“The detective, yes. What in God’s name are you doing here? You’re easily past thirty-five, I should think.”
“So are you. I got drunk and woke up the next morning in the Marines. What’s your excuse?”
He smiled; even grease-streaked and in wartime, it was the sort of sophisticated, vaguely intellectual smile that had typecast him as British in the movies, even though he was as American as the next guy.
He didn’t answer my question, but posed his own: “You know what we’d be doing right now, if we hadn’t got noble and enlisted?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Testifying to a grand jury, or getting ready to.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Bioff/Nitti affair has really hit the fan, back home.”
“No kidding. I wish they’d subpoena me back there.”
“No such luck,” he smiled. Looking past me, he said, “Isn’t that Barney Ross, the boxer?”
“No,” I said. “That’s Barney Ross, the raggedy-ass Marine.”
“Like to meet him sometime.”
“Maybe you will. It’s a small world, you know.”
“Too goddamn, these days. Got to shove off.”
We shook hands, and he climbed on board, and I turned back toward the beach, where Barney was guiding a wet, groggy sailor toward the airfield.
“Wasn’t that Robert Montgomery you were earbangin’ over there? The actor?”
“Nope,” I said. “That was Lieutenant j.g. Henry Montgomery, the PT boat commander.”
“Sure looked like Robert Montgomery the actor to me.”
“That’s ’cause they’re one and the same, schmuck.”
“What’s a guy like him doing in the goddamn service, of all places?”
“You mean when he could be home running a cocktail lounge?”
The battle continued on through the night-flares and tracer bullets lighting the sky-and well into the next day. The Army guys, who were on the Island in force now, the brass getting ready to launch a counteroffensive, were mostly combat virgins, and these air and sea battles they’d witnessed from the beach were an education.
Marines are pretty notorious for mixing it up with the other branches of the service-the Army and Navy being ahead of us in line, where supplies and equipment were concerned-and a lot of resentment naturally developed; but the sailors who survived their ship going down were treated royally on the Island, and I don’t know of a single fight between a soldier and a Gyrene on Guadalcanal. Maybe the jungle took the orneriness out of us. Maybe the Island was so all-consuming it reduced us all to common dogfaces and leave it go at that.
Or maybe what kept the peace was pogey bait.
The Army boys were Hershey-bar rich; we Marines had souvenirs up the wazoo to swap ’em. The bartering was intense and as all-pervasive as combat: Hershey bars and Butterfingers and Baby Ruths were traded for samurai swords and battle flags and Nip helmets. The Army had plenty of cigars and cigs, too-I swapped a rising sun battle flag for a couple cartons of Chesterfields and a quart of whiskey.
“Got any advice for somebody who was never in combat before?” an Army private asked me, after we swapped for something or other.
“Ever hear the expression ‘watch your ass’?”
“Sure.”
“It’s got a special meaning in combat. See, the Japs know us Americans don’t shit where we eat-we don’t like to take a crap, or even take a leak, in or near our foxhole. So at dawn, when you get out of your hole to go looking for a bush to squat behind, stay low-that’s when the snipers are really on the lookout for you. It’s the most dangerous goddamn time of day.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it, kid.”
“Say, uh-are you feeling all right?”
“Never better. I’m in the pink.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling nervously. And went on his way.
But I wasn’t in the pink. I was in the yellow, from the Atabrine tablets, despite which I had a fever. Goddamn malaria, no doubt.
“Check in at sick bay,” Barney said.
“I already did,” I said.
“And?”
“I’m only running a hundred and one degrees. And I can walk.”
“So you’ll be going back on the line with the rest of us.”
“I guess so.”
I guessed right. Late that afternoon we were moving past the native village, Kukum, to the dock complex we’d built there, a pontoon bridge having been thrown across the broad Matanikau days before. Some of the natives looked on-dark men in loincloths and the occasional scrap of discarded Marine clothing, faces tattooed, ears slit and hobbling with ornaments, frizzled hair standing eight inches and reddened by (so I was told) lime juice of all things, carrying captured Jap weapons: knives, bayonets, rifles. Several of them saluted me; I saluted back. What the hell. They were on our side.
On the sandbar nearby, as a grim reminder to the hidden enemy holding the river’s west bank, lay the charred and/or water-logged remains of several Jap tanks, dropped dead in their tracks like great beasts gone suddenly extinct. A dead Jap soldier, bloating up, bobbled on the water as we crossed the pontoon bridge.
“One of Tojo’s men who made good,” the skipper commented, nodding toward the corpse as we passed. The skipper was Captain O. K. LeBlanc-we all liked him, but he was a hard-nosed fucker.
We pushed through the humid, pest-ridden jungle a few hundred yards and dug in for the night; digging foxholes through the roots of small trees and deep-tendriled weeds and brush was no picnic in the park. All I could think about was how nice it would be to be back in Chicago-indoors.
Barney was bitching about his knee-in that and other joints he had some arthritis setting in, and this sodden hellhole wasn’t helping. He had to do all his shoveling without the bracing of a foot on the spade, and that made it tough; I told him not to worry about it-I could carry his weight, where the digging was concerned.
“Shit,” he said, “you’re half dead as it is. Your fever must be up to a hundred and three by now.”
“You’re the one’s delirious,” I said. “Just take it easy-I’ll do the goddamn digging.”
The next morning, after cold K rations, the skipper got the platoon together and asked for a patrol to go scout up ahead. The patrol was to pinpoint the Japs’ positions for the Army regiment that was coming up and taking over within hours.