The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [118]
But killed they would be, because the Japanese were dopes. They had been dopes for a thousand years. Wakara lit another cigarette, and sifted some sand through his fingertips.
Pop! The carbine sounded again.
Well, there was nothing he could do about it. The Americans would march in eventually and after twenty or thirty years the country would probably be the same again, and the people would live in their artistic abstract rut, and begin generating some more juice for another hysterical immolation. Two million, three million killed, it was all in the Oriental's stepped-up version of the Malthusian law. He could feel it himself, understand that better than the Americans.
Ishimara had been a fool. He didn't see things like population density; he saw it through his own shortsighted eyes, watching the sun go down with atavistic dread. The red sun and his own blood; that was what Ishimara knew. It was the sop allowed the Japanese. Deep in their own hearts, deep in the personal concretion of a diary, they could be philosophers, wistful philosophers, knowing nothing about the vehicle that moved them. Wakara spat on the sand, and then with a nervous furtive motion of his hand, he covered it over, and turned around to look at the sea.
They were dopes.
And he was alone, a wise man without a skin.
The tide was coming in, and the sand spit on which Major Dalleson had been firing his carbine was beginning to be inundated. He retreated a step or two as a wavelet pattered around his ankles, and then bent down to pick up another pebble. He had been shooting pebbles for almost an hour now, and he was beginning to weary. His large chest and belly had reddened in the sun, his body hair was slicked with perspiration, and the waist band of his cotton shorts, the only clothing he was wearing, had become quite wet. He grunted, looked at the pebbles in his hand, and selected one which he held between his forefinger and thumb. Then he slumped forward like a buffalo, his head almost parallel to the sand, the muzzle of his carbine pointing vertically downward just past his toe. He bent farther forward until his head was not more than a foot from his knees, and then he straightened abruptly, throwing the pebble into the air with his left hand and raising his carbine with his right arm. For just an instant he caught the pebble in his rear sight, a tiny speck of dust against the blue of the sky, and then he squeezed the trigger and the pebble spattered.
"Goddam," Dalleson said with satisfaction, wiping the sweat from his eyes with his heavy forearm, licking the dried salt at the corners of his mouth. That pebble made four in a row he had hit.
He selected another one, went into his motion, threw it up, and missed this time. "Well, anyway, I been hitting them about three out of five on an average," he told himself. It was all right; he hadn't lost his eye. He'd have to write a letter to his rifle club back in Allentown telling them about this.
That skeet shooting was all right. He'd have to try it when he got back. If he could hit pebbles three out of five with a carbine, they'd have to blind him before he'd miss a clay plate with a shotgun. His ear ached slightly, comfortably, from the noise of firing the carbine.
Conn and Dove were sporting in the water about a hundred yards away and he waved to them. Another wavelet encircled his ankles. Or better than writing to the rifle club, he could send them a picture.
Dalleson turned around and looked over the sand at the officers playing bridge. "Hey, Leach, where the hell are you?" he bellowed.
A tall slim officer with a lean face and silver-rimmed glasses sat up in the sand. "I'm over here, Major, what do you want?"
"Did you take your camera along?" Leach nodded dubiously. "Well, bring it over, will ya?" Dalleson shouted. Leach was his assistant, a captain, in operations and training.
Dalleson grinned at him as he came over. Leach was a good fellow, agreeable, did his work all right, anxious to please. "Listen, Leach, I'd like ya to take a picture of me shooting some pebbles."
"It's going to be kind of hard, Major. This's just a little ol' box camera, and it's only got a shutter speed of one-twenty-fifth of a second."