The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [101]
Croft grunted inaudibly and wiped the mouth of the canteen before he drank. Red sifted some dirt through his fingers. The liquor had been sweet and raw; it had rasped his throat and the irritation expanded through his body. He rubbed the side of his lumpish red nose and spat angrily. "No one's gonna ask you what you want to do," he told Wilson. "They just send you out to get your ass blown off." For an instant, he saw again the dead bodies in the green draw, the naked look of lacerated flesh. "Don't kid yourself," he said, "a man's no more important than a goddam cow."
Gallagher was remembering how the legs and arms of the Japanese prisoner had twitched for a second after Croft had shot him. "Just like wringing the neck of a fuggin chicken," he muttered surlily.
Martinez looked up. His face was drawn, and there were shadows under his eyes. "Why not you keep quiet?" he asked. "We see same things you do." His voice, almost always quiet and polite, had an angry strident note which amazed Gallagher and silenced him.
"Let's pass the canteen around," Wilson suggested. He tilted it upward, and drank the last inch. "Guess we got to open another one," he sighed.
"We all paid up for this," Croft said. "Let's see we drink the same amount." Wilson giggled.
They sat about in a circle, passing the canteen from time to time, and talking in slow indifferent voices which began to blur before the second canteen was finished. The sun was dropping toward the west, and for the first time that afternoon shadows were beginning to drift from the trees and the black-green ponchos of their pup tents. Goldstein and Ridges and Wyman were sitting about thirty yards away talking in soft voices. Occasionally, a noise of some minor activity -- a truck grinding up the lane that led to the bivouac or the shouts of some soldiers on a labor detail -- would filter through the coconut grove. Every fifteen minutes a battery about a mile away would fire, and a part of their minds would wait for the sound of the explosion when the shells landed. There was nothing to look at but barbed wire in front of them and the thick brush of the jungle beyond the grove.
"Well, back to headquarters company tomorrow. . . let's drink to that," Wilson said.
"I hope we just dig that fuggin road for the rest of the campaign," Gallagher said.
Croft fingered his belt dreamily. The awareness and excitement he had felt after he killed the prisoner had faded on the march to an empty sullen indifference to everything about him. As he drank, the sullenness remained but there were changes taking place in him. His mind had become dulled and blurred, and he would sit motionless for minutes at a time without speaking, intent upon the curious whirling and tumbling that was going on inside his body. His mind kept yawing drunkenly like the underwater shadows that ripple about a piling. He would think, Janey was a drunken whore, and a dull clod of pain would settle in his chest. Crack that whip, he muttered to himself, and his mind eddied over the lazy sensual memories of striding a horse and looking down a hill into a sunlit valley beneath. The alcohol spread through his legs, and he recalled for an instant the entire complex of pleasant sensations he felt when the sun had heated his saddle, and the smell of the hot leather and the wet horse spread about him. The heat re-created the glare of the sunlight in the green draw where the Japanese bodies were lying, and as he thought of the look of