Whistle (46 page)

“They’re tough,” Stevens said, more mildly, now that he had more control. “They’re not easy.”

“May I speak frankly, sir.”

“Go ahead,” Stevens said, and nodded.

“The lieutenant involved insulted my old outfit. He had no business doing that. He said we ought to come over to Europe if we wanted to see some real fighting. Besides, he didn’t have any business in there. In the recreation hall. It’s an enlisted man’s hall. He came in there looking for a Ping-Pong game.

“Major Hogan, when he stopped me in the hall, accused me of malingering. He said if I could play Ping-Pong like that, and fight like that, I ought to be back to duty, and that I was malingering by staying in the hospital. That’s why I cursed him, and that’s why I insulted him. As for threatening him, I said I’d like to beat him up. But I didn’t.”

“Why did you go AWOL?” Stevens said.

“I was sick of the whole thing, that’s why. I was sick of this place, and the people in it, and the war, and everything else. Major Hogan doesn’t deserve to be an officer. He’s never treated anyone fairly here, and everybody knows it. He’s probably a bum as a doctor, on the outside. He’s never been shot at, he’s never been in danger, he’s never seen men blown up beside him. I’ll probably be killed in this war. Certainly I expect to be. But he won’t be, and you won’t be, and neither will most of the people here. He doesn’t deserve the job he’s got, and he shouldn’t be where he is. He shouldn’t have it. And if there was any justice at all in this Army he’d be canned.”

He stopped.

“Is that all you have to say?” Stevens said.

“Yes, sir,” Landers said.

“All right then, Landers. You may go.”

“Yes, sir. I just want you to know that I don’t expect to get any square deal. And I won’t get one in this trial. That’s why I don’t really give a damn. The whole thing is a big fat joke. On me.” He drew himself up to attention and saluted and about-faced.

He didn’t know, as he left, that Stevens behind him in the office was wanting to jump up on his feet and yell with rage, and was instead resolutely studying his pale fingernails. Landers didn’t know because he was doing all he could to maintain his ego and combat the enormous, reproving presence of Jack Alexander which filled the outer room.

Back at his own ward Strange was waiting for him. With the message “to play ball” that Winch had asked him to deliver. When Landers gave him a detailed account blow-by-blow, quote-for-quote of the interview, Strange began to curse him.

Despite Strange, Landers had a weird sense of growing elation he had not had when he left the big office. When he left Stevens and Alexander, he had been suffering a deep depression. He had heard enough about stockades, one place and another, to picture graphically what it would be like for him when he was delivered to one. That was what he had done to himself. But slowly, as he walked back, the armed guard marching behind him, the strange elation had begun, and then had grown and grown. By the time he reached the exiling ward door, it had completely transformed the depression. While Strange railed at him, he simply sat and smiled beatifically.

“What the fuck are you smiling about?” Strange demanded.

“Well, we’ll just have to wait and see,” he finally finished lamely. “See what he does.”

They had to wait two days. Then orders came down from the administrator’s office, one copy to Landers, one to be posted on the ward bulletin board, to the effect that the special court-martial had not been called, and that orders were being cut to be forwarded to Washington for approval that the transit casual Sgt Landers, Marion J be reduced to private and all pay and allowances of sgt be withdrawn and discontinued.

“I think you got off damned lucky,” Strange said. “Considering.” There was an urgency in his voice, and on his face. “I don’t think you got one damn thing to complain about.”

He then proceeded to tell Landers, who did not know, about the two days of phone calls and talks that had gone on, to avoid the court-martial. Winch had been the prime mover, behind it. Alexander had been for the court-martial, but hadn’t really cared.

“If he had cared,” Strange said, “believe me, you’d have got it.”

Col Stevens had been against the court-martial, when he got over being angry. He did not think what Landers had done was all that terrible. The whole thing had rested on the conscience of Stevens. And Winch had played on that. Though he did not like Landers personally, in fact detested him personally, Stevens did not think what he had done really deserved the special court Hogan was after.

“You can thank your lucky stars that that old man has a conscience,” Strange said, urgently. “Hell, if you hadn’t acted up like you did, you wouldn’t even have got busted.”

Landers was curiously disappointed. Though he did not tell this to Strange. He had geared himself up emotionally for the trial. And its conviction, which he knew would be a foregone conclusion of it. And for his three to six months sentence, which he felt he had readied himself for. Being busted to private seemed like a ridiculous, terrible anticlimax after the possibility of all that. He had proved to himself, to his own satisfaction, an important moral point, moral issue, about the whole US Army—only to have the damned schoolboy conscience of that one old man ruin it and throw it all out.

Also, his nightmares had stopped. The dream about the platoon and Landers’ one canteen of water which kept recurring to him had ceased on the night of the day of the interview with Stevens, and had not come back until several days after the administrative order had come down. That in itself had been a blessed boon to him. At least, while it lasted.

“I can understand his disliking me,” he said to Strange at one point in their discussions. “But do you really think he
detests
me? That was the word you used. Where did you get that word?”

“It was Winch’s word,” Strange said. “He used it.” The odd look of urgency had come back over his face. “Winch would never use that word himself. So I reckon he heard the old man use it.”

“But detests,” Landers said. “That’s pretty strong.” He looked into Strange’s eyes, with their urgency which still did not make any sense to Landers. “If he detests me, it’s because I showed him what hypocrites he and the Army are,” he said righteously, “for not firing Hogan.

“He’s never been shot at, neither has Hogan,” he finished inconclusively. “None of them has. Or ever will be.”

“No,” Strange said. “I don’t reckon they ever will be.” The silent look of urgency, Landers noted, had not left his face.

“What’s this with Winch?” Landers asked him. “I didn’t ask him for anything. I don’t want any help from him.”

“You better be damn glad you had help from him,” Strange said. “Without him you’d be in jail.”

“Fuck him. He never comes around. We never see him. We never hear from him. He never comes up to the hotel.”

“He’s busy out at O’Bruyerre. He’s back to duty, and holding down a whole new job,” Strange said. “But he keeps an eye on us. Besides, he’s got some little girl he’s shacking up with.”

“Who? Not that little girl I tried to make?”

“I don’t know, honestly,” Strange said. “And I don’t care. Why? Does that make you sore?”

“Me? Are you kidding?”

“Well, what’s eating you then?”

“Nothing,” Landers said. “But fuck Winch.”

With his tentative bust to private in the works, Landers was no longer on ward arrest. He was able to go back to the suite at the Peabody. Until the demotion was approved in Washington he was not required to remove his sergeant’s stripes, so he didn’t. He found he had a really serious reluctance to part with them that was totally unanticipated. Especially around the Peabody.

But getting back to the Peabody was not the great thrill he had imagined so heatedly, when he was being kept away from it. The girls were all pretty much the same girls. And the few new ones were not that much different. The fellows were all still the same fellows. Corello, and Trynor, and the others. Strange apparently had developed a permanent relationship with Frances Highsmith, and no longer came around to the suite much, though he still saw to it that all its bills were paid, as did Landers himself. With Strange gone, Landers became the leader. He developed a semipermanent relationship himself, with Mary Lou Salgraves. But none of it was really that exciting.

Landers had lied to Col Stevens only once, and that had been during the interview when Stevens had asked him about his ankle. Stevens understood that Landers had reinjured his ankle in the fight in the rec hall with the lieutenant. He was given this impression by Landers’ surgeon, Curran, who had examined the ankle after the fight. Actually, the ankle had been reinjured in the first fight he and Strange had had with the Navy petty officers in the hotel bar, and then reinjured again when Landers had kicked the Air Force ferry commando in the head. But Curran had not known about this, and had not examined the ankle after the first fights, had assumed the ankle was reinjured in the hospital fight, and Landers had not felt up to telling either Curran or Stevens the whole truth about it.

It was not until after the whole thing was over and the court-martial had been canceled that Curran told Landers he had known about the ankle all along. They were together in Curran’s little office, after the most recent examination of it.

He had grinned. “Yes, it’s not too hard to tell from the swelling, or lack of it, if a muscle or a joint has been injured recently. It’s harder to tell how long ago, or how many times, something has been hurt, if the injury was at some time in the past. I just knew, was pretty sure, that you hadn’t done it in that particular fight.”

“Why didn’t you tell that to Col Stevens?” Landers said.

Curran was still grinning, that funny little private smile of his. “Well, you obviously hadn’t told him yourself. For some private reason of your own. I just wanted to back you up, and give you some maneuvering room if that was what you wanted, or felt you needed.”

“I just didn’t want them to know about the other fights, back then at the beginning,” Landers said.

“I figured it was something like that,” Curran said. He shrugged. “Sit down, Marion,” he indicated the chair on the other side of the desk. “You and I have known each other quite awhile, now. Enough to get to know each other pretty well.”

Landers took the chair gingerly. And sat in it a little stiffly. Then he proceeded suddenly, without having thought it out, to tell Curran about the two earlier fights, in detail. By the time he finished they were both of them laughing. On the strength of that he told in detail about the other fights he had had over the past months, the ones in which he had not hurt anything. Except a barked fist, or a jammed knuckle or two.

Curran made a large, elaborate shrug, and then held up his two surgeon’s hands. He wiggled the eight fingers and two thumbs in the air. “I simply can’t do something like that. I’d be out of a job.”

“I don’t think it’s all that great,” Landers said, lamely.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Marion.” Curran hitched his swivel chair a little closer to the desk. For intimacy. “Normally I don’t talk to anybody except about their surgical problems. But you’re on the verge of getting into serious trouble.’

Landers stared at him. “You mean like going to the stockade?”

Curran nodded.

Landers grinned. “I’m already in serious trouble. I’m going to get killed in this war. I’m futureless.”

“Think beyond that. Think about after the war.”

“I can’t.”

“You don’t want to get into trouble with the Army and wind up with a dishonorable discharge that will dog you the rest of your life.”

“I can’t think about after,” Landers said again. “There’s no after there. There’s nothing. A blank wall. A curtain of fog, that I can’t see beyond.”

Curran peered at him piercingly. “You really mean that?”

“Sure,” Landers said. “There’s no after the war. Not for me. It’s easy for you. You’ll go on. You’ll go into surgery, have a big career, become famous, you’ll help humanity and make lots of money. Incidentally. It’s easy for you.”

Curran pursed his mouth, still peering. “Yes. I guess it is. I guess that’s exactly what it will be like. I feel guilty enough about it, as it is, without your mentioning it.” He stared at Landers again. “But you really do feel that,” he said. “How did you say it? That there’s ‘a curtain of fog’ you can’t see beyond.”

“Sure,” Landers said. “That’s exactly what it’s like. There isn’t anything there.”

After a moment, Curran’s hand reached out and pushed his chair back, back a little way, from the desk. Didn’t take long, Landers thought with an inward grin.

“You’ll be going back to duty, before long,” Curran said in a different voice. “I’ll be sending you to the rehab cen soon.”

Rehabilitation center, Landers the old-timer translated. His outfit hadn’t even had those words. That was the barracks off in the far corner of the paved central compound. Everybody with atrophied muscles went there for a while for toning up, before going back to total duty.

“Your ankle’s all right. It’s not in bad shape,” Curran said in the changed voice. “You’re lucky you didn’t do it more damage. But you can’t get in any fights with it for a while. Ping-Pong’s all right, you can play all the Ping-Pong you like. But the sudden, enforced, disruptive violence of fighting could damage it again, much worse. I want you to remember that,” he said sharply. “If you came in with it hurt again, it would not look good to Stevens.”

“Injustice and insults bug me,” Landers said.

Curran ignored that. “You’ll be classified limited duty. Don’t thank me. That’s your true classification. That ankle’s no good for infantry, that’s for sure. Anyway, limited duty isn’t all that different. About two out of every five wounded we get are limited-duty men. Quartermaster Gasoline Supply Companies, in the tank fighting. That kind. Even that isn’t accurate because in the QM Gas Supply Companies the biggest number of casualties are never found. If an eighty-eight shell hits a truck that is loading.”

“I may not be in that.”

“No.” Curran stood up. “I’m Irish. I’m a superstitious man. I even believe in leprechauns. If you tell me you see a curtain of fog in front of you—” He shrugged. “What can I say? There’s nothing I can say.”