Whistle (64 page)

Up to now the girls had not said more than three or four words apiece. Now they began to giggle over the naked cook with his erection, and made it plain they did not want to be watched while they undressed, or to be seen nude. The men were to turn their backs, and hide their eyes. As soon as the girls were established in the bed under the sheet, the men could come on.

Of course, both men peeked, and there was a good deal of squealing and giggling and scolding over this. What the men saw for their trouble were two lovely, firm-breasted, young slender woman bodies. Only on the tanned hands and faces were there any signs of that swift aging process that was so noticeable out here among the hill farms. Then the two girls tumbled into the bed, and told the men to come on.

And that was the way they stayed, more or less, till after seven the next morning, when the girls said they must get home in order to wash and get ready to go to church. Sometimes, rarely, they had slept, while outside the hotel around them the little town rocked and rippled with its influx of last-gasp, end-of-the-world servicemen. The shouts and fights and breaking of glass and harmony singing did not bother the girls, and it certainly did not bother Strange and the cook. It was amazing, how two couples fucking in the same bed could spend so much time there, and still be so absolutely far away from each other.

Strange, who had developed a healthy hunger and was thinking of hotcakes, butter, syrup and sausage somewhere in the sunshine of the spring morning, wanted to buy them all a scrumptious breakfast, but the girls refused. Outside the hotel, without even a kiss (they had never been much for kissing, even when fucking in the old brass bed), they said good-by and went away along the now-quiet street in the sunny morning, then off down a path, back into the shrubbery out of which they had come.

So Strange was left with his fat first cook for a breakfast companion. It did not ruin the breakfast, but it came close to ruining nearly everything else. The cook would not stop talking about what a great night they two had had. Strange wanted only to savor it in silence. Strange felt he ought to owe the cook a favor. Instead, Strange was only angry. Finally he told the cook savagely to shut up.

“Oh, okay. Okay, John, okay.”

It was the first time the fat cook had ever dared use Strange’s first name. Strange raised his eyes and gave him a cold, murderous, fishy-eyed stare.

But the cook couldn’t ruin everything. Strange had come away from the whole thing, the bizarre night, the two girls, the drunken revel outside the hotel, with a feeling that the girls were a mythical impersonation of the spring itself, and this feeling stayed with him even in spite of the cook. Strange felt that if the spring, which had told him so much in other voiceless ways, had not been there, the girls would not have existed, either.

Together, he and the first cook slowly rounded up the rest of his kitchen force, going from place to place and group to group until they found them all. In the hot spring sunshine they had to take off their field jackets and carry them. Then they began the three-mile ride back to bivouac in the overcrowded jeep, past woods and fields that had leafed out noticeably since yesterday. They had four more days of maneuvers ahead, before they went back to camp. Most of that time was spent talking about the Saturday.

Strange would not talk about it. But this did not stop the cook from bragging to everybody about what a luckout and great night the two of them had had together, with their two hot farm girls. But Strange refused to answer all questions, even the most rollicking.

Strange was not at all proud of having doubled up with his fat cook in the same bed with two country girls. But more than that, the truth was that Strange had begun to fantasize about it.

It all had to do with whether the two girls had had orgasms or not. As far as Strange could tell, neither of the girls had come, not even once, all during the all-night lovemaking session. But this had not seemed to bother them. Or frustrate them. They seemed perfectly happy and satisfied, to be fucked over and over by the men who came on top of them.

They could not help but make him think of Linda Sue, when she was younger.

Strange had badly wanted to go down on his girl, and make her come that way. Maybe for perhaps the first time in her life. Frances Highsmith had told him that a come that way was twice as intense as a come from masturbating. But of course it had been impossible with the male cook present in the bed. And Strange himself was not so sure the girl herself would have accepted it without being shocked and horrified. It made the difference between himself and them intensely apparent.

Was he a pervert?

The whole thing was terribly distressing. And the following weekend when the company was back in out of the field, and he had gotten an overnight pass for himself into Luxor and had made a date ahead of time with Frances, he asked her about it.

They were lying in the bed with their arms around each other like two old buddies, after their first sexual thunderstorm, her breasts pressed deliciously against his stomach. Strange carefully had not questioned her about what she had been up to, or who she had been out with since he had seen her last.

“I want to ask you something,” he said, his chin on the top of her head. “Seriously. Am I a pervert?”

“Pervert why?” Her voice was muffled by his chest.

“Because I like going down on girls so much, damn it. Why else?”

Frances pushed away from him, to look into his eyes in silence. Then she smiled. “Well, are dogs perverts?” she said, finally.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Dogs lick each other’s genitals. Just about every animal does, as far as I know. And none of them seem to worry about being perverts.”

“They’re dogs. We’re people.”

“What I’m trying to say is I think it’s a perfectly natural act. I don’t know who first made the rules that it wasn’t, but I think they’re full of shit. So: I think you’re only a pervert if you think you’re a pervert.”

Strange did not answer for a long moment. “I guess I think I’m a pervert,” he said in a low voice. “For liking it so much. So I guess I am a pervert, hunh?”

“Okay, you’re a pervert,” Frances said. “If you think you are, you are.” She began to laugh, “Isn’t it great?”

Strange found himself beginning to laugh. “As a matter of fact, it is. I like it.”

Her sense of humor was contagious. And it wiped all the dark fog off all of the windows. She was so sensible, Frances, and so unguilty. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to have her sense of humor with him all the time, to fall back on. Especially after he left O’Bruyerre.

“But there are a lot of people who don’t think like you and me,” Strange said.

“Yes,” she said. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to pick your shots. Like I do.”

Strange nodded. He told her the story of the two girls, the fat first cook, and the one bed.

Frances was laughing through most of it. “Yes. I would say that was one of the times when it was better to keep it to yourself.

“Are you a Christian?”

Strange had to think about that one. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Any more.”

“But you were raised as a Christian. By religious people.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s your problem. So was I. And Christianity’s ideas about sex are as primitive as a bunch of witch doctors’. I don’t know where it all started,” Frances said, “I guess with those Puritans the damned English sent over here in 1620. The English were smart to get rid of them.”

“I’ll be going to England before long,” Strange smiled. “Maybe it’ll be a little different over there.”

“It ought to be, after the way they got rid of those Puritans. On the other hand, the Victorians didn’t do so good with it, either.” She shook her head. “I learned in college that in thirty-six of the forty-eight states it’s illegal for you and me to go down on each other. Actually against the law. All spelled out, in the particulars. I think it is, in this state. We could go to jail, if somebody caught us. All laws made by damned Christians.”

“But you still don’t think you’re a pervert,” Strange said.

“No. Absolutely not. I just like to suck cock.”

Strange felt himself beginning to laugh again, and when he left her the next day on the Sunday to go back to camp, he was feeling considerably better about the whole business of perversion.

It may have been partly those high spirits that caused him to go see Winch at the main PX and ask for a transfer out of the Signal Corps unit.

Strange had thought about doing it a number of times before. But the business with the fat first cook and the farm girls on that Saturday night had pushed him over the edge. The cook was never going to let up on it. He still insisted on calling Strange by his first name. Strange did not feel he should ask him to stop it. If he did, it might be taken the wrong way by the others. Strange had tried every silent way that he knew to let the cook know that he did not like it. But the cook had a hide like a rhinoceros. Or else he just chose to ignore it. Strange suspected it was the latter.

But the cook wasn’t the main factor. The cook was just the last straw. Strange never had liked the outfit. Two of the company commanders had moved away. Two other officers had moved off and been replaced. Two of the section sergeants had been transferred out, upward. Strange heard later that one of them was going to go to OCS. If there had ever been any esprit and unit loyalty, it had diminished visibly since Strange had come in.

He explained all this carefully to Winch, and a little apologetically, while Winch sat and grinned at him crazily.

“And just where would your fucking majesty like to go?” Winch said, when he had finished.

“I’d like to go back to the infantry.”

“You sure are a glutton for punishment. Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

They were seated at a small table a few feet from Winch’s big table, in the crowded roaring 6:00 p.m. interior of the huge beer-hall. Both of the Wurlitzers were going full blast. Winch had brought him over to the small table, after Strange had said he wanted to talk to him. It was Winch’s local private office, apparently.

Even in the 6:00 p.m. jam-up it was kept vacant for Winch’s use by the management.

“You know our old buddy Jack Alexander has a big piece of this place,” Winch said, with his crazy-grinning eyes,

“Sure, it figures.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you right at this moment,” Winch went on. “Both of these Divisions are moving out. One is leaving for England in a week, and the other not too long after. They both have had their final medical exams and there aren’t any vacancies.” He stopped to rub and pull at his ear, something Strange had never seen him do before. “But there will be two new Divisions moving right in on their heels as soon as they clear.”

“Sure. That’s fine. But what about my limited duty status?”

Winch grinned again. “Are you trying to put me on?”

Strange shook his head. “When is my outfit due to leave?”

“Not for a while. There’ve been no orders cut for it yet.

“But that doesn’t matter, either,” Winch said. “I can pull you out of it and hold you as a casual. If the orders are cut.”

“Okay, then. That’s fine.” Strange made as if to get up, but Winch put out a hand and held him down by his wrist

“What have you decided about Landers?” he said.

Strange ruminated. “I aint decided nothing,” he said. “Being out there in the field on maneuvers, I guess, makes it all seem pretty far away.”

“I guess,” Winch said.

Strange looked over at him, awkwardly. “You know, the spring came on while we were out there. I aint seen a real spring in a long time. Six years.”

“Yes?” Winch said. His eyes seemed to have lost their crazy energetic glint, and become more open.

“Everybody has to die sometime. In some particular way, or other.”

“Yes,” Winch said. “And generally, the later the better.”

“Yes,” Strange said. “Generally. But not always. I don’t honestly think there was anything anybody could have done.”

“That’s your considered opinion.” It was not a question, but more of a statement, made almost as if to Winch himself.

“It is,” Strange said. Winch had let go of his arm. He stood up. “I guess I better ought to be getting on.”

“No, no. No, no,” Winch cried, and his eyes began to heat up again. “You have to come over and have a few beers with this gang of bums. I want you to meet some of them.”

Strange went, but he didn’t want to. He felt he owed at least this much to Winch, but he did not like the quality, or the steady, sharply grinning faces around the table. He had never liked that kind of old-timer noncoms.

When he left, after two or three beers with them, Strange was careful to shake hands with every man he had been introduced to.

“You got to come back. You got to come back, Johnny Stranger,” Winch shouted after him, his face and hot eyes still twisted over some joke or other. “Any time. Any time. Tomorrow.”

Strange did not think Winch looked good at all.

S
TRANGE’S DISAPPROVAL WAS
not lost on Winch, at the big round table. If Strange thought it was, or thought Winch was unable to sense it and appreciate it, he was dead wrong.

On the other hand Winch was not in agreement at all with the way Strange had chosen to run out his string. The $7000 loss blown on the Peabody and its suite and parties was a ridiculous gesture, to Winch. Strange’s set determination to get himself to England and Europe, when he did not have to, was even crazier. But to come down here and ask to have himself transferred out of an outfit he now more or less dominated, back into the infantry, was a clear insanity.

There had to be something insanely self-destructive in it. Strange had to have gone off his rocker and a little crazy, over that dumb wife of his. Winch may have gone a little odd, a little peculiar, himself. But not so much that he could not notice and analyze something as flagrant as those choices.

Winch might be a little crazy. But he wasn’t that crazy. Statistically, they both knew, the mess/sgt of an infantry company stood a better chance of getting himself knocked off in Europe than the mess/sgt of a Signal Corps unit. For a large variety of reasons.