Whistle (58 page)

“Well,” Drere said. “We have to know. If we’re going to write the reports.”

“Can I tell you later?”

“I don’t see how. We need to know today. That’s why I’m here. The reports have to be written tonight. They go in tomorrow.”

Landers still did not answer, for a long moment. “All right,” he said, looking up. “Tell them to slant the reports toward a discharge. I’d rather be out of this fucking mess. Than in it.” He sighed. “As long as the Mayhews of the world are in it.”

“I’m afraid the Mayhews of the world will always be with us,” Drere smiled. “That’s the human race. Imperfect, to say the least.”

“Always?” Landers said, and he began to laugh. He was able to get hold of it in a moment, the laughter, and choke it down.

Drere was looking at him curiously. “You’re sure, now? You sure that’s the way you want it?”

“No, I’m not sure,” Landers said, beginning to get angry. He shrugged, swallowing down the anger, too. “Look, Lieutenant. What I’m thinking is that if I want to change the decision, in front of the board, it will be a lot easier to change it toward staying in the Army, than to change it toward wanting to get out. Right?”

“Yes. That would certainly be true,” Drere said. “So you want the reports slanted strongly toward a discharge?” he said. “Then that’s what I’ll tell them?” Drere said.

“Yes.”

Drere made a small precise note on a paper, then put all of the unused papers together in his little briefcase. His preciseness irritated Landers, and he stood up.

Drere got up with him, and thrust out his hand. “I’ll be on my way, then.” His face took on a peculiar look, for him, of embarrassment. “You know, you’re a real hero, Marion. In the 3516th.”

“Some hero,” Landers said sourly.

“It’s nice to know, I think,” Drere said. “I just want you to know it’s been a pleasure knowing you.”

Landers watched the big steel door shut behind him, wishing too late that he himself had said other, nicer things. But that wouldn’t have mattered to Drere.

It was amazing to see the change that occurred on the ward, almost immediately. Nobody ever knew how the word got around on these things, but it always did. Somebody always knew, somehow, and told somebody, and that somebody told somebody else. It was the same jungle telegraph that existed in every outfit. Landers told no one but by evening everybody on the ward knew: Landers was on his way out, to a clean, white discharge. An honorable.

Landers was disgusted, and infuriated. Particularly since he himself did not know whether or not he wanted out of the Army. Even the mean, crazy-headed stockade prisoners began treating him differently, with great respect. To the other mental patients he was a sort of shining example, a real American success story, that they could look up to, and model themselves after.

Even the ward boys were kinder to him. And the night man offered to sit down and go over his file with him, on the idea that there might be something in it Landers could use to help him with the board. Landers refused this categorically. In the back of his mind was the idea that this, too, might be another ploy of the crafty psychiatrists, testing him.

In the end it did not even take as long as Drere had suggested it might. It took more than the week, but less than the ten days Drere had postulated.

The ward boy came to him, grinning hugely, on the Monday. He would go before the board tomorrow at their regular Tuesday meeting. A clean new pair of MC pajamas, a clean maroon robe, clean duck slippers would be waiting for him in the morning.

It was so similar to the previous time at Kilrainey that Landers had a weird, eery sense of déjà vu. There was the same dark, formalized room. There was the same group of five civilian-looking men wearing lots of hardware on their collars, behind the same long table. It had the somber smell of a criminal courtroom. And Landers suddenly knew he desperately wanted out of the Army.

It had the distinct feel of a repeat performance. Except that now as Landers went up against this kindly, middle-class, bourgeois enemy, it was with all the pessimism and experience he had not had at his fingertips the first time out. Landers knew now that all the fine promises they made would have nothing to do with him once he was out in the field again, in the real world. They might not know that, but Landers did; now. He was prepared at any moment to tell them he wanted to stay in the Army.

But the moment would not come. That was apparently what they were trying to get him to say. But everything they said to him, every question they asked him, seemed to drive him away from the point of wanting to say it.

All the questions they asked him about his abilities and intentions were the same questions the five men at Kilrainey had asked him. All the statements they made about wanting to use his talents, his experience, were the same statements made at Kilrainey.

Finally the round-faced, jowly man in the middle wearing glasses, a full colonel among three other full colonels in the five but plainly the chief, asked him in a perplexed, slightly amused voice, “Well, Sergeant, what kind of job in the Army would you like?”

Drawing himself up, his voice fluting with the rage he was trying to hold down, Landers gave the only answer he felt he could give them. “Sir, there’s no job in the Army I want,” he said stolidly.

“All right, that’s all. You may go,” the bespectacled colonel said.

The word was around the ward almost before he could get back to it. Landers was out. The board had voted, unanimously, to discharge him. So many other prisoners, who saw this as a major triumph, rushed over to him to congratulate him and slap him on the back that the morose Landers finally insulted them and ran them all off, cursing.

After that, he was even more of a marked man. Not only was he out while all of them were still in, but they did not like it because he had rejected their well-meant congratulations. All of them left him strictly alone.

It didn’t really matter. The winding-down, the mechanics, took only five days. Five days, from the meeting of the board till Landers was out on the street, a free man. The wheels ground slowly, but once they got started, they rolled very fast. And much of the last three of the five days was spent out of the ward, signing releases in first one office then another. Landers wasn’t in the ward that much to suffer his new rejection. Anyway, he didn’t care what they thought. He wasn’t like them.

He went to the Finance office, to sign his last payroll. He went to the QM office, to turn in the last of his gear. To the Insurance office, to keep or cancel his GI insurance. Landers decided to cancel his. If he was going out, he did not want any more to do with the Army than was obligatory. Most of the rest was done in offices in the hospital HQ section itself.

As was required by the regulations, everywhere he went an armed guard had to go with him. He was still a prisoner. But it was indicative of his status that the pistol-wearing MP joked with him and hardly bothered to watch him. No guy who was going out in two days was going to run off from a guard.

In retrospect it seemed like a wild, fantastic rush, the last five days. Then on the morning of the sixth he was signing his last paper, which was the receipt for his engraved, pure, white Honorable Discharge which was tendered to him. That took place in the hospital clerical office itself.

Then, totally unprepared for it, he was suddenly out in the street in front of the hospital, in uniform, with an old blue barracks bag half full of personal gear, a free man able to go anywhere he pleased to go.

He walked the three blocks down to the bus stop, and waited there. After a moment, he set the bag on the frozen ground. A bus for Luxor should be along in a little bit. It was a dry day, but cold, and a little snowy on the ground.

Landers huddled down into his GI greatcoat. In front of him on the asphalt main street a long column of men in fatigues and field jackets marched by, wearing the Divisional patch of the new infantry Division, their faces gaunt and haunted and worn-down looking. It took them a long time to pass, and Landers watched them.

It had been running through his mind all the places he was now free to go. Places these guys couldn’t go. He would probably wind up going home, to Indiana, in the end. To his lousy family. The thought of going home filled him with anguish. But he didn’t have to do that yet.

Normally he would have gone into Luxor to the Peabody to see Johnny Stranger. But Strange had told him during his visit that in two or three days’ time, from then, he would be coming back to duty himself. Somewhere here on the post at O’Bruyerre. That meant Landers would have to go up to see Winch at the Command building and say good-by to him, in order to find out where Strange was. And Landers didn’t have the stomach for that at the moment. Of course, he could always go in to the Peabody by himself. Though Strange was giving up the suite, Strange had said, having run out of money.

In front of him the last of the troop column had made their right turn off of the main road, and were dwindling away down one of the hole-pocked gravel side roads. Behind them on the main road, coming fast, was a civilian car, but with post plates. Driven by a woman. Women were so important.

Landers watched the last of the troops dwindle, getting smaller and smaller, their breaths throwing out the same plumes as before, but now at this distance the plumes seemed bigger than they were. Landers was devoutly glad he wasn’t one of them. On the other hand, he had no desire really to go in to the Peabody all by himself. Even if he could get a room, this late.

Landers watched the woman coming on in the car. She was very good-looking, even at a distance. Probably some officer’s wife. But she was really going too fast. Landers bent with the tie rope of the barracks bag he was holding, and rolled it meticulously down and around onto the top of the bag, and then stood teetering on his heels and watching her.

Just as she was about to come level with him on the road, Landers stepped out off the curb in front of her.

As he stepped out, he realized he would not have done it if she had been a man, driving a jeep or a GI truck. But she really was so beautiful. Her coat was thrown back open in the heat of the car, and in the sweater under it her breasts swelled out thrusting their weight against the lapels deliciously. So delicious. And her hair fell to the collar of the coat with an equally delicious feminine grace.

Landers heard the wild squeal of the brakes. And perhaps a cry. And then the crash of glass and tear of headlight metal. And a loud thumping thud.

He saw or thought he saw the look of horror that came across her face in back of the windshield. Because she thought she was doing something wrong, and he wanted to laugh. The mouth a wildly spread O of lipstick. Eyebrows arched up. Eyes staring. He hated to do all that to her. But, by God, at least she knew she had hit something. Then the helicopter moved away from the ship.

The big red crosses were still on its white flank. And the sea still moved backward along its waterline. Everything was still silence.

Far off, the great blue continent still stood. Uninhabited. Green with the silent, unpeopled forests and soft grasses. The breakers clashing on the white, unpeopled sands. And the silence of home.

B
OBBY
P
RELL HEARD ABOUT
it at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City. Strange called him there long distance to tell him.

Prell was on his first bonds-selling tour, and in fact the call took several hours to reach him because he was out and running around. It was their first day in Kansas City, and the first day was always spent running around. Setting things up. “Working,” was what the people in the tour staff called it. Though Prell found it hard to think of what he was doing as work. He was also doing some real running around on his own, with some of the tour staff, chasing women. Something the tour staff boys apparently always did in every city. When he got back to the hotel after an all-day, eight-hour absence, it was to find six little white call slips waiting for him. That someone from Camp O’Bruyerre had been calling. A Sgt Strange.

All that seemed so far away. Prell had difficulty recalling who the caller was. If the slips had said Kilrainey General and Delia Mae, or Luxor where Delia Mae’s mama had moved in the past month, the call would have meant something was wrong with her damned pregnancy probably. But not Strange, from O’Bruyerre. Strange had only been at O’Bruyerre now for a month. Prell could not imagine why Strange would be calling him.

Prell was supposed to go out with a couple of the “crew” and the “producer” of the “show,” Jerry Kurntz, for drinks and dinner that night. They were meeting some of the women, or “broads,” they had collected like a comet’s tail during the course of the day and the day’s meetings. The tour staff were all Hollywood “types,” and Prell was learning a whole new “show-biz” vocabulary from them. But in the big, old lobby with the six call slips from the desk clerk in his hand, Prell begged off. He would take a rest in his room, and eat there, and find out what this phone call was and maybe he might meet up with them later. He had no idea what could be so important that Strange would telephone him. And no idea how soon the call might come.

“Okay. But listen, kid,” Jerry Kurntz said. “You’re missing a big opportunity. I aint never seen a bunch of broads as ripe as this one. And aint you the star of our show? Without you we won’t any of us stand as good a chance.”

Kurntz was a college graduate who was not only not ashamed of using
aint.
He was proud of using it, and other bad grammar. Something else that was new to Prell.

“My legs are tired,” Prell said, and made his eyes go flat. All of them knew how he disliked referring to his legs.

“Oh, fine, fine,” Kurntz said quickly. “You go on and rest, then. The legs are more important.” The group broke up quickly, to go to their own rooms.

Prell had learned there were two things they were afraid of. They were afraid because he had killed people, and nearly been killed himself. They thought that somehow made him different. And they were afraid because he came from the West Virginia coal country. And knew how to make his eyes go flat.