Whistle (31 page)

Somewhere in the back of Strange’s mind there had always been the idea that someday, when the war was over they would all of them all get together again somewhere. Become again the unit it once had been, only grown wiser and more experienced by war service.

Strange had been too embarrassed ever to speak of this to anyone, but he nevertheless had clung to the idea.

The idea had always been a pipe dream, of course. But as long as the company was still out there, with some semblance of its old roster and original organization intact, he could still hold on to and at least play with the idea. Now, with the company no longer there, and filled up and loaded down with strangers, Strange felt uprooted, homeless. He suffered from feeling naked and alone and orphaned with a severity he had never experienced before. Not even when he left home, or when his parents died. The existence of his civilian wife and her civilian family where he was accepted as a member was no help for this feeling at all.

In the wet-aired bus Strange sucked disconsolately at his pint of whiskey. What the hell, it wasn’t something that was going to kill him. He had been in the Army long enough to get used to changing outfits. He had done it a number of times.

But there was something special about this outfit. And he saw clearly enough that it was the war had done it. Death—death, and maiming—had pulled it together in a way the peacetime Army had never done with outfits. Shared deaths, shared woundings, shared terrors had given it a family closeness it wouldn’t be easy to find again.

And Strange did not know if he had the courage to start over from scratch and knowing what he knew now, go through the process a second time.

Outside the bus at the rest stops, when he got down occasionally to relieve himself, there was a chill of October in the fresher air.

When he finally got to the house in Covington it was midafternoon, and almost exactly the same time of day that he had arrived all the other times. Linda’s paternal uncle, 4-F older brother, and maternal cousin were all still sleeping preparatory to going off on the night shift. This time when they all began straggling down they found Strange already in the kitchen, drinking beer. Strange sat with them again in the kitchen while they made their breakfast, and had some bacon and eggs himself. None of them seemed much interested that his hand had been operated on and that he now wore the plaster plate on it, since they had seen him last.

He soon found out that Linda Sue, who should have been working the day shift and therefore should be coming home soon, had in fact been transferred to the swing shift. Instead of coming home she had just gone off to work, and would not be getting off until midnight. Strange hung around the house till some of the other women began coming home from work and from shopping, and then had to get out. The women filled up the kitchen so with their gossip and their preparations for cooking dinner that he couldn’t stand it. The only other place available was Linda’s little chintz-covered bedroom, which was too small for loafing and too small for anything else except sleeping, and maybe fucking.

He went to a lousy war movie. In it some green young Navy kid, stranded in Bataan, kept letting the spoons fly off of hand grenades and counting to three before he threw them, usually just across a coconut log where evil-looking Japanese were shooting point-blank at him. It was so outrageous that finally about halfway through he had to leave. As he walked up the aisle he looked at the faces of the people bathed in the flickering light from the screen as they chewed handfuls of popcorn and watched the fighting with avid eyes, and for a brief insane moment wished he had two or three grenades with him, to toss in among them. And see how they liked it.

After that, he simply went around from bar to bar drinking. When he finally went back to the house at twelve-thirty, he was three-fourths tight and went to bed in the little chintz room. Two others of the family who were on the swing shift were already home in the kitchen, and he talked to them for a while. Linda did not get home until after three.

Of course, she had not known he was coming. She was terribly apologetic when she found him, just waking up, in the little bedroom. Linda was about half-crocked herself, and explained she had been with a few of the girls for some drinks. When he wanted to make love to her, she was warm and kind and receptive. But she certainly wasn’t what Strange could call hot. When he was humping her, she stroked his head. He would have preferred her to be passionate.

But there was no inkling of anything else. Not that Strange could feel. Why should there be? Their lovemaking was the same as it had always been. Perhaps it was even just a little better than usual. But when, after he had come, he tried to talk to her about what Curran had said concerning the new, second operation and what this could mean to them with the restaurant, she begged off from hearing about it and wanted to go to sleep. When he went on talking anyway, she broke down and began to cry.

“But, Linda, honey, don’t you understand?” he persisted. “You can have your restaurant. All I have to do is say no to this second operation and they’ll discharge me.”

“I don’t want to hear about it now,” she wept. “I’m too fuddled and too tired and too sleepy. Can’t we talk about it tomorrow? Please?”

“Sure, sure. Of course. Don’t cry. Don’t cry, for God’s sake,” Strange said, and stroked her shoulder. After she was asleep, he lay awake a long time with his arms behind his head, thinking. It certainly wasn’t the reaction he had expected.

He suggested that he take her out for a nice high-class lunch somewhere, when she came down at eleven the next morning, because he thought she looked peaked and worn down. Certainly the kitchen, with its ebb and flow of family workers preparing or cooking one meal or another, was no place for a discussion. But Linda instead of being pleased gave him a sharp look, and then after a moment said she couldn’t have lunch with him. Though she did not say why. Instead, she wanted him to pick her up at a bar near her job after she got off at midnight. She gave him the address. Then around two she got dressed and went off. Shopping, she said.

So Strange found himself with another whole day to put in. He was soured on war movies but there did not seem to be anything else playing anywhere. Across the river the whole town of Cincinnati seemed full of nothing but war films. Finally he found a theater that was showing a rerun of
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle,
and went to see that. He remembered the outfit had seen that on Guadalcanal, and had loved it. But, now, the richness and wealth and high life of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was so foreign to anything he knew and so out of step with his mood of now that he left that one, too, before it was half over. Hell, even when they were poor they lived rich.

He tried not to drink too much, because he wanted to have his brains sharp. But it was hard not to. It seemed everybody everywhere who wasn’t working was drinking. He decided to take a taxi to the bar because he did not know the town well enough to trust trying the bus system.

He had already arranged where to take her to dinner. Across the river in Cincinnati during his lone drinking hours he had checked around, and found a ritzy hotel which had a place like the Peabody’s Plantation Roof that served good steak dinners till very late. Strange was proud of the sophisticated tastes he had developed during his two-month stay in Luxor, and decided to take her there and show her. Only when they were arriving and getting out of the taxi did it occur to him that such a high-class place might embarrass Linda and make her uncomfortable. She had never gone to ritzy places, even back in Wahoo. But of course, by the time he thought of this, it was already too late and they were at the door.

He needn’t have worried. Linda seemed at least as at home in the place as he was. When he tipped the head waiter three dollars to get them a nice quiet table off to themselves, she noted it with approval. She accepted the big menu with all the French words and ordered her dinner as smoothly and calmly as if she had been doing it right along. Strange ordered drinks for them, and she said she’d take a martini. After he’d ordered the drinks, he sat back and looked around, without really thinking that he had never known Linda Sue to drink a martini before. The big place was jam-packed and they were surrounded by servicemen and their women. The few civilian men in the place appeared drowned in the big sea of khaki and blue.

On the bandstand a sixteen-piece orchestra played through both “Little Sir Echo” and “Racing with the Moon” while Strange sipped at his drink and tried to collect his thoughts. He had never been much of a ballroom dancer so it did not occur to him to ask Linda to dance.

Since she would not mention the operation or bring it up, Strange was forced finally to bring it up himself.

“Well, where shall I begin?” he said finally.

Linda only looked at him. “Don’t you want to ask me to dance first?” she said.

“Oh,” Strange said. “Sure.”

On the dance floor, which though big was crowded, he moved her around to the music of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” feeling upset and disturbed. The song was almost finished before he realized that Linda Sue was dancing beautifully with him, and stopped and moved her away from him to look down at her.

“Didn’t you notice I’ve learned to dance since you’ve been away?” she said.

“Yeah. Yes,” Strange said. “I just now noticed. How did that come about?” Behind him a sailor still in summer whites bumped into him and he started moving again.

“Oh, well. You know. A lot of us girls go out dancing together,” Linda said against his shoulder.

“You dance with each other?” Strange said.

“Chattanooga Choo-Choo” ended and without waiting for applause the band moved into “You’ll Never Know,” the song Alice Faye had made so famous. Strange had heard it on the radio on both the Canal and New Georgia. And Tokyo Rose used to play it.

“Most of the time,” Linda said against his ear. “Sometimes the boys ask us to dance, too.”

In spite of his awkwardness and lack of talent Strange found himself dancing better with her now, because of her new expertise, than he had ever danced before. Instead of making him feel good it made him feel more disquieted.

When the song ended, he took her back to the table and ordered them another drink.

“Can we have some red wine with the steak, too?” Linda said.

“Wine?” Strange said, “wine? Sure. Sure, why the hell not?”

“Just ask the man for the wine list,” she said, and gave him a funny smile.

“Do you want me to wait until after we’ve eaten?” Strange said, after he had ordered a twelve-dollar bottle of French wine. “No,” she said. “No, I guess not.” “Well,” Strange said, “here’s the story.”

But as he laid out for her the options Curran had offered him, doing it with that same patient thoughtfulness he had been so famous for and was so proud of back in the company, he began to feel more and more disquiet, more and more distress. He didn’t know why exactly. She just wasn’t reacting right. She didn’t say anything at all until he finished telling it.

“So you see,” he wound it up, “I can get discharged—” he moved his shoulders, “almost immediately. We can start working on that restaurant. While the war boom is still on. Probably your folks would loan us some money, wouldn’t they?”

“What will happen to your poor hand?” Linda said with a sad smile, and reached across and put her hand over the bound member in its plaster plate.

Strange shrugged. “It’ll stay about the same. I’ll have only partial use of the two middle fingers. But hell, I’ve been living like that for almost a year now. It aint so bad. Probly I’ll get some kind of a pension, I guess.”

“And if you have the operation?”

Strange shrugged again, impatiently, feeling irritable. She knew all that. “He can’t guarantee he can fix it. If he does, I’ll have to stay in. For the duration. If he can’t, it’ll be the same, anyway.”

“Well,” Linda said, sadly, “it’s a beautiful offer.”

“Christ, aint you happy about the restaurant?” Strange couldn’t resist saying,

“Yes, of course. But—” She stopped.

“But, what?”

It was at just that moment, as if deliberately prearranged by some consciously malignant fate, that the waiter arrived with their steaks. Behind Strange the orchestra was playing some dizzy, lilty song called “Elmer’s Tune.”

“Let’s eat, first,” Linda said. “Then I’ll tell you what’s been happening.”

If she was upset or depressed or sad it certainly had no effect on her appetite. She put away the entirety of her big, healthy steak except for a thin strip of fat rind, and with it a whole order of French fries, green beans, and a salad. Working so hard made her hungry, she said. Strange attacked his own big steak as if wreaking vengeance on it for the meal’s having interrupted them when it did. After putting down three hefty glasses of the red wine with her meat, Linda Sue pushed her plate daintily two inches away from her with her knife and fork laid side by side on it, put her elbows on the table, and looked at him with wide, clear, unguarded, sorrowful eyes.

“Yes,” Strange said. “Well, what?”

“Well,” she said, and stopped. “It’s that—It’s because—Well, I’ve got a, uh, boyfriend.”

“You’ve got a what?” Strange said.

She blushed crimson. “Well. An, uh, lover. I’ve got a lover.”

“You’ve got a lover,” Strange said. He would remember later that the sixteen-piece orchestra was playing the ballad called “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a song recorded and made popular by Vera Lynn and probably the most well-liked song of the whole damned war, so far.

“Yes,” Linda Sue said, over the music. “And I’m not going to give him up.”

But, of course
, Strange’s mind was saying to him. So many things fell into place so suddenly that it was all there in front of him, all of a piece, a consistent pattern, only he had all along just not interpreted it right, was all. How she had been so confused and almost lukewarm, when he had telephoned her from Frisco. How she had decided not to come down to Luxor, because of her job. How she had seemed so distant when he came up to Cincinnati, because she was tired from overwork. How she had slept with him so indifferently, all those times. How she had not cared if he slept with her or not, all those times he had not slept with her.
You should have figured that out, dumbhead
, his mind was saying to him.