The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [162]
Deep in his bowels something had reacted and a twinge of diarrhea made him perspire. He reached over, picked up his field telephone, cranked it once, and murmured into the receiver, "Find Hearn and send him over to my tent." Then he rubbed vigorously at the flesh on the left side of his face, which seemed to have grown numb. "To do that." His rage was just beginning to function; a furious uncontrolled anger tightened his mouth, set his heart beating over-rapidly, and tingled in the tips of his fingers. Almost unbearable. He walked over to his refrigerator and poured himself a glass of water, which he drank with short distraught swallows. For an instant, deep beneath the currents of his rage, there was another feeling, an odd compound of disgust and fear perhaps, and something else, a curious troubled excitement, a momentary submission as if he had been a young girl undressing before the eyes of a roomful of strange men. But his rage choked this off, expanded inside him until it clotted all the conduits of his emotion, and left him trembling with an unendurable wrath. If he had been holding an animal in his hands at that instant he would have strangled it.
And with it was another sort of fear, overt and aware; what Hearn had done was equivalent to a soldier's laying hands on his person. To Cummings it was a symbol of the independence of his troops, their resistance to him. The fear, the respect his soldiers held for him now was a rational one, an admission of his power to punish them, and that was not enough. The other kind of fear was lacking, the unreasoning one in which his powers were immense and it was effectively a variety of sacrilege to thwart him. The cigarette butt on the floor was a threat, a denial of him, as fully as Lanning's defection, or a Japanese attack on his lines, and he had to meet it directly and ruthlessly. The longer you tarried with resistance the greater it became. It had to be destroyed.
"You want to see me, sir?" It was Hearn entering his tent.
Cummings turned around slowly, and looked at him. "Yes, sit down, I want to talk to you." His voice had been cold and even. With Hearn before him, his anger became incisive, controllable, an instrument of his actions. With great deliberation he lit a cigarette, his hands steady now, and exhaled it leisurely. "It's been a long time since we've had a little talk, Robert."
"Yes, sir, it has been."
Not since the night of the chess game. And they were both aware of it. Cummings surveyed Hearn with loathing. Hearn was an embodiment of the one mistake, the one indulgence he had ever permitted himself, and it had been intolerable to be with him since then. "My wife is a bitch, Robert." Cummings writhed at the memory, revolted with himself for that temporary weakness. At that time. . .
There was Hearn before him now, sprawled in the camp chair, his large body not nearly so relaxed as it seemed, his sullen mouth, his cold eyes staring back at him. For a while he had thought there was something in Hearn, a brilliance to match his own, an aptitude for power, the particular hunger that had meaning, but he had been wrong. Hearn was a vacuum with surface reactions, surface irritations. No doubt he had mashed the cigarette on an impulse.
"I'm going to give you a lecture, Robert." Until now Cummings had had no idea of how he would proceed. He had trusted his instincts to direct him. And this was the way. Put it on the intellectual frame, let Hearn slip into it, be unaware that there was going to be an end product today.
Hearn lit a cigarette. "Yes, sir?" He was still holding the match in his hand, and they both looked at it. There was a quite perceptible pause while Hearn fingered it, and then leaned forward to drop it in an ashtray.
"You're remarkably neat," Cummings said sourly.
Hearn's eyes lifted, searched his for an instant, wary, judging his answer. "Family upbringing," he said shortly.
"You know, it seems to me there are things, Robert, you could have learned from your father."
"I didn't know you knew him," Hearn