The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [79]
"Can you wait till morning?"
There was silence for a moment, then Toglio answered weakly, "Yeah, I'll be okay."
Croft got out of his hole. "I'm coming down," he announced. "Hold your fire." He walked along the path until he reached Toglio. Red and Goldstein were kneeling beside him, and Croft spoke to them in a low voice. "Pass this on," he said. "We're all gonna stay in our holes until mornin'. I don't think they'll be back tonight, but you cain't tell. And no one is gonna fall asleep. They's only about an hour till dawn, so you ain't got nothin' to piss about."
"I wouldn't go to sleep anyway," Goldstein breathed. "What a way to wake up." It was the same thing Gallagher had said.
"Yeah, well, I just wasn't ridin' on my ass either, waitin' for them to come," Croft said. He shivered for a moment in the early morning air and realized with a pang of shame that for the first time in his life he had been really afraid. "The sonsofbitchin' Japs," he said. His legs were tired and he turned to go back to his gun. I hate the bastards, he said to himself, a terrible rage working through his weary body.
"One of these days I'm gonna really get me a Jap," he whispered aloud. The river was slowly carrying the bodies downstream.
"At least," Gallagher said, "if we got to stay here a couple of days, the fuggers won't be stinkin' up the joint."
The Time Machine:
SAM CROFT THE HUNTER
A lean man of medium height but he held himself so erectly he appeared tall. His narrow triangular face was utterly without expression. There seemed nothing wasted in his hard small jaw, gaunt firm cheeks and straight short nose. His gelid eyes were very blue. . . he was efficient and strong and usually empty and his main cast of mind was a superior contempt toward nearly all other men. He hated weakness and he loved practically nothing. There was a crude unformed vision in his soul but he was rarely conscious of it.
No, but why is Croft that way?
Oh, there are answers. He is that way because of the corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because the devil has claimed him for one of his own. It is because he is a Texan; it is because he has renounced God.
He is that kind of man because the only woman he ever loved cheated on him, or he was born that way, or he was having problems of adjustment.
Croft's father, Jesse Croft, liked to say, "Well, now, my Sam is a mean boy. I reckon he was whelped mean." And then Jesse Croft, thinking of his wife who was ailing, a weak woman sweet and mild, might add, " 'Course Sam got mother's milk if ever a one did, but Ah figger it turned sour for him 'cause that was the only way his stomach would take it." Then he would cackle and blow his nose into his hand and wipe it on the back of his pale-blue dungarees. (Standing before his dirty wood barn, the red dry soil of western Texas under his feet.) "Why, Ah 'member once Ah took Sam huntin', he was only an itty-bitty runt, not big enough to hold up the gun hardly. . . but he was a mean shot from the beginning. And Ah'll tell ya, he just didn't like to have a man interfere with him. That was one thing could always rile him, even when he was an itty-bitty bastard.
"Couldn't stand to have anyone beat him in anythin'.
"Never could lick him. Ah'd beat the piss out o' him, and he'd never make a sound. Jus' stand there lookin' at me as if he was fixin' to wallop me back, or maybe put a bullet in mah head."
Croft hunted early. In the winter, in the chill Texas desert, it used to be a cold numbing ride across twenty miles of rutted hard-baked road with the dust blowing like emery into the open battered Ford. The two big men in the front would say little, and the one who was not driving would blow on his fingers. When they reached the forest, the sun would still be straining to rise above the brown-red line of ridge.
Now, look, boy, see that trail, that's a deer run. They ain't hardly a man is smart enough to track down a deer. You set an' wait for 'em, and you set where the wind is blowin' down from the deer to you. You got