Whistle (19 page)

It was ten o’clock and he had an hour and a half to kill before he should start back to the hospital. He couldn’t think of anyplace better to spend it than to spend it here, thinking over last night. He double-locked the door with the chain, and went in the bathroom and had a shower and shaved with the lieutenant commander’s wet razor. He was sure the lieutenant commander wouldn’t mind. Then he came back out and made another bourbon and water.

But after a while alone in the room, the bone-white loneliness was stronger than ever. And with it came the sense of guilt, and the wild rage. He felt he had not earned all this. But at the same time, he did not want to go back. He dressed and left and went down to the bar to drink. But before he did, he went to the state package store off the lobby and bought three bottles of bourbon and left them and the key with the Negro bell captain. He gave the bell captain his name.

When he showed up at the hospital snack bar in his official uniform of bathrobe and pajamas, after reporting back in, he found that several of the guys from the old company—as well as a number of others—already knew about Martha—Marty. The autographed cast was impossible to hide. The leg of the pajamas had had to be split too, and the red of the lipstick showed up brightly. She had done the same thing to Corello’s cast, when he first arrived.

“She’s a great blow job.” Corello, the Wop from McMinnville, grinned. “Did she try to get you to eat her pussy?” A couple of the others who knew her laughed.

“Any broad’d ask me that I’d break her goddamn jaw,” Alvin Drake the tall boy from Alabama growled.

Landers looked at all their faces, and lied. “No. She didn’t. Why?”

Corello hooted, and then laughed. “She asks everybody. Or nearly everybody. But nobody admits they did.
I
certainly didn’t.”

“Well, she didn’t ask me,” Landers said. All of the others laughed.

“You’re the only one,” Corello grinned. “She’s a great blow job, all the same.”

They knew everything about her. It was true that she came from Montgomery. It was not true that her fiancé had been shot down in Africa. She didn’t have a fiancé. And never had had. One of the men who was not from the company was from Montgomery, and knew her and her family. It was an excellent family, apparently. Apparently she never went with the same man twice. And she apparently picked her men carefully. She had never tried to pick up Drake, for example.

“And she better never,” Drake snarled with an evil grin. “I can’t stand cunts like that. She’s a fucking pervert.”

When he could get away from them, Landers went into the big recreation center and flung himself down on an overstuffed couch to think about it. He had already noted that his night with Marty had made him even lonelier than before. All this other added on top of it made it even worse. Their coarseness made him sick.

The recreation center had been built as a basketball court and gym, with a theater stage at one end. When there were no basketball games, the demountable bleachers were taken down and furniture was strewn all around. Every night the folding chairs were put up on the court for a movie. After a while Landers got up from the couch and went over to talk to the pretty Red Cross girl in her cubbyhole with the Ping-Pong paddles and athletic equipment. Maybe it was at just that moment that he fell in love with her—or fell halfway in love with her.

Her name was Carol Ann Firebaugh. She was a Luxor girl, and was going to Western Reserve in Cleveland, where she was studying acting. In the summer she was a volunteer Gray Lady for Red Cross. And she had one eye, her right, which every now and then did not track quite straight. This coupled with her long, clean-lined legs gave her a sexual attractiveness that was almost insupportable. A great many of the other patients had noted her, too, but she liked Landers because he had gone three and a half years to Indiana at Bloomington.

Landers had been talking to her ever since he was let out into the hospital proper off his ward. Now he began to importune her steadily and stubbornly for several days until finally—on the same day when he first saw Strange after his return from furlough—she agreed to have a date with him outside.

Strange, when Landers saw him, was on his way to visit Prell.

F
OR THE FIRST FOUR
days after his arrival Prell had done very little but sleep. Flat on his back and all trussed up again, there wasn’t that much he could do. And he was totally exhausted, physically and morally. In his little shaving mirror, the fragile, purple skin under his eyes seemed to have shrunk even farther back into his head. Occasionally he would wake up and drink some water or some soup. Kilrainey was well equipped for that kind of around-the-clock care. And fortunately, Prell had a night ward boy who worried about his charges. Also—somehow or other—the gossip that he was a potential Medal of Honor winner had preceded him, or at least come right along with him, and everybody on his ward including the nurse took a special interest in him.

Unfortunately Prell had not had such good luck in drawing a surgeon. Instead of the much-liked Curran, he had drawn the other chief surgeon, Colonel Baker. Prell’s troubles and his problems started there. And they started right away. As soon as Prell began to come around and be interested in things, he became aware of it. There was a sort of vibrant whisper about him everywhere around him on the ward that he could never quite come face to face with. Wherever he turned his head the whisper would cease there, and seemed to begin somewhere else behind him.

Col Baker was a tall spare older man, with gray-white grizzled hair, piercing eyes, and a seamed pouchy face that bespoke an irascible temper. It was reputed that he had been one of the two or three best orthopedic surgeons in America, just before the war. Baker looked like one of those men whose short temper was due to the shortness of time, and who could not be bothered to fool around with your sentiments and emotions if he was going to get your bones patched up, put back together and healed. In policy, he was much closer to the attitude of the administrator, Maj Hogan, which was to stick them back together and get them the hell out, willy-nilly—either back to duty if possible, or if not, then discharged and back to the farm—but get them out and open up the beds and make room for all the myriad others who, inevitably, would be coming along now with each new attack, each new offensive as the US began to move. Apparently, even at the first surgical conference on Prell, he had decided that the only thing to do with Prell was to amputate his right leg, which was not healing, and get him out of there and open up another bed.

Prell, who had been knocked out and only semiconscious at his first surgical conference, became aware of all this at the second conference, which was on his ninth day on the ward. Then he realized what the whisper about him on the ward was all about. But he had half suspected it already. He lay in the bed and watched and listened as the three officer doctors, Baker, Curran and Hogan, hovered over by the nurse, ward intern and enlisted ward boy, discussed his right leg as if it were some abstract problem in a chess game.

“I won’t give permission,” Prell said wearily when Baker put it up to him. It seemed to him he had been saying that same line all his life.

“We can do it anyway,” Baker said. “Without. If we decide it is to save your life, or is in your best interest.”

“Then I’ll sue the Army,” Prell said weakly. “I’ll sue the government. For every cent I can squeeze them for. And I’ll name you. For malfeasance.”

“A guardhouse lawyer,” Baker growled.

Prell nodded. “Yes, sir. When it’s my leg.” He had listened to them discussing it. He understood the mechanics. Because the splintered bone was at midthigh, it would mean sawing it off right up at the hip, so that there would be enough flesh left to make the protective flap to fold over. It made his spine go chilly.

“I don’t think you understand,” Baker said.

“I understand,” Prell said. “It’s my leg.”

Baker bulled right on. “The problem is your right leg is not healing. There is no infection—no serious infection—up to now. But we are keeping you pumped full of sulfa. To avoid that. But you can’t go on taking sulfa forever. In the meantime, you are getting weaker and weaker, slowly. If you do infect, you’re probably going to be dead. Do you understand that, soldier?”

Hogan was bobbing his head and grumbling his assent. Curran was looking off in the distance and doing and saying nothing. The nurse and intern and ward boy were all watching, their three sets of eyes like six vacuum cleaner nozzles sucking everything in.

Prell nodded. “I understand. The answer’s still no. Better dead than no leg.”

Baker’s eyebrows arched and his eyes narrowed. “I already told you we can do it without consent,” he said sharply. “It will take me a little longer that way, that’s all. I’ll have to send in a report and get clearance.” He peered at Prell, “Do you realize you are taking up attention and time and space that might save some other soldier’s life?”

“I don’t honestly give a shit about some other soldier’s life, sir,” Prell said. What a question to ask some man about to lose his leg. He noticed Curran had made a little movement, twisted his torso as if in protest.

The long-limbed Baker slapped both his big hands down on his knees. “Well, it is my professional opinion that we are going to have to take off that right leg of yours.” He got up. He looked at the other two doctors. “Unless there is some dissenting opinion with my colleagues here.” Hogan, already standing, shook his head vigorously no, and scowled. Curran, still seated, with an almost imperceptible movement, shook his head no, also.

Prell, looking at the three of them, could feel his heart beating in him with a slow, heavy ominous beat that was both exciting and doom-filled. It was exactly the way he had used to feel sometimes before an attack. And for a split moment he almost gave up and agreed. He had been fighting and fighting it until he had nothing left to fight with. Instead, he just looked at them and kept his mouth shut as, slowly, Curran got up too and they left. The worst thing was this awful feeling of being completely in their hands and totally helpless. There was absolutely nothing more he could do. Except maybe scream. He tried to get a hold on himself. But he was still so worn out, from the trip and all the rest of it, that after a few minutes, although his heart was still beating heavily, he turned his head to one side and went to sleep.

Hell, maybe the fucking doctors were right.

His last waking thought was that he must get hold of Johnny Stranger, or some of the others from the company, and tell them. Maybe—just maybe—there was something they could do. Then as he dropped off he remembered that Corello had told him Strange was on convalescent furlough, and that was why he hadn’t been by to see him.

That was the way it hung for another week. Col Baker—or more often, Maj Hogan—would come by and read his charts and glower and shake his head. The right leg was not healing. Even the left was slow. On one of these visits Baker told him he had sent in the report and made the request to amputate. It didn’t seem to upset Baker much. Prell wanted to spit at him, or curse him, but he had neither the heart nor the will, nor the energy.

For one second Prell thought of telling him of his intention to shoot himself and knock himself off if he lost a leg, but then he didn’t. To do that would only bring a psychiatrist into it. And maybe get him put away in a lockup ward.

After a week of this anguish—on the same day, in fact, that Strange got back and came to see him—Prell had a surprise visit from the chief hospital administrator himself, a full bird colonel. The two surgeons were light colonels.

It was the first time within the memory of anyone on the ward that the chief administrator had visited a patient. In fact, it was the first time anyone, including the nurse and intern, had seen the chief administrator. Col Stevens was an elderly man and a West Pointer, with white hair, handsome features and a quiet manner. Prell knew when he saw him that screaming and threatening were not going to be any good, and that he’d have to try for something else. Rumor had it that Stevens was on the next promotions list to make brigadier. He sat by Prell’s bed for half an hour and talked to him in a kindly way. The upshot of his conversation was whether Prell was still adamant about refusing permission to amputate. Prell said that he was. Col Stevens said this posed a serious problem, not only for the hospital administration but for Prell himself. Prell was in danger. Col Baker had sent in a report that it was necessary to amputate Prell’s right leg in order to save his life. None of the other doctors had dissented. This was going to force a very difficult decision on the hospital administration, which in effect was himself. Col Stevens. Prell said again that he did not want to live without his legs, without
one
leg.

“Sir, it’s not as if this didn’t happen before,” he said. Prell was not at all above using his hollow, harrowed eyes on somebody, if he thought it might help him. “Back up the line they wanted to take off
both
my legs. But I talked them out of it, and I’m still here, and so are the legs. I’m sure that they’ll heal up, sir.”

“That doesn’t appear to be the case,” Stevens said.

“All it needs is a little time, sir.”

“Col Baker doesn’t seem to think so,” Stevens said, and drew a breath and let it out in a sigh. “You’re an old-timer, an old Regular, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I was just winding up my third hitch when the war started,” Prell said.

“Tell me, what would you do with your life?” Stevens said abruptly. “If you had your choice, that is.”

“I’d stay in the Army,” Prell said without hesitation. “Be a thirty-year man.”

“You would?” Stevens rubbed his handsome chin. “Anyway, it’s twenty years, nowadays. Not thirty.”

“I’d stay in thirty, anyway,” Prell said. “If they’d let me.”

“Well, were’s not much chance of that. Not the shape you’re in.”

“No, sir. I guess not. But it’s my dream.”

“You know, it’s written into your dossier that your Division commander recommended you for the Medal of Honor. Did you know that?”