The Dream Merchants (29 page)

Rocco didn’t answer; he picked up the tray silently and put it back on the little wagon. He pushed it toward the door of the room, walked back to the bed, and picked up the crutches. He looked at them and then turned to Johnny.

“We got guys here who’d think they was lucky if they kin use these. Get wise to yourself, Johnny. You can’t lay in bed all your life.”

Johnny turned his face to the wall, away from him.

Rocco stood there a moment. Something inside him wanted to cry. It had been that way ever since he came across Johnny lying in the little ditch where the machine gun had been.

A few yards away was Joe’s body and in the trench near the gun were three dead German soldiers. Johnny was almost unconscious, but he kept saying over and over in a mad sort of delirium: “My leg, the bastards stuck it with a lot of needles!”

He knelt swiftly at Johnny’s side and rolled him over. Johnny’s right trouser leg was soaked with blood. He swore quietly to himself as he quickly cut the trouser from it and saw the line of perforations made by the bullets just above the knee. The blood seemed to pulse its way through the opening.

He cut a strip from his blouse and made a rough tourniquet, which stopped the bleeding. It was after that he first tried to move the leg.

He could still hear Johnny’s scream ringing in his ears. It was a sound of pain and horror. It hung high in the air over the now almost quiet battlefield.

“Rocco!” Johnny had screamed in a sudden burst of recognition. “Don’t take my leg off!” Then Johnny’s body had gone limp. He had fainted.

Rocco had carried him back to the medical officer. He stood there while the medic shook his head. He watched while the medic cut the flesh away above Johnny’s knee and exposed the splintered bone. He watched the doctor almost casually take the amputated leg and throw it on a pile made up of others and then draw the skin of the stump down as tight as he could over the raw flesh and stitch it together, leaving only a small opening for suppuration.

It was while Rocco trudged along beside the stretcher as they took Johnny back to the small hospital after the operation that he felt Johnny’s hand grabbing at his sleeve. He looked down.

Johnny’s eyes were wide and staring at him. “Rocco, don’t let them take my leg off. Stay with me. Don’t let them!”

Rocco’s eyes had filled with tears. “Go to sleep, Johnny,” he said, “I won’t let them hurt you.”

The war was over and Rocco did not go home with the others. He transferred to the medics and followed Johnny from the hospital in France to the hospital on Long Island. He had made a promise to himself that he would stay with Johnny as long as Johnny needed him. Maybe it was because he felt that it was his fault to begin with. Because he had issued the order that had sent Johnny on the mission. But it wasn’t his fault that it got mixed up. Everything was wrong that day. He still couldn’t figure out how, with everything going wrong, the attack could work out right. But it did.

And now he stood beside the bed looking down at Johnny. Pity surged within him and moved his hand. He placed it on Johnny’s shoulder.

“Johnny,” he said softly, “Johnny, look at me.”

Slowly Johnny turned around, drawn by some inexorable warmth flowing from the hand on his shoulder. He looked into Rocco’s face.

Rocco’s eyes were deep with understanding. “I know how you feel, Johnny. But you’re gonna have to face it. Yuh got things to do an’ friends tuh meet on the outside. An’ I’m not gonna let yuh hide from ’em in here.” He drew a deep breath. “You’re gonna walk because I’m gonna find the thing that will make you want to.”

Johnny looked into his eyes and found himself slipping into their depths. Instinctively he pulled himself back. “If you want to find the thing that will make me walk,” he said bitterly, “go find me my leg.” He turned back to the wall.

Rocco’s hand fell to his side. There was a pain inside him, a deep quiet hurt that was born of Johnny’s repulse. Quietly he left the room.

***

At night Johnny had a dream. He was running down a long familiar street. It was a long street and its end was nowhere in sight. Yet Johnny knew what lay at the end of that street and he wanted to go there. He had been running for hours and hours and now the end of the street was coming into view. A girl was standing there. She was only a slim figure, but he knew who it was even though he could not distinguish her features.

Just then the street filled with people. They stood and looked at him running and they laughed and pointed. “Look at that one-legged cripple trying to run,” they laughed.

At first Johnny didn’t pay any attention to them. His mind was on that girl who was standing there waiting for him. But as he drew nearer and nearer to her, the people began to laugh louder and louder. At last he stopped. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“You,” one of them answered derisively. “Everybody knows a one-legged man can’t run!”

“I can too!” Johnny said.

“You cannot!” a chorus of voices answered him mockingly.

“I can, I can!” he screamed at them. “I’ll show you!”

He turned and started to run, but suddenly he realized he wasn’t running at all, he was hopping. He tried desperately to run, his heart pounding, suddenly frightened. And then he fell.

The crowds of people gathered around him. “See,” they said, “we were right. You can’t run.” They laughed at him.

“I can run, I can run, I can run,” he sobbed, struggling to get to his feet. He looked down the street toward the girl. She had turned and was walking away from him. “Wait for me!” he cried desperately. “I can run!” But she was gone.

He opened his eyes in the night; they were wet with his tears. He took a cigarette from the table with trembling fingers and put it between his lips. He was looking for a match when suddenly one glowed in front of him.

He dragged on his cigarette and then looked up. Rocco’s face was limned in the dim glow from the match. Johnny took another deep drag from the cigarette. “Don’t you ever sleep, Rock?” he asked.

Rocco blew out the match. In the dark his teeth shone as he smiled. “How can I,” he replied, “if I have to keep chasing you up and down the halls all night?”

Johnny looked at him in sudden surprise. “What do you mean?”

Rocco smiled again. “I heard yuh yelling an’ decided to look in. You were poised there on the end of the bed, ready to take off. I pushed you back an’ you started to holler: ‘I can run.’”

“I must’ve been dreaming,” Johnny said.

“Not for my money you weren’t,” Rocco said quietly. “It wouldn’t s’prise me at all to find yuh doin’ it. Some day maybe.” He picked up the crutches and tapped them together. “After yuh learn to walk!”

9

The recreation hall was crowded as Rocco pushed the wheelchair toward a small space on the floor where Johnny could see the screen. Johnny looked around him. The faces he saw were eager, expectant, bright with anticipation.

Ever since the news had got around a week ago that they were going to see a moving picture in the recreation hall, the talk around the hospital had been about nothing else. Men who had not displayed interest in anything heretofore were suddenly interested, alive.

Johnny had been one of these, much to Rocco’s surprise. When he had heard about it, he had straightened up in bed. “I want to see the picture,” he said to Rocco.

Rocco looked at him. There was a look on Johnny’s face he hadn’t seen for a long time. A look of anticipation, of excitement. “Sure,” he said, “sure. Walk or ride?”

Johnny looked at the crutches and then back at Rocco. “I think I’ll ride,” he said, trying to smile. “It’s got more class and besides it guarantees a seat.”

Rocco laughed. Suddenly he began to feel better. It was the first time in a long while he had heard Johnny try to joke.

During the week that followed, Johnny plied Rocco with questions. Did he know what picture it was? Who was in it? What company made it? Who directed it?

Rocco didn’t know any of the answers. It seemed no one did. All they knew was that they were going to see a picture. He thought it was strange that Johnny should ask all these questions. “How come you’re so curious about the picture?” he asked.

But Johnny didn’t answer and Rocco thought he had fallen asleep. But he hadn’t. He lay there, his head on the pillow, his eyes shut, but his mind was awake—vividly awake with an excitement he never thought he would know again. He had not written to Peter or anyone since he had been hurt. Their letters had been unanswered. He didn’t want any sympathy, any acts born of charity. If he had been unhurt, he would have gone back gladly, but this way, crippled, he could not envision himself as being anything less than a burden to them. So he had not written and had closed his heart and mind to the past.

He looked around the hall. The projection machine was not too far behind him. Lovingly he let his eyes dwell upon it with all the fondness a man might look at his home. And it was true. Suddenly he was homesick. Homesick for the smell of the celluloid strips as they ran through the projector and came out warm. For the thin, tangy, crackling ozone-like smell of the carbon arc lights in the machine itself.

He gestured to Rocco. “Push me over to the machine,” he said, “I want to see what it looks like.”

Rocco pushed him near it and he sat there quietly watching the operator thread the film into the sprockets. He felt good just watching him.

They began to draw the curtains over the windows and gradually the room grew dark. Then it was pitch-black and he couldn’t see anything. He wanted desperately to light a cigarette, but he remembered he couldn’t smoke sitting near the film as he was. He heard the faintly familiar buzz as the carbon sparks caught, and then the strong bright light flashed on the screen.

Words flashed on. At first they were blurred and then they were clear and distinct as the operator set the focus on his lens. Johnny read the words, his lips moving as he passed over them.

The words flashed from the screen almost before Johnny could grasp their meaning. He had been frozen to his chair when Peter’s name had flashed on the screen, but now it was gone.

And in its place came the familiar trade-mark, the opening shot that identified every Magnum Picture: the big champagne bottle with the champagne flowing into a glass until the glass was filled to the brim. Then the words covering the whole screen in Gothic lettering:

MAGNUM PICTURES
PRESENTS

Johnny’s voice reached Rocco’s ears in an agonized whisper. “Take me out of here, Rock!” it said with suppressed intensity. “Take me out!”

For a moment Rocco stood still in surprise. He didn’t understand it. Johnny had been so eager to see the picture, and now before it began he wanted to leave. He leaned forward. “What’sa matter, Johnny?” he whispered in his ear. “Yuh sick?”

He could see Johnny’s fists clenched on the arm of the chair as he replied: “No. Just take me out, that’s all. Take me out!”

He steered the wheelchair to the door and out. The bright lights in the hall hurt his eyes and he blinked for a moment; then he looked at Johnny.

Johnny’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut, so tight that tears stood in the corners of them. His face was white and strained and drops of sweat stood out on his pallid skin.

Quickly Rocco pushed him back to his room and helped him into bed. Johnny’s body was trembling. Gently Rocco covered him and stood near him. “Was it somebody you knew, Johnny?” he asked gently.

Johnny’s eyes opened suddenly and stared at him. Accidentally Rocco had stumbled on the truth. He must not know any more. “No,” he said slowly. What was that thing he had heard the doctors talking about the other day—claustrophobia, the fear of being shut up in a small place and not being able to get out. Make Rocco think that was what had been the matter with him.

“Suddenly I couldn’t stand it in there any more,” he said. “I felt I would never get out.” He laughed self-consciously. “I must have that claustro—er—something the doctors talk about.”

Rocco looked at him but didn’t answer. His mind was working. Johnny wasn’t fooling him this time. He was going to find the real reason behind the way Johnny had acted. If he had really been afraid of being cooped up in there, he never would have been able to stay in this room so long a time.

***

The girl came out of the officer’s room. She smiled at Rocco. “You may go in now, sergeant. Captain Richards will see you.”

He thanked her and went into the little office. He drew himself to attention and saluted the officer.

The officer negligently returned his salute and looked up at him wearily. “Sit down, sergeant,” he said in a tired voice. “We don’t hold with the formalities in here.”

Rocco sat down in a chair opposite the officer’s desk. The officer looked down at the paper on his desk and then up at Rocco. “Your request is a most unusual one, sergeant,” he remarked.

Rocco leaned forward in his chair. “It’s the only way I believe we can help him, sir.”

The officer grunted and looked down at the paper on his desk again. He studied it for a few minutes and then spoke. “I have Corporal Edge’s service record here as you requested, but there is nothing on it that would give us any clues as to his family or friends or background. He took no life insurance from us and the only one to be notified in case of injury to him is one Joseph Turner, now deceased.” He took a pipe from his desk and filled it with tobacco. He held a match to it until it was drawing comfortably. He looked over at Rocco. “You say he says he has no place to go and that he wants to remain here.”