Whistle (9 page)

Forty-eight hours later the vast majority of them were on their way east, or south, the bulk of them by train, a few, like the Air Force boy with dry gangrene, by plane.

One of the men the reprocessing was hardest on was Bobby Prell. Although he said next to nothing about it, Prell was in constant pain from his legs. The pull of the traction he was in assured that. In addition, the slightest movement of the ship transmitted itself through the weights on his feet up his legs to his shattered thighs. During the voyage, he had lived in mortal terror of a storm at sea. Fortunately, the weather had stayed fine.

From the moment the ship nosed into the dock, Prell feeling each particular bump in a series of shocks through his broken bones, to the moment he was laid out in a hospital car berth on the train east, Prell and his legs were taken out of traction twice, carted ashore, jounced across Frisco in a seemingly springless damned ambulance, moved twice in a rolling bed to different wards, rattled to the train station in another springless ambulance, hoisted through a hospital car window to his berth. Only sheer stubbornness had kept him from crying out a dozen times. But he had made up his mind he was not going to let anybody see him blubbering.

He had seen nothing of San Francisco, and he had had no desire to.

From the time he had been wounded and had got his squad back inside the lines, he had been carded, tagged and stamped, indexed and inspected, numbered and catalogued increasingly the closer he got to home and any kind of civilization. In certain of his worst moments, it seemed to him it was more important to them that they keep track of him and not lose him than that they keep him alive. It seemed to Prell there ought to be a better way to treat men who had given their life and limb for their country, but there didn’t seem to be any better way of handling it. If there was, nobody had figured it out. He had come almost to feel that he was actually a piece of that “living meat” the casualties on the ship jokingly so liked to refer to themselves as. But so far he had managed to keep his mouth shut about it.

He had already gone through two major operations, and been wired and screwed back together. And would apparently have to go through another, to get the wires and screws out of him. When the first group of doctors at Letterman examined him, one of the younger surgeons studied his file and whistled, then smiled with admiring disbelief the way a man might over a piece of brass sculpture hammered out by another. It gave Prell a certain thrill of pride.

Because Prell wasn’t fighting only to save his legs; he was fighting to save his life. He had already made up his mind that if they took off his legs, he was going to kill himself. He would shoot himself in the head. Or perhaps in the heart. He hadn’t decided which yet. But he certainly wasn’t going to go on living around the clock in a Veterans’ Hospital without any legs. Even if they took off only one of his legs, it would not be enough. He wouldn’t live with one leg, either. He didn’t have to do it, and he wasn’t going to. So the way Prell figured it, he wasn’t saving only just his legs. He was saving his whole life. And he wasn’t particularly ready to die yet.

So at Letterman the young surgeon’s reaction was a shot in the arm. It meant at the very least that there was still some hope. There was an indifferent impersonality in the admiring smile but that didn’t matter to Prell since he knew the surgeon was looking at him as a job of work. He had no way of knowing how hard Prell had fought, and how many times, to keep them from amputating. Prell did not tell him. He compressed his lips and kept his mouth shut again. Nor did he mention all the incredible, unbelievable pain all the moving around had caused him. Prell was playing his cards, the bad hand he had been dealt, as tight and as close to his shirt as he could, and was taking no chances. The enormity of the pain might be a point in favor of amputation. The surgeon, however, seemed to know. All Prell had in front of him now, he said, was the three-day train trip, and then soon they would begin to be able to tell. Only three days on the train, then he could rest. The reason they were sending him so far, to Luxor, Tennessee, was because not only did they have one of the best orthopedics leg surgery teams there, they also had about the best postoperative team in the country.

“I can do it standing on my head, sir,” Prell said cheerfully. But he was already sweating from the pushing and probing.

The doctor gave him back a funny, arrogant smile. “Let us hope you don’t have to,” he said, in a snobby superior way. Apparently he didn’t like brash confidence in potential amputees. Prell didn’t care, or even get angry, since this one wasn’t going to be making any of the crucial decisions. Through the sweat on his upper lip and forehead, he made himself grin.

It was, however, a lot easier to talk about the train trip than to do it. High physical pain that did not cease could over a long enough period be supremely tiring. To both the body and the spirit. It could drain the will away like an open sewer vent. The two days of movement from the ship to Letterman to the train had taken an enormous toll from him, more than he had guessed, and by the time he was finally deposited, weak and sweating, in his berth in the hospital car at the station, Prell could only look ahead with a kind of stunned unbelief to the idea of three whole days in a jouncing, swaying train.

When you were very sick or very bad hurt, your very consciousness seemed to withdraw into the deep inside of you, until you were no longer aware, except vaguely, of any life outside of you. Bit by bit you were pushed further back into yourself by pain until your will was reduced to one simpleminded, singleminded, dedicated thought, which in Prell’s case was that he would not cry out. He would not make a sound. He knew if he did, he would begin to holler “Mama!” Or start begging them to take him off before the train started, back to Letterman and amputate the goddamned legs. It was like those slugs in the jungle that pulled in their eyestalks and shrank when you stepped near them or touched them with a cigarette. Prell had not had a mama since he was eleven. And he did not intend to give up the only pair of legs he’d ever had.

Then, finally, even that thought left him. He simply lay, silent, waiting for them to start, driven back to his uttermost, most basic, bedrock consciousness of existence.

It was almost like a—a religious experience. That was the only word Prell could think of to use. He might as easily have said mystical, but mystical was not a word Prell used except in crossword puzzles. So instead he used religious, lamely. It was as though the pain alone by itself had made him drunk. As though the pain, by slowly but effectively sealing him off from other awareness, had turned him inward in a total, uninterruptible concentration as if he had passed through the outer yellow flame of a candle into its center, which was not hot but purple and cool. And in there with him in that cool center was an awareness of another presence. Somebody or some thing was in there with him. It, or she, or he (it was not a personality) did not do anything. It was not an added strength. It was not an aid. Nor was it a detriment. It was just there. Prell realized that what he missed most was Strange. Strange, or somebody from the company. And it made him angry. Angry that they were not with him, and angry that he needed them to be.

The medics had filled him with as much dope as they safely could before bringing him down, and Prell lay in a kind of delirious euphoria, more pain-induced than dope-induced, waiting for the jolt in his legs of the train starting, and thought about the company. And about his squad. And about their last patrol.

There were many ramifications. The patrol itself was the patrol. But everything after it had been added on to compound and complexify it. Prell imagined, in his rapturous state, that he could see through it all clearly now.

The patrol was the least part. Prell had no scruples or misgivings about the patrol. He had handled everything the best way he could. And no matter what anybody said, he had made no mistakes. The retreat with the dead and the wounded after they had been hit he had handled superbly. Just getting the dead out was a feat. Not many could have done it. And he had made fucking damn sure he got the intelligence message back accurately. He had given it himself. It had saved the Division a lot of men two days later.

The squad he felt less good about. But any qualms he had were not qualms of conscience. Nobody liked to see their buddies they had lived with get killed and shot up in front of them. Nobody liked to command, then. But in a firefight men got wounded, and they got killed. It was enough testimony and evidence about his squad, to see how they had all made a special trip to come down and say good-by to him before he was flown out. He had got out of it with two dead and two wounded out of fourteen men, not including himself. Not many noncoms could have done as well.

All the rest of it had started afterward. With Winch. Or if not with Winch, with somebody else and Winch had picked up on it. Simple jealousy. As far as Prell was concerned that was what it was, jealousy. Although how anybody could be jealous of a poor son of a bitch about to lose both legs, Prell could not figure.

It had really started with the battalion colonel. He too had made a special trip down to see him before he was flown out. And it was squatting beside Prell’s cot in the big tent, with his aide and a couple of other men standing there to listen, that he had said he wanted Prell to know that he was going to recommend him for something. He didn’t know what yet, but something. Prell had been in too much pain and too worried about whether he was going to lose his legs to give it much attention. He had said he didn’t want any medal. But it had given him a certain thrill. He had thought, then, maybe a “V” Bronze Star, or maybe even a Silver Star.

Then it had been the regimental commander, at the New Hebrides Base Hospital. The Jap attack his patrol had forewarned them of, and the resulting battle, had brought enough casualties in the regiment that the regimental commander had decided to make a quick flying trip down to the New Hebrides to visit them. Beside Prell’s bed in the big ward he had said his own office was recommending Prell for the Distinguished Service Cross. He would, he said, have liked to have a celebration, but since that was impossible with Prell in bed he had brought along an Australian imperial quart of Scotch whiskey as a present. Since Prell couldn’t drink it, the American Naval nurse had taken it and kept it for him until after his second operation, when he could drink it. Or at least a part of it. After that he had become the prize pet pig of the hospital staff, the nurses, the ward boys, the doctors. And it was after that that the rumors went around the hospital that the Division was recommending him for the Congressional Medal. One of the nurses had told Prell. It could well have been that the regimental commander’s visit, and the Distinguished Service Cross recommendation, had helped him a lot with the doctors in his fight to keep his legs. Prell had certainly used his new notoriety to aid him when he could.

A DSC was not something to snort at. Prell did not honestly think he deserved a DSC. He had told the regimental commander he didn’t think he deserved it. Still, it would, as the regimental commander said, jokingly, look good up there on his chest alongside his two Purple Hearts. And Prell knew a Regular Army thirty-year soldier with a DSC could pretty much write his own ticket in any outfit he went to, after the war. As for the Congressional Medal, that was something in an entirely different category, and he simply put the rumor out of his mind. Prell was a conservative about decorations, and believed with the old-timers that if you were alive and there to receive it, you did not deserve any Medal of Honor. If he did not deserve a DSC, he certainly did not deserve any Medal of Honor. Besides, he was much too busy fighting with the doctors, and everybody, about his legs. The whole tiling had faded away, and had been forgotten. Until Winch appeared.

Prell had already heard that Winch was calling him a glory-hunter. Somebody had brought it down from New Georgia. Then Winch had appeared in Efate, not wounded, not even looking especially sick. And had started saying the same thing there. People were always quick to bring you that kind of news; they loved it. Winch was saying Prell had lost
two
of his squad killed, and two others badly wounded, because he was trying to earn himself a medal for killing General Sasaki. Fortunately, Johnny Stranger had arrived a week before Winch.

There was little Prell could do. About anything. Lying there trussed up like a chicken, in his plaster casts and ropes and weights. He certainly couldn’t get around much. Winch had come in to see him, once, just after he arrived. Winch almost had to. It was almost a necessity, if he didn’t want to create a serious scandal. They had just looked at each other. Then Winch had given his sneering smile, and sort of contemptuously offered his hand. Prell had had to decide whether to take it. All his instincts told him to say, “Go fuck yourself.” But he had to decide whether it would look better to take it, or look worse. If he did not take it, he was afraid it would look as if Winch’s gossip and accusations were upsetting him. In the end he had taken it, shaken it once, and let go of it. After a just barely decent interval, and one question about his legs, Winch had left. Later, Prell wished he hadn’t taken the hand.

If there was anybody around anywhere who knew whether the Division was recommending Prell for the Congressional Medal, it would be Prell’s company commander up in New Georgia, and if the company commander knew, his 1st/sgt would certainly know, too. Prell literally would rather have died than ask Winch. Prell would not even mention it to Strange. Winch, if he knew, was not mentioning it to anyone in the Efate hospital.

Strange’s arrival at the hospital a week before Winch was a big lucky break for Prell. Prell could tell, just from the way Strange treated him, that back up in the company in New Georgia, at least, nobody was thinking badly of him. No matter what Winch was saying. Strange thought Prell was some kind of a dumb hero, or something. Strange was a big help.