The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [313]
"You sonofabitch, Brown, you been shakin' me on purpose."
Brown wanted to cry or to strike him across the face. The jungle sores on his feet had come open and were bleeding inside his shoes, smarting unbearably whenever he halted and became conscious of them. He did not want to go on, but he could see the other litter-bearers staring at him. "Come on, men," he muttered.
They advanced like this for several hours, toiling under the brow of the midday sun. Slowly, inevitably, their will and their resolution were dissolved. They struggled forward through a glare of heat, bound to each other in an unwilling union of exhaustion and rage. Each time one of them stumbled the others hated him, for the load was suddenly increased on their arms, and Wilson's growls of pain bored through their apathy, startled them like a whiplash. They plumbed one level of misery after another. For minutes at a time their vision would blank out almost completely in a flood of nausea. The ground before them would darken, and they would taste their heartbeat in the acrid bile that filled their mouths. They toiled forward numbly, unquestioningly, suffering more than Wilson. Any one of them would have been pleased to have shifted positions with him.
At one o'clock Brown halted them. His feet had been numb for minutes at a time, and he was close to collapse. They left Wilson lying in the sun while they sprawled beside him, their faces close to the earth, drawing great gasping bursts of air. All about them the hills shimmered in the early afternoon heat, refracting their glare from one slope to another without relief. There seemed no breeze at all. Wilson would mumble and rant from time to time but they paid no attention to him. The rest period gave them no relief; all the submerged effects of their exhaustion were being exhumed now, bothered them directly. They retched, languished through long flaccid minutes when they seemed close to unconsciousness, and suffered from recurring spasms of shivering when there seemed no heat left in their bodies.
After a long while, perhaps an hour, Brown sat up, swallowed a few salt tablets and drank almost half his canteen of water. The salt rumbled uncomfortably in his stomach, but he felt some relief. When he stood up to walk over to Wilson, his legs moved without familiarity, weakly, like a man who is out of bed after a long illness. "How're you feelin', boy?" he asked.
Wilson stared at him. With a groping motion his fingers had fluttered up to his forehead, removed the dampened cloth. "You men better leave me, Brown," he croaked feebly. In the past hour, lying on the stretcher, he had slid between consciousness and delirium, and now he was very tired, very spent. To Wilson there was no point in moving on any farther. He was perfectly content at the moment to remain here; he did not think at all of what would happen to him. He knew only that he didn't want to be carried again, could not bear the agony of being jolted on the stretcher.
Brown was tempted, so tempted that he did not dare to believe Wilson. "What are you talking about, boy?"
"Lea' me, men, jus' lea' me." Weaks tears came into Wilson's eyes. Remotely, almost as if it did not concern him, he shook his head. "I'm holdin' ya back, men, jus' lea' me behind." It was all confused in his mind again; he thought they were on a patrol and he was lagging back because of his sickness. "When a man gotta be crappin' all the time, it jus' slows ya up."
Stanley had come up beside Brown. "What does he want us to do, leave him?"
"Yeah."
"Think we ought to?"
Brown generated some rage. "Goddammit, Stanley, what the hell's the matter with you?" Again Brown was tempted. A deep lassitude had filled his body; he had no desire to move on. "Come on, men, let's go," he bawled. He saw Ridges lying asleep a few feet away and it enraged him. "Come on, Ridges, will you quit dickin'-off?"
Ridges woke up slowly, almost leisurely. "Jus' restin', that's