The Pistol by James Jones
Mast had already sensed this attitude, not only in O’Brien but in everyone, or so he thought; otherwise he would never have dared leave the pistol. But now that O’Brien spoke it aloud, he was somehow embarrassed and at a loss for anything to say. “Well, thanks, O’Brien.”
O’Brien sat down stiffly and looked out over the valley floor for himself. It was dappled by moving cloud shadows today, and far off miles away one cloud, one single cloud, was raining. “It’s different up here somehow. I don’t know why. I guess it’s because the war seems so far away maybe.”
“I guess that’s it,” Mast said embarrassedly. Far below at Bellows Field a plane took off in the sunshine and began to circle upward, still far below them.
“It don’t really seem like the Army up here,” O’Brien said stiffly.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“But don’t get me wrong, Mast. I still want that pistol. I think I got a better right to it than you do. And once we get back down below I’ll get it off you hook or crook any way I can, see? You don’t need it. I need it. Now if you want it that way and be friends up here, okay and if you don’t, okay.”
“All right, let’s leave it like that then,” Mast said stiffly.
“Okay,” O’Brien said just as stiffly, and stuck out his big hamlike hand. “Our valley looks pretty today, don’t it?” he said after a moment, after they had shaken.
“Yes, it sure does,” Mast said. They had all four of them started calling it that: ‘our valley,’ as a joke about the feeling of possession that looking down from up here gave them.
Suddenly, from nowhere and for no reason, at least for no reason that he himself could ascertain, a fit of some unnamable emotion seized Mast so strongly that he was afraid for a moment he might weep. Because of this he got up and abruptly walked away, filled with astonishment at himself.
Well, at least his pistol was safe for the rest of the time they were up here anyway, and he could rest. Or so he thought. The only trouble was that it wasn’t, wasn’t safe. On the tenth day of the sojourn in Marconi Pass the fourth man, the tall thin quiet southerner Grace, tried to steal it—or rather just simply take it.
Nine
ACTUALLY, IF IT WAS the withdrawal of Army authority which had been in large part responsible for Mast’s newfound happiness, it was also this same absence of authority which was eventually responsible for endangering the pistol again.
Apparently the tall, thin, quiet, amiable southerner Grace, who had been Mast’s bunkmate since they arrived, had stood as long as he could the prospect, and the temptation, of seeing Mast’s unregistered pistol lying there unprotected at the head of their tent day in and day out. Finally he had succumbed. At any rate on the tenth day of their stay Mast came back to the camp from exploring a new rock pinnacle to catch Grace alone in camp and in the act of attaching the pistol to his own rifle belt, after having detached it from Mast’s.
“Hey!” Mast cried in alarm. “Hey! What are you doing!”
The southerner looked up and grinned, a tough, evil grin not at all like the quiet amiable man with whom Mast had shared a tent the past ten days. “What does it look like, Mast?” he said.
Mast, still standing at the bend of the little trail that they had gradually trampled in where it rounded the corner of rock from the saddle, could hardly believe what his eyes were offering him. “But you can’t!” he cried, disjointed words and bits and pieces of thoughts running through his head without coherence, not only about the pistol but about the meaning of the Pass itself and what O’Brien had said. “You can’t! Not up here! Not at the Pass!”
Grace, who had already had one hook of the holster through its eyelet, stopped working with it and looked up with that tough, mean grin which Mast could not recognize as belonging to him. “What’s to stop me?”
“We will!” Mast said. “All of us!”
“No you won’t,” Grace said, still holding the half-fastened holster and belt in his hands. Mast had started to walk toward him, but he did not move. “What have them two guys got to do with you and this pistol? You think they’ll help you? They will not. And you ain’t big enough, nor tough enough, to stop me.
“Look, Mast,” he said as Mast continued to advance along the trail. “You say you bought this pistol. But how do I know you bought it? Maybe you stole it. Even if you did buy it, somebody else stole it, didn’t they? All right, I’m stealing it. Or rather, just taking it.”
Mast had continued to come on, and now stopped a few feet away from him. “But you can’t. Don’t you understand? Not up here at the Pass, anyway. Are you a human being? Don’t you have any honor? Don’t you have any honesty? or integrity?”
“Did you have any integrity when you bought a pistol you knew was stolen property? I guess I got as much as the next man,” Grace said with his tough, mean grin. “Look, Mast. This is our last day up here. The Company Commander said we’d be relieved in ten days, didn’t he? All right. I waited till the last day to do it. I’ve liked it up here too. I didn’t want to spoil it. So I waited. Because I didn’t want to spoil it. But I’d be a damn fool to wait any longer. Our relief might show up any minute now. And when that happens, it’s done.
“When we get down from here, everything starts right over where it left off. We’re back in the Army again then and God knows where we’ll be a week from now. As soon as you get down off this mountain, you’ll start sleeping with this pistol inside your shirt again. And what chance’ll I ever have to get hold of it then?”
“But that’s cheating!” Mast said. “You knew I trusted everybody.”
“What’s cheating,” Grace said indifferently. “It all depends on how you look at it. I don’t look at it that it’s cheating. Way I look at it, you’ve been cheating me. Because I need this pistol worse than you do.
“Look, Mast,” he said, still holding it in his hands, it still only half-fastened, his tone sober and serious and intent. “You know what my spec number is on the T. O., don’t you? I’m a runner. I’m one of three company runners. Message carrier. Who stands to get it worse than a company runner? I’ll be off on my own all the time, alone, maybe even traveling through the Jap lines, for all I know. What if I run into a patrol, out there all by myself? with some wacky officer with one of them damn Samurai sabers in charge of it? What if I lost my rifle and got captured? At least this way I’ll be able to maybe get me a couple of officers and have a bullet left for myself. You know how they torture their prisoners and cut them all up with those sabers.”
Grace’s voice was very intent now. “While look at you, on the other hand. You’re a born clerk, Mast. With your education. You’ll wind up working for the Rear Echelon as company clerk, sure as hell, before you’re done. What good will this pistol do you there?”
“I have no intention of ever becoming a clerk,” Mast said in a voice which it seemed to him had become ancient, merely from repeating so many times the same words.
“Maybe not, but you will,” Grace said with conviction. “And I see no reason why you should have this pistol back there, when I need it so bad up front.”
“Say what you wish,” Mast said. “You’re a thief. And a cheat and a sneak.”
“I don’t think so,” Grace said. “In fact, I know so.”
As they stood staring at each other, separated by this difference of opinion, Mast heard footfalls behind him on the trail and turned to see Fondriere and O’Brien coming in from some exploration. “Well, you won’t get away with it!” he cried over his shoulder at Grace, and turning back and spreading out his arms in appeal, poured out to them the story of Grace’s defection and of just what had happened.
Grace continued to stand behind him listening stolidly, still holding the half-fastened holster and belt in his hands.
Not only did Grace, who was his own bunkmate, Mast pointed out, abuse his trust. Not only did Grace conduct himself like a thief and throw away his own honor and integrity. He had done what was much worse: he had destroyed the trip, and the Pas
Corporal Fondriere coughed embarrassedly and dropped his eyes, and O’Brien, his face setting itself into a sheepish mask of studied disinterest, looked away.
“Your pistol doesn’t have anything to do with my command,” Fondriere said, “or with my mission up here. I don’t see what it has to do with me and O’Brien. Whoever has your pistol it’s not going to do me a damn bit of good.”
“That’s true,” O’Brien said. “I think it’s between you and Grace. Your pistol don’t do me any good. I don’t think you even got any right to ask us.”
Mast stared at them, his arms still outspread, unable to believe that they would not help him, just on moral grounds alone. Not even considering what he meant to them as a person. Flashes and smatterings of all kinds of thoughts and feelings tore through him, the ruined peacefulness of the Pass here, his own violated trustfulness, the precious rest he had had for ten days but which was now lost, the cheap reaction of the two men before him to what was clearly a deep moral issue, the unconscionable lack of integrity of the man behind him. Mast could not even have separated them one from the other, so vague were they and so fast through his mind did they fly, but the sum total of all of them was outraged righteousness.
Armed with this, he turned abruptly and ran full force at Grace, butting him in the chest with his head and making a grab for the half-fastened pistol holster at the same time. Grace was standing on the path just in front of the tents where the lesser slope of the camp dropped away to the steeper slope down to the rock chimney. The force of Mast’s head striking him in the chest threw him off balance. Instinctively, he stepped back—and off the slope. The drop under his foot wasn’t much, a foot or two. But it was enough to make him fall, and when he fell he let go of the belt and pistol. Mast stood on the path, breathing heavily and once again in possession of the pistol, and watched Grace rolling down the steep slope toward the cup of the rock chimney into which everything on three sides, up here, would roll and fall.
Grace roiled thirty or forty yards down the two hundred yards of slope before he was able to dig in his heels and get himself stopped. He got up and in a half-scrambling run, staring up and grinning that mean, tough, squint-eyed grin, more a leer now than a grin, started back up the slope at Mast.
Mast, watching him, hastily and nervously set about getting the holster off the belt. Luckily for him it was only half-fastened or he wouldn’t have made it in time. He tossed the belt toward the tents behind him but continued to clutch the heavy, holstered pistol because he no longer trusted putting it down, and waited.
A few yards from the top Grace intelligently changed his direction off to the side, although it never would have occurred to Mast to kick him. Thus he came up to the path level with Mast eight or ten yards away. Pausing to breathe a moment and still wearing that fixed grin, he came down the path with his fists up. He was just about a head taller than Mast, although a little less husky, but his arms were at least six inches longer. Mast, trying to defend himself while still clutching the holstered pistol, took his first punch hard on the ear, making his whole head ring. It knocked him off of the path, and because he would not let go of the pistol he landed heavily on his side—and immediately found himself rolling dizzily down the slope toward the chimney, as Grace had done before him.
He still would not let go of the pistol, but by digging in the fingernails of his free hand and trying to dig in first with his toes and then his heels as he turned, he managed to squirm himself around perpendicular to the slope and get himself stopped.
Then he too started to scramble back up to the path. He knew now that to have possession of the pistol was not enough. He had to make Grace give it up voluntarily by whipping him, or Grace would make him. But he still couldn’t put the pistol down anywhere for fear of O’Brien or Fondriere taking it. He attempted, as he came back up, to utilize the same tactic Grace had, by turning off to one side, now that he knew about the kicking. But Grace, who had thought it up first, was not to be caught that way. He ran down the path above Mast, keeping himself directly above him.
A few feet from the top, just beyond kicking range, Mast stopped, breathing heavily, still clutching the pistol in his left hand.
“Come on, damn you,” Grace drawled. “I’m ready. I’ll kick your face off”.
Obviously there was nothing for it but to go on up, and Mast gathered himself, still staring upward, still breathing heavily. It was then that O’Brien intervened.
“Wait a minute! Mast, give me the pistol and I’ll hold it for you.”
“You?” Mast breathed.
“I promise I won’t keep it. I’ll give it back to you. Or to Grace, if you say so. Hell, you can’t fight like that.”
“He’ll say so,” Grace said with his mean grin.
“You think so?” Mast said. “All right,” he said to O’Brien. “Let me come on up,” he added, directing it at Grace.
“Go to hell,” Grace grinned. “I’m not giving away no advantages.”
“Here,” O’Brien said, and came down onto the path a few feet from Grace. “Toss it up then.”
For a long moment Mast stared at him in silence, breathing heavily.
“I promise I’ll give it back to you,” O’Brien said. “Or to Grace, if you say. I ain’t that kind of a louse. Not if I promise.”
After a moment of thought, staring up at him, Mast tossed the holstered pistol up to him in silence, and prepared himself to rush Grace. There was no other way to do it.
Mast jerked his head sideways when he saw it coming, and the kick grazed his ear, the same ear that had taken the punch earlier, and a hot streak of fire ran along the whole side of his head. Hurting fearfully, he dove upward and got Grace’s other leg with both hands and upended him, then rolled sideways and pulled. Grace, cursing savagely, tumbled on down over Mast’s back and commenced to roll down the slope again until he could get himself stopped, and Mast was once again in command of the path.
This time when Grace charged him, he did not allow Grace to go to the side but stayed in front of him as Grace had done to him. Just beyond range, Grace stopped too, gathering himself and his courage, and also getting a little wind. Then he charged, grinning evilly, his eyes wide and piercing. Mast, who had once had a one-semester course in boxing in high school, feinted, shifting his weight to his left foot, and when Grace jerked his head aside, delivered him a vicious kick in the face which carried with it all the righteous outrage that had been smouldering in him since this thing had started, that had been smouldering in him since long before that even, since all the way back to when the first man had tried the first time to beat him out of his pistol and his chance of being saved. And it was that kick that eventually won him the fight.
With a yelp of pain and then a stream of cursing Grace went over backwards with both hands to his face. When he finally got himself stopped on the slope, he paused crouching, his right hand to the already swelling side of his face, and then started back up again. This time, smiling triumphantly, Mast did not wait but launched himself down the slope at Grace as soon as Grace was in range, and they went lolling down the slope together, punching and grabbing at each other. This time they rolled more than half way down to the chimney before both intelligently decided to stop fighting until they could get themselves stopped from sliding right on over the edge.
After that, neither of them ever got back up to the trail again. The moment one of them started to try it the other would grab him and haul him back down and start punching him, thus gaining an advantage. After a few of these, neither tried again to get to the trail.
It was a strange, wild, insane fight, there on the steep side of the mountain, with the fluffy pure-white cumulus puffs moving serenely acros
Mast fought doggedly, tenaciously, slipping and sliding on the steep slope, taking punches that rang through his whole head and body like a great bell, actually heaving and gasping for breath now. It was impossible to kick here on this slope. He could hardly remember what the fight had been about, all he knew was that he had to win it, and that he was being beaten. Grace’s arms were too long for him, and while Grace was perhaps not quite as strong as he, Mast knew he was taking three times as many punches as he landed. Even as he continued to fight on, taking one more punch, sliding one more slide, he knew he was defeated. Even though he continued to throw punch after punch, he had resigned himself to defeat. So it came to him as a matter of astonishment and complete surprise when, after a particularly heavy exchange of blows, Grace muttered through swollen lips, “All right. I give up. I’m licked.”
Mast, his face swollen grotesquely and his arm cocked to deliver another blow, stared at him through puffy lids unbelievingly. Grace’s face was swollen also, perhaps even more so. And the right side of his face where the kick had landed was a liverish purple, and that eye was closed.
“I can’t take any more punches on that bad eye,” Grace mumbled through puffed lips, not without dignity.
Mast dropped his arm and turned and started off up the slope. Twice he slid to his knees before he got up there and he was not at all sure he was going to make it. But he did, and when he did, he went straight to O’Brien, took his pistol and holster out of his hands, and went to the tent and reattached it to the riflebelt that Grace had taken it from. Then he sat down. As an afterthought he reached for the belt and fastened it around him.