The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [271]
"Looks like a pussy," he heard himself murmuring, only the words sounded with a roar.
"Wilson, you got to shut up."
The fear lapsed, became a vague disquiet, lulled by Brown's hand. This time, Wilson really whispered. "One damn thing Ah cain't figger out. Two in bed and wake up three, two in bed an' wake up three." He repeated it like a jingle. "What t'hell's one got to do with t'other; you jus' do your screwin' an' it comes out a kid." He wrinkled his face, partially from pain, and then relaxed again, sinking into the sensual fetid memories of a woman over him. Then the image blurred, and his vision faded into a series of concentric circles boring into his head with the delirium of ether. Ah gotta hold on. When they done op-per-rated on ya, an' ya got a hole in ya, y' cain't go to sleep. Pappy went to sleep an' he woke up dead. His mind swirled, plumbing back into his core, considering himself objectively as a man who was going to die. He fought against it, terrified, not really believing it, like a man who looks in a mirror and speaks, and cannot believe that the face he has seen really belongs to himself. He careened from one unexplored cavern into another, believing at last that he had heard his daughter saying, "Pappy went to sleep an' he woke up dead."
"No!" Wilson shouted. "Where'd you git that idea, May?"
"That's a cute girl you got," Brown said. "That her name, May?"
Wilson heard him, made the long journey back. "Who's that?"
"Brown. What's May look like?"
"She's a goddam little hellion," Wilson said. "Smartest little bugger you'd ever want to see." Remotely, he felt his face twisting into a smile. "Ah tell ya, she can jus' twist me 'round, an' she knows it. She's one hell of a little girl."
The pain in his belly became acute again, and he lay there panting, absorbed only in the racking demands of his body like a woman in childbirth. "Ohhhh," he groaned thickly.
"You got any other kids?" Brown asked quickly. He massaged Wilson's forehead with slow tender motions as if he were soothing a child.
But Wilson did not hear him. He was concerned only with his pain, and he fought against it numbly, almost hysterically, like a man grappling in the dark, pitching with his opponent down an endless flight of stairs. Protesting, whimpering from the pain, he reeled into unconsciousness, his mind seeming to revolve over and over beneath his closed eyelids.
Brown continued to massage Wilson's forehead. In the darkness, Wilson's face seemed connected to him, an extension of his fingers. He swallowed once. An odd complex of emotions was working in Brown. Wilson's cries of pain, his shouts, had alerted Brown, made him worry about enemy patrols. It shattered the security of the grove, and reproduced the isolation of their position, the vast empty stretches of the hills around their little wood. He flinched unconsciously every time he heard an unexpected sound. But it was more than fear; he was keyed very high, and every quiver, every painful gesture of Wilson's body traveled intimately through Brown's fingers, through his arms, deep into his mind and heart. Without realizing it, he winced when Wilson winced. It was as if his brain had been washed clean of all the fatigue poisons of experience, the protecting calluses, the caustic salts, the cankers of memory. He was at once more vulnerable and less bitter. Something in the limitless darkness of the night, the tenuous protection of the grove, and the self-absorbed suffering of the wounded man beside him had combined to leave him naked, alone, a raw nerve responding to every wind and murmur that filtered into the wood from the bare gloomy hills in the blackness about them.
"Just take it easy, boy," he whispered.
All the lost things, the passions and ambitions of his childhood, the hopes that had curdled and turned to bile, swashed through him. Wilson's talk of his child loosed an old desire in