The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [6]
Then Hennessey had destroyed his mood. "Jesus, I just remembered," he had said.
"What?"
"I ain't got any air cartridges in my life belt."
Red had guffawed. "I'll tell you what. When the ship goes down, you just ride a nice fat rat to shore."
"No, this is serious. Jeez, I better blow it up." And in the darkness he had fumbled for the tube, found it, and inflated the belt. Red had watched him with amusement. He was such a kid. The way they turned them out now, all the kids wanted to obey the rules. Red had felt almost sad. "You're all set for everything now, huh, Hennessey?"
"Listen," Hennessey had boasted, "I ain't taking any chances. What if this boat should get hit? I ain't going into the water unprepared."
Now, in the distance, the shore of Anopopei slid by slowly, almost like a huge ship itself. Naw, Red thought, Hennessey wouldn't go into the water unprepared. He was the kind of kid who would put away money for marriage before he even had a girl. It was what you got for following the rule book.
He drooped his body over the rail, and looked down at the water. Despite the lethargy of the ship, the wake burbled rapidly. The moon had passed behind a cloud, and the water looked dark and malevolent, terribly deep. There seemed an aureole about the ship which extended fifty yards from the side, but beyond that was only blackness, so vast, so dense, that he could no longer determine the ridge line of Anopopei. The water churned past in a thick gray foam, swirling and shuddering along the waves the ship formed in its passage. After a time Red had that feeling of sad compassion in which one seems to understand everything, all that men want and fail to get. For the first time in many years he thought of coming back from the mines in the winter twilight with his flesh a dirty wan color against the snow, entering his house, eating his food in silence while his mother waited on him sullenly. It had been an acrid empty home with everyone growing alien to one another, and in all the years that had passed, he had never remembered it except in bitterness. And yet now, looking at the water, he could have some compassion for once, could understand his mother and the brothers and sisters he had almost forgotten. He understood many things, remembered sad incidents, ugly incidents, out of the years he had knocked around, recalled a drunk who had been robbed on the steps leading up to Bowery Park near Brooklyn Bridge. It was a type of understanding which could have come to him only at this moment, culled from all his experience, the enforced restlessness of two weeks on shipboard, and the mood of this night as they moved toward the invasion beaches.
But the compassion lasted for only a few minutes. He understood it all, knew he could do nothing about it any longer, and was not even tempted. What was the use? He sighed and the acuteness of his mood slipped out with his breath. There were some things you could never fix. It was too mixed-up. A man had to get out by himself or he became like Hennessey, worrying over every gimcrack in his life.
He wanted none of it. He'd do no man harm if he could help it, and he'd take no crap. He never had, he told himself proudly.
For a long time he remained staring at the water. He had never found anything. All he knew was what he didn't like. He snorted, listening to the wind cling to the ship. All through his body he had the sense of every second sliding past, racing toward the approaching morning. This was the last time he would be alone for months, and he savored the sensation. He had always been a loner.
There wasn't anything he wanted, he told himself again. Not a buck, not a woman, not a one. Just let there be Two-bit Annie around the corner when he felt like company. There wasn't anybody else would have him anyway. He grinned and gripped the rail, feeling the wind lap against his face, inhaling the swollen vegetal smells it carried from the island across the water.
"I don't care what you say," Sergeant Brown told Stanley, "you can't trust any of them." They were talking to each other in low voices from their adjoining bunks. Stanley had been careful to pick them together when they first came on board. "There isn't a woman you can trust," Brown decided.