The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [94]
"Let's pass the canteen around," Wilson suggested. He tilted it upward, and drank the last inch. "Guess we got to open another one," he sighed.
"We all paid up for this," Croft said. "Let's see we drink the same amount." Wilson giggled.
They sat about in a circle, passing the canteen from time to time, and talking in slow indifferent voices which began to blur before the second canteen was finished. The sun was dropping toward the west, and for the first time that afternoon shadows were beginning to drift from the trees and the black-green ponchos of their pup tents. Goldstein and Ridges and Wyman were sitting about thirty yards away talking in soft voices. Occasionally, a noise of some minor activity -- a truck grinding up the lane that led to the bivouac or the shouts of some soldiers on a labor detail -- would filter through the coconut grove. Every fifteen minutes a battery about a mile away would fire, and a part of their minds would wait for the sound of the explosion when the shells landed. There was nothing to look at but barbed wire in front of them and the thick brush of the jungle beyond the grove.
"Well, back to headquarters company tomorrow. . . let's drink to that," Wilson said.
"I hope we just dig that fuggin road for the rest of the campaign," Gallagher said.
Croft fingered his belt dreamily. The awareness and excitement he had felt after he killed the prisoner had faded on the march to an empty sullen indifference to everything about him. As he drank, the sullenness remained but there were changes taking place in him. His mind had become dulled and blurred, and he would sit motionless for minutes at a time without speaking, intent upon the curious whirling and tumbling that was going on inside his body. His mind kept yawing drunkenly like the underwater shadows that ripple about a piling. He would think, Janey was a drunken whore, and a dull clod of pain would settle in his chest. Crack that whip, he muttered to himself, and his mind eddied over the lazy sensual memories of striding a horse and looking down a hill into a sunlit valley beneath. The alcohol spread through his legs, and he recalled for an instant the entire complex of pleasant sensations he felt when the sun had heated his saddle, and the smell of the hot leather and the wet horse spread about him. The heat re-created the glare of the sunlight in the green draw where the Japanese bodies were lying, and as he thought of the look of surprise that almost came to the prisoner's face the instant before he died, a trickle of laughter began to flow in Croft, and dribbled between his thin tight lips like the frail saliva that bubbles from a sick man's mouth. "Goddam," he muttered.
Wilson was feeling exceptionally good. The whisky had filled his body with a rosy sense of complete well-being, and vague lewd sensual images stroked his mind. His groin was filling, becoming tumescent, and his nose quivered with excitement as he remembered the fermy sweating smells of a woman in heat. "They ain't anythin' Ah wouldn' give to be lovin' it up with a woman now. Time Ah was workin' as a bellboy at the Hotel Main in town, they was a girl there she was workin' as a singer in some little old band that'd come to town, and she used to keep ringing for me to bring her up some drinks. Well, Ah was a young kid then, an' Ah was kind of slow to catch on, but they was one day Ah went up to her room and they she was bare-ass naked, an' jus' waitin' for me. Ah tell ya, Ah didn't go down and tend to business for all of three hours, and they wan't hardly a goddam thing she wouldn' do for me." He sighed, and took a long drink. "Her and me jus' loved it up eveh afternoon for all of two months, and she tol' me they wan't a man could equal me." He lit a cigarette, and his eyes twinkled behind his spectacles. "Ah'm a good fella, anybody'll tell ya that. They ain't a damn thing Ah cain't fix, not a single piece of machinery eveh been able to lick me, but Ah'm a sonofabitch comes to women. They's lots of women tol' me they neveh found a man like me." He ran his hand over his massive forehead and through his pompadour of golden hair. "But it jus' plays hell on a man when he ain't got a woman." He took another drink. "Ah got a girl waitin' for me in Kansas don' know Ah'm married. Use to fool aroun' with her when Ah was at Fort Riley. That little ole gal writes me letters all the time, Red'll tell ya 'cause he been readin' 'em to me, and she's jus' waitin' for me to come back. Ah keep tellin' mah old woman that she better stop writin' me those kind of naggin' letters about the kids and why Ah don't send more money home, or Ah'm damn sure not gonna go back to her. Shi-i-i-it, Ah like that ole gal in Kansas better anyway. She cooks a meal for me that's fitten for a man to eat."