The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [47]
"Ah reckon so," Wilson said. A soldier went running by outside, and the sound of his footsteps evoked a moody spirit in Red. It was the old sound, a man trying to get under cover before a storm. He sighed again. "All I ever done my whole life was get a wet ass," he muttered.
"You know," Wilson said, "ol' Stanley is really feelin' his piss now that he's in for corporal. Ah heard him tellin' one of the replacements all about the Motome invasion. 'It was rough,' Stanley said." Wilson chuckled. "Ah was glad to hear that Stanley thought so, 'cause Ah hadn't made up mah mind about it."
Gallagher spat. "Stanley ain't gonna give me any of his crap."
"Yeah," Red said. Gallagher and Wilson still believed he had been afraid to fight Stanley. To hell with them. When he had heard that Stanley was going to make corporal he had been amused and contemptuous; it had seemed just right. Stanley would be noncom material. "More men get to heaven by sucking first at the other end," he mumbled to himself.
Only it wasn't that simple. He realized abruptly that he had wanted to be chosen for corporal. He almost laughed aloud, a little bitterly, as if there would never be an end to the surprises in himself. The Army's got me, he thought. It was the old trap. First they made you afraid, and then they let you sew on ribbons. He would have turned it down if they had asked him. . . only he would have got a bang out of turning it down.
Some lightning flashed nearby, and a few seconds later the thunder seemed to explode overhead. "Man, that was close," Wilson said.
The sky was almost black now with the impending storm. Red lay back again. All his life he'd been turning down the stripes, and now. . . He tapped his hand several times on his chest, slowly, almost mournfully. He had always lived his life in himself, able to carry his belongings on his back. "The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable." It was an old axiom of his, but this once it was without much solace. He was running down. He had been a loner for a long, long time.
"The rain's starting," Gallagher said.
A vicious wind lashed at the tents. The rain came on softly, tapped against the rubber fabric of the shelter, and then began to drive harder. In only a few seconds it became furious with pellets like hail. The tents began to bend and strain. A few bursts of thunder sounded in the distance, and then a cloud shattered overhead.
The men in the tent winced. This would be no ordinary storm.
Wilson reached up and braced his weight against the ridgepole. "Goddam," he muttered, "that wind could cut a man's head off." The foliage beyond the barbed wire had already assumed a beaten look as if a herd of animals had trampled upon it. Wilson peered out for an instant and shook his head. The bivouac area was invisible, a void of green across which the rain streamed, beating upon the subdued grass and shrubs. The wind was tremendous. Wilson remained on his knees, feeling the violence of it dumbly. Although he had ducked back from the opening in the tent, his face was completely wet. There was no way to keep out the water which dripped quickly through every rip and seam of the tent fabric and blew in through the entrance like successive waves of surf. The rain trench had filled already, was flowing over onto their bedding. Gallagher gathered up their blankets, and the three men squatted under the flapping ponchos, trying to hold them down, and failing miserably in the attempt to keep their feet dry. Outside the water had risen in great puddles which kept spreading and sending out tentacles like enormous amoeba absorbing the earth. "Goddam, goddam," Wilson said.
Goldstein and Ridges were completely wet. When the rain had started, they had got out of their tent and pounded down all the stakes. Goldstein had crammed the blankets into the rubber bag of his jungle pack, and he crouched on his knees now inside the tent, trying to hold it down in the wind. "This is terrible," he shouted.
Ridges nodded. His ugly dumpy face was covered with drops of water, and his straight