The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [160]
Certainly Cummings would have been perfectly capable of planting those documents if he had thought it necessary. Just as he had finagled the whisky label. And he was not going to become a chess piece for the General to direct. No doubt Cummings saw him now as a diversion.
Hearn stared around the tent. It would be a pleasure to wait for the General and tell him that he had brought back the supplies successfully, but it was a tainted pleasure and Cummings would be quite aware of it. "Had to extend yourself a bit, didn't you, Robert?" he might say. Hearn lit a cigarette, and walked over to the wastebasket to drop the match.
There it was, that instinctive reaction, don't drop a match on the General's floor. He paused. There was a limit to how far he could let the General prod him.
The clean floor. If you looked at it clearly without the aura of military mumbo-jumbo, it became absurd, perverted, a revolting idea.
He dropped the match near the General's foot locker, and then with his heart beating stupidly, he threw his cigarette carefully onto the middle of the General's spotless floor, ground his heel down brutally upon it, and stood looking at it with amazement and a troubled pride.
Let Cummings see that. Let him.
In the G-1 tent the air had become stifling by midday. Major Binner wiped his steel-rimmed glasses, coughed dolefully, and removed a trickle of sweat from the corner of his neat temple. "This is a serious thing, Sergeant," he said quietly.
"Yes, sir, I know."
Major Binner glanced at the General for a moment. Then he drummed on his desk and looked at the enlisted man who was standing at attention before him. A few steps away, near one of the corner poles, Cummings paced a small circle back and forth.
"If you give us the facts, Sergeant Lanning, it will have a very important bearing on your court-martial," Binner said.
"Major, I don't know what to tell you," Lanning protested. He was a short rather stocky man with blond hair and pale-blue eyes.
"The facts will be sufficient," Binner drawled in his sad voice.
"Well, we went out on patrol, and since we'd gone to the same place the day before yesterday, I just coudn't see any point to it."
"Was that for you to judge?"
"No, sir, it wasn't, but I could see the men weren't too happy, and when we got out about halfway I just set my squad down in a little draw, and waited an hour, and then I came on back and gave my report."
"And the report was completely false," Binner intoned. "You said you had been to a place to which. . . in which you hadn't even been within a mile of."
In the midst of his anger, Cummings felt a mild contempt at the way Binner had mangled the sentence.
"Yes, sir, that's true," Sergeant Lanning said.
"You got the idea in precisely that manner, it just occurred to you, so to speak?"
Cummings restrained himself from interrupting the questioning to speed it up.
"I don't understand, Major?" Lanning asked.
"How many other times have you dropped the ball on patrol?" Binner asked sadly.
"This was the first time, sir."
"What other sergeants in your company or battalion have been giving false and misleading patrol reports?"
"None, sir, I never heard of any."
The General walked up to him abruptly, and glared at him. "Lanning, do you ever want to go back to the States or do you want to rot over here in a prison camp?"
"Sir," Lanning stammered, "I've been with the outfit for three years, and. . ."
"I don't care if you've been with us for twenty years. What other sergeants have been giving false patrol reports?"