The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [110]
The sound of the shot bounded from wall to wall with the over-pouring clamor of an artillery piece. The snake's head disappeared into a mash of pulp, and its body quivered frenetically for many seconds. The men watched intently, awe-struck, their ears deafened by the noise of Red's gun. "Let's get out of here," Gallagher cried.
They stumbled over one another in their sudden frenzy to get out. All of them had an acute panic. Wilson mopped his face and breathed deeply of the air outside the hole. "Ah guess that's one box Ah'll never get," he said casually. Actually, he was feeling very tired, and his restlessness had spent itself temporarily. "Ah guess we might as well get on back," he said.
The men descended the ridge and struck out along the road leading back to the bivouac area. They passed a gutted tank which lay moldering off the road, its treads broken and rusted, looking like the skeleton of a lizard. "Goddam snake like that soon," Martinez said. Red grunted. He was looking at a corpse which lay almost naked on its back. It was an eloquent corpse, for there were no wounds on its body, and its hands were clenching the earth as if to ask for a last time the always futile question. The naked shoulders were hunched together in anguish, and he could easily conceive the expression of pain that should have been on the corpse's mouth. But the corpse lay there without a head, and Red ached dully as he realized the impossibility of ever seeing that man's face. There was only a bloody fragment at the terminus of the neck. The body seemed to lie in a casing of silence.
Abruptly Red realized he was sober and very weary. The other men were already many yards ahead of him on the road, but he continued to look, drawn by some emotion he could not express. Very deep inside himself he was thinking that this was a man who had once wanted things, and the thought of his own death was always a little unbelievable to him. The man had had a childhood, a youth and a young manhood, and there had been dreams and memories. Red was realizing with surprise and shock, as if he were looking at a corpse for the first time, that a man was really a very fragile thing.
The stench of the cave was still in his nostrils, and the cadaver gave him the same kind of horror that he had felt once in stepping on a coil of human feces in the middle of a lawn. There had been a strange self-sufficiency about that as there was now in the torso and limbs of this body. He realized that in a little while the fetidness of this corpse would seep into the earth and be lost, but now it was horrible in its stench. It caused him a deep pang of fear. He could still recall the odor of the cave, and it combined with this to terrify him -- he passed from the first warm smell of decay into the pungent quivering core of the stink, a clear nauseous odor that shocked him with cold fingers. It was the smell he would have expected if he had lifted a coffin lid, and it remained in him for a long bad moment in which he looked at the body and didn't look, thought of nothing, and found his mind churning with the physical knowledge of life and death and his own vulnerability.
Then it was all over and he continued to walk, looking at the tangle of war on the left and right of the road. The smell continued to oppress him. The way a bunch of ants would kill each other, he thought. He trotted after the other men, and walked moodily beside them through the coconut grove and along the trail. The liquor was wearing off for all of them, and they were silent. Red had a headache. He stumbled over a root, and swore, and then without any relation to what they had been talking about, he muttered, "There damn sure ain't anything special about a man if he can smell as bad as he does when he's dead."
Back at 2d Battalion, Wyman had just wounded an insect. It was a long hairy caterpillar with black and gold coloring, and he had jabbed a twig into its