The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [242]
Minetta lurched to his feet. "Why the hell don't they give us a decent break? Jesus Christ, we just sat down." He glared at Ridges, who was shouldering his way along the narrow ragged swath of the trail; nothing was left of his reverie but the resentment and fatigue that had initiated it.
"C'mon, M'netta," Ridges called back. "We got work to do." Without waiting for an answer, he plowed ahead to relieve the crew that had been laboring. Ridges was angry and perplexed. He had spent the rest period debating whether he would have time to clean his rifle, and he had decided he could never do the job properly in ten minutes. It annoyed him. The rifle was wet and muddy, and would rust if he couldn't take care of it soon. Shoot, Ridges said to himself, a man never has time to do one thing, when they ain't cussin' for him to do somethin' else. He felt pleasantly spiteful at the stupidity of the Army, and yet guilty too. He was taking poor care of a valuable piece of property, which bothered his sense of honesty. The gov'ment give me that M-one 'cause they figgered Ah'd watch over it, an' Ah ain't doin' it. The rifle must be worth a hundred dollars, Ridges thought, and that was a vast sum to him. Ah gotta clean it, but what ifen they don't gimme time? It was too much for him to resolve. He sighed, picked up his machete, and began to work. In a few seconds Goldstein had joined him.
The platoon reached the end of the jungle after five hours of cutting trail. The jungle was bordered by another stream, and on the other side yellow hills covered only with kunai grass or an occasional grove of shrubbery rolled away toward the north. The sunlight was brilliant, reflected with an incredible glare from all the bare hills and the clear blazing arch of the sky. The men, accustomed to the gloom of the jungle, blinked their eyes, were uncertain, a little afraid of the vast open spaces before them. It was all so bare, so painful.
All that space!
The Time Machine:
JOEY GOLDSTEIN
THE COVE OF BROOKLYN
A sturdy man about twenty-seven, perhaps, with blond straight hair and eager blue eyes. His nose is sharp, and there are deep sad lines which extend from his nose to the corners of his mouth. If it were not for this, he would look very young. His speech is quick and sincere and a little breathless as if afraid he will not be permitted to finish.
The candy store is small and dirty as are all the stores on the cobblestoned street. When it drizzles the cobblestones wash bare and gleaming on top, and the manhole covers puff forth their shapeless gouts of mist. The night fogs cloak the muggings, the gangs who wander raucously through the darkness, the prostitutes, and the lovers mating in the dark bedrooms with the sweating stained wallpaper of brown. The walls of the street fester in summer, are clammy in winter; there is an aged odor in this part of the city, a compact of food scraps, of shredded dung balls in the cracks of the cobblestones, of tar, smoke, the sour damp scent of city people, and the smell of coal stoves and gas stoves in the cold-water flats. All of them blend and lose identity.
In the daytime, the peddlers stand at the curb and hawk their fruit and vegetables. Middle-aged women in black shapeless coats pluck at the food with shrewd grudging fingers, probing it to the marrow. Cautiously, the women step out from the sidewalk to avoid the water in the gutters, stare with temptation at the fish heads that the owner of the fish store has just cast into the street. The blood gives a sheen to the cobblestone at first, fades, becomes pink, and then is lost in the sewer water. Only the smell of fish remains together with the dung balls, the tar, the rich uncertain odors of the smoked meats in the delicatessen windows.
The candy store is at the end of the street, a tiny place with grease in the ledges of the window, and rust replacing the paint. The front window slides open doubtfully to make a counter where people can buy things from the street, but the window is cracked and dust