The Pistol (14 page)

Old Makapoo had changed considerably during those weeks. The hutments they had worked on so long were completed now, and everybody had a dry place to sleep out of the wind. Another, greater change was caused by the bringing of the regiment up to full strength finally. Replacements, new, green, freshly drafted men from the States, were arriving in hordes and being assigned to regiments and companies which had been understrength since 1920. As a result there were now almost twice as many men at Makapoo as there had been in the first days, and rumors were already abroad that the regiments of the division were going to be relieved and shipped out, possibly to Attu, possibly somewhere south. There were even books to read now at Makapoo. A traveling library, fitted out with display shelves on both sides of a truck, had been added and was serviced by the Red Cross along with their canteens. It came around once a week. Old Makapoo was becoming almost civilized, and Mast like the other oldtimers at Makapoo never tired of telling the new men, the replacements, how tough it had been in the beginning.

Everything considered, Mast could almost be said to be quite happy, if his constant state of nervous apprehension and jumpiness over the pistol were discounted. And whenever he thought of those rumors about moving out, possibly into combat, he did not mind the nervous apprehension, not at all.

Nothing could get it away from him now, he was sure of that. What possible way was there that he could lose it?

It dawned clear and cold that day, and as always just at dawn and at dusk, the never-ending, unceasing wind across Makapuu Head fell away to a sudden eery silence louder than any noise for perhaps fifteen minutes. Mast had come off post at the machine guns in hole number five at five o’clock, and since it was so near dawn he stayed up to see it. The thin, violet pencil-line of light along the horizon out at sea grew slowly, spreading upward toward the zenith, slowly turning itself red as it grew, tingeing the scattered clouds with red, then orange as it swelled and swelled, an inexorable lightening of the world, irresistible, not to be stopped. Mast always had loved watching the dawn come up when he was on post.

After the spectacle was over, and feeling refreshed as only dawn after a night awake can make one feel, Mast went down to his hutment to get his mess gear for morning chow. He had just spent two hours sitting in the pitch black of a pillbox, staring out intently past the snub barrel of the .30-caliber watercooled at even deeper blackness in which Japanese ships could not be seen had they been there, until his eyes had wanted to cross themselves or lock themselves open. As always the tension of staring, of expecting, had told on him, worn him out as it did all of them, and now he was hungry. But tired or not, hungry or not, he had his pistol to console him. It was a thought which always came to him at such moments, and he rested his hand on it as he stood in the chowline.

He waited half an hour for the kitchen truck, another ten minutes for the line to move back to him, ate ravenously, cleaned his gear, and walked back to the hutment to get the book he was reading. So far it was just another day, a nice one. Work details were getting fewer and fewer at Makapoo and there was snore time to loaf and read. He sat down on an outcropping with the book.

O’Brien was sitting not far from him on another outcropping, reading a comic book, which the traveling library thoughtfully provided also. Their association was still the same as it had been since that last day at Marconi Pass, because O’Brien had not given up on the pistol. It was in effect an armed truce. They spoke to each other abruptly and stiffly and that was all.

Now, as Mast sat down, O’Brien looked up from his comic book, his pale green eyes cold and hard, and nodded stiffly. Mast nodded back.

Just another day, like any day.

He had been reading perhaps an hour, and it was just about nine o’clock, when another weapons carrier came roaring down the road and turned in at the position. It was too soon to be the noon chow truck, obviously, and the breakfast one had already gone. Mast, like everybody else around, looked up to see what it could be. Weapons carriers from the CP were always big occasions. The sentry opened the wire gate for it and it came on in, and then Mast saw that it was Musso who was in it.

Perhaps it was at that moment that he had his first premonition. At any rate, it was then that his heart surged and then began to pound loudly in his throat. As he watched—with a sense of seeing inexorable, inevitable movement which made everything seem to slow down to an unbearable slowness—the little weapons carrier stopped, Musso unwound his long legs out of the seat well and got out, came walking over toward him. He was unbuttoning his shirt pocket as he came. And Mast merely sat and watched him come.

It was all very simple, really nothing at all. It took but a moment to complete. Mast didn’t actually
feel
anything, except the pounding of his heart. All that would come later. But at the moment there was really nothing to it. Perhaps the most horrifying thing was that Musso had no idea at all of what he was doing, none at all. He was simply doing a job, and a trivial job at that. He was not angry at Mast, he was not even grinning at how Mast had almost ‘put one over,’ he was simply picking up a lost pistol.

He was, if Mast had been forced to voice it, assuming Mast was able, which Mast was not, simply and inexorably Authority. The personification of absolute, inexorable, impersonal Authority.

“I’ve been looking for that damn pistol for over a month,” Musso said indifferently. “Couldn’t figure out where it disappeared to. I knew I was one short, but I couldn’t figure where. Never thought to look up that old peacetime guard issue.”

He had already pulled out the old requisition Mast had signed so long ago, so many eons ago that it was even back before the war. It took but a moment for Mast to unhook the pistol and hand it over, another minute to go inside the hutment and bring out the lanyard brassard and web pistol belt.

“Okay, kid, thanks,” Musso said and turned and left, other more important jobs obviously on his mind.

Mast was still standing, looking after him. Near him O’Brien had gotten up and was standing too, his face totally blank with disbelief and horror. Slowly he moved closer to Mast, his arms dangling disbelievingly, impotently. Mast hardly noticed him. He was thinking that the worst thing was the question which kept running through his head: Had it all been for nothing? all the worries? all that effort? the fight? all that concentration? really all for nothing? He had actually forgotten somewhere along the line that he had ever really signed a requisition for that pistol. Wasn’t that silly? He really had believed he’d bought it.

Down below them Musso climbed back into the carrier, and the sentry opened the gate, and Mast simply stood. As O’Brien was simply standing, beside him. As the weapons carrier crawled out slowly through the gate, O’Brien began biting his lower lip furiously, as if the full import had finally reached him. Tears of rage, or frustration, had come into those pale green eyes of his, and his face was dark with anger.

Then, as the little weapons carrier with Musso in it shot off down the road and began to dwindle into the distance, O’Brien suddenly flung up a big fist and commenced to shake it after the dwindling carrier.

“You got no right!” he shouted. “You got no right! It ain’t fair! You got no right to do that to us!”

In the violence of his emotion he threw his head back and yelled it at the top of his lungs, so that in an odd way, while he was shaking his fist after the carrier, O’Brien himself, his teeth bared, was staring fiercely upward at the sky, as he went on shouting.

“It ain’t fair!” O’Brien shouted upward. “You got no right! It ain’t fair!”

And beside him Mast stood staring at the picture of his Japanese major, who would someday come for him.

James Jones (1921—1977) was one of the preeminent American writers of the twentieth century. With a series of three novels written in the decades following World War II, he established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern soldier’s life.

Born in Illinois, Jones came of age during the Depression in a family that experienced poverty suddenly and brutally. He learned to box in high school, competing as a welterweight in several Golden Gloves tournaments. After graduation he had planned to go to college, but a lack of funds led him to enlist in the army instead.

Before war began he served in Hawaii, where he found himself in regular conflict with superior officers who rewarded Jones’s natural combativeness with latrine duty and time in the guardhouse. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Jones witnessed, he was sent to Guadalcanal, site of some of the deadliest jungle fighting of the Pacific Theater. He distinguished himself in battle, at one point killing an enemy soldier barehanded, and was awarded a bronze star for his bravery. He was shipped home in 1943 because of torn ligaments in his ankle, an old injury that was made much worse in the war. After a period of convalescence in Memphis, Jones requested a limited duty assignment and a short leave. When these were denied, he went AWOL.

His stretch away from the army was brief but crucial, as it was then that he met Lowney Handy, the novelist who would later become Jones’s mentor. Jones spent a few months getting to know Lowney and her husband, Harry, then returned to the army, spending a year as a “buck-ass private” (a term which Jones coined) before winning promotion to sergeant. In the summer of 1944, showing signs of severe post-traumatic stress—then called “combat fatigue—he was honorably discharged.

He enrolled at New York University and, inspired by Lowney Handy, began work on his first novel,
To the End of the
War (originally titled
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
). Drawing on his own past, Jones wove a story of soldiers just returned from war, presenting a vision of soldiering that was neither romantic nor heroic. He submitted the 788-page manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, where it was read by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins rejected it, but saw promise in the weighty work, and encouraged Jones to write a new novel.

Jones began writing
From Here to Eternity,
a story of the war’s beginning. After six years of work, Jones showed it to Perkins, who was fully impressed and acquired the novel. After Perkins’s death, the succeeding editor cut large pieces from the manuscript, including scenes with homosexuality, politics, and graphic language that would have been flagged by the censor of that era, and published the novel in 1951. The story of a soldier at Pearl Harbor who becomes an outcast for refusing to box for the company team, it is an unflinching look at the United States pre-WWII peacetime army, a last refuge for the destitute, the homeless, and the desperate. The book was instrumental in changing unjust army practices, which created a public outcry when it was published. It sold 90,000 copies in its first month of publication and captured the National Book Award, beating out
The Catcher in the Rye
. In 1953 the film version, starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and made Jones internationally famous.

He returned to Illinois to help the Handys establish a writers’ colony. While living there he wrote his second novel,
Some Came Running,
which he finished in 1957. An experimental retelling of his Midwestern childhood, it stretched to nearly 1,000 pages and drew little acclaim.

In 1958, newly married to Gloria Mosolino, Jones moved to Paris, where he lived for most of the rest of his life, spending time with his old friend Norman Mailer and contributing regularly to the
Paris Review
. There he wrote
The Thin Red Line
(1962), his second World War II epic, which follows a company of green recruits as they join the fighting in Guadalcanal; and
The Merry Month of May
(1970), an account of the 1968 Paris student riots.
The Thin Red Line
would be brought to the screen by director Terrence Malick in 1998.

Jones and his wife returned to the United States in the mid 1970s, settling in Sagaponack, New York. There Jones began
Whistle
, the final volume in his World War II trilogy, which was left unfinished at the time of his death. However, he had left extensive notes for novelist and longtime editor of
Harper’s Magazine
Willie Morris, who completed the last three chapters after Jones’s death in 1977. The book was published in 1978.

A young Jones, riding his bike in 1925.