The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [293]
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 all," he complained mildly. "If a man wants to get some rest. . ." He trailed it off, hooked on his belt and walked over to the litter. "Well, Ah'm ready."
They moved on again, but the rest period had been bad for them. They had lost the urgency, the tension, that had driven them forward when everything else was gone. Now after marching a few hundred yards they were almost as tired as they had been when they halted, and the heat of the sun made them dizzy and weak. Wilson began to moan quite steadily.
This tormented them. Their bodies felt powerless and clumsy; each time he groaned they winced with guilt and empathy, and the torments of his wound seemed to pass through the handles of the stretcher up into their arms. They bickered constantly for the first half mile while they still had wind to speak. Everything they did grated on everybody else, and they snapped at each other continually.
"Dammit, Goldstein, why don't you watch it?" Stanley would shout after a sudden jar.
"Watch it yourself."
"Why don't you men quit the fussin' and do some work?" Ridges would mutter.
"Aaah, blow it out," Stanley would shout.
And Brown would interfere. "Stanley, you're talkin' too damn much. Why'n't you do some goddam work?"
They struggled on, enraged at each other. Wilson began to babble again, and they listened to him dully. "Men, why don' you all lea' me, a man who cain't hold up his end ain't worth a goddam. Ah'm jus' holdin' you back. Jus' lea' me, men, that's all Ah ask. Ol' Wilson'll get along, y' don' have to worry about him. Jus' lea' me, men."
"Jus' lea' me, men."
It tickled in their shoulders, washed down to their fingertips, which seemed to loosen on the litter handles. "What the hell you talkin' about, Wilson?" Brown panted. Each of them was fighting his private battle.
Goldstein stumbled, and Wilson shouted at him. "Goldstein, you're a no-good bastard, you done that on purpose, Ah been watchin' ya, and you're no good." The name twisted in Wilson's head; he remembered the handle at his right foot being called Goldstein, and when the litter had dipped in that direction, he had bawled out the name. But now it clicked. "Goldstein's no fuggin good, a man who won't take a drink." He giggled weakly, a little blood welling stickily from the parched hollow of his throat. "Goddam, ol' Croft never knew Ah got a free bottle off him."