The Naked and the Dead (10 page)

            "Yes."

            Japbait was a good old boy, Croft thought. There were good Mexicans and bad Mexicans, but you couldn't beat a good one. "A good man'll hold on to his job," Croft said to himself. He felt a surprising flush of warmth for Martinez. "You're a good old sonofabitch," he told him.

            Martinez lit a cigarette. "Brown scared, Martinez scared, but Martinez better scout," he said softly. His left eye still quivered nervously. And as if his eyelid were transparent, it seemed to reveal his heart beating behind it in anguished sudden ambush.

The Time Machine:

JULIO MARTINEZ

SHOEING THE MARE

           
A small slim and very handsome Mexican with neat wavy hair, small sharp features. His body had the poise and grace of a deer. And like a deer his head was never quite still. His brown liquid eyes always seemed nervous and alert as if he were thinking of flight.

            Little Mexican boys also breathe the American fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers.

            Julio Martinez, age of eight, walks the festering streets of San Antonio in 1926, stumbles over pebbles, and searches the Texas sky. Yesterday he has seen an airplane arching overhead; today, being young, he hopes to see another.

            (When I am big I build fly-planes.)

            Short white pants which reach the middle of his thighs. His white open shirt shows slim brown boy-arms, his hair is dark and clustered with ringlets. Cunning little Mex.

            Teacher likes me, Momma likes me, big fat Momma with the smell; her arms are great and her breasts are soft; at night in the two little rooms there is the sound of Momma and Poppa, shlup-shlup, shlup-shlup, giggle in your pillow. (When I am big I build fly-planes. )

            The Mexican quarter is unpaved, and little wood lean-tos sag in the heat. You can always breathe earth-powder, always smell the kerosene, the cooking grease, always sniff the mangy summer odor of spavined horses drawing carts, barefooted old men sucking at pipes.

            Momma shakes him, talks in Spanish. Lazy one, get me a pepper and a pound of pinto beans. He grasps the coin, which is cold against his palm.

            Momma, when I am big I fly plane.

            You are my good smart boy (the wet pungent smack of her lips, flesh smells), now get what I have sent you for.

            There are many things I will do, Momma.

            She laughs. You will make money, you will own land, but now you hurry.

            Little Mexican boys grow up, have hair creep like minuscule vines across their chins. When you are quiet and shy it is hard to find girls.

            Ysidro is your big brother; he is twenty and slick dresser. His shoes are brown and white and his sideburns are two inches long. Julio listens to him.

            I screw good stuff. Big girls. Girls with plat'num blonde. Alice Stewart, Peggy Reilly, Mary Hennessey. Protestant girls.

            I screw
them
too.

            Ysidro laughs. You make love to your hand. Later you will be smart. You will learn to play a woman like a guitar.

            Julio makes love when he is fifteen. There is a little girl on the earth-pressed street who wears no bloomers. Ysabel Flores, dirty little girl. All the boys she makes love to.

            Julio, you are sweet sweet sweet.

            Under the tree behind the empty house in the dark. Julio, like the dogs, okay?

            He feels the sweet sick nausea. (Protestant girls like me, I will make much money.) Ysabel, when I am big I buy you many dresses.

            Her wet velveted body relaxes. She lies down on her spread-out dress, her premature breasts lolling in the summer heat. Dresses? she asks. What color will they be?

            Julio Martinez is big boy now, big financier; he works in a hashhouse. Counterman. The foul rich barbecue smell, the garlic molten in the hot dogs on the griddle. Joe and Nemo, Harry and Dick, White Tower. Grease on a sizzling plate and the crumblings, the rancid fat, all to be scraped with the spatula. Martinez wears a white jacket.

            Texans can be impatient. Hey, you boy, hurry up that chili.

            Yes, sir.

            Prostitutes look through him. Lots of relish, boy.

            Yes, miss.

            The cars flare by in the electric night, his feet ache on the concrete floor. (I will make much money.)

            But there are no jobs with much money. What can a Mexican boy do in San Antone? He can be counterman in hashhouse; he can be bellhop; he can pick cotton in season; he can start store; but he cannot be a doctor, a lawyer, big merchant, chief.

            He can make love.

            Rosalita has a big belly; it is almost as big as the belly of her father Pedro Sanchez. You will marry my daughter, Pedro says.

            Sí. But there are prettier girls than Rosalita.

            It was time you were married anyway.

            Sí. (Rosalita will grow fat, and children will run through the house. Shlup-shlup, shlup-shlup, giggle in your pillow. He will dig ditches on the roads.)

            You are the first with her in any case.

            Sí. (It was not his fault. Sheik, Ramses, Golden Trojan. Sometimes it was even two dollars out of the twenty he made in a week.)

            I will talk with Señora Martinez.

            Sí. If you wish.

            The night is dull with woe. Rosalita is sweet but there are girls sweeter. He walks along the dirt-impacted streets. They are beginning to pave them now.

            Tired? Restless? Knock up a dame? Join The Army.

            Martinez is a buck private in 1937. He is still a private in thirty-nine. Nice shy Mex kid with good manners. His equipment is always spotless, and that's sufficient for the cavalry.

            There are details. You weed the officers' gardens, you can be houseboy at their parties. You groom a horse after you ride it; if it is a mare you swab out its dock. The stables are hot and fermy. (I will buy you many dresses.) A soldier strikes a horse across the head. That's the only way that dumb four-legged sonofabitch knows. The horse neighs with pain, lashes out with its feet. The soldier strikes it again. Sonofabitch kept tryin' to throw me today. Treat a horse like a nigger and it'll act up right.

            Martinez steps out from his stall, is seen for the first time. Hey, Julio, the soldier says, keep your mouth shut.

            The instinctive quiver. (Hey, you boy, hurry up that chili.)

            The nod, the grin. I do that, Martinez says.

            Fort Riley is big and green and the barracks are of red brick. The officers live in pretty little houses with gardens. Martinez is orderly for Lieutenant Bradford.

            Julio, will you do a good job on my boots today?

            Yes, sir.

            The Lieutenant takes a drink. Want one, Martinez?

            Thank you, sir.

            I want you to do a real good job on the house today.

            Yes, sir, I do that.

            The Lieutenant winks. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.

            No, sir.

            The Lieutenant and his wife leave. Ah think yore the best boy we eveh had, Hooley, Mrs. Bradford says.

            Thank you, ma'am.

            When the draft starts Martinez makes corporal. The first time he drills a squad he is so frightened he can barely sound the commands. (Fugged if I'll take an order from a Mex.) Squad left, left by squads. To the rear, march; to the rear, march. (You men must understand your responsibility. There is nothing more difficult in the world than to be a perfect noncom. Firm and aloof, firm and aloof, those are the keywords.) COL-umn RIGHT. The shoes tamping on the red clay, the sweat drips down. Hut, hup, hip, hor, hut, hup, hip, hor. (I frig white Protestant girls, firm and aloof. I WILL BE GOOD NONCOM.)

            Squad halt! PaRADE rest!

            Martinez is in the cadre for General Cummings's infantry division, goes overseas as a corporal in recon.

            There are discoveries. Aussie girls can be made. The streets of Sydney, the blonde girl with the freckles who holds his hand. I think you're awful cute, Joolio.

            You too. The taste of Aussie beer, and the Aussie soldiers hitting him for a buck.

            Yank, got a shilling or two?

           
Yank?
Okay, he mumbles.

            The blonde prostitutes to whom he makes love. Oh, what a roll you got, Joolie, what a bloody bloody roll. Gi' it to me, again.

            I do that. (I frig Mrs. Lieutenant Bradford now, I frig Peggy Reilly and Alice Stewart, I will be hero.)

            Martinez looks at a blade of grass. BEE-Yowww, BEE-Yoww. The whip of the bullet is lost crying in the wilderness. He crawls, slithers behind a stump. BEE-Yowwww. The grenade is heavy and dull in his palm. He lofts it into the air, hugs his head in the deep secret embrace. (Momma's arms are great and her breasts are soft.) BAAA-ROWWWWWMM.

            Did ya get the sonofabitch?

            Where the hell is he?

            Martinez inches forward. The Jap lies on his back with his chin jerked toward heaven. The white tripe of his gut makes a flower on the field of red.

            I got him.

            You're a good old bastard, Martinez.

            Martinez made sergeant. Little Mexican boys also breathe the American fables. If they cannot be aviators or financiers or officers they can still be heroes. No need to stumble over pebbles and search the Texas sky. Any man jack can be a hero.

            Only that does not make you white Protestant, firm and aloof.

3

            An argument was about to break in officers' mess. For the last ten minutes Lieutenant Colonel Conn had been conducting a tirade against labor unions, and Lieutenant Hearn was getting restless. It was a bad place to hold one's temper. The mess had been set up with a great deal of haste, and it was not really big enough to feed forty officers. Two squad tents had been connected, but even then it was rather cramped, not nearly roomy enough to hold six tables, twelve benches, and the equipment of the field kitchen at one end. Moreover, the campaign was too young for the food to show any real improvement over the enlisted men's mess. A few times the officers had had pie or cake, and once there had been a salad when a crate of tomatoes was purchased from a merchant ship off the peninsula, but the average meal was pretty bad. And since the officers were paying for their meals out of their food allowance, it made them a little bitter. At every course there would be a low murmur of disgust, carefully muted because the General was eating with them now at a small table set off at one end of the tent.

            At midday, the annoyance was greater. The mess tent had been erected in the least prepossessing area of the bivouac, several hundred yards from the beach, without any decent shade from the coconut trees. The sun beat down and heated the inside until even the flies ambled sluggishly through the air. The officers ate in a swelter, sweat dripping from their hands and faces onto the plates before them. At Motome in the division's permanent bivouac the officers' mess had been set up in a little dell with a brook trickling over some rocks nearby, and the contrast was galling. As a result there was little conversation, and it was not exceptional for a quarrel to start. But at least in the past it had not cut across too many ranks. A captain might argue with a major, or a major with a lieutenant colonel, but no lieutenants had been correcting colonels.

            Lieutenant Hearn was aware of that. He was aware of a great many things, but even a stupid man would have known that a second lieutenant, indeed the only second lieutenant in Combined Headquarters, did not go around picking fights. Besides, he knew he was resented. The other officers considered it a piece of unwarranted good fortune that he should have been assigned to the General as his aide when he had joined the outfit only toward the end of the Motome campaign.

            Beyond all this, Hearn had done little to make friends. He was a big man with a shock of black hair, a heavy immobile face. His brown eyes, imperturbable, stared out coldly above the short blunted and slightly hooked arc of his nose. His wide thin mouth was unexpressive, a top ledge to the solid mass of his chin, and his voice was sharp with a thin contemptuous quality, rather surprising in so big a man. He would have denied it at times but he liked very few people, and most men sensed it uneasily after talking to him for a few minutes. He was above all the kind of man other men love to see humiliated.

            It would only be common sense for him to keep his mouth shut, and yet for the last ten minutes of the meal, the sweat had dripped steadily into his food, and his shirt had become progressively damper. More and more he had been resisting the impulse to mash the contents of his plate against the face of Lieutenant Colonel Conn. For the two weeks they had been eating in this tent, he had sat with seven other lieutenants and captains at a table adjacent to the one where Conn was talking now. And for two weeks he had heard Conn talk about the stupidity of Congress (with which Hearn would agree, but for different reasons), the inferiority of the Russian and British armies, the treachery and depravity of the Negro, and the terrible fact that Jew York was in the hands of foreigners. Once the first note had been sounded, Hearn had known with a suppressed desperation exactly how the rest of the symphony would follow. Until now he had contented himself with glaring at his food and muttering "stupid ass," or else staring up with a look of concentrated disgust at the ridgepole of the tent. But there was a limit to what Hearn could bear. With his big body jammed against the table, the scalding fabric of the tent side only a few inches away from his head, there was no way he could avoid looking at the expressions of the six field officers, majors and colonels, at the next table. And their appearance never changed. They were infuriating.