The Pistol

by James Jones

  Well aware that he was taking a real chance of eventually losing it back to the supply room, Mast decided to gamble and wear it anyway. What good would it do him, what protection, lying in a barracks bag or pack? Luckily it was a regulation holster and not the kind the MPs wore. All he had to do was unhook it off the web pistol belt, hook it into his rifle cartridge belt, and stuff the extra clips into the cartridge pockets above it. The brassard and lanyard he packed in the bottom of the barracks bag with the pistol belt. Then, wearing his tin hat with a jauntiness he did not entirely feel when he thought about what might be in store for them, Mast carted everything downstairs to the yard where the company was slowly forming. Sergeant Wycoff had certainly been right about the time. There was another full hour and a half to wait, and it was nearly three o’clock before the personnel trucks of the Regiment began to move.

  On the way down to the beaches in the trucks Mast received only one comment on the pistol. A Private 1st Class in the same truck but from another platoon, a huge blue-jowled black Irishman of twenty-two named O’Brien, asked him enviously where did he get the pistol?

  “That?” Mast said coolly, but with his mind working swiftly. “Oh, I’ve had that a long time. Bought it off a guy.”

  O’Brien moved his big dark face inarticulately, wrinkling his broad forehead and moistening his lips, then flexed his hamlike hands a couple of times where they dangled from his knees. He stared at the holstered pistol hungrily, almost abjectly. Then he turned his huge dark head with the pale green eyes and stared off levelly from the back of the open truck with its hastily mounted MG on the cab roof, toward where the sea was. Mast had seen him engaged in some tremendous, almost Herculean fist fights since he had been in the company, but he did not look tough now. He turned back to Mast. “Want to sell it?” he said huskily.

  “Sell it? Hell, no. That’s why I bought it.”

  O’Brien reached one big-fingered hand up and unbuttoned his shirt pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Made some money on craps last night,” he said almost wistfully. “Give you fifty bucks for it.”

  Mast was astonished, and did not think he had heard right. He had had no idea his new possession would be so valuable—not to anyone but himself. But there was O’Brien, and there was the money. Nobody else in the truck was paying any attention.

  “No,” Mast said. “Nosir. I want it for myself.”

  “Give you seventy,” O’Brien said quietly, almost beseechingly. “That’s all I got.”

  “No dice. I told you. That’s why I bought it in the first place. So I could have it for myself.”

  “Well, hell,” O’Brien said hopelessly, and slowly put his useless money back in the pocket and buttoned the flap. Unhappily he clutched his rifle, and out of the broad, dark, brooding face with its pale green eyes stared off in the direction of the sea again.

  But that was the only comment. No one else noticed the pistol apparently, not even Mast’s own squad leader. They were all too concerned with thinking about what they might find on the beaches. Mast could not help feeling rather smugly sorry for O’Brien, somewhat the same feeling a man who knows he has salvation experiences for one who knows he has not; but Mast did not know what he could be expected to do. There was only one pistol. And through fate, or luck, and a series of strangely unforeseeable happenings, it had been given to him, not O’Brien.

  Mast and O’Brien were not the only ones who kept looking off toward where the sea was. If the colonel knew that the Japanese forces had not landed, he might possibly have told the Company Commander. But if he had, the Company Commander had not seen fit to tell his troops. Perhaps the truth was that nobody knew. At any rate, the men in the truck did not. And as the convoy, moving by fits and starts, wound its way down off the high central plateau of the island, there were places between the hills where the men could get clear glimpses far away below them of the smoking shambles of Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field. The sight made them even more thoughtful. As far away as they could see, a mile-long line of trucks was worming its way down bumper to bumper, carrying them at a pace a man could walk, toward Honolulu and they knew not what else.

  Actually, long before they ever reached the city everybody knew the Japanese had not landed. The word was shouted back from truck to truck, traveling far faster than the trucks themselves went forward. But the knowledge reassured nobody. If they didn’t land today, they would tomorrow, or the next day. And going through the city there was very little friendly response by the men in the trucks to the wildly cheering civilians who only so recently as last night had wanted nothing to do with soldiers except take their money.

  The method in which the trucks had been loaded back at Schofield by Regimental Order was planned in advance so that the men and equipment for each beach position would be loaded all on the same truck, or trucks. Consequently, the little section of the miles-long convoy which was Mast’s company (whose sector ran from Wailupe east through Koko Head to Makapuu Head), having split off from the main trunk highway and made its way through the city on back roads, found itself alone out on Kamehameha Highway going east, its trucks peeling off one by one from the head of the column as it came abreast of their positions, until finally only four were left: the four trucks for the Company’s last and biggest position at Makapuu Point, one of which trucks was Mast’s. The effect was weird, if not downright enervating: From a huge, powerful convoy of unnumbered men and vehicles they had dwindled down to just four trucks, alone, moving along a deserted highway between the mountains and the sea and filled with thirty-five puny men and eighteen puny machine guns, all that was left, apparently, to fight the war alone against the entire might of the Imperial Japanese war machine. Or so, they felt. Mast could not help feeling a shiver, in spite of his pleasure over his new pistol.

  Makapuu Head, and Point, was acknowledgedly the worst position in the company sector. For one thing, there were no civilian homes within miles, such as the majority of the company’s position had, and hence no civilians by whom to be admired, and from whom to bum food. For another, it was at the very extreme end of the company chow line and by the time the little weapons carriers that brought the food got to them, the food itself in the big aluminum pots was so cold the grease would be congealed on top of it. For a third, Makapoo (as they came at once to call it) was the only position in the company sector large enough to have a truly autonomous military organization; most of the positions had four, or five, or even seven, men and were run by a single sergeant or corporal; not Makapoo: it had thirty-five, its own private lieutenant, six sergeants, and at least four corporals. And, as every soldier knows, a sergeant who has an officer observing him does not act at all the same as a sergeant who is on his own.

  For a fourth thing, Makapuu Point was the very hub and apex of what the Islanders preferred to call the ‘Windward’ side of Oahu. Jutting far out into the sea all by itself, there was nothing between it and San Francisco, and the wind that poured against the Pali and shot straight up, strongly enough to keep more than one would-be suicide from obtaining more than a couple of broken legs by a fall of more than a hundred feet, poured across it also, a living river of air, a tidal ocean of it. ‘Windward’ was a pretty lax term for such a wind, if you had to live in it without relief. And at Makapoo you were never free of it. It never ceased. Even in the pillboxes cut into the living rock in November, the wind seeped in like water and made chilling eddies of air among the shivering men who tried to sleep there.

  And if these were not enough to earn Makapoo its title of ‘A-hole of the Universe,’ for a fifth thing, there was not a single building there to take shelter in; nor was there enough loose dirt on top the solid rock to drive a tentpeg into. This was the beach position Richard Mast, with his customary luck, had managed to get himself assigned to; and this was the beach position they scrambled out of the trucks that first day to try and make, first, militarily defensible, and then second, livable.

  The first week of both of these attempts was hectic, what with
the Japanese expected every day, and also ridiculous. It consisted mainly (after having first got the MGs set up in their proper fields of fire in the pillboxes) of putting up all day barbed wire which far more often than not the sea washed away, of standing guard half the night, and of having one’s shelterhalf and two blankets blown off of one during the rest of the night by the wind. There was consequently very little sleep. No matter how tightly and carefully a man might wrap up, the wind, testing here, trying there, eventually would find a loose corner somewhere with which to begin its endless and seemingly diabolical tug of war. There was not room enough for most of the men to sleep ‘indoors,’ if the rock floors of the pillboxes could be called that, and most of them had to lie down outside on the stony ground in the full force of the wind. No one had thought to try to provide sleeping shelter for the men.

  But even all of this discomfort, together with the excitement of the anticipated invasion and the bad news about the Philippines, did not stir up half as much interest at Makapoo as Mast’s loose pistol, once it became known generally that he had it. Everybody wanted it. In the first five days after the attack Mast had no less than seven separate offers to buy it, as well as two nocturnal attempts to steal it from him as he slept. He could not remember having had so much attention since he first came into this company over a year ago.

  Quite plainly O’Brien had talked about it. About this free-floating, unrecorded pistol loose at Makapoo in Mast’s hands. Out of his hunger for it, plus his lack of success in getting hold of it, O’Brien had talked about it to somebody, if not everybody. How else would anyone know? And Mast began to realize his error in having lied about it and said he’d bought it. He had done that out of sheer instinct, and because he did not want it brought to the attention of the supply room that he still had it; and after two years in the Army Mast was cynically suspicious that there existed more than one man who would go to the supply room and tell, just simply because he himself did not have one. And for the purpose he had used it, the lie had sufficed. The supply room apparently was still totally unaware it had a pistol missing. But in succeeding, the lie had created other problems. It had, in effect, thrown the possession of Mast’s pistol open to the field: anyone who had it, owned it.

  Actually, Mast was willing to accept possession of his pistol under those circumstances, or any other circumstances. Having worn and cared for it those days since the attack had made it his in a peculiar way that he could not possibly have felt that Sunday when he knew he had to turn it back in twenty-four hours. And from there, it was only one step to believing that he had bought it after all, the only logical step to take, in fact. He knew of course that somewhere there existed a paper with his signature on it saying that he owed God, or the Army, one pistol. And while the knowledge registered with him, it also somehow did not register. He had bought it. He could even, when pressed, remember the face of the man from the 8th Field Artillery who had sold it to him. So in one way the pistol had become what everyone believed it was. And Mast was prepared to defend it on those terms. From any source of jeopardy.

  The offers to buy it ranged in price from twenty dollars to sixty dollars, none as high as the seventy dollars O’Brien had offered him under the stress of that first day. O’Brien himself was out of the bidding now, having lost nearly all of his seventy dollars in a poker game in one of the pillboxes. Poker was just about the only recreational facility left them now, and since it was clear that money was not going to be of use to any of them for some time to come, almost everybody who had any cash played; and the young lieutenant in charge of the position was powerless to stop it. And usually, whenever anyone won a wad of money, the first thing they did was go to Mast and make an offer for his pistol. Mast, naturally, refused them all.

  As for the two attempts to steal it, Mast was lucky in being able to circumvent them both. The first occurred on the third night after the attack. Up to then Mast had been used to sleeping with his cartridge belt, and the holstered pistol, under his head for a sort of makeshift pillow and he woke up from a fitful sleep in the unceasing ear-beating wind to feel his belt, with the pistol on it, being stealthily withdrawn from under his head. He made a grab for it, caught it and yanked, and retained his pistol. But when he raised up to look, all he could see in the moonless darkness was the retreating back of a crouched running figure, its footfalls silent because of the loudly buffeting wind. After that, he decided to sleep with his belt on, around his waist. And after someone, whose retreating back he could also see but not identify, tried two nights later to sneak the pistol out of its holster while he again slept, he slept after that with the pistol itself tucked into his waist belt under his buttoned-down shirt and zippered field jacket while still wearing the riflebelt outside. This made for difficult sleeping, but then sleeping at Makapoo was difficult at best, and he didn’t care. Now that he had his pistol he meant to keep it.

  It was interesting to speculate upon just why everyone was so desirous of possessing this particular pistol, and Mast did speculate on it, a little. Everybody had always wanted pistols, of course, but this was somehow becoming a different thing, he felt. But he was so busy working all day long, trying to sleep at night, and above all trying to keep and protect his pistol, that he really had very little time left to speculate on anything.

  Certainly, a lot of it had to do with the fact that it was free, unattached. All the members of the machine-gun platoon at Makapoo carried pistols too, but theirs had been assigned to them and so nobody tried to steal them. It was pointless, because the serial numbers were registered to them. But because Mast had bought his (Had he? Yes! He had. He distinctly had.), instead of signing a requisition for it, it was unrecorded and therefore anyone who could come into possession of it would own it.

  And yet, despite that very strong point, there seemed to be something else, something Mast, certainly, could not put his finger on. Everybody seemed to be getting frantic to possess his pistol. And Mast was unable to account for it, or understand it.

  All Mast knew was the feeling that the pistol gave him. And that was that it comforted him. As he lay rolled up in his two blankets and one shelterhalf at night with the rocky ground jabbing him in the ribs or flanks and the wind buffeting his head and ears, or as he worked his arms numb to the shoulder all day long at the never-ending job of putting up recalcitrant barbed wire, it comforted him. Thy rod and thy staff. Perhaps he had no staff—unless you could call his rifle that—but he had a ‘rod.’ And it would be his salvation. One day it would save him. The sense of personal defensive safety that it gave him was tremendous. He could even picture the scene: lying wounded, and alone, his rifle lost, himself unable to walk, and a Jap major bearing down on him with a drawn saber to split him in half, then his pistol would save him. The world was rocketing to hell in a bucket, but if he could only hold onto his pistol, remain in possession of the promise of salvation its beautiful blue-steel bullet-charged weight offered him, he could be saved.

  Three

  THE FIRST OPEN ATTEMPT, as distinguished from the nocturnal tries at stealing it, came from the same big, dark, inarticulate Irishman, O’Brien, who had tried to buy the pistol from Mast in the truck. It happened one night when Mast and he were on guard duty together a week after the attack. The tension brought on by the anticipated invasion still had not slacked off by then.

  It was, of course, mandatory that at least one man should be awake at all times in each pillbox, or ‘hole,’ as they quickly came to be called, staring out over the darkling sea below the cliff in an eye-cracking effort to see Japanese landing craft where there were none. But in addition to these safeguards, because of the construction of the position and its vulnerability from the land side, a system of walking posts had been set up around the perimeter.

  O’Brien, on this particular night, being from another ‘hole,’ happened to have the post adjoining Mast’s, and during their two hours on post they met at the ends of their walkings and would stand for a while and talk in the chill, buffet
ing wind. It was during one of these meetings that they both thought they heard a sound, as of a stone falling, above the pummeling of the wind.

  “What was that?” Mast whispered. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yeah,” O’Brien whispered back. “Yeah, I heard it.”

  They both had crouched down and now they listened a while longer but they heard nothing else. There was no moon and it was pitch black and impossible to see, but they both knew what was in front of them. The bare rock where they walked post went on perhaps ten yards in front of them, at which point there was a fence separating the rocky point from a field of thin soil and sparse grass owned by a white industrialist but operated for him by an industrious, silent Japanese man as a cattle feeding field. Just beyond the fence to the left the rock of the point rose steeply to what higher up became the top of a small mountain, while the field sloped away, far down to the highway on their right.

  “It sounded like it came from right in there,” Mast whispered, the wind whipping his words away, and pointed to the spot where the rock began to rise above them.

  “Yeah,” O’Brien whispered, not too encouragingly. “It sure did.”

  They listened some more.

  “Well, what are we going to do?” Mast whispered finally.

  “I don’t know,” O’Brien whispered. “What do you think we ought to do?”

  Mast was astonished. Big, tough O’Brien whom he had seen engaged in so many heroic-sized fistfights asking him what to do. He was considerably flattered. “Well, we can’t just go back to walking post without investigating it,” he whispered toughly, and drew his pistol. “Don’t you think?” he added.

  “I guess so,” O’Brien said without enthusiasm. “But how’ll we do it?”