Once an Eagle

  “What’s the matter, Shif?” Randall said. “You nervous in the service? You want to get sent home? Boy, you’re going to be doing yourself color pieces of jigaboo labor battalions down in Hollandia if you keep that up.”

  “That’s what I was going to tell him,” Meade said.

  He looked at them in cold outrage. “Look, Charlie, you know as well as I—”

  “All right, all right …” Meade’s face was petulant with annoyance. “What are you going to do—fight city hall? You’ve been around.”

  “Yeah,” he said sullenly, “I’ve been around.”

  “Well, then,” Randall intervened, “relax. Massengale is going to be a big name in these parts. Old Dugout doesn’t send congratulatory radios like that unless he means them. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “What do you want to go roaring off at the mouth about Damon for?”

  “Because he’s getting the slimy end of the stick, that’s why …”

  “Oh Jesus, don’t talk to me about Damon: I’ve seen him do things on Wokai that would turn your stomach. He’s a blood-drinker, hard as nails.”

  “He is like hell.”

  “Sure he is—he’s a nut, like all the rest of them. Only worse. You’ve missed the rough stuff, Shif. You’ve got out here for the peaches and cream.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  They sauntered along the fine, broad streets, past the houses with their fanciful grillwork and second-story porches framed in tangles of vines. Ahead of them some children were playing; one of them was riding a captured Japanese bicycle which was wobbling all over the road, and fowl scattered here and there in a torrent of cackles and dust. Two women passed with a stately, undulant walk, carrying great calabashes on their heads; their skirts were lovely diagonal stripes of red and green and yellow. Was it better? to rescue a little city, even if it meant the death of many American soldiers? No, it wasn’t better. It was purchased at a breach of faith—and if trust went, a man’s word, his promise, there was nothing left to rely on in this world …

  “Cebu’s next,” Randall was saying pleasantly, squinting in the sunlight. “Then Panay and Zamboanga. Probably just in time for the grand old rainy season. This place has got it all over Leyte and Luzon. Bobby Blake just got over from Lingayen—he says they’re living like animals … That’s one of the distinct advantages of blitzing your way into cities—the billets and officers’ clubs are all ready for the opening.”

  Shifkin stopped all at once and started back toward the harbor.

  “What are you going to do now?” Meade demanded.

  “I’ll join you in an hour or so. There’s a little errand I’ve got to do, at the hospital.”

  “Don’t get into trouble, now,” Meade warned him. “This isn’t the ETO, you know. This is the Pacific.”

  “I’m getting the picture.”

  “Tell you what, Shif,” Randall called after him with his broad, malicious grin. “How’s for trotting around to see Massengale tomorrow, tendering your apologies? You could tell him you’ve got war nerves. Tell him you were out of your head with dengue, didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “Grand idea.” He turned and looked at the two men, who were gazing at him uncertainly. “Maybe it’s just dengue fever coming on.”

  “It’s mending,” Dr. Terwilliger said, peering balefully at the crusty, oozing flesh, his eyes bugging. “Coming along. You’re a tough bastard, Damon. Even if you are the world’s prize God damned fool.” He took a probe that looked like a miniature lance with a tiny mace attached to the business end and bent forward again. “Three rounds. The Nipponese was either a superb marksman—which I’m inclined to doubt—or he must have been about ten feet away when he decided to send you to Avernus.” Damon, breathing thickly through his nose, said nothing. “But that’s a grenade fragment,” Terwilliger went on. “Piece of scrap iron from a Chicago girder that’s been rusting merrily away lo, these many years in a junkyard in South Gary, Indiana … The little yellow perils knew what to do with it, though.” He handed the probe to a nurse, a big, pleasant girl with deep red hair named Eunice Hogan, and selected another while Damon opened his eyes and sighed. “Of course it’s going to take a while. Scapular’s affected, trapezium’s all smashed to hell and gone. You can hardly expect everything to glue itself together again in five minutes, like some nineteen-year-old.”

  “I suppose not,” Damon answered, watching Terwilliger reach toward his chest with the probe again.

  “You’re damned well right not. When are you going to stop playing Gustavus Adolphus? Ill-weav’d ambition, how much art thou shrunk!” he declaimed. “How long do you expect to get away with this particular game of Russian roulette? You must eat rabbits’ feet for breakfast.”

  “Old—French franc,” Damon muttered tightly.

  “From Flanders. How bloody quaint. You better find yourself a Greek drachma. Or a God damn Buddhist prayer wheel. Half an inch lower and to the left and you’d be food for worms. For worms, brave Percy!”

  The Tweaker, now a bird colonel, had lost all his hair and his face had thickened, which gave his upcurving satanic eyebrows all the more force. Staring at the place where one of the grenade fragments had entered, he chanted lustily: “They come like sacrifices in their trim, and to the fire-ey’d maid of smoky war … will we—will we …” He faltered. “Jesus, I’ve forgotten the lines. Would you believe it!”

  “All—hot and bleeding,” Damon gasped.

  The Tweaker looked up in outrage. His breath smelled of peppermint and hay. “Damn! Yes. All hot and bleeding will we offer them. Can’t imagine why you remember that. Call yourself an Army man, do you? Call yourself a mustang—and reading Shakespeare? Ah, times have changed,” he went on, studying the wound, probing with deft care. “Time was when you could count on an RA right down to the wire: bridge and poker and the sports page and now and then the Infantry Journal. There’s no consistency anymore: fecklessness, depravity is the order of the day … Spotted a boy in surgical when the carnage was at its height, lying there white as the belly of the sacred cod. Going right out on us, could tell by the lips. ‘But we’re giving him whole blood,’ his misguided samaritans informed me. ‘Put it in the femoral,’ I told them, ‘it’ll go in faster through the groin. Don’t you know anything?’ Then of course they couldn’t find it and I had to do that for them. Jesus. And all that time Margulis and I were sweating out a wicked abdominal. Fourteen resections. Hell, we don’t need all those tripes down there …”

  “Doctor, you’re just saying that,” Hogan protested.

  “I was never in more deadly earnest. And women!” The Tweaker chortled in demonic glee. “A labyrinth of absurdities. I could tell you tales of the operating room that would curl your lovely hair—”

  “Not mine,” Hogan retorted.

  “It’s hilarious. Look at our teeth—why couldn’t they have been made of something even faintly durable? and our arms and legs—why aren’t they self-replacing, like crustaceans’ limbs? Look at our joints: a riot of inflexibility. And fragile! One good puff and back we go to dust. Don’t talk to me about the human form divine. It’s a junk heap conceived by a clumsy, uninventive idiot …”

  “But it’s all we’ve got,” Damon murmured. The Tweaker had finished probing during this last Jeremiad, and he lay back against the pillows, breathing heavily, sweat crawling in his brows, and looked dutifully at the bent, spiculate piece of old iron the Tweaker held before him.

  “Well, it’s not good enough. We ought to start over again. Limulus polyphemus, Damon! Put your money on the lowly horseshoe crab: he’ll outlast us all, and more power to him.” He cocked an eye at the Nebraskan and sighed. “You ought to go home, old-timer. You’ve had enough, you know that? Next time I’m going to refuse to patch you up at all …”

  It was lonely in the private room after the Tweaker had gone. Damon had liked it better in the tent ward at Babuyan, where he was ranged with all the others,
cloaked in the fine anonymity of pain; at night the voices came slowly and impersonally, the voices of men who have nothing but time. Time to pass, to outlast.

  “… Jiggs Reardon was killed.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “I saw him, Harry. He was lying there all busted up. All he could do was wink at me.”

  “Look, you can’t kill Jiggs Reardon by degrees. If he wasn’t killed outright he’ll make it back all the way.”

  “…I can’t understand it. I was writing down a message for Swede Lund, the runner was right there beside me. And the next thing I knew I was in here. I can’t figure it out …”

  “… There’s at least a foot of snow now. Maybe more. We always get a good heavy fall first week in December or thereabouts, and another sockdollager just before the holidays. Then it eases off for a while.”

  “Screw the holidays.”

  “Don’t say that. Remember when the first real cold snap comes, and the ponds and swamps freeze solid, and clear as glass? You can look down and see all the leaves and branches and things, just as though they’ve been preserved …”

  “… I wonder if we get to get some ice cream.”

  “Ice cream—!”

  “Sure. When I got hit on Wokai they ran us out to the hospital ship and we had ice cream the day after. Mixed chocolate and vanilla. I’ll never forget the way that ice cream tasted.”

  “Well, you won’t get any on this rock …”

  Now, alone in the little room (I’m segregated, he thought wryly) in the hospital that had been converted from the old Spanish barracks in Reina Blanca, he lay patiently, confined in pain, and dozed, and stared at the ceiling, and tried not to think of the past thirty days and nights. Carefully he would thrust away the images and dwell on days back in Walt Whitman, barn raisings and church suppers and picnics, recall a frieze of faces, voices, gestures of school friends or grownups or girls. But inevitably, with the soft persistence of a tide’s turning, memories of Benning or Dormer or Luzon would seep in, and then thoughts of field problems or evenings in the beat-up, flimsy, peeling sets, and a homely, bony face with a beak of a nose and quick, twinkling, mischievous eyes—and in spite of himself his own would fill with tears and he would grip the sheet with his good hand in a transport of rage and shame. He should never have agreed to carry out that pivot; never. He’d known it was wrong. He should have refused, categorically … Then Massengale would have put Ryetower in and rammed it through anyway. And the Division wouldn’t have battled for Ryetower the way they had for him—they’d have been beaten back, overrun, busted all apart and brushed aside. Murasse would have reached the beach, turned Frenchy’s flank and burned and blasted and butchered his way along their rear all the way to Facpi …

  But maybe Ben would have quit, too: in which case—

  He closed his eyes. So many good men gone. So many! Bowcher, Jackson, Frohman, Stankula, Cavallon, Dougherty, Rodriguez—all the Old Indomitables from the night at the river. Joe Brand and Harry Pritchard. Ray Feltner badly hurt by a grenade: if he lived he was certainly going to lose his manhood. Tom Spaulding had lost a leg. Vinnie De Luca was hit in both legs and Jack McGovern had been burned in the face and throat. Levinson, Lilje, Goethals dead. They were not a division anymore. A few of the survivors had come by to see him on one pretext or another; had sat, constrained and attentive, in the chair beside his cot. But there had been so little to say. They were not a division any longer, and they knew it: they were a slender collection of broken, exhausted old soldiers, and nothing could alter that. So far! To come so far!—and then wind up like this. And Ben—

  There was the sound of movement, a brisk step, and he opened his eyes. Courtney Massengale was standing at the foot of his cot, watching him intently. There was no one with him. Had he been asleep? He scowled at the Corps Commander, blinking.

  “Well—Samuel. How are you getting along?”

  “Can’t complain,” he answered after a moment. “Well I could, but I imagine the Tweaker would turn a deaf ear.”

  “Yes, Terwilliger’s a terror, isn’t he? I was just talking to him about you: he’s obsessed with the idea that you’ve about emptied your barrel of good luck. I told him, ‘Audentes fortuna juvat,’ and quick as a whip he retorted, ‘Ben Jonson says it’s fools that fortune favors, General,’ and he gave me his satan’s-imp grin. I declare, we’re getting wonderfully cultured out here: next thing we’ll be writing sonnets in Latin, and conversing in iambics.” He swung the canvas folding chair around and sat astride it lightly. “I’ve meant to get by before this but things have been lively. Well: how are they treating you?”

  Damon gestured with the good hand. “As you see.” He pulled a cigarette out of the pack beside the bed and lighted it with Ben’s silver-plated Zippo. The salamander crouched amid the flames, his tongue licking out defiantly, his webbed foot on the sword. The Corps Commander’s eyes rested on it briefly, darted away again. He came alone, Damon thought; it’s the first time I’ve seen him alone since Luzon.

  “How’s the operation going?” he asked flatly.

  “Piece of cake, Samuel. Some of Archibald’s people are in Kalao. It’s all over—token resistance, a few road blocks, delaying actions purely. The rest of them are starving to death in the jungle. Just a case of mopping up. MacArthur’s very pleased.”

  “Is he.”

  “Didn’t you see the congratulatory radio? I had it posted and read to all units.”

  “Yes. I saw it.”

  Massengale bent down out of sight beside the cot, straightened again; and Damon saw the samurai sword lying across his knees, the purple whipping on the hilt studded with the garnet and emerald glow of gems, the delicate chasing on the naked blade. “It’s Murasse’s. Barbaric weapon, isn’t it? I want you to have it, Samuel. It’s yours, clearly.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s yours, General.” He remembered Jackson in the teeming dark at the Watubu, gaunt and wild, with the sword in his hands. Oh, didn’t we nail the sons of bitches! After all these months …

  “Where’s Murasse?” he asked.

  Massengale smiled tightly. “Safe in a ditch he bides, with twenty trenchéd gashes on his head, as Terwilliger would say. Not fifty yards from your reserve line at Ilig. They never did find the scabbard.”

  So Murasse had gone all out, too: leading a last forlorn charge on that endless morning. And now he was starting to molder in the black earth, along with Ben and Bowcher and Joe and all the others. He watched Massengale’s fingers running along the curved blade and rage began to beat in his head, making his hands tremble.

  “Samuel, that was a magnificent job you did. Magnificent. Really.”

  “The Division did it, General.”

  “Well now, I’d hardly—”

  “Oh, yes. The Division.” His voice was tense and unsteady, and it angered him. “Knowledge of terrain, you know?” he went on. “I hammered it into them: know your terrain. And they’ve got it now, you see. Perfect familiarity. Half of them will never leave the filthy place …” All at once he thrust himself forward in the bed, although the pain made him grunt.

  “—Why did you do it?” he whispered, despairing and enraged. “Why—? For headlines, for a phony Roman triumph?”

  Massengale’s face had gone very white, the thin lips more bloodless than ever. “Samuel, I don’t think an operational misunderstanding over—”

  “No,” he said softly, and shook his head. “No. It won’t wear, General. It won’t wash and it won’t wear. I’ve got your radios and I’ve got copies of mine. And there are a few witnesses left around. A couple of them. Too bad I didn’t get starched too, isn’t it? along with nearly everybody else? Then you’d have had it all your own way. No problems, no questions asked …”

  “Samuel, those are hard words.”

  “Are they? I’m sorry—they’re the very softest I can muster right now. The very softest, meechingest words I can come up with. Believe me.”

  Massengale examined his nails brie
fly. “I hope we won’t conclude this gallant campaign in a spirit of acrimony—”

  “Don’t use that word!” Damon snapped.

  “What word?”

  “Gallant. Don’t use that word in here. It makes me want to puke. You have no right to use that word, or several others. You profane them.”

  “Samuel, I know you don’t mean that—any of it.”

  “Don’t I? You’re going to find out how much I mean it.”

  There was a short silence, while the Corps Commander’s eyes widened, and the vein began to beat high on his forehead. “Surely you wouldn’t throw away a career of nearly thirty years …”

  He tried to laugh, but it didn’t come off. “Massengale, I’d shove this arm”—he raised the good one—“in a pot of boiling oil if it would put you out of reach of even a squad of GIs … But I won’t be throwing my career away. No.”

  “You’re sure, Samuel? You’re quite sure you want it that way?” The amber eyes were very pale and wide, the points of the pupils almost invisible. “You yourself have changed your plans when circumstances indicated. You even disobeyed orders on Moapora—”

  “The only difference being that I did it to save lives—and I put my own ass on the line …”

  “Ah, but there was more than that, wasn’t there?” That thin, indulgent smile wreathed the Corps Commander’s lips. “A certain indefinable pleasure in breaking away on your own—confounding the audience, carving a new triumph out of the blank rock of the future … ? And as you yourself are fond of saying—it’s one of the Sad Sam trademarks by now: All’s well that ends well.”

  Rage filled him again, thick as gas; he gripped the edge of the sheet. “You’re a monster,” he said, and his eyes filled. “You’re a dirty, cold-blooded monster—you’d feed on your own mother’s flesh for another rung in the golden ladder. You’re worse than Benoît-Guesclin—at least he didn’t know any better: but you—!”