Whistle (21 page)

Winch had heard about Prell from old T.D. Hoggenbeck. After the hospital had let him out of bed, and he was finally back on his feet again and able to move around a little, he had had dinner with old T.D. and Lily. Lily was T.D.’s rawboned, long-jawed, acquisitive battle-ax of a Missus. They invited him to their three-story brick house outside the Presidio.

Winch was on the wagon so he figured he might as well go. He was unable to drink at all. It was one of the worst evenings he had ever spent. The worst nights he had spent on Guadalcanal were not as bad. All T.D. and old Lily could talk about were their recent acquisitions of property. Neither of them was what you could call a light drinker. When they had their string of whiskeys before dinner, the anguish and rage Winch suffered watching them were the worst he could remember. But he had learned about Prell from T.D.

“You remember old Jack Alexander?” T.D. said after they had put down their three huge strip-sirloins—Winch’s cooked without salt. “From Wahoo? Old Alexander the Great?”

Winch remembered him. Alexander had been heavyweight champion of the Hawaiian Department during Winch’s first hitch out there. “Alexander the Great” and “The Emperor,” they had called him. He had held the title five straight years.

T.D. nodded. “Well, I just had a letter from old Jack. He holds down my same job in Luxor at Kilrainey General. He writes me they’re going to take a leg off of one of your boys down there. Only this kid won’t give his permission, and is throwing the whole place into a tizzy.”

“Prell?”

“That’s his name.”

Winch listened, while T.D. unfolded the entire tale. It certainly sounded like Prell.

“Who’s right?” he said when T.D. finished.

“Hard to say. The kid’s pretty sick, I gather. None of the other doctors want to go up against the opinion of this civilian big shot, Col Baker.” T.D. grinned. “It’s causing old Col Stevens a lot of worry. He’s the chief of administration down there. You remember him?”

Winch shook his head.

“Sure you do.” T.D. unwound his long shanks and reached for the whiskey bottle. “He was at Riley with you. Had a company. Well, the kid’s refusal is putting all the responsibility in his lap. And he’s up for brigadier on the next promotions list. You must remember him?”

Winch shook his head again. Col Stevens was the least of his concerns. But Prell was not. Like a poker player covering a filled flush, he said, “T.D., by the way. I’ve been meaning to ask you. What’re the chances of getting my orders cut to go on down there to Luxor? If I’m going to see about that job in 2nd Army, I had better be getting down there.”

“Why, sure. Any time you say. Just as long as the doctors give you the medical clearance.” T.D. looked as though he did not expect this could happen soon. An almost boyish concern flashed across his leathery hard-wrinkled face. “But you want to take care of yourself, you know. You’re not in any perfect shape. You gave us quite a scare.”

Winch shook his head. “I’m okay. As long as I don’t do any boozing.”

“Yeah. That must be hard.”

“No,” Winch said. “Not at all.”

“I sure wouldn’t like it,” T.D. said, and reached for the bottle.

Winch watched him drink, without expression. Then watched him pour for Lily, and watched them both drink.

As soon as he could, he got out of there.

The next day he started working on the doctors who were handling his case. In actual fact, he found it nice to have some goal in life again. But that it should be Bobby Prell outraged him.

“You must have a lot of friends in high places,” the chief heart man smiled, as he put away his stethoscope. “Normally we would discharge a man with what you’ve got.”

“They need my experience,” Winch said.

“I see no reason why you can’t go,” the doctor said. “As long as you remember all you’re supposed to do. The diet. No heavy exercise. But what’s your hurry? One hospital is the same as another.”

“I’ve got to see about a job, that’s supposed to be waiting for me down there,” Winch said.

“Well, I wouldn’t hold you back. You know that we’re not sure as to just what the actual chemical causes are. But we’re pretty sure it’s tied in with all the alcohol you’ve put in you. You’re just going to have to get used to the idea that you can never take one drink again the rest of your life.”

“I’m used to it,” Winch said.

But he wasn’t. When he thought about it, it was enough to have him almost biting the walls. It was astonishing, when you got down in and noticed it, how much almost everything in America had to do with drinking. Every dinner. Every meal. Almost every social occasion. If you were chasing some girl. And at night, when everybody was philosophizing about life and the war and death, or dancing and trying to make out with some broad, if you did not drink you were outside everything. And bored to death by all of it.

Winch had gone back into town for one evening, after he had been out of bed a week, but the whole place was totally impossible if you did not drink.

“Will you get a report up to W/O Hoggenbeck?” Winch asked. Another thing the attack had done was to entirely take away his sex drive. Or else, it was the medication they had been giving him.

“First thing tomorrow,” the heart doctor said.

“Could you do it today?”

The doc nodded. “Sure, I guess.”

After two hours of it in town Winch had come back to the hospital and had not left it since.

But the rest of it had not been really so bad. If you really wanted to die, it was probably as good a way as any, congestive heart failure. Winch wasn’t sure if he wanted to. Obviously, he did not want to or he wouldn’t be off drinking. But it was comforting to know about. If he ever did want to die, all he had to do was start drinking again.

They had slapped him in a bed in the heart ward and kept him there. And put him on a high dosage of diuretics and digitalis and kept an exact measurement of how much fluid he took in and how much he pissed out. Apparently, total bed rest was an excellent diuretic by itself. After twenty-four hours he was pissing out three times what he took in. And after the first night he was able to breathe easily again. They had kept him in the bed for five days.

Acute edema was what they called it. The retention of fluids. When the edema got into the lungs themselves was when it went into the congestive heart failure phase, and you began to cough up the foamy stuff. When it went into your lungs, your lungs began to fill up. This caused a further strain on the heart, which caused more edema. A vicious circle. Finally, you slowly drowned.

Once, at one point during that first night, he had nearly passed out. Everything had sort of faded away, and while he never actually lost consciousness, he seemed not to be inside himself any more. All the enormous fatigue, the exhaustion from coughing, the awful discomfort: a feeling of not being able to get enough air into his chest, no longer seemed to be coming from within himself. There never had been any actual physical pain. And now all the discomforts seemed to be somewhere else. All he wanted to do was to go sound asleep; and stay here, where all the discomforts weren’t. The doctors and medics only irritated him. He could remember thinking that maybe this was the beginning of death. From the start he had never been afraid, all through the thing. From the beginning. And he wasn’t afraid then. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t bad at all. It was pretty damn good. At the same time, it was not as if he were
actually
outside himself, and could “see” himself from some other place. In other words, he could in fact “see” nothing. And yet there was this persistent sense of another him.

Later he wasn’t afraid either. It wasn’t at all a bad way to go: To shuffle off. To Buffalo. He remembered at one point he had wanted to tell them the epitaph he had chosen for himself. It was to be:
Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
They were to carve it in large letters on the stone, and forget about his name. Leave the name off.

Later, one of the docs said to him, “I thought we were losing you there for a minute.” Winch only grinned at him.

But apparently his heart was not nearly as enlarged as the excited young intern had thought, that night he reported in. He was salvageable, as one of the docs put it. But he had come out of it with a weakened heart. When after the five days they got him back on his feet, he was ordered to start moving around. They were very insistent on that.

On his feet, he was shaky on his pins. For a formerly strong man it was an embarrassing experience. He felt too thin, too fragile. But there was some bitterness in him that appreciated, even relished, what had happened to him.

In the bed, it had been astonishing to watch the excess flesh drain off his body. Apparently, or so they said, fat was held in suspension in the fluid in the cells. And when you pissed off water, you were also pissing off fat. He had been carrying the beginnings of a paunch for a couple of years. This disappeared and he had a flat belly again. He developed handsome new hollows under his cheekbones. His feet and ankles had been puffy and thick. Almost as he watched, this disappeared and he could see the bones in his feet and hands again.

At least, they were willing to let him move on to Luxor. As long as he obeyed all his dietary rules and did no heavy exercise, and followed the injunction not to drink. Or smoke. Fine.

The next day he went up to see Hoggenbeck to make him push the papers through. Old T.D. was getting him on an Air Transport Command flight for Luxor. He was more than ready to go. Prell or no Prell.

The Army car from the Luxor Army Air Base deposited him in front of the big front doors of the hospital. There were no welcoming committees, no groups of patients looking to see if they could spot somebody they knew. Winch arrived alone. For a little he stood on the expanse of concrete in the summer sun and looked up at the entrance. He was thinking about that stupid dumb fuck, Prell. Then he picked up the green airman’s B-4 bag and carried it up the six low concrete steps to the big doors and inside.

He could feel it immediately in his faster breathing, and in his heart action. It was always a surprise and a shock, to have it happen to him like this. In one way it gave Winch sort of a kick. It was a little like walking around with a loaded time bomb inside your chest. One that might blow at any moment. At least, it made everything—life . . . every moment . . . every breath—an exciting event. It was a little like being back in combat.

When the orderly who picked him up at the desk read the tag on his shirt front, he looked alarmed and scolded him seriously for carrying the bag. Winch simply grinned at him. “You guys,” the orderly said glumly. “You’re all of you crazy.”

The first thing Winch did in his new ward was telephone Jack Alexander, the old ex-pug, and arrange to meet him. Alexander had been expecting him.

But before he could keep his date with Alexander, he was visited by a deputation for the nine-man contingent from his old company, in the persons of Strange and Landers.

Somehow, by the never-quiet hospital grapevine, the word had already gotten around to them that he was here. The others, Strange said, were waiting in the snack bar to meet him. Strange had told them to wait there, instead of all coming to the ward.

Strange coughed. Both men had sort of stopped short and stared, when they first came in and saw Winch. Winch was aware how thin and frail he looked. Now the two of them eyed each other guiltily. Winch decided to beat them to the punch and said in a frigid voice, “Well, what the hell are you staring at?”

“You’ve lost a little weight,” Strange said.

“So? I’m on a diet.”

“Yeah,” Strange said. “Well, good. Have you been sick, too?”

“I’ve been a little sick. But I’m over it now,” Winch said. “Now, what’s all this about fucking Prell?”

They both started in to talk at once. Then Landers shut up, and Strange went on alone. But Winch held up a hand and stopped him. He already knew all the background, he told them. The last he’d heard, this Col Baker had requested authority to take off the leg. Col Stevens had not yet given the okay. The other doctors all seemed to agree with Baker.

“That’s correct,” Strange said. It felt good to have the old First Sarn’t holding the reins again. Strange didn’t want the job. “But it’s more a question of degree. Of approach. Than of absolute agreement. There’s this other doctor, name of Curran. Prell seems to feel Curran’s not as hot to amputate it right away, and would give it more time. But Baker outranks Curran. If Curran disagrees, he’s not saying so.”

“Then we probably can’t count on him for much,” Winch said. “The main question is, are the doctors right? Is Baker right?”

“Who knows? How can we judge that? All we know is Prell wants to keep the leg. And we’re trying to help him.” Strange shrugged, happy to pass along the buck of decision-making. “Landers here talked to this Curran. Tell him about it, Landers.”

Slowly Landers began to tell about his interview with Curran, and its inconclusive result. He wanted to get it exactly right for Winch. Landers was finding he was much less in awe of Winch than before. Whether it was Winch’s new physical fragility, or the new wild something that kept happening to himself lately, he did not know. But he had always had this desire to be as absolutely honest with Winch as possible. Something in Winch demanded it. That hadn’t changed. When he finished, Winch went on staring at him, piercingly.

“What do you think, yourself?” Winch said. “What’s your opinion of it?”

“I’m inclined to think that Prell is probably right,” Landers said. “I think Col Curran would probably wait, if Prell was his patient. But Prell isn’t. And if he isn’t, Curran isn’t going to intervene.”

“And that brings it back to Col Stevens.”

“I guess so,” Strange said.

“And what influence do you think you’ve got with Col Stevens?” Winch leered. “If any.”

Strange shrugged. “None.” Then, looking a little shamefaced, he told him about the petition. They had gotten it together, and all signed it, and Strange was keeping it in the drawer of his bedside table, about the only place patients had to keep anything personal.