Whistle (17 page)

Deeply troubled and humiliated, Strange lay awake beside her, and wondered fearfully what was happening to him. He had dreamed of this moment so long, and so many times, it seemed absolutely unbelievable that he would not be able to perform. When he thought of all the times, and of all the places—the slit trenches, the bomb hole shelters, the kitchen fly, out in the edge of the woods behind the encampment—that he had tossed himself off and dreamed of this moment, it was not possible that he could have failed to perform.

There were plenty of excuses. It was true she had not helped him any, but then she never had. He had always been the one to start things. Which was the way it ought to be. Only once or twice had she ever asked him to make love to her, in their whole married life. She had never been that passionate.

It was also true that the kid brother was asleep just beyond the thin wall in the next room. And that the parents were asleep in the room on the other side. But that would never have bothered Strange before. Something had happened right in the middle of it, all the excitement had gone away, and he found he was bored.

Lying in the bed, red with the humiliation, he squirmed under the covers. And thought of himself at the last of the company’s Guadalcanal bivouacs, standing just inside the edge of the jungle, peering out through the screen of leaves at the sleeping tents in the moonlight, his throbbing cock in his hand, fantasizing this night with Linda Sue hot and all over him, clawing his back, shoving it up to him, groaning and gasping with her long-suppressed desires. That was not the way it had ever happened with them, but that was the way he always fantasized it. And under the covers he felt his hard-on coming back. Looking down from the pillow, he could see it slowly thrusting up the covers between his legs.

After a minute, Strange threw off the covers and grabbing a towel padded down the hall to the bathroom and locked the door and tossed himself off in the bathroom sink, fantasizing himself out there in the fantastic night jungle. After he orgasmed he cleaned it all up neatly, feeling weird, and disturbed. When he climbed back into bed, he found himself almost hating his wife for her closed-in lack of passion. He had never been able to draw her out of it. He was furiously angry with her. And he had to keep telling himself it wasn’t her fault. But what had happened to him in eighteen months away, out there?

The second night was a great deal better. But then he had spent most of the day over in Cincinnati drinking beer. So he was a lot more aggressive, and less apologetic. For that matter, with all the men around the house, there was a great deal of beer always there, too. He drank a lot of that also. There was very little else for him to do, with her at work all day. Over in Cincinnati, it was as wild and high-living and open as it apparently also was in Luxor. Servicemen with money were everywhere, and a uniform—any uniform—was a ticket into the best hotel bars and the ritziest places. You didn’t have to be an officer. Everybody loved you. Or said they did, as they took your money.

That night when they went to bed, he was conscious of how beery his breath smelled, but he didn’t give a damn. And Linda Sue did not complain. Half drunk and with more than enough aggressiveness now, he thought suddenly that his wife smelled funny. It was as if he could smell another man on her. When he sniffed her breasts, her skin, he of course couldn’t. But it made him uneasy. Anyhow, he performed. After that, he tried several times to get her to go out with him in the night, at least to a movie. She was always too tired, always said she had to get up too early to get to work. Her job seemed to have become an obsession.

They did talk some about their savings. Or rather Strange did. Linda seemed strangely passive about it. She no longer seemed so passionately desirous of a restaurant. When he suggested, just to see how she would react, that they should maybe put it all in with the family pool and go in with them on the farm, she only smiled at him, sweetly, a little sadly, and said that if that was what he wanted, it would be fine with her.

In the end he left four days early. He had never told them exactly how many days he had, that he had exactly two weeks. It was easy enough to tell them he had only ten days, and Strange could not stand the house any longer, with its constant comings and goings and the smells and agitation of meals always in preparation.

The four extra days he spent in downtown Luxor. He discovered a nonstop poker game in a third floor room at the ritzy Claridge Hotel on North Main Street, where he got himself a room and picked up four hundred dollars in the game. He spent almost all of it, drinking and running around, either at the Claridge bar or at another hotel, the Peabody, on Union Street. He avoided picking up any women, although it would have been easy. But he felt he owed it to Linda not to.

On the last day, at the very last minute, he reported back to Kilrainey General to find out what Col Curran was going to decide about his hand. And whether that Major Hogan had been able to cook up some bad news for him.

He did not feel he had been home at all.

L
ANDERS HAD HAD FOURTEEN
days in which to start getting along without his new buddy Strange. In civilian life or at college, he might have sat in his room brooding and deteriorating and forgotten. That wasn’t possible in the hospital. But he remembered their hours in the train car, and the uproarious semidrunken conversations, with a kind of grinding hunger.

When he finally did run into Strange, in the corridor outside the big recreation center, Strange acted as though nothing had happened, that there was no special bond between them, and seemed preoccupied.

As so often happened in Landers’ life, he appeared to take his relationships with people much more seriously than they ever did.

In the meantime, during Strange’s absence Landers had had his cast removed and a new one fitted. He had explored and gotten somewhat to know the huge labyrinth that was the hospital. He had had his first pass into Luxor and gotten himself laid—still with his cast on. And he had fallen in love—or fallen halfway in love. The girl he had fallen for was the dark, superb-legged, college-student volunteer Red Cross girl who handed out the games equipment in the recreation center. But it appeared he was not alone in this.

The removal of his cast was a near trauma. By luck he too had drawn young Col Curran. Curran, after studying his X-rays, decreed the removal of the old cast so he could get a look at the ankle, and the refitting of a new one. Landers had hobbled on his crutches with an orderly along the covered walkways to the orthopedics lab with its collection of huge scissors, big rolls of gauze and buckets of plaster of Paris. Since the first cast had been put on right after the operation while Landers was still under the anesthetic, Landers had never seen the ankle. When the lab orderly cut down through the length of plaster and the elastic stocking underneath with the big shears, and then cracked it open and worked it off, the sight that met Landers’ eyes was about the most horrible he had ever seen.

The smell of it and the look of it together were enough to stultify Landers. The purplish foot had whole pieces of gray skin pulling away. The skin of the calf was scabby and flaking. The muscle of the leg had just disappeared, it was nothing but a stark shin bone covered with hanging skin. Near the end of this, attached to the bony clawlike foot, the ankle was a swollen red blob of contused bone. Landers was reduced to dumb shock. This was his own leg. It felt dangerously exposed and feeble, out of the plaster. Try as he would, he could not move it, at all. In any direction. He felt fragmented.

The lab orderly had apparently seen worse. So apparently had Curran, who came in a few minutes later, whistling softly to himself some unrecognizable tune. He picked it up, moved it a little this way and that while Landers inhaled sharply, put it down and said, “Well, you’ve got yourself an excellent job here.” His happily cheerful mood was not at all in conjunction with Landers’ mood. “Who was the surgeon?” he asked. Landers told him the major’s name. Curran shrugged and smiled. “Whoever he is, he’s got damned good hands.” Then he told the lab orderly to wrap it right back up again and then get a new set of X-rays. This time, he told Landers, they would give him a walking iron. So he could get off the crutches. Then he left.

It was a great relief to feel the new cast go back on over the fragile, feeble member. Not only did it beg for the protective cocoon but he no longer had to look at it. The poor damned battered thing. The lab orderly chewed gum and had a way of cracking his gum with his back teeth while he worked. The wet plaster of Paris heated the leg uncomfortably as it set. The orderly explained that the walking iron he had worked into the cast could not be used until the plaster had set for twenty-four hours. So Landers would have to keep the crutches at least another day.

Landers was glad. He was so unstrung by the whole cast-changing operation that the crutches seemed like trusted old friends. He was so shaken that he was not sure he could make it back to the ward by himself. The lab orderly had anticipated this. They were often like that, the first time they saw them, he said. He had already called for an orderly to go with Landers. Back on the ward Landers lay down awhile, then gathered all his resources to make himself get up and go ask the ward nurse if he could not keep the crutches even longer. When Curran came through a little later, to look at some other patients, he heard the request, looked at Landers with narrowed thoughtful eyes, and okayed it. But only for three more days, he said; then Landers would have to start using the leg. Landers immediately became another of the partisans who adored Col Curran. But the next day, when Maj Hogan came through the ward checking new developments, he looked at Landers’ chart hanging on the bed foot and ordered the crutches removed. It was only when Landers protested vigorously, and was backed up by the nurse, that he relented and left the ward furious over Curran’s softness.

So it was still with his crutches that Landers made his first overnight pass into town. But he, too, knew he had made an enemy.

The pass was an automatic development, once he was all through with his surgical check-out. It was signed by Curran, but was okayed by Hogan. According to Curran, all Landers had to do was wait now, for the leg to heal. There might be a month, or six weeks, in the cast. Curran thought he would have very nearly full articulation in the ankle. And if it was the least little bit stiff, it would nonetheless be absolutely solid. In the meantime Landers would not even have to be at the hospital, except to be present for morning rounds at ten. When he had an overnight pass, he did not even have to do that. After the cast came off, he would have to start the therapy that would bring the leg back to normal shape. So, Curran grinned, he had at least three months to do almost nothing but play. “And Luxor is a great town to play in,” he said.

This last was certainly true. All the same, Landers was of two minds about his pass. Col Curran’s happy, hopeful prognosis for his leg was the basic cause of this. Even during the worst moments, when he had first looked at the fragile battered mess of his leg, a part of Landers’ mind hidden away far at the back was saying with sly cunning,
Christ! if it’s this bad, they’ll never he able to send me back to duty! they’ll have to discharge me!
He remembered the conversation with Strange in which Strange had suggested hopefully that perhaps he would be permanently disabled. Now, Curran’s sanguine prognosis seemed to preclude that. So with the pass in his pocket, he swung out the big main door on his crutches to the cab rank outside to go to town with mixed feelings about all of it. About everything. There was a kind of wild rage in him, and half of him hated himself for the way his mind calculated.

As far as Landers was concerned, there were only two places to go in Luxor. In the few days he had been loose out in the hospital proper, he had already spent enough time in the snack bar with the six or eight other members left of the old company to have learned that. One was the Claridge Hotel on North Main Street, and the other was the Hotel Peabody on Union Avenue.

In the several days he had spent around the other members of the old company, drinking coffee or milkshakes in the snack bar, or loafing in the big recreation center, Landers had discovered what it was that had made the others all look so different when he first had seen them. So much like strangers whom he did not know that he hadn’t recognized them. It was that they had all lost their sense of shock. All of them who were still here had been wounded back on Guadalcanal seven or eight months ago. They had never even seen New Georgia. And the peculiar numbness of soul that combat caused in everybody (which could be multiplied a hundred or a thousand times by being seriously wounded; and which carried with it its own kind of disclaiming innocence of new experience) had departed from them in the ensuing months at home. He and Strange and Prell hadn’t lost theirs yet. And that was why he hadn’t recognized them. They weren’t shocked any more, and they weren’t innocent any more. All that had been burned off. And in being burned off had left behind a kind of ashy residue on them that carried the sour, bitter, acid smell of furnace cinders. The kind his father used to call clinkers, and which as a boy it was one of his chores to shovel out of the furnace bottom during the long Indiana winters and carry outside and dump on the trash heap. The experience of recovering from being wounded had scorched out of them whatever innocence the experience of being wounded had given them.

Those that were going to be discharged were already discharged and gone (the lucky—or unlucky—bastards). Those that were left were all going back to duty, full infantry duty or some other. And they all knew it. And it showed on their faces. They were the ones who knew where to find the most whiskey, and the cheapest. Where to find the easiest and best girls, and the least expensive. Even freebies, if you were lucky. They were the ones who, with caustic grins, told Landers to go to the Claridge or the Peabody bar—if he had money. If you had money, those were the places to be.