The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [93]
"How much?" Croft asked again.
"Well, now, he wants twenty-five of them pounds for three canteens full. Ah never could figger out them damn pounds, but Ah reckon it ain't much over fifty dollars."
Croft spat. "Fifty dollars, hell. It's all of eighty bucks. That's pretty steep for jus' three canteens."
Wilson nodded. "Yeah, but then what the hell, we're jus' gonna get our haids blown off tomorrow." He paused and then added, "Ah tell ya, we can get Red and Gallagher in on it, and then it jus' makes five pound apiece 'cause they'll be five of us. Five time five, twenty-five, ain't it?"
Croft deliberated. "You get Red and Gallagher in, and Martinez and me'll put up."
Wilson went over to talk to Gallagher, and left him with five Australian pounds in his pocket. He stopped to chat with Red, and mentioned the price. Red exploded. "Five pounds apiece for three lousy canteens? Wilson, you can get five canteens for twenty-five pounds."
"Now, you know you cain't, Red."
Red swore. "Where the hell's your five pounds, Wilson?"
Wilson took out Gallagher's money. "That's it, Red."
"It wouldn't be one of the other men's money, would it?"
Wilson sighed. "Honestly, Red, Ah don' know how the hell you can think those kind of things about a buddy." At the moment he was completely sincere.
"All right, here's five," Red growled. He still thought Wilson was lying, but it didn't really matter. He needed to get drunk anyway, and he did not have the energy to find some liquor for himself. His body stiffened for a moment in a duplication of the panic that had caught him when he was walking alone on the trail and had heard the shot from Croft's gun. "All we ever do is screw each other anyway, what the hell." He could not shake the death of the Japanese prisoner. It had been wrong somehow. When the Jap hadn't been killed the first time, he rated being taken in as a prisoner. But it was more than that. He should have stayed. The whole week up there, the night on the river, the killings. He sighed heavily. Let Wilson have his good time; it was getting hard to find.
Wilson collected the rest of the money from Croft and Martinez, picked up four empty canteens, and went off to see the mess sergeant. He paid the twenty pounds he had promoted, and returned with the four canteens filled. One of them he hid under a folded blanket in his pup tent, and then he joined the other men and unhitched the canteens from his belt. "We better drink 'em up fast," he said. "That alcohol might eat on the metal."
Gallagher took a swig. "What the fug is it made of?" he asked.
"Oh, it's good stuff," Wilson assured him. He took a long drink and exhaled pleasurably. The liquor flushed its way through his throat and chest and settled warmly in his stomach. He felt tendrils of pleasure winding through his limbs and a joyous warmth began to relax his body. "Man, that does me good," he said. With the drink inside him, and the knowledge that there would be more to follow, Wilson felt mellow, he had a desire to speak of philosophical subjects. "Y'know," he said, "whisky is the kind of thing a man oughtn't to do without. That's the trouble with the goddam war; a man cain't get off by hisself, and do the kind of things where he had a good time for hisself and don't hurt no one a damn bit."
Croft grunted inaudibly and wiped the mouth of the canteen before he drank. Red sifted some dirt through his fingers. The liquor had been sweet and raw; it had rasped his throat and the irritation expanded through his body. He rubbed the side of his lumpish red nose and spat angrily. "No one's gonna ask you what you want to do," he told Wilson. "They just send you out to get your ass blown off." For an instant, he saw again the dead bodies in the green draw, the naked look of lacerated flesh. "Don't kid yourself," he said, "a man's no more important than a goddam cow."
Gallagher was remembering how the legs and arms of the Japanese prisoner had twitched for a second after Croft had shot him. "Just like wringing the neck of a fuggin chicken," he muttered surlily.
Martinez looked up. His face was drawn, and there were shadows under his eyes. "Why not you keep quiet?" he asked. "We see same things you do." His voice, almost always quiet and polite, had an angry strident note which amazed Gallagher and silenced him.