Whistle (42 page)

It was not true that it did not taste. There was a faint taste of urine, which was not at all unpleasant, and a faint odor of it, but this disappeared almost at once, presumably because he himself had licked it off and swallowed it, and then it was true that it had no taste. The faint odor of urine combined with an even fainter smell of perfume, and perhaps of sweat, and mingled with the odor of what for lack of a better word Strange could only call “Woman,” which got stronger, and then stronger.

But the really delicious thing about it was the textural quality. It had all the benefits of deep kissing, but was a hundred times more delicate. Strange had never felt anything with his mouth that felt so delicious. The smaller, delicately formed inner lips seemed to cling to his face. The texture of the roll that covered the little organ felt like an inner lip of the mouth but was more sensory, and moved from side to side under his tongue. The hairs along the heavier outer lips tickled the sides of his nose.

“Do it up at the top more,” Frances said in an unsteady voice. “Do it up at the top more. Do it up at the top mowwWWWAARRGHNNNNnnnNNHHH!” She seemed to go on talking in disconnected syllables that did not seem to say anything, for quite a long time.

Strange did not know what she was saying, and did not care. When her body stopped quivering, he rolled away and sat on the floor, breathing as harshly as she was. His cock felt like some kind of monstrous club. It was so charged with blood he felt it might just blow up like a grenade, explode outward spattering himself and her and the walls of the room with red drops. It wanted something around it, a hand, a mouth, a rubber glove, a pussy. Anything. And yet he was all prepared, all psyched, to abide by whatever decision she made, even if it meant going to bed beside her with this swollen red, flamboyant thing untouched.

Strange had discovered he was a pervert, that was the truth. There wasn’t any other way to look at it.

As if responding to him, Frances, who had put her legs down and crossed them in a sort of self-hugging, pussy-hugging way, opened her eyes, staring at nothing. “There are so many things we can do,” she said dreamily to the ceiling. “Hundreds of things.”

Abruptly she brought her eyes down, to Strange, looking at him in a way as if she had never seen him before.

“Oh!” she said. “You! I don’t care about all that other stuff. I want you. I want you inside of me.” Quickly she got to her feet from the chair, and headed across the room to where the bed was.

Strange almost beat her to the bed. Although he felt a faint disappointment in him.

“God,” she said. “I never had it like that before. Most men, you know, most men don’t really like it. They want to do it but they hate it. They’re rough, and mean, and brutal. When they do it.

“Oh, there’s so much we can do,” she said. “Strange. Johnny. Johnny Stranger.”

When he had come, and after she had quieted and gone sound to sleep, which wasn’t long, Strange rolled over on his back and tried to think it through.

In the first place, it was such a flattering, ego-pumping thing to have somebody say your name so lovingly. So he had to discount, because of that.

In the second place, he was not in love. Not any kind of love he had ever heard about. And he was sure Frances Highsmith wasn’t either.

On the other hand, they had it pretty damned good together in the bed. That wasn’t to be sneezed at. Anyway, it wasn’t going to last that long. Not if his educated guess about the new hand operation was correct. He would be going back to duty.

But in the third place, there was the new undigested knowledge. He was a pervert. A sexual pervert. From some deep well in him where he had never been, this thing had risen up and taken him over. In one fell swoop, he had become an addict of eating pussy. Just like it was some damned drug or something. Jesus, in most places it was even against the laws. Specifically against the laws. Like fucking animals. Or homosexuality. And he didn’t even care. Laws simply could not stop him. Addict or not, unlawful or not, he would never want to be without it again. And that made him a real pervert.

For the first time in what seemed a very long time, lying in the cool bed, between clean, smooth sheets, with the hump of Frances Highsmith’s sleeping ass under them beside him, Strange thought about the old company’s mud-hungry platoons, still out there, still fogging it, still sweating, still dying.

Nobody, until he had been out there with them, could appreciate sheets. And clear, clean water flowing out of a tap, on demand. Or the smell of a woman that wasn’t really his, sleeping next to him.

Strange wondered what they would say, if they ever found out that their old mess/sgt, Mother Strange, was a cunt-eating pervert.

Strange felt very undeserving. He was afflicted with a terrible guilt. But the guilt wasn’t sexual. It was military. Or, maybe it was both. He could no longer tell.

Finally, having decided nothing, he rolled over on his side and went to sleep, replete. More replete, more fulfilled, than he could remember ever having been in all his life.

To think that all those years, he had . . .

The next morning just at dawn (he had left a call downstairs in the lobby) Strange hoisted himself, and joggled Frances awake just enough to say good-by, and took off for the hospital and the regular reveille. It was still the prime guiding principle in his life.

At morning rounds, when Curran told him they would take the cast off in a day or two and see how successful they had been, Strange wondered if the surgeon, looking at him, could tell he was a pervert.

M
ART
W
INCH HAD BEEN
at Camp O’Bruyerre three weeks when he first heard Marion Landers had been fighting people and was in trouble because of it. By that time winter finally had set in, it was the first week in December, and Luxor had had its first cold and its first light snow.

The word on Landers came to Winch via a telephone call from big Jack Alexander at the hospital. Landers had gotten into a fist fight with an injured, wounded 1st/lt, had beaten him up in the post recreation hall, had then proceeded to have a violent altercation with Maj Hogan, the administrative chief, in which he had threatened and verbally insulted the major, and then had gone AWOL for five days.

Landers was now under ward arrest, Alexander said. Maj Hogan was preferring charges, on all four counts. The 1st/lt had declined to prefer charges. But Hogan’s charges would be enough to get Landers a special court-martial and a three to six months sentence.

If Landers had not come back on his own, and instead had been picked up by the MPs and been brought back, he might easily have drawn a general court.

“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?” Winch said, in a kind of exasperated bawl.

For a second he let his eye go to his office windows outside which so much was going on at the moment.

“I dunno. Nothing,” Alexander said. “Nothing at all.” His clipped, hard, thickened voice came over the phone in exactly the same way his blue eyes fixed you. Winch had a sudden wild vision of his hard-edged turtle’s mouth, eating its way up the phone mouthpiece crunch by slow, ruminative crunch. “He’s one of your original bunch of boys, aint he? I thought you’d want to know.”

“Wait a minute,” Winch said. “Don’t hang up. What is there I can do about it? What does your Col Stevens say?”

“Col Stevens,” Jack Alexander said, very slowly and very precisely, “aint said anything about it.” He did not say “his” Col Stevens, this time, Winch noted. “I don’t know he even knows about it.”

“He must know about it,” Winch said. “If Hogan’s preferred charges.”

“I suppose he must know about it. Yeah,” Alexander’s voice said. “But he aint said a thing to me.”

“Do you think it would be worthwhile to talk to him?”

“I don’t have an idea.”

“Well would it be bad, if I talked to him?”

“I don’t see how it could do Landers any harm. But I don’t know.”

“Now what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Winch cried. He was getting frustrated. Here was supposed to be one of the most important men the US Army in the middle area of the United States was supposed to have. A man who could get done just about anything he wanted done, the word said. A man who was supposed to be making deals and money right and left and backward. And Winch was soliciting him. Begging him, and asking him not to hang up. And he—after making the call in the first place—was playing footsie and being coy. “Do you think I can be of any help to him, or don’t you?”

“I don’t know if you can be any help to him, or not be any help to him,” the hard, scarred, old sea turtle’s voice said. “I only called you. You know as well as I do, just how uptight things have been getting in all the services lately. All around the Horn. And you know why.

“Don’t you?” the voice said sharply.

A little thrill ran up Winch’s back. But he did not want to think about any of that, right now. He glanced again at his windows.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Jack. I know why. You think that might affect this thing on Landers? Well, do you think if I came in there to see you?”

“I’m not in this,” the voice said immediately. “Not in it.”

“Okay. Then I’d better see Col Stevens here at the club. If I want to get involved. He comes out just about every evening, at cocktail time.”

“Fine. If you want to get involved. And I’ll see you in town up at the Claridge. I’ll be coming in the next few nights.”

“I’m not sure I do want to get into it,” Winch said. He thanked him, for the call, before he hung up. For a moment he stared down at the black instrument. Then he went over to look out his big picture-glass windows. They were among the only third-floor windows in the only three-story building on the post.

The view that met his eyes was a little breathtaking. As far as his eyes could see from his third-floor windows, through the rising mists of a sunshiny winter morning, collections of one-story hutments and two-story barracks stretched in various lines, encompassing muddy drill fields and parade grounds. Secondary gravel roads and streets, their holes and low spots glinting back watery reflections of the winter sun, divided them. A few main arteries of asphalt, streaked with muddy vehicle tracks and smeared with the snail-like exudations off the feet of marching columns, weaved among them. Over everything lay a pall of coal smoke, adding to the mists. Far off over the huge rolling plain that seemed to begin at the foot of his building, but in fact began some two miles behind him out of visibility, clumps of taller treetops were apparent in the horizon-band of the woods. That was what all this area was like, before some astute citizen had got hold of his congressman and sold his piece of badlands to the government for a camp. Among the distant trees, way beyond the newest group of tarpaper hutments that they were building, geysers of black cloud rose silently, blowing up dirt and chunks of trees as heavy artillery units practiced range firing. Nearer in, companies and platoons and occasionally a full battalion of drab-clad men, helmeted and under slung arms, moved along the gravel streets of wet holes, exhaling streams of steam that matched the steam emitted by the strings of vehicles.

And Winch was, theoretically at least, the chief overseer of them all. At least until they left Second Army Command.

Everything had happened just as old T.D. Hoggenbeck had said it would. Just as old T.D. had envisioned it and set it up. The perfect sinecure. All you had to do was keep your nose clean.

It was everything Winch had dreamed about, back in his misspent youth, back when he was bucking for his first staff rocker, to add to his stripes. Now he had it.

Below his hands on the low sill a radiator sent a stream of hot air up at him. It merged with others, to warm the air of the office so that he would not feel the cold the men outside were feeling. Warmed enough to where his trim winter blouse with its new w/o insignias could be hung neatly over a chair back, the two rows of ribbons throwing color splinters.

Winch continued to stand at his windows, rapt.

If he had it, had it all so handily, so nicely, why didn’t it make him happy?

Two full divisions were under training out there. Getting ready to go to northern Europe—not Italy.

Two full divisions. That was 18,000 men. And God knew how many other single, autonomous QM and Ordnance and Signal units.

Winch could let himself think now about the allusion Alexander had made on the phone. Because Winch was looking right at it, out there. Canny, closemouthed, old Jack Alexander, the ex-pug, had alluded to the tightening-up that was going on in all of the services.

The same little thrill ran up Winch’s back again. The United States was finally going into Europe. The United States, helped by Great Britain, was going to invade France. A few thousand men involved with command knew it. The public announcement, and the command designations for it, was going to come any day now. Men like himself and Alexander were not even told and taken into the secret. But they knew. Just about everybody knew.

The public announcement wasn’t supposed to come until around Christmas time. But these civilian draftees out there in the winter mud of Camp O’Bruyerre knew where they were going, and what they could expect.

European invasion. There had been rumors of it as far back as September, before the Salerno landings. Light rumors and heavy talk had flowed up and down the corridors of Kilrainey General about it. Any man who went back to duty would be getting back just in time for it.

Now it was no longer rumor. It was definitely coming next spring or summer. In about six months or so. With it coming, as Alexander had pointed out, every service was tightening-up on AWOLs and insubordinations.

That was the time Landers had to pick to get himself in trouble. Still staring raptly out his windows at the steam-exhaling marchers, Winch watched the winter Mississippi rain begin to fall on them as the winter sunshine clouded over.

It seemed almost the last straw to lay on them. But a lot worse than that lay ahead of them. He wondered how many of them would die in the coming big affair. Go down, disappear forever. A lot.