The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [159]
On another level it was the sort of deal his father might have pulled. "Every man has his price, there's more ways than one to skin a cat." Oh, there were enough platitudes to cover it, but the General was showing him that he wasn't superior to the platitudes either. It had been the recreation tent all over again with fifty, perhaps a hundred variations.
"You forget, Robert, there's such a thing as papal dispensation." All right, now there was no dispensation. He was merely a second lieutenant, squeezed by all the pressures above and beneath him, no more capable than any of the other officers of maintaining his own course with a little dignity, a little restraint. After it went on long enough the reactions would become automatic, fear-inspired. Somehow you never did win when you were with the General. Even on that night of the chess game it was he who had felt sick, not Cummings; it was he who had lain on his cot and dredged his memory for all the silt and cankers.
"Are you junior officers getting your liquor supplies?" What the hell had he meant by that? On an impulse Hearn opened the General's liquor closet, and examined the opened bottles. Almost every night Cummings could be counted on to drink an inch or two of Scotch, and with a curious niggardliness he would mark the level of the bottle with a pencil before he put it away. Hearn had noticed this with amusement, found it an interesting little quirk in all the contradictions of the General.
But today the liquor level on his bottle of Scotch was at least two and a half inches below the last pencil mark. Cummings had seen that this morning, had rebuked him for drinking it. "Are you junior officers getting your liquor supplies?" Only, that was absurd. Cummings would know better than that.
It could have been Clellan. Possibly. But it was unlikely Clellan would jeopardize a sinecure like general's orderly merely for a drink. And besides, Clellan was shrewd enough to mark the liquor level himself if he wanted to take a nip.
Suddenly, Hearn had an image of Cummings sitting in his tent the night before, about to go to bed, examining thoughtfully the label of his whisky bottle. He might even pick up his pencil, deliberate a moment or two, and then he would leave the bottle unmarked, return it to the closet. What had his face looked like at that moment?
This, now, was not funny. Not after the recreation tent and the flowers and Kerrigan. Until this little episode, he could consider the General's antics as pranks that spewed out of twisted and intense hungers. It had been in a way like the probing banter between friends. But this was vicious. And frightening, a little. With all his concerns, with all the pressures upon him, Cummings had had time to concoct these schemes, release a little of the greater frustration he was feeling.
And that basically was what their relationship had always been, Hearn understood at this moment. He had been the pet, the dog, to the master, coddled and curried, thrown sweetmeats until he had had the presumption to bite the master once. And since then he had been tormented with the particular absorbed sadism that most men could generate only toward an animal. He was a diversion for the General, and he resented it deeply with a cold speechless anger that came to some extent from the knowledge that he had acquiesced in the dog-role, had even had the dog's dreams, carefully submerged, of someday equaling the master. And Cummings had probably understood even that, had been amused.
He remembered a story Cummings had told him about an employee in the War Department who had been discharged after some Communist documents had been planted in his desk.
"I'm surprised it worked," Hearn had said. "You say everybody knew the man was harmless."
"Those things always work, Robert. You can't begin to imagine how effective the Big Lie is. Your average man never dares suspect that the men in power have all the nasty