Whistle (24 page)

But new groups were coming in behind them every ten days or couple of weeks, and going through their own shakedowns. Men from the European campaigns came in trains from the eastern ports. Others from the Pacific battles came through Letterman or the hospital in Seattle. The two groups found it interesting to compare notes on casualties and deaths and particular maimings, once they’d settled in. The German 88, for example, had no counterpart as yet in the Pacific jungle campaigns. Wounds from burnings were much more prevalent in the European theater, due to the greater use of tanks. Illnesses on the other hand—malaria, black-water, and the like—caused many more casualties in the Pacific than in Europe.

During the weeks after Prell’s turn for the better, Johnny Stranger made another trip home to Cincinnati, on an illegal four-day pass produced by Winch through Sgt/Maj Alexander. Anything over a three-day pass should have counted as a furlough, of course. Winch and Alexander got around this by giving Strange two passes, one for three days and one for a day. Strange found it no better, not more livable in Cincinnati the second time than he had the first. If anything, Linda Sue seemed more distant and preoccupied the second time than the first.

During the same period, Marion Landers kept his fiasco of a date with Carol Firebaugh, had his cast off at the hospital, and received and took a ten-day convalescent furlough home to his hometown of Imperium, Indiana. The ten-day furlough, in actual fact, came just shortly after the big awards ceremony. So that Landers had his Bronze Star in its handsome gold-stamped blue-leather case to take home with him to show, along with his Purple Heart. Landers took them. By some sly, sure instinct Landers knew that the medals would infuriate his father. But Landers would rather have suffered the terrors of another wounding than to have worn either ribbon in Luxor.

Nobody from the Luxor hospital ever wore his decoration ribbons, or campaign ribbons. Among the infantry soldiers at Kilrainey, as if with some elite class, it was permissible to wear the blue and silver Combat Infantryman’s Badge with its silver wreath. So Landers would wear that. But nothing else. It was an iron rule among the combat men at Kilrainey about the ribbons, and the punishment for breaking it was instant and total derision from all sides. Nobody seemed to know from where the rule came, or what started it. But they all obeyed it. It was as though some bitter secret of contempt or disdain passed among the combat casualties and caused the rule to leap full-blown into existence, an absolute law. We don’t need your pats on the head, the attitudes seemed to say, we’ve been where you haven’t.

Landers’ date with Carol Firebaugh began well enough but ended up a strikeout. Landers had wanted to take her for dinner to the Plantation Roof on the top of the Peabody. “The Roof” was Luxor’s “Top O’ The Mark,” which, whatever it might have been before, was now hectic and full of uniforms and making money hand over fist, and the scene of so many service-connected seductions. There was a wild, wide-open quality about it, as though everybody was thoroughly enjoying the idea that four months from now everyone present might be dead. Landers had been there once with a couple of men from the company, without girls, and had wanted to come back and bring a girl there. Vaguely, he had thought about himself being able to talk to her; about himself, and about what had happened to him.

Instead, Carol Firebaugh, who didn’t like “The Roof,” suggested they have dinner at a restaurant she knew called Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room.

It made a weird scene. For the first time in nearly a year and a half, except for one three-day pass back home in uniform, Landers found himself in a genuine homelike, non-Army, non-war atmosphere. Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room was run by three elderly white Southern ladies who were widows apparently, helped by one old Negro gentleman who did part of the waiting on tables, and apparently did much of the organization. White couples and white parties of four sat at tables covered with snowy tablecloths in the genteel, uncrowded, middle-class atmosphere, eating leisurely dinners of excellent Southern-style cooking, and talking quietly. Every table had its brown-paper-sacked whiskey bottle, and drinks were served, but as adjuncts to the food, instead of as means to get drunk as quick as possible. Almost none of the men were in uniform and those who were, looked as if they were at home.

Landers had not been anywhere like this since leaving the university. This was like what he thought about when he thought of home. Despite his despair over his family. It was certainly not the place to carry through any seduction. But neither was it the place to try to talk to someone, anyone, about what had happened to him back on the hill ridge in New Georgia. Landers could only just barely formulate it in words to himself. How was he going to connect it to this kind of place? They were like two different worlds. There was no way to pull the two close enough together for any spark of understanding to bridge the gap. Quite suddenly he was furiously angry, outraged at all this false security of snowy white tablecloths and doddery old ladies serving food they had lovingly prepared themselves to appreciative diners. He was being disloyal to Winch and Strange and Prell and all the others by merely being here. Instead of talking, he became tongue-tied.

So they talked about Carol. Or she did. About her ambitions. About her frustrations. She had been going to Western Reserve to study acting and would be going back at midterm this year for her final semester. The war had kept her at home, with her brother gone. But she didn’t know whether she had the guts to strike out on her own and go to New York afterward, which was what you had to do. She was having parental problems. Her folks wanted her to stay here in Luxor and marry some nice young man with “prospects.” Some young attorney, or some smart young doctor. They would probably help her with money if she went to New York, but how long could she fight the system in New York? And there were all those producers you might have to sleep with.

Landers mostly listened and nodded, and fidgeted. Carol Firebaugh had a deliciously soft, deliciously uneven, deliciously attractive mouth, and when she looked at you with that slightly cocked eye of hers moving over your face as she kept refocusing, she was so appealing and so vulnerable you wanted to take her in your arms and pet her, and murmur reassurances in her ear even as you fucked your cock into her. Landers couldn’t help it. That was exactly how she made him feel. And it was clearly why all the other fellows at the hospital found her so attractive. But everything she stood for, everything she was, everything she liked, made his sense of disloyalty to his old outfit and his common experience with them mount alarmingly.

“I don’t see how you men stand it,” Carol said at one point sympathetically, talking about the hospital. “And most of you will have to go back again.”

“We stand it because we don’t have any choice,” Landers said with sour fatalism. “That’s why.” And more and more he felt he should be out with them, the guys, getting drunk and picking up whores.

After the dinner they walked for a while in a part of Luxor Landers had not seen. There was no war here. Big comfortable old houses lined the streets behind their big old trees. Not rich, but comfortably well-off. Very comfortably well-off. When finally they went inside the one owned by her parents, they wound up on the sofa in her parents’ parlor. It really was a parlor. And it was the same kind of thing Landers had been doing for years at the university, in the homes of girls in Bloomington, or in the homes of girls back home in Imperium. She put on some records. She liked Ray Eberley. She had taken off her glasses, which she seldom wore, and tears came into her slightly fuzzy, slightly unfocusing eyes when “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” came on. Her eyes were violet-colored. And then they were necking—but not necking, really: love-kissing—on the sofa.

“What about your parents?” Landers said.

“Are you kidding?” Carol said with a sad smile. “They’re in bed asleep half-drunk. They never wake up.”

When the record player ran out of discs and shut itself off, she left it. But every time Landers tried to get his hand under her blouse onto her breasts or push his hand up along her stockings under her skirt, she pushed him away and fought him off hard. Once he managed to get two fingers far enough up her skirt to touch her panties and feel the cushion of pubic hair beneath. But that was all.

After two hours of this, sporting a powerful throbbing erection so swollen that it hurt him, wet in the crotch from all the unutilized lubrication fluid that was pouring out of him, Landers disentangled himself and got up and blew out his breath and looked at his watch. Had to be getting back to the hospital. Carol got up too, with a questioning look in her slightly unfocusing eyes. But she made no protests. At the door as she let him out, she said in a soft voice, only, “You’re not very forceful.” Landers was across the porch and down the steps and halfway down the walk before he realized what she had said and what it meant. But when he turned back to look and debate going back, the lights went out as he watched.

All the way back to the hospital he felt outraged, and filled with that wild, directionless rage he had been getting so often lately.

It was directionless, because there was nothing to point it at. Aim it at like a rifle. And because it was so directionless, it became wilder. For several days he avoided her by staying away from the big recreation center where she worked. It was hard on him to stay away from the rec center, because it was where everyone went to meet and where everything was going on. When he did reappear, she immediately called him over and wanted to know why she hadn’t seen him. She seemed to think they would, or should, be having another date soon. But Landers did not ask her. When he looked at her and thought about his evening with her, and about their dinner at Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room and its safe genteel interior, the rage filled him, making him want to rip their safe quiet genteelness all apart and show her, show them, the understructure of blood and lopped-off bone their genteelness was built on. Prell’s bone. Corello’s blood.

Anyway, Landers did not feel like making any more dates with her or anybody right then. Let her wait. Let them all wait. That morning Curran had told him they were going to take his cast off tomorrow or next day. Not only that, Curran said, they were not going to give him back his crutches. He would have to get along the best way he could on the uncased leg with his cane. The mere thought of it filled Landers with a nameless, helpless terror. What if he fell on it? Let Carol Firebaugh, and her three widow ladies, try to empathize with that. Empathize, she was always saying. If Carol Firebaugh and her three widow ladies wanted a piece of his hot body, they could damn well wait. Maybe he would see her later, and maybe not.

The awards ceremony was a week after the day they took his cast off. Although his therapy sessions in the labs seemed to be progressing, Landers was sure he would not be able to walk to it, and claim the Purple Heart he was supposed to get. But he did. Though it tired the leg terribly, going and standing up there all that time in the sun. And when he got his Bronze Star in addition, he was dumbfounded. He knew he did not deserve it. There was no question of that. Lots of other men deserved it more than he did.

When Curran offered him the ten-day furlough a couple of days later, Landers accepted it immediately, although it was probably too soon for his leg, because he could not stand to think any more about the cushiony pubic hair of Carol Firebaugh.

Although Imperium had always been a hard place to reach by train, Landers took the train. Two little branch lines served Imperium. Going by train meant a lot of changing. But the thought of taking the Greyhounds, where he would be unable to move around at all for hours on end, was more than Landers could tolerate with his leg as weak as it was and his ankle so stiff.

As it turned out, the train was no help. Almost before they moved out of the station a wild party developed in the day coach Landers was riding, so that he was terrified and unnerved and unable to move around much. He did not have a sleeping car berth. Pullman berths were reserved long in advance, and anyway he did not want to spend the money on a sleeping car. He did not even know if there were Pullmans on this train, since he was too scared of his leg to try and negotiate the steel-plate couplings between the cars to go back to the club car. But if his own coach with its bottle-toting servicemen was any example, the club car must have been a pandemonium anyway.

Soldiers sprawled all over the seats and squatted or sat in the aisles. Pint bottles passed from hand to hand. Two groups at opposite ends began singing conflicting songs. The few women in the car laughed, but nervously.

Finally one of the Air Force sergeants who were whooping it up in the middle of the coach came over and asked him drunkenly why he wasn’t joining in.

“I’ve got a bum leg,” Landers said, showing him his cane. “I can hardly walk. That’s why.”

“What the hell?” the Air Force sergeant said. “We’re all shipping out. We’ll all be dead in a couple of months. So come on.”

“Well, I’m just shipping back. And I’m not dead. So fuck off,” Landers said. His new wild rage, righteous, flaming and lethal, suddenly boiled up all over him.

The Air Force man leered. “You trying to tell me you’ve been overseas already and wounded, Mack? Or something like that?”

“Yeah. That’s right. I was wounded.”

“Hey, fellows. Here’s a guy claims he’s been wounded,” the sergeant called.

“If you’ve been wounded, Mack, where’s your Purple Heart?”

Landers carefully moved his hand on his cane to just below the curve, ready to jab or to slash with it. “Up my ass. You want to look at it?” he said. He looked up into the Air Force man’s eyes.

He didn’t really know what was happening to him, or care. He was as surprised as the Air Force man. He gave him a cannibalistic smile that, although Landers did not know it, was strangely like Winch’s.

The Air Force sergeant’s eyes widened and seemed to grow flat. “No. I guess not. Thanks.” He was trying to appear hurt, and civilized. In contradistinction to Landers.