The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [334]
"C'mon, let's keep going," Red muttered. Guys came and guys went, and after a while you didn't even remember their names.
"Roll me over in the clover."
They passed a bend in the island and saw Mount Anaka in the distance. It looked immense. "Boy, did we climb that?" Wyman asked.
Some of them scrambled up the side, pointing out slopes of the mountain to each other, arguing whether they had climbed each particular ridge. They had a startled pride in themselves. "It's a big sonofabitch."
"We did okay to go as far as we did."
That was the main sentiment. Already they were thinking how they would tell it to their buddies in other platoons.
"We just got lost in the shuffle. Everybody's gonna have a story to tell."
"Yeah."
And that pleased them too. The final sustaining ironies.
The song was still going on.
"Ha' past six
I had her doin' tricks.
Lay me down,
Roll me over,
Do it again."
Croft stared at the mountain. The inviolate elephant brooding over the jungle and the paltry hills.
It was pure and remote. In the late afternoon sunlight it was velvet green and rock blue and the brown of light earth, made of another material than the fetid jungle before it.
The old torment burned in him again. A stream of wordless impulses beat in his throat and he had again the familiar and inexplicable tension the mountain always furnished him. To climb that.
He had failed, and it hurt him vitally. His frustration was loose again. He would never have another opportunity to climb it. And yet he was wondering if he could have succeeded. Once more he was feeling the anxiety and terror the mountain had roused on the rock stairway. If he had gone alone, the fatigue of the other men would not have slowed him but he would not have had their company, and he realized suddenly that he could not have gone without them. The empty hills would have eroded any man's courage.
Ha' past seven
She thought she was in heaven. . .
In a few hours they would be back, pitching their pup tents in the darkness, getting a canteen cup of hot coffee, perhaps. And tomorrow the endless routine of harsh eventless days would begin once more. Already the patrol was unfamiliar, unbelievable, and yet the bivouac before them also was unreal. In transit everything in the Army was unreal. They sang to make a little noise.
". . . roll me over
And do it again."
Croft kept looking at the mountain. He had lost it, had missed some tantalizing revelation of himself.
Of himself and much more. Of life.
Everything.
Mute Chorus:
ON WHAT WE DO WHEN
WE GET OUT
(Sometimes spoken, usually covert, varying with circumstance.)
RED: Do the same fuggin thing I always did. What else is there?
BROWN: When we hit Frisco, I'm going to take my pay and throw the biggest goddam old drunk that town ever saw, and then I'll shack up with some bitch, and I won't do nothing but screw and drink for two whole goddam weeks, and then I'm going to take it easy going home to Kansas, just stopping off whenever I damn feel like it, just throwing the damnedest old binge you ever saw, and then I'm gonna look my wife up, I ain't gonna let her know I'm coming, and I'm going to give her the surprise of her life, and have witnesses along, by God, and I'll throw her out of the house, and let people know the way you treat a bitch when we're stuck over here God knows how long, never knowing when you're going to catch something, just waiting and sweating it out, and finding out things about yourself that, by God, it don't pay to know.
GALLAGHER: All I know is there's a fuggin score to be paid off, a score to be paid off. There's somebody gonna pay, knock the fuggin civilians' heads in.
GOLDSTEIN: Oh, I can just see it when I get home. I'm going to get back in the early morning, and I'm going to take a taxi from Grand Central, and ride all the way out to our apartment house in Flatbush, and then I'm going to come up the stairs, and ring the bell, and Natalie'll be wondering who it is, and then she's going to come, and she's going to answer it. . . I don't know. So much time ahead.
MARTINEZ: San Antonio, see family maybe. Walk around, nice Mexican girls San Antonio, big wad money, ribbons, go to church, kill too many goddam Japs. Don't know, re-enlist, Army no goddam good, but Army okay. Nice pay.