The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [100]
Martinez prodded with his shoe the genitals of the charred corpse. The genitals collapsed with a small crispy sound as if he had stuck his finger into a coil of cigar ash. He felt a trace of pleasure, which was lost in the gloominess he now felt. This liquor had made him despondent and the walk had intensified this; he felt no horror nor any fear at the bodies; his own terror of death had no relation to the smells and the cruel shapes into which physical death could force a body. He could not have said why he was gloomy, but he had to fasten it upon something. He resented the money he had spent for the whisky, and for the past half hour he had been trying to calculate how long it would take him to replace that money with his pay.
Red leaned against the half-track. He was feeling dizzy and he extended his arm over the metal tread guard. His hand closed on a piece of pulpy fruit and he dropped it hastily. The fruit was red and looked like a pear, but he had never seen anything like it before. "Where the hell this come from?" he asked thickly.
"That's Jap food," Wilson said.
"Where'd they get it?"
"Ah don' know," Wilson shrugged. He kicked it aside. A touch of fear penetrated through Red's drunkenness. For an instant he thought of Hennessey. "Well, Wilson, where the fug is the souvenirs?" he asked bitterly.
"Men, you jus' got to follow me," Wilson said.
They wandered away from the vehicles and made a little exploration off the side of the road on the ridge where the Japanese had entrenched themselves. Once there had been foxholes and dugouts pocking the entire surface of this shallow hill, but the artillery had collapsed most of these. The dirt walls were half caved in like a sand hole on the beach after the children have deserted it and people tread over its edges. There were dead Japanese lying all about this ridge, perhaps twenty or thirty men scattered in groups of two and three and four. Littered among them were thousands of small pieces of rubble, and a strong intense smell close to that of burning garbage arose from the ridge. There were rations rotting and boxes of equipment half emptied, their contents spilling out. There were mangled packs and rusted rifles and shoes and canteens and bits of rotting flesh strewn everywhere over the blasted earth. On the ridge there was not an area of five square yards which did not have some refuse. The debris was scattered everywhere in thousands of chaotic items. The Japanese had been dead for a week, and they had swollen to the dimensions of very obese men with enormous legs and bellies, and buttocks which split their clothing. They had turned green and purple and the maggots festered in their wounds and covered their feet.
Each maggot was about a half inch long and it looked like a slug except that it was the color of a fish's belly. The maggots covered the dead bodies the way bees cluster over the head of a beekeeper. It was impossible to see any longer where the wounds had been, for the maggots covered every bit of ruptured flesh and crawled sluggishly over all the minor sores on the corpse. Gallagher watched drunkenly while a train of maggots filed into the gaping mouth of the dead man. Somehow he expected the maggots to make some sound, and their rapt noiseless feeding angered him. The stench was acute and flies lusted over the corpses.
"Goddam flies," he muttered. He walked around a body and picked up a small paper carton which was lying on the ground. The cardboard was sodden and fell apart in his hands; he picked out a few tiny vials which contained a dark liquid, and looked morosely at them for a few seconds. "What are these?" he asked. No one answered, and after a moment he threw them to the ground again. "What I want to know is where the fug is the souvenirs?"
Wilson was trying to remove the bolt from a rusted rifle. "Ah'm gonna get me one of them sammerigh swords one of these days," he announced. He prodded a corpse with the butt of the Japanese rifle, and made a face. "Goddam carrion, that's all we are, men, goddam carrion." A few ribs were protruding from the cadaverous chest and in the late afternoon light they had a silver sheen. The exposed flesh had turned a sickly brown-green. "Look jus' like a shoulder o' lamb," Wilson stated. He sighed again, and began to wander off down the ridge. There were a few natural caves on the reverse slope, and in one of them were a half dozen dead men piled over many boxes and crates. "Hey, men," Wilson yelled, "Ah found ya somethin'." He was proud of himself. The drunken taunts of the others had hurt his feelings. "If ol' Wilson tell ya that he get somethin', then he do it."