Whistle (54 page)

Landers found he had no answer.

“Come on,” Annie said. “We might as well get dressed. I still have to call daddy for you.”

“Listen, don’t call from out there. I don’t want Strange and those others—”

“Don’t worry. I read your plans. You don’t want Johnny Strange to know where you are, or to tell your Sergeant Winch.” She smiled. “In actual fact, I was planning on taking you home with me to my place. I’ll call daddy from there, and you can listen. Then I thought I’d see you off at the bus station.”

“Well,” Landers said, at a loss, “fine. But why are you so nice to me?” He felt perturbed. There had been whiskey available up here at the suite, and now he had drunk enough to make his courage considerably reinforced. But he was upset by the extravagance of her help. It made him want to look around for exits. “Why?” he said, and made himself grin. “Tell me why?”

Annie laughed. “I suppose it’s partly because I’m not going to Barleyville with you. I feel a little guilty.” She paused. “But I’ve had to run a couple of times in my life,” she said more seriously, “and I know what it’s like. Especially if you have no place really to run to.”

“Let’s get something straight,” Landers said stiffly. “I’m not running anyplace. I’m leaving an untenable position.”

“That was what I meant,” Annie smiled. “Besides, you’re a nice boy.” She took a deep breath, and sighed. “But before you go through with this, I wish you’d think twice, Marion.”

“I’ve thought twice,” Landers said shortly. “More than twice.”

While they dressed, she went on talking to him, about her sister Loucine. Now that they were moving, Landers wished that she would shut up about it all. It was as if having once got started talking about her family, she did not want to stop. Loucine had come down here to Luxor for a while to stay with her, she said, when the baby began to show, but Loucine had hated Luxor. After two months she had gone back home, to face it out. She preferred that to staying in Luxor.

“Nobody said anything to her?” Landers asked, tying his shoes.

Annie laughed. “What are they going to say? They’ve all seen unmarried pregnant girls. About as many as married.” She was putting on her lipstick. “You know, times have changed, even since you’ve been away overseas. This old war has changed everything a lot.”

Landers guessed that was true, but didn’t care very much. He did not answer her. “Now you just let me handle Strange,” he said.

But it wasn’t that easy to handle Johnny Stranger. Landers pretended that he was just going off somewhere for a few days with Annie, and that he was being covered for in his outfit at O’Bruyerre, but Strange wasn’t buying that.

“Listen, you crazy son of a bitch, Landers. I know exactly what you’re trying to pull. And you’re never going to get the fuck by with it. They’ll trace you down, and they’ll get you. They’ll get you, and they’ll do you in. So I’ll goddamn follow you, if I have to.” He reached and grabbed his own GI overcoat. “You crazy son of a bitch, I’ll follow you and camp right outside your fucking doorstep, until you come back.”

By this time it had all become a big joke to just about everybody in the suite, except Strange and Landers.

“You can’t do it. You’ll never get away with it,” Strange half shouted. “You’re ruining your fucking life. I’m not going to let you.”

Several people tried to shout him down. In the end Landers had practically to tear himself out of Strange’s arms, to get out of the door. It was only through the ministrations of Annie, plus some help from Frances Highsmith, that Strange was kept from following.

“I’m only taking him to my place, Johnny. I promise I’ll call you from there. I swear I promise.”

“Where is this place that’s your place?” Strange demanded, shouting. “Nobody knows where the fuck you are. I’d never find him.”

“No. And not just anybody’s going to know, where my place is. Either,” Annie said. “A girl’s got to have some privacy. In her life. Around this stinking mess.”

It was only on the strength of the promise to call that they were finally able to get outside.

And they did call him, after Annie had talked to Charlie Waterfield in Barleyville. Strange insisted on talking to Landers. Landers talked to him for five minutes, but was unable to convince him he was only taking a small AWOL vacation. He could only get off the line by promising faithfully that he would call tomorrow.

“I hate to lie to him,” he said heavily, when he finally hung up.

“Come on,” Annie said. “If you don’t hurry, we’ll miss your bus.”

At the bus station he waved to her in the sea of faces until the bus turned out from the stall, and her face swung away with the others into invisibility. Then he was off on his single-handed, one-man adventure, alone. As soon as she was out of sight, it was curiously as if she had never existed. And deep down, he felt very righteous and very Christian, if a little sick.

But he couldn’t help wondering what kind of a looking guy Charlie Waterfield must be.

I
T WAS THREE
in the morning, when the Greyhound pulled up for Landers in Barleyville. Landers hadn’t the least idea of what to expect. And didn’t much care. The windswept little town square was empty, nothing was open. The driver had some bundles of newspapers to deliver, depositing them against the closed storefront of the newsstand. Then the big door closed, and the hissing of the big bus’s air brakes whispered, fading across the square.

Almost at once, a tall figure in a sheepskin coat and a semi-Western-style hat stepped leisurely out from the shelter of a storefront, into the cold wind.

“Marion Landers?”

Landers said he was. “Charlie Waterfield. Annie’s dad,” the other said. He was a lean man, but even in the heavy sheepskin you could see he had the paunch of a heavy drinker.

“Might as well go somewhere where there’s lights and people,” he said.

There was an official sheriff’s car parked across the street against the courthouse square. The courthouse was a red brick and white clapboard affair. It had a Sheriff’s Office sign on it, and Landers realized Waterfield could have waited for the bus there, in his own office, where it was warm. Instead of standing alone out in the cold and wind, in a darkened storefront.

Waterfield was squinting up at the courthouse, through the bare branches of the big trees, from beside the driver’s door of the car. “Damn grackles. Roosting in the eaves again. Do it every winter.” He got in and slammed his door.

By the time Landers was in, he had a pint bottle of whiskey out. “Want a snort?” Landers accepted gratefully. Waterfield took one, then slipped it under the driver’s seat.

But then he didn’t start. Instead, he sat with his ungloved hands on the wheel, staring out across the country square. Landers got the impression of an immensely inarticulate man, tongue-tied not so much by dumbness, as by the terrible complexity of saying anything at all. After a minute, without a word, he turned the ignition key and jerked at the gear lever.

Somewhere in the outskirts of the town he pulled up to what up north would have been called a roadhouse. It was dark, and looked deserted and closed. Waterfield rapped on the door, anyway. A man in an open shirt and a woman in a long gown opened it. The two led them into music, warmth, low lights, and a long bar along the lefthand wall with a dance floor behind. Vera Lynn was singing “The Umbrella Man.” There had been ten or twelve cars outside in the parking lot. All the people from them were in here.

Waterfield got a chorus of affectionate greetings. Somebody said, “Say, Charlie, who’s your friend?”

“Friend of Annie’s come to visit. From Luxor.”

The point wasn’t pressed, but it was an announcement. Any friend of Charlie’s had better be a friend of Landers.

In the light, he had circles under his eyes so pronounced they gave him the look of an alert, very patient hound dog. The eyes looked at you with that same look of a smart hound, alert, patient, waiting.

They fixed a table for him, in what was apparently a ritual. Off by itself, with a bottle of whiskey, glasses, ice, and a pitcher of water. The two of them sat at it and talked as they drank, mostly questions by Charlie and answers by Landers about Annie.

How was she doing down there in Luxor? Was she in good shape, healthy? Was she having a good time, was she happy? How was that job of hers holding up? Did she look good? Did she have decent friends?

Here was the only place he stumbled, over the adjective decent, which he half hesitated on, then changed to nice. So that the final question read: Did she have nice friends?

Landers answered the best he could, not knowing much about Annie. Landers did not know, for example, whether Annie had a job or not. He did not see how she could, going off for a week or a month with servicemen all the time. But he did not tell this to Charlie.

“She doesn’t have to work,” Charlie smiled, from below the perpetually alert hound’s eyes. “I send her all the money she wants. But I guess she enjoys working.” Landers thought it best not to make an answer to this at all.

There wasn’t much question that Charlie was at least part owner of the joint. The lady manager in the gown came over to ask his advice on a technical question about the bar. “I don’t want to talk about it now,” was all he said, raising those alert, patient hound’s eyes, and the lady faded. Charlie went back to his questions about Annie.

It was six-thirty and the daylight was coming up in the east, when they finally got home. Landers was both drunk and exhausted. Charlie showed no signs of either. He showed Landers to his bedroom in the huge derelict house, but he himself did not go to bed. He changed into his day uniform, and went out to do his morning inspection tour he did every day at this hour.

Changing into his day uniform meant taking off his navy blue pants, and the white shirt with shoulder straps, with its black four-in-hand tie; and putting on khaki pants and a khaki shirt with shoulder straps, and a khaki four-in-hand tie. The sheepskin coat and semi-Western-style hat he did not change. He walked out of the house, telling Landers that Loucine would be around the house when he woke up, to make him breakfast. This was the pattern life took, in the big Main Street house. It was Charlie’s pattern, but day by day Landers’ pattern fell more and more in line with it. He got up at noon, had breakfast, then read the papers in the dark, unused living room. Then he went for a walk in the business district, hitting all the poolrooms, and in one of them he usually found Charlie. He would have a sandwich and a Coke laced with illegal whiskey for lunch in one of them. It was amazing how much whiskey there was loose in this county seat of a dry county. Then he would go back to the tall, spindly house and sleep or read for a couple of hours. They almost always had dinner out with Loucine. Then when Loucine went home to bed, the two of them would start Charlie’s late evening rounds that would last till dawn.

It was not such a terrible deal. At the very least he was safe here. The only comment Charlie Waterfield ever made on his being a deserter was to hand him a full book of blank pass forms. “There’s plenty more where these come from. And you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

But of course that didn’t solve anything. The problem was somewhere else. Whenever Landers thought of Captain Mayhew and his fucking telephone, and what he had done to the 3516th, he went into a rage that was murderous, and which he carefully hid, and he swore he would never go back.

But the sworn oath was always followed by a monstrously deep, black depression, which drove him out to wherever there was whiskey. He had not been there more than a week when he knew he would not be able to stay.

When Landers woke that first morning at noon, it was to the smell of bacon frying. When he could get dressed and downstairs, he found Loucine in her winter nightgown and a not very sexy robe, cooking and eating her own breakfast. She did not seem surprised to see him. She was enormously pregnant. She was a small, slender girl, but she literally waddled around the kitchen. It was a big, comfortable kitchen, sunny at the end where the table was, on a sunny day. The plate of yellow scrambled eggs laced with red-brown strips of bacon and tan squares of toast she placed before him looked and tasted delicious, in the winter sunshine. Then she went off to get dressed.

Landers had to grin sourly two days later, when Annie’s prediction about how long it would take for him to end up in bed with Loucine came true, a day ahead of schedule.

It happened suddenly. The second noon at breakfast she was not in the flannel nightie and unsexy robe, and instead wore a thin shorty nightgown and a knee-length negligee, also thin. When Landers went into the living room after he’d eaten, and sat down with the papers, she sat silent on a windowseat near him and looked out over the town, which was under a thin snow, granular and sifting like flour. The next afternoon she was suddenly in his lap, between him and the papers, crushing the Louisville
Courier-Journal,
although Landers never quite knew how she arrived there. Charlie seemed to make it a point of not coming home at this time of day.

So Loucine was added to Landers’ daily life pattern in Barleyville. Her time was the early afternoon, or the early and late afternoon, depending. Loucine would screw him as many times each afternoon as he felt he was capable of screwing. The record was ten, in four hours of one afternoon. Landers wanted to see just how far she would go, and what her limit was, and also whether he could get her to talk, besides just saying hello and good-by. Besides, he had nothing much else to do. But he never found out. And afterward she had to make him a big raw-eggs-and-milkshake drink, to help his shaky legs, before he went out for his daily walk down the street and a half of business establishments and pool halls.

Charlie introduced him to lots of other available women, during the nights. Almost all were married, or at least engaged, to guys who were away overseas, or at least off somewhere in the Army. All of them were lonely, and hungry for a cock.

Landers had a sneaking feeling that Charlie already had made out with each of the ones he himself went off with. But Charlie never talked about it, or about women. The women never talked about it, either. Any more than Loucine did. It was as if the women all felt that if they did not talk about it, it would seem not to have happened. And they all would still be getting the release they all needed.