IV

Had the Colonel entertained any immediate notions of retribution, he

held them off, for at a quarter past four that morning--halfway through

the march, when the first green light of dawn streaked the sky--Culver

still heard Mannix’s hoarse, ill-tempered voice, lashing his troops from

the rear. For hours he had lost track of Mannix. As for the Colonel, the

word had spread that he was no longer pacing the march but had gone

somewhere to the rear and was walking there. In his misery, a wave of

hope swelled up in Culver: if the Colonel had become fagged, and was

walking no longer but sitting in his jeep somewhere, at least they’d all

have the consolation of having succeeded while their leader failed. But

it was a hope, Culver knew, that was ill-founded. He’d be back there

slogging away. The bastard could outmarch twenty men, twenty raging

Mannixes.

The hike had become disorganized, no slower but simply more spread out.

Culver--held back by fatigue and thirst and the burning, enlarging pain

in his feet--found himself straggling behind. From time to time he

managed to catch up; at one point he discovered himself at the tail end

of Mannix’s company, but he no longer really cared. The night had simply

become a great solitude of pain and thirst, and an exhaustion so

profound that it enveloped his whole spirit, and precluded thought.

A truck rumbled past, loaded with supine marines, so still they appeared

unconscious. Another passed, and another--they came all night. But far

to the front, long after each truck’s passage, he could hear Mannix’s

cry: “Keep on, Jack! This company’s walking in.” They pushed on through

the night, a shambling horde of zombies in drenched dungarees, eyes

transfixed on the earth in a sort of glazed, avid concentration. After

midnight it seemed to Culver that his mind only registered impressions,

and these impressions had no sequence but were projected upon his brain

in a scattered, disordered riot, like a movie film pieced together by an

idiot. His memory went back no further than the day before; he no longer

thought of anything so unattainable as home. Even the end of the march

seemed a fanciful thing, beyond all possibility, and what small

aspirations he now had were only to endure this one hour, if just to

attain the microscopic bliss of ten minutes’ rest and a mouthful of warm

water. And bordering his memory was ever the violent and haunting

picture of the mangled bodies he had seen--when? where? it seemed weeks,

years ago, beneath the light of an almost prehistoric sun; try as he

could, to dwell upon consoling scenes--home, music, sleep--his mind was

balked beyond that vision: the shattered youth with slumbering eyes, the

blood, the swarming noon.

Then at the next halt, their sixth--or seventh, eighth, Culver had long

ago lost count--he saw Mannix lying beside a jeep-towed water-cart at

the rear of his company. O’Leary was sprawled out next to him, breath

coming in long asthmatic groans. Culver eased himself painfully down

beside them and touched Mannix’s arm. The light of dawn, a feverish pale

green, had begun to appear, outlining on Mannix’s face a twisted look of

suffering. His eyes were closed.

“How you doing, Al?” Culver said, reaching up to refill his canteen.

“Hotsy-totsy,” he breathed, “except for my frigging foot. How you making

it, boy?” His voice was listless. Culver looked down at Mannix’s shoe;

he had taken it off, to expose heel and sock, where, soaked up like the

wick of a lantern, rose a dark streak of blood.

“Jesus,” Culver said, “Al, for Christ sake now, you’d better ride in on

a truck.”

“Nail’s out, sport. I finally stole me a pair of pliers, some radioman.

Had to run like hell to catch up.”

“Even so--” Culver began. But Mannix had fallen into an impervious

silence. Up the road stretched a line of squatting men, Mannix’s

company. Most were sprawled in the weeds or the dust of the road in

attitudes as stiff as death, yet some nearby sat slumped over their

rifles, drinking water, smoking; there was a thin resentful muttering in

the air. And the men close at hand--the faces he could see in the

indecisive light--wore looks of agonized and silent protest. They seemed

to be mutely seeking for the Captain, author of their misery, and they

were like faces of men in bondage who had jettisoned all hope, and were

close to defeat. In the weeds Mannix breathed heavily, mingling his with

the tortured wheezes of O’Leary, who had fallen sound asleep. It was

getting hot again. No one spoke. Then a fitful rumbling filled the dawn,

grew louder, and along the line bodies stirred, heads turned, gazing

eastward down the road at an oncoming, roaring cloud of dust. Out of the

dust came a machine. It was a truck, and it passed them, and it rattled

to a stop up in the midst of the company.

“Anyone crapped out here?” a voice called. “I got room for ten more.”

There was a movement toward the truck; nearby, half a dozen men got to

their feet, slung their rifles, and began to hobble up the road. Culver

watched them tensely, hearing Mannix stir beside him, putting his shoe

back on. O’Leary had awakened and sat up. Together the three of them

watched the procession toward the truck: a straggle of limping men

plodding as wretchedly as dog-pound animals toward that yawning vehicle

in the smoky dawn, huge, green, and possessed of wheels--which would

deliver them to freedom, to sleep, oblivion. Mannix watched them without

expression, through inflamed eyes; he seemed so drugged, so dumb with

exhaustion, that he was unaware of what was taking place. “What happened

to the Colonel?” he said absently.

“He went off in a jeep a couple of hours ago,” O’Leary said, “said

something about checking on the column of march.”

“What?” Mannix said. Again, he seemed unaware of the words, as if

they--like the sight of this slow streaming exodus toward the

truck--were making no sudden imprint on his mind, but were filtering

into his consciousness through piles and layers of wool. A dozen more

men arose and began a lame procession toward the truck. Mannix watched

them, blinking. “What?” he repeated.

“To check the column, sir,” O’Leary repeated. “That’s what he said.”

“He _did_?” Mannix turned with an angry, questioning look. “Who’s pacing

the march, then?”

“Major Lawrence is.”

“He _is_?” Mannix rose to his feet, precariously, stiffly and in pain

balancing himself not on the heel, but the toe only, of his wounded

foot. He blinked in the dawn, gazing at the rear of the truck and the

cluster of marines there, feebly lifting themselves into the interior.

He said nothing and Culver, watching him from below, could only think of

the baffled fury of some great bear cornered, bloody and torn by a foe

whose tactics were no braver than his own, but simply more cunning. He

bit his lips--out of pain perhaps, but as likely out of impotent rage

and frustration, and he seemed close to tears when he said, in a tone

almost like grief: “_He_ crapped out! _He_ crapped out!”

He came alive like a somnambulist abruptly shocked out of sleep, and he

lunged forward onto the road with a wild and tormented bellow. “Hey, you

people, get off that goddam truck!” He sprang into the dust with a skip

and a jump, toiling down the road with hobbled leg and furious flailing

arms. By his deep swinging gait, his terrible limp, he looked no more

capable of locomotion than a wheel-chair invalid, and it would have

been funny had it not seemed at the same time so full of threat and

disaster. He pressed on. “Off that truck, goddammit, I say! Off that

truck. Saddle up. Saddle up now, I say! On your feet!” he yelled. “Get

off that goddam truck before I start kicking you people in the ass!” His

words flayed and cowed them; a long concerted groan arose in the air,

seemed to take possession of the very dawn; yet they debarked from the

truck in terrified flight, scuttling down like mice from a sinking raft.

“Move the hell out of here!” he shouted at the truck driver, a skinny

corporal, eyes bulging, who popped back into the cab in fright. “Get

that heap out of here!” The truck leaped off with a roar, enveloping the

scene in blue smoke and a tornado of dust. Mannix, with windmilling

arms, stood propped on his toe in the center of the road, urged the men

wildly on. “Saddle up now! Let somebody else crap out O.K., but not you

people, hear me! Do you hear me! Goddammit, I mean it! Shea, get those

people moving out up there! You people better face it, you got eighteen

more miles to go....” Culver tried to stop him, but they had already

begun to run.

Panic-stricken, limping with blisters and with exhaustion, and in

mutinous despair, the men fled westward, whipped on by Mannix’s cries.

They pressed into the humid, sweltering light of the new day. Culver

followed; O’Leary, without a murmur, puffed along beside him, while to

the rear, with steady slogging footsteps, trailed the remnants of the

battalion. Dust billowed up and preceded them, like Egypt’s pillar of

cloud, filling the air with its dry oppressive menace. It coated their

lips and moist brows with white powdery grit, like a spray of plaster,

and gave to the surrounding trees, the underbrush and vacant fields, a

blighted pallor, as if touched by unseasonable frost. The sun rose

higher, burning down at their backs so that each felt he bore on his

shoulders not the burden of a pack but, almost worse, a portable oven

growing hotter and hotter as the sun came up from behind the sheltering

pines. They walked automatically, no longer with that light and

tentative step in order to ease the pain in their feet, but with the

firm, dogged tread of robots; and if they were all like Culver they had

long since parted with a sensation of motion below the hips, and felt

there only a constant throbbing pain--of blisters and battered muscles

and the protest of exhausted bones.

Then one time Culver saw the Colonel go by in a jeep, boiling along in a

cloud of dust toward the head of the column. He caught a glimpse of him

as he passed: he looked sweaty and tired, far from rested, and Culver

wondered how justified Mannix’s outrage had been, assigning to the

Colonel that act of cowardice. So he hadn’t been pacing the march, but

God knows he must have been hiking along to the rear; and his doubts

were bolstered by O’Leary’s voice, coming painfully beside him: “Old

Captain Mannix’s mighty pissed off at the Colonel.” He paused, wheezing

steadily. “Don’t know if he’s got a right to be that way. Old Colonel

ain’t gonna crap out without a reason. Colonel’s kind of rough sometimes

but he’ll go with the troops.” Culver said nothing. They plodded ahead

silently. Culver felt like cursing the Sergeant. How could he be so

stupid? How could he, in the midst of this pain, yield up still only

words of accord and respect and even admiration for the creator of such

a wild and lunatic punishment? Only a man so firmly cemented to the

system that all doubts were beyond countenance could say what O’Leary

did--and yet--and yet God knows, Culver thought wearily, he could be

right and himself and Mannix, and the rest of them, inescapably wrong.

His mind was confused. A swarm of dust came up and filled his lungs.

Mannix was screwing everything up horribly, and Culver wanted suddenly

to sprint forward--in spite of the effort it took--reach the Captain,

take him aside and tell him: _Al, Al, let up, you’ve already lost the

battle_. Defiance, pride, endurance--none of these would help. He only

mutilated himself by this perverse and violent rebellion; no matter what

the Colonel was--coward and despot or staunch bold leader--he had him

beaten, going and coming. Nothing could be worse than what Mannix was

doing--adding to a disaster already ordained (Culver somehow sensed) the

burden of his vicious fury. At least let up, the men had had enough.

But his mind was confused. His kidneys were aching as if they had been

pounded with a mallet, and he walked along now with his hands on his

waist, like a professor lecturing in a classroom, coattails over his

arms.

And for the first time he felt intolerably hot--with a heat that

contributed to his mounting fury. At night they had sweated more from

exertion; the coolness of the evening had been at least some solace, but

the morning’s sun began to flagellate him anew, adding curious sharp

blades of pain to the furious frustration boiling inside him.

Frustration at the fact that he was not independent enough, nor

possessed of enough free will, was not _man_ enough to say, to hell with

it and crap out himself; that he was not man enough to disavow all his

determination and endurance and suffering, cash in his chips, and by

that act flaunt his contempt of the march, the Colonel, the whole bloody

Marine Corps. But he was _not_ man enough, he knew, far less simply a

free man; he was just a marine--as was Mannix, and so many of the

others--and they had been marines, it seemed, all their lives, would go

on being marines forever; and the frustration implicit in this thought

brought him suddenly close to tears. Mannix. A cold horror came over

him. Far down, profoundly, Mannix was so much a marine that it could

make him casually demented. The corruption begun years ago in his

drill-field feet had climbed up, overtaken him, and had begun to rot his

brain. Culver heard himself sobbing with frustration and outrage. The

sun beat down against his back. His mind slipped off into fevered

blankness, registering once more, on that crazy cinematic tape, chaos,

vagrant jigsaw images: Mannix’s voice far ahead, hoarse and breaking

now, then long spells of silence; halts beside stifling, windless

fields, then a shady ditch into which he plunged, feverish and comatose,

dreaming of a carnival tent where one bought, from a dozen barrels, all

sorts of ice, chipped, crushed, and cubed, in various shapes and sizes.

He was awakened by that terrible cry--_Saddle up, saddle up!_--and he

set out again. The sun rose higher and higher. O’Leary, with a groan,

dropped behind and vanished. Two trucks passed loaded with stiff,

green-clad bodies motionless as corpses. The canteen fell off Culver’s

belt, somewhere, sometime; now he found though, to his surprise, that he

was no longer thirsty and no longer sweating. This was dangerous, he

recalled from some lecture, but at that moment the young marine vomiting

at the roadside seemed more important, even more interesting. He stopped

to help, thought better of it, passed on--through a strange crowd of

pale and tiny butterflies, borne like bleached petals in shimmering

slow-motion across the dusty road. At one point Hobbs, the radioman,

cruised by in a jeep with a fishpole antenna; he was laughing, taunting

the marchers with a song--_I got romance in my pants_--and he waved a

jolly fat hand. A tanager rose, scarlet and beautiful, from a steaming

thicket and pinwheeled upward, down again, and into the meadow beyond:

there Culver thought, for a brief terrified moment, that he saw eight

butchered corpses lying in a row, blood streaming out against the weeds.

But it passed. Of course, he remembered, that was yesterday--or was

it?--and then for minutes he tried to recall Hobbs’s name, gave up the

effort; it was along about this time, too, that he gazed at his watch,

neither pleased nor saddened to find that it was not quite nine o’clock,

began to wind it with careful absorption as he trudged along, and looked

up to see Mannix looming enormously at the roadside.

“Get up,” the Captain was saying. He had hardly any voice left at all;

whatever he spoke with gave up only a rasp, a whisper. “Get your ass off

the deck,” he was saying, “get up, I say.”

Culver stopped and watched. The marine lay back in the weeds. He was fat

and he had a three-day growth of beard. He held up one bare foot, where

there was a blister big as a silver dollar and a dead, livid white, the

color of a toadstool; as the Captain spoke, the marine blandly peeled

the skin away, revealing a huge patch of tender, pink, virgin flesh. He

had a patient hillbilly voice and he was explaining softly, “Ah just

cain’t go on, Captain, with a foot like this. Ah just cain’t do it, and

that’s all there is to it.”

“You _can_, goddammit,” he rasped. “I walked ten miles with a nail in

my foot. If I can do it you can, too. Get up, I said. You’re a

marine....”

“Captain,” he went on patiently, “Ah cain’t help it about your nail. Ah

may be a marine and all that but Ah ain’t no goddam fool....”

The Captain, poised on his crippled foot, made a swift, awkward gesture

toward the man, as if to drag him to his feet; Culver grabbed him by the

arm, shouting furiously: “Stop it, Al! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

Enough!” He paused, looking into Mannix’s dull hot eyes. “Enough!” he

said, more quietly. “Enough.” Then gently, “That’s enough, Al. They’ve

just had enough.” The end was at hand, Culver knew, there was no doubt

of that. The march had come to a halt again, the men lay sprawled out on

the sweltering roadside. He looked at the Captain, who shook his head

dumbly and suddenly ran trembling fingers over his eyes. “O.K.,” he

murmured, “yeah ... yes”--something incoherent and touched with

grief--and Culver felt tears running down his cheeks. He was too tired

to think--except: old Al. Mannix. Goddam. “They’ve had enough,” he

repeated.

Mannix jerked his hand away from his face. “O.K.,” he croaked, “Christ

sake, I hear you. O.K. They’ve had enough, they’ve had enough. O.K. I

heard you the first time. Let ’em crap out! I’ve did--done--” He paused,

wheeled around. “To hell with them all.”

He watched Mannix limp away. The Colonel was standing nearby up the

road, thumbs hooked in his belt, regarding the Captain soberly. Culver’s

spirit sank like a rock. Old Al, he thought. You just couldn’t win.

Goddam. Old great soft scarred bear of a man.

* * * * *

If in defeat he appeared despondent, he retained one violent shred of

life which sustained him to the end--his fury. It would get him through.

He was like a man running a gauntlet of whips, who shouts outrage and

defiance at his tormentors until he falls at the finish. Yet--as Culver

could have long ago foretold--it was a fury that was uncontained; the

old smoking bonfire had blazed up in his spirit. And if it had been out

of control hours ago when he had first defied the Colonel, there was no

doubt at all that now it could not fail to consume both of them. At

least one of them. Culver, prone on his belly in the weeds, was hot with

tension, and he felt blood pounding at his head when he heard the

Colonel call, in a frosty voice: “Captain Mannix, will you come here a

minute?”

Culver was the closest at hand. There were six more miles to go. The

break had extended this time to fifteen minutes--an added rest because,

as Culver had heard the Colonel explain to the Major, they’d walk the

last six miles without a halt. Another break, he’d said, with a wry

weary grin, and they’d never be able to get the troops off the ground.

Culver had groaned--another senseless piece of sadism--then reasoned

wearily that it _was_ a good idea. Probably. Maybe. Who knew? He was too

tired to care. He watched Mannix walk with an awful hobbling motion up

the road, face screwed up in pain and eyes asquint like a man trying to

gaze at the sun. He moved at a good rate of speed but his gait was

terrible to behold--jerks and spasms which warded off, reacted to, or

vainly tried to control great zones and areas of pain. Behind him most

of his men lay in stupefied rows at the edge of the road and waited for

the trucks to come. They knew Mannix had finished, and they had crumpled

completely. For the last ten minutes, in a listless fashion, he had

assembled less than a third of the company who were willing to continue

the march--diehards, athletes, and just those who, like Mannix himself,

would make the last six miles out of pride and spite. Out of fury. It

was a seedy, bedraggled column of people: of hollow, staring eyes and

faces green with slack-jawed exhaustion; and behind them the remnants of

the battalion made hardly more than two hundred men. Mannix struggled on

up the road, approached the Colonel, and stood there propped on his toe,

hands on his hips for balance.

The Colonel looked at him steadily for a moment, coldly. Mannix was no

longer a simple doubter but the heretic, and was about to receive

judgment. Yet there was still an almost paternal reluctance in

Templeton’s voice as he spoke, slowly and very softly, out of the

troops’ hearing: “Captain Mannix, I want you to go in on the trucks.”

“No, sir,” Mannix said hoarsely, “I’m going to make this march.”

The Colonel looked utterly whipped; gray bags of fatigue hung beneath

his eyes. He seemed no longer to have strength enough to display his odd

theatrical smile; his posture was taut and vaguely stooped, the

unmistakable bent-kneed stance of a man with blisters, and Culver was

forced to concede--with a sense of mountainous despair--that he _had_

made the march after all, somewhere toward the rear and for legitimate

reasons of his own, even if Mannix now was too blind, too outraged, to

tell. _Goddam_, Culver heard himself moaning aloud, _if just he only

hadn’t made it_, but he heard the Colonel go on coolly: “Not with that

foot you aren’t.” He glanced down. The Captain’s ankle had swollen to a

fat milky purple above the top of his shoe; he was unable to touch his

heel to the ground even if he had wanted to. “Not with that foot,” he

repeated.

Mannix was silent, panting deeply--not as if taken aback at all, but

only as if gathering wind for an outburst. He and the Colonel gazed at

each other, twin profiles embattled against an escarpment of pines, the

chaste blue sky of morning. “Listen, Colonel,” he rasped, “you ordered

this goddam hike and I’m going to walk it even if I haven’t got one

goddam man left. You can crap out yourself for half the march--” Culver

wanted desperately, somehow, by any means to stop him--not just because

he was pulling catastrophe down on his head but because it was simply no

longer worth the effort. Couldn’t he see? That the Colonel didn’t care

and that was that? That with him the hike had had nothing to do with

courage or sacrifice or suffering, but was only a task to be performed,

that whatever he was he was no coward, he had marched the whole way--or

most of it, any idiot could see that--and that he was as far removed

from the vulgar battle, the competition, which Mannix had tried to

promote as the frozen, remotest stars. He just didn’t care. Culver

strove, in a sick, heaving effort, to rise, to go and somehow separate

them, but Mannix was charging on: “You run your troops. Fine. O.K. But

what’s all this about crapping out--”

“Wait a minute, Captain, now--” the Colonel blurted ominously. “For your

information--”

“_Fuck_ you and your information,” said Mannix in a hoarse, choked

voice. He was almost sobbing. “If you think--”

But he went no further, for the Colonel had made a curious, quick

gesture--stage-gesture, fantastic and subtle, and it was like watching

an old cowboy film to see the Colonel’s hand go swiftly back to the

handle of his pistol and rest there, his eyes cool and passionate and

forbidding. It was a gesture of force which balked even the Captain.

Mannix’s face went pale--as if he had only just then realized the words

which had erupted so heedlessly from his mouth--and he said nothing,

only stood there sullen and beaten and blinking at the glossy white

handle of the pistol as the Colonel went on: “For your information,

Captain, you aren’t the only one who made this march. But I’m not

_interested_ in your observations. You quiet down now, hear? You march

in, see? I order you confined to your quarters, and I’m going to see

that you get a court-martial. Do you understand? I’m going to have you

tried for gross insubordination. I’ll have you sent to Korea. _Keep your

mouth shut._ Now get back to your company!” He was shaking with wrath;

the hot morning light beat with piety and with vengeance from his gray,

outraged eyes. “Get back to your men,” he whispered, “_get back to your

men_!”

Then he turned his back to the Captain and called down the road to the

Major: “All right, Billy, let’s saddle up!”

So it was over, but not quite all. The last six miles took until past

noon. Mannix’s perpetual tread on his toe alone gave to his gait a

ponderous, bobbing motion which resembled that of a man wretchedly

spastic and paralyzed. It lent to his face too--whenever Culver became

detached from his own misery long enough to glance at him--an aspect of

deep, almost prayerfully passionate concentration--eyes thrown skyward

and lips fluttering feverishly in pain--so that if one did not know he

was in agony one might imagine that he was a communicant in rapture,

offering up breaths of hot desire to the heavens. It was impossible to

imagine such a distorted face; it was the painted, suffering face of a

clown, and the heaving gait was a grotesque and indecent parody of a

hopeless cripple, with shoulders gyrating like a seesaw and with

flapping, stricken arms. The Colonel and the Major had long since

outdistanced them, and Culver and Mannix walked alone. When the base

came into sight, he was certain they were not going to make it. They

trudged into the camp. Along the barren, treeless streets marines in

neat khaki were going to lunch, and they turned to watch the mammoth

gyrating Captain, so tattered and soiled--who addressed convulsive

fluttering prayers to the sky, and had obviously parted with his senses.

Then Mannix stopped suddenly and grasped Culver’s arm. “What the hell,”

he whispered, “we’ve made it.”

V

For a long while Culver was unable to sleep. He had lain naked on his

bed for what seemed hours, but unconsciousness would not come; his

closed eyes offered up only vistas of endless roads, steaming thickets,

fields, tents--sunshine and darkness illogically commingled--and the

picture, which returned to his mind with the unshakable regularity of a

scrap of music, of the boys who lay dead beneath the light of another

noon. Try as he could, sleep would not come. So he dragged himself erect

and edged toward the window, laboriously, because of his battered feet;

it took him a full minute to do so, and his legs, like those of an

amputee which possess the ghost of sensation, felt as if they were still

in motion, pacing endless distances. He lowered himself into a chair and

lighted a cigarette. Below, the swimming pool was grotto-blue, a

miniature of the cloudless sky above, lit with shapes of dancing light

as shiny as silver dimes. A squad of sunsuited maidens, officers’ wives,

splashed at its brink or ate ice-cream sundaes on the lawn, and filled

the noontime with their decorous sunny laughter. It was hot and still.

Far off above the pines, in the hot sunlight and over distant peace and

civilization, brewed the smoky and threatful beginnings of a storm.

Culver let his head fall on his arm. Yes, they had had it--those eight

boys--he thought, there was no doubt of that. In mindless slumber now,

they were past caring, though diadems might drop or Doges surrender.

They were ignorant of all. And that they had never grown old enough to

know anything, even the tender miracle of pity, was perhaps a better

ending--it was hard to tell. Faint warm winds came up from the river,

bearing with them a fragrance of swamp and pine, and a last whisper of

air passed through the trees, shuddered, died, became still; suddenly

Culver felt a deep vast hunger for something he could not explain, nor

ever could remember having known quite so achingly before. He only felt

that all of his life he had yearned for something that was as fleeting

and as incommunicable, in its beauty, as that one bar of music he

remembered, or those lovely little girls with their ever joyful, ever

sprightly dance on some far and fantastic lawn--serenity, a quality of

repose--he could not call it by name, but only knew that, somehow, it

had always escaped him. As he sat there, with the hunger growing and

blossoming within him, he felt that he had hardly ever known a time in

his life when he was not marching or sick with loneliness or afraid.

And so, he thought, they had all had it, in their various fashions. The

Colonel had had his march and his victory, and Culver could not say

still why he was unable to hate him. Perhaps it was only because he was

a different kind of man, different enough that he was hardly a man at

all, but just a quantity of attitudes so remote from Culver’s world that

to hate him would be like hating a cannibal, merely because he gobbled

human flesh. At any rate, he had had it. And as for Mannix--well, _he’d_

certainly had it, there was no doubt of _that_. Old Al, he thought

tenderly. The man with the back unbreakable, the soul of pity--where was

he now, great unshatterable vessel of longing, lost in the night, astray

at mid-century in the never-endingness of war?

His hunger faded and died. He raised his head and gazed out the window.

Over the pool a figure swan-dived against the sky, in crucified,

graceless descent broke the water with a lumpy splash. A cloud passed

over the day, darkening the lawn with a moment’s somber light. The

conversation of the girls became subdued, civilized, general. Far off

above the trees, on the remotest horizon, thunderheads bloomed, a

squall. Later, toward sundown, they would roll landward over a shadowing

reach of waves, borne nearer, ever more darkly across the coast, the

green wild desolation of palmetto and cypress and pine--and here, where

the girls pink and scanty in sunsuits would slant their tar-black eyes

skyward in the gathering night, abandon pool and games and chatter and

with shrill cries of warning flee homeward like gaudy scraps of paper on

the blast, voices young and lovely and lost in the darkness, the

onrushing winds. One thing, Culver thought, was certain--they were in

for a blow. Already there would be signals up and down the coast.

Abruptly he was conscious of a dry, parched thirst. He rose to his

feet, put on a robe, and hobbled out into the hallway toward the water

cooler. As he rounded the corner he saw Mannix, naked except for a towel

around his waist, making his slow and agonized way down the hall. He was

hairy and enormous and as he inched his way toward the shower room,

clawing at the wall for support, his face with its clenched eyes and

taut, drawn-down mouth was one of tortured and gigantic suffering. The

swelling at his ankle was the size of a grapefruit, an ugly blue, and

this leg he dragged behind him, a dead weight no longer capable of

motion.

Culver started to limp toward him, said, “Al--” in an effort to help him

along, but just then one of the Negro maids employed in the place came

swinging along with a mop, stopped, seeing Mannix, ceased the singsong

little tune she was humming, too, and said, “Oh my, you poor man. What

you been doin’? Do it hurt?” Culver halted.

“Do it hurt?” she repeated. “Oh, I bet it does. Deed it does.” Mannix

looked up at her across the short yards that separated them, silent,

blinking. Culver would remember this: the two of them communicating

across that chasm one unspoken moment of sympathy and understanding

before the woman, spectacled, bandannaed, said again, “Deed it does,”

and before, almost at precisely the same instant, the towel slipped away

slowly from Mannix’s waist and fell with a soft plop to the floor;

Mannix then, standing there, weaving dizzily and clutching for support

at the wall, a mass of scars and naked as the day he emerged from his

mother’s womb, save for the soap which he held feebly in one hand. He

seemed to have neither the strength nor the ability to lean down and

retrieve the towel and so he merely stood there huge and naked in the

slanting dusty light and blinked and sent toward the woman, finally, a

sour, apologetic smile, his words uttered, it seemed to Culver, not with

self-pity but only with the tone of a man who, having endured and

lasted, was too weary to tell her anything but what was true.

“Deed it does,” he said.

[Illustration]