Whistle (16 page)

He knew it would make an even greater enemy of Hogan, but fuck the chain of command. He waited on the surgeon outside his little office next to the big surgery theaters. There were three of them. Curran came out from somewhere, whistling to himself with some deep satisfaction, his hands and the rest of him spotlessly clean. He was still in his “cutting” apron. “Ah, yes. Sergeant Strange, isn’t it?” Yes, he could arrange to let him go. But for two weeks only. And he could not give the order. He could only recommend. Everyone was theoretically entitled to a month’s convalescent furlough after getting back. But much depended on the situation at the moment. Some got a month, some got none at all. If Strange took two weeks now, he would probably not get two further weeks later on. Strange said he would waive that. Curran would want one more much fuller examination, would take him down to the therapy lab where they had machines to check the hand more thoroughly. Then he would recommend the leave. But during the two weeks Strange must use the hand as much as possible. Make himself use it. Pick up glasses, light cigarettes, pull change from his pocket. Things like that. Even if it hurt him. And it would hurt him, a lot. He smiled at Strange merrily, and pursed his lips again for whistling.

“Look at these hands,” he said suddenly, holding them up. They spread themselves, at the ends of the slim muscled forearms, bespeaking in their shape and movement all the delicacy and reflexes that made them. “They’re worth a fortune, did you know that.” Curran grinned. “And no credit to me at all. I just happen to be the one to have them. Did you know I can’t even go out and get drunk and get in a fight? For fear of hurting them?” He whistled a little, silently. “We’re ghouls. Parasites. This war is a great boon to us. This war, and you people.” He gripped Strange by the arm above the elbow, and smiled merrily. “But it’s tough on you. We should show our appreciation occasionally. Strange, eh? A strange name, huh?” He laughed happily at his own joke.

In the taxi heading into town to the Greyhound station Strange could not decide whether he liked him or not. But at least, anyway, he told the absolute truth. He didn’t try to doll it all up in phony propaganda about duty and service to humanity, like Hogan. Hogan had been furious, red in the face when Curran’s recommendation came down approved by the head of Administration.

The big Greyhound station was jammed. Servicemen with or without their families, families with or without their servicemen, were in transit toward just about every point around the compass. Ranks of the big blue and white buses stood in echelons in their stalls, under the protective roofing. A loudspeaker’s metallic voice intoned their arrivals and departures. Loading or unloading, or just sitting silent waiting on their huge wheels, their mass dominated everything, making the people around them insignificant and small. Heading mostly northeast toward Nashville, or into the Deep South for Birmingham, Atlanta, Montgomery, and Jackson, they rolled cumbrously in and out of the main entrance with clockwork regularity.

Both the Negro and the White waiting rooms were crowded, and both the Colored and White drinking fountains had lines waiting at them. The Negro waiting room was less crowded, and lacked the preponderance of uniforms visible in the White. Tired, sweating people crouched on their suitcases or sat on the dirty floor near the overcrowded seats. A jukebox in a corner blared out “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” competing with the loudspeaker. Born and raised in Texas, Strange was used to the separation of waiting rooms and fountains and accepted it as natural. But having been away overseas so long, the segregation made a bizarre pictorial effect on his eye. He paid for his ticket, fumbling the money because he was conscientiously using his bad hand, and sat on the floor with his back against a wall to wait.

Strange had often daydreamed about his homecoming. He had imagined himself returning carrying one of those sharp green folding airman’s valises, full of uniforms, his other arm full of packages of presents for everyone. He had bought fanciful presents in Guadalcanal, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia and Australia, but they had all been stolen or lost or broken or just thrown away until now he had nothing. He had no suitcase. He had only the clothes he stood up in. A small zipper bag carried an extra summer uniform. He didn’t mind. He was content, and sat against the wall waiting happily in the crowded steaming White waiting room, among the squalling babies and exhausted young mothers coming from or going to their husbands in the service.

Strange had traveled the Greyhounds all his adult life. It never would have occurred to him to try to go by train.

Anyway, the trains were hardly better.

The ride itself was a long half-waking nightmare of heavy-smelling bodies, paper-wrapped bologna sandwiches, swollen feet, toilet stops, beers, half pints of whiskey, oncoming headlights flashing uneasily over the sleeping faces in the darkened interior. Stopovers and changes late at night in Nashville and Louisville. He made the acquaintance of a young sailor in the seat next to his who was going home on leave from the Luxor Naval Air Station, before shipping out to the West Coast for duty in the South Pacific. When he learned Strange was just back from there, he plied Strange with an endless stream of questions. But it was hard to explain to him. Nothing was like or fit in with what the boy had already imagined. In the midst of describing the fleet base in Noumea in New Caledonia to him, Strange fell fast asleep back into his nightmare of paper-wrapped bologna sandwiches and swollen feet.

He was not sure the boy believed him, anyway. As the boy pointed out, he wore no ribbons.

But if the ride itself was a not entirely unpleasant nightmare, it was as nothing to the unpleasant nightmare he found in Covington when he arrived.

He did not know if it was his fault, or Linda’s fault, or neither’s. Maybe it was something that happened to every dogface who came home from overseas. But he had no genuine contact with any of them. They never paid any attention much to the newspapers and the battles that were going on abroad, for example. He could think of nothing else.

When he first arrived at the house (he had had the address, but no description or apartment numbers) it was midafternoon and he had thought there was nobody home. He had knocked and gotten no answer, so he sat on the front steps for two hours, waiting for somebody to show up, until one of the three people who were asleep in the house had waked up and come outside and found him. The three were all asleep because they were all working the night shift. One was Linda’s paternal uncle, who owned the house, one was Linda’s older brother who was 4-F, one was Linda’s maternal cousin, the son of Linda’s mother’s sister, who had the top floor. All the others were at work, or already out, going to work on the swing shift, and that included all the adult females. Strange had sat with them in the kitchen while the three men fixed themselves breakfast (or lunch; or dinner) and asked him in their various-sounding drawls (two Kentucky, one Texas) how it was over there. Strange said it was all right.

One of them asked him what he had done to his hand, and when he explained he had been shot in it, they all wanted to see it so he showed it to them. After examining it, the cousin drawled, “That bullet sure didn’t make much of a hole.” Strange explained that it was done by a mortar shell fragment. But none of them seemed much interested in mortars.

It was about the same with the women, and the other males, when they all came home. The trouble was, they never all came home at the same time. It was hard to sort them out and keep any track of them, with all the coming and going. Not once, while Strange was there, was the whole family ever all together. In the kitchen some meal or other—breakfast, or supper, or noonday dinner—was always in process of preparation or was being eaten, and quite often they overlapped. So that, while those on the swing shift were at work, those going on night shift might be eating breakfast at the same time those coming off day shift might be preparing or eating evening dinner. All told, there were eleven working adults living in the house, and four children.

The house itself was a three-story frame structure belonging to the paternal uncle, on a shady street in Covington. The uncle and his wife had the ground floor and their oldest son, who was unmarried, lived with them. Linda’s father and mother had the second floor and Linda and her unmarried older brother and her younger brother, who was still in high school, lived with them. The married maternal cousin and his wife had the top floor with their two children, a boy of four and a baby of one, and with them lived also the divorced female cousin, and her girl of seven. It was crowded. But since they all worked, and the two older children went to school, it was never actually overcrowded. Of course, now it was summer vacation and the two older children weren’t in school. But they were generally outdoors in the daytime playing, or running around, and never came in except at night. The kitchen took the heaviest wear and tear, and sort of served also as the living room. The living room itself was the bedroom of the oldest, unmarried cousin. The dining room had been converted to the bedroom of the uncle and his wife.

In a way it was like separate apartments. Each family’s floor was its own domain. Except, of course, they all had to use the same kitchen downstairs. When Strange asked why, since they were all working, they did not sell or rent this place and all get themselves separate apartments, it was explained that they were all saving their salaries. When asked what for, Linda’s father and the uncle told him they were thinking of all pooling their combined savings and buying a big nice farm out in western Kentucky. When pressed as to where, they were vague and didn’t know exactly where. Nobody had time to go out there and look, they were too busy working. Linda’s father explained kindly in his sober, slow way and his Texas drawl that none of them had ever seen such a boom time in their lives, and that included the 1920s, and after the Depression they had all lived through, the point was not to spend but to work and save the money, and worry about spending it later, after the war.

Linda’s kid brother, who was listening, chimed in here, to say that next year when he got out of high school he was going to work too and add his salary to the pool. He was already taking some night courses in machine work at an aircraft parts plant.

Strange was welcome to come in with them, Linda’s father added in his slow way, if he and Linda ever changed their minds about having a restaurant. Strange, feeling a little as if someone had punched him in the back of the neck, and stunned him, did not know what to answer.

Linda’s savings, of course, were her own. Her own and Strange’s. Almost the first thing she did when she first saw him, after giving him a perfunctory kiss, was to take him aside and show him their bank book. They had a total of a little over six thousand dollars. She had a separate bedroom on the Darrells’ second floor next to the two brothers who had another, and that was where she kept her bank book, locked up. She offered it to Strange almost as if it were some votive gift. One made in atonement. Perhaps for all he had suffered in Wahoo and overseas in the Pacific for so long. His allotment payments were part of it, of course. She had fixed up her bedroom with new chintz curtains and pillow covers, and a chair cover to match for the one overstuffed chair, when she knew he was coming. It was all very wifey. She had not been able to meet him at the Greyhound station, when he arrived, because she had been working the day shift. That night when they first went to bed together in the chintz-covered bed, it turned into a nearly complete fiasco. Right in midpassion, so to speak, Strange lost his hard-on and could not get it back.

Strange didn’t know what was happening to him. He tried to mumble some kind of an apology. After a little while, when nothing happened, Linda Sue patted him sympathetically on the back and rolled over with her back to him and swiftly went to sleep. She had to get up early and go do the shopping for the house before going to her job at the plant.

Deeply troubled and humiliated, Strange lay awake beside her, and wondered fearfully what was happening to him. He had dreamed of this moment so long, and so many times, it seemed absolutely unbelievable that he would not be able to perform. When he thought of all the times, and of all the places—the slit trenches, the bomb hole shelters, the kitchen fly, out in the edge of the woods behind the encampment—that he had tossed himself off and dreamed of this moment, it was not possible that he could have failed to perform.

There were plenty of excuses. It was true she had not helped him any, but then she never had. He had always been the one to start things. Which was the way it ought to be. Only once or twice had she ever asked him to make love to her, in their whole married life. She had never been that passionate.

It was also true that the kid brother was asleep just beyond the thin wall in the next room. And that the parents were asleep in the room on the other side. But that would never have bothered Strange before. Something had happened right in the middle of it, all the excitement had gone away, and he found he was bored.

Lying in the bed, red with the humiliation, he squirmed under the covers. And thought of himself at the last of the company’s Guadalcanal bivouacs, standing just inside the edge of the jungle, peering out through the screen of leaves at the sleeping tents in the moonlight, his throbbing cock in his hand, fantasizing this night with Linda Sue hot and all over him, clawing his back, shoving it up to him, groaning and gasping with her long-suppressed desires. That was not the way it had ever happened with them, but that was the way he always fantasized it. And under the covers he felt his hard-on coming back. Looking down from the pillow, he could see it slowly thrusting up the covers between his legs.

After a minute, Strange threw off the covers and grabbing a towel padded down the hall to the bathroom and locked the door and tossed himself off in the bathroom sink, fantasizing himself out there in the fantastic night jungle. After he orgasmed he cleaned it all up neatly, feeling weird, and disturbed. When he climbed back into bed, he found himself almost hating his wife for her closed-in lack of passion. He had never been able to draw her out of it. He was furiously angry with her. And he had to keep telling himself it wasn’t her fault. But what had happened to him in eighteen months away, out there?