The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [257]
"You want another blanket?" Brown asked.
"Yeah, can you gimme that?"
Brown stepped away from him, moved over to where the others were talking. "Anybody got two blankets?" he asked.
None of them answered immediately. "I have just one," Goldstein said, "but I can sleep in my poncho." Ridges was slumbering. "I'll sleep in my poncho too," Stanley offered.
"The two of you bunk together with a blanket and a poncho, and I'll take one from each of you." Brown returned to Wilson, covered him with his own blanket, and the blanket and poncho the others had donated. "You feel better, boy?"
Wilson's shuddering was becoming less frequent. "Feels good," he murmured.
"Sure."
Neither of them said anything for a moment or two, and then Wilson began talking once more. "Ah want you to know Ah 'preciate what you men are doin'." A spasm, of gratefulness welled in him, and tears formed in his eyes. "You're pretty goddam good men, an' they ain't a damn thing good enough for ya. The on'y thing worth a damn is when a man's got good buddies, an' you men are really stickin' to me. Ah swear, Brown, we maybe got a little pissed off at each other from time to time, but they ain't a thing Ah won' do for ya when Ah git fixed up. Ah always knew you was a buddy."
"Aw, shit."
"No, a man wants, wants. . ." In his eagerness he began to stutter. "Ah 'preciate it, an' Ah jus' want you to know that Ah'm always gonna be your buddy. You're gonna be able to know that they's one man, Wilson, who'll never have a bad thing to say about ya."
"Better take it easy, boy," Brown said. Wilson's voice was rising.
"Ah'm gone to sleep, but don' think Ah don' 'preciate it." He was beginning to ramble again.
After a few minutes he became silent.
Brown stared into the darkness. Once more he swore to himself. I gotta get him back. More than anything else it was a plea to whatever powers had formed him.
The Time Machine:
WILLIAM BROWN
NO APPLE PIE TODAY
About medium size, a trifle fat, with a young boyish face, a snub nose, freckles, and reddish-brown hair. But wrinkles had formed about his eyes and there were jungle ulcers on his chin. At second glance he was easily twenty-eight years old.
The neighbors always like Willie Brown, he is such an honest boy, he has such an average pleasant face, you can see it in all the stores, in the framed pictures on the desks of all the banks and offices in the country.
Nice-looking boy you have there, they always say to his father, James Brown.
Fine boy, but you ought to see my daughter, she's the bee-yootey.
Willie Brown is very popular. The mothers of his friends always take to him, the teachers always make him a pet.
But he has a knack for squaring it. Aw, that old crow, he says of the teacher, I wouldn't spit on her. (Proceeding to spit on the dusty baked sod of the schoolyard.) I don' know why in tee hell she don' lea' me alone.
And his family is nice. Good stock. The father works for the railroad in Tulsa but he is an office man even if he has started in the yards. And they have their own house in the suburbs, a decent plot of ground behind it. Jim Brown is dependable, always improving his house a little bit, fixing the plumbing or planing the sill of a door that jams.
Isn't the kind of man who runs into debt.
Ella and me try to hold to one of those budgets, he says deprecatingly. If we find we're gone a little over, we jus' cut down on the liquor for the week. (Half-apologetically) I kinda look on liquor as a luxury, especially now when you gotta break a law to get it, and you're never sure when it'll leave you blind.
Keeps up with things too. The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's and back in the early twenties a charter subscriber to Reader's Digest. It all comes in handy for small talk when you're visiting, and the only dishonesty people have ever noticed him in is that he has a habit of talking about the articles without crediting the source.
Do you know thirty million people smoked cigarettes in 1928? he'll say.
The Literary Digest keeps him informed on politics. I voted for Herbert Hoover in the last election, he admits pleasantly, even though I've been a Democrat as long as I can remember. But I think I'll vote Democrat in the next. The way I look at it, one party's in power for a while and then you give the other a turn.