ing kindergarten. And I
saw M.A. more recently he was probably eight or ten."
"And you are related to them how, one more time?"
"I think Robin is my second cousin. And I could explain M.A.'s
relationship to me, but you'd start shifting around and heaving great big
sighs before I got more'n halfway through it."
"So, to these guys, you are a shirttail relative they glimpsed once or
twice when they were tiny little boys."
Amy shrugs. "Yeah."
"So, like what possessed them to come out here?"
Amy looks blank.
"I mean," Randy says, "from the general attitude they copped, when they
fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard and leapt out of their
red hot, bug encrusted vehicle, fresh from Tennessee, obviously the number
one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was
being treated with all of the respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera,
properly owed it."
"Oh. That's not really the vibe that I got."
"Oh, it wasn't? Really?"
"No. Randy, my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each
other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed."
"Well, you are making an implied comparison to my family here which I'm
not that crazy about and maybe we should talk about later. But as far as
those family obligations go, I do certainly think that one of those
obligations is to preserve your notional virginity."
"Who says it's notional?"
"It's got to be notional to them because they haven't seen you for most
of your life. That's all I mean."
"I think you are blowing the perceived sexual aspect of this thing way
out of proportion," Amy says. "Which is perfectly normal, for a guy, and I
don't think less of you for it."
"Amy, Amy. Have you done the math on this thing?"
"Math?"
"Counting the trip through Manila traffic to NAIA, the check in
procedure, and formalities at SFO, my entire journey from Manila to San
Francisco took me something like eighteen hours. Twenty for you. Another
four hours to get down to my house. Then eight hours after we got to my
house, in the middle of the night, Robin and Marcus Aurelius showed up. Now,
if we assume that the Shaftoe family grapevine functions at the speed of
light, it means that these guys, shooting hoops in front of their trailer in
Tennessee, received a news flash that a female Shaftoe was in some kind of
guy related personal distress at about the time you jumped off of Glory IV
and hopped in a taxi in Manila."
"I sent e mail from Glory," Amy says.
"To whom?"
"The Shaftoe mailing list."
"God!" Randy says, slapping himself in the face. "What did this e mail
say?"
"Can't remember," Amy says. "That I was headed for California. I might
have made some kind of backhanded remark about a young man I wanted to talk
to. I was kinda upset at the time and I can't remember exactly what I have
said."
"I think you said something like 'I am going to California where
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, who has AIDS, is going to forcibly sodomize me
upon arrival.' "
"No, it was nothing of the kind."
"Well, I think that someone read it between the lines. So, anyway, Ma
or Auntie Em or someone emerges from the side door, shaking flour out of her
gingham apron I'm imagining this."
"I can tell."
"And she says, 'Boys, your umpteenth cousin thrice removed America
Shaftoe has sent us e mail from Uncle Doug's boat in the South China Sea
stating that she is having some kind of dispute with a young man and it's
not out of the question that she might need someone around to lend her a
hand. In California. Would you swing by and look in on her?' And they put
away their basketball and say, 'Yes ma'am, what city and address?' and she
says, 'Never you mind, just get on Interstate 40 and drive west not failing
to maintain an average speed of between one hundred and a hundred and twenty
percent of the legal speed limit and call me collect from a Texaco somewhere
and I will supply you with specific target coordinates later,' and they say,
'Yes ma'am' and thirty seconds later they are laying a patch in the driveway
as they pull five gees backing out of the garage and thirty hours
subsequently they are in my front yard, shining their twenty five D cell
flashlights into my eyes and asking me a lot of pointed questions. Do you
have any idea how far the drive is?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, according to M.A.'s Rand McNally Road Atlas, it is an even
twenty one hundred miles."
"So?"
"So that means that they maintained an average speed of seventy miles
an hour for a day and a half"
"A day and a quarter," Amy says.
"Do you have any idea how difficult that is to do?"
"Randy, you push on the gas pedal and keep it between the lines. How
hard is that?"
"I'm not saying it's an intellectual challenge. I'm saying that this
willingness to, e.g., urinate into empty McDonald's cups rather than stop
the car, suggests a kind of urgency. Passion, even. And being a guy, and
having had the experience of being a guy of the age of M.A. and Robin, I can
tell you that one of the few things that gets your blood boiling to that
extent is this notion of some female you love being done wrong by a strange
male."
"Well, what if they did?" Amy says. "Now they think you're okay."
"They do? Really?"
"Yeah. The financial disaster aspect makes you more human. More
approachable. And it excuses a lot."
"Do I need an excuse for something?"
"Not in my book."
"But to the extent they thought I was a rapist, it kind of palliates my
image problems."
A brief lull in the conversation ensues. Then Amy pipes up.
"So tell me about your family, Randy."
"In the next couple of days, you're going to learn a great deal more
than I would like you to about my family. And so am I. So let's talk about
something else."
"Okay. Let's talk about business."
"Okay. You go first."
"We got a German television producer coming out next week to have a
look at the U boat. They might do a documentary about it. We have already
hosted several German print journalists."
"You have?"
"It has caused a sensation in Germany."
"Why?"
"Because no one can figure out how it got there. Now, your turn."
"We are going to launch our own currency." By saying this, Randy is
divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But
he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making
himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard on.
"How do you go about that? Don't you have to be a government?"
"No. You have to be a bank. Why do you think they're called bank
notes?" Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business
information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self titillation but it
is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn't especially care.
"Okay but still, usually it's done by government banks, right?"
"Only because people tend to respect the government banks. But
government banks in Southeast Asia have a huge image problem right now. That
image problem translates directly into crashing exchange rates."
"So, how do you do it?"
"Get a big pile of gold. Issue certificates saying 'this certificate
can be redeemed for such and such an amount of gold.' That's all there is to
it."
"What's wrong with dollars and yen and stuff?"
"The certificates the banknotes are printed on paper. We're going to
issue electronic banknotes."
"No paper at all?"
"No paper at all."
"So you can only spend it on the Net."
"Correct."
"What if you want to buy a sack of bananas?"
"Find a banana merchant on the Net."
"Seems like paper money'd be just as good."
"Paper money is traceable and perishable and has other drawbacks.
Electronic banknotes are fast and anonymous."
"What's an electronic banknote look like, Randy?"
"Like any other digital thing: a bunch of bits."
"Doesn't that make it kind of easy to counterfeit?"
"Not if you have good crypto," Randy says. "Which we do."
"How did you get it?"
"By hanging out with maniacs."
"What kind of maniacs?"
"Maniacs who think that having good crypto is of near apocalyptic
importance."
"How'd they get around to thinking any such thing?"
"By reading about people like Yamamoto who died because they had bad
crypto, and then projecting that kind of thing into the future."
"Do you agree with them?" Amy asks. It might be one of those pivotal
moment in the relationship questions.
"At two in the morning, when I'm lying awake in bed, I do," Randy says.
"In the light of day, it all seems like paranoia." He glances over at Amy,
who's looking at him appraisingly, because he hasn't actually answered the
question yet. He's got to pick one thing or the other. "Better safe than
sorry, I guess. Having good crypto can't hurt, and it might help."
"And it might make you a lot of money along the way," Amy reminds him.
Randy laughs. "At this point, it's not even about trying to make
money," he says. "I just don't want to be totally humiliated."
Amy smiles cryptically.
"What?" Randy demands.
"You sounded just like a Shaftoe when you said that," Amy says.
Randy drives the car in silence for about half an hour after that. He
was right, he suspects: it was a pivotal moment in the relationship. All he
can do now is totally screw it up. So he shuts up and drives.
Chapter 69 THE GENERAL
For two months he sleeps on a beach on New Caledonia, stretched out
under a mosquito net, dreaming of worse places, polishing his line.
In Stockholm, someone from the British Embassy got him to a certain
cafe. A gentleman he met in the cafe got him to a car. The car got him to a
lake where a floatplane just happened to be sitting with its motors running
and its lights off. The Special Air Service got him to London. Naval
Intelligence got him back to D.C., drained his brain, and turned him over to
the Marines with a big stamp on his papers saying that he must never again
be sent into combat; he Knew Too Much to be taken prisoner. The Marines
found that he Knew Too Little to serve as a Rear Echelon Motherfucker, and
gave him a choice: a one way ticket home, or higher education. He opted for
the ticket home, then talked a green officer into believing that his family
had moved, and home was now San Francisco.
You could practically cross San Francisco Bay by jumping from one Navy
ship to the next. The waterfront was lined with the Navy's piers, depots,
hospitals, and prisons. All of them were guarded by Shaftoe's military
brothers. Shaftoe's tattoos were obscured by civilian clothes and his
haircut grown out. But he only had to look a Marine in the eye from a
stone's throw, and that Marine would recognize him for a brother in need and
open any gate for him, break any regulation, probably even lay down his
life. Shaftoe stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii so fast he didn't even
have time to get drunk. From Pearl, it took him four days to get on a ship
to Kwajalein. There, he was a legendary hero. His money was no good on Kwaj;
he smoked, drank and ate for a week without being allowed to spend a dime,
and finally his brothers got him on a plane that took him a couple of
thousand miles due south to Noumea, in New Caledonia.
They did so with great reluctance. They would willingly have hit a
beach with him, but this was different: they were sending him perilously
close to SOWESPAC, the Southwest Pacific Theater, the domain of The General.
Even now, a couple of years after The General had sent them into action,
poorly armed and poorly supported, on Guadalcanal, Marines still spent
approximately fifty percent of their waking hours talking about what a bad
guy he was. He secretly owned half of Intramuros. He had become a
billionaire from Spanish gold that his father had dug up when he'd been
governor of the Philippines. Quezon had secretly named him postwar dictator
of the archipelago. The General was running for president, and in order to
win, he was going to start throwing battles just to make F.D.R. look bad,
and blaming it all on the Marines. And if that didn't work he'd come back to
the States and stage a coup d'etat. Which would be beaten back, against
enormous odds, by the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!
Anyway, his brothers got him to New Caledonia. Noumea's a neat French
city of wide streets and tin roofed buildings, fronting on a big harbor
lined with mountainous dumps of nickel and chromium ore from gigantic mines
up island. The place is about one third Free French (there's pictures of de
Gaulle all over the place), one third American servicemen, and one third
cannibals. Word on the street is that the cannibals have not eaten any white
people in twenty seven years, so Bobby Shaftoe, sleeping out on that beach,
feels almost as safe as he did in Sweden.
But when he reached Noumea he slammed into a barrier more impervious
than any brick wall: the imaginary line between the Pacific theater
(Nimitz's turf) and SOWESPAC. Brisbane, The General's headquarters, is just
a short (by Pacific standards) hop almost due west. If he can just get there
and deliver his line, everything's going to be fine.
During his first couple of weeks on the beach, he's stupidly
optimistic. Then he's depressed for about a month, thinking he'll never get
off this place. Finally he starts to come around, starts to display
adaptability again. He's had no luck getting on board a ship. But the amount
of air traffic is incredible. Seems that The General likes airplanes.
Shaftoe starts tailing flyboys. The MPs won't give him the time of day, he
can't get into an Army NCOs' Club to save his life.
But an NCOs' Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in
search of more profound satisfactions must leave the perimeter defined by
hardassed MPs and enter the civilian economy. And when horny, well paid
American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and
half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Shaftoe finds a
vantage point outside an airbase gate, plants himself there, his pockets
loaded with cigarette packs (the Marines on Kwaj left him with a lifetime
supply) and waits. Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe picks out
the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line
of sight, begins to chain smoke. Before long they've come over and started
to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.
Once he gets this routine figured out, he learns a lot about the Fifth
Air Force in a big hurry, makes a lot of friends. In a few weeks, he strikes
the jackpot. He goes over the airfield fence at 1:00 A.M. of a moonless
night, belly crawls for about a mile along the shoulder of a runway, and
just barely makes a rendezvous with the crew of the Tipsy Tootsie, a B 24
Liberator bound for Brisbane. In fairly short order, he finds himself
stuffed into the glass sphere at the tail of the plane: the rear ball
turret. Its purpose, of course, is to shoot down Zeroes, which tend to
attack from behind. But Tipsy Tootsie's crew seems to think that they are
about as likely to find Zeroes around here as they would be over central
Missouri.
They warned him to wear something warm, but he didn't have any thing of
that nature. Tipsy Tootsie has barely left the runway when he begins to
understand his mistake: the temperature drops like a five hundred pound
bomb. It is physically impossible for him to get out of the turret. Even if
he could, it would just lead to his getting arrested; he has been smuggled
on board without the knowledge of the officers who are actually flying the
plane. Calmly he decides to add prolonged hypothermia to his already
extensive knowledge of suffering. After a couple of hours, he either loses
consciousness or falls asleep, and this helps.
He is awakened by pink light that comes from every direction at once.
The plane has lost altitude, the temperature has risen, his body has thawed
out enough to bring him awareness. After a few minutes he's able to move his
arms. He reaches into the pink glow and rubs condensation off the inside of
the ball turret. He takes out a hanky, wipes the whole thing clean, and now
he's looking straight down the throat of a Pacific dawn.
The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink
in a Caribbean cove. For a while, it's as if he is under water with
Bischoff.
Puckered scars mar the Pacific in loops and lines, and he is reminded
of his own naked flesh. But the hard jagged pieces work their way out of the
scar tissue like old shrapnel: coral reefs emerging from a shallowing sea.
Warmer and warmer. He begins to shiver again.
Someone has dumped brown dust into the Pacific, made a great pile of
it. On the edge of the pile, is a city. The city swings around them, comes
closer. Warmer and warmer. It's Brisbane. A runway streaks up and he thinks
it's going to take his ass off, like the world's biggest belt sander. The
plane stops. He smells gasoline.
The pilot discovers him, loses his temper, and makes ready to call the
MPs. "I'm here to work for The General," Shaftoe mumbles through blue lips.
It just makes the pilot want to slug him. But after Shaftoe has uttered
these words, everything is different, the angry officers stand a pace or two
farther away from him, tone down their language, knock off the threats.
Shaftoe knows, from this, that The General does things differently.
He spends a day recovering in a flophouse, then rises, shaves, drinks a
cup of coffee, and strikes out in search of brass.
To his extreme chagrin, he learns that The General has relocated his
headquarters to Hollandia, in New Guinea. But his wife and son, and a bunch
of his staff, are still staying at Lennon's Hotel. Shaftoe goes there and
analyzes the traffic pattern: to pull into the hotel's horseshoe drive, the
cars have to come around a particular corner, just up the street. Shaftoe
finds a good loitering place near that corner, and waits. Looking through
the windows of the approaching cars, he can see the epaulets, count the
stars and eagles.
Seeing two stars, he decides to make his move. Jogging down the block,
he reaches the awning of the hotel just as this general's door is being
hauled open by his driver.
"'Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!" he blurts,
snapping out the perfectest salute in military history.
"And who the hell might you be, Bobby Shaftoe?" says this general,
hardly batting an eye. He talks like Bischoff! This guy actually has a
German accent!
"I've killed more Nips than seismic activity. I'm trained to jump out
of airplanes. I speak a little Nip. I can survive in the jungle. I know
Manila like the back of my hand. My wife and child are there. And I'm kinda
at loose ends. Sir!"
In London, in D.C., he'd never have gotten this close, and if he had
he'd have been shot or arrested.
But this is SOWESPAC, and so the next morning at dawn he's on a B 17
bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank.
New Guinea is a nasty looking piece of work: a gangrenous dragon with a
wicked, rocky spine, covered with ice. Just looking at it makes Shaftoe
shiver from a queasy combination of hypothermia and incipient malaria. The
whole thing belongs to The General now. Shaftoe can plainly see that such a
country could only be conquered by a man who was completely fucking out of
his mind. A month in Stalingrad would be preferable to twenty four hours
down there.
Hollandia is on the north shore of this beast, facing, naturally,
towards the Philippines. It is well known throughout Marinedom that The
General has caused a palace to be built for himself there. Some credulous
fools actually believe the rumor that it is merely a complete 200% scale
replica of the Taj Mahal, built by enslaved Marines, but savvy jarheads know
that it is actually a much vaster compound built out of construction
materials stolen from Navy hospital ships, dotted with pleasure domes and
fuck houses for his string of Asiatic concubines, with a soaring cupola so
high that The General can go up there and see what the Nips are doing to his
extensive real estate holdings in Manila, 1,500 miles to the northwest.
Bobby Shaftoe sees no such thing out the windows of the B 17. He
glimpses one large and nice looking house up on a mountain above the sea. He
supposes that it is a mere sentry post, marking the benighted perimeter of
The General's domain. But almost immediately the B 17 bounces down on a
runway. The cabin is invaded by an equatorial miasma. It's like breathing
Cream O' Wheat direct from a blurping vat. Shaftoe feels his bowels
loosening up already. Of course there are many Marines who feel that Army
uniform trousers look best when feces stained. Shaftoe must put such
thoughts out of his head.
All the passengers (mostly colonels and better) move as to avoid
working up a sweat, even though they are already drenched. Shaftoe wants to
kick their fat, waffled butts downstairs he's in a hurry to get to Manila.
Pretty soon he is hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a jeep full of
brass. The airfield is still ringed with ack ack guns, and shows signs of
having been bombed and strafed not too long ago. Some of these signs are
obvious physical evidence like shell holes, but Shaftoe gets most of his
information from watching the men: their posture, their facial expressions
as they stare into the sky, tell him exactly what the threat level is.
No wonder, he thinks, remembering the sight of that big white house up
on the mountain. You can probably see that thing by moonlight, for
crissakes! It must be visible from Tokyo! It's just begging to be strafed.
Then, as the jeep begins to trundle up the mountain in first gear, he
figures it out: that thing's just a decoy. The General's real command post
must be a network of deep tunnels hidden beneath the jungle floor, and that
is where you would have to look for your Asiatic concubines, etc.
The trip up the mountain takes an eon. Shaftoe jumps off and soon
outpaces the whining jeep, and the one in front of it. Then he's on his own,
walking through the jungle. He'll just follow the tracks until they lead him
straight to the cleverly camouflaged mineshaft that leads down to The
General's HQ.
The walk gives him plenty of time to have a couple of smokes and savor
the unrelieved nightmarishness of the New Guinea jungle, compared to which
Guadalcanal, which he thought was the worst place on earth, seems like a
dewy meadow strewn with bunnies and butterflies. Nothing is more satisfying
than to consider that the Nips and the United States Army spent a couple of
years beating the crap out of each other here. Pity the Aussies had to get
mixed up in it, though.
The tracks take him straight to that big white clay pigeon of a house
up on the mountainside. They've gone way overboard in trying to make the
house look like someone's actually living there. Shaftoe can see furniture
and everything. The walls are crisscrossed by bullet trails. They have even
set up a mannequin on the balcony, in a pink silk dressing gown, corncob
pipe, and aviator sunglasses, scanning the bay through binoculars! As
reluctant as he is to approve of anything done by the Army, Shaftoe cannot
keep himself from laughing out loud at this witticism. Military humor at its
finest. He can't believe they got away with it. A couple of press
photographers are standing down below, taking pictures of the scene.
Standing in the middle of the house's mud parking lot, he plants his
feet wide and thrusts his middle finger up at that mannequin. Hey, asshole,
this one's from the Marines on Kwajalein! Damn, this feels good.
The mannequin swivels and aims its binoculars directly at Bobby
Shaftoe, who freezes solid in his bird flipping posture as if caught in the
gaze of a basilisk. Down below, air raid sirens begin to weep and wail.
The binoculars come away from the sunglasses. A puff of smoke blurts
out of the pipe. The General snaps out a sarcastic salute. Shaftoe remembers
to put his finger away, then stands there, rooted like a dead mahogany.
The General reaches up and removes the pipe from his mouth so he can
say, "Magandang gabi."
"You mean, 'magandang umaga,' " Shaftoe says. "Gabi means night and
umaga means morning."
The drone of airplane engines is now getting quite noticeable. The
press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.
"When you're headed north from Manila towards Lingayen and you get to
the fork in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head
across the cane breaks towards Urdaneta, what's the first village you come
to?"
"It's a trick question," Shaftoe says. "North of Tarlac there are no
cane breaks, just rice paddies."
"Hmm. Very good," The General says grumpily. Down below, the
antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it
sounds as if the north coast of New Guinea is being jackhammered into the
sea. The General ignores it. If he were only pretending to ignore it, he
would at least look at the incoming the Zeroes, so that he could stop
pretending to ignore them when it got too dangerous. But he doesn't even do
so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks
him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like
he is standing in an anechoic sound booth in New York City or Hollywood,
narrating a newsreel about how great he is.
"If you're trying to find out if I hablo Español, the answer is,
un poquito," Shaftoe says.
The General cups a hand to his ear irritably. He can't hear anything
except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred
odd miles per hour, liquefying tons of biomass with dense streams of 12.7
millimeter slugs. He keeps a sharp eye on Shaftoe as a trail of bullets
thuds across the parking lot, spraying Shaftoe's trouser legs with mud. The
same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right angle turn when it reaches
the wall of the General's house, climbs straight up the wall, tears out a
chunk of the balcony's railing about a foot away from where the General's
hand is resting, beats up a bunch of furniture back inside the house, and
then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.
Now that the planes have passed overhead, Shaftoe can look at them
without having to worry that he is giving The General the idea that he is
some kind of lily livered pansy. The meatballs on their wings broaden and
glower as they bank sharply, sharper than any American plane, and come round
for a second try.
"I said " The General begins. But then the atmosphere's riven by a
series of bizarre whizzing noises. One of the house's windows is suddenly
punched out of its frame. Shaftoe hears a thud from inside and some crockery
breaking. For the first time, The General shows some awareness that a
military action is taking place. "Warm up my jeep, Shaftoe," he says, "I
have a bone to pick with my triple A boys." Then he turns around and Shaftoe
gets a look at the back of his pink silk dressing gown. It is embroidered,
in black thread, with a giant lizard, rampant.
The General suddenly turns around. "Is that you screaming down there,
Shaftoe?"
"Sir, no sir!"
"I distinctly heard you scream." MacArthur turns his back on Shaftoe
again, giving him another look at the lizard (which on second thought might
be some sort of Chinese dragon design) and goes inside the house, mumbling
irritably to himself.
Shaftoe gets into the vehicle indicated and starts the engine.
The General emerges from the house and begins to plod across the lot
cradling an unexploded antiaircraft shell in his arms. The wind makes his
pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.
The Zeroes come back and strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck
nearly in half. Shaftoe feels as if his intestines have dissolved and are
about to spurt from his body. He closes his eyes, puckers his anal
sphincter, and clenches his teeth. The General takes a seat next to him.
"Down the hill," he orders. "Drive towards the sound of the guns."
They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by
the two jeeps that had been carrying all the brass up from the airfield.
They now sit empty on the road, their doors hanging open, engines still
running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.
Colonels and brigadier generals begin to emerge from the shadows of the
jungle, like some especially bizarre native tribe, clutching their attache
cases talismanically. They salute The General, who ignores them testily.
"Move my vehicles!" he intones, jabbing at them with the stem of his pipe.
"This is the road. The parking lot is that way."
The Zeroes come back for a third pass. Shaftoe now realizes (as perhaps
The General has) that these pilots are not the best; it is late in the war
and all the good pilots are dead. Consequently they do not line their
trajectories up properly with the road; the strafing trails cut across it
diagonally. Still, a bullet bores through the engine block of one of the
jeeps. Hot oil and steam spray out of it.
"Come on, push it out of the way!" The General says. Shaftoe
instinctively begins to climb out of the jeep, but The General yanks him
back with a word: "Shaftoe! I need you to drive this vehicle."
Wielding his pipestem like a conductor's baton, The General gets his
staff back out on the road and they begin shoving the ruined jeep into the
jungle. Shaftoe makes the mistake of inhaling through his nose and gets a
strong diarrheal whiff at least one of these officers has shit his pants.
Shaftoe's still trying hard not to do the same, and probably would have if
he'd pushed the jeep. The Zeroes are trying to line up for another strafing
run, but a few American fighter planes have now appeared on the scene, which
complicates matters.
Shaftoe maneuvers them through a gap between the remaining jeep and a
huge tree, then guns it down the road. The General hums to himself for a
while, then says, "What's your wife's name?"
"Gory."
"I mean, Glory."
"Ah. Good. Good Filipina name. Filipinas are the most beautiful women
in the world, don't you think?"
Experienced world traveler Bobby Shaftoe screws up his face and begins
to review his experiences in a systematic way. Then he realizes that The
General probably does not actually want his considered opinion.
Of course, The General's wife is American, so this could be tricky. "I
guess the woman you love is always the most beautiful," Shaftoe finally
says.
The General looks mildly pissed off. "Of course, but..."
"But if you don't really give a shit about them, the Filipinas are the
most beautiful, sir!" Shaftoe says.
The General nods. "Now, your boy. What's his name, then?"
Shaftoe swallows hard and thinks fast. He doesn't even know if he has a
kid he fabricated that to make his line sound better and even if he does,
the chances are only fifty fifty that it's a boy. But if he does have a boy,
he knows already what the name will be. "His name well, sir, his name and I
hope you don't mind this but his name is Douglas." The General grins
delightedly and cackles, slapping the antiaircraft shell in his lap for
emphasis. Shaftoe flinches.
When they arrive at the airfield, a full fledged dogfight is in
progress overhead. The place is deserted because everyone except them is
hiding behind sandbags. The General has Shaftoe drive up and down the length
of the field, stopping at each gun emplacement so that he can peer over the
barrier.
"There's the fellow!" The General finally says, pointing his swagger
stick at a gun on the opposite side of the runway. "I just saw him poking
his head out, yammering on the telephone."
Shaftoe guns it across the runway. A flaming Zero, traveling at about
half the speed of sound, impacts the runway a few hundred feet away and
disintegrates into a howling cloud of burning spare parts that comes
skittering and rolling and bounding across the runway in their general
direction. Shaftoe falters. The General yells at him. Reckoning that he
can't avoid what he can't see, Shaftoe turns into the storm. Having seen
this kind of thing happen before, he knows that the first thing to come
their way will be the engine block, a red hot tombstone of fine Mitsubishi
iron. And indeed there it is, one of its exhaust manifolds still dangling
from it like a broken wing, spinning end over end and spading huge divots
out of the runway with each bounce. Shaftoe swings wide around it. He
identifies the fuselage and sees that it has plowed to a stop already. He
looks for the wings; they broke up into a few large pieces that are slowing
down rapidly, but the tires broke loose from the landing gear and are
bounding along towards them, burning wheels of red fire. Shaftoe maneuvers
the jeep between them, guns it across a small patch of flaming oil, then
makes another hard turn and continues towards their objective.
The explosion of the Zero sent everyone back down behind their
sandbags. The General has to climb out of the jeep and peer over the top of
the barrier. He holds the antiaircraft shell up above his head. "Say,
Captain," he says in his perfect radio announcer voice, "this arrived on my
end table with no return address, but I believe it came from your unit." The
captain's helmeted head pops into view over the top of the sandbags as he
jumps to attention. He is gaping at the shell. "Would you please look after
it, and make sure that it has been properly defused?" The General tosses the
shell at him sideways, like a watermelon, and the captain barely has the
presence of mind to catch it. "Carry on," The General says, "let's see if we
can actually shoot down some Nips next time." He waves disparagingly at the
burning wreckage of the Zero and climbs into the jeep with Shaftoe. "All
right, back up the hill, Shaftoe!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Now, I know that you hate me because you are a Marine."
Officers like it when you pretend to be straight with them. "Yes, sir,
I do hate you, sir, but I do not feel that this need be an impediment to our
killing some Nips together, sir!"
"We agree. But in the mission I have in mind for you, Shaftoe, killing
Nips will not be the primary objective."
Shaftoe's a bit off balance now. "Sir, with all due respect, I believe
that killing Nips is my strong point."
"I don't doubt it. And that is a fine skill for a Marine. Because in
this war, a Marine is a first rate fighting man under the command of
admirals who don't know the first thing about ground warfare, and who think
that the way to win an island is to hurl their men directly into the teeth
of the Nips' prepared defenses."
The General pauses here, as if giving Shaftoe an opportunity to
respond. But Shaftoe says nothing. He is remembering the stories that his
brothers told him on Kwajalein, about all the battles they had fought on
small Pacific islands, precisely as The General describes.
"Consequently, a Marine must be very good at killing Nips, as I have no
doubt you are. But now, Shaftoe, you are in the Army, and in the Army we
actually have certain wonderful innovations, such as strategy and tactics,
which certain admirals would be well advised to acquaint themselves with.
And so your new job, Shaftoe, is not simply to kill Nips, but to use your
head."
"Well, I know that you probably think I am a stupid jarhead, General,
but I do think that I have a good head on my shoulders."
"And on your shoulders is exactly where I would like it to stay!" The
General says, slapping him heartily on the back. "What we are trying to do
now is to create a tactical situation that is favorable to us. Once that is
accomplished, the actual killing of Nips can be handled by more efficient
means such as aerial bombardment, mass starvation, and the like. It will not
be necessary for you to personally cut the throat of every Nip you run into,
as eminently qualified as you might be for such an operation."
"Thank you, General, sir."
"We have millions of Filipino guerillas, and hundreds of thousands of
troops, to handle the essentially quotidian business of turning live Nips
into dead, or at least captive, Nips. But in order to coordinate their
activities, I need intelligence. That will be one of your missions. But the
country is already crawling with my spies, and so it will be a secondary
mission.
"And the primary mission, sir?"
"Those Filipinos need leadership. They need coordination. And perhaps
most of all, they need fighting spirit."
"Fighting spirit, sir?"
"There are many reasons for the Filipinos to be down in the dumps. The
Nips have not been kind to them. And although I have been very busy, here in
New Guinea, preparing the springboard for my return, the Filipinos don't
know about any of this, and many of them probably think I have forgotten
about them entirely. Now it is time to let them know I'm coming. That I
shall return but soon!"
Shaftoe snickers, thinking that The General is engaging in some self
mocking humor here yes, a bit of irony but then he notes that The General
does not seem especially amused. "Stop the vehicle!" he shouts.
Shaftoe parks the jeep at the apex of a switchback, where they can look
northwest across the outermost reaches of the Philippine Sea. The General
extends one arm toward Manila, hand slightly cupped, palm canted upward,
gesturing like a Shakespearean actor in a posed photo graph. "Go there,
Bobby Shaftoe!" says The General. "Go there and tell them that I am coming."
Shaftoe knows his cue, and he knows his line. "Sir, yes sir!"
Chapter 70 ORIGIN
From the point of view of admittedly privileged white male technocrats
such as Randy Waterhouse and his ancestors, the Palouse was like one big
live in laboratory for nonlinear aerodynamics and chaos theory. Not much was
alive there, and so one's observations were not forever being clouded by
trees, flowers, fauna, and the ploddingly linear and rational endeavors of
humans. The Cascades blocked any of those warm, moist, refreshing Pacific
breezes, harvesting their moisture to carpet ski areas for dewy skinned
Seattleites, and diverting what remained north to Vancouver or south to
Portland. Consequently the Palouse had to get its air shipped down in bulk
from the Yukon and British Columbia. It flowed across the blasted volcanic
scab land of central Washington in (Randy supposed) a more or less
continuous laminar sheet that, when it hit the rolling Palouse country,
ramified into a vast system of floods, rivers and rivulets diverging around
the bald swelling hills and recombining in the sere declivities. But it
never recombined exactly the way it was before. The hills had thrown entropy
into the system. Like a handful of nickels in a batch of bread dough this
could be kneaded from place to place but never removed. The entropy
manifested itself as swirls and violent gust