Whistle (60 page)

Prell had simply nodded, too dazzled to make an answer. He was as dazzled by the old gentleman’s honesty and sense of honor, as he was by the prospect of so much swift promotion. And it was these traits, Stevens’ honesty and sense of honor, that sent him back to the old West Pointer for advice when his problem arose with Delia Mae a month or so later.

There wasn’t really anybody else to go to. He did not want to go to Strange with it. Anyway, what could Strange tell him? And in the month since their first talk he had been back three or four times to see Stevens, whose door as Stevens said was always open to a Medal of Honor winner. Prell had come to think of him almost as a father. It was as close to a father, anyway, as a West Virginia orphan boy had ever had. Winch or Strange had never been that to him.

If it had not been precisely as he told it to Strange at the wedding, it had been very close to that. Perhaps he had not knocked her up the very first time his legs had been physically able to get on top of her and seriously fuck her. But it had been damn close to the first time. It had been in the first five days. All that time his damned legs had been too damned weak, and painful, to pull back out. And they had been going at it like a couple of minks. Then in two or three weeks she had come to him with looks of chagrin and fright darting over her face and told him that she had missed her period. But even then on her face there had been that look, that glow, of triumph, victory and success. It shone out openly and with total shamelessness from under the other looks, a glow saying that she knew she had trapped him.

“Of course, you must marry her!” Stevens exclaimed, without preamble or qualification, as soon as he was told what had happened. “It’s the only honorable thing you can do.”

Prell was ready to accept this. But he needed a little time to digest it. “Well there are other ways to solve it, sir. I mean, as a problem. If we were thinking of it like a mathematics exercise. Several other ways.”

“What ways?”

“Well, I could just not marry her at all. That’s happened a lot more times around this area than you might think, sir. She’d just go on off home and have the baby. And her mom would work and she’d take care of it. Or she’d work and her mom would take care of it. That’s happened a lot. Particularly in cases like this, when I’m about to ship off from here.”

“Good God, son! And that’s what you propose? What about her father? What’s he say? Where is he?”

“He’s overseas, sir, in the Army. In New Guinea, I believe.”

“MacArthur,” Stevens murmured, to himself.

“Some Signal Corps outfit,” Prell said.

“Well at least it isn’t the infantry. What other brilliant ideas have you got?”

“I could take her to an abortionist, sir. There’s one of these sleazy doctors who does them, down on South Main. Down below Beale Street, near the black section. I have lots of friends who have the address. She has the address herself.”

“No, no! Great Scott, boy!” The old West Pointer looked seriously shocked. “You’re destroying a human life.”

“I don’t really think of it as a human life yet,” Prell said. “She’s only a month and a half gone.”

“A human life is precious,” the old soldier said. “Um, how did she get hold of that address?”

“She said a friend gave it to her. In case she ever might need it.”

“I see. Well. Are you sure you’re the father?”

“It would be easy to say I’m not sure. But, honestly. Between us, sir. I’m pretty sure I am.”

“Well then, you’ve got to do the right thing by her,” Stevens said staunchly. “We men. We men like to have our good times. But we don’t like to pay up for it. We are supposed to look after women, and take care of them. Protect them. They need that from us. Our whole civilization is based on that.

“What about her mother? Does she know?”

“Yes,” Prell said. “She knows. She told her mother before she told me.”

Stevens stared at him. “She did? Well. Well, what does the mother say?”

“Oh she’s all in favor of the marriage,” Prell said. “She thinks I can become a movie star.”

“She
what?!
” Stevens said.

Prell shrugged lamely. “She said since I’m going off on this war bonds tour, I should make all the contacts I can with these Hollywood people. Then I can get started through them. She has this idea of a series of movies where I can be the owner of a ranch in the West somewhere, in a wheelchair. She seems to think I can become another Hopalong Cassidy or John Wayne.”

“Great Scott!” Stevens said.

“Well, she’s a little crackers, sir. The truth is she’s got this boyfriend in town in Luxor, older fellow, who is stationed at Second Army, and she wants to move into town with him. She figures if she marries Delia Mae to me, she’ll be free to do that.”

“Does her husband in New Guinea know?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Hasn’t the daughter written him about it?”

“No, sir. I don’t think she has.”

Stevens was staring at him, kind of unbelievingly.

“She’s sort of in the middle,” Prell said.

“Yes,” Stevens said. “Do you see much of this, uh, mother?”

“Only when I can’t avoid it.”

Stevens continued to stare for a minute, then sighed. “You’ve gotten yourself into a bad bind, haven’t you, son?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. Yes.”

Stevens stared down at his desk, frowning at it furiously as if it were responsible for this, before he looked up. “Well, if you’re asking my advice, I think you should marry the girl. In spite of all. I think you owe her that. Besides, you don’t know. She may love you with all her heart.”

“She loves the fact that I’m a Medal of Honor winner,” Prell said.

“I think you must marry her. You want to give your child a name.” He had commenced to doodle on a pad on his desk.

It was somehow what Prell had expected to hear. It was almost as if he had heard it in the air around him, before he had even come in. Perhaps he even had come here hoping to hear just that.

“Well, sir. I’m ready to do it,” Prell said. “If you think that’s what I ought to do.”

Stevens made a big circle over his other doodles, and ran it around three times, and then threw his pencil down. “I do. And you’ve given me an excellent idea. I think there is at least a way that we can make a lot of capital out of this for you, just in publicity alone.” And he had commenced to lay out his ideas for the hospital wedding.

Prell himself, in Kansas City, still did not know how much effect the idea of the wedding had had on his final decision to marry. It certainly had had some. Also, as Stevens had said, “If it doesn’t work out, you can always get a divorce. But at least you’ll have given your son your name.” He did say son. Although how he thought he knew, Prell had no idea. Delia Mae was about five months into her pregnancy right now and nobody, including the doctor, had any idea boy or girl. In the big hotel room Prell pulled himself laboriously up onto his feet again and, haltingly, walked across to the table for another bourbon.

He looked at his watch, which said ten-thirty, and realized room service would cut off serving dinners soon. If he didn’t order, there would be nothing but damned white turkey meat sandwiches.

But he wasn’t hungry. He took the straight bourbon back to the bed and sat down on the bed edge to drink it. Then he stretched back out and tried to burrow back into the sleep the ringing phone of Strange’s call had brought him up out of.

The sexual cutoff had begun almost as soon as the wedding itself was over. She was too tired, her back hurt her, or she was nauseous. He tried to point out that she was only two days more pregnant than she had been two days before the wedding, but it had not made the slightest difference. Stevens had arranged for them to spend four days at the Claridge free, paid for by the hotel’s public relations account, as a sort of honeymoon. Prell actually had gotten less sex during that four days than he had had at any time since he had first met Delia Mae on the ward, when he had felt a hell of a lot worse.

It was as if all the hot sexuality in her, which she had hated secretly all this time but had never admitted hating, had run down out of her like mercury out of a broken thermometer, leaving only the glass shell and the etched numbers as sort of ghostly reminders of the heat that had once been measured there.

It was as if now, with her back areas and lines of retreat safely stabilized and covered by a marriage certificate, she was ready to stand and fight for her principles. Whatever the fuck they were. One of them was clearly that genu-wine high-class ladies wasn’t supposed to like sex.

Prell burrowed his head down deeper into the bed’s pillow.

The sleep came slowly, in little spurts. It came like small snow flurries, sweeping an area with their stillnesses, on the light winds of a steadily thickening snowstorm. Then when the full sleep came, with it came the nightmares. Immediately. Or so it seemed. It seemed only half of him was truly asleep, because it seemed half of him was awake watching the nightmares.

They were all involved with the squad again, and the patrol. They went all through it again, over and over. The half of him that was not asleep was aware that he had not had them in quite a long time, and was a little shocked at seeing them. And this time Landers was with them, in them.

It was as though Prell could never quite spot him. But he was with the dead, and at the same time he was with the wounded. Whenever Prell looked back from his own improvised stretcher to check, the two dead, both Crozier and Sims, would be there; but Landers would be one of them, or sort of with them. Whenever he looked at his wounded and counted them to check, all of them would be there, the count exactly right, but one of their agonized faces would be Landers. When Prell looked at their faces individually, each belonged to its owner. But he would know that there was another one hanging around, hovering somewhere.

He woke sweating. He had not had any of these dreams in quite some time. And never had Landers been in any of them.

His watch said it was after midnight. He knew he would never go back to sleep now. He didn’t want to go back to sleep. Heavily, he got himself back onto his feet and walked teetering over to the phone, and on the strength of a pretty solid hunch called Jerry Kurntz’s central suite. Sure enough, they were all there.

“Shit, kid,” Jerry Kurntz cried at him from the phone. “Didn’t I tell you this bunch was ripe? All you got to do is pour some booze down them, and loosen up their inhibitions. And they all of them got the hots for you. One of them thought she was your date, and got so mad when you didn’t show up, she went into a sulk. But she’s beginning to loosen up now.”

“Well what about the other guys?” Prell said. “Are there enough to go around?”

“Hell, baby, nobody cares,” Kurntz roared into the phone. “You come on over and you can take your pick.”

Prell’s pick was the one who had sulked over his absence. She was a good-looking blonde lady, who by the time he arrived had had more than enough to drink, but was still a lady. None of these ladies was the kind of bimbo you would find down around 4th Street in Luxor. And, usually, almost always they were married. “Married and harried,” Kurntz liked to say, laughing. Kurntz always liked to point out that it was because the tour people were out-of-towners, only there for a night or two, that they made out so well. They represented no strings, no embarrassing reappearances.

Kurntz’s suite was laid out more or less on the same principles as Strange’s suite at the Peabody. Except that there was only one bedroom, and there was no “preparation station” bed in the living room. These ladies would never have gone for, would have been shocked by, something as open as that. But since the tour guys had their own rooms in the hotel to take the “Damsels of their choice,” as Kurntz called them, there was no problem.

Prell had ridden over in his wheelchair, and had the bellboy push him. He had found the wheelchair worked wonders of sympathetic limpness on the ladies, once the ladies realized he was no paraplegic and not paralyzed from the waist down.

The Kansas City lady’s name was Joyce. “Joyce, would you mind pushing me back to my own room in this thing?” he asked after they had talked awhile in Kurntz’s loud, crowded living room.

They always loved pushing him in the wheelchair. And they loved talking to him about the Medal of Honor, and how he had gotten it. Prell didn’t mind telling them. He simply soft-pedaled his own feelings of inadequacy about the whole thing. A feeling of inadequacy was not what they were after, at a time like that. Sometimes when he was telling them about it, it seemed that was the way it really was, had really happened.

Most of them liked undressing him, too. Prell always let them. He wasn’t ashamed of the scars, and if they wanted to inspect them and ask questions about them, well, the scars were very close to where he wanted to get their faces. And that almost always worked, too. If only with passionate kissing.

“What kind of outfit’s your husband in? Where is he?” he asked Joyce.

“He’s in England,” Joyce said drunkenly. “He’s in the Air Force. He’s an air-crew ground mechanic. He doesn’t fly. But he’s written me,” she said, running her fingertips over Prell’s thigh scars, “about some of the boys who’ve been flown back to base all terribly torn up. They’ve had two Medals of Honor in his squadron, he wrote me.”

They went to sleep with their arms around each other, Joyce performing a sort of contortionist feat, by keeping her breasts pressed against him up above, while lying away from him down below so as not to hurt his legs. There were no nightmares.

She woke up around five, cold sober. Prell had gotten pretty used to this, too. Her eyes were full of panic.

“My God. What on earth am I doing here?” she demanded, and pulled the sheet up over her breasts.

The lines were almost always the same. So was the action with the sheet.

“What ever will you think of me?”

That line was usually the same, too. Prell had learned how to handle them by talking gently and affectionately and sensibly. He wasn’t even sure they heard the words he said, only the tones. He wasn’t even sure they saw him.