Whistle (15 page)

Landers looked up, and after looking at him a long minute from the other end of the berth, he took a deep breath and said, “I don’t give a damn about this war any more. That’s the truth. That’s what bothers me. Fuck this war. Look at all those rich, well-off fuckers out there. What the fuck do they care? I think I’m becoming a pacifist.” He had thought Strange would be shocked by this, at the very least outraged. But it didn’t even bother Strange.

“Of course, there’re a lot of people serving the country who aren’t in front line rifle companies,” Strange said.

Landers had his head down and did not answer that, and Strange stared at him. Johnny Stranger in fact was far and away in the best shape of them all, Strange guessed. Mentally, and physically. He had his plans all laid, and he was getting out. He was even happy—if happy was the right word for a man who, constantly, every half hour or so, found himself remembering the old outfit. Who worried and fretted over them, and the fact that they were still out there. And who found he was constantly thirsting for news of them. Strange was happy because he had telephoned his wife from San Francisco. It had meant waiting in line for over two hours outside one of the public phone booths at Letterman. But he had gotten through to her at home in Covington across the river from Cincinnati. And she was going to meet him in Luxor in the next week or so. Being so happy made him feel guilty in front of Landers. He got up.

“Well, let me think about it. Maybe I can come up with something. I’ll come back. We’ll have to come up with something to get you out of this doldrums. Summer doldrums, my granddaddy used to call it.” He grinned and went off.

Landers stared after him in silence, thinking he would probably never come back now. Run like a thief. Except that he had to come back past here to get back to the rear of the train to inquire about Prell.

He did come back, though. He came back later that afternoon, and he came back again that night. And after that he came back often, as often at night as in the day. That was because on the train night and day got mixed up, had no meaning. Somebody was always calling for the medics so that the lights were never turned off anyway. By a sort of unspoken common consent nobody complained or asked for them to be turned off and they were left on all the time. People slept when they could, day or night.

Strange seemed to prefer the night, to come. As a matter of fact. As though he had difficulty sleeping at night, too.

Strange was concerned, though. He seemed to be trying desperately hard to help.

“As far as being killed goes, it’s true you might be killed,” he said on one visit. “If you don’t change your job. Sergeant of infantry. Whereas I don’t know if I would. I mean, with my kind of work. Cooking, and running a mess. I’ve never even seen any real combat. Like you have.”

“I haven’t really seen any either,” Landers said.

“Well, at least you’ve been in a couple of firefights and killed some Japs.”

“Only one Jap. And that was at pretty long range. I don’t know if I killed him. I know I hit him. I’m only a clerk, really.”

“Yeah, company clerk, rifle company, infantry. That’s what you’ve got to get changed.”

“Can you see me getting myself transferred to the quartermaster?”

“No. I guess not.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to begin.”

“It’s that damned getting wounded. If you hadn’t got wounded, you’d have been all right.”

“Yes. I guess so,” Landers said. “And I’d still be out there.”

Strange had managed to get hold of a bottle somewhere, and passed it over. “Well, don’t go feeling lonesome and blue. Shit, we don’t even know what we’re gonna run into when we do get to Luxor. Maybe you’ll find you’re permanently disabled.”

“I don’t think so. Not from the way that surgeon who operated on me talked.”

“Well, you never can tell,” Strange said.

Another time he said, “What about your family?”

“Ha, my family.” Landers laughed. The suggestions were becoming more and more ridiculous each time Strange came. “I could tell you a lot about my family. If I got killed, my mother would buy herself a gold-star flag to stick in the window, that’s what. And be tickled to death she had something to cry over every week at her bridge club. My sister would have something to get attention with in her sociology courses in college. And my father. My father would be able to go down to the American Legion three nights a week and brag about how his boy fought, bled and died for his country.”

Strange stared back at him expressionlessly and ran his tongue slowly over his teeth. “That don’t sound like much of a family.”

“They’re all phonies. Hypocrites. Listen, I quit college to join the infantry when the war started,” Landers said. “Well, my father raised all kinds of hell. He wanted me to stay in college till I graduated and then he would help me get a commission, he said, something nice and safe like in Washington. I refused. He wouldn’t even come to say good-by to me when I left.”

“But now it looks like your father was right, don’t it?” Strange said.

“I suppose he was. In a way. The cynical old son of a bitch.”

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“Maybe you should let your father help you get that commission now?”

“I’d rather die,” Landers said. “Anyway, now he wouldn’t.”

“Well, maybe there are other ways to do it. You’re an educated fella. You ought to be able to use it.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do, how to begin. And besides I’d be ashamed.”

“Hell, that’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Strange said. “Let me think about it awhile more. I’ll come back later.” He stood up, swaying with the train’s sway.

This time, Landers was almost laughing when he left. It had become a personal challenge to Strange, apparently, the way he shook his head and set his jaw. And the next time he came, ambling bandy-legged and picking his way back along the swaying central corridor, Landers began to laugh almost before he sat down. Strange stopped and looked at him, nonplused, and then grinned and began to laugh himself. He had brought a newer, almost full bottle with him this time. They drank it empty, getting drunk and roaring with laughter, and each trying to outdo the other in making up newer and more outlandish, more outrageous ways for Landers to save himself. And save his life.

When he left that time, Landers watched him with warm eyes.

Strange could feel pleased with himself. But if he thought his little therapy had cured the despair, he was mistaken. He came back more and more, and they drank more and more, and laughed more and more, but whenever he left, Landers still had the night window to stare out of. The moon was full over the Kansas wheat fields on that trip. It seemed right in keeping. And Landers clung to Strange more and more. When the truck convoy stopped inside the Kilrainey General central compound and started unloading, all Landers could think of, in a kind of juvenile panic, was where to find Strange. Like most people who pick a confessor to expose themselves to, he had become the slave of the therapist.

In the confused press of the unloading, in the midst of all those to be unloaded and all those who had come to see them arrive, it was impossible to find anybody. Landers let himself be helped off the truckbed, and standing on his crutches in the crowds looked frantically everywhere for Strange, until in the edge of the crowd of observers he heard somebody cry, “There’s Landers!” He looked and saw five men from the old company who looked vaguely familiar, but he didn’t really recognize them. They didn’t look like the same men. Their faces had changed in some way. Some way that he could not read. They weren’t the old companions from the company that he’d known. Before he could do more than wave, he was hurried away on his crutches with a group, toward one of the distant wards, along the brick-porticoed-covered concrete walkways.

When he finally was allowed to get outside the big doors of his ward a few days later on his own, and find his way around a bit, he found that Strange had already left on a short convalescent furlough to Cincinnati.

T
HE SHAKEDOWN TOOK A
full six days. It was not only that there was so much to do to and for each man. It was also the amount of time required to get the simplest thing done.

Getting an X-ray was often a full day’s job for a man who could walk, like Landers or Strange. It meant going to the X-ray Section (always a long way off and hard to find) and sitting and waiting in line through a full working day, and then often having to return the next day. While the ambulatory cases waited patiently, each with his signed chit in his hand, one or two or three stretcher cases might be rolled in in their surgeon’s “meat wagons” and given precedence. There were always more men waiting than the staff could get to. The Chemical Medicine Section for blood tests was equally difficult.

Each man had to have a complete VD examination. Each man had to have a full dental checkout. Then there were all the physical examinations on the ward itself. His ward intern had to get acquainted with him. His surgeon had to get acquainted with him. His file had to be studied. Questions had to be asked. And asked again.

The new arrivals learned quickly that just because this was a hospital did not mean that it would not be run in the Army way. The Army way was to achieve expertise by handling en bloc larger and larger numbers of similar objects, including casualties. While saving time and enhancing efficiency in the upper levels of bloc-manipulating, this method passed all time loss and inefficiency straight down to the lowest level of individual unit—where it enhanced and multiplied time loss, waste, human error, discomfort, all inefficiency at the individual unit level. Namely, each man. In actual fact, it was not just the Army way. It was the way of all large organizations. Such as factory forces, universities, big offices, and all hospitals, Army or otherwise.

Since most average soldiers had never experienced this managerial method, they thought of it uniquely as Army, put up with it patiently, and cursed it. And soon saw they were not going to be freed of it just simply because they were hospitalized.

By the time Landers was allowed out into the hospital proper to look around and found that Johnny Stranger had already left on convalescent furlough, he had been shut up in his particular ward for more than five full days. There was a huge general messhall somewhere, he was told, but as far as his life was concerned all meals in Kilrainey General were served on the ward.

Landers was again at a loss, without Strange to talk to.

Strange, though, had quickly developed into a special case. Partly this was because of the nature of his injury, but partly it was because his wife telephoned him from Cincinnati.

Strange lost no time in learning what he could find out about the hospital internal politics. By the sheer luck of the draw he had been assigned to the younger and more tolerant of the two chief surgeons in orthopedics, both transposed civilians. By luck also, he was put in the same ward with two old members of the old company, Corello the Italian from McMinnville and a long lanky Southerner from Alabama named Drake. These two quickly filled him in on what they knew, or had heard. The young lt colonel who was his surgeon was rumored by hospital gossip to be a crackerjack poker player. This alone showed the points he had already earned with the men. When during his rounds he first examined the articulation of Strange’s hand and then looked at the X-rays, sitting on Strange’s bed with the hand on his knee, he shook his head and made a wry smile. It was perhaps a snap judgment, he felt, but he was afraid the hand might come out of the operation in worse shape than before. He wanted more time to study it and make further examinations.

Behind him, standing at the bed foot, the thickset sandy-haired administrative major, who wore a bristly red military mustache and had administrative control over all the orthopedics cases, harumphed his displeasure and cleared his throat and coughed. Col Curran simply turned to smile brightly at him.

Strange watched them both covertly, the exchange not lost on him. He had heard all about the major, too. Not much of it good. The major’s job, in fact, was to get every man back to full duty as quick as possible. Also, the surgeon’s comment on his hand immediately sensitized Strange to the possibility that he might be up for a discharge even sooner than he had anticipated. Carefully keeping his eyes lowered, careful not to show any pleasure, Strange used the opportunity to ask in a low humble voice that if such was the case, might not the colonel see his way clear to giving him a three-day pass, since his wife was coming to Luxor to see him from Cincinnati, and he had not seen her in eighteen months.

Young Col Curran raised clear, bright, amused eyes from Strange’s hand to Strange’s face, and laughed silently. “Actually I don’t see any reason why not, Will you see to that, Major?”

The major cleared his throat again. “Well, the policy is not to allow any leaves or passes until a man has finalized his potential operative surgical status.”

“As far as I’m concerned, Sergeant—uh?—Stranger?—Sergeant Strange here has a finalized operative surgical status. At least for two weeks. So will you see to it, Doctor Hogan?”

“Yes, sir, Doctor. I will.” Hogan’s voice was stony. “But I’m sure the colonel realizes it’s unorthodox. You come see me,” he said to Strange, “when your wife arrives.”

Strange kept his eyes down. Though he knew he had made an enemy. “Thank you, Major, sir. My wife’ll appreciate it as much as me.” Col Curran’s eyes were still laughing.

But then Linda Sue hadn’t come. She had telephoned instead.

Taking a personal phone call on a crowded ward, especially a call that carried an embarrassing message, was as frustrating as it was unpleasant. You couldn’t really say anything you wanted to say. There was a small office with a phone in it on each ward, but it was kept locked and only the ward intern and the nurse had the keys. So Strange had to take the call at the ward boy’s desk.

She could not get away from her job, was the upshot of Linda’s call. The job was in a defense plant making precision parts for 105 howitzers and they wouldn’t let her off. Yes, she’d told them it was because her husband had just returned from overseas, wounded. They still wouldn’t let her off. Strange thought her voice sounded distant and sullen. And it occurred to him suddenly that she had sounded a little bit that same way, too, when he called from San Francisco. But he had been too elated to notice. Something picked stiffly at the back of his mind. Well, why didn’t she just quit the damned job? he demanded. She could get another easy enough; in wartime. No she couldn’t, Linda came back. The good jobs were not all that easy to get. She had taken special training for this one. If she quit, she would have to start all over at the bottom in something else. Besides, she had made friends there. She liked the job. Strange suddenly stopped talking. He was aware without looking that faces were turned toward him on the ward. Besides, quite suddenly, he could see her point, her side of it. There was no reason to suspect her of anything. Well, what if he could get himself a two-week convalescent furlough, would that please her? There was a pause. Of course it would, she’d be overjoyed, Linda said, did he think he could? “I don’t know,” Strange said. “But I’ll try. I’ll call or send a wire when I find out.” She said she loved him. He said he loved her. In a low voice. Then he hung up and walked away toward his bed trying not to show any unhappiness on his face. It was then he decided to go straight to Curran. He, Strange himself, on his own.