Whistle (50 page)

But Prevor knew, and caused the entire 3516th to know. Prevor bought a bottle of champagne and with the rest of the officers and the clerk force opened it and drank it in the orderly room, toasting Landers. Landers walked out into the company area in the drizzle to find he was the new hero of the 3516th. In the messhall he was cheered. Every man who had his pay stuffed in his wallet wanted to shake his hand and pat him on the back, and by the end of the next month he was a buck/sgt and nobody begrudged him the promotion.

Only Landers was not elated. If he had told Winch what he felt, Winch would have snorted and then cursed. If he had told it to Strange, Strange would have said that he was seriously crazy.

But only Landers knew. He had an instinctive feeling that all this was not going to last. Not for him. Not for Landers. Just as he knew Prevor the Jew was not going to last, was going out. And when Prevor went, God only knew what would happen to the 3516th.

Landers wondered if Winch up at Second Army Command, the place where all the morning reports had been returned from, was following his progress.

W
INCH HAD KEPT TRACK
of him. As he had all of his boys. In his job there was not all that much to do, that he did not have time to do outside things, too.

Also, Winch’s contacts had grown. In the time he had been at O’Bruyerre. With important help from Jack Alexander, he had extended his contacts until by now he had a web of informers, spreading out through all of Second Army Command here at O’Bruyerre, through all of Second Army HQ in Luxor, through Alexander’s hospital, and through all the various areas and aspects of O’Bruyerre itself.

Winch hated to use that word
informers.
But that was what it was. Pals, or buddies, would have been a better word. But that wasn’t what they were, they were informers. For vanity’s sake, and for pride, the whole thing was built and structured to look, and to seem, as if they were buddies. Nobody wanted to be an informer. First-three-graders from the QM from here, first-three-graders from Signal from there. All coming in singly to report from time to time, but looking like they were coming in really to say hello and have a beer.

Winch had set up in the first-three-graders area of the big main PX beer hall, at a big corner table. This was part of the bigger NCOs’ section, which was separated from the rest of the huge hall by a low fence of aluminum poles. At early evening every evening, just after work (what would be called the cocktail hour at the officers’ club) the big table was reserved for Winch, and there at his corner table Winch received.

The topics of conversation were always the gossip. That was how his informers conveyed their information. Junior first-three-graders came into Winch’s table for beer from just about everywhere on the big post. I don’t know if anybody can believe this, but I heard. So and so may not know what he’s talking about, but he said. So and so said this. Some other so and so heard this.

Winch presided, buying the various beers, easily, laughing, but filing away in the dark file cabinets of his head everything that might be pertinent somewhere or other. Almost everything was. For a while at first he kept a half-full glass mug of beer in front of him which he never touched. Later on he dispensed with the untasted beer. He would drink a glass of white wine or two now and then, from bottles he himself brought the barman.

Winch hated the aluminum-post fence. Just as he hated the two huge chrome-and-colored-lights Wurlitzer jukeboxes which stood in the big hall and were constantly being paid fortunes in nickels and quarters to play at top volume all the popular war songs. If they were going to put in a fence, why couldn’t they have put in a fence of turned wooden posts, like a beer hall should have? And he was heartily sick of Jo Stafford’s “I’ll Never Smile Again”; Dinah Shore’s “Sentimental Journey”; Vera Lynn’s “I’ll Be Seeing You”; Dick Haymes’ “I’ll Get By”; Alice Faye’s “You’ll Never Know”; Frank Sinatra’s “All or Nothing at All”; Helen Forrest’s “I’ve Heard That Song Before.” Sentimental hogwash. And “Avalon,” “Elmer’s Tune,” “Ciribiribin,” “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “The Jersey Bounce,” “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.” They rattled and banged, or moaned, all over the place without cease, hanging up high in the huge room like a second cloud of tobacco smoke. But they made a good screen cover for the information that was passed to Winch in the form of lighthearted gossip.

So Winch knew all about Harry L Prevor and the 3516th, long before Landers showed up and drew that assignment. He also knew immediately it happened how Landers had saved Prevor’s ass twice, or three times, if you counted the payroll, with his superior clerking ability, learned right here at Mother Winch’s tit. He also knew, as soon as it came through, about Landers’ promotion back up to buck sergeant. And a month later he knew about his promotion to staff.

In spite of promotions Winch shrewdly suspected Landers was a long way from being out of the woods yet. It was Winch’s hunch that Landers had taken up the cause of Lt Prevor, and the saving of his company for him, as a moral cause. If so, Landers was shit out of luck. Winch had followed Lt Prevor’s progress since Lt Prevor had arrived in Second Army, a week after Winch himself. The anti-Jewish discrimination practices utilized against Prevor and two other Jews who had come in in the same batch of young officers were constant and unbending.

There was nothing in it for or against Winch and his command. But Winch found it an interesting thing to watch. There were other Jews in Second Army, quite a few of them, and some of them quite high-placed. But none of these were new, and strangers, without friends. And none of these established Jews came forward, either openly or behind the scenes, to help Prevor and the other two. According to the gossip received by Winch from their various sergeants, the established, accepted Jewish officers seemed to be more against Prevor and the other two than the white Anglos. In the sergeants’ opinions, the accepted Jews were doing it to stay “in.”

That made sense to Winch. He had long ago given up making moral judgments against Jews, or anybody else. But he did not think Landers had. And if Landers had decided to throw in his moral indignation behind Lt Prevor, Landers was on the losing side from the start. Because poor Prevor was a lost cause from the beginning, and his ouster from command of the 3516th was a foregone conclusion from the moment he got the command.

Second Army was allowing only two alternatives. One, if Lt Prevor got the command working and whipped it into some kind of good shape, Second Army would put some well-liked unassigned captain in over Prevor’s first lieutenancy to command it, and sop up the gravy poor Prevor had sweat blood to create for him. Second, and much more likely, if Prevor turned out an inept and shady outfit that was malfunctioning and in lousy shape, Second Army would relieve him and put him to work on some other cadre, with several black marks against him. And would then let some unloved young officer take the outfit overseas.

The only other possible alternative, the worst of all, would be that Prevor would be able to do nothing at all with this soured, motley crew, and would wind up with an undisciplined, morale-less gang of crippled stockade figures. In that case Second Army would let him take them overseas himself, caught up in the midst of his own death trap he had created, to be rid of him. Any way it came out Prevor stood to lose.

And if this was the cause Landers was putting himself and his talents behind, there was no way Landers could do anything but lose, too. What Landers would do, when one of these bad alternatives came up to be faced, was something Winch had to think about.

Meantime Winch had his own life to live. Mostly, his life consisted of Carol. Carol, and his nightmares. And the nightmares were gaining ground, on Carol, and on everything.

There had been a time, when Winch first got back from overseas, that he had had a very strong, almost uncontrollable desire to sleep with a bayonet or .45 pistol under his pillow. There was no sense to it. It was just comforting, like a kid with his security blanket. Winch had kept his pistol from the old company, writing it off as lost or stolen, and it was easy enough to come by a bayonet. He had used one or the other a few times, self-consciously, at the hospital in San Francisco, but then had stopped it. But both pieces still reposed in his gear and now the desire had come back so strong that only the presence of Carol in the apartment and in the bed at night kept him from doing it. The few nights he slept alone in his quarters, he did sleep with one or the other. There was something immensely comforting about the feel of the warm metal under your hand under the pillow as you fell asleep.

The nightmares had nothing to do with the desire for a weapon, at least not as far as Winch could see. But lately the nightmares had started to win. There were three of them now. Three separate and different nightmares. There wasn’t a night, or a nap, or a half-hour’s doze, that there wasn’t one of them there, bedeviling him. And recently the original nightmare had broken through into the outside world, into the conscious awareness of other people. The thing he had tried most to avoid.

One night in a deep sleep Carol had awakened him saying that he was shouting something in his sleep. Something about “Get them out of there! Get them out of there!” The same sentence, over and over. It sounded as though it had something to do with the war, she said. But it was all so garbled. Was that what it was? Something about the war?

“It was nothing,” Winch said. “No. It wasn’t about the war.”

But the eager look on her face of concealed delight was so apparent, and so strong, that he felt sorry he couldn’t tell her. It would give her something romantic to remember about the war. When she was older. An older woman.

“It was nothing,” he said. “Just a bad dream.” But he was shaken, by the fact that he had yelled it aloud.

“You really are upset,” Carol said.

“A little. It’ll go away.”

Instinctively, or almost instinctively (it was always hard to tell with her), she had shoved one of those delicious breasts of hers up to his face, lying beside him, as if to comfort him. Winch had begun to nuzzle it, then kiss it and lick it, then suck it, the puckering nipple. Detesting himself. But it was so soft, so tender. Then she began to pant.

So he had wound up fucking her. It was probably the best thing. But his way, not her way. She liked it hard and driving, like a piston, beating against her spread crotch and crotch hair. He liked that, too. But he liked better the slow, long insertion and withdrawal, softly, gently, over and over, feeling every tiniest quiver along the barrel of his blood-swollen organ. When he came, it was all he could do to pull it out. But he remembered she did not have her diaphragm in, and he had to. Afterward, he lay rubbing his loosening cock into the wetted cushion of her pussy hair while she clutched his shoulders.

He fell asleep to be awakened by one of the other nightmares, some unknown time later, and lay looking down at her as she slept, for a time. He had a hunch she was not going to let it drop and he was right, she didn’t. The next time he saw her she brought it up, and kept on bringing it up, asked about it. And once the nightmare had broken through the one time, as if a gate had opened, it began to happen more times. Before long she was waking him every night, from one of the nightmares or another. Winch got so he hated to drift off to sleep. He became what he had never been before in his life, even on Guadalcanal and New Georgia—an insomniac.

The two new nightmares were totally different. In both texture and quality. Different from each other, and different from the familiar one. In one of them he was being attacked by a Japanese, either an officer with a sword or a tough, mean, old-hand sergeant with a Nambu which was out of ammo but was armed with a bayonet. The Japanese was coming on, intent on killing him. Winch had his .45. Winch knew he would get him, but that was not the point. The point was that they were in the middle of a mortar barrage, and the Japanese ignored it. But each time a mortar round landed nearby, which was every couple of seconds, Winch would find himself flinching. The Japanese did not flinch. Winch would fire two or three times, flinching and missing each time because a mortar had landed. There was no question he would get the Jap, he would save his last round until the Jap was right on him. This made no difference; the Jap had won. Because the Jap was ready to die, and Winch wasn’t. So he would stand, waiting, and flinching, ready to kill, but stricken with a boundless terror at his own inadequacy, uncontrollability.

The other was of a wounded man. Winch could not recognize him, and never knew who he was. It was not Jacklin (whom Winch had actually seen dead, and always remembered in the dream as a comparison), but he was lying in the same manner as Jacklin had lain. Stretched out, arms widespread, head back, but looking uphill this time, instead of downhill like Jacklin. And he wasn’t dead. A long way from dead. But enemy fire kept them from getting to him. Winch could hear him crying piteously, bleating for help, whenever the fire slackened. And there wasn’t a thing Winch could do about it. The company commander was dead, Winch commanded the company (Winch had never actually had a real company commander killed), he had a hundred and sixty men at his back, and there wasn’t a thing he could do. He couldn’t send one, or two, of these men down into that fire. And he could not go himself, he was needed to command the company. Below him the man cried out piteously. The enemy fire swept across, giving him a new wound. Again, and again. But never a killing wound. The man would never die.

Winch never did tell Carol the nightmares, could not tell her. He still believed, even though he had in his sleep let them outside himself inadvertently, that if he did not tell them to anyone, didn’t talk about them, he would be able to wriggle out of it somehow, and get back his control. And Carol was too delighted by the idea of them. Too delighted to tell them to.

There was something about her that seemed to enjoy gruesome, monstrous war stories, with an almost sexual thrill. It was like a kid loving and hating Dracula movies. That was because she had never had to live them. When you had lived them, they weren’t gruesome any more. They were just sorry. Sorry tales. But there was no reason she should be expected to see that. Far too many civilians were like her, Winch had found.