Whistle (59 page)

Prell ordered some bourbon sent up to his room, and went on up himself. Beside the desk was his wheelchair, and he dropped into it gratefully, and let the bellboy push him to the elevator.

His folding wheelchair was always kept near the desk, out of sight, no matter what the hotel or the city. This was a strategy he and Kurntz had worked out at the start of the tour to satisfy Prell. The wheelchair was never taken along in the cars at the start of the day for the day’s outings and meetings. Not unless there was a speech to be made that night, before they came back to the hotel. They took the little half-crutches, and if Prell had to have help during the day, he used those. But Prell hated the wheelchair, with a rabid dislike. He refused to have it in the cars, or to use it, during the day. But there were times, like right now this evening, when he simply could not stay up on his feet any longer and had to use it.

The room was big, and comfortable. But Prell had to get up onto his feet again, out of the wheelchair, in order to make himself a drink at the little table bar. The bellboy brought in the new bottle, and Prell double-locked the door and put the chain lock on. With his impassive face, nobody was aware of the effort it took for him to get onto his feet from a sitting position. With the door secured, he took off his pants and sprawled down on the bed to ease his legs, while he waited on the phone call.

His legs were worse than tired. They were like two toothaches. Using them was the only way to make them better. But then the pain was always there. It was like one of those toothaches you so learned to live with and got so used to, that when the dentist finally got to you and stopped it you felt there was some part of you missing.

He was so uncomfortable on the bed, turning on his side each time to drink from the glass, that after a couple of tries at it he got up again, and sat in the damned wheelchair until he finished the drink. Then he lay back down again.

He had fallen asleep when the phone rang loudly in the room and he made a large scringe in both thighs as he rolled convulsively over onto his belly and put his head down, thinking Mortars. A part of his mind was already saying how ridiculous he was. What was it? eight months? nine months now? It took him a little while to get up off of the bed and the phone rang four or five times before he could get to it.

“Yes?” he said cautiously. “Yes?”

It was Strange, all right. And he didn’t fiddlefuck around. He came right to the point. Had Prell heard that Landers had been killed?

“What? Killed?” Prell said. “Killed? How?”

Strange went on to tell him. A woman. In a civilian car. But with post plates. Some officer’s wife. Had hit him. Killed him instantly. He had only been discharged just an hour before. Was on his way off the post. The woman was all broken up by it.

“What a dumb way to get it,” Prell said. But why call him up, all this way, to tell him about it? he wondered. His first, natural reaction had been to think it was some drunken fight. In some poolhall or bar. “Sure a dumb way to get it,” he said.

“Yes,” Strange’s voice said. “But there’s even some question about that. The woman claims he stepped right out in front of her. She couldn’t miss him. And he was looking right straight at her.” The voice stopped.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Prell said. But why call me up? he wondered again. He was beginning, as his sleep confusion lifted, to catch a peculiar urgency in Strange’s voice.

“Well, there’s no reason for her to make it up. Nobody’s blaming her. They were already calling it an accident. Not her fault. Why make up a story like that?”

“Wait a minute. Then you mean a suicide?” Prell suddenly felt wide awake. But he wondered still again, So what? Why call him? If old Landers wanted to knock himself off, he had the same right everybody else had. “A suicide, Johnny?”

“Well, nobody’s saying that. And certainly officially it’s going to go down as an accident. Maybe she’s just feeling guilty anyway. Even if she’s not responsible?” Strange said. “We all do that sometimes. Otherwise why would she make up such a story?”

What was coming through to Prell was that Strange had not called him because of him, but because of Strange. Prell had never been a buddy of Landers’. Had hardly known him, really. Landers hadn’t even been Regular Army. But Strange had been a buddy. If Strange needed him, he had to be there.

“Would she?” Strange’s voice said urgently.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She might have. But anyway you can’t solve it all right now, Johnny. Hell, maybe it’s something we’ll never know.

“What does Winch say about it?” he asked cautiously. “How is Winch taking it?”

“Who knows,” Strange said. “With him? He’s pretty upset, I guess. Hell, I’m pretty upset. But I didn’t mean to upset you, by calling you.”

“I didn’t really know him all that well,” Prell said calmly.

“I know. But the four of us were all on that same ship together.”

“Yeah. He came in to see me there in that main lounge a bunch of times, I remember.” As he talked, he was casting around for the right thing to say that would ease Strange.

“Yeah. Well.” He heard Strange swallow. “Well we were working on that discharge for him. Or Winch was. He thought that was what he wanted. He said that was what he wanted. To one of his lieutenants.” Strange’s voice was getting higher, and threatening to crack.

“Yeah, you told me,” Prell said. “I thought it was all fixed up.”

“Well, how would you feel? If you suddenly walked out of the hospital, with a discharge out of the Army?”

“I’d feel terrible,” Prell said. “But I wasn’t him. He wasn’t a Regular Army type”—then he changed that word—“Regular Army guy. I am. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. That’s true,” Strange said, sounding unconvinced. “He was no RA soldier.”

“Listen, Johnny. I’ll be back at Kilrainey in a couple weeks. You just hang on to it. Go talk to Winch about it.”

“Winch won’t talk about it.”

Of course he wouldn’t. That fucker, Prell thought, furiously. “We’ll go over it when I get back. We’ll talk it all out.”

“Sure,” Strange said. “Sure. I’m not flipping out, over it. I just thought you’d want to know.”

“Of course I’d want to know. I’m glad you called me,” Prell lied. “Call me here tomorrow, if you want. The day after tomorrow we’ll be in Lincoln, Nebraska.”

“Sure,” Strange said. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry about me, I mean. I’m fine. I’ll see you as soon as you get back.”

“How’s the new outfit doing?” Prell asked.

“Fine. It’s no great outfit. Signal Corps, I’m in. But at least I’m seeing they get some decent hot meals, for a change.”

“I bet they love it,” Prell said, and found he was grinning frantically, at the phone. Idiotically. As if Strange could see him.

“They do. They do. Okay, so long.” The question that followed was a polite afterthought. “How are you doing, out there?”

“Fine,” Prell said. “I guess I’m a natural-born speechmaker.”

“Good.”

The phone clicked off, dead. Prell realized he had been standing up on his feet all this time, and that his legs had begun to hurt him seriously again. He went back to the bed. Then, after he had sprawled back down, the guilts began to attack him.

Guilt because he had not helped Strange as much as he might have on the phone. Guilt because he had not cared more about Landers. Then, guilt because he had not been a better friend to Landers. Why hadn’t he been?

Then finally, the biggest guilt of them all. What was a man like him doing here? Making speeches for a living. He had become an entertainer. Him, and his Medal of Honor. They were a vaudeville team. It was something he had to wrassle with and defeat every day. And every new day it was back again, stronger and more powerful, to be wrassled with and defeated again.

Usually it hit him at this same time of every afternoon. After a day of loose pussyfooting around. He would come back to some hotel, with something great to look forward to, like an evening speech. Or another night of revels with the jolly funsters of Hollywood. All now in US Army uniform. He would lie on his bed, trying to give his legs a couple of hours of rest, and try to battle it

An entertainer. Get people to pay out their money to buy war bonds. Playing on their emotions. A “performer.” With “lighting experts” and “sound experts” and “script writers,” and a “director” and a “producer.” All telling him what to say and how to say it, and how to “act” it. What on earth was he doing here?

Prell had no new answers to the question. The old, simple answer to it was he was here because he wanted to stay in the Army. If he wasn’t here he would be a civilian out on the streets somewhere.

Prell had been over it all before. Long before. He had been over it back when the final decision was made, back in early December. General Stevens, then still only a colonel, had called him in and presented him with the alternatives. There were only the two. Discharge; or sell war bonds. Stevens had kindly been willing to discuss it with him. The two of them had decided it then.

“I know how much you dislike the idea of it,” Stevens said. “But if you want to stay in the Army, I don’t see any other way. There’s just no other way to keep you in. In the shape you’re in.”

The slim, white-haired old West Pointer smiled, and behind his desk pushed back his own chair, looking at Prell in his wheelchair.

“I have to admit I feel a certain personal involvement in this, Bobby. It goes back to when you first came in here, in danger of losing your leg. We discussed the various options then, you and I, if you remember.”

“Yes, sir. I remember,” Prell had said, huskily.

“Back then, you didn’t have any Medal of Honor, and we weren’t even sure you were going to have the leg,” Stevens smiled. “Even then all you could say was that you wanted to be a twenty-year man.”

Prell had nodded, but hadn’t felt up to smiling back.

“I’ve looked into it for you carefully, as much as I can,” Stevens said. “W/O Alexander and I have. I can tell you pretty much what to expect. I’m not sure you’ll like it.”

He was a hospital casual right now, not a member of any outfit. He would be assigned directly to the AGO Washington, his provisional HQ here in Second Army, Luxor. His actual authority would be Stevens himself here at Kilrainey, at first. If he was as successful on the first couple of tours as they had every reason to think he would be, and if physically he was up to it, he would then be reassigned, probably to Los Angeles on the West Coast. And after that perhaps to Washington. Out there and in Washington he would work with these professional theater people who ran this kind of thing for the Army. He would become a member of a unit that traveled all over the country selling war bonds.

“That ought to keep you in business at least until after the war,” Stevens said.

“What about after the war?” Prell said.

Stevens held up his hand. “Now, after the war,” he said, and cleared his throat. “After the war is something else again.”

After the war, there were going to be an awful lot of men hanging around looking for work as soldiers. And there weren’t going to be that many jobs for all of them. At the same time, there were going to be a lot of bread-and-butter assignments lying around, for men who qualified for them and could get their hands on them.

One of them would be all of those ROTC assignments, at all of the various colleges and universities across the country. Usually they were held back for old-time master sergeants. But they had been known to go to lesser ranks.

“I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t qualify for one of them,” Stevens smiled.

Prell had sat listening, suddenly wanting to weep. A kind of wildly inarticulate love, out of all proportion to anything he was used to feeling for anybody, had seized him for this elegant old soldier. He was such a fine example of the old-time, old-line, gentlemanly school of Army officer who once had existed. Those were the school of men Prell had wanted to serve under, back when he first enlisted, but he hadn’t found too many of them. At the moment, he would have done just about anything the old gentleman might have asked of him.

“I’m not saying you’ll love it. But it’s the best that can be done,” Stevens said. “I’ve asked around and found out what I could, both W/O Alexander and I have, about placing you in one of these posts. And I think you can get one, after the war,” Stevens smiled. “Particularly with that Medal of Honor you have tucked away under your web belt.”

“I only have one question, sir,” Prell said, huskily. “I’m not sure it isn’t degrading the Medal.”

Stevens glared at him piercingly. “Nothing on earth can degrade that Medal. Or what you did to earn it. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“Aye, sir,” Prell said. And then decided to go one step further. “But I’ve always felt I didn’t really deserve the Medal.”

“If you didn’t deserve it, you wouldn’t have gotten it. That’s why the system of recommendations is set up the way it is, to make it difficult. And since you have gotten it, you deserve everything the Army can do to help you.” Slowly, he smiled again; but his eyes were still piercing.

And that was the way they had left it. Back in early December. There were a few little strings attached, to getting Prell one of the coveted ROTC posts, Stevens said. One of them was the problem of rank. If Prell wanted to come out of the war a master/sgt, so that he would be truly qualified for the ROTC post, it meant he would have to make at least 1st/lt. Once the war was over, everybody made during it would be reduced two grades in rank. Stevens was beginning to do what he could about that. “As of right now, today, you’re a staff sergeant.” And at the successful conclusion of his first war bonds tour, he would be moved up to tech/sgt. And then up to master. Once he was with AGO Washington and on the West Coast, he would be given a commission to 2nd/lt, and then promoted to 1st/lt. “There’s a little trick to this rank problem,” the old colonel smiled. “That’s right.” He nodded. “If I want to retire as a colonel, I’ll have to make major general during the war.”

He had pulled his chair back up to the desk. “You understand, there are no absolute guarantees to this. I can’t guarantee you all of this. It’s much too soon, for anything like that. And it would be dishonest to say so. But it is certainly something to work toward, and I think it’s something you should plan toward.”