The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [294]
"Yeah, understand." Martinez was tying his shoes.
"Just take a trench knife."
"Okay, I be back in three hour maybe. Tell guard," Martinez whispered.
Croft held his shoulder for a second. Martinez was shivering very slightly. "Are you okay, boy?" he asked.
"Yeah, okay."
"Well, now listen," Croft said. "When you get back, don't say anything to anybody till you see me. If the Lootenant is up, you just say to him nothing happened, do you understand?" Croft's mouth was numb, and he felt the powerful anxiety of disobeying an order. More than that, there was something else, unexpressed as yet. He exhaled his breath painfully.
Martinez nodded, clenching and opening his fists to restore the sensitivity to his fingers. "I go now," he said, standing up.
"You're a good boy, Japbait." It was eerie, whispering in the darkness. The bodies lying about them seemed dead.
Martinez wrapped his rifle in his blanket to keep it dry, left it lying on his pack. "Okay, Sam." His voice quivered just slightly.
"Okay, Japbait." Croft watched him talk for a few seconds to Hearn, and then move out of the hollow, dip into the kunai grass and bear off to the left, parallel to the great cliffs of the mountain. Croft rubbed his forearm reflectively and went back to his blanket, lay down, knowing he would not sleep until Martinez had returned.
There it was before him again. You made a decision and backtracked on it and none of the problems was changed. Hearn shrugged wryly. If Martinez came back and reported no Japs in the pass, they would be moving forward in the morning. He scratched his armpit tenderly, staring down at the valley and the empty mournful hills about him. The wind soughed through the draws, drifted over the kunai grass, and whistled along the crests of the knolls, making a small murmur in its circuit like surf breaking a long distance away.
It was a mistake, and he had played a curious deception with himself. It had been more than yielding to Croft, he had yielded to himself again, made it so complicated that he could never untangle the rationalization from what was valid. Tricks and tricks, more ways than one to skin a cat, and he had allowed it, knew that he would go forward in the morning if Martinez brought back a report of no Jap activity.
When they finally got back to their bivouac, if they ever did, he could turn in his commission. That was the thing he could do, that would be honest, true to himself. Hearn rubbed his armpit again, sensing a reluctance. He didn't want to give up his commission, and that of course was part of the mechanism. You sweated through OCS, joked about the bars, were always contemptuous of them, and in time they grew to have an existence of their own, colored more than half your attitudes. After enough time went by it was like amputating an arm.
He knew what would happen. He would be an enlisted man, a private, and the other enlisted men in whatever unit he would be assigned to would find out sooner or later that he had been an officer, and they would hate him for it, resent him, resent even the fact that he had resigned a commission, for it would mock their own ambitions conscious and unconscious. If he did this, it would be with open eyes; there would be nothing cleaner at the end of it, certainly nothing more pleasant. It would be lousy and painful, and probably the only discovery would be that he could fit into a fear ladder as well as anyone else.
But there it was. He had been running away from fear, from vulnerability, from the admission that he was a man also and could be humbled. There was a saying, "It is better to be the hunted than the hunter," and that had a meaning for him now, a value.
Mockingly, he could hear what Cummings would say to that. "'A nice sentiment, Robert, one of the nice lies for today, just like the lie about a rich man not going to heaven." And Cummings would laugh and say, "You know, Robert, it's only the rich who do go to heaven."
Well, the hell with Cummings..