The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [123]
Hearn shrugged. Then he'd end up like Conn and to hell with it. He'd buy it and talk about it, and it was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of women who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.
"She looked at it, and she said, 'Major' -- I was a major then -- 'what are they gonna do next? White ones, silver ones, gold ones, they'll probably be puttin' the American flag on 'em.' " Conn laughed and spat a little phlegm into the sand.
Why didn't they quit? Hearn rolled over on his belly, and felt the sun warming his body to its core. He'd be needing a woman soon, and short of ferrying to the next island, a couple of hundred miles away, where there were supposed to be native women, he was going to find little comfort.
"Hey," he said abruptly to Conn and Dove, "if you can't bring a whorehouse in, how about letting the women go for a while?"
"Beginning to get you down?" Conn asked with a smile.
"It's brutal," Hearn said, imitating Dove. He lit a cigarette, shaking the sand out of the pack.
Dove looked at him, tried another gambit. "Say, I was thinking before, Hearn, is your father's name William?"
"Yeah."
"We had a William Hearn who was a Deke about twenty-five years ago; could it be him?"
Hearn shook his head. "Hell, no, my father can't even read or write. All he can do is sign checks."
They laughed. "Wait a moment," Conn said, "Bill Hearn, Bill Hearn, by God, I know him, has some factories in the Middlewest, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota?"
"That's right."
"Sure," Conn said, "Bill Hearn. You look like him, come to think of it. I met him when I was out of the Army in 'thirty-seven, organizing the stock for a couple of companies. We got along fine."
It was possible. His father would throw back his straight black hair, and clap Conn on the back with one of his meaty moist hands. "Hell you say, man," he could hear his father booming, "either you throw your goods on the table, and we talk a little turkey, or you can admit you're just a goddam fraud" -- then the twinkle, the charm -- "and we can just get potted together, which is what the hell we want to do in the first place." But, no, Conn wasn't right; Conn didn't quite fit it.
"I saw his picture in the papers about a month ago. Have about ten papers sent to me regularly. I can see your old man's putting on a little weight."
"Keeping about even, I guess." He had been sick in the past three years and was down to almost the normal weight for a man his size. Conn didn't know his father. Of course not. Conn wasn't even a first sergeant in 'thirty-seven. You didn't quit the Army to organize companies when you were a staff sergeant. Abruptly Hearn realized that Conn had not whored with Generals Caldwell and Simmons in Washington, oh, possibly once he'd had a drink with them, or more likely he'd served under them as a noncom before the war but the whole thing was pathetic, and a little disgusting. Conn, the big operator. Even now the watery sagging eyes, the paunch, the mottled bulbous nose, were staring at him with sincerity. Sure he knew Bill Hearn. If they put Conn on the rack, he'd die swearing he knew him, believing he knew him.
"I'll tell you what, when you see Bill Hearn again, you tell him you saw me, or write to him, tell him that."
What had gone on in Conn's head for twenty years in the Army? Or particularly the last five when he had discovered he could swim as an officer?
Pop! went Dalleson's carbine.
"I'll tell him. Why don't you look him up? He'll be glad to see you."
"I might. I'd