The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [346]
Gallagher had the last shift. It was very cold in the half hour before daylight and he woke up dazed, and sat shuddering in his blanket. For many minutes he was conscious of little, feeling the vast shapes of the mountain range about him as no more than a deeper border to the night. He only shivered and drowsed, waiting passively for the morning and the heat of the sun. A complete lethargy had settled over him, and Roth's death was remote. He drifted through a stupor, his mind almost inert, dreaming sluggishly of far-gone pleasant things as though deep within him he had to keep a small fire going against the cold of the night, the space of the hills, and the cumulative exhaustion, the mounting deaths of the platoon.
The dawn came slowly on the mountain. At five o'clock he could see the top of the mountain range clearly as the sky became lighter, but for a long half hour there was little change. Actually he could see nothing, but his body contained a tranquil anticipation. Soon the sun would struggle over the eastern ramparts of the mountain and come down into their little valley. He searched the sky and found a few tentative washes of pink streaming over the higher peaks, coloring the tiny oblong clouds of the dawn a purple. The mountains looked very high. Gallagher wondered that the sun could get over them.
All about him now it was getting lighter but it was a subtle process, for the sun still remained hidden and the light seemed to rise from the ground, a soft rose color. Already he could discern clearly the bodies of the men sleeping about him, and he felt a touch of superiority. They looked gaunt and bleak in the early dawn, oblivious to the approach of morning. He knew that in a short while he would be rousing them, and they would groan as they came out of their sleep.
In the west he could still see the night, and he recalled a troop train speeding across the great plains of Nebraska. It had been twilight then, and the night chased the train out of the east, overtook it, and passed on across the Rockies, on to the Pacific. It had been beautiful and it made him wistful now. He longed suddenly for America, wished so passionately to see it again that he could smell the odor of wet cobblestones on a summer morning in South Boston.
The sun was close to the eastern ridge-line now and the sky seemed vast, yet fresh and joyful. He thought of Mary and himself camping in a little pup tent in the mountains and he dreamt that he was waking with the velvet teasing touch of her breasts against his face. He heard her say, "Get up, sleepyhead, and look at the dawn." He grunted drowsily, nuzzled against her in his fantasy and then popped open one eye as a grudging concession. The sun was clearing the ridge, and while the light in the valley was still faint, there was nothing unreal about it. The morning was here.
In that way Mary ushered in the dawn with him. The hills were shaking off the night mists and the dew was sparkling. For this brief moment the ridges about him appeared soft and feminine. All the men scattered around him looked damp and chilly, dark bundles from which mist rose. He was the only man awake for a distance of many miles, and he had the youth of the morning all to himself.
Out of the dawn, far on the other side of the mountain, he could hear artillery booming. It shattered his reverie. Mary was dead.
Gallagher swallowed, wondering with a dumb misery how long it would be before he would stop tricking himself. There was nothing now to anticipate, and he was conscious for the first time of how tired he was. His limbs ached and his sleep seemed to have done him no good. The character of the dawn changed, left him shuddering in his blanket, damp