Whistle (30 page)

For now, men sat around uncomfortably on the comfortable sofas, and stared off at the high windows screened on the inside to keep the basketballs from hitting them.

Thinking about cunt, probably. A few bathrobed men played checkers on the low tables. Two pairs of intellectuals engaged in chess games. In a far corner a volunteer worker in her sexless, motherly Gray Lady outfit conducted a listless class in basket weaving. As he was about to go out, Carol came up to him with a Ping-Pong ball and two paddles.

“How about a game with me, Sergeant?”

She was smiling. The sheer beauty of just her youth alone was an insult, like a slap in the face. In addition she was quite beautiful in herself, in a nonmovie star way. But had anybody ever been that young, ever? Winch wondered. Had he? There was a certain coquettishness in her eyes and in her attitude that was very Southern.

Winch had to hold himself tightly, not to respond with a cocky male truculence.

He heard his own voice saying, “Sure. Okay. Why not?”

There were a number of things Winch had done well in his career, as Landers ruefully found out when in a moment of misbegotten intellectual superiority he’d challenged Winch to a game of chess. In addition to football, basketball, springboard diving, track, checkers, and chess there was Ping-Pong. At Forts Bliss and Houston he had been one of the Army’s top players in the late nineteen thirties.

He took off his maroon issue bathrobe and duck slippers and played her barefoot in his gray issue pajamas. He was able to play her three games before he had to quit. His heart was pounding unbelievably but the unaccustomed exercise made him feel good. He beat her 21—12, 21—17, 21—18. She was a good player, and obviously had slyly believed she would beat him.

“You’re really a fine player,” she said, laughing breathlessly. Her pale, black-Irish complexion was flushed and rosy under the raven black hair framing her forehead. “Don’t you want to play a few more?”

“No,” Winch said. He was trying to hide his own breathlessness. “You better practice up with somebody your own class, before you try me again.”

“Oh!” But she laughed. Winch wanted mostly to sit down someplace for a few minutes, but would not let himself. Instead, he put back on his maroon issue bathrobe and duck slippers. He walked over with her while she put away the paddles and the ball.

When he asked her to have dinner with him that night, she accepted almost before he could get the words out of his mouth.

He wanted her to meet him in the bar lounge of the Claridge Hotel. He thought that would be better than the bar at the Peabody. But she was hardly inside and seated before it was plain she did not like being in the place.

“I haven’t been in this place since my high school senior prom,” she said nervously.

“And is that such a long time ago?”

“Three and a half years.” She paused a moment. “Actually, it’s not that long. I’ve been here since then. But I haven’t been here since the war, and all the servicemen descended on Luxor.”

“I don’t know any bar to take you where there aren’t servicemen,” Winch said.

“There are a few,” she said. She looked around the place again.

“You find this place too low-brow for you, now?”

“No. But on the other hand it’s not the real Luxor any more, either.” She hunched her shoulders and then pulled them back down, skittishly. “I don’t like the way they look at me when they’ve been drinking. Out at the hospital it’s a different thing.”

When they got around to discussing where to go for dinner, over their drinks from Winch’s brown-sacked bottle, she suggested a place she knew: Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room. There wouldn’t be servicemen there. Winch didn’t know it was the same place she had suggested to Landers. But Winch vetoed it immediately, anyway.

“Let’s get something straight. If I’m going to be taking you around to places, I’m not going to take you to places where you’re well known. Your own local places. I’m going to take you places where you’re not known. My places.”

Carol smiled. “Is that an order, sir?”

“Call it that.”

“You’re ashamed to be seen with me? Is that it?”

“No. Certainly not. I’m thrilled and delighted,” Winch said. “Let’s just say I don’t want people you know in Luxor to think you’re robbing the cradle.”

She laughed at that. “Yes. You’re some cradle rider.”

Winch grinned, briefly. “I might be able to show you some places in your city you didn’t even know existed.”

“I’ll bet you could,” she said. “But I’m not sure I want to see them.”

For the dinner he took her to the Plantation Roof of the Peabody. She hadn’t been there in a long time, either. But after a little while she seemed to like it.

“It’s certainly got energy,” she smiled, looking around. “I didn’t know there were that many servicemen
in
Luxor.”

Winch suddenly noticed she was not wearing her glasses. Her irises were dark, almost black. Her one sometimes uncontrollable eye was more prominent without them, and kept looking at him briefly and then looking guiltily away while the good eye went on smiling at him coquettishly. It was enormously sexually exciting somehow.

“Booze,” he said grimly. “It’s the energy of the doomed. Most of these people will be shipping out of here soon. Either east or west,”

“Please. Let’s don’t talk about that.” Her brother, her younger brother, Winch now found out, was a fighter pilot in Florida, finishing up his training before heading for Europe. That was why she was home from college this year.

She was a good ballroom dancer, it turned out, light and supple and easy to lead. Winch paced himself carefully, sitting out as many dances as they danced so he would not get out of breath.

“Why are you in the hospital?” she asked when they were sitting out some dances. “What did they send you back to America for?”

Looking at him with that one unmanageable eye, she reached out a youth-smooth hand and placed it over his calloused one on the table.

Winch had been anticipating this question, and wondering how he could handle it. He could not bring himself to tell her he had heart trouble.

“Dengue fever and malaria,” he said, promptly and laconically.

“Is that enough to get sent home for?”

“It is if it’s bad enough.”

“And now you’re getting over it?”

“Just about.”

“Is that why you don’t drink?” She had had two whiskeys out of the bottle on the table. “I didn’t know drinking was bad for malaria.”

Winch shrugged. He wanted badly to change the subject. “They told me not to,” he said shortly.

“And soon you’ll be going away again. Off somewhere.”

“Probably,” Winch lied. “Actually,” he added, “I may be stationed here for a while. In Second Army.”

“That would be great,” Carol smiled.

“Let’s dance awhile,” he said.

It had been so long since any sexual desires had moved him. Not since Frisco. They said the digitalis and the diuretics caused that. Holding her against him dancing, her breasts lying heavy against the chest of his shirtfront, he felt no sexual stirrings. That didn’t bother him. It wasn’t sex he was after with her. It was that incredible, unbelievable youth. It stung him, like some furious insect.

When he took her home to her parents’ house on the big, tall tree shaded avenue, he did not attempt to kiss her and told the taxi to wait as they got out.

“Let him go,” she said. “Don’t you want to come in for a while?”

Winch shook his head. “I’m too old to go around necking with girls on the sofas of their mamas’ parlors,” he said as they walked up the walk.

“Oh, there might be more to it than that,” Carol smiled promptly.

“Not on any living room sofas, with papa and mama upstairs,” Winch said. “Not for me. But next time I take you out I can have a place to take you. If you want.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No threat,” he said. “A promise.”

They were at the door and instead of answering she put back her head, closed her eyes, and pushed out her lips for him to kiss her. Winch waited, deliberately, until she opened her eyes looking startled, before he leaned forward and put his lips on hers. When he did, she immediately popped her tongue into his mouth and rubbed it around hard all over the inside of his mouth in a mechanical way.

“When?” she said, when their mouths parted.

“How about tomorrow night?” Winch said, and when she nodded, added coldly, “First thing, I’m going to have to teach you how to kiss.” Before she could answer that, he was on his way down the walk to the cab.

He sat quietly on the ride back. He was feeling the first sexual stirrings he had felt since the heart failure attack in Letterman and old, what was her name? Arlette. Carol pretty clearly didn’t know any but the most obvious things about sex and it could be great sport to teach her. In his khakis which he never wore underwear with he could feel his cock crawling and extending itself a little, tentatively. His breathing deepened. He sat quietly in the cab and savored the sensations all the way back to the hospital, watching out the window the rich, well-off lawns and trees and avenues and then the poorer places and suburban juke joints of Luxor’s Southern city landscape.

It was easy enough to arrange for a room at the Claridge. Jack Alexander kept two rooms there for players to rest or sleep or drink in, as well as the suite in which he ran the big-time, high-stakes poker game for the big winners of the Army’s monthly payroll. Alexander called the Claridge for him. Jack made sure the room was on another floor from the one his game was on.

“You knew exactly how to handle me, didn’t you?” Carol said with a triumphant little smile, when he took her there after another dinner at the Peabody’s Plantation Roof. “I’ll bet you’ve done that many times before, with women.”

Winch sensed she wanted him to grin. So he did, briefly. “If you want to know the real truth,” he smiled, “I’m just too old to fart around any more.”

“You intrigued me. You said you’d teach me how to kiss. I thought I knew how.”

“Well, you don’t,” he grinned. “The first thing to remember is never to use heavy pressure. And never be mechanical, never keep repeating the same movement. The whole art of sex is to tease just ever so slightly. That way you want more. And more. Come here. But first, let me show you how I undress you.”

The covered parts of her were as deliciously, unbelievably youthful as the uncovered parts. There wasn’t an excess ounce of fat on her. With that black, black hair and pale, pale skin of the black Irish she had a thick black luxurious bush against her white belly. She played a lot of tennis and golf, she said. Her father was a big-time lawyer in Luxor, she told him.

“How old did you say you were?”

“I’m uh twenty-two.” The slight hesitation betrayed her. “I will be. Soon.”

“How soon?”

“In seven months.” She blushed.

“I’m old enough to be your father.”

“I think of you as something else. You make me think of a smart, tough, wise, old elephant, who’s been roaming his forests forever,” she whispered.

“I do, hunh?” Winch said.

She did not seem to mind at all that he was extraordinarily slow in achieving an erection.

“I don’t know why I’m drawn to you so, the way I am.” Holding his head against her, she added in a breathy voice, “I’ll have to go home later, you know. I can’t stay out all night.”

He found, as he had suspected, that she knew very little about sex at all. He was sure she had not, for example, ever had anyone go down on her before. But he decided that that could wait for some future session.

“Do you think I’m attractive?” she whispered as he raised himself over her to enter her, and stretched out her long-waisted, long-legged pale black-Irish body for him on the bed.

“Yes.” Winch didn’t feel it necessary to elaborate. In any case Winch was discovering for the first time in his life, to his surprise and disbelief, fatigue in sex. As he worked on her carefully in the bed. He had always been in good enough shape, before, that he had never had to worry about becoming tired. Now was different.

“Oh. Oh. It was never like this.” She whispered it with her eyes closed. How many women had said that line to how many new men? Winch wondered. To each new man. He had never been much at long-dicking them but he knew he had a more than usual circumference.

While they were lying side by side afterward, after he had come, though he was sure she hadn’t, Carol said, “What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us?”

Winch thought that that, to say the least, was a little bit premature. “Well, for one thing, we can have a hell of a great time together for a while,” he said softly.

But after two weeks of her he found he too was beginning to think distastefully about his having to move out to Camp O’Bruyerre and Second Army some time soon. It was only thirty miles from Luxor but that thirty miles meant he would not find it that easy to meet her in town every night.

But by that time Johnny Stranger was back from Cincinnati and Winch knew about his old mess/sgt that, some way or other, Johnny Stranger had seen the shit hit the fan.

W
HEN HE LEFT
L
UXOR
for Cincinnati with his two three-day passes in his pocket, Strange was so used to the long crowded bus trip by now, had done it so many times, that he about had it memorized and hardly bothered to look out.

He had hoped to doze but in the moving vehicle full of breathing bodies it was impossible to sleep. The air of the big bus was clogged with exhaled body moisture, and a kind of perpetual murmur. Strange sucked at a pint bottle of whiskey he had bought for the trip, stretched in the cramped seat, and let his mind run over the story and catastrophe of Billy Spencer. His mind had been wanting to do that since the day Billy had first shown up. Strange had known he would have to come to grips with it eventually.

The arrival of Billy at Kilrainey had been as much a torture for Strange as it was for Winch. It was perhaps even worse for Strange, because Strange could not come to terms with it in the way Winch apparently had. Billy Spencer was the first so-called basket case the company had had. And while everybody understood theoretically that such things could happen, nobody really believed it would happen to him. And nobody ever really believed it would happen to anyone in their company. They had all heard of them in other companies.