Whistle (14 page)

Winch could only shut his eyes. He was too exhausted to argue.

T
HE HOSPITAL WAS OUT
in the eastern suburbs. Luxor had no western suburbs. Founded in 1820 and built on a bluff along the mile-wide Mississippi, its modern downtown business and shopping district lay right against the river. The Mississippi barred western expansion. Coming toward it across the flats in Arkansas on the train, its blocks of downtown buildings on their bluff looked like the forward edge of some tidal wave of masonry, pushing against the sky. On the long bridge over the river, the sounds of the wheel thumps slowing as the train slowed, the skyline had a metropolitan allure. Women existed there. And bars, and hotels, and restaurants. Even the badly hurt were aware of them. The wounded who were getting off were especially aware.

Their train trip had lasted nearly five full days, not three. From Reno on, every man aboard was thoroughly exhausted. Rolling constantly, they stopped only to unload patients. At Kansas City the entire train was split into two trains. One headed east and north to St. Louis and Chicago. The other came south through Fort Scott, Springfield, and finally to Luxor. And it was going on to Atlanta.

Just the logistics studies alone, that were required on a national scale to facilitate such a move, were staggering to think of. And another train made the same trip or a variation every week.

Bobby Prell had managed to hang on mainly by gritting his teeth and never crying out, and by squeezing his eyes tight shut when he knew he was alone. He also lied to himself shamelessly. He told himself that soon he would be able to rest. Soon the torment in his tortured legs would stop. Prell himself didn’t believe a word of it. This train trip more than anything had made him realize suddenly that, even if he did manage to save his legs, the pain would probably never stop anyway. It would be his constant, loving companion probably the rest of his whole life. This was something pretty dire to think about. What it really meant was that his life was over either way, in any case—at least, the active physically vigorous life he had lived before, was over. That had stopped, at that exact moment on the hill near Munda, running down that muddy trail, in the same way as if some antique grandfather’s clock had stopped. Having realized it, Prell refused to think about it and suffered on in silence. Silence had become his lucky talisman. The dope the medics kept him full of helped some. But whenever he dropped off to sleep, he was afflicted with a new, recurrent nightmare. One or two or several members of one of his squads (he had had three) would appear in his dream, and with sorrowful smiles would accuse him of errors in his handling of them that he had not committed. Sometimes it was the dead or the wounded who appeared, sometimes the healthy living. Always he was unable to convince them otherwise, and would wake up full of undigested horror. Then he would lie and listen to the slap of the steel wheels, and feel the movement of the train in his weak, still-unknitted bones.

When the medic came to tell Prell they were pulling into Luxor, and that he would soon be resting in Kilrainey Army General, Prell could not honestly say whether he was glad, or sorry.

Eight cars up ahead, Marion Landers felt the train slow further as they came off the bridge. Below it, he caught a glimpse of the famous Luxor levee, an enormous expanse of tilted concrete stretching away. Then the train slid curving into the dirty yards of the main downtown station. Stretcher-bearers, ambulance men, medical officers—and this time, Red Cross women in gray uniforms—lined the quays. This time, there were Army trucks for the walking wounded. Landers was ticked off as one of them. Eighteen vehicles, ambulances and trucks, were strung out in the convoy as it moved east out of the grimy station.

In the truck Landers stood, holding on to the truck ribs. His crutches clamped under his arms, he watched the rich-looking, affluent, clean American city roll past them in the sunny summer air, and did not know if he was happy, or angry and jealous. Well-off-looking men and women in summer clothes stopped on the streets to wave at them. One well-stacked girl with shoulder-length blonde hair, walking with two girlfriends, stopped and, laughing with white white teeth, put her arms over her head and did a couple of bumps and grinds for them. Landers wanted to throttle her, but the damaged men in their maroon bathrobes in the trucks whistled and cheered.

Farther east outside the business district, huge tall shade trees, elms and maples and oaks, stood along the wide avenues and streets, and in the yards dominated the houses. They passed a couple of homemade store fronts built right against the sidewalk, outside which old men sat on upturned Coke cases in the dirt under the shade trees. They passed a large green public park with a golf course in it, where men in shirtsleeves moved on the fairways followed by Negro caddies. Then the brick buildings of the hospital appeared, and Landers turned to get a look at what his new home for the next months would be like.

It was rawly new. The two oldest buildings, administration and recreation, couldn’t have been two years old yet. Around these, covering a vast amount of acreage and getting newer and rawer the farther out they stood, lay two multiple series of ward buildings. Each ward building was a separate two-story brick building. All of them were connected to each other and to the center by strings of brick-porticoed concrete walkways. The sheer magnitude of it was disheartening.

At the outer extremities two new ward buildings were in the process of construction. Here and there a few spindly young trees stood weakly on the flat levelled expanse of new dirt and scant swatches of sparse grass struggled to make themselves a lawn.

Inexorably, the convoy turned into it led by the commanding officer’s jeep, between the brick columns that bore the name KILRAINEY ARMY GENERAL HOSPITAL, and Landers’ heart sank. Though he did not know what he had been expecting. Some shrewd, rich citizen who knew a senator had made himself a deal for a piece of no-good land on the edge of town. Some contractor (perhaps the same rich citizen) who knew a congressman had made another enormous profit building a hospital for the government on it. Landers would live in it. Once again, Landers felt cheated.

Landers was in almost as bad a way as Prell. If he had less physical pain, he suffered a much greater depression. The outsider-ness he had been afflicted with since his wounding, the sense of being all alone, had not diminished with the disembarkation on American soil. If anything, it had been enhanced. The impersonal way they had been handled and shipped off reinforced it. On the train, because of his crutches he was not allowed to leave the car he was assigned. The constant vibration of the train’s passage caused his ankle to swell in the cast. About all he could do was sit or lie in his berth and look out the window and brood. Salt Lake City. Denver. Omaha. Brood over all the beautiful and unbeautiful places in this great country of his, this great United States of America. Where he did not belong. Over the Sierra Nevada, down onto the Great Basin’s deserts, on through the Rockies and their emerald valleys, on across the hot dry Kansas plains. Reflect on the fact that in all of them there was not a single living soul who gave one damn whether he was alive or dead, including his own family back in Indiana.

Landers was also well aware that if he could have found one person who did care, or pretended to care even, he would gladly have punched them as hard as he could in the face with all of his strength. This didn’t make any sense, even to Landers.

That was the state—and the place—in which Johnny Stranger had found him on the morning of the second day, as the train came down into the desert of the Great Salt Lake.

Strange was far and away the best off of the three, Landers felt. Strange’s legs were in good shape. His hand was giving him no especial pain. He could travel up and down the train at will, without being restricted to one car. It was Strange who had discovered Prell in one of the hospital cars at the rear, and brought back the news that Prell was in a pretty bad way. Strange said Prell’s legs were giving him so much pain on the train that he was half-delirious, and did not want to see or talk to anyone, including Strange and Landers. Strange could also say with authority, since he had been everywhere on it, that 1st/Sgt Mart Winch was not even on the train at all.

Landers felt badly about Prell. But under the circumstances, with his own distress and despair, he did not have much emotion to expend on Prell. He was much more concerned about the fact that Winch was not on the train, because he had hoped to talk to Winch. Talk about himself and his problem. The four or five times he had been alone with Winch, he had not even been able to mention it. The trouble was, there was no easy handle with which to grasp it and present it. It was not as if he were physically crippled and had lost a leg, say, or like Prell, was in danger of losing a leg. Now, in lieu of Winch, he began to look at Strange as a possible receptacle.

Landers felt he had to talk to somebody, and there was about Strange the air of a man who might be receptive. But in the end there wasn’t really any choice. It was either Strange, or nobody. And Landers at twenty-one still had faith that in talking about things you helped them.

He broached it to Strange the second time the mess/sgt came down through the swaying train to sit and talk awhile.

“I’ve got this problem,” Landers said clumsily, after they had talked for a while about Prell, and about the rigors of the trip. “Maybe you could help me with it. Something happened to me when I got hit. I’ve got this terrible depression. Had it ever since.”

Strange sat swaying on the berth, his hands hanging between his knees, and looked at him a long time without answering.

“I know it sounds stupid,” Landers said, “but nothing seems to mean anything any more. It all seems so pointless, useless. It’s all worthless.”

“Did they give you some new bad news about your leg at Letterman?”

“No,” Landers said helplessly. “It’s not anything like that.”

“You ought to be feeling pretty good. You got a nice easy wound that’ll keep you out of things for a while. Maybe permanently. You got six months’ back pay coming, and a nice town to spend it in.”

“I know,” Landers agreed eagerly. Then shrugged disconsolately. “I know all that.”

“All that’s not something to turn your nose up at,” Strange offered, not unkindly.

Landers, on his side, now that he was committed, was looking at him studiously, and wondering just how far he could go. Both Winch and Strange were old-time Regular soldiers, and Landers being a replacement didn’t know them all that well. Winch he had been thrown with a lot more because of working for him. But Winch had a way of reacting with a rudely passionate arrogance in a kind of paradoxical, contradictory way that could be very unsettling. Landers knew less about Strange, never having associated with him. But the mess/sgt’s sad, bitter, almost smile made him feel Strange might be understanding about a problem like his, and sympathetic. On the other hand, Landers felt Strange had always avoided him. Perhaps for being a replacement. Especially since being wounded and shipped out together with him, he felt Strange avoiding him. So he was hesitant.

“I think this whole war is asinine,” Landers said. “I think it’s insane, and it’s useless. Did you—Didn’t you ever feel the whole fucking thing was just sort of ridiculous?”

“Yes-s. I have, I guess,” Strange said judiciously. “But I’ve never found any way to see that that makes any difference with anything.”

“For example, I can see how in ten years from now all these people who are fighting each other so desperately now will be back at peace and friendly. And then they’ll be making business deals and treaties with each other. And everybody getting rich. Just like nothing had happened. But all those guys who are dead, young guys like me, guys like you, will still be dead.”

“Yeah, it’s a pretty sorry state. For them. But it’s no good to think about it like that.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I can never forget that it was them who attacked us.”

“Yeah. That’s true. I can’t forget that, either, I guess,” Landers said. But his voice was full of despair.

From the other end of the berth, swaying with the train’s swing, Strange nodded at him thoughtfully.

For his part, Strange had noticed something was not right with Landers. He had noticed it when he first came through his car and stumbled onto him, when looking for Winch and Prell. Strange had never had much use for the later draftees and volunteer replacements. They all wanted to be one of the boys so bad that they couldn’t be themselves and act natural. Landers particularly he found hard to talk to. And he resented Landers’ education. He had disliked Landers for getting himself transferred out of the old company to become the handyman of the battalion’s colonel. But seeing him in such a disarranged state, particularly after finding he couldn’t get in to see Prell, had called up in Strange all his mothering instincts the old company had evoked so intensely and which now had nowhere to direct themselves. That in fact was why he had come back down the second time. That, and perhaps because he was lonely.

Strange had been looking for, anticipating, despair in Prell and instead had suddenly found it in Landers. Briefly he wished Winch were here with his wisdom. Winch with his smart head would know what to tell Landers. If he decided he wanted to.

“Just what is it that’s bothering you, Landers?” Strange said.

“I guess it’s because nobody anywhere seems to think the way I do. And I’ve got a hunch. I’ve come to the realization finally that I’m going to be killed in this war. It’s kind of hard.”

“They say lots of men, almost everybody, feels like that after they’ve been seriously wounded for the first time.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“At least you’re not going to be lulled right away. I mean, not today or tomorrow. You’ve got several months ahead of you.”

“I know all that. Oh, I’ll be all right. Never mind.”

“Try to take it a day at a time,” Strange said.