The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [149]
"Don't kid yourself, boy," Brown told him. "They ain't many men want to take chances when it's a case of stopping a bullet."
"Naw, I don't mean that," Stanley said. "You can see the way he was in civilian life. He wanted to get ahead just like you and me, but he didn't have the guts to stick to something. He was too cautious. You got to be a smart apple if you want to live big."
"What the hell'd you ever do?" Brown asked.
"I've taken my chances, and got away with them too."
Brown laughed. "Yeah, fugged a dame when her husband was out."
Stanley spat again. It was a habit he had assimilated from Croft. "I'm going to tell you something. Just after Ruthie and me got hitched, we had a chance to buy some furniture from a guy who was movin' out of the state, and it was one hell of a buy, only he wanted cash. I didn't have it, and my old man didn't have it just then. For about three hundred bucks we could get a whole living room that must have been worth a thousand new. You know, you invite people over, it makes an impression. What do you think I did, folded my hands, and said it's a shame, and let the thing go? Hell, no, I didn't. I took the money from the garage I was working at."
"What do ya mean ya took the money?"
"Oh, it wasn't so hard, if you watched the angles. I was the bookkeeper there and we were taking in a thousand dollars a day in repairs. It was a big garage. I just took the money out of the till, and I held over to the next day the Work Completed slips on three cars which had repairs totaling up to the three hundred bucks. Those cars had gone out that afternoon, and I had to hold them over in the books so the receipts for that day on work completed and paid for wouldn't show a hole. Then the next day I checked them out in the books and held over another three C's worth."
"How long did ya do it for?" Brown asked.
"For two whole weeks, how do ya like that? There was a couple of days when we only had a couple of cars being paid for, and I was sweating blood 'cause by the time I took out the three hundred there wasn't much left. Of course I carried over the receipts from the day before that I didn't credit, but there was so few cars it would have showed up kind of funny if anyone had looked at the books that day."
"Well, how'd you get out of it?" Brown asked.
"This'll kill ya. After we bought the furniture I took out a loan for three hundred with that as security, and then I just slipped the three hundred back in a couple of days, and paid off the loan in monthly payments. But I had the furniture dirt-cheap. And maybe it didn't make some good impression on people. I never woulda had it, if I didn't take the chance."
"That was pretty good," Brown admitted. He was impressed; this was a facet of Stanley about which he had been ignorant.
"It took a lot to do it, I'll tell ya," Stanley said. He was remembering the nights he had lain awake worrying during those two weeks. He had suffered from any number of fears which attacked him in the night. His manipulations had become confused and impossible in the black hours of the morning; he would go over and over in his mind the changes he had made in the books and they would seem in error to him; he would become convinced he would be discovered the next day. He would try to concentrate, and find himself repeating an addition in his mind over and over again. "Eight plus thirty-five makes. . . makes. . . eight plus thirty-five makes three and carry one. . ." His stomach had become upset, and he could hardly eat any food. There would be times when he woud lie sweating in his bed, completely conquered by despair and anxiety. He wondered that everyone did not know what he was doing.
His love-making had suffered. He had been just eighteen when he married a few weeks before, and in his inexperience he had been inept, incapable