Shaftoe nodded to no one in particular, then stepped to the nearest empty chair at the bar and sat down.
Other Marines would have waited until the whole squad had assembled. Then they would have invaded the restaurant en masse, knocked over a few chairs, spilled some soup. But Shaftoe had seized the initiative before the others could do any such thing and gone in by himself, as a sniper scout was supposed to do. It was not just because he was a sniper scout, though. It was also because he was Bobby Shaftoe, and he was sincerely curious about this place, and if he could, he wanted to spend a few calm minutes in here and learn a few things about it before the fun started.
It helped, of course, that Shaftoe was a quiet and contemplative drunk, not a dangerous explosive drunk. He must have reeked of beer (those Krauts in Tsingtao cranked out a brew whose taste took him right back to Wisconsin, and he was homesick). But he wasn’t hollering or knocking things over.
The chef was busy crafting one of his little morsels and pretended to ignore Shaftoe. The other men at the counter stared coldly at Shaftoe for a while, then turned their attentions back to their food. Shaftoe looked at the array of raw fish laid out on shaved ice behind the bar, then looked around the room. The guy back in the corner was talking in short bursts, reading from a notebook. He would speak maybe ten or twenty words, and then his little audience would turn to one another and grin, or grimace, or sometimes even make a patter of applause. He wasn’t delivering his material like a dirty joke. He spoke precisely and expressively.
Fuck! He was reading poetry! Shaftoe had no idea what he was saying, but he could tell, by the sound of it, that it must be poetry. Didn’t rhyme though. But the Nips did everything queerly.
He noticed that the chef was glaring at him. He cleared his throat, which was useless since he couldn’t speak Nip. He looked at some of that ruby red fish behind the bar, pointed to it, held up two fingers.
Everyone was startled that the American had actually placed an order. The tension was broken, only a little. The chef went to work and produced two morsels, which he served up on a wooden pedestal.
Shaftoe had been trained to eat insects, and to bite the heads off chickens, so he figured he could handle this. He picked the morsels up in his fingers, just like the Nips were doing, and ate them. They were good. He ordered two more, of another variety. The guy in the corner kept reading poetry. Shaftoe ate his morsels and then ordered some more. For perhaps ten seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, he actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a vicious racial brawl.
The third order looked different: laid over the top of the raw fish were thin translucent sheets of some kind of moist, glistening material. It looked sort of like butcher paper soaked in oil. Shaftoe gawked at it for a while, trying to identify it, but it looked like no foodstuff he knew of. He glanced left and right, hoping that one of the Nips had ordered the same stuff, so that he could watch and learn the right way to eat it. No luck.
Hell, they were officers. Maybe one of them spoke a little English. “ ’Scuse me. What’s this?” Shaftoe said, peeling up one corner of the eerie membrane.
The chef looked up at him nervously, then scanned the bar, polling the customers. Discussion ensued. Finally, a Nip officer at the end of the bar, a naval lieutenant, stood up and spoke to Bobby Shaftoe.
“Seaweed.”
Shaftoe did not particularly like the lieutenant’s tone of voice—hostile and sullen. This, combined with the look on his face, seemed to say, You’ll never understand it, you farmer, so why don’t you just think of it as seaweed.
Shaftoe folded his hands primly in his lap, regarded the seaweed for a few moments, and then looked up at the lieutenant, who was still gazing at him expressionlessly. “What kind of seaweed, sir?” he said.
Significant glances began flying around the restaurant, like semaphores before a naval engagement. The poetry reading seemed to have stopped, and a migration of enlisted men had begun from the back of the room. Meanwhile the lieutenant translated Shaftoe’s inquiry to the others, who discussed it in some detail, as if it were a major policy initiative from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The lieutenant and the chef exchanged words. Then the lieutenant looked at Shaftoe again. “He say, you pay now.” The chef held up one hand and rubbed his fingers and thumb together.
A year of working the Yangtze River Patrol had given Bobby Shaftoe nerves of titanium, and unlimited faith in his comrades, and so he resisted the impulse to turn his head and look out the window. He already knew exactly what he would see: Marines, shoulder to shoulder, ready to die for him. He scratched the new tattoo on his forearm: a dragon. His dirty fingernails, passing over the fresh scabs, made a rasping sound in the utterly silent restaurant.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Shaftoe said, pronouncing the words with a drunk’s precision.
The lieutenant translated this into Nipponese. More discussion. But this time it was curt and decisive. Shaftoe could tell that they were about to bounce him. He squared his shoulders.
The Nips were good; they mounted an organized charge out the door, onto the sidewalk, and engaged the Marines, before anyone actually laid a hand on Shaftoe. This spoiling attack prevented the Marines from invading the restaurant proper, which would have disturbed the officers’ meal and, with any luck, led to untold property damage. Shaftoe then felt himself being grabbed from behind by at least three people and hoisted into the air. He made eye contact with the lieutenant while this was happening, and shouted: “Are you bullshitting me about the seaweed?”
As brawls went, the only remarkable part of this one was the way he was carried out to the street before he could actually get started. Then it was like all the other street fights he’d been in with Nip soldiers in Shanghai. These all came down to American brawn (you didn’t get picked for the Fourth Regiment unless you were an impressive-looking six-footer) versus that Nipponese chop-socky.
Shaftoe wasn’t a boxer. He was a wrestler. This was to his advantage. The other Marines would put up their dukes and try to fight it out—Marquis of Queensberry style—no match for chop-socky. Shaftoe had no illusions about his boxing, so he would just put his head down and charge like a bull, take a few blows to the face on his way in, but usually get a solid hold on his opponent and slam him into the cobblestones. Usually that shook the Nip up enough that Shaftoe could get him in a full-nelson or a hammerlock and get him to cry uncle.
The guys who were carrying him out of the restaurant got jumped by Marines as soon as they were in the open. Shaftoe found himself going up against an opponent who was at least as tall as he was, which was unusual. This one had a solid build, too. Not like a sumo wrestler. More like a football player—a lineman, with a bit of a gut. He was a strong S.O.B. and Shaftoe knew right away that he was in for a real scrape. The guy had a different style of wrestling from the American, which (as Shaftoe learned the hard way) included some illegal maneuvers: partial strangulation and powerful, short punches to major nerve centers. The gulf between Shaftoe’s mind and body, already wedged open by alcohol, was yanked open to a chasm by these techniques. He ended up lying on the sidewalk, helpless and paralyzed, staring up into the chubby face of his opponent. This was (he realized) the same guy who’d been sitting in the corner of the restaurant reading poetry. He was a good wrestler for a poet. Or maybe vice versa.
“It is not seaweed,” said the big Nip. He had a look on his face like a naughty schoolkid getting away with something. “The English word is maybe calabash?” Then he turned and walked back into the restaurant.
So much for legend. What none of the other Marines knows is that this was not the last encounter between Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo. The incident left Shaftoe with any number of nagging questions about subjects as diverse as seaweed, poetry, and chop-socky. He sought out Goto Dengo after that, which was not that hard—he just paid some Chinese boys to follow the conspicuous Nip around town and file daily reports. From t
his he learned that Goto Dengo and some of his comrades gathered every morning in a certain park to practice their chop-socky. After making sure that his will was in order and writing a last letter to his parents and siblings in Oconomowoc, Shaftoe went to that park one morning, reintroduced himself to the surprised Goto Dengo, and made arrangements to serve as human punching bag. They found his self-defense skills hilariously primitive but admired his resilience, and so, for the small cost of a few broken ribs and digits, Bobby Shaftoe got a preliminary course in the particular type of chop-socky favored by Goto Dengo, which is called judo. Over time, this even led to a few social engagements in bars, and restaurants, where Shaftoe learned to recognize four types of seaweed, three types of fish eggs, and several flavors of Nip poetry. Of course he had no idea what the fuck they were saying, but he could count syllables, which, as far as he could tell, is about all there is to Nip poetry appreciation.
Not that this—or any other knowledge of their culture—is going to do him any good now that it will soon be his job to kill them.
In return, Shaftoe taught Goto Dengo how not to throw like a girl. A lot of the Nips are good at baseball and so it was hilarious, even to them, to see their burly friend pushing ineffectually at a baseball. But it was Shaftoe who taught Goto Dengo to stand sideways, to rotate his shoulders, and to follow through. He’s paid a lot of attention to the big Nip’s throwing form during the last year, and maybe that’s why the image of Goto Dengo planting his feet on the ashlars of the Bund, winding up, throwing the streamer-wrapped grenade, and following through almost daintily on one combat-booted foot stays in Shaftoe’s mind all the way to Manila and beyond.
A couple of days into the voyage it becomes apparent that Sergeant Frick has forgotten how to shine his boots. Every night he puts them on the deck beside his bunk, like he’s expecting a coolie to come around and shine them up during the night. Every morning he wakes up and finds them in a sorrier state than before. After a few days he starts to draw reprimands from On High, starts to get a lot of potato-peeling duty.
Now in and of itself this is forgivable. Frick started out his career chasing bandolier-draped desperadoes away from mail trains on the High Chaparral, for God’s sake. In ’27 he got shipped off to Shanghai on very short notice, and no doubt had to display some adaptability. Fine. And now he’s on this miserable pre-Great War cruiser and it’s a little hard on him. Fine. But he does not take all of this with the dignity that is demanded of Marines by Marines. He whines about it. He lets himself get humiliated. He gets angry. A lot of the other old China Marines see things his way.
One day Bobby Shaftoe is up on the deck of the destroyer tossing the old horsehide around with a couple of the other young Marines when he sees a few of these older guys accumulating into a sort of human booger on the afterdeck. He can tell by the looks on their faces and by their gestures that they are bellyaching.
Shaftoe hears a couple of the ship’s crew talking to each other nearby. “What the hell is wrong with those Marines?” one of them says. The other one shakes his head sadly, like a doctor who has just seen a patient’s eyeballs roll up into their sockets. “Those poor bastards have gone Asiatic,” he says.
And then they turn and look at Shaftoe.
That evening, at mess, Bobby Shaftoe gulps his food down double-time, then stands up and approaches the table where those Old Breed Marines are sullenly gathered. “Begging your pardon, Sergeant!” he hollers. “Request permission to shine your boots, Sarge!”
Frick’s mouth drops open, revealing a half-chewed plug of boiled beef. “Whud you say, Corporal?”
The mess has gone silent. “Respectfully request permission to shine your boots, Sarge!”
Frick is not the quickest guy in the world even when he’s sober, and it’s pretty obvious, just from looking at his pupils, that he and his comrades have brought some opium aboard. “Wull, uh, I guess so,” he says. He looks around at his crew of gripers, who are a little confused and a little amused. He unlaces his boots. Bobby Shaftoe takes those disgraceful things away and returns a bit later with them resplendently shined. By this time, Frick has gotten high and mighty. “Wull, those boots look real good, Corporal Shaftoe,” he says in a brassy voice. “Darned if you ain’t as good a shoe-shiner as my coolie boy was.”
At lights out, Frick and crew are short-sheeted. Various other, ruder practical jokes ensue during the nighttime. One of them gets jumped in his bunk and beaten by unspecified attackers. The brass call a surprise inspection the next morning and cuss them out. The “gone Asiatic” crew spend most of the next day gathered in a cluster, watching each other’s backs.
Around midday, Frick finally gets it through his head that all of this was triggered by Shaftoe’s gesture, and that Shaftoe knew, all along, what was going to happen. So he rushes Bobby Shaftoe up on the deck and tries to throw him over the rail.
Shaftoe’s warned at the last minute by one of his compadres, and spins around just enough to throw off Frick’s attack. Frick caroms off the rail, turns around, and tries to grab Shaftoe’s nuts. Shaftoe pokes him in the eye, which straightens him right up. They back away from each other. The opening formalities having been finished, they put up their dukes.
Frick and Shaftoe box for a couple of rounds. A large crowd of Marines gathers. On most of their cards, Frick is winning the fight. Frick was always dim-witted, and is now crazy to boot, but he knows his way around a boxing ring, and he has forty pounds on Shaftoe.
Shaftoe puts up with it until Frick socks him pretty hard in the mouth and gives him a bloody lip.
“How far are we from Manila?” Shaftoe hollers. This question, as usual, leaves Sergeant Frick confused and bewildered, and straightens him up for a moment.
“Two days,” answers one of the ship’s officers.
“Well, goddamn,” Bobby Shaftoe says. “How’m I gonna kiss my girl with this fat lip?”
Frick answers, “Just go out and find a cheaper one.”
That’s all he needs. Shaftoe puts his head down and charges in on Frick, hollering like a Nip. Before Frick can get his brain in gear, Bobby Shaftoe has him wrapped up in one of those chop-socky holds that Goto Dengo taught him in Shanghai. He works his way up Frick’s body to a choke-hold and then clamps down until Sergeant Frick’s lips turn the color of the inside of an oyster shell. Then he hangs Frick over the rail, holding him upside-down by the ankles, until Frick recovers enough to shout, “Uncle!”
A disciplinary proceeding is hastily called. Shaftoe is found guilty of being courteous (by shining Frick’s boots) and defending the life of a Marine (himself) from a crazed attacker. The crazed attacker goes straight to the brig. Within a few hours, the noises Frick makes let all of the Marines know what opium withdrawal feels like.
So Sergeant Frick does not get to see their entrance into Manila Bay. Shaftoe almost feels sorry for the poor bastard.
The island of Luzon lies to port all day long, a black hulk barely visible through the haze, with glimpses of palm trees and beaches down below. All of the Marines have been this way before and so they can pick out the Cordillera Central up north, and later the Zambales Mountains, which eventually plunge down to meet the sea near Subic Bay. Subic triggers a barrage of salty anecdotes. The ship does not put in there, but continues to swing southward around Bata’an, turning inland toward the entrance of Manila Bay. The ship reeks of shoe polish, talcum powder, and after-shave lotion; the Fourth Marines may have specialized in whoring and opium abuse, but they’ve always been known as the best-looking Marines in the Corps.
They pass by Corregidor. An island shaped like a bead of water on a waxed boot, it is gently rounded in the middle but steeply sloping into the water. It has a long, bony, dry tail that trails off at one end. The Marines know that the island is riddled with tunnels and bristling with terrible guns, but the only sign of these fortifications is the clusters of concrete barracks up in the hills, housing the men who serve the weapons. A tangle of antennas rises up above Topside. Their shape
s are familiar to Shaftoe, because many of the same antennas rose above Station Alpha in Shanghai, and he had to take them apart and load them into the truck.
There is a giant limestone cliff descending nearly into the sea, and at the base of it is the entrance to the tunnel where all the spooks and radio men have their hideaway. Nearby is a dock, quite busy at the moment, with supplies being offloaded from civilian transports and stacked right there on the beach. This detail is noticed by all of the Marines as a positive sign of approaching war. Augusta drops anchor in the cove, and all of that tarp-wrapped radio stuff is unloaded into launches and taken to that dock, along with all of the odd pencil-necked Navy men who tended that gear in Shanghai.
The swell dies as they pass Corregidor and enter the bay. Greenish-brown algae floats in swirls and curlicues near the surface. Navy ships lay brown ropes of smoke across the still sea. Undisturbed by wind, these unfold into rugged shapes like translucent mountain ranges. They pass the big military base at Cavite—a sheet of land so low and flat that its boundary with the water would be invisible except for the picket line of palm trees. A few hangars and water towers rise from it, and low dark clusters of barracks farther inland. Manila is dead ahead of them, still veiled in haze. It is getting on toward evening.
Then the haze dissolves, the atmosphere suddenly becomes as limpid as a child’s eyes, and for about an hour they can see to infinity. They are steaming into an arena of immense thunderheads with lightning corkscrewing down through them all around. Flat grey clouds like shards of broken slate peek out between anvils. Behind them are higher clouds vaulting halfway to the moon, glowing pink and salmon in the light of the setting sun. Behind that, more clouds nestled within banks of humidity like Christmas ornaments wrapped in tissue paper, expanses of blue sky, more thunderheads exchanging bolts of lightning twenty miles long. Skies nested within skies nested within skies.
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