Whistle (66 page)

“Does that bother you?” Winch grinned from the bed. He got up himself, and began collecting his warrant officer’s uniform.

“You haven’t let me tell you my two pieces of news,” Carol said while they were dressing.

“Won’t they keep till later?” Winch said. “Till after we’ve had dinner, say?”

“Well won’t you let me tell you the one?” Carol said. “Or didn’t you notice the suitcases?”

“I noticed them. You planning on going on a trip someplace?”

“No. No, that’s just it. Those suitcases are because I’m moving in here, with you.”

Winch did not honestly know whether to be happy, or pissed off. He decided to grin, while playing for time. “You’re moving in here with me? What about your parents?”

Carol was trying, without total success, to smooth the wrinkles out of her skirt in front of the mirror. She brought her eyes up to her face in the mirror and took a deep breath like someone about to begin a reading in front of a declamation class. “It just seemed to me to be silly to keep on getting up at four in the morning and getting all made up and all dressed up to go home and try to get an extra hour and a half of good sleep. Nobody was ever waiting up for me. Nobody ever asked me about when I got in.”

“So?”

She turned away from the mirror. “So I had it out with them. I got them together and sat them down and told them I had a lover. And that it seemed dumb to me to lose all that good sleep.”

“You tell them about me?”

* * *

Carol had told Winch that she was going to move in with him in his small apartment in Luxor. Having found it ridiculous, finally, that she should wake up every morning at 4:00 a.m., get dressed, and go home, she had informed her parents in a moment of defiance that she had a lover and intended to live with him. She told Winch she had lied to her parents that he was a commander in the Navy. Winch did not know whether he should have been happy or unhappy over this new state of things.

Winch and Carol were preparing to go out for dinner. He had noticed the two suitcases which she had brought with her. She had explained that they were part of her move into the apartment. It had been implied that Winch thought these suitcases meant she was ending their affair and leaving Luxor, which was why he had first told her he did not want to hear her “two bits of news” until later.

They left the apartment and decided to have dinner in the rather staid and chic family-type restaurant of the Peabody Hotel rather than one of the Army hangouts. Winch tipped the waiter for a good table, and they were seated among the quiet, respectable citizens of Luxor.

Winch had an acute stomach discomfort which accompanied his heart ailment. What ensued in the restaurant was both a sign of his suffering and of his increasing craziness.

While sitting in conversation at the dinner table with Carol, he leaned forward slightly and let loose this enormous loud rippling fart which reverberated from the walls of the restaurant. There was a pronounced though short silence all over the place, a discreet turning of heads, and then the people at the surrounding tables went back to their dinners. Carol did not know how to react since this was a social gaffe she was incapable of coping with. Winch continued talking as though nothing had happened, although he watched Carol’s eyes—they did not widen, they might have narrowed just the slightest bit—but she gave no indication that she had heard this enormous fart, and she, too, continued talking. Later, back at the apartment, after a cab ride through the beautiful April night, Carol told Winch the other bit of news. She had decided to go to summer school. Her new boyfriend, whom she had already told Winch about, who suited her so much better than the proper Luxor boy whom she had inveigled into going up to Western Reserve with her, wanted her to come back up to Ohio to get married. Carol told Winch she was about ready to agree with this, and had in her mind already.

So in essence this was the beginning of their good-by—a good-by that would take place in late May. Winch had been anticipating something of this sort for quite a long time. He knew, in fact, that had he wanted to keep her he could have talked her at any time into marrying him. She was still in love with him in a special private way, and enjoyed and had learned from their sexual relationship, but like him, and because of his reticence, she realized that for them to marry would be catastrophic.

Winch handled this news well enough, and near the end of this chapter he saw himself facing up to a future without Carol, all of this augmented by his approaching insanity. As he thought it all over, he seemed more concerned with having Carol not wake him up at night during his nightmares than he did with the fact that soon he would lose her.

At the end of the chapter Winch’s thoughts turned to Bobby Prell, who appeared now to Winch—after Johnny Strange had told Winch of the telephone conversation with Prell from Kansas City—to have been the only one of the four old-company men to have found “peace” for himself in the wartime noncombat areas.

W
HEN WE LAST LEFT
Prell in Chapter 29, he was on his bond-selling tour in Kansas City, Lincoln, and Denver. Strange had telephoned him from Luxor in the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City to tell him of Marion Landers’ death. Prell was feeling guilty about his own lack of reaction, during his talk with Strange, to Landers’ apparent suicide. As with the others, he was being beset with nightmares involving the squad again, the patrol on New Georgia, and in his dreams Landers was now one of the dead. He was guilty also about his own position, the Medal of Honor hero, which he did not believe he deserved. He felt he was making speeches for a living—that he had become an entertainer, part of a vaudeville team.

His reaction when he returned briefly to Luxor from this first bond-selling tour was to avoid getting in touch with either Strange or Winch. He did not want to see them; he did not want to expose himself to the ridicule he imagined he would provoke in them because of what he considered his false role as a public relations man.

All he had left now, Prell felt, was his son-and-father relationship with former colonel, now Brigadier General Stevens, the commander of the hospital, a kindly relationship which began with Stevens’ first visit to Prell in the hospital when the doctors were threatening to amputate his leg, and deepened as the months passed.

But in a scene with Brigadier Stevens in his office in the hospital in Luxor, Prell found to his sorrow that Stevens did not truly understand his feelings of guilt and inadequacy, and that in fact Stevens never had understood him. Prell did not feel up to explaining to Stevens what he believed to be his hypocritical role as a salesman and a fake hero.

Prell left his session with Stevens more desolate than ever, realizing that perhaps Strange and Winch were the only two people who genuinely did sympathize with what was happening to him. But he was still unwilling to call either one of them.

Warrant Officer Jack Alexander informed Winch that Prell had returned to the Luxor hospital for a few days. As far as Alexander could see, in his uncomprehending attitude, Prell was all right. Winch had hoped that Prell would come and see him and Strange, but his talk with Alexander nonetheless reassured him.

Prell was then ordered more or less permanently to Los Angeles with Major Kurntz and the same public relations crew with which he had made his first bond-selling trip. Since he had had a highly unsatisfactory reunion with his pregnant wife, Delia Mae, and his ambitious mother-in-law in Luxor, he took an apartment in Los Angeles and did not give them his telephone number or address.

In Los Angeles Prell made a couple of appearances with several movie stars and starlets. But after his first speech there, which was a huge success, he got drunk and went out that night in the limousine which had been put at his disposal with its Army driver, a sergeant. He ran around down in the low-bar areas of Los Angeles and ended up in a seedy bar filled with drunk servicemen. The driver waited for him outside.

With all the accumulated rage burning in him, he tried to pick a fight. But with his bad legs he was practically incapable of self-defense. Just as the irate soldiers whom he had insulted and challenged were about to beat him up, perhaps even kill him, one of them suddenly recognized the Medal of Honor ribbon he was wearing on his blouse, and then remembered him from his pictures in the Los Angeles papers. The soldier said: “Good God, we’re about to beat up on a Medal of Honor winner!” and stopped the fight.

The soldiers found out that there was a sergeant waiting for Prell in the limousine outside the bar. They went and got him. The soldier who had recognized Prell warned the sergeant, “He shouldn’t be in a place like this.” The sergeant took Prell home. He did not inform Major Kurntz of what had happened, thinking that he was protecting Prell, and doing so with his natural soldier’s instinct not ever to tell the authorities anything they did not already know.

The next speech was in Bakersfield. The entire bond-selling group drove out in limousines for the evening “performance.” After his speech, Prell repeated the same pattern with a different driver. He got very drunk and asked the driver to let him off at another tough bar.

He got out of the limousine and hobbled into the bar on his ruined legs. There was an expression on his face of hard desperate determination. He walked into the bar. It was a green place, smoke-filled, with the rattling of pool balls, and mean drunken soldiers at the tables and on the bar stools, and a couple of poker games in the corner. After two or three drinks he began to bait some of the servicemen around him, and picked another fight. This time he was not recognized by the soldiers. The result was a bloody brawl, with Prell at the center, in which he seriously hurt someone. In the smoky haze one of the soldiers picked up a pool cue. He hit Prell over the head with it and killed him.

The sergeant driver, having heard the noise, rushed into the bar and saw Prell bleeding on the floor. He felt his pulse. He told the men what they had done, told them whom they had killed. The soldiers were horrified, but left the impression that Prell had brought it all on himself, as in fact he had done, deliberately picking the fight with them.

T
HIS BRIEF CHAPTER
is from Winch’s viewpoint after learning of the death of Prell. In this chapter we see the progressive deterioration of Winch. He goes crazy.

We have already seen the signs of Winch’s imminent crackup: the night he saw the image of one of the platoon’s dead infantrymen on the windshield of his car and skidded off the road; his urge to pinch the Gray Lady at Prell’s wedding; his wild poker game at the Claridge and later his burning Jack Alexander’s IOU; his bad dreams of the Japanese charging with the bayonet during the mortar fire and of the soldier in no man’s land being wounded over and over again with no hope of rescue; the fart in the Peabody restaurant; his hatred for the two Wurlitzer jukeboxes in the main PX, which he viewed as the world of the future—“chrome, and pipe, and plastic, and whirling iridescent lights, and jarred, canned music”; his pent-up grief over the death of Landers. All of this mental stress was compounded by the increasing symptoms of congestive heart failure. When Strange left Winch in the Camp O’Bruyerre PX at the end of Chapter 30, he “did not think Winch looked good at all.”

“Prell and Landers and Strange were what was left to him of his real life,” the author wrote in Chapter 22. And now Winch hears of the death of Prell.

Beginning with Winch’s dwelling on the fate of Prell, the action in this chapter took place in May, 1944, not long before the D-Day invasion.

Winch was still seeing Carol, but they were beginning to make their farewells. He had not yet broken up with her—she was not leaving Luxor until June—but he had in fact pushed her toward leaving and encouraged her to marry her new boyfriend from Ohio. When she finally departed, it was the end of their affair.

During the time he was making his farewells to Carol, and advising her to marry the second lover rather than the boy from Luxor, Winch had been wandering down to the grenade range of Camp O’Bruyerre in the afternoons. Being a top sergeant and now a junior warrant officer, he was on friendly terms with the grenade officer and grenade warrant officer, and there was a lot of amiable banter among them as they watched the raw draftees learn about hand grenades. While he was there one afternoon, when no one was looking he casually picked up a couple of grenades and slipped one into each pocket of his coat, then walked away unnoticed. Later, in his room, he unscrewed them with a pair of pliers and poured the powder into a jar, which he hid. For two or three nights he slept with the defused grenades under his pillow.

Then late one night, after he had been in the main PX drinking wine against the contradictory blasts of the two Wurlitzer jukeboxes, he returned to his room and put the powder back in the grenades. He waited for the base to quieten down. At 3:00 a.m. he put the grenades into his pockets and snuck across the deserted grounds to the PX.

Winch broke the window of the PX with the butt of one of the grenades. Then, very slowly and deliberately, he pulled out the pins and tossed the grenades one at a time through the broken windows into the empty room, so that they rolled across the floor and landed under the Wurlitzer machines.

Winch moved away and ducked. A terrific explosion followed, blowing up not only the Wurlitzers but most of the PX as well. Smoke and debris were everywhere.

Winch allowed the wreckage to settle and then peered in through the broken window at the results of his raid. He began to laugh maniacally. In no time at all the MPs descended on the area in jeeps. They spotted Winch hiding in the shrubbery. He tried to run from them, still laughing wildly, but because of his heart condition he could not get away from them, he bent over with breathlessness, and the MPs captured him and took him away. He wound up in the hospital prison ward.

I
N THIS, THE FINAL CHAPTER
of Book 5:—“The End of It”—and the novel, the viewpoint is Johnny Strange’s, the last one of the old company.