The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [57]
But Minetta yawned. "Jeez, I'm glad this is over." He started to go and then turned back. "You know who you wake up?"
"Sergeant Brown?"
"That's right. He's sleeping on a blanket with Stanley over there." Minetta indicated the direction vaguely.
Roth muttered, "Just five of us on this part of the perimeter. Think of it, five men having to hold down a whole platoon's part of the perimeter."
"That's what I mean," Minetta said. "We ain't getting any break. At least there's a lot of men where the first squad is." He yawned quietly. "Well, I'm going," he said.
Roth felt terribly alone after Minetta left him. He gazed into the jungle, and got into the hole behind the machine gun as silently as he could. Something like this was beyond him, he told himself; he didn't have the nerves for it. This took a younger man, a kid like Minetta or Polack, or one of the veterans.
He was sitting on two cartridge boxes, and the handles cut into his bony rump. He kept shifting his weight, and moving his feet about. The hole was very muddy from the evening storm, and everything about him felt damp. His clothes had been wet for hours, and he had had to spread his blankets on the wet ground. What a way to live! He would have a cold by morning, he was certain. He'd be lucky if it wasn't pneumonia.
Everything was very quiet. The jungle was hushed, ominous, with a commanding silence that stilled his breath. He waited, and abruptly the utter vacuum was broken and he was conscious of all the sounds of the night woods -- the crickets and frogs and lizards thrumming in the brush, the soughing of the trees. And then the sounds seemed to vanish, or rather his ear could hear only the silence; for several minutes there was a continual alternation between the sounds and the quiet, as if they were distinct and yet related like a drawing of some cubes which perpetually turn inside-out and back again. Roth began to think; there was some heavy thunder and lightning in the distance, but he did not worry about the threat of rain. For a long time he listened to the artillery, which sounded like a great muffled bell in the heavy moist night air. He shivered and crossed his arms. He was remembering what a training sergeant had said about dirty fighting and how the Japs would sneak up behind a sentry in the jungle and knife the man. "He'd never know at all," the sergeant had said, "except maybe for one little second when it was too late."
Roth felt a gnawing, guttish fear, and turned around to look at the ground behind him. He shuddered, brooding over such a death. What an awful thing to happen. His nerves were taut. As he tried to see the jungle beyond the little clearing past the barbed wire, he had the kind of anxiety and panic a child has when the monster creeps up behind the hero in a horror movie. Something clattered in the brush, and Roth ducked in his hole, and then slowly peeked above it, trying to discern a man or at least some recognizable object in the deep shapes and shadows of the jungle. The noise stopped, and then after ten seconds began again. It was a scratching urgent sound, and Roth sat numb in the hole, feeling nothing but the beat of his pulse throughout his entire body. His ears had become giant amplifiers and he was detecting a whole gamut of sounds, of sliding and scraping, of twigs cracking, of shrubs being rustled, which he had not noticed before. He bent over the machine gun, and then realized that he didn't know whether Minetta had cocked it completely or left it half-loaded. It meant that he would have to pull back the bolt and release it in order to be certain, and he was terrified of the noise it would make. He took up his rifle, and tried to loose the safety lever quietly, but it clicked into place quite audibly. Roth flinched at the noise, and then gazed into the jungle, trying to locate