The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [96]
Croft opened his fingers, and the handle of the grenade snapped off and spun a few feet away. The fuse in the grenade popped, and a sputtering noise destroyed the silence. The Japanese heard it, sprang to their feet with sudden cries, and moved a few steps uncertainly back and forth in the tiny circle of the draw. Red watched the expression of terror on one soldier's face, heard the sizzling of the grenade, the sound mixing with the ringing in his ears and the pounding of his heart, and then dropped to the ground as Croft lofted the grenade into the draw. Red grasped his tommy gun and stared intently at a blade of grass. He had time before the grenade exploded to wish he had cleaned his gun that morning. He heard a terrifying shriek, thought once of the soldier with the broad face, and then found himself afoot, crashing and stumbling through the brush.
The three of them halted on the edge of the draw and looked down. All four of the Japanese soldiers were lying motionless in the trampled kunai grass. Croft gazed at them and spat softly. "Go down and take a look," he told Red.
Red slid down the bank to the gully where the bodies lay sprawled. He could tell at a glance that two of the men were certainly dead; one of them reposed on his back with his hands clawed over the bloody mash of what had once been his face, and the other was crumpled on his side with a great rent in his chest. The other two men had fallen on their stomachs and he could see no wounds.
"Finish them off," Croft shouted down to him.
"They're dead."
"Finish them off."
Red felt a pulse of anger. If it'd been anyone else but me, the bastard would have done it himself, he thought. He stood over one of the motionless bodies, and brought the sights of his tommy gun to bear on the back of the soldier's head. He took a little breath, and then fired a burst. He felt nothing except the rising quivering motion of the gun in his hands. After he had fired, he noticed that it was the soldier who had been sitting with his rifle across his thighs. There was an instant in which he hovered on the lip of an intense anxiety, but he repressed it and strode over to the last soldier.
As he looked down upon him, Red felt a wash of many transient subtle emotions. If he had been asked, he might have said, "I didn't feel a goddam thing," but the back of his neck was numb, and his heart was beating rapidly. He had an intense distaste for what he was about to do, and yet as he stared at the body and pointed his sights at the man's neck, he was feeling a pleasurable anticipation. He tightened his finger on the trigger, taking up the slack, tensing himself for the moment when he would fire and the slugs would make round little holes in a cluster, and the corpse would twitch and shake under the force of the bullets. He pictured all those sensations, pulled the trigger. . . and nothing happened. His gun had jammed. He started to work the bolt when the body underneath him suddenly rolled over. It took Red almost a second to realize that the Jap was alive. The two men stared at each other with blank twitching faces, and then the Jap sprang to his feet. There was a fraction of a second in which Red could have knocked him down with the stock of his gun, but the frustration he had felt when the gun jammed, added to the shock he experienced when he realized the soldier was alive, combined to paralyze him completely. He watched the soldier stand up, move a step toward him, and then Red's muscles worked suddenly, and he hurled his gun at the Jap. It missed, and the two soldiers continued to stare at each other, not three yards apart.
Red could never forget the Jap's face. It was gaunt and the skin was drawn tightly over the eyes and cheeks and nostrils so that he had a hungry searching look. He had never seen a man's face so intensely; his gaze concentrated until he could detect every imperfection in