The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [177]
"It can," Red said.
"Well, there's somepin all fugged up, that's all Ah can say. It jus' don' make sense for a good thin' like that to end up hurtin' ya." He sighed. "Red, Ah swear the whole thing is confusin' as hell." They walked back to their tents.
The Time Machine:
WOODROW WILSON
THE INVINCIBLE
He was a big man about thirty with a fine mane of golden-brown hair and a healthy ruddy spacious face whose large features were formed cleanly. Incongruously, he wore a pair of round silver-rimmed glasses which gave him at first glance a studious or, at least, a methodical appearance. "With all the gals Ah've had, Ah'll never forget that little old piece," he said, wiping the back of his hand against his high sculptured forehead, sliding it up over his golden pompadour.
Clichés like lazy decadence, death and disease, monotony and violence, well up in your mind. The main street has assumed its tawdry prosperity with discomfort; it is hot and packed with people and the stores are small and dirty. Languid and feverish, the girls walk by on thin legs, with painted faces, staring at the movie houses with gaudy placards, picking at the sore on their chin, squinting with their pale insolent eyes as the sun glares on the dirty asphalt and models the dust-filled pores of the trampled papers underfoot.
A hundred yards away the back streets are green and lovely, and the foliage of the trees meets overhead. The houses are old and pleasant; you cross a bridge and look down on a tiny stream winding and twisting gently over some soft rounded rocks; there are the sounds of things growing and the soughing of the leaves in the swollen torpid May breeze. A little farther on, there is always the small rotting mansion with its broken shutters, its peeling columns, and the dull black-gray of its walls like a tooth after the nerve has been killed. The mansion alters the loveliness of the streets, limns it with darker mortal lines.
The grass enclosure in the center of the town square is deserted, and the statue of General Jackson stands on its pedestal and looks with calculation at the cannon balls pyramided in cement, the old cannon whose breech is missing. Behind him the Negro quarter stretches out along the sandy roads into the farm lands.
There, in the black ghetto, the shacks and two-room shanties sag on their stilts, the wood dry and splintered and dead, the rats and roaches scurrying across the sapless planks. Everything withers in the heat.
Toward the end, almost out in the country, the poor whites live in similar huts, hoping to graduate to the other side of town where the shoe clerks and the bank tellers and the mill foremen live in cubical houses along rigid streets where the trees are not old enough to cover the sky.
Over it all hangs the torpid sullen breeze of May, stifling in the late spring.
Some people feel only the heat. Woodrow Wilson, almost sixteen, sprawls on a log along the sandy road, and drowses in the sun. His loins are warm and a lazy delight drifts along his body. In a couple hours Ah'll go see Sally Ann. Warm smells, the image of teat and female pubes, tickle his nose with passion. Ah, man, Ah wish this here evenin' was over. A man'll melt in the sun thinkin' about nookie. He sighs, moves his legs leisurely.
Guess Pa's sleepin' it off.
Behind him, on the slanting warped porch above the stilts, his father sleeps in a rusty swinging couch, his undershirt gathering soddenly about his chest.
Ain't anyone can drink like Pa. He giggles to himself. 'Cept me, come a year or two. Goddam, ain't anythin' a man wants to do but lie in the sun.
Two colored boys walk by, leading a mule by the halter. He rouses himself.
Hey, you niggers, what's that mule's name?
The boys look up frightened and one of them rubs his foot in the dust. Josephine, he mumbles.
Okay, boy. He chuckles easily to himself. Man, Ah'm glad Ah don' have to work today. He yawns. Hope Sally Ann don' find out Ah ain't nineteen. She like me anyway, she's a good little ole gal.
A colored girl about eighteen walks past him, her bare feet swirling tiny clouds of dust before her. Under her sweater she wears no brassiere, and her pendulant breasts look very full and soft. She has a round sensual face.