Waddy spoke in Kachin, but the mahout, a black-skinned Dravidian Indian, did not understand this language. Waddy gazed for a long moment into the native’s tear-stained face. Then he drew a .45 caliber pistol and shot the wounded elephant in the forehead.
The elephant, screaming in torment, leaped to its feet and charged. Waddy dove into the fringe of the forest. The elephant tore at the underbrush with its trunk and tusks. The mahout, sobbing and shouting, danced beside the elephant, dodging the great round feet that stamped the ground, groping for Waddy in order to crush the life out of him. Waddy rolled around on the ground, samurai sword in one hand, pistol in the other. A young Kachin darted in front of the elephant, planted his bare feet, and grinning happily, fired an entire twenty-round magazine from a Thompson submachine gun, every third bullet a tracer, into the elephant’s brow. The animal fell, uttering no sound except for the shuddering thud that its great scruffy body made when it struck the ground.
Waddy leaped to his feet. “Jesus!” he said, rolling his eyes. He was trembling. The Kachin who had killed the elephant calmly reloaded his tommy gun. The unwounded elephant, trumpeting, was loping away down the path, its mahout on his head. The sight of this beast escaping infuriated Waddy.
“Stop that man!” he shouted.
Though he spoke no English, the Kachin understood his meaning. He lifted his weapon and knocked the mahout off the elephant with a five-round burst. Then he seized the surviving mahout and dragged him down the trail in pursuit of the fleeing elephant.
“Shit,” Waddy said.
He might have said more, but the Kachin headman trotted out of the darkness and began to speak to him.
“Not now, N.S.,” Waddy said, and moved away, so as to peer down the trail after the escaping elephant. A smile crossed his face. The elephant was coming back with the mahout and the Kachin on its back. The headman caught Wolkowicz’s eye and pointed his bare arm at the flames of the burning tank. Half a dozen Japanese soldiers, brandishing their immensely long Arisaka rifles with their glittering sword-bayonets, were leaping over the log barrier and advancing into the camp. They were killed almost immediately by fire from the Kachins.
Waddy, who had begun to trot down the trail in the opposite direction to meet the returning elephant, skidded to a stop, then turned around and ran at top speed toward the burning tank. Wolkowicz, assuming that Waddy was charging back to meet the enemy, felt anger erupt in himself: he hated this evidence of his commander’s bravery.
Then Wolkowicz looked farther down the trail. Beyond Waddy’s sprinting figure in its Yale track shirt, beyond the clumsy galloping bulk of the elephant, a whole platoon of Japanese infantry, led by an officer who waved a bright samurai sword, were trotting down the trail, firing as they advanced. The outpost was being counterattacked from two directions. Waddy, shouting at the top of his lungs for his troops to follow him, started to run into the forest. A machine gun winked among the trees. The Japanese had outflanked them through the jungle as well.
More enemy soldiers were entering the outpost from the direction of the burning tank. Kachins, falling back as they fired, ran into a hail of bullets from two other directions, and were cut down one after the other.
Wolkowicz fell to his knees and began firing his BAR at the Japanese officer. The man fell, his sword spinning out of his hand. As the Japanese officer died, gouts of blood flying from his spinning body, Wolkowicz saw a map of Burma in his mind—the Shweli River flowing out of China to the north between two green mountain ranges, and all the vast impenetrable wilderness that lay to the south and west between him and the sea, between him and India, where he would be safe. Wolkowicz believed that his life was over. The Kachin leader was kneeling too, his back pressed against Wolkowicz’s, firing in the opposite direction. Wolkowicz felt a tremor in the body of the other man, and then felt—he always remembered this—a brief cold puff of wind against his sweating back, as if a door had been opened a crack on a wintry day and then slammed shut, as the headman fell away, a bullet through his brain.
Wolkowicz looked around him. The elephant, trunk swinging idly, stood a few yards away with the mahout on its head. The animal was quiet. Bullets chewed the dirt at its feet and clipped leaves from the trees above its uplifted trunk, but they did not touch the elephant; the elephant, so calm when it should have been fleeing in panic, seemed to know that it was safe.
The fact that any creature so huge, standing in the middle of such a storm of fire, should not only be alive but be untouched seemed to Wolkowicz a religious miracle. He did not believe in God, he had been raised to laugh at the idea of God, and even now, at the point of death, it did not occur to him to speak God’s name, much less to pray to Him. But it was obvious to Wolkowicz that the elephant was in touch with a higher power; the elephant itself had the power to protect Wolkowicz and save him. If he could touch the elephant, no harm could possibly come to him.
Wolkowicz, gripping his BAR, staggered through the singing bullets toward the elephant. The animal turned its massive head and gave him a look of deep enchantment; the mahout, his black face glistening beneath a white turban, seemed to nod in calm benediction from his seat on the elephant’s skull. Wolkowicz reached out to touch the elephant. As he did so, a Kachin standing beside him was shot through the skull.
“Wolkowicz! Wait!”
Waddy Jessup, trembling violently, lay on the trail, his body pressed into the dirt. One trouser leg had ridden up, and Wolkowicz saw that the muscles on Waddy’s calf were bunched and knotted, so great was his effort to drive himself into the ground and escape from death.
Wolkowicz slung his BAR, picked up Waddy’s Thompson submachine gun and a pack of ammunition, and seized Waddy by the ankle. Dragging the leader of Force Jessup after him, Wolkowicz walked the last three steps to the elephant, and pressed his forehead against its bristly hide, which was dusty and cracked like sunbaked mud. The sound of firing seemed to fade to a whisper.
The elephant started to walk. It plunged into the jungle, flattening the tough springy growth as it went, just as Waddy Jessup, who scuttled along behind with empty eyes, clutching his samurai sword, had predicted it would do.
— 3 —
The elephant, carrying Waddy and Wolkowicz on its neck along with the terrified mahout, walked steadily forward into the rain forest for about five hours. Just at sunup, as it reached the crest of a hill, it trumpeted, dropped to its knees, and rolled over onto its side. The three men leaped free, flinging their weapons away. The mahout, tears streaming down his cheeks, darted to the elephant’s head and began speaking to it in a soothing chirpy voice.
Waddy searched frantically through the underbrush, muttering. Wolkowicz found the Thompson and the pack of ammunition, but he could not locate the BAR. As the firepower of this gun represented their one slim hope of withstanding a Japanese attack, Wolkowicz assumed that Waddy was as anxious to find it as he was. But Waddy was not looking for the lost BAR. He was looking for his samurai sword.
“Wolkowicz!” Waddy said, his voice cracking. “My sword is missing. Find it.”
Wolkowicz pointed at the ground, next to the elephant. The curved handle of the samurai sword protruded from the elephant’s hip. The animal was lying on the sheathed sword. Waddy fell to his knees and tugged at the handle. The crescent blade slid out of the scabbard, winking in the filtered early sun that slanted through the branches and vines of the forest.
Waddy’s eyes were so unfocused that Wolkowicz thought he must have struck his head when he jumped off the elephant. Waddy’s bush hat was still on his head, secured by a chin strap. This outlandish headgear made his face look pinched; his narrow shoulders, freckled by the sun, seemed frail and childish beneath the blue shoulder straps of his Yale jersey.
“Do you know why this sword is curved?” Waddy asked.
Wolkowicz shook his head.
“The steel is contorted by its own strength,” Waddy said, speaking in an easy conversational tone. “The steel is heated in a charcoal forge
, then hammered into a strip twice the desired length of the blade. Then it is heated and folded and hammered out again, then heated and folded and hammered and heated and folded and hammered. Each time this is done, the number of layers of steel in the blade is squared, not merely doubled, so that the curved blade of a samurai sword consists of tens of thousands of layers of tempered steel. The ideal sword will cut through the torsos of two enemies with a single stroke. To a Japanese of the samurai class, a sword such as this is a metaphysical object, a gift from the gods, embodying the fighting spirit of his race. You can understand why, yes?”
Smiling his genial smile, Waddy drew back the sword, holding the handle in both hands as if he meant to cut Wolkowicz in half, then threw it, spinning and flashing, into the forest.
“They’d kill me,” Waddy explained, “if they captured me with that sword in my possession.”
Wolkowicz looked carefully into Waddy’s cheery face and empty eyes, and decided to change the subject.
“I think the BAR is underneath the elephant, too,’ he said. “We’ve got to get him up.”
The elephant was lying flat on its side. All its little signs of life—the sinuous movements of the trunk, the twitching of the tail, the flapping of the ears—had ceased; the elephant might have been dead. Wolkowicz floundered through the undergrowth to the elephant’s head. The animal’s round greenish eye, the size of a mango, looked out of its face but did not seem to notice Wolkowicz or Waddy, who was following along behind.
Wolkowicz could hear the mahout’s voice but he could not see him. Waddy, smiling dreamily, stood on tiptoe and peered over the motionless head of the elephant. Two skinny black legs, webbed with leathery scars, protruded from the elephant’s head but the rest of the mahout could not be seen. Waddy giggled and leaped gracefully over the elephant’s outstretched trunk. Wolkowicz, burdened by the Thompson and the ammunition pack, struggled after him.
The mahout lay on the ground with his head inside the elephant’s ear; the ear itself covered his shoulders like a gray cape. His muffled voice droned on; the elephant stared with his mango eye at the canopy high above.
Waddy kicked the mahout on the leg. The man lifted the elephant’s ear.
“What’s the matter with the elephant?” Waddy asked in Kachin.
The mahout shook his head. “No Kachin,” he said in English. These were the first words he had spoken through the long hours they had spent together.
“English, then,” said Waddy. “Why is the elephant lying down?”
“He is disgusted.”
“What are you doing inside his ear?”
“I am explaining.”
“Then tell him we must go on.”
“He will not do that, master.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“He will not listen to you.”
“He doesn’t seem to be listening to you, either. What language do you speak to him—Hindi? Tamil?”
The mahout grinned, embarrassed. “No, master.”
“What, then?”
“I am speaking elephant. He only understands elephant. But he is not paying attention just now. He is disgusted.”
The mahout, with a smile that asked Waddy’s pardon, lifted the great rubbery leaf of the elephant’s ear and thrust his head beneath it. His voice resumed its muffled cajoling.
Naturally, the elephant had left a highly visible trail through the forest. As soon as it was light, the Japanese followed it. Just as the mahout began to talk to the elephant again, a Japanese scout pulled the pin from a grenade and heaved it. Wolkowicz, who had excellent eyesight, caught the glint of sun on metal, looked up, and saw the grenade turning lazily in the air, end over end like a punted football.
“Grenade!” he shouted, diving over the elephant’s head.
The grenade exploded with a flat noise and a puff of dirty smoke. The elephant snorted and heaved its forequarters upward. Wolkowicz, lying flat against the elephant’s ribs with his face pressed to the ground, saw the butt of the BAR. He seized it and pulled it free before the elephant fell back to its former position, flat against the earth.
Wolkowicz stood up and, using the elephant’s supine body as a breastwork, fired a burst at a flash of movement he saw in the brush fifty yards away. Waddy stood upright, gazing in the direction of the attacking Japanese with a smile of amusement on his lips.
Another grenade exploded between the mahout’s legs. The mahout, now legless, twitched and lay where he was, with his head inside the elephant’s ear.
Blood welled up from a wound in Waddy’s left arm. He looked at it, still smiling, then turned his head away. A jet of yellow vomit squirted out of his mouth, then another. Wolkowicz clambered over the elephant, firing into the undergrowth with the BAR.
“Captain,” he shouted, “take cover.”
Waddy vomited again. The half-digested C rations from his stomach smelled exactly like the jungle itself: foul and slimy and in a state midway between ripeness and shit. Wolkowicz picked Waddy up, surprised by the lightness of his tall bony body, and threw him over the elephant.
The Japanese withdrew. Wolkowicz knew that they would soon be back in greater force. He sprinkled sulfa powder on Waddy’s wound, a superficial cut an inch long, and bandaged it.
In addition to his U.S.-issue .45, Waddy carried a captured Baby Nambu pistol concealed inside the crown of his Australian hat. This was a tiny Japanese weapon, little more powerful than an air gun, that was sometimes given to officers by their families as a going-away gift. While Wolkowicz stripped down and cleaned the BAR, Waddy examined the miniature Japanese pistol.
“I suppose I’d better get rid of this, too,” he said.
Wolkowicz reassembled the BAR, deftly fitting the parts together.
“Waddy,” he said, “I don’t think it’s going to make a fucking bit of difference to the Japs if you’ve got one of their guns. They’re going to kill you. They’re going to kill both of us.”
“Kill me?” Waddy said. His pale hair, soaked with sweat, stood up in peaks. It gave him a look of even greater bewilderment. He clenched his lower lip between his straight, even teeth, and uttered a shrill whimper, like the outcry of a child in a temper. Then he drew back his fist and punched the elephant.
Wolkowicz heaved himself to his feet, rested the barrel of the BAR across the elephant’s ribs, and looked out over the approaches to their hilltop. The mahout lay where he had died, the shredded flesh of his legs already crawling with vermin. The elephant, still in its reverie, continued to lie flat on its side, unmoving as a rock.
Waddy began to sing Yale songs. He had a surprisingly deep voice, almost a bass, that burbled on the low notes. Wolkowicz’s trained ear detected that Waddy’s singing became progressively more sharp as he rendered “Bright College Years,” “Aura Lee,” “Bingo, Bingo, Bingo,” and other airs that Wolkowicz up to then had only heard about, but never actually heard.
“Were you happy in college, Barnabas?” Waddy asked after a silence.
“I don’t know, Waddy,” Wolkowicz said, his eyes searching the jungle. “Were you?”
“Yes, I was—tremendously happy. ‘It was a shady gentle time and we were all in leaf.’ Hubbard Christopher wrote that line about Yale. You remember Hubbard from the Christmas party.”
Waddy, leaning against the elephant, his legs crossed at the ankles, his Australian hat once again firmly in place, smiled sweetly at Wolkowicz.
“I can accept death, having had so much in life,” he said. “But it must be awfully hard for you.”
“I’m not looking forward to it,” Wolkowicz said.
“Is there anything I can do to make it more bearable?”
“Do? Like what?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it was, I would do it, Barnabas. Have you thought about what we’re dying for?”
“What?”
Wolkowicz was outraged to think that Waddy actually expected him to listen to a patriotic lecture moments before he was going to be shot or bayone
ted, moments before the eyes were going to be gouged out of his dead body, before his genitals were going to be sliced off. Wolkowicz visualized his mutilated body, hidden by the vegetation, rotting as it was eaten by insects, bursting as it was cooked by the sun and became part of the general stench of the jungle.
“I’m not going to wave the flag,” Waddy said, suddenly sensitive to Wolkowicz’s mood. “But let me ask you a simple question that contains the meaning of this whole experience. Is your father a worker, Barnabas? Does he work in the steel mills in Youngstown?”
“A worker? My father? Yes, sure he is.”
“Then we’re dying for him.”
“We’re dying for my father?”
“For the workers, yes,” Waddy said. “This is the fight against fascism, right here, on this spot of earth. And we’re fighting it, you and I together.”
Waddy’s voice trembled with tender sentimentality. In his last hour he seemed to have taken a genuine liking to Wolkowicz—or, rather, to Wolkowicz as a symbol of the proletariat.
“I’m proud to tell you,” Waddy said, “that I am a member of the Communist Party.”
Waddy, shoulders thrown back, chin raised, posed like a figure holding a flowing red banner on a Soviet poster. He wrung Wolkowicz’s hand. Wolkowicz, permitting Waddy to fondle him, gazed with disgust on this silly, vain, stupid rich man’s son who was responsible for the death of Wolkowicz, son and grandson of a worker. He shook his head and pulled his hand away.
Waddy was not through speaking. “There’s something you can do for me, if you will, Barnabas,” he said.
“What’s that, Waddy?”
“Before they kill us, when it seems inevitable that they will kill us—wait! Do you think they’d kill a wounded man, an officer? Wouldn’t they want information?”
“They know why we’re here, Waddy. They might torture us for the fun of it, but what can we tell them?”
“We?” Waddy said. “Just a minute, wojjig. I didn’t know you were an expert on the Japanese mind. Or did they have great courses in Japanese culture at Kent State College? You’re certainly not an officer.”
The Last Supper Page 11
