The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [94]
POLACK: He believes the bitches.
MINETTA: Well, I tested her plenty of times, and I never caught her in a lie yet.
BROWN: That just proves she's smarter than you. (Stanley laughs uncomfortably.) Listen, they're no different from you and me, especially the ones that've had their screwing. They like it just as much as men do, and it's a helluva sight easier for them to get it.
POLACK: (falsetto voice) I don't know why I'm not more popular with the girls. . . I'm such an easy lay. (They all laugh.)
BROWN: What do you think your girl friend is doing now? I'll tell you what. It's just about six A.M. now in America. She's wakin' up in bed with a guy who can give her just as much as you can, and she's giving him the same goddam line she handed you. I tell you, Minetta, there ain't a one of them you can trust. They'll all cheat on you.
POLACK: There ain't a fuggin woman is any good.
MINETTA: (weakly) Well, I ain't worrying.
STANLEY: It's different with me. I got a kid.
BROWN: The ones with kids are the worst. They're the ones who're bored and really need a good time. There ain't a woman is worth a goddam.
STANLEY: (looking at his watch) It's about our turn to dig. (He jumps into the hole and picks up a shovel.) Jesus, you guys are a bunch of goldbricks. Why the hell don't you do your share? (He shovels furiously for a minute, and then halts. He is sweating freely.)
POLACK: (grinning) I'm glad I ain't got to worry about one of those bitches cheating on me.
MINETTA: Aaah, fug you. You think you're pretty goddam good.
7
After the night when the Japanese failed to cross the river, the first squad remained in its position for three days. On the fourth day, 1st Battalion advanced a half mile and recon moved up with A Company. Their new outpost was on the crest of a hill which looked down into a tiny valley of kunai grass; they spent the rest of the week digging new holes, stringing barbed wire, and making routine patrols. The front had become quiet. Nothing happened to the platoon, and they seldom saw any other men except for the platoon of A Company whose positions were on an adjoining hill a few hundred yards away. The bluffs of Watamai Range were still on their right, quite close, and in the late afternoon the cliffs hung over them like a wave of surf about to break.
The men in recon spent their days sitting in the sun on top of the hill. There was nothing to do except eat their rations and sleep and write letters and stand guard in their foxholes. The mornings were pleasant and new, but by afternoon the men were sullen and drowsy, and at night they found it hard to sleep, for the wind moved the grass in the valley beneath them and it looked like a column of men moving toward their hill. At least once or twice every night, a man on guard would awaken the entire squad and they would sit in their holes for almost an hour searching the field beneath them in the silver uncertain moonlight.
Occasionally, they would hear the crackling of some rifles in the distance sounding like a bonfire of dry twigs on an autumn day, and often a shell or two would arch lazily overhead, sighing and murmuring before it crashed into the jungle beyond their lines. At night the machine guns would be hollow and deep, and would hold the mournful boding note of primitive drums. Almost always, they could hear some noise like a grenade or a mortar or the insistent shrill tatting of a sub-machine gun, but the sounds were so far away and so muffled that in time they disregarded them. The week went by in an uncomfortable suspended tension which they felt only in their unvoiced fear of the towering mute walls of Watamai Range on their right.
Every day a ration detail of three men would trudge over to the hill on which the adjacent platoon of A Company was bivouacked, and return with a box of 10-in-l rations and two five-gallon jerricans of water. The trip was always uneventful and the men did not dislike it, for the monotony of the morning was broken and it gave them a chance to talk to someone