Whistle (12 page)

The point was, Luxor, Tennessee, was also the headquarters of the Second Army Command. And Second Army Command would shortly be in need of a new sgt/maj for its Personnel G-1 office. Old Frank Maynard there was about on his last legs and they were going to retire him. Hoggenbeck was still in touch with a couple of his old commanding officers who were down there now, and had already spoken to them about Winch. The point was, when Winch came out of hospital at Luxor, if he went there, he would automatically go right into Second Army Command in any case. And from there it would be just a simple step. They could discover him. “If you’re interested, Mart,” old T.D. grinned, “I’ll write them right away today. How about it?”

The point was, it was the kind of long-term, not very killing kind of a job—a sinecure, old T.D. said—that Winch or a man like him should have, and that Winch deserved. And it wouldn’t hurt old Frank Maynard, because old Frank was going out anyway.

Winch looked up. It was one of those refined, delicate, shrewdly juggled pieces of old-Army-type manipulation, as finely balanced and calculated as any Winch had ever put together. As an old, professional manipulator himself, Winch had to admire it.

Winch had been nodding and hardly listening, but his ears and attention straightened up when he heard Luxor, Tennessee, mentioned. Luxor, he seemed to remember, was one of the places where a good-sized number of men from his old company happened to be congregated. He dimly recalled someone mentioning it. Then he pulled himself up short. It was he who had warned Johnny Stranger that all that of the company was finished and over. Still, it was a good deal old T.D. was proposing to him. It was exactly the kind of deal that, a few years back, before Guadalcanal, he used to dream of and imagine for himself. But he had imagined himself as old.

“Tell them I’d be very pleased to have it,” he said.

“By God, I’ll do just that,” old T.D. said, and cracked his palms together. “You’ll make junior warrant officer out of it within a year. That’s great, boy, that’s great.”

Winch realized suddenly that, although it rankled, he was going to have to thank old T.D. Hoggenbeck for it.

“I’ll tell you something, Mart,” T.D. said. “I’m sitting pretty right now, and I know it. But I won’t be for very long and I know that too, once this war gets over and we go back to anti-Army and the reaction sets in. But I aint going to stay in a full thirty years. Or twenty, if it’s that. When it’s over, I’m getting out. You’ll be smart to do the same. I know what I am, and I know what I’m worth. And I know I’m valuable, for right now, anyway. And if there’s anything I can do for any of my old buddies who’ve been out there and come back through here, I’m sure’n hell gonna do her. You’re the first one to come back that I know of. If there’s anything I can do more for you, don’t you hesitate to pop up here and let me know it.”

He rubbed his hands together. “Say, I’ll tell you something else. Did you know you’re getting the Distinguished Service Medal?”

Winch looked at him unbelievingly. “Who the hell did that?”

“Not me, not me. Don’t look at me,” T.D. said, enjoying his surprise. “There’s some things I can’t do. No. But it’s all on your records. Recommended by your Division commander. With personal recommendations from your battalion commander and your company commander. And, of all people, your old Division surgeon.”

Before Winch left, T.D. hauled out two flat pint bottles of the Seagram’s and thrust them on him. “Stick ’em down inside your pajama belt, and hold them up with your bathrobe pockets. Go on, take ’em. No, don’t thank me, Christ’s sake. You fellows, you’ve been out there. That’s all I need to know.” At the door, he offered one last word of advice. “When you’re set up down there, buy real estate. Buy a bar. You can’t go wrong with a bar.”

A little less than three hours later, not quite five hours after the ship had put her nose against the Embarcadero dock, while the others off her were finishing their warmed-over supper off compartmented tin plates, Winch was standing on the corner of Geary and Market at Lotta’s Fountain with his hands in the pockets of an officer’s tropical worsted with shoulder straps for thirty-six dollars, from a tailor joint on Market Street. He was already half drunk. It felt wonderful.

T
HE
M
ARK
H
OPKINS,
of course, was the place to go. It was on the top of Nob Hill, and its “Top O’ The Mark” was famous all over the South Pacific as the place to head for, if you ever got back home. Winch hailed a cab and headed there.

If you ever got back home. The very phrase, and all its insinuations, made the pit of Winch’s stomach fall. Well, Winch was back home. Wasn’t he? Fuck the rest of them. Winch sat back and looked out. In his mind was his constant admonition not to drink. Or smoke. He listened to both, constantly. Each time he took a drink or lit a cigarette he listened to them, he thought; and laughed out loud in the cab.

It was pretty hard not to drink around this place. Outside all the ritzy hotels they passed on their way up Nob Hill, parties of girls and sailors or girls and soldiers roared and hooted, or cackled out nighttime laughter, and went off up the streets playing kids’ games. Everybody seemed so rich, with money to spare, and time to spend it. It was unbelievable. Winch thought suddenly of his waterless, gasping, sweating platoons. And his stomach sank down through him to somewhere in the vicinity of the soft, springy cab seat. Unbelievable. Again he had the disturbing feeling that all this had nothing to do with all that, out there. They were not connected. His momentary fine mood was gone.

The “Top O’ The Mark” was a bust. Flyboys, both Naval and Air Force, dominated it. With their medals and decorations and Midway campaign ribbons. Fruit salad. And their crushed-wing officer’s garrison caps. They hopped from table to table, and shouted with gay laughter, and danced jitterbugging dances, and bought bottles and bottles of champagne. And had apparently already usurped all the luxurious-looking women in the place. Winch wore no ribbons or insignia. In his pocket he had two brand-new 1st/sgt’s chevrons, but at the last minute had not had them sewn on. Like an aging private, in his tailored officer’s uniform he had no right to wear, he stood at a bar, had two drinks, and left and rode down to the street and went outside. He had been accosted twice, by two different but equally exquisite call girls wanting a hundred bucks a throw, and had talked for a minute to a cutely giggling upper-class college belle, who was whisked away to dance by an Air Force captain she called by the name Jim.

These were the only two types the “Top O’ The Mark” had available. And Winch did not feel like buying the one, or spending the week of evenings it would cost to make out with the other. Apparently most of these people already knew each other.

Outside on the street Winch stopped a moment, then stepped back quickly to let a laughing party of girls and sailors go loping past. They went on into “The Mark.” Winch turned down California Street, heading down the hill toward the honky-tonk and low bar area of North Beach. Momentarily he regretted not having taken on one of the hundred-dollar hookers. He had the money. And they were delicious. But it had happened to him too suddenly. For eleven months he had so stringently put women completely out of his mind that he was experiencing difficulty letting them back in again. It was all too fast.

With it so nearby, he decided to walk on down through Chinatown on Grant Avenue. It was a walk of about three-quarters of a mile, and it was all downhill, but by the time he got to the bottom he felt tired and worn-out.

Into North Beach, the number of bars multiplied swiftly. Servicemen were everywhere. Women were nearly everywhere. Jukebox music drifted out of the bars. It was like the last last-ditch, desperate dream of his badgered, beleaguered platoons, here, and his heart sank again. Winch figured he would have no difficulty finding himself some kind of lady friend before too long.

Winch had promised himself he would not have another drink until he got to Washington Square. But before he did, with the Square in sight up ahead, he broke the promise and stepped inside a bar. The single drink refreshed him, and put some energy back into him. It also raised his spirits. He was watching himself carefully, since those first three fast drinks in old T.D. Hoggenbeck’s office. He was keeping the level of drinking up only to just that exact point where everything was painless and life was tolerable. But he did not want it to drop below that.

Back outside the music from the bar jukes drifted along the street. The Andrews Sisters rendition of “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” competed for attention momentarily with “I’m Gonna Buy a Paper Doll,” sung by the Inkspots. Farther along, the Andrews Sisters faded, and Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls” came up strong from somewhere. Under it Winch heard a song he had never heard before, called “Paper Moon,” sung also by the Inkspots, or perhaps the Mills Brothers. Winch drifted along with it, toward the Square.

He found her in the third bar. She was seated at a table with a girlfriend, who was with a drunken young Marine. She was obviously on the lookout for somebody, and sent Winch over an open smile of invitation where he stood at the crowded bar nursing a drink.

The two girls were around twenty-eight. Or thirty? Too old for a drunken nineteen-year-old Marine, who could not seem to get enough liquor down him. If he didn’t slow it up, he was not going to be of any use to any lady. But that was her girlfriend’s problem, not Arlette’s, and Arlette made that quite plain. She also made it plain to Winch that everything was going to go by the proper rules of first meeting and seduction, and that she was not just some floozy.

The two women were dressed almost identically, which was to say mannishly, in slacks, and shirts open at the neck, with big kerchiefs tied around their heads, which advertised that they were workers. Like hundreds of others Winch had seen since crossing Pacific Avenue. It was almost a uniform. Winch had even read about it, in old, fifth-hand, mud-stained copies of Pacific
Yank.

She was a welder. In some machine manufacturing plant over in Oakland, that was classified as Defense Industry. So was her chum. She was no raving, beautiful lovely, like the two exquisite call girls at the “Top O’ The Mark,” but Winch did not think he could have tolerated a real lovely at this point, this first time, and she was attractive enough. She was also married. There was no ring on her finger, but there was the white mark where there had been one until very recently.

Winch’s stomach sank again. A kind of suspicious fear seized him. What if she was the wife of one of his own bemired, panting, mud-marked draftees? He thought he had some from northern California. Seeing him looking, she rummaged in her purse and giving him a sad, grim little smile, slipped the ring back on.

She wanted to dance. Winch moved her stiffly around in the press on the postage-stamp-sized dance floor. Winch was normally a good ballroom dancer, but there was nowhere to move on the crowded floor, and anyway Arlette was clearly not one. It did not matter. He welcomed the chance to dance; it gave him time to get his nerve back. What did he care if her husband was some poor draftee son of a bitch? Back at the table he bought her more drinks and listened to her talk, mostly about her work. Arlette loved welding.

At one point her friend’s drunken young Marine, who wore a Rifle Sharpshooter’s medal, glanced up from his booze and studied Winch’s Army uniform and lack of ribbons or insignia with contempt and belligerence. Winch bent on him his hard, official, on-duty 1st/sgt’s stare, which seemed to touch some well-trained, still-unnumbed nerve in the boy. Because he suddenly straightened up in his chair and felt for his necktie with panic-wide eyes, before putting his face back in his glass.

At the hotel, which was right around the corner and apparently had some deal going with the bartender of the bar, after they had visited a package store for liquor and were getting undressed, Winch asked her about the husband. He felt he had to, though he already had his shirt off. The guy was out there, all right. He was not in the Solomons, though, Winch was relieved to learn. He was in New Guinea. But Jesus, New Guinea. Buna! Gona! Morobe! Hell, they were in Salamaua right now. But the guy was not in the 32nd or 41st Divisions. He was in the Signal Corps. Not the infantry. Winch felt a little better. But still it made him angry at her. “Doesn’t it make you feel a little bit like a shit?” he said. Arlette’s eyes flared. “No, it doesn’t make me feel like a shit! Why should it? We made an agreement before he left. What do you care?”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, good for you. Then shut up. Why should I feel like a shit? He’s out there getting all he can get. Everything he can get his hands on, while he’s out there.”

“There’s nothing to get,” Winch said. “Except a bunch of scrofulous natives nobody wants.”

“He was in Australia,” Arlette said.

“Well, Australia,” Winch had to admit. “Their men are all in North Africa. I hear Australia’s great. But I was never there.”

“Are you trying to talk yourself out of a lay?” Arlette demanded. “For some reason?”

“No,” Winch said. But he had to think about that a minute.

“Because if you are, you’re doing a pretty damn good job of it. You’re from somewhere out there yourself, too, aren’t you?” Winch nodded. “I knew you were, damn it. I knew it. I knew it the minute I saw you in that bar, without any ribbons or insignia or rank markings on your uniform. But that expensive, tailor-made uniform, it fooled me. Listen, nothing ever stopped him any before, when he was here at home, before the war,” Arlette said. “Before the Army. I’ll tell you something else.”

It was as though Winch had opened some floodgate. Nude to her panties, she began to scold at him, exactly like a legal wife, her bare breasts jiggling violently with her vehemence. Going right on ahead and stripping off the panties, and exposing a gorgeously luxurious bush, she went right on with her tirade, about all the unfair practices women had to suffer.

Winch had heard most of them before. Most were fair enough complaints. Hers had mostly to do with work, and work habits. All her life she had never been allowed to work, to do anything, all her life she had had to sit at home, like some hothouse flower, until this damned war of theirs came along, and they all went off to play soldier. Well, they should never have let her get the taste for it. Because she loved working. They were going to have a damned hard time taking it away from her again, after their damned war was over. Winch could easily have sympathized with her. But he was angry with her, for what she was doing to her husband. And he didn’t see what any of it had to do with anything. He stopped listening, and concentrated on looking at her deliciously jouncing breasts and her gorgeously hairy, gorgeously gropable crotch as she flounced back and forth in front of him.