The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [291]
Even if we do get back we'll get a fuggin. What did it matter if they ever got out of the Army? It would be the same thing on the outside. Nothing ever turns out the way want it. And yet they weren't really tough, they still believed it would all be perfect in the end, they separated all the golden grains in the sand and looked at them, only at them -- with a magnifying glass. He did it himself, and he had nothing to look forward to but a succession of barren little towns and rented rooms, of nights spent listening to men talk in barrooms. What would there be outside of a whore and some tremors in his groin?
Maybe I ought to get married, he thought, and snickered immediately afterward. What was the use? He had had his chance, and turned it down, he could have had Lois, and he skipped out on her. When you're like me you're scared to admit you're getting old. That was it, nice and simple. You started out with something, something they all had, and it was just pissed away. For an instant he remembered Lois getting up in the middle of the night to look at Jackie, and then coming back to bed, shuddering against him until her body warmed. His throat choked on it for an instant and he forced it back. He had nothing to give a woman, nothing to give anybody. What do you tell them, that it's all bloody noses? Even a wounded animal went away alone to die.
In affirmation, his kidneys were aching again.
Still he could see a time when these years he was living now would seem different, when he could laugh at the men he'd known in the platoon and remember the way the jungle and the hills sometimes looked in the dawn. He might even want the kind of tension there was in stalking a man. It was stupid. He hated this. He hated it more than anything he had ever done and yet if he lived he knew that in the end it might turn mellow. The magnifying glass on the gold grains.
He grimaced. You always get caught. He had been caught himself once; with all he knew he had still got burned. He had believed a newspaper. The newspapers were written for guys like Toglio to believe in, and sure enough Toglio had got a million-dollar wound, and would go home, and make speeches for bond drives, believing every word of it. "Shall the GIs have died in vain?" He remembered an argument he had with Toglio about a clipping of an editorial one of the men received from his mother. "Did the GIs die in vain?"
He snorted. Who didn't know the answer? Of course they died in vain, any GI knew the score. The war just t.s. to them who had to fight it.
"Red, you're too cynical," Toglio had told him.
"Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap."
He stared up at the moon now. Maybe it did count for something. He didn't know, and there was no way he'd ever find out, no way any of them ever would. Aaah, just chalk it off, it's down the drain and who gives a goddam.
He wouldn't live long enough to find out anyway, he thought.
Hearn couldn't sleep either. He was extremely restless, and an odd febrile fatigue had settled in his legs. For almost an hour he turned over continually in his blanket, staring at the mountain, the moon above them, the hills, the ground before his face. Since the ambush, he had been feeling something, not exactly definable, but close to anxiety and unrest, and it had been driving him. It was almost painful to remain still. After a while he stood up, and walked through the hollow. The guard on the hilltop saw him and raised his rifle. He whistled softly, and then said, "Who is it -- Minetta? This is the Lieutenant."
He climbed up the slope and sat down beside Minetta. Before them in the moonlight the grass swayed in silver waves over a valley and the hills looked like stone.
"What's up, Lootenant?" Minetta asked.
"Not a damn thing, just stretching my legs." They talked in whispers.
"Jesus, it's a bitch being on guard after that ambush."
"Yeah." Hearn massaged his legs, trying to soothe them.
"What're we doing tomorrow, Lootenant?"
Well, what were