The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [5]
"Nah, I'm quitting," Gallagher repeated angrily.
Wilson shrugged again. He couldn't understand these men like Croft and Gallagher who took their poker so damn hard. He liked the game, and they wasn't gonna be much of a way to pass the time now till morning, but it wasn't that important. A stack of money spread before you was a good feeling, but he'd rather drink. Or have a woman. He chuckled sadly. A woman was a long way off.
After a long while, Red got tired of lying in his bunk and sneaked past the guard to go up top. On deck, the air seemed chill after being so long in the hold. Red breathed it deeply, and moved about cautiously for a few seconds in the darkness until the outline of the ship formed for him. The moon was out, limning the deck-housings and equipment with a quiet silver sheen. He stared about him, aware now of the muted wash of the propellers, the slow contained roll of the ship which he had felt down below in the vibration of his bunk. He felt at once much better, for the deck was almost deserted. There was a sailor on watch at the nearest gun but in comparison to the hold this was isolation.
Red walked over to the rail and looked out to sea. The ship was hardly moving now, and all the convoy seemed to be pausing and nosing its way through the water like a hound uncertain of the scent. Far off against the horizon the ridge line of an island rose steeply, formed a mountain, and fell away again in one descending hill after another. That was Anopopei, he decided, and shrugged. What difference did it make? All islands looked the same.
Blankly, without any anticipation, he thought of the week ahead. Tomorrow, when they landed, their feet would get wet and their shoes would fill with sand. There would be one landing boat after another to be unloaded, crate after crate to be toted a few yards up the beach and dropped in a pile. If they were lucky there would be no Jap artillery, and not too many snipers left. He felt a tired dread. There would be this campaign and then another and another, and there would never be an end to it. He massaged his neck, looking dourly at the water, his long thin body sagging at every joint. It was about one o'clock now. In three hours the guns would start and the men would bolt a hot nauseating breakfast.
There was nothing to do but to go from one day into the next. The platoon was lucky, for tomorrow anyway. They'd have recon working on the beach detail for a week probably, and the first patrols where all the trails were strange would be made already, and the campaign would have dropped into a familiar and bearable rut. He spat again, kneading with his blunt scarred fingers the knurled swollen knuckles of his other hand.
In silhouette against the rail, his profile consisted almost entirely of a large blob of a nose and a long low-slung jaw, but in the moonlight this was misleading for it did not show the redness of his skin and hair. His face always seemed boiled and angry except for his eyes, which were quiet, a pale blue, marooned by themselves in a web of wrinkles and freckles. When he laughed his teeth showed, big and yellow and crooked, his rough voice braying out with a contemptuous inviolate mirth. Everything about him was bony and knobbed, and although he was more than six feet tall, it was unlikely that he weighed one hundred and fifty pounds.
His hand scratched his stomach, explored about for a moment or two and then halted. He had forgotten his life belt. Automatically he thought of going back to the hold for it, and was angered at himself. "Goddam Army gets you so you're afraid to turn around." He spat. "You waste half your time trying to remember what they told you to do." Still he debated for a moment whether he should fetch it, and then grinned. "Aaah, you can only get killed once."
He had told that to Hennessey, a kid who had joined recon only a few weeks before the division's task force had loaded ship for this invasion. "A life belt, that's something for Hennessey to worry about, a life belt," he said to himself now.
They had been up on deck together one night when an air raid sounded, and they had squatted under a life raft, watching the ships in convoy lashing through the black water, the crew at the nearest gun standing tensely by the breech. A Zero had attacked and a dozen searchlights had tried to focus on it. Hundreds of tracer arcs had lined red patterns through the air. It had all been very different from the combat he had previously seen, without heat, without fatigue, beautiful and unreal like a technicolor movie or a calendar picture. He had watched in absorption, not even ducking when a bomb had exploded in a livid yellow fan over a ship a few hundred yards away.