The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [141]
Stanley and Brown lay on their stomachs, talking to each other and looking at the jungle. Stanley was feeling very weak. He tried to ignore his panic but he kept thinking of how safe they had felt when there had been Japanese so near to them. You never know when you're safe, he muttered to himself. He felt an intense horror which he repressed with difficulty. All his nerves seemed to have come apart. He felt he would say something absurd in a moment or so, and he turned to Brown and uttered the first thought in his mind, "Wonder how Gallagher took it?"
"What do ya mean?"
"You know, the Japs being killed, and him thinking of his wife."
"Aaah," Brown said. "He didn't even connect it."
Stanley looked at Gallagher, who was talking quietly to Wilson. "He seems to be coming around," Stanley said.
Brown shrugged. "I feel sorry for the guy, but I'll tell you what, maybe he's lucky."
"You don't mean that."
"When you get rid of a woman, you never know when you're well off. I don't know Gallagher's wife, but he's not a big guy, he probably wasn't able to give her too much loving. Hell, they'll cheat on ya even when you do give 'em something to remember, so I wouldn't be too surprised if she had her little fling, especially in the first months when she knew the kid was coming and she wasn't taking any chances if she fooled around with anybody."
"That's all you ever think about," Stanley muttered. He hated Brown for a moment. Brown's contempt for women stroked the jealousy, the fear that Stanley usually was able to control. For a moment or two, he was half convinced his wife was cuckolding him, and though he flung off the idea, he sat there troubled and nervous.
"I'll tell ya something I think about," Brown said. "Just what happened right now. You're sitting around talkin' and wham something starts. You never know what's gonna hit ya. Y'think Minetta ain't scared now? He's learnin' what it's all about. Listen, I'll tell ya, they ain't gonna be a moment until I get back and touch my foot on the ground in the States before I stop believin' that I never know when I'm gonna get it. You stay over awhile and you're due, that's all."
Stanley felt a nameless anxiety rising in him. Dimly, he knew that part of it came from fearing death, really fearing it for the first time, but he knew that it also swelled out of everything he had been thinking about before the skirmish had begun. It fed upon his jealousy and his indifferent love-making, it came from the nights at home when he had been sleepless and frantic. For some reason he found it painful suddenly to think about Gallagher and the abrupt way in which his wife had died. You look out for everything, he thought, and you still get hit from behind. It's a trap. Stanley felt a deep malaise. He stared about him, listening to some artillery fire in the distance, and the anxiety increased, became almost painful for a moment. He was sweating, close to whimpering. The heat of the day, the glare of the sand, and the nervous fatigue from the action, had combined to drain him of any strength. He was weak and terrified, and he didn't understand. Outside of a few uneventful patrols, he had experienced no combat. Yet now he was feeling an intense loathing and fear at the thought of having any more. He wondered how he could lead men in combat when he was so terrified himself, and yet he knew that he had to get another stripe, and then another, that he would force himself to move up. There was something wrong, basically upset in himself at that moment, and he muttered to Brown, "Goddam heat makes a man weak." He sat there, sweating damply. A vague oppressive horror bothered him.
"You think you know all the angles, but you never do," Brown said. "Like before with that garage deal, you were lucky. You think we knew there were Japs? I'll tell ya, Stanley, it was the same with you there. How the hell did you know when something was gonna pop? It's the same with my old game, selling. There's tricks, there's ways to grab the big money, but you're never sure."
"Yeah," Stanley said. He was not really listening. Stanley was feeling a diffused rebellion at the things that made him worried and envious, made him always ferret for some advantage. He did not know what caused it in himself, but without putting it into words he was brooding that there would be many nights through all the rest of his life when he would lie sweating and restive, prey to all the latest torments of his mind.