Whistle (4 page)

The head, tilted till the thick brows were perpendicular, parallel to the jamb they peered around, righted itself and a body appeared below it and came on in in a slow saunter, its face making the briefest of grins. John Strange was deliberate and slow about everything. He was oddly built, Strange, his legs just a little too short for the rest of him. And his right hand hung down now against his thigh, a maladroit claw whose fingers looked misplaced.

“I mean it,” Winch said. “I got nothing to talk to you about, Strange. Except your asshole reminiscences. And that bores my ass.”

Strange nodded appreciatively. “I figured
you
wouldn’t be up on deck.”

“To see what?” Winch growled.

“I went,” Strange said, looking a little ashamed, “for a little. It’s mighty pretty.” He moved his head. “They all whooping and hollering.”

Strange grinned again, in his tough, broad face, a strange scornful-sorrowful rictus of malevolent appreciation. In the unusual broadness of his face there was a kind of peasant’s long-standing patience with the universe, and a sadness. And yet the thick line of brow hair, which formed one single hairy bar of dark brown across the upper third of his head, carried an unbelievably angry, furious look about it.

You had to know the man before you recognized the expression as a smile instead of a sneer. They had all of them learned, learned very early on, that Strange was a man who liked to bark, and that his bite was a whole hell of a lot worse than his bark.

“How’s the old health there, First Sarn’t?” Strange said now.

“Better than yours,” Winch said. He had told nobody about his ailment, and he was absolutely sure Strange had no idea what was wrong with him. “And don’t call me First Sergeant. I’m not one any more. I’m a casual in transit, just like you.”

“You still carry the rank and draw the pay.”

“Asshole!”

“Sure,” Strange said. “Why not? My sentiments exactly.”

“Then we understand each other.”

“I also thought I’d stop over the lounge see Bobby Prell awhile,” Strange said more softly.

Winch would not answer this.

“You want to come along?”

“No.”

Strange moved his head. “Go by myself then.”

“Stupid son of a bitch. He wouldn’t be over there if he hadn’t been trying to play hero.”

Strange moved his head again. “Some guys got to play hero. Anyway, he must be feeling pretty down, right now. Today. The scoop the doctors putting out say he won’t never walk again. Say he may still lose one of his legs.”

“Whatever happens to him, it’s his own damn fault,” Winch said promptly.

“He’s still one of the old outfit,” Strange said.

“That shit’s all over, too,” Winch said. “And you better believe it, Johnny Stranger. You better get it through your thick Texas head.”

Strange made his brief grin. “I don’t think so. Not quite yet, for a while, it aint. You sure you won’t come?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself. You’re a hard man, aint you? I was just telling somebody today what a hard man you are.” He wrinkled his lip. “I was going to offer you a congratulatory drink. On the landfall, and all. But I seem to forgot my booze.”

Winch peered at him a moment. Then reached down for his musette and sailed it across to Strange, overhanded all in one motion, as one might sail a manilla envelope of papers. Strange caught it effortlessly, edge-on, between the thumb and extended fingers of his good hand, his left.

“Why, thank you, First Sarn’t.” In high, grand style he dipped the neck of the bottle at Winch before he drank. He held the bottle in his clawlike right hand, whose fingers did not seem to open and close except very slowly.

He inspected the bottle, then handed it back. “Getting low. You want anything, First Sarn’t, you come see the old Stranger.”

“Me want booze?” Winch shook the bottle. “You kidding me? This tub has more sources than a fountain.”

“Might want something else.”

“You mean like an old buddy? Haw. Fuck yourself. At my age?”

“Never can tell.” The mess/sgt half-saluted. A dry joke, with his crippled claw hand. He went out and across the passage into the big lounge.

Winch stared after him. He stretched back out. In a way, Strange was Winch’s hero. If he could be said to have such a thing. The thing Winch admired about Strange was that he really did not give a damn about anything. The others, like Winch, pretended they did not but, really, they cared. Strange really didn’t. About anything. The Army, the outfit, his job, people, women, life or success or humanity. Strange pretended to care but really didn’t. He was completely alone inside himself and content with that. And for that Winch admired him.

He reached down and tickled the cool neck of his bottle under the berth with a finger, through the flap of the musette. It was funny how they went together, whiskey and sex. Especially when the whiskey was forbidden. Secret, illicit drinking was as exciting, and in exactly the same way, as going down on some woman. Well, tomorrow. Tomorrow he would drink nothing.

Damned dumb fucking morons, all of them! his mind flashed at him suddenly. Would his field tech/sgt be able to handle them now at all?

Dreamily, in a kind of despondency that was like a drug effect almost, and which ate bone deep but no longer hurt more than a chronic low-level toothache, Winch thought about all those fools up there on deck goggling away at the landfall they idiotically believed to represent some haven.

W
ITHOUT EXCEPTION, EACH SHIPLOAD
had felt moved and disturbed and somehow stricken by the home continent landfall. And the voyage of Winch and Strange and the rest was not much different from the voyage the others made.

Hardly a handful of them actually believed it would really be there, really appear. But exactly on schedule it came up over the horizon. The long blue landfall appeared in the east, exactly as they had been told it would.

On the empty vastness of the slowly pulsing ocean the single steamer trailing its black plume was the only visible sign of life. The white ship with its big red crosses moved slowly along through the flat sea, which heaved and breathed beneath it like a separate existence. The ship plowed on. The sea continued to sparkle and show just the slightest froth of white now and then in the breeze and bright sun.

On the eastern horizon the long blue cloud, only slightly darker than the sky, appeared and disappeared like a mirage at first. Home. The word sped whispering through the ship like a prickle over the skin. The ship steamed slowly on and imperceptibly the blue cloud fixed itself above the waterline until it could be stared at without disappearing. Most of the cases on board had been serving overseas for at least a year. Home. The way they said it to each other, it was more a word of anxiety and deep unexorcised fear, of despair even, than of relief, love or anticipation. What would it be like, now? What would they themselves be like?

It was the same with everything. The bulletin boards and news-sheets had told them they were going home. But after so long a time away, they no longer trusted bulletins and communiqués. Bulletins and communiqués in general were more concerned with morale and with their beliefs than with realities. They all knew their beliefs were okay. God forbid anyone’s beliefs among them should be bad. But it was difficult to know if a bulletin or report had been created to affect morale, or to pass on specific information about the long blue cloud.

They could not see it from everywhere. It was visible only from the forward part of the upper decks. Of these, the only one not off-limits to them was the deck once called the Promenade Deck. Here as many of them as were able, wanted to, and could squeeze themselves into the available space, came to have a look at it.

They were a sorry-looking bunch. In the gray pajamas and maroon bathrobes, wearing the heelless duck slippers that would never stay on their feet, they pushed out through the doors onto the open forward deck and squeezed against the rail, or against those already squeezed against the rail. Shaky, skinny, stringy, yellow of eyeball and of skin, bandaged and suppurating or wearing plaster, they crippled their way up from below, some tottering, some helping each other along, a number limping along on leg casts. They were the lucky ones out of all the casualties. They had been judged sufficiently damaged to send all the way back home.

A few cried. Some laughed and clapped their hands, or slapped each other on the back. All gazed around them and at each other with anxiety. Anxiety at being so immensely lucky. A screened, secreted terror in their eyes suggested that they felt they had no right to be here.

Down below them, out on the more roomy space of what in normal times was the ship’s crew’s working deck, was crowded a mob of blueclad sailors, and whiteclad medical personnel. All of them were hired, paid, ranked, and organized, solely to service this steadily accumulating jetsam of a modern war. And the jetsam on their one small deck, indecent as a herd of turkeys, gobbled and craned and jostled and elbowed to get their look at the homeland they were all so vividly and happily aware none of them had yet died for.

Deep down in the ship in one of the cabins Marion Landers had tried to stay in his berth and found he couldn’t. Finally he rolled out and got laboriously to his feet in the small place. This was no easy operation since his right leg was in a cast to the knee. But it was impossible not to get caught up and carried along in the excited hubbub.

As a company clerk Landers was only a buck sergeant. He did not rate any airy stateroom with a porthole, like Winch and Strange. He had grown used to living mostly below decks in the half-gloom of bare electric bulbs. He felt under his pillow for his cheap sunglasses.

Involuntarily, he groaned a little. The pain was not due to his wound so much. That had stopped hurting. This was due to the stiffness caused by trying to live with the heavy plaster cast. It was impossible to sit, stand or lie comfortably in it.

On the other side of the tiny, six-man cabin there was a rustle. The kid Air Force tailgunner, who had been crying again, this time over the landfall, raised his head. “Are you going to leave me, too?”

“I guess I’ll go up. Have a look, yeah,” Landers said. He tried not to sound irritated. He got his crutches from the clothes hook. “Please, don’t leave me.”

Landers paused in the doorway, and turned deftly on his crutches. You did get used to the damn things, finally. He peered at the boy.

All of us were burdened with the same thing, at one point, Landers thought. In every cabin there was the one weak sister. The cabins always sifted themselves down into a pecking order, with the weak sister at the bottom. There was always a moral problem with him. Everybody had a responsibility to him. It was part of the code. None of us liked it much, but if you wanted to be one of us you had to go by the code. And the weak sister could use it against you. Had the moral right to do so. That was part of the advantage he gained by giving up, and accepting to be the weakest.

Landers and his kid gunner had not said a word in the half hour since the others had left to go up on deck. Landers had not felt like talking, himself. He had simply lain and stared at the ceiling shadows. Then the Air Force kid had started to cry again. It was partly what had driven Landers to his feet.

“Aw, come on, kid,” he said.

“You’re like all the others,” the thin voice piped from the depths of the berth. “I thought you were different. You’re the only decent one here. You know how I can’t stand to be alone.”

“I’ll call the ward boy for you. He’ll sit with you.” Landers paused. “He’s probably bored to death with all of us,” he added.

“I’m sure he is. Him and that damned prescription pad of his. Doodling and drawing cocks and pussies, all the time.”

Landers felt he had to get out of there or die. Explode, blow apart. It wasn’t only the boy. Something was eating at him terribly. Had been since the news came. Anyway, what a thing to be saddled with. It was not bad enough to be cooped up in here, six miserable bastards in a space meant for four healthy men. They had had to draw him. A skinny kid tailgunner with eyes as big as dinner plates in his emaciated face and dry gangrene in both legs.

He had been a hero, for his one brief day. In flight an improperly mounted .50 cal had bounded loose from its mounting and falling to the deck had locked itself on Fire and begun spraying the inside of the plane. Like a loose fire hose. The kid had dived forward and collared it and unlocked it, but he had taken four .50 cal slugs in his shins. By the time they got him back in the ripped-open refrigerated plane he had his dry gangrene. He had been given the DFC and the Silver Star and been put on this hospital boat home, and he was a crybaby. The smell was bad enough, a deep acrid bronzegreen odor that bit deep at the back of your throat like copper pennies in your mouth. His poor bare feet were the same verdigris color, and shriveled like a mummy’s. He complained all the time, and cried half the time, and he had been a college sophomore. Landers didn’t know why, by what incredible administrative mixup, he had been put on this boat. Especially since he was Air Force. They should have flown him home.

“I know it smells,” he said now. “But please stay with me.”

“I’ll call you the ward boy,” Landers said.

“Thanks. You selfish prick. I only hope someday you get in my shape.”

“Thanks,” Landers said. “Look. At the risk of sounding fatuous, I will say to you that we have all of us got to live alone. You’ve got to learn to live with it. I can’t help you. Nobody can.”

“I don’t
want
to live with it.” He began to blubber. “I want my mother.”

Landers ran his tongue over his teeth. “Look, they’re flying you to Walter Reed from San Diego. They’ve got the best men in the world there. If anybody can save your legs, they will. And they promised you your mother would be there to meet you.”

“Do you believe that? Anyway, the doctor told me yesterday there wasn’t any hope,” the boy said in a tiny voice.

This was an out and out lie, and Landers knew it. “I was here,” he said. “I didn’t hear him say that.” Usually when they changed his dressings, everybody stampeded like a herd of cattle out the narrow door. But at least once in a while Landers felt morally bound to stay and pretend he did not have an olfactory nerve.