The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [306]
"Who says we're going back?" Polack asked.
"That looey did," Wyman said.
Red snorted. "Yeah, the Looey." He rolled over on his stomach.
Polack picked his nose. "Y'wanta bet we ain't knocking off?" There was something screwy about the whole setup, screwy as hell. That Croft, what a baby. A hood. It was the kind of guy you needed, a sonofabitch.
"Aw," Wyman said vaguely. For an instant he thought of the girl who had stopped writing letters to him. He didn't even care if she was alive or dead now. What did it matter? He stared up at the mountain, and hoped they would turn back. Had Croft said anything about it?
As if to answer him, Croft sauntered toward them from his guard post. "All right, you men, let's get movin'."
"We going back, Sergeant?" Wyman asked.
"Don't gimme any of your goddam lip, Wyman, we're gonna try the mountain." A low shocked chorus, grumbling and resentful, answered him. "Any one of you men got something to say about it?"
"Why the hell don't we go back, Croft?" Red asked.
'"Cause that ain't what they sent us out to do." Croft hovered about an intense rage. He would not be balked now. For an instant he was tempted to raise his rifle and blast it at Valsen's head. He felt himself compressing his jaws. "Come on, you men, you want the Japs to be waitin' for ya again?"
Gallagher glared at him. "That lootenant said we're goin' back."
"I'm in charge of this platoon now." He stared at them, besting them with his eyes. One by one they stood up, hoisted their packs sullenly. They were a little numb. This was a shock which left them passive. "Aah, fug him," Croft heard one of them mutter, and he grinned to himself, lashed them with his tongue. "You bunch of women!"
They were all standing now, all ready. "Let's go," he said quietly.
The platoon moved out slowly in the midmorning sun. After a few hundred yards they were tired again, and plodded along encased in a stupor. They had never really believed the patrol would end so easily. Croft led them on a route parallel to the cliffs of the mountain and toward the east. After twenty minutes they came to the first rent in the great bluffs of the mountain's base. A deep ravine slanted upward for several hundred feet to the first ridge, its red clay walls refracting brightly the heat of the sun. Without a word Croft turned toward it and the platoon began to climb the mountain. There were eight men left now.
"You know that Croft," Polack said to Wyman, "he's an idealist, that's what the fug he is." The big word pleased him for a moment and then was lost in the labor of scrambling up the burning clay floor of the ravine. Something screwy. He'd have to pump Martinez.
Wyman could see the Lieutenant again. A process which had been working in him since the ambush came to a focus. Before he could think, for he was very afraid of Polack's derision, he mumbled, "Listen, Polack, you think there's a God?"
Polack grinned, worked his hands under his pack straps to ease the chafing. "If there is, he sure is a sonofabitch."
"Oh, don't say that."
Painfully, the platoon continued to ascend the ravine.
The Time Machine:
POLACK CZIENWICZ
GIMME A GIMMICK AND I'LL MOVE THE WORLD
The lewd mobile mouth, the three upper teeth missing on the left side of his face. . . perhaps twenty-one years old, but his eyes were shrewd, bawdy, and when he laughed his skin was wizened and tough like the skin of a middle-aged man. With his hooked broken nose, his long pointed jaw, which slanted back to his receded gums, Minetta thought he looked like a cartoon of Uncle Sam. Yet he felt uncomfortable with him; secretly he was afraid to match his knowledge against Polack's.
The lock on the downstairs door is broken of course, and the mailboxes have been looted long ago; the hinges that remain are rusting off. It smells like a urinal in the hallway; the dirty tile of the entrance has absorbed the odors of the leaking pipes, the cabbage and garlic, the grease traps in the plumbing, which no longer work. On your way up the stairs you must lean toward the wall, for the banister is