The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [76]
"It jus' don' pay to marry a woman with hot pants," Jesse Croft said later.
Croft found out in a quarrel.
And another thing, you go tomcattin' to town, and jus' hellin' around, well, don' be thinkin' Ah'm jus' sittin' around. They's things Ah can tell you too.
What things?
You want to know, don't ya? You got yore water hot. Jus' don't push me around.
What things?
She laughs. Jus' a way of talkin'.
Croft slaps her across the face, catches her wrists and shakes her.
WHAT THINGS?
You sonofabitch. (Her eyes glaring.) You know what kind of things.
He strikes her so heavily that she falls.
That's one thing you ain't best in, she screams.
Croft stands there trembling and then wrenches out of the room. (Goddam whore.) He feels nothing and then anger and shame and then nothing again. At this moment his initial love, his initial need of her is full-throated again. (Jus' an ole fuggin machine.)
"If Sam coulda found any of the boys who was scooting up her pants, he'da killed 'em," Jesse Croft said. "He tore around like he was gonna choke us all with his hands and then he took off for town and threw himself about as good a drunk as Ah've seen him indulge. And when he got back he'd enlisted himself in the Army."
After that there were always other men's wives.
You must think I'm a pretty cheap woman going out with you like this.
Wouldn't say that. Everybody likes to have a good time.
That's it. (Drinking her beer.) That's my philosophy. Need to have a good time. You don't think a bit cheap of me, do you, soldier?
Hell, you're too good-lookin' a woman for me to think cheap. (Have another beer.)
And later. Jack don't treat me right. You understand me.
That's right, honey, I understand you. They roll together in bed.
Ain't nothing wrong with that philosophy, she says.
Not a damn thing wrong. (And. . . crack. . . that. . . WHIP!)
You're all fuggin whores, he thinks.
His ancestors pushed and labored and strained, drove their oxen, sweated their women, and moved a thousand miles.
He pushed and labored inside himself and smoldered with an endless hatred.
(You're all a bunch of fuggin whores)
(You're all a bunch of dogs)
(You're all deer to track)
I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF
6
The battle that began on the night of the storm carried over well into the next afternoon. The attack recon had repulsed was only one of many similar assaults that sputtered up and down the river for hours, and ended at last in a breathless and dreary stalemate. Almost every one of the line companies was involved at one time or another, and each time the pattern was repeated. A group of thirty or fifty or a hundred Japanese would try to cross the river against a squad or platoon of American soldiers, entrenched in foxholes with automatic weapons. That night the Japanese had struck first at Cummings's left flank near the water, and then at dawn had engaged the two companies near the mountain bluffs where recon held the extreme right flank. After both had failed, Toyaku attacked in early daylight the center of the line, and succeeded in giving one company a bad mauling, and forced another to retreat almost back to 2nd Battalion headquarters. The General, still at headquarters battery of the 151st, made a quick decision, confirmed the tactics he had decided upon the preceding night, and sent out orders that the center of the line was to hold its positions.
Toyaku was able to send four hundred men across the river and four or five tanks, before the General's artillery and counterattacks by companies on the edge of the gap made it too expensive to continue. At the most dangerous moment for Cummings, it was still no worse than the problem of ejecting the rump of a fat man who had broken a hole through the stuffing of a couch, and was not spluttering and wriggling his backside in an effort to escape. The General attacked with his reserves, concentrated all the division's artillery on a natural clearing into which the Japanese behind his lines had been forced, and with the aid of his tanks, which had been held in readiness at a point only a quarter mile from the Japs' deepest penetration, succeeded in puncturing the rump. It was the biggest battle of the campaign to date, and the most successful. By late afternoon of that day the Japanese striking force was shattered, and the survivors disappeared into the jungle again, and were either pinched off one by one during the week that followed or succeeded in making their way back across the river to their own lines. This was the second time the General had routed a force which had penetrated his lines, and he gave Hearn a little lecture about it. "This kind of thing is what I call my dinner-table tactics. I'm the little lady who allows the lecher beside me to get his hand way up under my dress before I cut off his wrist."