with some other folks. You can tell them how bad your son was. You can't say it to me.'
The bottle came; the bartender disappeared.
Earl worked on the bottle; the bottle worked on Earl. By the time it was a third gone, he was happy: he had forgotten who he was and why he was there. But by the time he reached the halfway point again, he remembered.
Choo choo ch'boogie, came another train song off the juke, driving rhythms, so full of cheer and hope it made him shiver.
I just love the rhythm of the clickety-clack Take me right back to the track, Jack.
Trains again. What he remembered about trains was they took him to ships and then the ships took him out into the sea.
He remembered the 'Canal, that time it got to hand-to-hand, and he and his young boys on the ridge were fighting the Japs with entrenching tools and knives and rocks and rifle butts. There was no ammo because the planes hadn't come in weeks. The Japs were crazy then; they came in waves, one after the other, knowing the Marines were low on ammo, and just traded lives for ammo until the ammo was gone. Then it was throat-and-skull time, an exertion so total it left you dead or, if you made it through, sick at yourself for the men whose heads you'd split open, or whose bellies you ripped out, or who you'd kicked to death. And you looked around and saw your own people, just as morally destroyed. What you did for something called your country that night! How you killed! How you gave your soul up!
Then, Tarawa. Maybe the worst single moment of the whole thing: oh, that walk in was a bitch. There was no place to go. The bullets splashed through the water like little kids in an Arkansas lake, everywhere. Tracers looped low overhead, like ropes of light, flickery and soft. You were so low in the water you couldn't see the land or your own ships behind you. You were wet and cold and tired and if you slipped you could drown; your legs turned to lead and ice but if you stopped you died and if you went on you died. You tried to keep your people together, keep them moving, keep them believing. But all around you, men just disappeared until it seemed you were alone on the watery surface of the planet and the Japs were a nation hell-bent on one sole thing: killing you.
Earl blinked away a shudder, took another pure gulp of this here Jim Beam, as it was called. Fine stuff. He looked at his watch. He had a trip upcoming on the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, but where it would take him and why, he couldn't remember.
Iwo, in the bunker. That he would never forget.
He killed his way along Charlie-Dog. His flamethrower people hadn't made it. The captain was hit. There was no cover, because you couldn't dig into the ash; it just caved in on you. He jumped into a nest, hosed it with his tommy. The bullets flew and bit into the Japs. It blew them up, tore them apart. Earl had blood on his face, Jap blood. But he kept going, nest to nest, shooting up the subsidiary positions until he'd finally killed his way to the main blockhouse.
It was secured from within. On top of that he had no weapon, as the tommy had become so fouled with ash and blood it had given up. He could hear the Nambus working from the other side of the blockhouse.
He raced back to the nest he'd just cleared, threw a Jap aside and pulled three grenades off his belt. The Jap things, you banged them to arm them. He grabbed them, ran to the metal blockhouse door, banged them hard and dumped them. He was back dragging the Nambu out from under more dead Japs when the triple concussion came.
The next part was hard to remember, but also hard to forget. He was in the blockhouse. Give this to the Japs, goddamn were they soldiers. They fought to the end, pouring fire out off Charlie-Dog, killing every moving tiling they saw. They would die to kill: that was their code. Earl jumped from room to room, or rather chamber to chamber, for the place had a low, dark insect-nest quality to it, and it stunk: shit, blood, food, fear, sweat, old socks, rot, rice. He jumped into a chamber and hosed it down. But he didn't know the Nambu was loaded up with tracers.
When he fired in the smoky darkness, the blue-white tracers tore through all, struck hard surfaces and bounced and bounced again, crazed and jagged. Each squirt on the trigger unleashed a kind of neon structure of pure light, blue-gray, flickery, flung out to embrace the Japs, far more power with the careening bullets than he'd have thought possible. It was like making lightning.
He raced from chamber to chamber, pausing to change magazines on the hot thing in his hands. Odd gun: the mag locked in top, not on the bottom where it would make some sense. It was no BAR; only guys who dreamed up samurai swords and kamikaze planes and human-wave attacks would have cooked up such a silly, junky thing. It even looked slant-eyed. But it worked, always.
In the last room, they waited for him with the predator's eerie calmness. They were out of ammo. He didn't care. They didn't care. What happened they expected, as did he. They faced him; one had a sword out and high, but no room to maneuver in what amounted to a sewer tunnel, illuminated by a gun slit. He sprayed them with light and they danced as their own 6.5s tore through them. When they were down, he changed magazines, sprayed them again, unleashing the lightning. Then he threw the hot little machine gun away.
Earl looked at what he had wrought: a massacre. It was too easy. The Japs were committed elsewhere, their eardrums blown out by the shelling, and the gunfire, their sense of duty absolute. He merely executed them in a sleet of fiery light. He heard a moan from the last chamber and thought: one is alive. But then he heard a clank, meaning that a grenade had been primed, so out he spilled, maybe a tenth of a second before the detonation which shredded the last of the wounded.
He returned to the surface, clambering for breath. Men from his platoon had made it up Charlie-Dog now that the blockhouse guns were silenced, but if they spoke to him, he didn't hear, for his ears too were temporarily ruined by the ringing.
'Burn it out,' he screamed.
One of the flamethrower teams disinfected the blockhouse with a cleansing two-thousand-degree ray of pure heat; the radiance drove them all back.
The captain was saying, Goddamn he never saw nothing like it, except the captain was from something called Yale and so what he said in that odd little-girl voice of his was 'I don't believe I have ever seen a more splendid example of field-expedient aggression.' Or something like that.
Earl and his bottle took one more dance. It hit him again, and drove the thoughts out of his head, but then the thoughts came back again.
What was bothersome was the faces. They were vanishing. In one melancholy afternoon in the hospital on Guam after the bad wound on Iwo, he'd done the arithmetic, learned its savage truth.
He had been a sergeant in the Second Marines, then a platoon sergeant also in the Second, and the company gunny sergeant in the Second. When the new Fifth Marine Division was organized in September 1944, he'd been assigned to its 28th Regiment and promoted to first sergeant of Able Company. He had a total of 418 young Marines under him and had been directly responsible to three lieutenants, a captain and finally a major. Of those, 229 had been killed outright. The rest had been wounded, including himself, seven times, three times savagely. None of the officers survived. Of his NCO friends with whom he served at the Marine Detachment in Panama on December 7,1941, he was the only survivor. Of the company professionals, including officers, from that day, he was the only survivor. Of his first platoon in the Second Marines, on Guadalcanal, he was one of ten survivors; of his company that went into the water off Tarawa, 232 men, he was one of thirty-three survivors; of his company of 216 men that hit the black-ash beach at Iwo, he was one of 111 survivors, but he had no idea how many of them had been wounded seriously. On Tinian and Saipan the numbers were a little better, but only by the standards of the Pacific war.
He knew he should not be alive, not by any law of math, and that the medals he had been awarded were much more for the brute violation of the numbers than for any kind of heroism. Manila John Basilone, the bravest man he ever knew, won the Medal of Honor on a ridge on the 'Canal, stopping a Jap attack with a.30 water-cooled and a fighting spirit and nothing else; he made a bond tour, became a celebrity, married a pretty gal, and was blown to pieces in the black ash of Iwo that first day.
Across from the bar Earl saw himself in a mirror, his eyes black as the black in floodwaters as they rise and there's no high ground left. His cheeks were drawn, and his gray lips muttered madly. He swallowed, blinked, and opened his eyes to see himself again. He saw an empty man, a man so tired and lost he hardly was worth the oxygen he consumed, or the bourbon he drank.
He felt so unworthy.
