The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [111]
We're gonna do a lot of cleaning up, I hear they got some niggers down in Washington that's a fact, I was readin' it in the newspapers they got a nigger down there tellin' white men what to do.
War's gonna fix all that.
Aaah, balls, Red butts in, the big boys are just gonna get a little more. But he is excited. So long, Lois, no entangling alliances.
And Jackie too. A little pit of misery. But if you stop and quit moving you die.
Have a drink.
It's my liquor, Red bellows, what do ya mean, have a drink! (Laughter.)
On his last pass before he went overseas, Red wandered around San Francisco. He climbed up to the top of Telegraph Hill, and shivered in the fall winds sweeping across the summit. A tanker was heading for the Golden Gate, and he watched it, and then stared across Oakland as far as he could see into the east. (After Chicago the land was flat for a thousand miles, across Illinois and Iowa and halfway into Nebraska. On a train you could read a magazine for an afternoon, then look out the window, and the country would seem exactly the same as when you had stared out before. The foothills began as gentle rolls in the plain and after a hundred miles became isolated as hills, took almost a thousand miles to become mountains. And on the way were the steep brown hills that massed into Montana.) Maybe I should write them a letter. Or Lois.
Aaah, you don't look back.
Two ensigns with young girls in fur coats were laughing and hugging at the other end of the paved summit of Telegraph Hill. I might as well go down.
He walked through Chinatown, ended up in a burlesque house. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the place was almost empty. The girls dragged languidly through their dances, the comedians fumbled through the skits. After the last strip and the ensemble the lights went on, and the hawkers began to sell Nestle bars and picture books. Red sat in his seat and dozed a little. What a lousy joint.
There seemed nothing to do, and all through the movie he thought of the boat he would be traveling on soon. You keep rolling along and you never know what the hell the score is. When you're a kid they can't tell you a damn thing, and when you ain't a kid no more there's nothing new for you. You just got to keep pushing it, you don't look back.
When the picture ended and the show began again, he listened to the music for a moment and then went out. In the painful sun of late afternoon he could hear the band still playing.
WE'RE GONNA SLAP THE DIRTY LITTLE JAP.
Fug it.
8
Lieutenant (sg) Dove finished covering his bare legs with sand and groaned. "Oh, God, it's brutal," he exclaimed.
"What's brutal?" Hearn asked.
Dove wiggled his toes through the sand. "Just being out here. My God, a hot day like this. A year ago I was in Washington, and if you think there weren't some parties there. Oh, this goddam climate."
"I was in Washington about a year and a half ago," Conn said in his whisky voice.
They were off. Hearn sighed to himself, and eased himself slowly down on the sand, letting his head touch the ground, exposing his chest to the sun. Its heat was palpable, and he could feel the sun boring through his eyelids, exciting his retina into blind and angry circles of red. From the jungle a dank sulphurous breeze was exuded from time to time like the draft from an oven when the door is opened.
Hearn sat up again, folded his forearms over his hairy knees, and stared about the beach. Some of the officers who had come down with them were swimming now, and a few others were playing bridge on a blanket inside the shade of a peripheral coconut tree which leaned over the beach. About a hundred yards away on a small sand spit there was the occasional sharp ineffectual pop of a carbine as Major Dalleson threw a pebble into the air and fired at it. The water had deepened in color from its almost transparent early-morning blue to a deep violet, and the sun glittered over it like the reflections from a rainy pavement at night. About a mile to the right a lone landing craft was chugging leisurely in toward shore after having transferred a load of supplies from one of the freighters anchored out in the water.