The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [6]
His hand scratched his stomach, explored about for a moment or two and then halted. He had forgotten his life belt. Automatically he thought of going back to the hold for it, and was angered at himself. "Goddam Army gets you so you're afraid to turn around." He spat. "You waste half your time trying to remember what they told you to do." Still he debated for a moment whether he should fetch it, and then grinned. "Aaah, you can only get killed once."
He had told that to Hennessey, a kid who had joined recon only a few weeks before the division's task force had loaded ship for this invasion. "A life belt, that's something for Hennessey to worry about, a life belt," he said to himself now.
They had been up on deck together one night when an air raid sounded, and they had squatted under a life raft, watching the ships in convoy lashing through the black water, the crew at the nearest gun standing tensely by the breech. A Zero had attacked and a dozen searchlights had tried to focus on it. Hundreds of tracer arcs had lined red patterns through the air. It had all been very different from the combat he had previously seen, without heat, without fatigue, beautiful and unreal like a technicolor movie or a calendar picture. He had watched in absorption, not even ducking when a bomb had exploded in a livid yellow fan over a ship a few hundred yards away.
Then Hennessey had destroyed his mood. "Jesus, I just remembered," he had said.
"What?"
"I ain't got any air cartridges in my life belt."
Red had guffawed. "I'll tell you what. When the ship goes down, you just ride a nice fat rat to shore."
"No, this is serious. Jeez, I better blow it up." And in the darkness he had fumbled for the tube, found it, and inflated the belt. Red had watched him with amusement. He was such a kid. The way they turned them out now, all the kids wanted to obey the rules. Red had felt almost sad. "You're all set for everything now, huh, Hennessey?"
"Listen," Hennessey had boasted, "I ain't taking any chances. What if this boat should get hit? I ain't going into the water unprepared."
Now, in the distance, the shore of Anopopei slid by slowly, almost like a huge ship itself. Naw, Red thought, Hennessey wouldn't go into the water unprepared. He was the kind of kid who would put away money for marriage before he even had a girl. It was what you got for following the rule book.
He drooped his body over the rail, and looked down at the water. Despite the lethargy of the ship, the wake burbled rapidly. The moon had passed behind a cloud, and the water looked dark and malevolent, terribly deep. There seemed an aureole about the ship which extended fifty yards from the side, but beyond that was only blackness, so vast, so dense, that he could no longer determine the ridge line of Anopopei. The water churned past in a thick gray foam, swirling and shuddering along the waves the ship formed in its passage. After a time Red had that feeling of sad compassion in which one seems to understand everything, all that men want and fail to get. For the first time in many years he thought of coming back from the mines in the winter twilight with his flesh a dirty wan color against the snow, entering his house, eating his food in silence while his mother waited on him sullenly. It had been an acrid empty home with everyone growing alien to one another, and in all the years that had passed, he had never remembered it except in bitterness. And yet now, looking at the water, he could have some compassion for once, could understand his mother and the brothers and sisters he had almost forgotten. He understood many things, remembered sad incidents, ugly incidents, out of the years he had knocked around, recalled a drunk who had been robbed on the steps leading up to Bowery Park near Brooklyn