The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [42]
"No, not any more." With a belated insight he understood suddenly that the General had been riding a great many emotions when he ordered him to stand up. It was so difficult ever to be certain what went on in the General's head. Through their whole conversation Hearn had been on the defensive, weighing his speech, talking with no freedom at all. And abruptly he realized that this had been true for the General also.
"You've got a great future as a reactionary," the General said. "The trouble is we've never had any thinkers on my side. I'm a phenomenon and I get lonely at times." There was always that indefinable tension between them, Hearn thought. Their speech was forced to the surface through a thick resistant medium like oil.
"You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical." Outside the partially opened flap of the tent, the bivouac sprawled out before them, rank and cluttered, the raw cleared earth glinting in the early afternoon sun. It was almost deserted now, the enlisted men out on labor details.
The General had created that tension but he was involved in it too. He held on to Hearn for what. . . for what reason? Hearn didn't know. And he couldn't escape the peculiar magnetism of the General, a magnetism derived from all the connotations of the General's power. He had known men who thought like the General; he had even known one or two who were far more profound. But the difference was that they did nothing or the results of their actions were lost to them, and they functioned in the busy complex mangle, the choked vacuum of American life. The General might even have been silly if it were not for the fact that here on this island he controlled everything. It gave a base to whatever he said. And as long as Hearn remained with him, he could see the whole process from the inception of the thought to the tangible and immediate results the next day, the next month. That kind of knowledge was the hardest to obtain, the most concealed in everything Hearn had done in the past, and it intrigued him, it fascinated him.
"You can look at it, Robert, that we're in the middle ages of a new era, waiting for the renaissance of real power. Right now, I'm serving a rather sequestered function, I really am no more than the chief monk, the lord of my little abbey, so to speak."
His voice continued on and on, its ironic sustained mockery spinning its own unique web, while all the time the tensions inside him flexed and expanded, sought their inexorable satisfactions in whatever lay between Hearn and himself, between himself and the five thousand troops against him, the terrain, and the circuits of chance he would mold.
What a monster, Hearn told himself.
Chorus:
THE CHOW LINE
(The mess tent is on a low bluff overlooking the beach. In front of it is a low serving bench on which are placed four or five pots containing food. The troops file by in an irregular line, their mess gear opened and extended. Red, Gallagher, Brown and Wilson shuffle past to receive their rations. As they go by they sniff at the main course which has been dumped into a big square pan. It is canned Meat and Vegetable Stew heated slightly. The second cook, a fat red-faced man with a bald spot and a perpetual scowl, slaps a large spoonful in each of their mess plates.)
RED: What the fug is that swill?
COOK: It's owl shit. Wha'd you think it was?
RED: Okay, I just thought it was somethin' I couldn't eat. (Laughter)
COOK: (good naturedly) Move on, move on, before I knock-the-crap-out-of-you.
RED: Take a bite on this.
GALLAGHER: That goddam stew again.
COOK: (shouting to the other cooks and KPs on the serving line) Private Gallagher is bitching, men.
KP: Send him to officers' mess.
GALLAGHER: Give me a little more, will ya?
COOK: These portions are scientifically measured by Quartermaster. Move on!
GALLAGHER: You sonofabitch.
COOK: Go beat your meat. (Gallagher moves on.)
BROWN: