The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [7]
"I don't know, that isn't the whole damn truth," Stanley muttered. "I know I trust my wife." He didn't like the way the conversation was going. It was feeding a few worms of doubt in his mind. Besides he knew Sergeant Brown didn't like anybody to disagree with him.
"Well, now," Brown said, "you're a good kid, and you're smart, but it just don't pay to trust a woman. You take my wife. She's beautiful, I've shown you her picture."
"She's really a good-looking dame," Stanley agreed quickly.
"No doubt about it, she's beautiful. You think she's gonna sit around and wait for me? No, she ain't. She's out having herself a good time."
"Well, I wouldn't say that," Stanley suggested.
"Why not? You ain't going to hurt any feelings of mine. I know what she's doing, and when I get back I'm going to have a little accounting with her. I'm going to ask her first, 'Been having any dates?' and if she says, 'Yes,' I'll get the rest out of her in two minutes. And if she says, 'No, honey, honest I haven't, you know me,' I'm just going to do a little checking with my friends and if I find she's been lying, well, then I'll have her, and, man, maybe I won't give her some lumps before I kick her out." Brown shook his head in emphasis. He was 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 several jungle ulcers on his chin. At a second glance, it was apparent that he was easily twenty-eight years old.
"It certainly would be a dirty deal for a guy to get when he does go back," Stanley offered.
Sergeant Brown nodded soberly, and then his face turned bitter. "What do you expect? Do you think you're going to go home a hero? Listen, when you get home folks are going to look at you and say, 'Arthur Stanley, you been gone a long time,' and you'll say, 'Yeah,' and then they'll say, 'Well, things've been pretty rough here, but I guess they're going to improve some. You're sure lucky you missed it all.' "
Stanley laughed. "I haven't seen much," he said modestly, "but I do know that those poor civilians don't begin to know the score."
"Man, but they don't," Brown said. "Listen, you've seen enough combat at Motome to have an idea. Why, when I think of my wife fooling around probably right this minute, while I'm lying here sweating out tomorrow, I begin to get mad. . . mad." He cracked his knuckles nervously, fingered the steel pipe between their hammocks. "It ain't as if tomorrow is gonna be so bad although they'll have recon working its ass off, but a little work ain't gonna kill us." He snorted. "Hell, if General Cummings was to come up to me tomorrow and say, 'Brown, I'm putting you on unloading detail for the duration,' you think I'd bitch? In the pig's hole I would. I've seen enough combat to last ten men, and I'll tell you this invasion tomorrow if we was to be shelled from the ship to the beach and back couldn't begin to equal Motome. That was one day I knew I was gonna be dead. I still don't see how I got through it."
"What happened?" Stanley asked. He flexed his knees carefully to avoid kicking the man in the bunk above him, only a foot above his head. This story he had heard a dozen times when he was first assigned to recon, but he knew Brown liked to tell it.
"Well, from the beginning when they assigned the platoon to Baker Company for that rubber boat deal, it was a cinch we were screwed, but what could you do?" He went on, telling a story of how they had set out in rubber boats from a destroyer several hours before the dawn, had been caught in an ebb tide and seen by the Japanese. "Man," Brown said, "maybe you think I wasn't keeping a tight asshole when those Japs started firing at us with an AA battery. There wasn't any of our boats that didn't get hit some and start sinking, and in the one next to us was the Company Commander, Billings was his name I think, and the poor bastard had just broken down completely. He was crying and moaning and trying to fire off a flare so the destroyer would open up and give us some cover, but he was shaking so much he couldn't hold the flare gun in his hand.