Whistle (57 page)

A little later when Mathieson was signing him in, one of the guards spoke to him. There was little or nothing the men could do but they wanted him to know. “The guys are all for you. That cocksucker should get every fucking kick in the balls he’s got coming.” Landers made himself grin and said to thank them.

He ought not to feel so terrible, going in the way he was. He was going in with lots more people behind him than most men going to jail. But the truth was, he did not feel much like grinning, on the prison ward. After the big door clanged shut. And once he was fixed there.

He tried hard not to let anybody know that. One of the worst things was the being cut off from all the local war news and developments that went on in the camp, and with all of the outfits. The ward had newspapers and the radio speakers over the doors for the general war news. But the big iron door cut off all that other, individual news, as cleanly as it cut off the illusion of freedom that circulated on the other side of it. Freedom? Landers had to laugh sourly. It seemed like freedom from here.

Another bad thing, one that had to be fought against every minute if you wanted to avoid despair, was the sense of total abandonment you got on the prison ward. Outfits went on, the war went on. People in your outfit might have cared for you, yesterday. But the yesterday you remembered so vividly when locked up here was receding into their past. They couldn’t go on caring about you, even if they wanted.

In spite of what Mathieson had said to him, in confidence beside the jeep, there was no word at all from the officers of the 3516th. Nor was there any word from Winch. Or from Strange. Neither was there any word from Mayhew, or the stockade provost marshal.

He had almost no visitors. A good-hearted noncom or two came up and sat and talked awhile, embarrassed, obviously making duty calls. None of them knew what was happening with his case. Landers was intensely relieved when they left. They didn’t come back.

Time, the days, passed in a hurrying unidentifiable slide which could hardly be marked off on a calendar, punctuated only by the almost daily sessions with the psychiatrists, who asked him if he had ever sucked a cock, or if he had ever wanted to suck one, and whether he hated his father. Happily Landers got his weekends off from these, when all the doctors went in town on Saturdays and Sundays.

The life itself was not so bad, and not all that different from life on any hospital ward. The prison ward was one of four lockup wards in the hospital, all situated together at the end of the same corridor in a wing, two above, two below. The other three were the nut wards, for the psycho cases, called NP wards for neuropsychiatric, and while they were also restraining wards, their patients were not legally prisoners.

At night sometimes, when he had first come in, Landers heard a man screaming faintly from one of these wards on the floor below, and yelling over and over something like, “Get them out of there, goddam it, get them out of there.” It seemed very much in keeping with the whole place. But then one night he did not hear it any more, and the scuttlebutt came around that the old-timer 1st/sgt who had been doing the screaming had been discharged out of the Army and moved out to a Veterans’ Administration hospital somewhere. The rumor said he had been a sergeant in a company on Guadalcanal in Landers’ old Division.

Things like this made life a little more interesting.

The prison ward had its share of mental patients, of which Landers was one. But it also had prisoners who officially at least weren’t mental patients, and were there because of illness or some violent injury. This tended to liven things up a little, too. Most of the knife cuts from the knife fights on the post tended to end up there. So did the bad results of fist fights or club or rock fights, until their injuries healed enough for court-martial. It was sometimes difficult to know whether these men were also mental patients. A couple of times men were brought in badly injured from the stockade itself, where it was reported they had fallen off the back ends of trucks. When they were well enough to talk, they made no bones about saying their damage was the result of beatings. But nobody much listened. And Landers had to admit, after looking at their shifty faces, that they could easily have been lying. Another interesting item was a German Nazi prisoner who was on a hunger strike, and drank only one quart of milk a day for nourishment.

Landers took an insanely violent, murderous dislike to the German. The German had worked on one of the prisoner-of-war farms nearby, but now refused to because he wanted to be repatriated, to fight for the Führer and the Fatherland again. Heavy-footed, stolid, completely self-assured, he made Landers think more than anything else of Mayhew. To Landers the German was representative of everything about the human race that had sickened him since that day on the hilltop in New Georgia. His hatred reached such a point that he would have killed the German if it were possible.

The German had a habit of marching up and down the ward while he drank his one bottle of milk. Landers made up a fantasy in which he leaped on the German, smashed the milk bottle on the German’s head, and cut the German’s throat with the jagged edge of the neck. He would sit on the edge of his bed and play his fantasy while the German walked back and forth with his milk. In the night, the German was kept locked in a special cell, which doubled as a padded cell when needed, so that none of the Americans like Landers could get at him.

Another thing which could provoke Landers to instantaneous rage was the fact that on Sunday mornings the radio loudspeakers played Christian religious sermons. The sermons were blasted all over the ward, everywhere, and there was no escape. Being forced to listen to such honeyed bullshit and obvious falsehoods about love of man threw Landers into such a state of fury he could not sit down, or stay still. After the first time, he went to the ward man and complained about it. He was an atheist, and his rights were being infringed on. The Sunday ward man hastened to agree with him. But he pointed out that he did not have control over radio volume or the choice of programs; all that came from hospital HQ. All he could do was send them a note. He doubted it would do much good. Landers noticed that while he talked, he was also writing detailed notes on sheets of paper which went into Landers’ thickening file.

“What are you doing that for?”

The ward man shrugged. “Orders. From the head head shrinker.”

The sermons were never stopped. But after three Sundays of violent complaining, Landers was allowed to shut himself up in the padded cell on Sunday mornings—the same cell in which the German prisoner spent his nights of protective custody. The sermons did not bother the German. Who it turned out was an ardent Catholic, and anyway spoke no English. In the cell Landers could still hear the sermons, but a lot less clearly. It was a minor triumph of sorts, to sweeten his days.

There was also the problem of where to masturbate when it became necessary. There was not a lockable door in the place. The toilet stalls in the shower room did not even have doors. There was nothing for it but to do it in bed at night and try not to make the springs squeak, then lie with the cold wetness of drying semen on your belly so as not to have telltale spots on the sheet. Only a desperate man would jerk off that way, and slowly bit by bit the greatness of Christian thought triumphed.

Then, suddenly, Strange came to visit, and things began to open up very quickly. Strange brought words from Winch.

Winch was not coming himself because he didn’t think it would look good for the case, Strange said. But Winch could now assure him that no punitive measures would be taken. In other words, he would not be court-martialed or sent to a stockade and he would not be sent overseas as a cannon-fodder replacement. What he must do, though, now, was some serious thinking. What he must do the serious thinking about, was whether he wanted to be discharged out of the Army completely, or not.

To be discharged would be the easiest, Strange said. But if he wanted to stay in, Winch could guarantee him with a seventy to seventy-five percent surety that he would be transferred to Winch’s outfit. But Winch would not guarantee it one hundred percent. Too many other things might still happen.

Surely, Landers had the time and place for some serious thinking, Strange grinned as he left.

The discharge, Strange hastened to reassure him, would not be dishonorable. Not a yellow one. Not a Section Eight. Not even a blue discharge. It would be clean and clear and a white one. A Section Two Medical, Winch said to tell him. A Section Two was for neuropsychiatric reasons, service-connected; no loss of citizenship; no loss of voting; no taint, in other words.

That kind of a discharge, Landers realized, really would require some serious thinking.

The place Landers used for serious thinking was the window behind his bed. Fortunately his bed butted against a window in the ward. Only one out of every four beds got a window. That was where Landers did his serious thinking, usually late at night, after lights out. He would sit on the pillow at the head of his bed, his arms propped on the sill, and look out through the heavy wire grid at the lights of the camp and think. Think seriously. About all of it. Everything.

Although he never came up with any satisfactory answers. Or even any unsatisfactory ones.

It had taken awhile to get permission to do it. The first week the night ward man kept making him get back into bed, and trying to give him a pill. Then finally he gave up, and became more sympathetic. Or else was ordered to by one of those wily psychiatrists.

But the thousands of lights of the camp through the window gave Landers a pleasant melancholy. They left him with a tranquillity and sense of objectivity he never had in the day, when he was constantly reminded how insane everybody and everything was, and kept flying into rages because of it. Out there, thousands of men were going through lives at least as bad as his was.

Up until Strange’s visit, he had not trusted Winch. All this time there had been no word from him, any more than there had been word from the 3516th’s officers. From his window Landers could see one corner of the tall three-story Command building. The lights in the third-floor corner office were on late every night, and Landers liked to think he was watching Winch’s office. It was too bad the Venetian blinds were closed. Even so, if he had a rifle he could put a round just about where the desk chair would be, closed Venetian blinds and all. Having been there.

But he didn’t really hate Winch.

What Landers hated were the war and humanity. And people. People like Mayhew, and the German prisoner. He thought a lot about Mayhew, and the German, and what it was that made them like they were. Landers guessed he would never find out what that was. But there were certainly a great many more like them in the world, than there were people like Strange, say, or Prevor. And they were the human race which sickened Landers, and filled him with this despair, and made him into this terrible, lonely thing of being an outsider.

The ones who wanted power. Who cared about having power, more than they cared about how they got it, or what they did with it when they got it. Like Mayhew. The ones who wanted to die for some glorious cause. Like the German. And Winch? Winch did not count. Winch was an anomaly. But now he had something else to think about. A discharge. A real discharge. A clean one, a white discharge. And Landers did not really know if he wanted a discharge or didn’t. When he thought about Mayhew, and that German, he wanted a discharge. He wanted nothing to do with humanity, or with humanity’s war.

But when he looked at those thousand lights out there; and thought about Winch, and Strange, and Prevor, and those two good-hearted sergeants who had come up to see him; when he thought of all that, he did not want the discharge. He wanted to be with them.

Landers simply could not make up his mind if he wanted the discharge from Winch or not.

And he wasn’t given all that much time to mull it over. Two days after Strange’s visit, one of the officers from the 3516th was brought in to see him.

They talked sitting on his bunk. The officer was Lt Drere, a thin, blond, slight man in his thirties. He was one of the newer officers brought in later to fill out Prevor’s company, like Mathieson. Drere was quietly incapable of coping with anything physical or manual, but always in good control of his head. As out of place in the 3516th as it was possible to be. He had wound up as the company intellectual, whom the other officers always went to with their paper problems. That he was also warm, genuine, and generous was just an extra.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t get up to you sooner,” he said. “But we thought it was best to wait until we had something specific we could do.”

Landers just nodded. “Yeah, well. How are things going down there?”

“We’re surviving.” Drere smiled. “Your case is coming up before the Medical Board for review and a final decision. All of us officers have been asked to write personal reports on you. To go to the Medical Board.”

“Yeah, great. I know these fucking Medical Boards,” Landers said sourly.

“No, no. Don’t be discouraged. By the way, how are you?” Drere said kindly.

Landers shrugged. “I’m all right. It’s not the best place for a vacation.”

Drere looked around the ward curiously, and nodded brusquely. “Naturally, we all know what kind of report Capt Mayhew will write. And we pretty much know what Lt Prevor will write, which will be laudatory. The rest of us have decided among ourselves we will write the best reports we can to help you. According to what you want to do. To do that, we need to know how you want us to slant them.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, if you want to stay in the Army. Or if you want a discharge. We can write them either way, and slant them toward either objective. But we need to know from you which way you want us to write them.”

“This was your idea?”

“Mine,” Drere assented. “More or less. But the other officers all created the idea. I only formulated it.”

Landers was looking out of his window. From here it was a different angle, and he could not quite see the Command building. But he could see the thousand hutments. “I don’t know,” he said disconsolately. “I just don’t honestly know. Which way. I don’t know whether I want out or not.”