Whistle (63 page)

It was just three days before they were to move out that Winch called him about Landers.

It was one of the most emotional moments Strange had had since seeing the Golden Gate. It was just ten o’clock in the morning. Landers had been killed at about eight-thirty. They had taken him back up to the hospital, not knowing where else to take him. Then they had called Winch and Winch had gone up there. That was why he was so late in calling. “Can you meet me at the main PX?” Winch asked hoarsely. “In the senior NCOs section? Have you got a ticket to let you in the PX this early in the day? Never mind. I’ll make one out for you, and forge it.” When Strange turned away from the phone, his new 1st/sgt was looking at him with a distressed face.

“What happened? You look like you seen a ghost.”

“What? Oh. Yeah. Almost. Old buddy of mine from the Pacific just got killed here at O’Bruyerre.”

The 1st/sgt’s face got jumpy. “What was it? Artillery? MG ranges? Hand grenades?”

“No. No. He just got hit by a car.”

“You old guys.” The 1st/sgt shook his head. “Your old combat buddies are closer than family.”

“Here, sign this, will you? I got to meet my old first sarn’t,” Strange said, getting from the clerk’s desk a ticket that said he could be allowed in the PX bar before noon. The 1st/sgt looked perplexed, as if about to say an officer must sign the ticket, which Strange already knew; but then he signed it, with an illegible, scrawled flourish.

“I’ll be back in a while,” Strange said. “Anyway, everything is in shape in the kitchen and they’ve all got something to keep them busy.”

But he might as well not have bothered with the PX pass. No one stopped him, or asked to see it. This PX pass ticket was a new thing, put into effect since the training had gone up into high gear for the European D-Day. Finding Winch was easy, as uncrowded as the place was now. It was only the second time Strange had been in the big main PX.

Winch was alone. Strange sat down beside him at the big round table.

“Well,” Strange said. “Tell me.”

Winch did. Strange listened as he ran through all that the woman had told the authorities, and what she had said about it looking like a deliberate suicide. They talked about the possible suicide awhile. Winch did not think it was possible. But Strange was not so sure.

“What the hell?” Winch said harshly. “He was getting exactly what he wanted. That’s what he told that company officer of his he wanted. That’s not a suicide position.”

“I don’t think he knew what he wanted,” Strange said suddenly. It was as if he had seen it and read it, written on the pressed paper Budweiser coaster under his beer mug, and was reading it off the circular paper mat, “I think he wanted both equally. Exactly equal. That’s an unsolvable position.” He looked up from his coaster.

Winch looked at him, his eyes wondering. “Then there wasn’t anything anybody could do for him.”

“No,” Strange said. “Nothing.”

“So it was all of it. . . And I was just wasting my time,” Winch said, to himself.

Some man in the big empty hall got up and put some money in the tall, bubbling, whirling, lighted Wurlitzer machine. “Ciribiribin” by the Andrews Sisters began to play in the huge hall.

“By God, I hate those fucking Wurlitzers,” Winch said viciously.

“Did you see him?” Strange said.

Winch drank down the glass of white wine that was sitting in front of him. Then he signaled the barman over behind the mahogany-colored bar for another. He drank two more in quick succession, Then he began to hem and haw around about how, and whether or not, he had seen Landers’ body. They wanted another identification signature, besides just the hospital people. They didn’t want to call his old outfit. Anyway, he didn’t have an old outfit any more. Somebody knew Winch had known him.

“Did you see him?” Strange said again.

“Yeah, yeah, I saw him. Or at least his face. Was no great thing. Just another dead guy. He had that pale, greenish color they get. Face wasn’t smashed up. Just one big bruise on the right cheekbone.”

“What are they going to do with the body?”

“Send it home to his family, I guess.”

“He never liked his family that much.”

“No. I know. He told me that, too. But they can give it one of those big old local military American Legion funerals, out in the old cemetery. Beside his grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather, and all that. Fire a couple of volleys over it.”

“Have some Boy Scout play his bugle over it.”

“What the hell?” Winch said. “It’s only a body. It’s as good a way to dispose of it as some other.”

“You going to write them a letter?”

“No,” Winch said.

“Me neither. I wouldn’t know what to say to them.”

Winch signaled for another white wine. “Listen, you never come down here. Come on down some evening, at five-thirty or six. If you get the blues or anything.”

“We’re going out in the field day after tomorrow,” Strange said.

“Then come down when you get back,” Winch said, harshly.

Strange had nodded. “Sure. It’s only ten days.”

He had telephoned Prell that night. Winch had found out for him from Jack Alexander that the tour was in Kansas City at the Muehlebach. But Prell’s reaction made him decide right away that there was no point to calling Prell back.

The ten days out in the field were probably the best thing that could have happened to him at the moment. First, it was an abrupt switch from the garrison living. And existing under canvas that had to be pulled down and put back up twenty miles farther on in some other patch of woods every two days did not allow you much time for thinking, except in snatches. Strange could handle snatches. From 3:30 in the morning to midnight he was constantly on the run; cooking, stretching kitchen flies, feeding, overseeing that the flies and tents were ditched properly against the rain on the wooded slopes. Strange loved every minute of it.

And spring came while they were out there. For the first three days it rained, dismal winter rains at first, then each day warmer and more humid. Then, suddenly, the sun came out, and stayed out for the remaining seven days, and the leaves popped out and everything turned green.

It was absolutely beautiful. And the incredible speed with which it happened was unbelievable. Strange would stand outside his kitchen fly in the soft mud of some bare woods, checking his Lister water bags, and look off at some western Tennessee hill farmer’s rough slab cabin through the hard black lines of the bare hardwood branches. Minutes later the cabin would be invisible through the screen of leaves which had popped out, uncurling on the budded limbs.

Not many of the other men seemed to notice, or to give much of a damn. When it rained, they complained about the wet. When the sun came out, they complained about the mud. But to Strange it was unbelievably beautiful. This was the first time in six years that he had seen an American spring come on. Before the war he had spent four years in Wahoo, where there was no real winter or spring, then another year in Wahoo after the sneak attack, then a year in the South Pacific in the tropics. He hadn’t seen a real American spring in a long time.

They were out in the western Tennessee hill country, west of the Tennessee River. It was nothing like the primitive mountain country of eastern Tennessee, but if you got back into it far enough, where they were, you still found the home-built cabins covered with home-split shakes, the well and the outhouse outdoors around them. The farmers in their dilapidated hats and gum boots had eyes like wild, secretive animals. They were always willing to sell you a pint or two of homemade white lightning, yellowish and oily and evil-looking. Inside above the front door there were always some home-grown tobacco twists hanging, rolled and bent double and the ends twisted around each other. They would not sell you the tobacco but would give you a twist. The women with their hatchet faces always looked at you with gentle, tender eyes above the seamed, tight slash of their mouths. Strange had not chewed home-twist tobacco since he’d been a boy in Texas.

In almost every home, behind the home-set, swirly glass window-pane, hung one of the blue star flags with one, or two, or more blue stars in its center indicating the male members of the family in the service.

If there were any daughters, you never saw them.

On the single Saturday night of their ten-day field assignment orders came down giving them the Saturday afternoon, the night, and the Sunday morning off. The nearest town was a dinky little burg called McSwannville, three miles away. Those who could not catch a ride in on some loosened company vehicle walked it, along the muddy country lanes. Strange had control of the company’s freed kitchen jeep, and was able to take his entire kitchen force in on it. Men hung from it like overfull grapes dangling from an overladen garden cluster. After he parked it in the town, Strange wisely walked to the one hotel, intelligently thinking he should have some place to take any windfalls, and it was well he did. He got the very last room.

Men had centered on the one available town from all over the maneuver area. Infantry. Artillery. Quartermaster. A few raucous, tough paratroopers; tankers; other Signal Corps units. They all were there. It did not look like there were going to be many windfalls. But there was plenty of booze. The town was the county seat of a dry county, but there were three bootleg joints on its outskirts, where you could get real bottle whiskey instead of the always available, powerful white lightning. Each joint clearly had been alerted to stock up. Each was crowded, with a line of servicemen that came out of its door down to and along the muddy edge of the county road. As Strange walked down the one main street in midafternoon, the fistfights had already begun. One here. One there. Another starting, as still another stopped.

Not many women were even visible. Most of them stayed completely indoors. A few local bad girls and hookers hung around the two little eating places where much of the “concealed” drinking was done, or sat at one of the few tables the bootleg joints had inside, always with some soldier. The men of the town went about with a sort of business-as-usual attitude, but apparently trying to stay off the streets as much as possible. MPs with jeeps hauled jeeploads of lax drunken bodies off to some staging area where they would be collected by their outfits. Strange decided quickly there weren’t likely to be any windfalls, and concentrated on drinking. Even bad bottle whiskey tasted delicious after the white lightning.

There was this odd feeling everywhere that it was one week before the end of the world, and Strange let it pick him up and carry him.

He no longer thought about Landers with pain. People, like the seasons, all had to end sometime. In one manner or another. Somehow, seeing the spring had straightened that out for him.

Amiably drunk and at peace with this ending world he wandered through, he ate some food somewhere. Then about eleven p.m., as he walked along the one main street, he was accosted by the fat first cook of his company. The cook was sweating profusely and breathing heavily, and came out of a darkened alley.

“Hey, Sarge. Is it true you got a hotel room?”

“Yeah. I got one. Why?”

The fat first cook had been the biggest troublemaker Strange had had to deal with in the company. Naturally, he had wanted Strange’s job, and had thought he was in line for it. Strange was not about to give him half an inch. But none of that seemed to be bothering the cook, now.

“I got these two cunts, two broads, down here. I’d like to trade one of them for half a hotel room.”

Strange paused to stare at him. Strange never had liked him. If he had brought his complaints out, and had done his fighting in the open. But he hadn’t. He had done it all under cover, using other people to do his dirty work, and getting them into trouble. Strange intended to break him as soon as he could.

“How much do they want?”

“They don’t want any money. They just want to get fucked.”

“Do they know you’re trading one of them off?”

“Oh sure. It was them that suggested it. They’ll go off in the woods, or the park. But if we had a real place to take them, they’d stay all night.”

“How’d you find them?”

“I didn’t, really. They found me,” the cook said. “I was sitting out in the grass, drinking. By myself, And they just sort of came up out of the shrubbery. I don’t think they’re townie girls. I think they’re off some farm.”

“How old are they? Are they of age?”

“How the hell do I know? They look the right age.”

Strange looked down the dark alley. “What the hell are they hiding down there for, then? Why don’t they come on out here into the light?”

“They’re not hiding. They just don’t want to come out here where all these guys are. They’d have a mob of guys all over them, if they came out here with no men.”

“That makes sense. Okay, let’s have a look.”

Strange had made his mind up so strongly that there weren’t going to be any windfalls that he was finding it hard to shift gears.

In the dark of the alley the girls were waiting. They both wore faded print dresses that came just to the knees of their shapely legs. Each of them wore a shabby girl’s coat against the spring night’s chill. They certainly weren’t women, but they certainly weren’t underage girls, either.

Strange knew when he saw them that he wasn’t going to turn it down. The thickness in his throat when he swallowed and the breathlessness in his chest when he breathed told him that.

They didn’t mind walking along the lighted street when they had men with them. One’s name was Donna and the other’s was Ruby. Neither of them wanted anything, except to go to the hotel. Both Strange and the cook had bottles, but the girls didn’t want a drink. Neither girl drank. Nor did they want something to eat. Thinking of all the girls he had squired so grandly at the Peabody, Strange grandly offered to buy them a meal at one of the hash-houses. Neither of them wanted it.

At the hotel the boy behind the old, tiny, ramshackle desk in the tiny lobby looked at the girls with carefully widened eyes which did not seem to see them, and gave the key to Strange. In the room, which Strange had not inspected, there was one bed. This did not seem to bother the girls. Fortunately, it was a double bed. The fat cook began to get out of his green field uniform immediately. He was apparently already counting the available hours he would have.