Whistle (7 page)

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.

It was not that Prell was depressed, or defeated, or suicidal. Or anything bad like that. That wasn’t Prell’s style, any more than it was Winch’s. Prell was just as mean and ornery as he’d ever been. He’d always been a stubborn, proud West Virginia hardhead, which was part of why Winch had never liked him. It was why Strange liked him.

But underneath Prell’s toughness about being wounded, Strange was acute enough to sense a canker. A sort of well-encrusted, walled-off cyst of despair. Which had hardened, and been sealed off. But which might flare up. Or burst, and pour out its morbid fluid. And if that happened, Prell would be in trouble. Some news, even unconfirmed, about a Congressional Medal would be damn good medicine for that.

But Winch was not about to come through with it, even if he had it.

Strange had learned to live with Winch. It wasn’t so hard. You just had to understand that he was a little crazy, and make allowances for it. In fact, just about everything good that had happened to Strange in the past three years Winch had been responsible for. Strange couldn’t forget that.

Back in early 1940, when the old peacetime Division was stationed inland at Schofield Barracks on Wahoo, long before the sneak attack, Strange had been a second cook in the Coast Artillery at Fort Kamehameha, with a 4th CI specialist’s rating and no prospect of advancement. Winch, who as a staff/sgt had been in the same outfit with him at Fort Riley, Kansas five years before, had come down to see him and invite him to transfer into his infantry outfit at Schofield. It was a crazy thing to ask. Fort Kam was close to Honolulu, and had its own swimming beaches, and Strange was drawing down a spec 4’s pay. But Winch had promised him that within three months he would be mess/sgt of his company. Winch had a mess/sgt he wanted to get rid of. This was back in the days when mess/sgts and 1st/cooks reenlisted in place, just to keep their jobs. Strange had accepted. And Winch had come through. Exactly as he’d said.

The move had changed Strange’s life. After his big jump in pay, he had sent home to Texas for his girlfriend and brought her out and married her. This was something Strange had not expected to be able to do for another three years. But with the grade of staff/sgt he could get married NCOs’ allowances, and quarters on the post. He had stopped his wild living, and spending his pay on booze and the whores and running around, and had settled down. With Linda Sue with him it was easy. She had even started them saving some money. By the end of 1941, when the sneak attack came and the war, they had saved two thousand dollars.

All of this had been directly due to Winch. Strange figured he owed him more than he could ever hope to make up to him. And if Winch wanted to be a nut and an eccentric, and do his crazy, bitchy things every now and then, Strange was not going to intervene and try to put him straight. Anyway intervening with Winch was like trying to intervene with a force of nature like a line squall. You couldn’t do it.

Between them (with a little help from some NCOs they had gotten made), they had turned Winch’s company into one of the best the Division had had. Maybe the best the Division had ever had. Strange for one at least would never forget it the rest of his whole life. Now the war was ruining it. Mangling it, tearing it to shreds. But that was what it had been designed and put together for. It couldn’t go on forever. And when he had left it, and then Winch left it, Strange was sure it had virtually ceased to exist. Their old outfit. But Strange would not forget it.

Whatever else, we were pros, Strange thought with grim satisfaction for the five-hundredth time. Whatever else they could say about us, we were professionals. He was unaware, again, that he had used the past tense.

And whatever the company was, it was crazy Mart Winch who had made it. Winch might be unorthodox, and cheat, and even be downright dishonest on occasion, in his methods. But the results he got were phenomenal, and amounted to a kind of crazy genius. Strange had to love him for that.

But if he was willing to back up Winch and make allowances for Winch, Strange also had a very special feeling about Bobby Prell.

There had been a couple of moments right after the war began in Wahoo when Strange had looked at his wife and regretted being married. Prell made him feel a little bit like that.

Strange had wanted to kick himself in the ass, for feeling that way about Linda. He had not even seen all that much of her, after the sneak attack. The company had moved out right away to defense positions. Soon after, all the wives and dependents had been sent back to the States. Twice before her ship left, he got an overnight pass from Winch to meet her in town in a hotel. Both times, with the war all around them, he had a sense of regret at having hurried into his marriage. It would have been so nice and easy and relaxed, if it had just been some hooker. Instead of all this weeping and carrying on about being parted. She had not understood why he wanted to stay, or why he felt the way he did about the company.

And Strange realized, that if he had only known this war was coming, he would not have married her in such a hurry.

It tore his heart for her to sail off home, but half of him was relieved to see her go. He felt it would be different and like the old days again, with her out of the way. But it wasn’t. The one time he had gone to the whores in town with a bunch of the guys, after things loosened up in Wahoo, he had been both bored and guilty. He no longer liked to go out on pass and get drunk with the guys. And when the outfit arrived in Guadalcanal to relieve the Marines, Strange found a new caution and new thoughtfulness in him had replaced the old desire to take risks. And he missed his wife terribly.

Not Prell, though. There had always been a streak of the heroics-lover about Prell. With his unbending West Virginia pride. Prell wasn’t a gay carefree laughing-boy type. He was dead responsible, and steady, cool, calculating. But he was vain to a fault. He took bigger risks than the motorcycle-jockey, wild-ass kind. He had done unbelievable things on the Canal. Like walking all night through the jungle alone out beyond the lines, to get back to the company which was cut off somewhere a mile up ahead. And had never blinked an eye about it afterward. Strange envied him, even before the outfit left the Canal for New Georgia.

Small, slight, with long hollows under his high cheekbones and narrow eyes, Prell now was emaciated. There were huge purple circles under the coalblack eyes. He had been broken from sergeant twice in the past two years, the last time after the Canal campaign ended. But before New Georgia, he had worked his way back up to corporal. And to acting squad leader, in addition. He was too good a soldier, and everybody knew it. Then, to get all torn up in a crappy little campaign like New Georgia. Back home in the States nobody had ever heard of New Georgia, apparently.

Oddly enough, Prell was cheerful about being hit so bad, more than Strange had ever seen him be about anything. As if he felt it was required of him. He had raised his head up off the pillow and grinned, behind the terrible fragile hollows under his eyes, as Strange came up to the bed.

“Won’t be long now, hunh?”

Strange made himself grin. “Two days they say. Two days, and then the old Golden Gate, and the Bridge, and the old Presidio.” He looked around the lounge. “Looks pretty empty in here.”

“It was a big scene in here,” Prell said. “People sniffling. And crying.”

“I bet. But not you.”

“No, not me. I been around the Horn before.”

“You been out and back. You’re no cherry. And you wouldn’t show it if you were.”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

Strange squatted, a countryman’s squat, his haunches on his heels. There were no chairs. There wasn’t any room for chairs. Prell had, with a medic’s help, rigged up a rearview mirror for himself out of a shaving mirror and some coat-hanger wire, so that he could see the part of the lounge that was behind him. Now he looked in his mirror, and shifted himself slightly with his elbows, before he spoke again. With his legs both hanging from the pulleys, he could only move himself a few inches.

“Goddamn bedsores are starting to kill me,” he said. He paused, but only for a second. “How’s Winch?”

“He’s all right as far as I know. I don’t see much of him.”

“That son of a bitch will always be all right. As long as there’s anything to steal. He hasn’t been in here to see me once.”

“Hasn’t he?” Strange said. “I thought he said he was coming in to see you.”

Prell’s obsidian eyes looked up into his rearview mirror a moment, scanning the hall behind him. “Landers has been in to see me six times.”

“He has? I haven’t even seen Landers since we got on board. I ought to look him up.”

Prell ignored that. “You’ve been in to see me seventeen times.”

“I have? What are you, keeping some kind of a scoreboard or something?”

“I sure am. Sure, I am. I aint got anything much else to do,” Prell said authoritatively.

“How’s your crossword book coming?”

“I finished it.”

“I’ll have to rummage around, see if I can’t find you another one.”

Prell pressed his elbows into the bed, and moved himself an infinitesimal inch. “I’d appreciate it. It sounds kind of empty in here, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Strange said. “It does. I was just going to say the same thing.” He raised himself up and looked around the lounge, again. There weren’t all that many empty beds.

“They took out a little less than one-third. But it makes an awful difference with the acoustics,” Prell said, watching him look. His voice got more casual, a little hollower. “Where do you think they’re going to send us?”

“Got no idea,” Strange said, squatting again, then sitting down. On the bare floor. “And nobody seems to know. Doesn’t seem to be any system to it. They say they’re supposed to send you to the hospital nearest your home. In principle. But that’s only if you can get the medical service you need, there. If you can’t, they send you where you can get the medical attention.”

“That means they’ll be splitting us all up,” Prell said.

“Yeah. I suppose so.”

“I don’t like that. You’d think they’d know enough to send all the guys from one outfit someplace where they’re together. At least until we all get used to it.”

“I guess they aint got time to be worrying about shit like that,” Strange said lightly.

“It’s funny, you know,” Prell said after a moment. “We never really knew what happens to them, after they get hit and leave the outfit. And now we’re doing it ourselves. They get hit and they walk off the field, or get carried off, and that’s just sort of the last we ever see of them. Some go to Efate, some to New Zealand, some to New Caledonia. And then they get flown or shipped back to the States and they—just sort of disappear into thin air. And we never know. And now it’s happening to us.”

“Some of the guys got a couple of post cards,” Strange said.

“I know. Yeah. I ran into so-and-so at such-and-such. And such-and-so lost his arm. But we never knew what it was really like.”

“Well, now we’ll know, I guess.”

“You’ll probably go somewhere in Texas,” Prell said. “I don’t know where I’ll go. Where will I go? I’m from down on the Big Sandy on the Kentucky border. But I aint been back there in twelve years. Wheeling? Washington? Baltimore? I don’t even know where all the general hospitals are.”

“You and me might wind up together after all,” Strange grinned. “I won’t go to Texas, I don’t think. My wife’s family all moved back to Kentucky, to work in the defense plants in Cincinnati. And she moved with them. I aint got any family left in Texas.”

“I haven’t any either in West Virginia,” Prell said.

“You and me may wind up in Cincinnati.”

“Where’s Winch from?” Prell asked.

“Somewhere in New England, I think.”

“That’s good, anyway,” Prell said. He settled himself in the bed with his elbows. “I think they’re about to turn the lights out.”

“Yes,” Strange said. “I think so. I better get to going. It feels to me like maybe we’re under way again. I’ll stop in tomorrow.”

“Don’t do it if you don’t feel like it,” Prell said, stiffly.

Strange gave him a grin. “Okay. I won’t. If I don’t.” He was already back on his feet. Down the way some of the medical personnel were stripping some of the emptied beds. The sight gave him a sudden lonely feeling. He waved his hand and walked away. At the big double swing doors he stopped and looked back.

A little over halfway down, Prell was watching him in his rear-view mirror, and stuck his arm up in the air. Strange realized that if he had not looked back, Prell would probably have held that against him. He raised his arm in a wave and went outside onto the deck’s promenade. As he walked, he clenched and unclenched his crippled hand, although it hurt to do it.