Whistle (28 page)

“But don’t let that stop
you
,” Strange said.

“No,” Frances said. “Oh, no. No, sir. Let’s just fuck. I’ll find somebody else to come with later. I’m not going to blow some fellow that won’t blow me.”

“Well, fuck him then, honey, and shut up,” a muffled female voice said from the big bed.

“I guess she’s right,” Frances said. “If we’re going to do anything at all, we better get on with it.”

“I’m ready,” Strange said. “For everything but licking you.”

She had already turned flat on her back, and now she made a practiced little sideways motion that seemed to slide her right under him, legs apart, like a card in a deck. Like the burn card going onto the bottom of a poker deck.

Later on, later in the evening, he saw her going off with Landers. He wondered if Landers would make her come by licking her pussy for her. Maybe Landers might, he was an educated college boy. Well, every man to his own taste.

Like many another boy, Strange had stared heatedly and hungrily at all the photographs and drawings of wide-open vaginas that were available just about everywhere across America in his youth. He had sat and watched the stag films that always, somehow or other, found their way to all the NCO clubs across the country. But all the photos of wide-open pussies had never destroyed the ultimate mystery of woman for him. Nothing had ever destroyed the mystery of women for him. Not even marriage had. Maybe that was the trouble. Sometimes he wished something had.

But grown men did not get down and lick women’s cunts. That was just as much a perversion as being a fag. It was sick in the head. The truth was he had never even seen Linda Sue’s pussy wide-open. Or closed for that matter. He’d seen her naked. But my God, what would Linda Sue say, if he asked her to let him see her pussy wide-open? Or asked her to let him lick it? He couldn’t imagine it.

The trouble with women was when you had had them you still hadn’t had them. He had had four, and hadn’t had any. He was right back where he started before he came up here, only now he was lonelier than he was before.

While Landers was off with Frances Highsmith, he told somebody to tell Landers he would be back, and went off down to the setups bar off the lobby before they closed it at midnight, and sat by himself in a corner with a bottle.

The place was jammed with servicemen drinking. And of course with women. But no matter how many women there were, anywhere, they were always more servicemen, lonely, looking. The bar had them all the way from bald grizzled old Navy chief petty officers in whites with hash marks all the way up to their shoulders, to boys in the ill-fitting unworn uniforms of the newly drafted. Strange felt more at home here with them.

Once, upstairs—it was while he was lying on the way-station bed in the sitting room waiting with his fourth friend of the day—he had looked around at everybody standing and drinking and shouting and singing; and suddenly the mud-weary, eye-baggy, scared platoons of the company appeared before him in ghostly form, slogging away at the swampy jungle of New Georgia. And briefly, crazily, Strange wished he was back with them.

You had to be crazy to wish you were back in a place like that.

But as he sat in the downstairs bar and drank more and more in the midst of the uproar, that was where he wished he was. With a kind of horrified, aghast longing, he pictured their faces one by one, all of them more sharp, more detailed, more clear, than any of the faces he had seen since. Or before.

When they locked down the bar at twelve, he took his bottle and went back upstairs to collect Landers and go back out to the hospital.

He didn’t collect him, of course. Landers was still making out, or flirting, with one woman after another. As the night wore on and people dwindled away, finally there was left only a tight hard-core little group of drunken male singers, with whom he and Landers sang drunkenly for a while, all the old songs. Nobody in the hotel ever complained about noise, to anyone’s knowledge. At five-thirty with dawn coming up across the plains in the east they left to go back and sleep just enough to sober up before morning rounds. In the taxi Landers gabbled and gabbled about all the women he had fucked.

Two days later, from Curran, Strange had the deposition of his surgical status. The upshot of it was that Curran simply did not know what to do. It was possibly the best news Strange could have been given, if he had selected his own.

Curran switched on the little light screen and put the X-rays up for him to see.

“See where those knots are? All ligaments and tendons in there. Very ticklish. I don’t honestly know if I can do it for you. So I’m not recommending the operation. You will have to decide if you want it done.”

“And if I don’t?”

Curran shrugged. A strange quiet smile came over his face. “Then I’ll recommend you for a disability discharge. That won’t set too well with Maj Hogan and Col Baker. But they can’t overrule me.”

“And if I do want it?”

Curran shrugged again. “I won’t promise. If it works, you’ll be fit for limited duty, or even full duty. If you’re lucky. So I guess it all depends on whether you want to stay in the service. You’re a thirty-year man, aren’t you? If it doesn’t work, you won’t be any worse off than you are. You’ll have about the same partial use of the hand. But the two middle knuckles will be partly frozen in a slightly different way than they are now. It’s up to you to decide.”

“Are you trying to give me some kind of an out if I want out of the service?” Strange said.

“No. Not at all. I’m presenting you with the proper medical prognosis. I know the Army wants men, all the men it can save, and preferably trained men. You’re a trained man. But I can’t let that override a proper medical decision.”

“Can I have a few days to think it over?”

“Sure. All the time you want. It’s your hand. And it’s your life.”

Suddenly, he held his surgeon’s hands up between his face and Strange’s, and flexed them. “I know a lot about hands.”

“You’ve been pretty square with me, Colonel,” Strange said. “And I want to thank you for it.”

“I’m a doctor,” Curran said. “I was a doctor before I was a colonel in the Army.”

“Which is more than you can say for some,” Strange said. “I’ll get back to you soon, sir.”

Somehow he felt like saluting. It wasn’t much of a salute, with the plaster plate still on his hand. Then he went to find Winch and see if Winch would fix it up with his pal Jack Alexander to arrange another consecutive double three-day pass to go up to Cincinnati and talk it over with Linda.

When he saw Winch, he thought Winch looked better than he had seen him look in quite a long time. Way back, in fact. Since before they left Wahoo for the Canal. More relaxed, less acid, less hard-faced.

The little girl was apparently quite good for him.

J
OHNNY
S
TRANGER’S REQUEST
for passes was no trouble for Winch. Some time back, Jack Alexander had given him a big stack of blank pass forms, already signed, so that all he had to do was fill in the name, and the dates.

“These are for you. And any of your people you think deserve them,” Alexander had rasped in his scarred voice, the day after the medals presentation. “Use them any way you want.”

Winch scribbled out two of them for Strange, over Col Stevens’ neat signature. Both men knew it was impossible for Strange to get up to Cincinnati and back on any ordinary three-day pass. Strange had told Winch about the operation. But as the stocky mess/sgt walked away down the ward something about the set of his shoulders said that everything was not as straightforward as Strange had made it sound.

Winch would not have agreed with Strange that Mart Winch was looking happier than he had looked since the Division left Oahu. But Winch was certainly feeling better than he had felt since Doc Harris shipped him out of New Georgia.

There was no doubt in Winch’s mind that this was due to the appearance of Carol in his life. He could hardly believe his own luck. An old man like him.

Before he’d picked her up (or been picked up by her, he could never be sure which) he had been suffering one of the lowest points of his life. Even the long nights on the line in Guadalcanal and New Georgia had not been as bad as this hospital half-life at Kilrainey General.

And then, they had received yet another casualty into Kilrainey from the old company, and this had nearly done him in.

The medical stuff was bad enough. The heart failure attack had left him with what the docs called a left bundle branch block. They had had hopes the block would disappear with treatment. But more and more the docs at Kilrainey had come to think it was going to stay, a permanent impairment.

Weakness, shortness of breath, the inability to run, or carry weight, or do any but the lightest exercise. In the past month he had lost the initial feeling of total fragility he had had in the beginning. But Winch had always been a strong man physically, and depended on that as one source of his authority. Without it he felt helpless.

His need for diuretics was part of the same thing. The weakened heart muscle could not pump the blood through strongly. This caused a back pressure to build up behind the heart, between the heart and kidneys. The back pressure aided the heart, but caused the kidneys to function at less than full efficiency. The edema came from that, and tied Winch as tightly and securely to the hospital as if he had been tied to it with a rope. He was getting one big intramuscular injection of mercurial diuretic a day. Even if later they could lower the dosage, they could never eliminate it altogether. If he had not had a lot of pull, they would have discharged him. Then he would find himself among the living dead in some Veterans’ Hospital, tied to it as he was now tied to Kilrainey, for his daily shot. A great future to look forward to.

And into all of this there was suddenly dropped onto him the new casualty. It was like some giant’s hand steam iron falling from the sky, flattening Winch.

There was no reason for them not to expect newer casualties from the company. Men wounded after Winch left but before the campaign ended had continued to drift home. Even though the fighting in New Georgia had ended a month before. But Staff/Sgt Billy Stonewall Dodson Spencer was a special case.

Partly Billy was special because of the bad way he’d been wounded. Partly he was special because of what he told them about the company.

But partly Billy was special simply by the very fact he was a staff/sgt. That alone said a great deal about the state of the company. When Winch had left the company, Billy Spencer had just been promoted corporal. Winch, who had had a lot to do with his promotion, had assured himself that was as high as Billy could ever rise. Now here Billy was, not only a staff/sgt and former squad leader. He had been promoted platoon guide of the second platoon shortly before getting hit.

What Billy told them about the company bore out the amazing fact of his promotion. Letters from the company had been getting scarcer and scarcer since the end of the New Georgia campaign, and recently there had been none. Billy was the first uncensored news any of them had had since Winch himself came out. All of them hung on every word he had to say. Winch hung on each one, too. Though he hid this from the others.

The upshot of it was, there wasn’t any old company any more. Only about fifty of the original hundred and eighty remained, most of them pfcs and privates. A few were higher-ranking noncoms. Winch’s old tech/sgt, Zwermann, had not been chosen for the job of 1st/sgt and a new man had been shipped in over him from outside. The others, the rest, were replacements. Just green dumbass cannon-fodder draftees. Some of these, the better ones, were now running squads. All the officers had been changed. The old-timers, when they weren’t fighting, were drunk all the time. Old Zwermann when he was passed over had tried to turn in his stripes and been refused. Then he had tried to get himself shipped out sick, and been refused that too. Everything was being clamped down everywhere. The only way to get out now was to get yourself shot up. Or be so sick you literally were dying. Even shot up, you had to be shot up pretty good. Minor wounds didn’t count any more, you could forget it. Many of the draftees were joining the drunks. And the drunks, when they couldn’t get real booze, were stealing five-gallon cans of peaches and pineapple by the dozen from the ration dumps, sometimes at pistol point, and making illegal swipe and jungle juice out of them in the jungle clearings. There simply wasn’t any company esprit or morale any more. The rumor was that they were going in on Bougainville as soon as the Marines had secured a beachhead. Perhaps they were even going in with the Marines. Almost none of the original noncoms, who had held it all together, were left now. That was why Billy had been promoted. Some squad leader had been killed. Later the second platoon guide was killed. Billy had tried to refuse both promotions, but had not been allowed.

In the old days Billy had been a typical happy-go-lucky middle-class boy from Alabama. Now as he lay in his bed and talked with the rest of them clustered around it, it was easy to see his responsibilities as a noncom had completely changed his personality.

He had been wounded on a patrol. Taking the point himself, which as platoon guide he did not have to do, he stepped on a Jap land mine which had blown off his one foot halfway up the shin, shattered his other leg, and sprinkled his body with tiny pieces of casing. Its blast had also blinded him in both eyes.

“Is that you, Top?” he whispered in a new, hoarse voice, putting out one hand. When he found Winch’s hand, he put his other hand over it and held on to it in both of his. “Is that really you, Top? I heard on the West Coast you might be here in Luxor, Top. But I never thought I’d get to see you.”

Some of the men still went down to the hospital compound for each unloading when they knew the trucks were bringing in cases from a West Coast train and one of them had spotted Billy on his stretcher and spread the word. When they gathered around his bunk, Winch had been the last to arrive.

Winch let him keep the hand. Until Billy saw fit to let go of it himself. Then Winch drifted to the back of the crowd and stood while Billy talked about the company until the nurse came and shooed them all away.