Whistle (53 page)

“You don’t want to go back to straight duty.”

“I wouldn’t mind straight duty. Tossing gas cans around in the trucks would be heavenly, compared to working for that son of a bitch.”

“You wouldn’t feel like that after you’d been doing it a little while,” Prevor said.

There was something else, too, he could do. But Landers instinctively shied away from mentioning it to Prevor. He could go over the hill: desert. That could cause Mayhew the worst trouble. Landers felt like laughing. But he did not want to mention it to Prevor. Anyway, after talking to Prevor, he did not feel quite so bad. Although Prevor in effect released him from the so-called promise, he decided not to do anything for a while.

It was the fucking telephone that was the last straw, and finally drove him over the line. Since the beginning it had been situated in the company commander’s office. In the days of Prevor it had not been a problem. When it rang, whoever was near it picked it up and answered it. Since his very first arrival Mayhew had taken to never answering the phone personally. Even when he was in his office alone at his desk, where the phone sat, doing nothing, he would call out, “Sergeant, get the phone.” And whoever was in the outer office, usually Landers or the clerk, would have to stop whatever work they were doing and go into the commander’s office and answer it. Just about always the call was for Mayhew.

One day, a week after Landers’ talk with Prevor, Mayhew did this, “Sergeant Landers, get the phone,” and Landers exploded. That the explosion was entirely internal did not make it any less powerful. Maybe it made it more. Mayhew was leaning back in his swivel chair with his boots up on his desk, smoking one of his cigars. It seemed to Landers that he looked at Landers with hatred and amused contempt.

After he had answered it (it was for Mayhew) and handed it over, he went back to his own desk in the outer office and sat looking at his trembling hands. “What’s the matter with you?” the cadre clerk whispered nervously. He had been looking at Landers more and more nervously, lately. “Are you all right?”

“Me?” Landers said. “Me? Fine. Just fine. I’m just fine. Why?”

It was nearly five-thirty and quitting time, and when Mayhew left, locking the inner office, and the 1st/sgt and the others left the outer office, Landers did not even go back to the barracks but walked through the cold down to the little local PX and from one of those freezing cold little pay telephone booths outside under the front door floodlights, called Johnny Stranger in Luxor at the Peabody suite.

“I’m coming in,” he said, the phone beginning to shake against his ear with cold. “I want you to have everything ready for me.”

“You’re what?” Strange asked. “Have you got a pass?”

Landers did an abrupt about-face. He hadn’t even been thinking about Strange. Strange would only try to talk him out of it, if Strange knew he was going over the hill. “Of course,” Landers said scornfully. “Do you think I’d come in if I didn’t have a pass? Is Mary Lou there?”

There was some rustling.

“I’m taking off,” Landers said harshly, as soon as she came on. “I’m going over the mountain. Do you want to run away with me? Have you got someplace to go?”

“You’re what, you’re what?”

“Hush!” Landers barked. “I don’t want Strange to hear this. Or even know about it. Are you where he can hear you?”

“No. No, I’m in the bedroom.”

“Then, listen. I’m skipping. Pulling out. Do you want to go away somewhere with me?” She must have somewhere she could take him that was safe, some home, some place.

“But, Marion, I can’t do that,” Mary Lou wailed. “I’ve got a boyfriend. I’m in love. He’s on his way up here, right now. We’re going to get married, I think. We’re—We’re in love.”

“Oh,” Landers said, “well.” He stopped, at a loss. It had not occurred to him Mary Lou would not go, and he had no other resources. He should have guessed it about Mary Lou. But there must be somebody. In the world. Who was willing to hide him. The cold was beginning to get to him so badly his teeth were chattering into the phone. But he couldn’t think of anyone.

“I could maybe get Annie Waterfield for you,” Mary Lou said. “She’s back.”

“Is she there?”

“No. But she’s supposed to be coming over. I could try to get hold of her for you.”

“You have her phone number?”

“I have her home number here in town.”

“All right, get her for me. And I mean, get hold of her. Don’t fuck around. Don’t tell her I’m going AWOL. I want to tell her. But you get hold of her for me, hear? Or I’ll—Now, give me Strange. And keep your mouth shut. To Strange and everybody.”

Cold as he was, and shaking uncontrollably, he talked to Strange for several minutes, to kill Strange’s suspicions. If he had any. It appeared that he had some, and when Landers hung up he did not think he had allayed any.

He was too cold now to stand out on the cab stand and wait for a cab. He went inside the little local PX and drank three cold mugs of beer at the bar. They warmed him and gave him some spirit. He had a full half pint of whiskey back at the company barracks, and wished he had brought it, but did not want to go back there after it. Lucidly he had on his regular ODs and had his GI overcoat, instead of a field jacket uniform.

The little local PX, one of five on the big post, was nowhere near the size of the big main PX beer hall. But it still had plenty of room, and plenty of beer drinkers. It was warm and funky with the smell of tobacco smoke and damp GI wool and stale beer. There was a magnificent feeling of safety in numbers about it and its crowded interior. It was an illusion. But at least these guys here, bitter and sour or happy and acting up, were on the right side of the line. They would at least die in bunches and groups, not alone. Landers had a distinct feeling of hating to leave its warmth, as he buttoned up his GI overcoat and turned up its high collar. He went outside.

It was a long, chill ride in the taxi. There was no trouble getting out of the post’s main gate, in a cab. He found nobody had kept their mouths shut to anybody, when he got to the Peabody.

Rather than argue it out with Strange, Landers claimed his rights with Annie Waterfield first. Mary Lou had gotten hold of her and she was there waiting. Nobody could argue against that with him. When they had locked themselves in the bedroom, he thought he had better tell Annie the truth. Until they made their way to the door and got inside, and shut the door and locked it, he took refuge in the statement that he was only taking a little AWOL vacation of a few days, or maybe a week, and that he was being covered for, in his company. But inside he told Annie the truth.

He did not tell her before the sex was taken care of, though. Annie had her own rights. “You’re in much better shape than you were before you went out to O’Bruyerre,” she said, running her hands over his bare shoulders. Landers had to admit he did not require much urging, mental distress or not. After they had sixty-nined awhile and come that way, and he had gone down on her while she had a multiple orgasm of at least two or three, he fucked her and came again himself and they lay on the bed side by side replete while he fondled one of those gorgeous breasts.

“Have you got any money?” she said.

“A little over eight hundred dollars. In a bank.”

“That should last us a week or ten days,” Annie said. “We can go up to St. Louis.”

“I can probably get a few hundred more off of Strange,” he said.

“Say two weeks, then,” she said. She sat up and leaned on her elbow, and her young breast became heavy in his cupped palm. “But I have to say,” she said, looking down at him, “that I don’t think it’s such a good idea. I don’t think you ought to do it, Marion. Besides.”

“Besides, what?” Landers said.

“Besides, I’ve got this trip to New Orleans I can take, if I don’t go with you. That’s what. I’ve got this Navy flyer I met here who’s being transferred to New Orleans. He wants me to go down there with him and stay three weeks or a month. I hate to give that up to go off with you, with practically no money, and the chance of you getting picked up always hanging over our heads. I have to admit it.

“Have you got anyplace we could go and be safe? Some kind of refuge, or place only you know about? That was more what I had in mind.”

She didn’t answer. She continued to sit, leaning on her elbow. “Don’t do that. I’m trying to think.” She took his wrist and moved his hand away from her breast.

“You know,” she said, “it’s kind of crazy, but I do have a place like that. I don’t go there much.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s my dad’s.”

“No good,” Landers said. “If somebody here told on us, that you were with me, that’d be the first place they’d look.”

Annie’s voice trilled with a young, bright laughter. “And a fuck lot of good it would do them. My dad’s the sheriff.”

It was almost square in the middle of west Tennessee, way west of Nashville. No cities around anywhere. Did Landers have any idea how country west Tennessee was? There was no reason why Landers couldn’t go up there and stay as long as he liked. All she would have to do would be to call her dad, and give Landers a note to him. Her daddy had been sheriff there since before she could remember. Actually, since the county law was that a sheriff could not succeed himself, her daddy and his number-one deputy traded places every four years, and the deputy would be sheriff for a term. “But there’s never any question who the real sheriff is,” Annie laughed. “That’s my daddy.” Barleyville was the county seat, her hometown. “A great name,” she laughed, “for the county seat of a dry county. In Barleyville, the saying goes, there’re two kinds of people. Baptists and drunks.” There were also a lot of Holy Rollers.

“It doesn’t sound like the swingingest place in the world,” Landers said.

“You’d be surprised. Booze and juke joints may be illegal, but there are plenty of them around,” Annie laughed. “And my daddy knows them all. He owns half of most of them.”

“Any Army camps around there?”

There was one. Fort Dulane. About fifteen or twenty miles from Barleyville. But that wouldn’t matter. Her daddy would know every provost marshal and MP there. “He’ll get you a pocketful of blank pass forms, if you want them,” she laughed.

“But you wouldn’t be going with me,” Landers half asked.

“No, I don’t think so.” She really wanted to make this trip down to New Orleans. And she didn’t go up to Barleyville much any more. She had taken a boyfriend up there for a week a couple of different times, but it upset her daddy so and made him so sad she had about stopped it. “And if I go up there alone, there’re five or six old flames of mine from back in high school, who come buzzing around like bees around a sugar cube,” Annie laughed. Her bare breasts swayed deliciously, and quivered. “Of course, they’re all of them married, if only to stay out of the draft. It tends to create a certain havoc. While I’m there.”

Landers studied her. “Do you fuck them?”

Annie laughed again. “Well, it doesn’t really matter if I do or not. Believe me. It doesn’t.”

“I guess not.”

“I have,” she said. “Have fucked them all. At one time or another. In the past. And all that kind of upsets daddy, too.”

She got up off the bed and went to the spindly little hotel desk and got a sheet of hotel stationery out of its drawer. Carefully she tore the hotel letterhead off the top, using the big desk blotter edge as a straightedge. Then she tore off the bottom line that carried the hotel’s name, address, and phone number. She held what was left up to the light. While she did all this, she went on talking gaily, about her family.

“I never knew a man who understands women like my daddy. But maybe that’s natural, with him having four daughters.” She was nineteen, her next youngest sister sixteen. The two younger ones, who had come along ten years later, were now nine and eight. “Love babies,” Annie laughed. “You know. When people almost break up and then get back together, they often have a baby or two.” That was what happened to her folks. Her daddy had had a mistress, or at least that was the local story. Now they were separated, though still married, and her mother lived on the other side of town with the two younger girls in a fine old expensive brick house, and was the mistress of one of the local politicians who was a bigwig in the state senate in Nashville. His wife, a Barleyville girl, and their kids lived in Nashville. Loucine, the sixteen-year-old sister, lived with their daddy in their big old house across town that their daddy had bought for them when Loucine was born. Loucine, at the moment, was about eight months pregnant and still unmarried.

“Sounds like a wild wide-open place, Barleyville. For a country town,” Landers said from the bed.

Annie stopped writing the note to her father and looked up, nude, her face laughing. “Are you kidding, country town? It’s country people who really know what people are like. That’s why they’re all Baptists.”

“Or drunks,” Landers said.

“Or drunks.” She finished the note, and signed it and folded it up. “I don’t want to put this in a hotel envelope,” she said. “It would just make daddy sad. Will you get a plain white envelope and put it in it?”

Landers took it and put it away carefully. When he looked back up, Annie still in the desk chair, still nude, had begun to laugh outrageously. “What’s the matter, now?” he said.

“Nothing. Nothing. Just laughing. I was just thinking how you won’t be there three days probably, before you’ll be fucking my pregnant sixteen-year-old sister. Old Loucine.” She began to laugh again.

Landers felt shocked. “Oh, no. No, no. I wouldn’t do something like that.”

“I don’t see how you’re going to avoid it.” She stared at him, her face grinning more. “You’re shocked,” she said.

Landers felt irritated. “No, I’m not. Not shocked.” He made himself grin. “But I don’t want your daddy the sheriff to throw down on me with his shooting iron.”

“My daddy would be more likely to throw down on you if you didn’t,” Annie laughed. “I told you he understood women, didn’t I? Well, women are going to get love made to them. One way or another. And it doesn’t matter what they call it. Or if they don’t call it at all. Or don’t mention it even, which is more likely. Well, my daddy was born knowing that, from a baby. I guess that’s why women have always found him so attractive.”