The Naked and the Dead (30 page)

            Wilson was feeling restless. There was a tickle in his throat and his legs and arms felt drawn, overworked. "Man," he announced, "Ah could sure use a nice big bottle of likker." He stretched his legs and yawned a little desperately. "Ah tell ya what," he said, "Ah heard they's a mess sergeant over here that makes a decent drink for a man." None of the men answered him, and he got to his feet. "Ah think Ah'm gonna take a little walk and see if Ah can manipilate some likker for us."

            Red looked up irritably. "What the hell you gonna use for money? I thought you lost it all up on the hill." They had been playing poker every day.

            Wilson was hurt. "Listen, Red," he confided, "they ain't ever a time when Ah been broke. Ah don't claim to be no poker player, but Ah'll bet ya they ain't many men who can say they busted me in a game." Actually he had lost all his money, but an obscure pride kept him from admitting it. At this moment, Wilson was not thinking of what he would do if he could find some whisky without having the money to purchase it. He was interested only in finding the whisky. Jus' lemme see some likker, he thought, an' Ah'll fin' a way to drink it.

            He got up and walked away. In about fifteen minutes he returned grinning. He sat down beside Croft and Martinez, and began to poke at the ground with a twig he was holding. "Listen," he said, "they's a little ole mess sergeant here who's got a still out in the woods yonder. Ah was talkin' to him, and Ah manipilated him into settin' us a price."

            "How much?" Croft asked.

            "Well, Ah'll tell ya," Wilson said, "it's kinda high. . . but it's good stuff. He been usin' canned peaches and apricots and raisins with lots of sugar and yeast. He let me sample it, an' it's goddam good."

            "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.

            "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."

            Gallagher snorted. "Fuggin cracker like you, all you got time to do is screw and eat."

            "What the hell's better?" Wilson asked mildly.

            "A man can't get ahead, that's what," Gallagher said. "You work your ass off, you want something for it." He held his face numb. "I got a kid coming, probably being born right now while I'm drinking, but I never had a fuggin break, that's the goddam truth." He gave a little moan of anger, and then leaned forward tensely. "Listen, I remember there was times when I'd be going out alone for a walk and. . . I'd. . . I'd see things, and I'd know I was going to be something big." He paused bitterly. "But there was always something screwing me up." He stopped angrily, as if looking for words, and then looked off moodily.

            Red was feeling very drunk and very profound. "I'll tell you guys something. . . none of ya are ever gonna get anything. You're all good guys, but you're gonna get. . . the shitty end of the stick. The shitty end of the stick, that's all you're gonna get."

            Croft let out a roar of laughter. "You're a good bastard, Gallagher," he shouted sullenly, clapping him on the back. He felt a vast explosive mirth which embraced everything. "An' you're jus', jus' an old
cock-hound,
Wilson. You're the goddamnedest ole lecher. . ." His voice was thick and the others, even in their drunkenness, looked at him uneasily. "I bet you were born with a stiff rod."

            Wilson began to cackle. "Ah've suspected it mahself." They laughed together violently, and Croft shook his head as if to halt the uproarious whirl of his head. "I'm going to tell you men something," he said. "You're all good guys. You're all chicken, and you're all yellow, but you're good guys. They ain't a goddam thing wrong with you." He gave a tight smile which set his mouth awry, and then laughed again. He took a long drink. "Japbait here is the best goddam friend a man could have. Mex or no Mex, you can't beat him. Even ol' Red who's a dumb mean ol' sonofabitch, and I'm gonna shoot him someday, even ol' Red means all right in his own stupid way."

            Red felt a pang of fear which alerted him for an instant as if a drill were probing one of his teeth. "Up yours, Croft," he said.

            Croft laughed with intense merriment. "See what I mean," he pointed out.

            Red relapsed into a moody somnolence. "You're all good fuggin guys," he said, waving his arm vaguely through the air.

            Croft giggled suddenly. It was the first time the men had ever heard him make such a sound. "Like Gallagher said, that dumb ol' sonofabitch floppin' around in the dirt like he was a chicken with its neck jus' been wrung."

            Wilson cackled with him; he did not know why Croft was laughing, but it did not concern him. Everything about him had become diffused and uncertain and pleasant. He felt only an encompassing warmth for the men with whom he drank; in the languorous swirls of his mind they existed with him as something superior and amiable. "Ol' Wilson'll never let you all down," he chuckled.

            Red snorted and rubbed the edge of his nose, which had become numb. He felt a savage irritation at a combination of things too numerous and subtle for him to determine. "Wilson, you're a good buddy," he said, "but you're no goddam good. I'll tell ya somethin', the whole bunch of us are no damn good."