The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [328]
But nothing happened. He kept telling himself to jump at Croft and his legs wouldn't function.
Croft turned back to him. "Awright, Red, go get your pack."
"Fug you."
"Ah'm gonna shoot ya in about three-four seconds." He stood six feet away, his rifle raised to his hip. Slowly the muzzle pointed toward Red. He found himself watching the expression on Croft's face.
Suddenly he knew exactly what had happened to Hearn, and the knowledge left him weak. Croft was going to shoot. He knew it. Red stood stiff looking at Croft's eyes. "Just shoot a man down like that, huh?"
"Yeah."
It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him. For an instant he had a picture again of lying on his stomach waiting for the Japanese bayonet to strike into his back. He could feel the blood thumping in his head. As he waited, his will drained away slowly.
"How 'bout it, Red?"
The muzzle made a tiny circular motion as if Croft were selecting a more exact aim. Red watched his finger on the trigger. When it began to tighten he tensed suddenly. "Okay, Croft, you win." His voice croaked out weakly. He was making every effort to keep himself from trembling.
About him he could see the platoon relaxing. He felt as if his blood had slowed down, halted, and now had begun to flow again, outlining every nerve in his body. With his head down he strode over to his pack, rammed in the blanket, buckled the straps, and stood up.
He was licked. That was all there was to it. At the base of his shame was an added guilt. He was glad it was over, glad the long contest with Croft was finished, and he could obey orders with submission, without feeling that he must resist. This was the extra humiliation, the crushing one. Could that be all, was that the end of all he had done in his life? Did it always come to laying down a load?
He fell into line and trudged along in the middle of the platoon. He looked at nobody, and no one looked at him. All of them felt a wretched embarrassment. Each man was trying to forget the way he had been tempted to shoot Croft and had failed.
As they walked, Polack cursed continually in a low sullen voice, filled with self-loathing. Dumb yellow bastard. He was swearing at himself, frightened, a little shocked. The moment had been there, and he had let it go, had had his rifle in his hands, and had done nothing with it. Yellow. . . yellow!
And Croft at this point was confident again. This morning they would cross the mountain peak. Everything and everybody had tried to hold him back but there could be nothing left now, no obstacle at all.
The platoon climbed the slope, crossed another ridge, and descended over a stretch of scattered rocks into one more tiny valley. Croft led them through a small rock gorge onto another slope and for an hour they toiled upward from rock to rock, crawling sometimes for hundreds of yards on their hands and knees in a laborious endless progression which skirted the edge of a deep ravine. By midmorning the sun was very hot, and the men were exhausted once more. Croft led them much more slowly, halting every few minutes.
They topped a crest-line and jogged feebly down a gentle slope. Before them was a huge amphitheater, bounded in a rough semicircle by high sheer bluffs covered with vegetation. The cliffs of jungle rose almost vertically for five hundred feet, at least the height of a forty-story skyscraper, and above them was the crest of the mountain. Croft had noticed this amphitheater; from miles away it looked like a dark-green collar encircling the neck of the mountain.
There was no way to avoid it; at either side of the amphitheater the mountain dropped for a thousand feet. They had to go forward and climb the jungle before them. Croft rested the platoon at the base, but there was no shade and the rest had little value. After five minutes they set out.
The wall of foliage was not so impossible as it had appeared from a distance. A crude stairway of rocks bedded in the foliage and zigzagged upward like a ramp. There were bamboo groves and bushes and plants, vines, and a few trees whose roots grew horizontally into the mountain and whose trunks bent upward in an L toward the sky. There was mud, of course, from all the rains that had trickled down the rocks, and leaves and plants and thorns restricted their passage.