Whistle (8 page)

It was for this patrol that the Division commander was reputedly recommending him for the Congressional Medal. And it was this patrol that Winch was down on him for.

Compared to that, Strange felt his own wounding had been little more than a dirty cosmic joke.

His had happened back on Guadalcanal. Way back. In January. It was just at the time when the company had successfully terminated its first big combat and first big attack against the Japs. Strange and a couple of his cook force had walked up with a resupply to visit the company. They were bivouacked on top of a hill they had taken two days before. Some staff colonel had named it the Sea Horse. They sat around on the slope talking, the guys filling Strange and his cooks in on all that had happened, and Strange had noticed how they were all somehow changed. He did not know exactly how they were changed. They just were different. Then suddenly there was the soft, almost soundless shu-shu-shu of mortars coming in, and someone squawked, and everyone hit the dirt. Strange threw himself flat. There was a yell from somewhere, during the explosions. When he sat back up, he noticed the palm of his hand was burning hot. A sharp, hot, toothy little piece of fragment half the size of your little fingernail had hit him in his palm between the knuckles of his middle fingers but hadn’t come out the other side. There it was, sticking in his palm, just above the center. While the wounded man who had yelled was being taken care of, Strange started showing his hand around. He had been briefly terrified, his heart somewhere up between his ears, but when he found himself to be all right, and the man who was wounded was found to be okay, neither maimed nor killed, he began to laugh. And soon they were all laughing. It was a great joke, his hand. Mother Strange had come up to visit the company and had got himself a Purple Heart. There was no blood on his hand. The hot metal apparently had itself cauterized the wound. Carefully they pulled the piece of fragment out, and Strange put it in his pocket. No blood followed it out. There was only this longitudinal little blue slit. Like a miniature pussy, someone said. They took him around to the command post, everybody laughing, and showed it to the company commander to make sure of the Purple Heart and then a medic put a Band-Aid on it. A little later, still laughing, he and his two cooks left and walked back with another, returning resupply.

Later on, though, he hadn’t laughed. When he thought about it, it was with a sense of irritated anger. What he remembered was the sense of fear, and the momentary feeling of total helplessness. He hadn’t liked either worth a damn.

Along the ship’s promenade, Strange spotted a window that was empty and went over and stood and watched the American coastline himself for a while.

It was summer here back home, mid-August, and the glass was open. He pulled up the sleeves of his bathrobe and leaned on the glass and let the light breeze of passage along the glass riffle the hairs on his forearms.

It was enough to bring the fear back to him, just for him to think that if it had been a little harder, it would have gone right on through his hand; and if it had hit hard enough to do that, and had hit him in the head, he would be dead. And none of it meant a damn thing. Not to anyone but Johnny Stranger. It just hadn’t happened to hit him in a vital spot, and that was all it meant. It was at that point that the irritated anger always rose up on him.

Each time he clenched and unclenched the hand it hurt him and inside his head he could hear it grate. The doc had said there was still a tiny piece of metal in it. And that a tendon was rolling over the piece of metal, or over a bone growth. But getting the metal out was the least of it. The trauma and continued use had caused a degenerative arthritis to set in in the hand, in the six months since he got it.

Studying the black, hilly shore, Strange drew a deep breath of the sea air, and then blew it back out into the sea airspace, through which the ship was again moving steadily now, across the flat uninhabited wastes of moving salt water. Strange was not at all averse to being home.

In the clear, calm, moonless night the shore and the sea seemed to be illumined by a lemon-pink night light that did not come from anywhere. Behind both the mountains made a black presence, visible only in silhouette, by the stars they blocked. Once, the lights of a city made a dull glow on the shore. And Strange thought of all the blackouts he had seen, as far south as New Caledonia.

After six months, he had let one of his cooks talk him into going on sick call with his hand. They had immediately clapped him in the hospital for evacuation, and had flown him out. In Efate they had said they would not even attempt to operate on it there. So they would have to send him home. The doc there said there were only a few men in the States who could do the operations. He would need more than one. It would be a long painful process, but he ought to have an 80 to 90 percent recovery, when it was finished. The whole thing was the result of his not having come in with it when it first occurred. He should have reported it when it happened. The doc went on to say that, fortunately, the Army would still do all this for him. And the government would pay for it all. But if he had been an industrial worker, his negligence would have cost him the insurance. Strange could not tell him he had been ashamed to report it, embarrassed to go to the hospital, where so many badly mangled men were lying stretched out moaning and would see him. He had only nodded, repeatedly, and said nothing.

Nor could he claim to anybody, even to himself, that he was miserable and unhappy when he heard all this terrible news about his hand.

Way back on the Canal, in the very beginning, Strange had decided early that he was not going to get his ass shot off unless it was absolutely necessary.

When the company went up into its first combat on Guadalcanal’s Hill 52, everybody who could had grabbed his rifle and wanted to go along. Cooks and bakers, supplyroom men, drivers, clerks, and Strange and his kitchen force. Everybody wanted to be in combat. Two days of it was enough for Strange. Nobody but a nut would get himself shot at when he didn’t have to. And when Strange left and went back down, most of his cooks and the supplyroom men went with him. The rest came down the next day. They were under no orders to stay up there. Their orders were to stay back in the rear and guard the company baggage and try to get hot food up to the men, and Strange saw to it that they did just that. They didn’t have much luck with the hot food part. But they did keep the company’s “A” and “B” bags from being rifled by a new outfit who had just arrived. And when the battalion moved up to New Georgia for the invasion, Strange had held himself to the same principle. He would follow his orders, and follow them to the letter. But no more. And he would see that everybody under him did the same. If their orders required them to go on up on the line in the New Georgia jungle, they would go. But not unless.

You could always get yourself knocked off in one of the air raids that came over every day. Without going up on the line to the company. But the percentages were minuscule, compared to what could happen to you up there with the company.

And Strange, like most intelligent men trained in the various logistics disciplines, had realized right away that the wins and losses of this war were going to be governed by industrial percentages and numerical averages, not by acts of individual heroism. And that included survival.

And yet he stayed. When at any moment he could have turned himself in with his bad hand and been evacuated, he had stayed. And even now he felt terrible about leaving. Strange was perceptive enough to understand the paradox of that.

At the window, Strange straightened up from watching the night sea and the dark coastline, and looked around. Most of the men were beginning to drift away, bored as the newness wore off of watching the homeland coast. He leaned down on his elbows again.

His move with Winch from Fort Kam to Schofield back there in Wahoo, and his subsequent marriage, had changed more than Strange’s life. It had changed his ambitions. Strange spit out the window into the sea’s airspace, and watched the breeze grab it. Or at least it had changed Linda Sue’s ambitions. As Linda liked to say, she wasn’t always going to be married to an Army staff/sgt. The two thousand dollars savings they had collected was going to be stashed away until after the war and then it was going to go into a restaurant and Strange, who up until two years before had always considered himself a thirty-year man in the Army, was going to become a restaurateur.

Linda had bought a car with the first of the money and taken a job downtown in Honolulu as cashier in a big restaurant, and started taking courses in restaurant management. As much of their joint savings had come from her salary as from Strange’s pay. By the end of the fall of 1941 Strange was calculating that one more three-year hitch would do it for them. They’d be able to leave the Army, and give Linda Sue her restaurant.

Then the Japs had arrived in December, with their sneak attack. But the two thousand bucks was safe at home with Linda. And Linda was working and adding to it. She was also getting the biggest pay allotment Strange was allowed to send her, to add to the rest.

Strange had never told anybody in the company about the restaurant. Something about leaving the Army, and particularly about leaving the company, made him too uncomfortable. A couple of times he almost had told Winch. But Winch’s reaction to the earlier news that he was getting married stopped him. Winch had hooted and howled and pranced around the orderly room, and roared with laughter and sneered at him with insulting contempt. It was the nearest he ever came to an open falling out with Winch.

He knew of course that Winch was married and had a wife somewhere. Or was divorced. Although apparently nobody else knew it. But back at Fort Riley Strange had seen the tall, long-necked, broad-hipped woman, Winch’s wife, walking around the post. And the fact that Winch had not brought her to Wahoo with him indicated that something had happened to them. So once again he had given Winch the benefit of the doubt and made allowances for him.

Strange was aware that his reluctance to mention the restaurant was unusual. That the idea of quitting the Army for good embarrassed him and left him feeling uncomfortable. Sighing, he stood up straight again from the open window-port, his hand hurting. Most of the coast watchers were gone now. The ship was moving farther out from shore, and soon even the high mountains behind the coast would be unnoticeable.

The constant clenching and unclenching of his hand had caused a dull, deep ache in his palm, which had spread all across the hand, then up into his wrist and on up through the wrist into his forearm. He would have to ask the medic for a pill to sleep tonight.

In six months he could be out of the Army, if he played his cards right. This war was going to last a lot longer than that. Six months in the hospital, an operation or two, wasn’t so very long. With his mustering-out pay, plus all his back pay and allowances, plus all the money Linda had been making working in the defense plants around Cincinnati, they could open the restaurant right there as soon as he got discharged. And get in on the wartime boom with it.

But the thought depressed him. At the same time that it made him both happy and glad, it depressed him.

And it hurt him physically, in his gut, to see Prell all trussed up that way. Prell was one of the people who should never be laid up like that. And yet Prell was one of the ones who would always get hurt the worst, and the most often, in his life. He was too young to know that, yet. Or maybe he was just learning it, now.

How old was Prell? Twenty-three or -four. Strange was twenty-seven.

Getting hit wasn’t so bad. As long as you didn’t get killed. It only took a second, and you didn’t really feel anything. It was all that time afterward, that it took you to get over it, that really did you in.

After a last look out the window-port, Strange turned away and headed toward the iron stairs, thinking he ought to get to sleep, if he wanted to get up early and go see if there was anything he could do for Prell.

T
HEY CAME IN JUST AT
six o’clock. Behind them the sun was lowering in the west. It turned everything in front of them a reddish gold. The great red bridge with its great bellying bight of cable and flimsy-looking roadbed suspended under it, visible from miles away out at sea, was golden in the sun. So were the hills at both ends of it. It was indeed a golden gateway into America, its twin supports towering up. Time seemed to hang as the ship slid along, homing to it. Facing it, tough grizzled old troopers with years of service broke down. Restrictions limiting the open upper decks to officers had been removed and everyone who could hobble or crawl was up there on them. In the channel, the great stately bridge moved slowly, majestically toward them. As the ship passed under it, hooting its arrival blasts on the ship’s horn, the heads of the men craned back to look straight up at it and a ragged cheer went up. Inside the bridge was home ground, and they had finally reached it. Inside the channel, first Alcatraz and then beyond it Angel Island and Fort McDowell, the place where most of them had started their Pacific voyaging, separated themselves from the bay coast behind. Along the starboard the Embarcadero glittered. The ship curved, then turned in slowly toward it. Behind the docks Telegraph Hill and Nob Hill made rising curves. Hungry eyes studied every detail. This scene was about all of San Francisco and the bay area that any of them, almost without exception, would get to see. If the owners of the eyes had known that, they would have studied each detail even more closely. At the docks Army and civilian ambulances were waiting for them, and continued to roll in in a long line. As the ship nosed in, ship’s medical personnel began to move through the crowds of bathrobed men on the open upper decks, telling them to get below.

The main impression they got was one of enormous growth. Urban, industrial, maritime, civic. Even men who had only been gone six months, like Landers, thought they could see a difference. Whole new forests of smokestacks seemed to have sprouted. Industrial smoke seemed to have doubled. Shipping had tripled. Truck traffic had at least doubled. There were many more installations, and many more people, everywhere. To men who had been away one year, or two, or more, like Strange, it did not even seem the same city. Then they were whisked below, bundled ashore and hustled into the ambulances. From which they could see next to nothing. They were being moved around with all the ceremony of a stockyard delivery. Then, in a long string, aided by policemen and stopped traffic lights which halted all cross traffic, the ambulances headed for the Army’s Letterman General. They traveled in convoys of twenty and thirty, with sufficient distance between to let the backed-up cross traffic through. Some of them made four and five trips. A few of the men, seated by the ambulance rear windows, caught glimpses of a city.