The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [109]
"They're just crates," Red said.
"Tha's what Ah mean," Wilson told him. "We empty them, an' then we got foot-lockers to take back with us."
Red swore. "If you want a crate you can get it back at headquarters company."
"Aw, no," Wilson told him, "those crates we got are jus' old shoddy. These yere are built way a box should be built."
Red looked again. "I'm fugged if I'm going to tote a box all the way back."
Martinez wandered off a few yards. He had noticed a corpse whose open mouth was filled with gold teeth, and fascinated he kept turning around to look at it. He stood over the body and looked down at the teeth. There were at least six or seven which seemed to be of solid gold, and Martinez darted a quick look back at the other men, who were going into the cave.
He was filled suddenly with a lust for the gold teeth. He could hear the men thrashing about in the cave, swearing thickly to one another, and despite himself he looked down again at the gaping mouth of the cadaver. No good to him, he told himself. Tensely he was trying to estimate how much the teeth were worth. Thirty dollar, maybe, he told himself.
He turned away, and then came back. The battlefield was very silent, and he could hear nothing for a moment but the intent buzzing silence of the flies on the ridge. Down below in the valley everything stank, and the wreckage of mutilated men and vehicles was scattered everywhere. It looked like a junk yard, rust-red and black with an occasional patch of green grass. Martinez shook his head, Everything stink. A discarded rifle was lying at his feet, and without thinking he picked it up, and smashed the butt of it against the cadaver's mouth. It made a sound like an ax thudding into a wet rotten log. He lifted the rifle and smashed it down again. The teeth spattered loose. Some landed on the ground and a few lay scattered over the crushed jaw of the corpse. Martinez picked up four or five gold ones in a frenzy and dropped them in his pocket. He was sweating terribly, and his anxiety seemed to course through his body with the pumping of his heart. He took a few deep breaths, and gradually it subsided. He was feeling a mixture of guilt and glee, and he thought of a time in his childhood when he had stolen a few pennies from his mother's purse. "Goddam," he said. He wondered idly when he could sell the teeth. The opened battered mouth of the corpse bothered him, and he turned the body over with his foot. A school of maggots was uncovered, and he shivered. For some reason, he was very frightened, and he turned and went back to the men in the cave.
The cave was small and the air in it was dank and oppressive. The men were sweating heavily, and yet the air seemed cold. The bodies were heaped over the boxes like bags of flour, and when they would try to move one the maggots would scatter like a school of minnows. Inside was a disordered rubble of fragments, black charred objects, rusted scraps of metal, shell fragments, a few broken boxes of mortar shells, a few mounds of gray ash like the kind found in trash barrels; there was even just a little bit of a dead body, a charred shinbone jutting from a mound of dirt and ash. The stench had the intensity and delirium of ether.
"We ain't gonna get a goddam box," Red said. He was feeling sick, and his back had begun to ache inordinately from the effort it took to shift the bodies with his fingertips.
"Let's quit this mess," Gallagher said. The sunlight at the mouth of the cave seemed astringent.
"Men, you ain't gonna quit now, are ya?" Wilson pleaded. He was determined to bring back a box.
The sweat ran into Martinez's eyes. He was irritable and impatient. "We go back now, huh?" he suggested.
Wilson threw a body aside, and then stepped back with an exclamation. He had uncovered a snake, which moved its head slowly from side to side over the top of one of the boxes. The men all drew away with a murmur of fear and flattened against the opposite wall of the cave. Red pressed the safety on his gun, and drew a