Whistle (25 page)

“Listen,” Landers raged. His voice was low key but vibrating. “You know what this is?” He pointed to his Combat Infantryman’s Badge, over his left pocket. “You know how you get one of those? You go away and get yourself one of those, and then you come and talk to me. Until then shut up and get the fuck away from me, flyboy.”

Wooden-faced, the Air Force sergeant walked away. Landers was almost sorry. At the same time a small, still reasonable part of him was glad. He was almost sobbing. In two seconds he would have started to cry with rage. And if he had started to cry, he would have struck with the heavy hospital-issue cane. Right alongside the skull.

Across from him, a tired-looking young woman, worn-out from traveling and somehow clearly and obviously newly married, tried to strike up a sympathetic conversation with him.

“Listen, lady,” Landers said. “Just leave me alone, will you? I didn’t say anything to anybody. I didn’t try to talk to you. So just leave me alone. Okay?”

After that everybody in the car ignored him as if he weren’t there. This made Landers feel hurt and angered. He smoked and stared out the window. When it came time to change trains, he would not let anybody help him, and insisted on getting off by himself. Fortunately, he was carrying only a canvas hand satchel with an extra uniform in it. Later he would have to change again.

The little two-car local train, in contrast to the main line flyers, had almost no passengers. Landers sat by a window and watched the flat undulating countryside roll by. This was close to home. He knew almost every tree. He had come this way when he came home from school.

As usual, there was nobody and nothing at the little weather-beaten green station. And Landers’ problems began there, immediately. A couple of old men sat on the weatherbeaten green bench along the front of the station platform, chewing tobacco and spitting down on the gravel. Inside, the agent-dispatcher sat behind his telegraph desk, wearing black sleeve covers and a green eyeshade. Not another soul was there. Landers suddenly did not want to talk to anyone, only to slip away and sneak off home without seeing anybody at all. But the thought of the mile-long walk in to the center of town, with his heavy limp and his cane, was too much. The walk was more than he could physically handle. So he had to go inside and ask the dispatcher to call a cab for him. But before he could even open the door, one of the old men sidled over to him.

“Say, aint you Jeremy Landers’ boy, Marion?” he asked, “Welcome home, son, welcome home.”

Landers wanted to say
Go to hell,
but instead said only, “Thanks,” and kept his eyes lowered. The dispatcher said almost the same words to him. He called the cab (there were two in Imperium) for him gladly, but could not resist telling the cab man who it was he was picking up. Landers stood and listened to the dispatcher’s glowing report of the returned wounded hero, feeling abysmal.

That was the way it was going to be. Everybody was going to be treating him as the returned war hero. And suddenly he saw a vivid mental picture of the company’s waterless platoons, with their fear-haunted eyes under their helmets and dirt on their faces and the stubbles of beard. It blanked out everything, the station, the dispatcher, the cab.

It would be all over town before he could even get home, Landers thought. And indeed it was. His mother was already weeping into the telephone when he walked in. Someone had called her. His father came home early from the law office. Somebody had called him, too. Both of them were upset because Landers had not written to them. The news of his return had been printed in the local paper.

Fortunately, Landers felt, his sister was already away at school. She had gone up a week early to get settled in for her last year, his mother said. But his mother was going to call her to come down. Landers told her not to bother, thinking of Carol Firebaugh and her last year.

Almost immediately he had his first run-in with his father, when he refused to wear his Bronze Star and Purple Heart ribbons. His father could not understand why. Once, just once, Landers tried to explain it to him, that it was obscene, immoral, with the rest of them still out there, still dying, but his father wouldn’t agree. Landers forgot that he could easily have left the medals in Luxor, that he had brought them deliberately to bug his father, and silently wished that his father might try to understand him. “We don’t any of us wear them,” Landers said angrily, “at the hospital. This is the only thing we wear.” His father glared at the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and wanted to know why that meant so much. He began to expostulate in his lawyer’s courtroom voice. Landers’ mother stood wringing her hands. Landers silenced him with an authoritative wave of his hand. His father wasn’t used to that, either. Then his father broke out a bottle for a celebratory drink, and Landers began to drink.

A little later in the evening he had his first major fight with his father, when he refused to make a date to come down to the American Legion and tell the boys from World War I about his experiences. His father refused to take no for an answer. Landers flatly refused to go. By then Landers was drinking almost nonstop. So much his father complained about it. But Landers did not stop, or even slow down. Instead, he drank more.

It was easy enough to drink. Later on, when he escaped from the big house on West Main and limped the two blocks to the Elks Club, everybody there wanted to buy him a drink. Landers started by accepting half of the offers, but quickly progressed to accepting all of them. Everybody he met everywhere in town wanted to buy him a drink. It would begin early in the day, depending on when he got up, at one of the poolrooms or bars on the square, and progress through the afternoon and evening until late at night Landers would stumble home from the Elks Club or bum a ride in from the Country Club and fall into bed and sleep till noon the next day. Dimly, he slowly became aware that everyone was afraid of him, for some reason, but by then had usually progressed far enough in his drinking that he would forget or ignore it. He saw little of his family. His sister did not come home.

On one of these earlier evenings Landers was asked to make a speech at the Elks Club. It had become a local custom to give each new batch of departing draftees a free farewell dinner at the Elks Grille, and the local Chamber of Commerce secretary, who organized the dinners, on the spur of the moment had the bright idea of inviting Landers to talk to them. This was undoubtedly a mistake but the secretary, who was also the newshawk for the local paper, was noted for making gaffes. Landers, who was sitting alone in the club bar and grille, drinking quietly and minding his own business when the secretary came over and slid into his booth, thought about it awhile and then said sure he’d be glad to talk to them. They were having one of the local ministers, the secretary explained, to talk to them about religious responsibilities; and the principal of the high school to talk about social responsibilities; and the football coach to talk about patriotic responsibilities. He thought it would be nice if Landers, who had been over there, could talk to them about a soldier’s responsibilities. “Sure, that’s a great idea,” Landers said.

The draftees were just coming in and Landers looked over at them. There were twenty of them. Landers had been to school with some of them. All of them but one were poor boys whose fathers were farmers or plant workers and too poor to be members and, unless they had played varsity football or basketball, they had probably never seen the inside of the club, and so were suitably dazzled by their surroundings. This, too, offended Landers’ social conscience. He nodded at the secretary.

While the draftees ate their farewell dinner, Landers drank more and prepared his speech on a soldier’s responsibilities.

Landers was to follow the coach. The secretary introduced him, with a highly laudatory introduction, mentioning that though he did not wear them Sgt Landers had the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Craftily, when he stepped up on the little orchestra stand in the corner, Landers got hold of the microphone so they couldn’t shut him up. Even so, he had decided he had better make it short. He began by saying he had listened to the other speeches with interest, but that he was not sure just how much all those responsibilities applied to a soldier in a war.

“You don’t think much about God, or the Four Freedoms, or loving your country, when you’re in a fight.” He grinned at them. “It is true that a lot of fellows pray a lot. But that is not quite the same thing as thinking of your religious responsibilities. I can tell you for one thing that that man who said there are no atheists in foxholes was wrong. Mostly you think about getting your ass out of there, and about killing those other people so they won’t kill you.” Down below the secretary had sat up straight in his chair and was blinking his eyes behind his thick glasses. Landers grinned at him, too. “I’ve been asked to talk to you about a soldier’s responsibilities,” he said into the mike, which seemed to carry much louder and much farther than he had anticipated, “and I think I can safely assure you that the soldier’s first responsibility is to stay alive.” He felt he was warming up. “In the first place, a dead soldier is no good to anybody. And second place, a wounded soldier takes two or three other men away from fighting to take care of him. So, theoretically, it’s better to wound a man badly than to kill him. I can’t in honesty tell you that you will be fighting for freedom, and God, and your country—as all these other gentlemen have told you. In combat you don’t think about any of that. But I can assure you that you will be fighting for your life. I think that’s a good thing to remember. I think that’s a good thing to fight for. And remember, if you have the choice—which you may not—always try to wound a man badly instead of killing him. Good luck, fellows, and God bless.”

When he let go of the mike, the secretary seized it. “And now, boys, there will be drinks over at the bar, so cluster round, gather round,” he said quickly.

Feeling pleasantly red around the ears, Landers stepped down and went to his booth and sat down with his drink. Let the sons of bitches ask him to make some more speeches. None of the draftees came over to thank him. Landers did not mind, and beamed at all of them indiscriminately. Naturally, he was not asked to make other speeches. And when his father heard about it, they had another fight.

It was not that he was the only wounded vet back home in town. There were several others. Two boys had been to North Africa as ambulance drivers, and had come back home. Another, whose father ran a drugstore on the square, was an Air Force sergeant and had been shot down in a bomber over Italy, and was being discharged. But in September 1943 there were not all that many, and each was a celebrity. Landers did not like it. It made him feel guilty, and as if he were masquerading under false pretenses.

He did not make out well with the girls either. They were all either with somebody who might soon be drafted, or were waiting for somebody who had already gone, or else they were scared of Landers. He was not the Marion Landers who had gone away a year and a half ago, one of them told him nervously. At the hospital, when he first arrived, Landers had received three letters—one from his folks, one from his sister, and one from an old girlfriend who wrote she had read of his return in the paper and wanted him to know that she would be glad to see him if he got home, that all the men like him coming back should be treated with admiration and understanding and if there was anything she could do for him she would. So on the fifth or sixth night he was there, Landers called her and asked her to go to the basketball game that was being played that night. Frances said she would love to go.

It was early in the year for basketball, but Imperium was especially a basketball town, and was playing this big exhibition game ahead of the regular schedule. Landers of course did not know then, when he invited her, that Frances Mackey had been writing in only a purely social way, when she wrote she would do anything for him that she could.

At the basketball game he endeared himself to everyone by refusing to stand up for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” when it was played before the game. But nobody said anything. This not standing up for the national anthem had become quite a big thing with the guys at the hospital, where every night at closing it was played at the Starlight Roof of the Hotel Peabody and other bars in Luxor. The theory was that if you had a Purple Heart, you shouldn’t have to stand up. And besides, everybody knew he had a bum leg.

After the game, it was raining. As he and Frances came out of the big gym, a little Dodge pulled up in front of them and stopped short, so violently it rocked a little. Inside it was a large older woman named Marilyn Tothe, who worked for one of the other law firms in town as a clerk. And who was a notorious bull dyke, though it was thought impolite to say so. Landers had known her all his life, too. She had come to pick them up, she said brusquely. Landers could only stare at her wonderingly. She was at least as broad in the shoulders as he was, and, at least at this moment anyway, considerably stronger. She could certainly beat him up if she wanted, and she seemed to know it. Frances Mackey got meekly into the front. Landers was invited to sit in the back. “Where do you want us to drop you?” Marilyn Tothe said harshly. Landers said he guessed the Elks Club would be good enough. When the car stopped in front of it, Frances turned back to wave but the car started forward almost before he was out, so that she was jerked back around to the front. Landers stood looking after them in the rain, feeling bemused and left out of everything.

Perhaps that was why he got more drunk that night than usual. If he was more drunk than usual. He could remember leaving the Elks when it closed at three. He could remember deciding to walk up town to the square for some food at the all-night restaurant. He could remember crossing the treeless courthouse lawn in the rain. And he could remember coming upon the old brass Civil War cannon in its marble pedestal on the courthouse lawn with a sense of shock and surprise, just as if it had not been there all his life since he could remember and he had not known about it there. He could remember putting his arm around the cannon and rubbing his cheek against the brass, and shedding a few drunken tears—or was it raindrops—for this other old soldier, whose reward for faithful service it was to be left to stand and molder in the rain. Every year all his life on Memorial Day the fake red poppies were thrust into the courthouse lawn, and the white crosses were driven into the grass in rows, and somebody read “In Flanders Field.” Every fucking year. Who would write the poem for them? What would they call it? Who would read it?