The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [26]
Roth sighed. As he walked, his feet made soft slushing sounds through the sand.
"Sure. Listen," Polack said, "there's all kinds of ways of beating a game." He extended his long pointed jaw at Steve Minetta and grinned. "They ain't a way you can't figure out to get around something."
Minetta was only twenty, but his hair had receded far enough to give him a high forehead. He had developed a thin mustache which he trimmed carefully. Once he had been told he looked like William Powell, and he combed his hair to increase the resemblance. "Naw, I don't agree with you," he said. "Some raps you can't beat."
"What're you talkin' about?" Polack wanted to know. He twisted about in his blankets, and turned to face Minetta. "Listen," he said, "once in the butcher shop, I'm drawin' a fowl for this old biddy, and I try to get away with one of the two pieces of fat around the belly." He paused dramatically, and Minetta laughed at the grin on Polack's big lewd mobile mouth.
"Yeah, so what?" Minetta asked.
"Well, she's watching me real close, and when I start to wrap up the fowl, she says, 'Where's the other piece of fat?' I look at her and I say, 'You don't want it, lady, it's diseased. It'll ruin the taste of the whole chicken.' She shakes her head and says, 'Never mind, young man, I want it.' So what could I do, I give it to her."
"How'd you beat the game there?" Minetta wanted to know.
"Hah, before I give it to her, I cut open the bile sack on the liver. That chicken must have tasted like shit."
Minetta shrugged. The moon cast enough light into the tent for him to see Polack's face. He was grinning, and Minetta decided Polack was comical with the three teeth missing on the left side of his mouth.
Polack was perhaps twenty-one but his eyes were shrewd and bawdy, and when he laughed his skin was wizened, tough, like the skin of a middle-aged man. Minetta felt a little uncomfortable with him. Secretly he was afraid to match his knowledge against Polack's.
"Stop throwing it," Minetta said. Who did Polack think he was telling the story to?
"No, it's the truth," Polack said in a hurt voice. He always dropped the "h" when he said "think" or "the" or "truth."
"Yeah, it's da troot," Minetta said, mimicking him.
"You havin' a good time?" Polack asked.
"I can't complain," Minetta said. "You talk like something out of a comic book." He yawned. "Anyway, one thing nobody ever beat was the Army."
"I ain't done so bad," Polack said.
"You're doing bad till the day you get out of it," Minetta told him. He clapped his hand against his forehead, and sat up. "The goddam mosquitoes," he said. He rummaged underneath his pillow, a towel wrapped about a soiled shirt, and drew out a small bottle of mosquito lotion. As he rubbed it over his face and hands he grumbled. "What a way for a guy to live." He propped himself on an elbow and lit a cigarette. He remembered he was not supposed to smoke at night, and for a moment debated with himself. "Aaah, fug it," he said aloud. Unconsciously his hand shielded the cigarette, however. He turned toward Polack and said, "Boy, I don't like to live like a pig." He pounded his pillow smooth. "Sleeping on top of your own filthy clothes, wearing dirty clothes to sleep. Nobody lives like that."
Polack shrugged. He was next to the youngest of seven brothers and sisters, and until he went to an orphanage he had always slept with a blanket spread out on the floor near a coal stove in the center of the room. When the fire died down in the middle of the night the first child to become chilled would get up and fill the stove again. "It ain't so bad wearin' dirty clothes," he told Minetta, "it keeps the bugs off ya." He had washed his own clothing since he was five years old.
"Ain't that a hell of a choice?" Minetta asked. "Smell your own stink or get carried away by the bugs." He was thinking of the clothes he used to wear. He was always known as the best dresser on the block, the first kid to pick up the new dance steps, and now he had a shirt which was two sizes too big for him. "Hey, did you hear that joke about Army clothes?" he asked. "It comes in two sizes, too large and too small."