Ice-Cream Headache by James Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

from the Junker onto us. Alcorn’s clothes hung from him like rags and on the back of his head was a fatigue hat with the brim turned up that defied the wind. He must have sewed an elastic band on it. Beside him I looked like I was all bucked up for a short-timer parade.
    “Where’s your helmet?” Mazzioli said. “You’re supposed to wear your helmet at all times. That’s the orders.”
    “Aw now, sarge,” Alcorn whined. “You know the steel band of them things gives a man a headache. I cain’t wear one.”
    I grinned and gave the brim of my own inverted soup-plate helmet a tug. Alcorn was a character.
    “When are you men going to learn to obey orders?” the Greek said. “An army runs by discipline. If you men don’t start acting like soldiers, I’ll turn you in.”
    “Off with his head,” I said.
    “What did you say?”
    “I said, coffee and bed. That’s what we need. There’s not a man on this position who’s had three good hours sleep since this bloody war started. Putting up barbed wire all day and pulling guard all night. And then putting up the same wire next day because the tide washed it out.”
    Alcorn snickered and Mazzioli said nothing. The Greek had had charge of a wire detail that worked one whole night to put up three hundred yards of double apron wire on the sand beach below the road. In the morning it was gone. Not a single picket left.
    “Alcorn,” Mazzioli ordered, “get a rifle and keep a bayonet against this guy’s belly till I tell you not to.”
    “I don’t know where the rifles are down here,” Alcorn said.
    “I’ll get it,” I said.
    I walked to the culvert and climbed down around it. The wall made a protection from the wind and I felt I had dropped into a world without breath. The absence of the wind made me dizzy and I leaned my face against the concrete. I felt the way you feel when you look out the window at a blowing rainstorm. All our blankets and stuff were down here. Against the wall of the culvert lay four rifles with bayonets on them, wrapped in a shelter-half. I pulled one out and made myself climb up into the wind again.
    Alcorn took the rifle and kept the bayonet against the Junker’s paunch. Every time the Junker moved or tried to speak Alcorn jabbed him playfully in the belly. The Junker was getting madder and madder, but Alcorn was having a fine time. I knew the lewd nakedness of that scraped face someplace before. I went over in my mind all the people I had seen at the University.
    The Greek was doing a bang-up job of searching the car, he even looked under the hood. I sat on the culvert and got my mess kit and put a handful of fresh sand in it from beside the road and rubbed it around and around. The dishwater that got out to us from the CP at Hanauma Bay gave us all the dysentery until we started using the sand.
    I tried to think where I’d seen him. It wasn’t the face of a teacher, it had too much power. I dumped the greasy mess from the mess kit and poured in a little water from my canteen. I sloshed it around to rinse the sand out, listening vacantly to the Greek cursing and fidgeting with the car.
    Just three days ago a two-man sub ran aground off Kaneohe and the second officer swam ashore, preferring capture. It was expected the sub was scouting the invasion that was coming truly any day.
    They said he was the first prisoner of the war. I got to see him when they brought him in. He was a husky little guy and grinning humbly. His name was Kazuo Sakamaki. I knew a girl at the University named Harue Tanaka. I almost married her.
    It seemed like the wind had blown my mind empty of all past. It had sucked out everything but Makapuu and the black rocks and blue lights and the sand-choked grass. The University with its clear, airy look from the street, its crisp greenness all hidden away in a wind-free little valley at the foot of rocky wooded Tantalus, it was from another life, a life protected from the wind, a life where there were white clouds in