The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [48]
The bottom of the ocean would look like this, he told himself. There were subterranean storms that he had read about, and this must be like them. Apart from his awe, and his concern that the tent should remain up, Goldstein was watching the storm with a fascinated interest. Probably the world had been something like this when it first began to cool, he thought, and felt a deep excitement as if he were witnessing creation. It was silly to think about the tent in the same moment, but he could not help himself. He was convinced that it would remain standing; the stakes were three feet deep, and the soil was the clay type that could take extreme stresses. If he had only known a storm like this was coming, he could have built a shelter that would last through anything, and he could lie underneath it, completely dry without the slightest worry. Goldstein was annoyed at Ridges. He should have told him what kind of storms there were; he was a veteran and he should have been prepared. Already Goldstein was planning the next tent he would build. His shoes had filled with water and he worked his toes to warm his feet. Squeegee action, he thought; probably the man who invented the squeegee had an experience like mine.
Ridges was watching the typhoon with panic and acceptance. Mighty sponges o' God swelling, he said to himself. The foliage of the jungle was churning turbulently, and the leaden-green sky painted it with greens so varied and brilliant that Ridges thought it looked like the Garden of Eden. He felt the throbbing of the jungle as a part of himself, the earth, which had turned to a golden mud, seemed alive to him. He kept looking at the fantastic green of the jungle and then at the orange-brown earth, febrile and pulsing as though the rain were cutting wounds into it. Ridges flinched before the power of it.
The Lord giveth and He taketh away, Ridges thought solemnly. Storms were a basic part of his life; he had come to fear them, to bear with them, and finally to expect them. He saw his father's reddened wrinkled face with the sad quiet blue eyes. "I'll tell you, Ossie," his father had said, "a man works and he toils, he puts in his good sweat tryin' to pull out a livin' from the land, and when all his work is done, if the good Lord sees it fitten, it's taken away in a storm." Perhaps that was the deepest truth in Ridges's nature; it seemed to him that all his life, he and his father had struggled with barren land and insects and blights, had worked their fields with one aging mule, and often as not, their work had been ruined in one black night.
He had helped Goldstein pound in the stakes because you helped your neighbor when he asked for it, and Ridges had decided the man you bunked with, even if he was a stranger, was still your neighbor; but secretly he had felt that their attempts to secure the tent would be useless. God's ways were God's ways, he told himself, and a man did not try to brook them. If the storm was meant to blow away their tent, it would do it even if they had a plow to hold it down. Now, because he did not know it was not raining in Mississippi, he prayed that the storm should not destroy his father's crops. They jus' been planted, Lord. Please don' wash them away. And even in his praying Ridges had no hope; he prayed to show that he was respectful.
The wind tore through the bivouac area like a great scythe, slashing the palm fronds from the coconut trees, blasting the rain before it. As they looked, they saw a tent jerk upward from its mooring, and then stream away in the wind, flapping like a terrified bird. "I wonder