The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [271]
And more than this; he didn't want to. There was something nasty, unclean, about the emotion Roth was showing. Red always curdled before emotion. "For Christ's sakes, man, cut it out," he snapped. "I don't give a goddam about you and your bird."
Roth stopped as if he had been slapped across the face. For a moment in his weeping he had been expecting the warm arms of his mother. They were gone now; everything was gone. He was alone. It gave him a bitter pleasure, as if in having plumbed this last rejection he knew at last that there was no further humiliation he could receive. The foundation stones of his despair were at least stones. Red could not see the bitter smile Roth assumed instinctively. "You can forget about it," Roth said, turning over on his side away from Red, staring through the tears in his eyes at the cold gaunt reaches of the mountain. His throat was hot when he swallowed. At least now there was nothing left to desire, he told himself. Even his boy would grow up to mock him and his wife would become more and more of a nag. No one appreciated him.
Red stared at Roth's back, still tempted to reach out to him. The small hunched shoulders, the stiffness with which Roth held himself worked as a reproof; Red was troubled and felt a little guilty. Why did I even help him with the goddam bird? he asked himself. Now it's gonna be between me and Croft. He sighed with fatigue. Sooner or later it had to come out between them. I ain't afraid anyway, Red told himself.
Wasn't he? He wondered, and then edged away from the question. He was weary and Roth's appeal had moved him despite himself. As often happened when he was very tired, his mind had become clear and he felt as if he understood everything, but at times like this the knowledge was always wistful, burdened with the exhaustion of living. He thought of Wilson, saw him very clearly for a moment as he had looked in the assault boat months before when they had invaded the island. "C'mon in, y'old billygoat, the water's nice an' cold," Wilson had shouted to him.
"Up yours," or it had been something like that he had answered, but what difference did it make? Wilson was a mile or two away, perhaps dead by now, where the hell did it all come out?
Aaah, everybody loses. Red almost said this aloud. It was true. He knew it, they all knew it, every one of them. He sighed again. They knew it, and yet they still were soft, still didn't get used to the idea.
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.