull now on my whole body. At last the metal freed what was left of my hands, and I fell blindly downward.
Under the water was darkness, coolness, the agonizing pain of my hands. I was no longer aware of anything except my agony and a sick rage and disgust over the stupidity of what had happened. I was beyond vanity, beyond irony, seeking only oblivion and escape from pain. And yet the pain went on, past the moment when I thought it had become intolerable and into other moments when it increased tenfold, then a hundredfold. I thought I had touched bottom more than once before in my life but I hadn’t; this was it. When the skin slid off my hands onto that incandescent metal I sloughed off everything with it: ego, name, identity, the ink that still clung from the fingerprint room in San Francisco, all the scars, passions, bitterness, humiliation, the lingering odor of failure like stale cabbage that had sunk into my flesh in all those years of cynicism and apathy. I no longer had any idea whether I was dead or alive, underwater or in the air. My hands pulsing, I sank naked through the blackness.
When I became aware of myself again I seemed to be hanging in space. Everything throbbed. A part of my mind, the passive consciousness, was quite lucid. I remember hearing very clearly a voice explaining that the depth charges were armed and would explode when they reached a given depth, I think fifty fathoms. Other voices talked but I didn’t connect the sound with any meaning. Someone was trying to push me up onto something, a raft or a piece of floating wreckage; the hard edge of it was digging in my ribs. I understood that these voices that were talking about me thought I was one of them and wanted to preserve my life; I felt like telling them not to bother, that they were making a mistake, but it didn’t seem worthwhile explaining it to them. I didn’t want them to push me up on a raft or do anything to me, I just wanted them to go away and leave me alone with my pain, above water, underwater, anywhere. But against my will, working patiently against my recalcitrant arms and legs, they lifted me out of the water where it was death to stay and into the air. And I knew that, even though passively and unwillingly, with the compliance of my body I joined together with those unknown hands against the common enemy, not the Japanese ships but pain, weakness, death. “Jack, hang on, God damn it, I cain’t hold you,” a flat Texas voice warned me patiently.
But without my hands I couldn’t hold on and I slid back into the sea again. The first depth charge exploded far underneath; I had the sensation of water forced with a hammer blow into all the openings of my body. “Git your carcass up there, now, go on,” the Texas voice insisted. The hands pushed me up again (I wish I knew who he was, this lunatic who went on patiently trying to save me while the depth charges exploded around his own testicles) and finally I was sprawled on a hard surface out of the water. Everything rocked: bump, bump, bump. I felt the shock of the board I was lying on against my teeth. I was conscious for a while and when I woke up I was retching, the nauseous taste of fuel oil in my mouth. There wasn’t any pain anymore and the vomiting seemed only a mild annoyance, something that prevented me from going back to sleep. Once I had the impression there was somebody else with me on the broken raft: perhaps a corpse, perhaps a hallucination. Or possibly it was my own body I was dreaming of, strangely aware of the touch of my limbs against the boards as though they belonged to somebody else. There were no more voices, and with a sensation like floating I felt myself slipping back into the coolness of sleep.
Oblivion, dream, hallucination. When I opened my eyes again it was because a light was shining on them, so strong I could feel it through the lids. A round eye of white stared at me and there were disconnected noises. Talking, lights; I was suspended in the air by my armpits, then with a swoop I was lowered. I was in a litter; I could feel the reticulated pattern of wires under my body. The pain had not stopped as I had thought; it was still there but too big for my brain to grasp. It had become simply the fact of existence, reality itself. Now the needle slipped in and the pain was washed away in a cool flood, and I realized how immense it had been. I felt alternatingly chilled and covered with sweat; I dozed. Somebody pried my teeth apart with a finger and stuck in a glass tube, and I drank. I heard the soft throb of propellers. When I tried to move my arms I became aware of the two balls of my hands, swathed in soft cotton. It was not the propellers that were pulsing but the hands, a soft almost audible throb at the ends of my arms. Pough, pough like the big blades cutting the water as I slept, the insides of my eyelids were coated with phosphorescence, the wake swarmed and whorled across them. Another needle, more sleep. The sun was shining uncomfortably hot and bright; I lay on a dock while a black man who smelled of coconut oil waved away flies with some rags on the end of a stick. Then somebody must have given me a really terrific injection because I slept for a long time, dreaming of soaring and vibration, a reassuring sound like a cataract, warm and continuous, playing over my nerves. The next thing I remembered was lying in a base hospital, looking straight upward with a very still and hypnotized curiosity into the arched ceiling of a Quonset hut.
I had lost all contact with the passing of time. The corrugated walls bulged and dimpled as though they were made out of water, the sounds came to me undulating in the disconnected logic of a dream. Now and then I woke up and heard people talking around me, impersonally, as though I were an object. From the words I gathered, I was in Noumea and I remembered that this was where they had taken Kammerath ashore. Somehow I knew that he was dead now and this seemed strange; it had not struck me before that a man who was not alive, who had no emotions and gave nothing to others, could die. While the walls rippled around me I pondered over this, with a kind of delirious and lucid clarity.
Someone changed the urinal now and then and asked me if I wanted anything. No one had time to take any special interest in me. Every four hours they would give me a shot, and once a day they would change the dressings on my hands. For the most part I kept my eyes closed. I wasn’t blind, it was just that the eyes were scorched or perhaps inflamed from the fuel oil and it seemed more comfortable to keep them shut. When I opened them, if it happened to be daylight I looked detachedly at the hands that lay on the sheet on either side of my body. I could feel nothing in them and they hung at the ends of my arms like two inert animals, their tentacles coiled into a ball. Once somebody took off the bandages and tried to straighten out the fingers. I let out a piercing yell and that was the end of that. The cracked skin oozed fluid and the corpsman had to mop it up with a piece of cotton. After that they left me alone.
It was the third or fourth day. A Navy doctor who needed a share, in khaki shirt and pants, was standing by the bed, and behind him was a corpsman with a clipboard.
I opened my eyes, stared at him for a few seconds, and shut them again.
“Name?”
There was nothing there; around me everything rippled and the sound hung in a void.
“Service number? Wake up now.”
It was like listening to a radio program tuned in idly. The silence followed and nobody answered. “What’s your name, your name, your name?” My brain turned the phrase over. I was aware of the significance of the words, but they didn’t seem to have any relation to me or even any abstract importance. The doctor seemed to agree; his voice was flat, unemotional, and impersonal.
“Is he still on Demerol?”
“We can take him off if you want.”
“No, leave him alone.”
They hung a bottle of glucose from a kind of a hat-rack and stuck a needle in my forearm. I felt the nutrition drip, drip, drip in the vein. My bladder was uncomfortable and I began mumbling and keening peevishly. Finally the corpsman brought a urinal. The fluid dripped in one end of me and leaked out the other. I was a conduit, a hydraulic system.
I woke up and the voices were talking again. This time they were at the other end of the room but they were moving slowly toward me. It must have been a couple of days later.
“These two stay.”
“Right.”
“This one we’ll ship out, send him to CincPac1 and enter it on the jacket.”
“Check. No, listen Commander, I got him on the other form.” The voices came closer.
“This one’s okay, we’ll keep him. What the hell’s wrong with you anyway, son? You start eating and get some flesh on.”
“These are the three from Tulagi, these three here.”
“Compound fracture, can’t move him. The burn case to CincPac.” He was standing now by my bed.
“I got no BuMed2 jacket on that one, Commander. What do I write?”
“Unidentified, off the Marcus”
Somebody tied a string around my wrist with a cardboard tag attached to it. The voices went on.
“Com Twelve for medic discharge.”
“. . . all right, check.”
Toward nightfall I was loaded into a plane. I opened my eyes once: I was inside a metallic cave painted yellowish-green with litters arranged inside like bunks. The litters were stacked three high but not all of them were occupied. There were perhaps eight or ten other wounded. One of them was moaning in what seemed to me an affected and unconvincing way, as though he had learned how to do it from a bad war movie. The engines barked, missed, barked again and caught. We began moving, bumped across the runway, then my head lifted and I was horizontal; I realized that before I had been lying on a slant. The plane banked and climbed, then it settled back to the level and the note of the engines lowered a little. We flew all night. It was dark except for a small light up forward where the corpsman sat. We landed several times. Whenever the noise of the engines stopped I could hear the man across from me moaning. When we were in the air I lay half-conscious listening to the boom of the engines, which had a pleasant lulling throb, and now and then the corpsman in white pants and a T-shirt would come and give me another shot. Then it was daylight again. “Hickam in ten minutes, I heard somebody yelling over the noise of the engines.
