Whistle (34 page)

It was much more difficult to go in a taxi, rather than in the ambulance. In the ambulance they had had the big back door to slide him in, and a cot for him to lie on. Prell discovered this right away, at the front gate, before he even got out of the folding wheelchair Maj Hogan had so reluctantly and ungraciously provided.

Landers and Strange were able to get him out of the chair well enough, but then one of them had to let go of him to fold up the chair. At this point the cab driver, when he saw what was going on, leaped out and came running around the cab, following his paunch like a train following a cow-catcher, to help.

Together, the three of them got him into the front seat beside the meter and got the folded chair into the back beside Landers and Strange. Back behind his steering wheel, sweating and puffing, the driver shook his head. “Jesus! What you guys won’t go through to get drunk and get laid.”

Beside him, Prell was sweating too. But from pain, rather than exertion. He agreed with the driver wholeheartedly. He had no more business here than he had in a pole-vaulting contest, Baker was right. The four extra days of therapy had helped, especially in loosening up his knee joints, but he was in no shape for this. If it had not been for Landers and Strange witnessing it, he would have given up on the spot and asked to be taken back.

All he could do was keep his teeth clenched, and his lips pressed tight together over them. Mainly it was his knees, which were bent and compressed in the short space of the seat-well with its meter, but his thighs ached, too. As if he had been an hour with the therapist. He noted the driver giving him uneasy looks from time to time, as the cab rolled along through the Luxor streets Prell had never seen before. In the ambulance, the only other time he’d been out, he had been lying flat.

It was fall now in the Southland of Luxor and the big maples were just beginning to turn. In the huge city park men ambled along the fairways of the golf links swinging their clubs, and young people strolled under the big trees. In the poorer Negro sections and poorer white sections men and women sat quietly on the ramshackle porches, or on the grass of their yards. Every house, even the poorest, had trees. At one spot they passed a high school football field surrounded by trees. On it boys in uniforms scrimmaged and bawled at each other and threw forward passes or punted the ball.

Prell tried to smile with his clenched teeth at the driver. “Hurtin’ you, hunh?” the driver said, and reached down under the seat and brought up a pint bottle of whiskey. “Here.” Prell risked relaxing one of his fists which were pressed down into the seat on both sides of his buttocks for support and took a slug of the raw whiskey that burned his nose and throat and made his eyes water but felt marvelous. He was afraid of the whole thing turning into some kind of nightmare.

He had one more bad moment getting out of the taxi, and another in the elevator. The elevator came the nearest to becoming the nightmare. It was small, and slow, and they had to drop the chair’s leg supports in order to close the door. There was only room for himself and the black elevator man. By the time they reached the eighth floor Prell’s bent knees seemed to have been in the closed space for a century.

But once out of the elevator the painful parts ended. He waited in the hall with the leg rests up again until the others came up behind him. Slowly the pain subsided. A couple of drunk soldiers and their girls wandered along and said hello and offered a drink. When the other two came out of the elevator they all went in together.

In the suite the party was already going full Hast. Though it was only two-thirty in the afternoon. Strange had given Corello a key to come on ahead with the other guys from the company.

Winch was not there. Prell immediately looked all around for him. Later on Winch did come in apparently without Prell seeing him and stationed himself quietly in a corner with, peculiarly, a glass of water. But he did not stay long, and Prell did not see him leave.

Landers had asked his Navy flyer friends and their gang from the floor below and immediately Prell was in the room Jan Mitchell, the lt cmdr, started a roaring chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and the other flyers joined him and finally, in a more embarrassed way, the men from the old company joined in. When the song finished, Mitchell raised his arms for quiet and raised his glass toward Prell in a toast.

“To the only Medal of Honor winner I have ever had the honor of getting drunk with.” “Hear, hear!” cried several of the flyers.

Suavely Prell shook hands with all of them, and accepted the first drink that was offered him, something he might not have done a month before.

From Landers he found out that Commander Mitchell held the Navy Cross, won at Guadalcanal.

Prell was about three-quarters drunk when Mitchell began auctioning him off, to the various girls in the suite. Had he not known about the Navy Cross, or had he been cold sober, Prell might have balked. Instead, he went along with it and with Mitchell. Nobody who had won a Navy Cross over Guadalcanal could be all bad.

What he garnered by keeping his mouth shut was to find himself in a bedroom with the prettiest girl, getting himself the best blow job he had had since River Street in Honolulu, if not the best he had had ever.

Mitchell hadn’t really auctioned him off. The girls had not been asked to pay for him. But Mitchell had appealed to their patriotism, using just the right amount of appealing grace and a carefully leavened sincerity, in a way that would have made the hardest-hearted hooker jump in with a gratis offer to take Prell to bed. And these girls weren’t hookers. “Here’s a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, girls,” the lt cmdr called, from on top of one of the little cocktail tables, after hollering for silence, “Do you people know what that means? You may never live to meet another one in your whole lives. This is the highest decoration the good old U.S. of A. can bestow upon one of her sons. Can you do less?”

It was a rhetorical question. Warming to his own oratory, Mitchell clapped his hands. “The problem here is that in order to do and complete the mission he was so carefully entrusted with, our new friend was so thoroughly butchered up in his legs by those dirty Japs that, for the moment at least, he is completely incapacitated in a certain delicate but important physiological, muscular way. Let us say the spirit is willing but the flesh of the thighs for the moment is weak. But what he can’t do for himself, just now, can be done for him. In any of a certain number of delicate but immensely laudatory ways. And he is on his first pass in a matter of some seven or eight months. He hasn’t even seen a girl close up in that terrible long length of time. Do I have to say more, ladies?

“Just remember. Probably the only chance any of you will ever have at a Medal of Honor winner.

“NOW. What am I bid for him? Who wants him? First come, first served. In that good old traditional American fashion.”

Mitchell cleverly had made it a joke, and yet, equally cleverly, it wasn’t a joke. Five girls responded. Out of the eleven or twelve. First one, then another, then as the idea became less embarrassing, three others. They pushed their way forward and leaped out into the center of the room, laughing and striking poses. Then two others, emboldened by the five, tried to get into the act but were disallowed by Mitchell. The first five Mitchell decided would have to draw straws. There was a long concerted hunt and confused search for a cleaning broom with straws. This was finally found and brought forward and handed over to Mitchell. The winner was a girl named Ann Waterfield who worked in town, tall, pageboy blonde, stacked, and exceedingly beautiful. Annie had come with one of the Navy flyers, but was not his special girl. Prell suspected Mitchell of having manipulated the broom straws in his favor, but wisely said nothing. Drunk, blushing and embarrassed, and stiff-faced, until Annie rolled his chair away from the others into the bedroom, Prell felt he would owe her a debt for the rest of his natural life.

When they finally came back out, after a long time away there, where under strictest orders nobody was allowed to occupy the secondary bed, and where Annie Waterfield had been so accomplished, tender, and sweet, Annie Waterfield started laughing.

“Y’all been sayin’ this young man hasn’t had a pass for only seven or eight
months?
He acts like he hasn’t had a pass in a year and a
half!
Would you believe three times?”

Three, in the fact of it, was correct. And the second time Annie Waterfield had been able to accomplish something Delia Mae Kinkaid never had done. By rolling him on his side and pushing two pillows against his behind for him to roll back on, and then getting her knees astraddle of him, Annie had been able to get onto her feet and squat slowly down over him and fuck his cock without putting any weight at all on his thighs. Delia Mae Kinkaid had never done that. The position made his legs ache, but it was worth it.

Back out in the crowded, yelling sitting room she did not leave him. She stayed close to him the rest of the evening, always touching him with one hand or the other. This warmed Prell enormously. He certainly hadn’t wanted to let her go. To somebody else.

Delia Mae Kinkaid. Prell had thought about Delia Mae several times. When he was in the bedroom with the highly accomplished Annie Waterfield. He had wished it was Delia Mae doing all these marvelous things to him.

But the main bent of his thoughts about Delia Mae was quite blunt. It was to hell with Delia Mae and let everybody look after himself. All that talk about marriage. That was a lot of shit. Delia Mae was bending his ear.

If Delia Mae wanted to marry, she should find herself some other Medal of Honor winner.

Still, it occurred to him it would be great if, relatively quickly, he could teach her that semigymnast’s trick Annie Waterfield had used on him that second time.

It was while he was sitting in the chair with Annie Waterfield beside him touching his arm that Johnny Stranger came over from somewhere and from slightly behind Prell put his good hand on Prell’s shoulder. Prell turned his head to look up at him and grin. Strange, drunk and red-faced, grinned back down; and then over one drunkenly bulging eye brought down the eyelid with an almost audible click.

“Everything all right?”

“Everything’s great.”

“Good.”

Slowly, swaying ever so slightly, he leaned over till his mouth was almost at Prell’s ear.

“We’re gonna blow every damn nickel of it. Every fucking dime. Nobody’s gonna want for anything, as long as there’s one fucking damn fucking dime of it left.”

Prell felt the pressure from the hand increase on his shoulder as Strange pushed himself back erect. Then he sensed rather than saw, because he couldn’t see that far behind him, that Strange took two paces rearward as the pressure left his shoulder.

When he moved his wheelchair to steal a glance a moment later, Strange was standing there, arms folded, leaning on the point of one shoulder against the wall. The stance was so exactly the same way Prell had seen him stand so many times—leaning against his kitchen wall back in Wahoo; against the tent pole of his kitchen fly on the Canal; against a cocopalm beside his mess tent in New Georgia—that it called up not so much a single memory response as a whole syndrome of memory response.

Right now, the drunken red face was suffused with a peculiar look, both above and below his bulging eyes. It was a look of happiness on the surface. But underneath that butter was something hard and bitter and so flinty it seemed to Prell a bayonet would not have chipped it.

Prell didn’t know what it was. And he didn’t care very much. It seemed to him now that, without realizing it, out of the corners of his eyes, he had been seeing Strange standing in that same position in one part of the room or another all afternoon and evening. Strange had not been off with a single one of the girls, as far as Prell had noted.

Then, while he was thinking this, the heavy hand pressure came on his shoulder and he felt Strange’s mouth come down beside his ear again.

“Did you ever eat a pussy?”

“Well, I—” Prell began, and then stopped, because he realized he was hedging. He did not know what was going on but he knew enough to know that this was not some joke question. The intensity of the voice precluded that. “Hell, yes,” he said, and grinned up into the red face.

“Hell, yes. It’s great. I loved it,” Prell said valiantly. Which was true. Not only with Annie Waterfield, but with a not unworthy number of other girls. But it was not so long ago that he would have refused to admit it to anyone.

The pressure on his shoulder increased again as Strange pushed himself erect once more. When Prell felt he could risk a look, the mess/sgt was standing as before, leaning against the wall. He appeared to be watching what was going on out in the center of the room.

Prell put his own gaze back onto the room. The zany Navy flyer Mitchell was in the middle of pulling off some other kind of a crazy college-boy stunt. Suddenly, without preparation, the old movie roster of Prell’s mud-smeared squad, the dead along with the living, began to parade across behind Prell’s eyes. He had not had the apparition for so long now that its sudden appearance shook him. Slowly, each hollow-eyed face turned back to smile wistfully, sadly, before it moved on and faded. Faded into whatever Godawful night. God, what they wouldn’t all of them have given, Prell thought, just to have been here.

Probably it was the memory syndrome Strange had called up in him which had caused it. The only sane answer to it was to point out forcefully, as forcefully as possible, that he was here and they were not.

On the metal arm of the wheelchair his right hand holding his drink began to tremble, so that the ice in the glass made a faint, constant tinkling. Beside him Annie Waterfield put her own right hand over his and stopped the tinkling, and made a quick motion with her mouth to him that was like a kiss. Prell threw her a wink.

In the cab going back at two in the morning drunk, Prell felt no anguish at all when he was stuffed into the front seat-well, or when he was pulled bodily from it to be stuck back into the unfolded wheelchair by Landers and Strange. The driver of this second cab was not nearly so nice or so helpful as the first driver had been. It didn’t matter. “It was one of the best nights of my life,” Prell told them, and the driver, again. For maybe the twentieth time. “I wish it had gone on forever.”