Whistle (6 page)

Wacky from the concussion and from shock and fear, half-laughing and half-blubbering, standing on the wounded ankle he was still too much in medical shock even to know he was hurt, the issue hung in the air in balance for a long moment. Then he took another drink, letting the water run out of the corners of his mouth luxuriously, and put the canteen away, back in its cover.

A number of them were looking at him, but there was no envy of his water on their faces. Perhaps there was a small envy of his wounding. Mainly there was a general look of sympathetic distaste. They wanted him to go away. He had been wounded, lucky bastard, he should leave. And quickly. They didn’t want to look at him. They didn’t want to be reminded.

Back on the hilltop he had sipped at the canteen until jeeped out, as most of the wounded around him were doing, while down below in the hot valley the waterless platoons bungled ahead.

This was the scene that kept presenting itself to Landers in the hospital bed. His mind seemed not to include the walk out, or the medical officer’s examination, or the discovery of his mangled ankle. Only the canteen part. He would wake in the night under the dope and babble about it to the night medic on duty. Because, in his dream, the men of the platoon wanted his water, looking at him silently with beseeching eyes, and he, Landers, would not give it to them. The night medic could never understand what he was trying to say and would always bring him water, which he always refused to drink. When they stopped the dope, it went away and he had not thought about it again.

Not until just now, that is, Landers thought. In his berth. On this reeking hospital meat boat, with the news that they had sighted home. He sighed suddenly.

The two emplastered men had passed on along the Main Deck promenade going forward. Landers had pulled his head back in out of the breeze.

From inside, framed by the edges of the big, square port, the piece of dim blue coast was like a living painting. It seemed some kind of terrifying panacea to Landers, capable of remedying all your problems, but at a terrifying cost that would leave you permanently crippled.

The air inside was tranquil, quiet. Just outside the wind caused by the ship’s passage still blew, and if he stuck out his arm his bathrobe sleeve would flap wildly. But Landers did not want to stick his arm out. The air of the long, deserted corridor gave a sense of security that washed against the feelings which fluttered wingless flutterings inside him.

He was just thinking of going to look up goddamned Mart Winch, just for someone to talk to, when a hallucination took him. Fixed him, the way a man is frozen by some kind of seizure.

Vision, illusion, waking daydream, dementia, whatever, Landers suddenly found himself outside the ship and moving up and away from it in the air.

He could look down and see the big red crosses on its white flank. There was no breeze now; the air was still. It was just as if a big helicopter was hook-lifting him away from the ship. Except there was no noise. Everything was silence. And he was hanging free and moving upward—until from a great height he looked down upon both the immensely diminished ship and a far distant shore.

Below him, slowly, the white ship moved soundlessly—and, curiously, with no smoke plume smudging the air—on toward its distant goal across the gently heaving blue expanse, whose swells ran on and on before the ship to crash in white, silent breakers against the far-off coast. The staring Landers knew that neither ship nor shore was inhabited, just as he knew the ship would never reach its coastal destination. The coast would gently recede, cunningly adjusting its movement to the ship’s own speed, so that the distance between the two would remain the same forever in the bright warm cheerful sun—a sun that, strangely, did not move in the heavens and at the same time cast no shadows.

That the empty ship would never reach the empty continent did not matter. Indeed, Landers knew from somewhere that it was the ship’s express purpose not to reach that shore. The ship itself was not even a ship any more but something else, And the unpeopled mysterious blue continent was—what? Landers did not know. But it was the most beautiful and serene and peaceful, and right, sight he had ever seen, and looking at it filled him with the greatest composure and sense of pleasure he had ever known.

Down below somewhere, he knew, another man called Marion Landers stood gazing with eyes widened in a trance. Landers knew that if that other man blinked the vision, dream, revelation, whatever it was, would disappear. But this could not scratch or dent his pleasure. That was part of it, too.

And far off, the white breakers clashed gently on the unpeopled sands of that long blue coast, where forests of great green-leafed trees and green supple grasses remained the only living things. That continent which, uninhabited, enigmatic, unfathomable and vast, loomed beckoning. And upon which no ship would ever make its landing.

Landers did not blink. He refused to. He would not let himself. But it didn’t matter. Slowly he felt himself coming back into himself, anyway. He felt a part of him pouring back in slowly in a thick solid untrickling stream like liquid chocolate poured from a bowl. Then he did blink.

What was happening to him? A jerky panic ran all through him like a jolt of electricity. Slowly he turned away, and limped off to look for Winch. Somebody, anybody, to talk to.

But before he reached the top of the flight of ship’s stairs to Promenade Deck, he had changed his mind. Winch was Landers’ hero. And had been, since Landers was first assigned to the old Regular Army outfit, and because of his clerical knowledge been dragooned to work for Winch as clerk. But Winch would be no help to him in the things Landers was wrestling with now. And maybe no help to him ever. That was another new revelation.

So at the top of the stairs, he veered off and headed for the main lounge. Where Bobby Prell would certainly still be. Prell, all trussed up in traction like a chicken going to market, was not about to go on deck.

As he approached the door, Landers began preparing himself for the soft sick smell that would engulf him. The only thing to do was to breathe it in, and not try to avoid it. As he opened the door, it hit him in the face with a warm, wet, slippery splash like glissading sewer water.

Then, as he stood still inside the door a moment, to get used to it, he saw the old company’s former mess/sgt Johnny Stranger was leaning over the end of Prell’s bunk halfway down the big room, laughing and talking.

After standing indecisively a moment, Landers opened the door and went back outside. He did not want to talk to Strange. He had not really wanted to talk to Prell. Rather hopelessly, but cautiously, he started back down the steep ship’s stairs on his crutches.

Going down the steep, slippery iron stairs was even more dangerous than climbing them, to a man on crutches.

T
HEY DOCKED LATE THAT NIGHT,
in San Diego. No one felt like sleeping, but it would have been impossible anyway. Dago was where the Navy and Marine Corps wounded were being taken off.

The little ship, dwarfed now by the Navy fighting ships nearby, blazed with lights. Shore-based stretcher-bearers and the whiteclad shipboard medics moved down the aisles and passageways, calling to each other in loud voices. Berth after berth in the staterooms and bed after bed in the main lounge were emptied, and the occupants carted away. Some of them were coming from as far away as the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Australia, from New Zealand. From New Guinea, the Solomons, the Coral Sea.

On shore under the dockside floodlights there was a great bustle, as ambulance after ambulance drove up, was loaded, and pulled off into the darkness. In the big harbor packed with wartime shipping, lights shone everywhere, on ships, in shore installations, from cars and buses and trucks.

And above the harbor the lights of the city blazed as if for a festive occasion, or as if welcoming the wounded home. To the men on board, used to blackouts and brownouts, the sight was breathtaking. Some began to weep again.

When the unloading was over, and the lights on board began to dim down again, a third of the berths and beds were empty. The rest, the Army personnel, would have to wait for San Francisco. Frisco was another two days run up the coast. Those last two days, in the partially empty ship, were going to seem the longest, and the worst. And everybody knew it.

John Strange certainly knew it. When things settled down, Strange made his way back to Bobby Prell’s bed in the diminished-seeming main lounge. Strange leaned over Prell’s bed foot again and tried hard one more time to think of something funny to say. He had hoped once again, because of the greatness of the occasion, to get Winch to come with him to visit Prell. If he had, it would be the first time. The first in fact since Winch had suddenly appeared at the Naval base hospital in the New Hebrides, on his way out apparently, but not looking wounded and not even looking particularly sick. Even back there, Winch had flatly refused to visit Prell or have anything to do with him.

Because of Prell, Strange had spent a lot of time in the ship’s main lounge. They hadn’t called him Mother Strange for nothing, back in the old company. But he had never gotten used to the lounge, or gotten so he did not feel uncomfortable in it.

Long afterward, Strange noted, they all of them still spoke about how during the voyage the main lounge was never far from anyone’s thoughts. No matter where they went, or what Stateside hospital the post cards and letters came back from. They all of them said or wrote the same thing about the lounge. All of us, Strange thought. It was as if all of them, hunting, casting around, were trying to find the common factors that would hold the whole experience together for them. And the voyage was the final act of the play, the dividing line. Like the International Date Line, when they crossed it.

Among themselves, they had calculated that 13 percent were damaged bad enough to have to travel in the lounge. The statistics of being wounded fascinated Strange as much as they did the rest of them. And on board, it was their biggest game. Next to card playing. Blackjack. And poker.

Of the 13 percent of them in the lounge, one-fifth, or 2.6 percent of the total, had to go into the extra-care unit. The 2.6 percent were almost all lung wounds. Only about a sixth of them were abdominals or head wounds. Because the head wounds almost always died before they got on board, and the abdominals either died or recovered sufficiently to travel out in the open lounge with the others. Among the infantry, us infantry, Strange thought with a chief cook’s smile, it was an interesting note that 75 percent of the lung wounds were caused by rifle or machinegun bullets, but only 50 percent of the abdominals were bullet wounds. They did not know why, and they did not know whether these figures also applied to other types of outfits.

Strange found it a well-run, put-together place, the main lounge. Once your nose got over its outrage at the smell. And once the dark part of your mind got over its supernatural, witches-and-broomstick feeling about it. The feeling that right here, traveling with you, was the true hell of your Christian grandmother. It even looked like it. Pincers, and needles, and tubes and scissors. With its working imps, and gory damned ones. All of them paying out or receiving the punishment for human sins. It could seem the repository, the collection-place and bank, of all human evil. It often gave Strange that feeling.

Strange was not a religious man. Or at least, not a very religious man. Better to say, a poorly religious man. Who wasn’t much good at living up to it. But Strange believed in God. And believed he would pay someday for his lapses. And it was not too big a jump of the imagination for him to see the main lounge as the hell where he might someday be paying.

Like so many others, he carried a big reluctance to enter it or breathe its air, or even to touching the door handles that opened its doors. Out of a superstitious fear of contamination. But once you got past all that, it was remarkable how well it did and ran the things it was supposed to do and run. As no doubt hell did, too, Strange thought.

The extra-care unit was in one corner. It was cordoned off from the rest by curtain screens. Generally silence prevailed there. But all sorts of gruesome medical noises kept issuing from it. Enhanced perhaps by the silence. Liquid gurglings. Soft hissings of air. Louder air blasts. Peculiar tickings. Heavy breathing. No visitors were allowed in it.

If you wanted to carry the hell idea further, you could think of the extra-care unit as the seventh level of your grandma’s Christian hell, Strange often thought. The lowest. The worst of all.

If it had not been for Prell, Strange might never have gotten to know the lounge as well as he did. He spent a good part of every day in there with Prell, talking and laughing and trying to cheer him up. He doubted if he would have done as much for another man. Not in that lousy place. He hadn’t even bothered to look up Landers, Winch’s clerk, during the voyage. But Landers was a wartime volunteer. And Prell—like Winch—was from the old outfit.

Strange with his bad hand had preceded Winch by a week to the Naval base hospital at Efate in the New Hebrides. And when he left the company up in New Georgia, Winch to all appearances had been healthy and in good shape. Bobby Prell of course had preceded both of them by several weeks, when the New Georgia campaign was getting up to its peak of fighting.

Strange would not have put it past Winch to simply decide he had had enough combat, and simply have himself shipped out back to America. Winch was perfectly capable of it, and Strange was convinced he had enough pull to do it. If that was what he decided he wanted to do.

Gossip around the New Hebrides base hospital said that Winch had something wrong with his heart. Just as gossip in the hospital had it that Prell was going to lose one or both of his legs. But Winch did not look or act like a man who had had a heart attack, any more than Bobby Prell looked or acted like a man who was going to let them take off one or both of his legs.

Gossip around the hospital also had it that Prell was being recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor by the Division’s commander. But when Strange told this to Winch, Winch only snorted with outraged disgust. If anybody knew anything definite about Prell’s potential recommendation, it would be his own 1st/sgt, Winch. But Winch refused to admit he had heard about it. Prell himself had heard nothing about it, apparently. And Strange had felt that if he could get Winch to back-up the fact of the recommendation, it might do Prell a world of good.