Chapter 13
WINCH HAD NO IDEA what he was going to say to Prell. Nor did he have any idea what to expect from Prell when he saw him. He tried to brief himself before going, not only by talks with Landers and Strange, but also by talking to Corello and Drake and the others from the company. Corello and Drake and the rest were no help at all. Strange and Landers were almost no help.
Landers kept hemming and hawing, and saying Prell looked bad. “Well, naturally he looks bad,” Winch said, “you dumbass clerk. That doesn’t help me any.”
After a lot of haranguing him, and some considerable but useless soul-searching on Landers’ part, Landers finally looked up with widened eyes and said, “Well, he just looks like he’s run out of gas.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, you know. No gas, no steam. Just what the hell do you want to find out, Top?” He was beginning to get angry. “I’m trying to tell you all I can.”
“You’re supposed to be a goddamned college boy,” Winch sneered. “Can’t you express yourself any better than that? If you can’t, you ought to pack it in and shoot yourself.”
“I’m trying, damn you.”
It was the first time Winch could ever remember Landers cursing him directly. Usually he would curse all around him, indirectly, but never head-on, face to face. Well, the little bucks grew up in the herd, and wanted to try their antlers, and take on the big bucks. “What the hell do you mean, no gas?” he bellowed. “No heart? No will?”
“No,” Landers said. “No, he’s got heart. And will. You wouldn’t believe how much. I guess it’s energy I mean. He’s run out of energy.”
This brought Winch up short. He had learned, lately, what it was to run out of energy. He had never used to.
“Well, why the f*ck don’t you say what you mean?”
“You can have all the heart in the world. And all the will,” Landers said. “It doesn’t help you a bit when you finally run out of energy.”
Strange was not much better, though it was a calmer discussion. Strange talked about despair.
“I’ve been watching him for just that, you know, Top. Ever since Efate. And on the ship. He’s made this same fight, what now? Twice? This is the third time. I’ve been afraid all along it was going to hit him. That he was going to get full of despair. I thought long before now. He’s really a front-runner, you know.”
“You can say that again,” Winch said thinly.
“At least, it’s better when he’s out there in front, leading. And all that.”
“So you think he’s, uh, despaired, huh?” Winch said.
“Well, it’s been a long time. Landers talked to this Col Curran, and Curran said it was something in his body chemistry. Well, what the hell is that? Who knows anything about that? Even the doctors don’t know much about that. What makes a man’s body chemistry be one way one time, and another way another time?” Strange paused, then shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
So that was what he was left with, Winch thought. Energy or despair. Or, energy and despair. What good was that? Who knew? Who knew anything? About anything?
He even picked his time. He talked to Prell’s ward boy, and the ward boy said that most patients were at their best around mid-morning, after they’ve gotten over the waking-up process, and before they have their noon meal, which always took energy and time to digest. And that way, Prell was normal. So Winch postponed his visit by a day, in order to be arriving at the proper time. He still didn’t know what to say to him, or do. What did you say to a man whom you didn’t much like and who was about to lose a leg, to make him get over his despair, and pump some energy back into him? It was all a goddamned game, anyway. Life. People played at it like football or chess or poker, even when they were dying. At the last minute he decided to take Strange with him, as a kind of smoothing-over agent.
There was certainly no question that he looked awful, Prell. He did not look even remotely like the same man Winch had last seen, in the ward on Efate. Spread-eagled on the bed, with his legs still up in the air like a goddamned woman about to have a baby, he looked already dead except for his eyes. His feet were purple, his face a pale mauve, shading into a purple that was nearly black under his sunken eyes.
In spite of all that, he seemed visibly to pull himself all together, when he saw who it was.
“Hello, Top,” he said in a pale, hollow voice from the depths of the bed. “Come to pay your last respects?”
“Hello, Prell,” Winch said evenly. That pulling-himself-together act made him think. “How are you?”
It was all such a goddamned game. Everything was. Bravado. Bravery. Fear. Pride, humiliation, dignity, decency, viciousness. And yet it was serious. Even panic started out as a game, before it got serious.
“Come to gloat, hunh?” Prell said faintly. “Come to say, I told you so.”
Something flashed in the back of Winch’s brain, like a green Go signal. Except this was a green explosion. Which engulfed everything. He had been playing it by ear, looking for something to say. “Still looking for sympathy, huh?” he said. He heard Strange inhale sharply behind him. “Still hungerin’ to be appreciated by everybody.”
Something obsidian glittered somewhere down in the depths of the jet-black sunken eyes of Prell. A kind of evil. A murderous hatred. “That’s me,” he said faintly. “Always want to be appreciated.”
Winch had debated long, as to whether he should tell Prell about the stalling game he had engineered with Alexander and Col Stevens. He had not told anybody, had not told any of the others, not even Strange. It was too ticklish. And they couldn’t any of them keep their f*cking mouths shut. One of them was bound to tell it. And if it got around and got back to Col Stevens and Jack Alexander, all the good that might come out of it would be broken. Stevens was noted for having a terrible temper, that was why he tried so hard never to lose it. And Winch and Strange still didn’t know if Col Baker was right, about amputating. So Winch had told nobody.
But he had debated telling Prell. And had already decided not to. Now he suddenly knew he was right, not to. That wasn’t what Prell needed. What Prell needed was enemies. An enemy, if he was going to fight. He wasn’t complex enough to fight without an enemy there in front of him.
“You reckon they’ll give me a tin cup and some GI pencils to sell, when they let me out of this”?” Prell said from the bed.
“They’ll do better than that,” Winch said. “They’ll give you a pension. And a leather leg. So you can go down to the American Legion on Saturday nights and show the boys your stump and tell them how you fought the war in the South Pacific. Just don’t tell them about your squad.”
“You son of a bitch,” Prell said. His voice did not increase in tone or volume, but the timbre of it got taunt, vibrant. “I’ll kill you when I get out of this. That’s a promise. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking you up, if it takes the rest of my life, and kill your sharecropping ass.”
“I don’t think so,” Winch said. “I’ll probably be dead long before you’re well enough to do anything.” There was probably more truth in that than he realized when he said it, Winch thought, and grinned. Oh, well. He would be his enemy. Everybody needed one enemy.
“At least, you won’t be going around leading any squads into any death traps,” he said.
The Indian eyes of Prell glittered at him from the bed. He didn’t answer.
“I think you’d better go,” the ward nurse said nervously from beside Winch, “really.”
“Okay. Well, take it easy, kid,” he said. “Keep fighting.” He turned on his heel.
Outside in the corridor he had to lean against the wall. He felt drained and absolutely gray all over, and had to suck in energy with his breath.
“Jesus Christ, Top,” Strange protested beside him. “What did you have to do that for?”
“Shut up,” Winch hissed, “you dumbass. Get the f*ck away from me, and leave me alone.”
After a minute Winch straightened up, and headed back for his ward. Strange had only walked off ten steps away, and fell in step beside him.
Four days later, or perhaps it was five, Prell miraculously began to mend. It took that long to note the signs, and it took several days longer to be sure the signs were real and weren’t just temporary manifestations. As if nothing had even been wrong with it, except getting broken, the leg began to heal. The bone to knit. Strange found it hard to believe. He had been expecting a serious relapse, after Winch’s visit. In any case, Prell was mending, and the crisis they had all been waiting for for so long was past. Certainly Strange gave no credit to Winch’s visit. Rather the reverse. Winch had lost control of himself. Strange felt it showed how far gone the old 1st/sgt was, after whatever it was had happened to him. Strange and Landers spent a lot of time with Prell, and Strange noted that never once did Prell ever mention or refer to his conversation with Winch. It struck Strange that he would not like to be Winch, when Prell did get up and around.
Winch himself didn’t know what to think. He could not believe that what he had done had had that much effect. The change was too precipitous, too sudden and dramatic, for him to believe his action had caused it. Prell must already have been beginning to heal when Winch came to see him, if it could happen that fast. So, or so Winch felt, the whole thing had been a waste.
Landers had a theory of his own. Strange had told him, and sworn him to secrecy, about the scene with Winch; but Landers didn’t think that had anything to do with it one way or the other. A few days after the good news concerning Prell had circulated, he had run into Col Curran along one of the brick-columned walkways and Curran had stopped him.
“You know I’ve been wanting to tell you this, but I haven’t had the chance,” Curran said, with his weirdly merry grin Landers had been getting to dislike. “Do you remember something you told me that day you came to see me? About if we couldn’t give him something more, why didn’t we take something away?”
“No, I don’t,” Landers said. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, you did. And it set me to thinking. I spent half a night going over Prell’s case all by myself, because of it. Well, I found something nobody else had noticed. You know, all of you men from the South Pacific are still taking atabrine. Because of the malaria. You’re supposed to keep taking it for four months after you get back.” He leaned forward with his smile, and took Landers lightly by his bathrobe sleeve. “Well, I noticed Prell was being given atabrine. Naturally enough. Since he’s South Pacific, too. Well, I took him off it. On my own hook. Without telling anybody.
“It was after that that he began to heal.”
“But is that possible?” Landers said. “I mean, medically?”
“No,” Curran said. “Absolutely, positively not.” His face suddenly got very sober. “But strange things happen. You never know with people. Weird things affect them. It’s almost metaphysical. It’s possible that in a borderline case like his, where everything counts, that the atabrine was tiring him and through fatigue inhibiting his ability to heal. But if I ever told anybody that, I’d be in hell’s own way of proving it.
“So, it may well be, indirectly, that you are responsible for his mending.
“But I don’t want you to tell anybody about this. Even Col Baker doesn’t know. I didn’t tell him I was doing it. You’ll keep it to yourself, huh?”
“Sure,” Landers said. And he had. He had not even told Strange. Certainly he had not told Winch.
Later on, on his own, he had deliberately gotten into a discussion—a “theoretical” discussion—with his own ward boy about it. The ward boy had looked up everything on atabrine. There was absolutely no reason to think that atabrine had any inhibiting power, or any effect at all, on any of the healing mechanisms. But then why would that crazy Curran have told Landers a story like that? Catch Landers telling a tale like that to Winch?
Winch would not have cared. Probably, he would not even have heard. After the energy and thought he had put out on Prell, beginning as far back as Letterman, he was totally depleted. It was all he could do to pull himself up out of bed to take his meals. His own doctors, on the heart ward, told him it was the natural result of his trip from California, plus the substantial steps he had made in his own recovery. They of course knew nothing about Prell, and told Winch what he needed was rest. Winch took them at their word. What with the diuretics he was still taking, which still so thoroughly inhibited his sex drive, he did not even think about going to town. The very thought exhausted him. But he was not too tired to go when, a week after Prell’s start toward recovery, he got a summons from Sgt/Maj Alexander to come to Alexander’s office.
Jack Alexander, of course, had sent in a progress report on Prell, as soon as it was established for sure that he was on the mend. Had sent it to the same AGO office designation in Washington that he had received the initial query from. Now he pushed a letter across his desk for Winch to read. It was from the Medals Division. They wanted a dossier on Prell. Everything that might be pertinent from his Service Record and 201 File to help them decide on a nominee and potential recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Winch read it through and shoved it back across the desk.
“I know you can’t drink,” Alexander rasped with his boxer’s larynx, “or smoke. But you ought to do something to celebrate. Why don’t you go into town and get laid?”
Winch could only shake his head, and sit there, wanting most of, all to roar with laughter.
They would have to wait on the confirmation but that was only a formality now, Alexander said. It would be the first Congressional Medal awarded at the hospital. They were building the next medals presentation around it. Col Stevens was already working on the plans and the list. It was going to be the biggest presentation Kilrainey’d ever had.
“You’re on it yourself,” Alexander said.
Winch could only nod, again. “That D.S.M.”
“A Distinguished Service Medal won’t look bad on your records after the war,” the practical Alexander said.
So it was that, almost a month after Prell’s first upward turn for the better, Winch along with most of the other souls at the hospital found himself standing at parade rest on the asphalt of the hospital’s central compound. The compound was not a parade ground, had not been designed as one, and didn’t look like one. It was too small, and it was too crowded, with all the formations that had been marched into it. Just about everybody who could move under his own locomotion, and many who could not, had been called out. The entire hospital staff, except those actually on duty, was present also, on orders of Col Stevens. Col Stevens had even had some bunting strung from the buildings around. The civilian press as well as the Army papers were well represented, with reporters and photographers from papers as far away as Chicago and Kansas City.
There was a large number and long list of men to be decorated. At the center of all this was Prell, in his bathrobe in a wheelchair, with his two legs out stiffly in front of him on the rests in plaster casts. Almost everybody, naturally—with the exception of Winch—received Purple Hearts. There were several Bronze Stars, some with the V for valor, some without, and one Silver Star. Landers to his surprise got a Bronze Star (without the V), for meritorious service. Winch was given his D.S.M., the only one given. Then Col Stevens marched out, Sgt/Maj Alexander at his heels two steps to the right, Alexander’s huge bulk unbelievably light on his feet and in absolute step, carrying the flat larger-than-normal presentation box. When Stevens placed the light blue ribbon with its white stars around Prell’s neck, there was a hint of tears in Prell’s black Indian eyes. But when he looked at Winch, immediately beside him, the glitter came back in them.
Winch stood at attention with the others, in the uncomfortably hot early September sun, not knowing whether to laugh or spit, wanting to do both, doing neither.
Directly in front of him, behind Col Stevens, Alexander’s right eyelid flicked down for a split second in a gesture of sanity.