Whistle (20 page)

Strange was not at all sure that the doctors weren’t right. Prell looked terrible. His eyes were sunk so far back in his head, and the skin drawn so tight over his cheekbones, that he looked like a skull. A dead man. But at least the fuckers could let him die decently, the way he wanted.

On the other hand what was there that Strange could do for him? Him, a low-life s/sgt of a mess/sgt? What colonels were going to listen to him? He told Prell that.

“I thought maybe if you went and talked to Curran,” Prell said. His purplish eyes were almost desperate. “Curran didn’t seem to be so strong for amputating it as the others.”

“I’ll certainly talk to him,” Strange said desperately. “But you know how much he’s going to pay any attention to me.”

“Maybe if you got all the guys together,” Prell said. “Get up a petition. Get them all to sign it.”

“A petition?” Strange said. “In the Army?”

“Well, times are changing. And those guys aren’t soldiers. They’re civilians,” Prell insisted. “Maybe a petition would impress them.”

“I can try it,” Strange said. “I can try it.” He paused a minute, then said, “But listen. Wait a minute. You’ve given me an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll get Landers to go and talk to Curran.”

“Why Landers?”

“Well, you know. He’s a college man and all that. He speaks their language. If he was to talk to them, I think it’d carry more weight than if I went.”

“That’s a good idea,” Prell said, his sunken eyes widening to grasp at any hope. “Try that.”

“I will. I will,” Strange said.

He did not waste time on any formal good-bys. He found Landers in the big recreation center, talking to the pretty girl with the walleye, she nervous and behind her athletic equipment counter as if it were some protective wall between them. Strange would have laughed, normally.

“But why me?” Landers said, after they had gotten off by themselves on one of the couches on the basketball floor. “I don’t know Curran any better than you do.”

Landers was having difficulty concentrating. Carol Firebaugh had just accepted his invitation, about his twentieth invitation, to have a date with him outside. But instead of being elated, he suddenly found himself full of the old despair again. Inexplicably, he found himself seeing again the picture that had been emblazoned on his retinas that day on the ridge when he sat with the wounded and stared at the clean, white streaks down all the dirty faces from weeping. The two things were so far apart that there was no way of reconnecting them at all. Grown men. All of them. Himself included. She had been so circumscribed in her acceptance that it was almost a refusal. And the picture kept coming back, to oppress him. Something somewhere had stopped for Landers there that day. How could you explain that to someone who hadn’t been there? How could you say it to her? It made that kind of wild rage come back up in him. Reckless. He had been just on the point of withdrawing the invitation when Strange arrived.

“Well, you’re a college man. And all that,” Strange said. “You talk their language.”

“I thought you were mad at me,” Landers said.

Strange stared at him. “What?” He couldn’t connect Landers’ comment with anything. “Mad at you? What do you mean, mad at you?”

“Well, you hardly even said hello, when I saw you in the corridor earlier,” Landers said. “You just sort of went right off. As if you were cutting me.”

“Oh.” Strange felt as if he had come up against some kind of unanticipated brick wall in the dark. Here was a whole new field, new outlook opening up that he had neither the time nor the inclination to poke into. “Well, I was worried about Prell, don’t you see? Will you do it? Will you go to Curran?”

“Of course I will. I’ll do anything for any of the guys from the company. Especially Prell.”

Landers had heard the bad news about Prell. All of the guys had heard it, from Corello. At the time Landers had shrugged inwardly, and counted it as one more inevitable loss to the jungle campaigns, the jungle war, one more casualty to New Georgia. A leg. It had never occurred to him there might be anything anybody could do about it. Now a kind of wild flame of loyalty licked up in him searing his trachea and heart. He would do any damn thing he could do, for any of them.

They would understand, if he told them about the men on the hilltop. They might laugh about it. Now. But they would understand.

“But I don’t think Curran’ll listen to me any more than he would you,” he said. “Less, probably.”

“But will you try? And tell him all of us guys from the old company are ready to get up a petition and sign it, if he wants?”

“Sure I’ll try.”

“Prell seems to feel Curran wasn’t as strongly for the amputation as the other two.”

“I’ll go right now. You want me to go now?”

“Fine. And tell him about the petition?”

Landers was off his crutches by now, and was using a cane and the walking iron. He was still nervous with them, and unsure of himself on them. It took him a long time to get from the recreation center to the area of the surgery theaters. He had to work hard and move carefully going up and down the various ramps designed for rolling surgery beds and wheelchairs. When he got to Curran’s tiny office, his knees felt shaky. Fortunately, Curran was in.

Curran’s head was down, over some papers. Landers paused to rest, and to pull himself all together. He was going to have to remember to be tactful and polite. He didn’t feel much like either.

“May I speak to. you a few minutes alone, Col Curran, sir? Off the record?”

Curran looked up, his eyes immediately growing remote. He nodded. “Sure. I guess so. Come in.”

“It’s not about me,” Landers said. “It’s about a friend of mine. Named Prell.”

“What about him?”

“There are seven of us here from his old company. The guys decided to sort of appoint me their spokesman. We’ve heard that his right leg may have to be amputated.”

Curran seemed to stare, Landers thought. But not quite. Abstractedly, with another part of his mind, Landers wondered where he was getting the nerve to do what he was doing. But that was easy enough to answer. All he had to do was think of those men he had sat with on the hill. None of these people knew the first thing of what it was like to be like that. And didn’t want to. Any more than we did, he thought.

“It’s a possibility,” Curran said. “A very likely possibility.”

“Well, he’s one of the best men our outfit ever had. I guess you know, he saved his whole patrol after he got shot up. He’s been recommended for a medal for it. And, well, we think it will probably kill him if he loses that leg. The guys wanted me to ask you if there wasn’t something you could do to save his leg.”

Curran’s eyes seemed to get larger, and deeper. “What the hell do you think I could do?”

“We thought something that might give him a chance. A fighting chance.”

“Like what? Anyway, he’s not my patient.” Curran looked down and moved the papers on his desk.

“He said he felt you weren’t as much in favor of the amputation as the others.”

Curran’s head snapped up. “He told you that?”

Landers nodded. “Well, he told one of us. Not me. He said it was a hunch he had.”

“The man is in a very bad way,” Curran said. “His one leg won’t heal. The other is not doing all that well. There’s something wrong with his system. With his chemistry. He’s getting weaker and weaker, and he just won’t heal.”

“Couldn’t you give him something?”

“We’re giving him everything we can. Sulfa. Plasma. Glucose. Besides, you seem to forget that he’s not my patient.”

“Well, what if you stopped giving him something? If it’s his body chemistry?”

Curran stared at him, his eyes narrowed. He looked down at the desk, then looked back up. “I don’t think you understand. That’s not the way it works. I can’t disagree with Col Baker’s statement. I think Col Baker is right. And he’s Col Baker’s patient.”

Landers nodded politely. It struck him suddenly that there was the possibility that Curran might be hedging on the truth the least little bit. That he wouldn’t admit that Prell was right in thinking Curran was less in favor of the amputation than the other two. He said nothing.

“It’s possible that Col Baker is pushing it a little,” Curran said. “But that’s not important, really. Col Stevens is not going to decide to amputate immediately, when it’s without Prell’s permission. Which Prell won’t give. Col Baker is just trying to be prepared for it. Ahead of time. As for stopping something that he’s getting, there’s very little that he’s getting that isn’t absolutely necessary. Don’t get the idea that some of us are ogres here, hoping for a chance to do a leg amputation.”

Landers had been nodding politely again. But somewhere inside his chest, or right behind his eyes, something seemed to be changing in him. Another personality that he did not know seemed to be taking over his muscles and his voice. It was almost like that day on the ship when he seemed to go out of himself. That kind of wild rage against everything, against life itself, seemed to flow all over him. “Nobody thinks that, Colonel. Anyway, the guys told me to tell you that we would all be willing to sign a petition amongst ourselves against the amputation and present it to you,” the new voice said. Harshly. “If you would want us to.”

Curran’s head snapped up again. He looked astonished. He said the same thing to Landers that Strange had said to Prell. “A petition? In the Army? Are you men out of your minds?” Then he stared at Landers a long moment. “You men think a lot of him, don’t you?”

“I guess we all admire him,” Landers’ new, harsh personality said. Landers was suddenly seeing his hilltop ridge and all the faces with their perpendicular white streaks running down them, beyond and through the clean sympathetic face of Curran. “But that’s not what it is. I don’t think you understand
us.
I don’t guess we any of us give much of a shit about anything, except each other. It’s not so much that we think a lot of Prell. It’s like we were investors. And each of us invested his tiny bit of capital in all the others. When we lose one of us, we all of us lose a little of our capital. And we none of us ever really had that much to invest, you see.”

“ ‘Do not ask for whom the bell tolls,’ ” Curran quoted.

“John Donne, sure,” Landers grinned wolfishly. “But that’s shit. And that’s not what it is with us. That’s abstract. And it’s poetry. That’s all of humanity. We’re not all of humanity. And we don’t give a shit about all of humanity. We probably don’t give much of a shit about each other, really. It’s just that that’s all the capital we have.

“So,” he said finally, “we’re perfectly willing to get up a petition and all of us sign it, and turn it over to whoever you say turn it over to, and to hell with the consequences. If it means going to the stockade, we’d all sign it cheerfully anyhow. If by doing it, it would help at all to save Prell’s leg.”

Curran’s face was white. And he got to his feet, stiffly. But he didn’t look angry. Landers wondered if he had gone too far somewhere, and forgotten to be tactful and polite.

“Do you realize it may very well kill him?” Curran said. “It’s getting that close. Do you want him dead?”

“I guess all of us would say let the poor son of a bitch die that way, if that’s the way he wants to die. Let him die the way he wants it. It’s about all he’s got left. Besides, he’s been nearly dead before. All of us have.”

“I can’t promise anything, Sgt Landers,” Curran said mildly. “But I can tell you that he’ll get every chance we can give him. Nobody here wants to take his leg off. But we may have to.”

“Then you don’t want us to get up the petition?”

“Get it up and sign it, if you want to. If it makes you feel any better. But I think it would serve absolutely no use with Col Stevens.”

Outside, Landers leaned against the wall of the corridor along the surgeries to collect his wits. The other personality was gone. For a while he had actively been another person in the little office. That had never happened to him before. He did not know whether what he had done was helpful or detrimental. Or whether it had no effect. After a while, he started hobbling back.

Back in the rec center he told Strange the whole story, with Curran’s responses. He left out only his metaphor of the investors, which now sounded high-toned and dumb to him, and he didn’t mention that feeling of another personality. Between them, he and Strange were unable to deduce whether the visit had helped at all.

“Maybe it’ll make him think about it a little,” Strange said sourly.

Across the basketball floor in the corner, the girl Carol Firebaugh motioned to Landers to come over, that she wanted to talk to him. Grimly Landers stared at her and slowly shook his head and turned away back to Strange.

“I just wish to hell Winch was here,” Strange said sorrowfully. “If only fucking Winch was here.”

“I thought Winch hated Prell,” Landers said.

“He does. I mean, he doesn’t like him,” Strange said. “But that wouldn’t matter.”

When Strange asked him to come, Landers left and went with him to the snack bar to see the others from the company. Strange had decided they would make up the petition and sign it, anyway. Landers did not bother to say good-by to Carol Firebaugh, or even wave at her.

When the two of them went to report to Prell about the interview with Curran, Prell listened in silence until they were finished. Their inconclusive ending. Then still without a word he turned his head to the side and two tears squeezed out from under his closed lids. After a minute they decided to sneak away.

“I’m sorry, buddies,” Prell called after them in a frog’s croak. “I’m not quite myself. This thing’s got me all worn down.”

“Winch would know what to do,” Strange said softly as he closed the ward door.

S
TRANGE AND
L
ANDERS
could not know it, but Winch already knew about Prell. And was already pushing forward his departure from Letterman to Luxor, because of him. Even as Strange was closing the big plywood swinging door of Prell’s ward, and wishing his 1st/sgt were there.

Winch did not know what he could do about Prell, but if there was anything he could do, he wanted to be there. Not that the prick deserved it.