Whistle (26 page)

Landers remembered standing up and looking across the square through the drizzle at the lights of the restaurant, in the middle of a great stillness, and that was the last he remembered. When he woke up, he had a terrible hangover, and the dazzling sun was pouring into his eyes through the barred window, and he was in a cell in the city jail with the cell door unlocked and open.

His cane was lying on the cot beside him, and he got it and walked outside and yelled, “Hey, where is everybody?”

“Down here, Marion,” the chief of police’s voice called from the anteroom. “You finally wake up? Come on out.”

The chief, a big Swede named Nielson, was sitting behind his desk with an embarrassed look on his face.

“What the hell happened?” Landers said.

Several loafers were standing around grinning.

“Well, you know old Jeremy,” the chief said with an embarrassed smile. “Charlie Evans, the night cop, took you home and the old man said to let you sleep it off in the jail.”

“Well, did I do something terrible?” Landers asked.

“No, no. You went into the all-night restaurant and ordered some bacon and eggs and passed out cold. They couldn’t wake you, so they called Charlie Evans. When Charlie couldn’t wake you, he took you home. That’s all. But old Jeremy told him to bring you down to the jail.”

“My father did that?”

“Well, you got a good night’s sleep out of it,” the chief smiled. “You don’t look so bad.”

Landers looked down at himself. “I’m pretty messy. Well, what do I owe you, Frank?”

“Nothing. There’s no fine or anything.” He hesitated. “We would have left you at home. But you know old Jeremy. He wouldn’t accept you. You’re not going to hold it against him, are you?”

“Against my father?” Landers said. “Call me a cab, will you, Frank?”

“I know the Landers,” the chief said, looking perplexed. “There’s a cab right outside, Marion.”

Landers shook hands all around. “Thank you for a pleasant stay.” In the cab the driver kept grinning back into the rearview mirror so broadly that it was obvious he must already know the story. Landers only winked at him.

Back at home he showered and shaved and put on his other uniform. Then, with his mother pleading and moaning behind him, and trying to hold him back, he telephoned his father at his office.

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” Landers shouted into the instrument, “I just want you to know—”

“Don’t you hang up on me, you son of a bitch!” he raged at the phone. Then he slammed it down and turned on his mother. “All right then, you tell him. You tell him I said to forget he ever had a son named Marion. Jeremy Landers has no son named Marion. You tell him that. And I’ll forget I ever had him for a father. You understand? You got that?”

“Marion,” his mother wailed. “Marion. Please, Marion, please.”

“Go to hell,” Landers shouted and grabbed his canvas satchel.

At the station he had to wait an hour and a half for the next train. He waited on the green bench out in front, alone. Landers could hardly wait to get back to Prell and Winch and Strange and the others. He wondered how Prell’s legs were doing. Also, they were going to have to do something about Strange’s hand some time soon.

On the train the ride back did not seem nearly so difficult. Maybe the six days using it had helped the leg. Landers was even able to negotiate the steel plates between the cars and go to the club car for some drinks. As might be expected, it was full of drunken servicemen. He sat on the couch with his drink in his hand, thought about his family briefly, his ex-family, and could hardly wait to get back to Luxor.

When he reported back in to his ward, four days earlier than necessary, he found that Mart Winch had been taking out the girl Carol Firebaugh every single night since he had left.

I
T WAS HARD
to make any real friends in a hospital ward. As their medical status changed, men moved from one ward to another. There was a constant shuffling process going on that kept moving men away from each other. Men who made friends with the men in the beds beside them would look up and find them gone, replaced by newer strangers.

John Strange found this had a tendency to throw men back for friendship onto other members of their old outfits, if they were lucky enough to have any around. If they didn’t, they just sat around and brooded and withdrew. Just when they should be starting to forget their old emotional attachments and build new ones.

Strange had watched the beginning of Winch’s romance with Carol Firebaugh at first with amusement, then with irritation, and finally with downright envy.

Like everyone else who went in and out of the big basketball-court lounge of the recreation building, Strange had lusted after the sweet youthfulness and shy grace of the Red Cross girl who handed out the Ping-Pong balls and paddles, and had wanted to fuck her. But being a properly married man just returned to his wife from overseas Strange put it out of his mind. Still she was, as some forthright, bathrobe-clad Government Issue had said, eminently fuckable.

Some female thing about her every movement said so, and her shy self-awareness of her sex in front of so many male eyes underlined it. Her one kooky eye
that
kept looking off in a wrong direction half the time made her even sexier. For some odd screwball reason.

Strange had paid attention when she seemed interested in Landers, and thought that all right and in keeping with the fact that they were both college people. But when in Landers’ absence she attached herself to Mart Winch twenty years her senior, Strange’s mind balked. When he saw them together in town up at the Plantation Roof on the top of the Peabody Hotel, sitting together right in front of everybody, Strange was suddenly intensely jealous. If he had known she went for older fellows, he would gladly have offered himself. Only, he hadn’t. Leave it to shrewd old Mart Winch to wheel in there, and sop up the gravy.

Up to now, Strange had studiously avoided other women in Luxor. He felt he owed that to Linda. But it was not nearly so easy to do as it sounded. It required more effort not to pick up women in town in Luxor than it did to meet them and take them out and screw them. The city was full of unattached women. Riveters. Welders. Lathe operators. All sorts of minor assembly-line workers. And all of them hellbent on picking up some in-transit serviceman for a one-night stand or one-week fling. Since their work shifts ran right on around the clock, it was just as easy to run into one at eight o’clock in the morning as in the evening. A lot of them didn’t work at all, had quit it, or had never done it, and just went on and on, from one party to another, from one hotel suite to another hotel suite. It was hard work not to pick them up, or be picked up by them.

Just the same, Strange had resisted. He had been home—home?—to Cincinnati one further time after his second trip while Bobby Prell was mending. Making a total of three visits in all. He had not found anything there had much changed. Linda Sue was just as cold and indifferent to his bedroom advances as she had been the first time. Though she never turned him down when he asked. But Strange found it harder and harder to ask with any real excitement. He found it easier to just roll over and go to sleep. Or go downstairs to that never-vacant kitchen and drink more beer.

Maybe at the age of twenty-eight he was outgrowing sex excitement. The way his parents had done. He only knew that for the marriage and their dream of a restaurant to be maintained required fidelity. On both sides, his as well as hers.

So when his jealousy and envy of Winch with Carol Firebaugh came up in him so strong, it came as a shock. Obviously, he badly wanted to fuck her himself. And once he had seen the desire in him for Carol, he began to see it in him for others, in other places.

That he did not do anything about it was mostly due to his feelings about Linda and the restaurant and their savings. But it was also due to his concern and preoccupation with the final medical status of his hand wound. All through the business of Prell’s legs Strange had waited for some word from Col Curran about his own disposition and first operation. But every day at morning rounds the surgeon would only look at the hand, move it a little, and ask how Strange was doing.

Strange had tried to stay with Curran’s instructions about forcing himself to use the hand, even when it hurt and he did not want to. Finally he was obliged to tell Curran it hurt almost too much. Curran nodded, silently pursing up his mouth as if about to whistle, with that polite interested look on his face, and told him to stop using it.

Then about a week after the big awards ceremonies, at which Strange standing alongside Prell and Winch had received his absurdly unjustified Purple Heart, Curran had stopped by his bed at morning rounds and without even looking at the hand had told him he wanted to see him in his office beside the three big surgeries at twelve o’clock that same day.

Strange had been planning on spending the day in town after morning rounds. But there was no begging off from a summons like this one.

Curran was as immaculate as usual, with his starched doctor’s smock and scrubbed hands, behind his little desk in the cubbyhole office. But his face looked tired and wan and in the corner an open GI laundry bin overflowed with what looked like bloody surgeon’s aprons.

“I’m sorry about those,” Curran said with his bright almost lip-less smile. “They were supposed to pick them up. But of course they haven’t done it.”

“Blood doesn’t bother me,” Strange said. “I’ve seen a lot of it, Doc.”

“I expect you have.” Curran rubbed his well-kept, manicured hands over his face for a moment.

“You’ve had a pretty heavy work schedule today, hunh?” Strange said.

“Yes,” Curran said. “Now. About your hand.”

“Yes, sir.” In a ridiculous way, Strange felt responsible for not upsetting Curran. He didn’t want to do anything that might tire or distress the surgeon. He listened while Curran went over it all. Every now and then as he talked Curran’s hands moved the papers about on his desk aimlessly.

“I’ve probably given you more loose time than was good for your hand. This hand of yours is a ticklish piece of business. But I couldn’t help it,” he said, looking up. “We’ve had a heavy schedule of operations lately, and this hand of yours is a pretty delicate thing to operate. There are an awful lot of ligaments in there that can’t be nicked or cut. In any case, I’m prepared to do the first job on it tomorrow.”

He leaned back in his swivel chair. “We’ll go in and take out the metal fragment first. And I’ll see how it looks in there. I probably won’t try to do anything about the bone growth this time. Unless I see that it looks easy. I have no reason to expect that it will look easy.

“I want to get at you early in the morning while I’m still fresh. So I’m going to have them give you a mild enema tonight, and a sedative. You won’t get any breakfast in the morning. They’ll probably wake you around six. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” Strange said and grinned. He felt a necessity to make it a tough grin. Then he added, “Uh, sir. Will it be all right if I go see my buddies tonight? At the snack bar?”

Curran nodded slowly. “It will be all right. But I don’t want you drinking any coffee, or eating.” He leaned back again in his chair. “You know, you people amaze me. You’re really as thick as a bunch of fleas, aren’t you?” He placed the tips of his fingers together and stared at Strange over them.

Strange stared back at him, suddenly irritated. It wasn’t any of Curran’s business how thick they were. What was he picking at now? And why? Strange ran his tongue judiciously over his teeth before framing an answer.

“Well, sir. I guess we are,” he said slowly. “We been through a lot of shit together. But probably more than that, you got to remember we come out of an old Regular Army outfit together. Don’t forget, we spent like two to three years together. Before we ever got into this war. We know each other pretty good.” He stopped, debating whether to go on and tell the surgeon more. But immediately something in him decided not to tell more to Curran. It was an intimacy Curran didn’t deserve from him, big-shot surgeon who was going to cut on him tomorrow or no.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Curran said, and swung his chair back up level. “But you probably won’t notice it. They’ll be giving you a light injection tomorrow, to calm you down a little. Before they roll you in.”

Outside, Strange felt distinctly peculiar, as he made his way back to his ward. He felt as he used to feel when he boxed, or played football. Suddenly he felt he had to piss. Though he knew his bladder was empty. He headed back in his issue bathrobe to find Winch and Landers and Prell and tell them the news.

Winch, of course, did not show up that evening. He was out with his little girlfriend. Couldn’t stay away, couldn’t get enough of her, likely. When Strange went by to tell him at 12:45 he had just barely caught him, all dressed in uniform to go to town. Strange noted, but did not comment on it, that Winch was finally wearing those brand-new 1st/sgt’s stripes of his. That was what a woman would do for you, he thought to himself wryly.

Landers and Prell did show up. At the snack bar. Landers limping and with his cane. Prell in his wheelchair: with new, white casts on his legs, in which now his knees had been slightly bent. “My knees are what are going to do me in,” he told them. “I can’t even move them. Christ, they’re like a couple of rusty old, seized-up, frozen, door hinges.” Prell, of course, wasn’t going anyplace off hospital. So it was not such an effort for him to arrange to be at the snack bar to see Strange. It was a big event for him. Landers, though, had clearly missed a date in town, to be with his old mess/ sgt on the night before his operation. Strange, who had never been that close to Landers, felt a new warmth for him.

Prell, though he could not get off hospital grounds to go in town, had not been wasting his time. They found out as they talked that he had found himself a girlfriend. Right on his own ward.

“Hell, yes,” he grinned at them. “She’s some sweet little country girl from some little town just outside of Luxor. Her daddy’s off overseas somewhere so her and her momma come into town every day to volunteer as Gray Ladies out here. I aint met her momma. But she got assigned to our ward, so every afternoon she spends the whole afternoon reading to me. She’s reading me
Treasure Island,
right now.”