The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [348]
"Why the fug don't you throw the scabbard away?" Gallagher asked.
"Yah," Martinez said quickly. He felt embarrassed, meek. His fingers shook as he worked the hooks of the scabbard out of the eyelets in his cartridge belt. He tossed it away and winced at the empty clattering sound it made. Both of them started, and Martinez had a sudden gout of anxiety.
Gallagher could hear Hennessey's helmet spinning in the sand. "I'm gone to pot," he murmured.
Martinez felt automatically for the scabbard, realized it was gone, and with a sudden congealing of his flesh saw Croft telling him to be silent about his reconnaissance. Hearn had gone out believing. . . Martinez shook his head, choked by relief and horror. It wasn't his fault that they were on the mountain.
Abruptly the pores of his body opened, discharged their perspiration. He shivered in the cold mountain air, wrestling against the same anxiety he had suffered on the troopship the hours before they had invaded Anopopei. Against his will he stared up at the tessellated stones and jungle of the upper ridges, closed his eyes and saw the ramp of the landing boat going down. His body tensed, waiting for the machine-gun fire. Nothing happened and he opened his eyes, racked by an acute frustration. Something had to happen.
If only he could see a snapshot of his kid, Gallagher thought. "It's a goddam trap goin' up this mountain," he muttered.
Martinez nodded.
Gallagher extended his arm, touched Martinez's elbow for a moment. "Why don't we go back?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"It's fuggin suicide. What are we, a bunch of goddam mountain goats?" He rubbed the coarse itching hairs of his beard. "Listen, we'll all get knocked off."
Martinez wriggled his toes inside his boots, extracting a bleak satisfaction.
"You wanta get your fuggin head blown off?"
"No." He fingered the little tobacco pouch in his pocket where he kept the gold teeth he had stolen from the cadaver. Perhaps he should throw them away. But they were so pretty, so valuable. Martinez wavered, then left them there. He was struggling against the conviction that they would be an effective sacrifice.
"We ain't got a fuggin chance." Gallagher's voice shook, and as if he were a sounding board, Martinez resonated to it. They sat staring at each other, bound by their common fear. Martinez wished dumbly that he could assuage Gallagher's anxiety.
"Why don't you tell Croft to quit?"
Martinez shivered. He knew! He could tell Croft to go back. But the attitude was so foreign to him that he shied away from it fearfully. He could just ask him, maybe. A new approach formed for him naïvely. For a moment as he had hesitated before killing the Japanese sentry he had realized that he was only a man and the entire act had seemed unbelievable. Now the patrol seemed ridiculous. If he were just to ask Croft, maybe Croft would see it was ridiculous too.
"Okay," he nodded. He stood up and looked at the men bundled in their blankets. A few of them were stirring already. "We go wake him up."
They walked over to Croft, and Gallagher shook him. "Come on, get up." He was a little surprised that Croft was still sleeping.
Croft grunted, sprang to a sitting position. He made an odd sound, almost like a groan, and turned immediately to stare at the mountain. He had been dreaming his recurrent nightmare: he lay at the bottom of a pit waiting for a rock to fall on him, a wave to break, and he could not move. Ever since the Jap attack at the river he had been having dreams like this.
He spat. "Yeah." The mountain was still in place. No boulders had moved. He was a little surprised, for the dream had been vivid.
Automatically he swung his legs free of the blanket and began to put on his boots. They watched him soberly. He picked up his rifle, which he had kept beside him under the blankets, and examined it to see if it was dry. "Why the hell didn't you wake me earlier?"