Whistle (3 page)

And he was supposed to be his own company’s hero. Damn them, damn them, Winch thought suddenly and savagely, God damn them. They weren’t worth the turds to put in a sock and thump them over the head with. Why should he give a damn about them?

The bottle was still sitting on his chest. He let the hand holding it slide away down over the berth edge and put it away.

God damn their souls, cannon fodder was what they were. He couldn’t be expected to keep them all alive forever, could he?

Winch raised up on his elbow and stared through the open door, across the passageway. Across the passageway was what had once been the ship’s main lounge. There was your cannon fodder.

There were easily several hundred of them. All the chairs and tea tables had been removed and replaced with hospital beds. In ranked rows. Here in the one huge room were the serious cases which needed constant attention. White-jacketed figures moved among them under the high ceiling. Here and there a medic squatted, supervising the giving of glucose or plasma from a glass jug hanging on a white stand. The room had not been repainted, and all its gay gilt and vermilion and mirrors stared down on all the slow quiet pain.

Only four of Winch’s company were on board this trip, four including himself. And only one of them was in there in the lounge.

His first look at the main lounge had made him weak in the stomach. We all of us feel that way when we first see it, he thought. It made such a clear, concise picture of the cost for you. The only ones of us who didn’t notice the lounge were those who traveled in it, and only those who traveled in it failed to notice the smell it gave off.

Apparently the news of landfall had passed that way, too, because a murmur was fluttering weakly across the lounge. Many of the reclining figures had raised up in their bandages. It was an eerie picture. Some of them had their entire heads bandaged, as they peered about. Winch went on staring at them, rapt. The smell from it was almost insupportable.

Man-stink. How used to it he had gotten over the years. And all its various flavors. What was that word? Effluvia. Sweaty male armpits and smelly male feet. Socks and underwear. Fetid breath. Uninhibited belches and farts. Ranked open toilet bowls and urinals in the early morning. It mingled with the smell of toothpaste and shaving soap from the row of washbasins all down the other side.

And now he could add a new one. Suppuration. Suppuration and granulation. The sweet foul smell of injured flesh trying slowly, painfully to heal itself down there under the lymph-stained bandages. It diffused itself throughout every part of the big lounge, and overflowed its doors. It would stay in his nose with the others the rest of his life.

Which in the case of Mart Winch might not be too fucking long. If he didn’t take care of himself. He wasn’t supposed to drink. He wasn’t supposed to smoke, either. Defiantly, he reached down for the musette and pulled the bottle up and had another, and lit a cigarette.

Neither gesture helped. He was still standing at the same junction as before. A night junction. Trailer trucks whammed by. Nobody stopped. How unmanly could you get, here at the end of the string? Where there wasn’t any audience. An aging, pitiless, tough, old infantry 1st/sgt, looking desperately everywhere for a shot of pity. It was laughable.

Hell, he wasn’t even wounded. He was only sick. An unaccustomed hollowness opened up in him at the word. Shit, he had never been sick a day in his life. Under the hollowness, the booze seeped through him its insidious, seductive, golden-honey, poisonous message of sunshine and good will.

He looked over again at the lounge. He only had one of his people in there this trip, thank God. That fucking Bobby Prell.

He wanted another drink. But this time he drank water, from a loose uncoupled canteen in its canvas cover that was lying under the berth.

“You’ll get over the dengue fever,” Col Harris had told him. Col Harris was the Division Surgeon. He had come out into his jungle tent hospital personally to see Winch. “Everybody does. Though it’s painful.”

“Thanks a lot, Doc,” Winch had growled.

It was the dengue that had brought him down. Like a green-ass recruit, he had fainted dead away across his makeshift desk.

“And you’ll get over the falciparum malaria,” Doc Harris said. “That’ll take longer. It’s the worst kind. You should have reported it, Mart.”

Winch had managed to keep his malaria secret for over two months. Lying in the hospital field cot with his bright red, swollen palms and the rash of dengue all over him, he had been through the first bone-breaking fever, the twenty-four-hour euphoria, and the second fever period. He felt terrible.

“Okay, Doc, okay. What the hell? What the hell? So?”

Doc Harris had begun to tap his prominent front teeth with the eraser of a fresh long yellow pencil. Fresh long yellow pencils were a thing of his.

“I’m afraid there’s more, Mart,” he said. “You’ve got high blood pressure.”

Winch for once had no answer. Finally, he laughed. “High blood pressure? Are you kidding?”

“And I would guess a pretty serious case of it. Usually, fever makes it go down. They’ll check it out down the line after we ship you out. But I’m pretty sure. If I’m any judge, they’ll find you’re suffering from what we call primary hypertension.”

“What’s that?”

“High blood pressure,” Doc Harris said. “Just what I said.”

He came back in a couple of days and they talked about it more. Winch could move around a little bit by then. But Winch was feeling peculiarly unmanned, lying there in his cot. Why did intelligent men feel the need to measure everything by physical vitality? But they all did.

“You’ve had it with the Infantry, Mart. You’re going to have to watch your diet. Must not drink. Must not smoke. Don’t drink coffee or tea. Don’t get overexcited. If I could, I’d put you on a salt-free diet right now. I certainly can’t send you back up.”

“Christ, that sounds great,” Winch said. “Like some old lady’s school for girls. Coffee and tea.”

“I sure can’t send you back to any line outfit,” Doc Harris said.

“I’m a lucky man, huh?” Winch said.

“How old are you, Mart?”

“Forty-two. Why?”

“A little young for hypertension.”

“So?” He certainly did not feel lucky. Only half of you wanted to go. The rest wanted to stay, and felt a failure. Ashamed, and guilty, for leaving. No matter how badly you were sick or shot up. All of us, Winch thought. “Just what is this disease, Doc?”

Hypertension? They did not know everything about the disease, that was the truth. It was one of those usually bland diseases whose course could not be measured easily. You could have a heart attack or stroke tomorrow or you could go on living till you were eighty. In Winch’s case it was Doc Harris’ opinion that a constant very high intake of alcohol could be a lot of the cause. That, and smoking. But there had been some interesting research on effects of alcohol recently.

“What a fucking joke,” Winch said bitterly.

This was not to accuse him of being an alcoholic. No alcoholic could hold down his job. But his alcoholic capacity was a legend. How much did he drink a day?

“Yeah. Some legend,” Winch said.

How much? Half a bottle? A bottle?

“Easy,” Winch said staunchly.

“A bottle and a half?”

“Oh, sure,” Winch lied. “If I can get it.” The truth was he didn’t really know.

How much did he smoke? Two packs a day? Three? In any case, Doc Harris predicted that once he had recuperated, and gotten rid of these fever ailments, they were going to find his blood pressure shooting way up.

Winch only nodded. For the first time he could feel somewhere in himself a beginning to give up. It was like hanging onto a high window ledge by your fingertips and feeling your fingers begin to straighten. In one way, a vast relief. Every cripple feels that, finally, all of us, he thought.

“You really mean I’m really through.”

“I’m afraid so. In the Infantry.”

That was how it had turned out. Winch had known Doc Harris for over six years. Harris pretty well knew his stuff. He predicted it exactly. The high blood pressure had mounted. The stranger doctors down the line were more secretive and circumspect about it with him. But that was the upshot of it

Apparently their theory was, Do not tell them anything you do not have to and you will not frighten them. Winch had very little use for the bulk of the medical profession.

That was why, shrewdly, he asked Doc Harris about it all one time more before he left.

Death usually occurred from congestive heart failure in the fifties. That was assuming it was fairly well contained and there was no heart attack or stroke. On the other hand, long survival was not at all a rarity. Congestive heart failure was a gradual failure of the heart. It became enlarged and feebler, and the pulse got faster. Finally this caused a congestion of fluids in the body called edema. In the final stages the lungs themselves filled up with fluids. It accounted for death in about 50 percent of the cases. It wasn’t so much a disease as a condition. And in that sense, it was incurable. But still there was a vast extreme of difference in life expectancy running from a few years to several decades. “I’m trying to tell you that very likely you can still live a long time if you take care of yourself,” Doc Harris said.

Winch had listened intently. We all of us did that, when it was our own personal diagnosis, and our own prognosis, he thought briefly. It was at that point that you felt distinctly peculiar. Like the man in the movie standing up before the judge. While the solemn judge, after an excellent breakfast, pronounced word by slow word some horrible sentence on you, for having done some damned thing or other.

“There is a lot to be said for clean living,” Doc Harris said.

“Clean living!” Winch exploded. “Sure. Okay, Doc, look. You’ve explained it all to me. I understand all about it now. Why don’t we just forget this talk we’ve had? And why don’t you just mark me fit for duty and send me back up there to my company? Huh?”

“You know I can’t do that,” Doc Harris said angrily. “I swear I don’t understand you, Mart. Most of the people around here are bucking their heads off to get shipped back home to the States, and can’t.”

“Well,” Winch said, “you know.”

“You’ve got a wife and kids back home, haven’t you?”

“Oh, well, sure. Somewhere.”

“You don’t even know where?”

“Well, sure. They’re in St. Louis. I guess.”

“I simply don’t understand you,” Doc Harris said.

“Oh, it’s easy enough.” Winch stood up. “To understand me. Then that’s your absolute final last word?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

For some reason, Winch felt like saluting. He aboutfaced. That was the last he saw of Doc Harris. They had flown him out the next day, with some others, to the New Hebrides.

Despite the excitement, the ship’s motors had not altered their steady hammering. But Winch could still hear the unaccustomed scurrying caused by the American landfall. Here he was, on this stinking, suppurating, stockyard-smelling scow of a hospital cattle boat, headed home. He continued to lie on his elbow, staring across the passageway at the shattered figures in the main lounge.

He wondered why Doc Harris had looked so shocked? Hadn’t he ever heard of men giving up on and quitting their wife and kids? He did not know what kind of man Doc was around the house. But Winch was sure Mrs Harris at least tried to get along with her husband the colonel. A picture of his own sloppy, fat-assed wife and two tow-headed brats tried to flash onto the screen of Winch’s mind. He thrust it violently aside. Thoughts of them only caused a sort of irascibility to take him over. His wife and her two blond, cow-eyed kids that looked just like her were no great thing to come home to. She was certainly not hurting any there in St. Louis without him. Not with all the outside fucking she had managed on posts where they did live together. That was what you got for marrying some drunken master/sgt’s daughter on some flea-bitten post out in the boondocks. She liked to speak of herself as statuesque. They looked so much like her it was impossible to tell who their father was. There wasn’t even any way to tell if the boys were his. He was pretty sure they were. But it didn’t matter. Winch didn’t care if he ever saw any of them again.

In front of him the top half of a human head stuck itself around the door jamb, disrupting his demon’s vision of the lounge, the faceless eyes peering at him like a sniper.

Quickly, Winch changed gears in his head, adopting the bantering snarl his long association with his former mess/sgt had fixed into a ritual. “Johnny Stranger,” Winch said. “Go away. Go on away! Go up on deck and play with the big kids.”

The head, tilted till the thick brows were perpendicular, parallel to the jamb they peered around, righted itself and a body appeared below it and came on in in a slow saunter, its face making the briefest of grins. John Strange was deliberate and slow about everything. He was oddly built, Strange, his legs just a little too short for the rest of him. And his right hand hung down now against his thigh, a maladroit claw whose fingers looked misplaced.

“I mean it,” Winch said. “I got nothing to talk to you about, Strange. Except your asshole reminiscences. And that bores my ass.”

Strange nodded appreciatively. “I figured
you
wouldn’t be up on deck.”

“To see what?” Winch growled.

“I went,” Strange said, looking a little ashamed, “for a little. It’s mighty pretty.” He moved his head. “They all whooping and hollering.”

Strange grinned again, in his tough, broad face, a strange scornful-sorrowful rictus of malevolent appreciation. In the unusual broadness of his face there was a kind of peasant’s long-standing patience with the universe, and a sadness. And yet the thick line of brow hair, which formed one single hairy bar of dark brown across the upper third of his head, carried an unbelievably angry, furious look about it.

You had to know the man before you recognized the expression as a smile instead of a sneer. They had all of them learned, learned very early on, that Strange was a man who liked to bark, and that his bite was a whole hell of a lot worse than his bark.