The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [295]
"Shut up, Stanley!" Brown waved his free arm loosely. "Keep going and cut out all this talk." Stanley glared at him. With his exhaustion he was feeling an intense hatred for Brown.
Wilson's thoughts rolled back into his pain. He drifted along, not conscious for a while of the jarring of the litter, not even thinking directly of anything about him. Sensations washed through to him through the filter of his delirium. He could feel his wound throbbing, and in his mind he saw a horn boring into his stomach, pausing and then boring forward again. "Ahhhrr." He heard himself groan without feeling his voice stir in his throat. He was so hot. For minutes he floated on the stretcher, his tongue exploring the roots of his teeth for moisture. He was convinced that his legs and feet were on fire, and he twitched them experimentally, rubbing them together as if to extinguish the blaze. "Put it out, put it out," he mumbled from time to time.
A new pain caught him, familiar and demanding. He felt a cramp in his lower belly, and the sweat stirred on his forehead, mounted into individual droplets. He fought against it with a childish fear of punishment and then relapsed into the heat and pleasure of voiding, the good strain on his bowels. For a moment he was lying again with his back upon the broken fence outside his father's house, the southern sun imparting a lazy sensuality in his loins. "Hey, nigger, what's that mule's name?" he mumbled, and then giggled weakly, content and drained. For a moment his hand clutched the litter, and he watched the colored girl walking by, twisted his head. The woman beside him was caressing his stomach. "Woodrow, do ya always spit before ya piss?"
"Jus' for good luck," he mumbled aloud, trying now on the litter to empty his bladder. But another pain, sharp and grinding, tore through his loins. He remembered, or at least his groin muscles recalled the difficulty, knotting in resistance. It shattered the images, left him aware and troubled and perplexed, conscious for the first time of the way he had soiled himself. He had a picture of his loins putrefacted and a deep misery passed through him. Why in the hell did it have to happen to me? What's it got to do with what Ah been doin? And he lifted up his head and mumbled again, "Brown, you think that wound's gonna git all the pus outa me?"
But no one answered, and he fell back again, brooding over his illness. A chain of unpleasant memories bothered him, and he became conscious again of the discomforts of the stretcher, the effort it cost him to remain lying on his back for so many hours. He made a feeble attempt to turn over, but it was too painful. He felt as if somebody were leaning against his stomach.
"Git off, men," he shouted.
And then he remembered the weight. On the night so many weeks before when the Japanese had tried to cross the river he had felt that same pressure in his chest and stomach as he had waited behind the machine gun.
"We-you-coming-to-get." They had shouted that at Croft and him, and he shuddered now, bringing his hands up before his face. "We got to stop 'em, men, they're comin' now," he moaned, pitching on the litter. "Banzaaiiiigh, aaiiiiiiiigh!" he shouted, the sounds gurgling in his throat. "Come on, recon, up, git up here!"
The litter-bearers halted and set him down. "What's he yellin' about?" Brown asked.
"I cain't see 'em, I jus' cain't see 'em. Where the hell's the flares?" Wilson bawled. He was grasping a machine-gun handle in his left palm, his forefinger extended to the trigger. "Who the hell's at the other gun? I cain't remember."
Ridges shook his head. "He's talkin' 'bout that Jap attack on the river."
Something of Wilson's panic transferred to the other men. Goldstein and Ridges, who had been on the river, stared at Wilson uneasily. The vast barren stretches of the hills about them seemed a little foreboding now.
"I hope we don't run into any Japanese," Goldstein said.
"They ain't a chance," Brown told him. He mopped the sweat out of his eyes, stared weakly into the distance. "Nobody around," he panted, but a feeling of weakness, of desperation welled in him. If they were to fall into an ambush now. . . He felt like crying again. There were too many things asked of him, and he was so enfeebled. A vortex of nausea resolved itself in his stomach, and he retched emptily, obtaining a mild relief from the coldness of his sweat. He couldn't let go. Brown heard himself saying, "We gotta move on, men."