Chapter 14
WHILE PRELL’S CRISIS was developing, the group from Letterman who had come with him settled in, and became part of the hospital scene and part of the hospital scenery. Casts among them began to disappear and crutches began to be replaced by canes. Certain faces disappeared, and they would learn someone had been discharged. Amputees in wheelchairs who had been there when they arrived, and whose faces became recognizable, began to be seen struggling manfully along the corridors and brick-porticoed walkways with their artificial limbs and canes. Every time Bobby Prell saw one of them his stomach went sick. For the group that had arrived with Prell and Landers and Strange, it had all become only a matter now of waiting to heal.
But new groups were coming in behind them every ten days or couple of weeks, and going through their own shakedowns. Men from the European campaigns came in trains from the eastern ports. Others from the Pacific battles came through Letterman or the hospital in Seattle. The two groups found it interesting to compare notes on casualties and deaths and particular maimings, once they’d settled in. The German 88, for example, had no counterpart as yet in the Pacific jungle campaigns. Wounds from burnings were much more prevalent in the European theater, due to the greater use of tanks. Illnesses on the other hand—malaria, black-water, and the like—caused many more casualties in the Pacific than in Europe.
During the weeks after Prell’s turn for the better, Johnny Stranger made another trip home to Cincinnati, on an illegal four-day pass produced by Winch through Sgt/Maj Alexander. Anything over a three-day pass should have counted as a furlough, of course. Winch and Alexander got around this by giving Strange two passes, one for three days and one for a day. Strange found it no better, not more livable in Cincinnati the second time than he had the first. If anything, Linda Sue seemed more distant and preoccupied the second time than the first.
During the same period, Marion Landers kept his fiasco of a date with Carol Firebaugh, had his cast off at the hospital, and received and took a ten-day convalescent furlough home to his hometown of Imperium, Indiana. The ten-day furlough, in actual fact, came just shortly after the big awards ceremony. So that Landers had his Bronze Star in its handsome gold-stamped blue-leather case to take home with him to show, along with his Purple Heart. Landers took them. By some sly, sure instinct Landers knew that the medals would infuriate his father. But Landers would rather have suffered the terrors of another wounding than to have worn either ribbon in Luxor.
Nobody from the Luxor hospital ever wore his decoration ribbons, or campaign ribbons. Among the infantry soldiers at Kilrainey, as if with some elite class, it was permissible to wear the blue and silver Combat Infantryman’s Badge with its silver wreath. So Landers would wear that. But nothing else. It was an iron rule among the combat men at Kilrainey about the ribbons, and the punishment for breaking it was instant and total derision from all sides. Nobody seemed to know from where the rule came, or what started it. But they all obeyed it. It was as though some bitter secret of contempt or disdain passed among the combat casualties and caused the rule to leap full-blown into existence, an absolute law. We don’t need your pats on the head, the attitudes seemed to say, we’ve been where you haven’t.
Landers’ date with Carol Firebaugh began well enough but ended up a strikeout. Landers had wanted to take her for dinner to the Plantation Roof on the top of the Peabody. “The Roof” was Luxor’s “Top O’ The Mark,” which, whatever it might have been before, was now hectic and full of uniforms and making money hand over fist, and the scene of so many service-connected seductions. There was a wild, wide-open quality about it, as though everybody was thoroughly enjoying the idea that four months from now everyone present might be dead. Landers had been there once with a couple of men from the company, without girls, and had wanted to come back and bring a girl there. Vaguely, he had thought about himself being able to talk to her; about himself, and about what had happened to him.
Instead, Carol Firebaugh, who didn’t like “The Roof,” suggested they have dinner at a restaurant she knew called Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room.
It made a weird scene. For the first time in nearly a year and a half, except for one three-day pass back home in uniform, Landers found himself in a genuine homelike, non-Army, non-war atmosphere. Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room was run by three elderly white Southern ladies who were widows apparently, helped by one old Negro gentleman who did part of the waiting on tables, and apparently did much of the organization. White couples and white parties of four sat at tables covered with snowy tablecloths in the genteel, uncrowded, middle-class atmosphere, eating leisurely dinners of excellent Southern-style cooking, and talking quietly. Every table had its brown-paper-sacked whiskey bottle, and drinks were served, but as adjuncts to the food, instead of as means to get drunk as quick as possible. Almost none of the men were in uniform and those who were, looked as if they were at home.
Landers had not been anywhere like this since leaving the university. This was like what he thought about when he thought of home. Despite his despair over his family. It was certainly not the place to carry through any seduction. But neither was it the place to try to talk to someone, anyone, about what had happened to him back on the hill ridge in New Georgia. Landers could only just barely formulate it in words to himself. How was he going to connect it to this kind of place? They were like two different worlds. There was no way to pull the two close enough together for any spark of understanding to bridge the gap. Quite suddenly he was furiously angry, outraged at all this false security of snowy white tablecloths and doddery old ladies serving food they had lovingly prepared themselves to appreciative diners. He was being disloyal to Winch and Strange and Prell and all the others by merely being here. Instead of talking, he became tongue-tied.
So they talked about Carol. Or she did. About her ambitions. About her frustrations. She had been going to Western Reserve to study acting and would be going back at midterm this year for her final semester. The war had kept her at home, with her brother gone. But she didn’t know whether she had the guts to strike out on her own and go to New York afterward, which was what you had to do. She was having parental problems. Her folks wanted her to stay here in Luxor and marry some nice young man with “prospects.” Some young attorney, or some smart young doctor. They would probably help her with money if she went to New York, but how long could she fight the system in New York? And there were all those producers you might have to sleep with.
Landers mostly listened and nodded, and fidgeted. Carol Firebaugh had a deliciously soft, deliciously uneven, deliciously attractive mouth, and when she looked at you with that slightly cocked eye of hers moving over your face as she kept refocusing, she was so appealing and so vulnerable you wanted to take her in your arms and pet her, and murmur reassurances in her ear even as you f*cked your cock into her. Landers couldn’t help it. That was exactly how she made him feel. And it was clearly why all the other fellows at the hospital found her so attractive. But everything she stood for, everything she was, everything she liked, made his sense of disloyalty to his old outfit and his common experience with them mount alarmingly.
“I don’t see how you men stand it,” Carol said at one point sympathetically, talking about the hospital. “And most of you will have to go back again.”
“We stand it because we don’t have any choice,” Landers said with sour fatalism. “That’s why.” And more and more he felt he should be out with them, the guys, getting drunk and picking up whores.
After the dinner they walked for a while in a part of Luxor Landers had not seen. There was no war here. Big comfortable old houses lined the streets behind their big old trees. Not rich, but comfortably well-off. Very comfortably well-off. When finally they went inside the one owned by her parents, they wound up on the sofa in her parents’ parlor. It really was a parlor. And it was the same kind of thing Landers had been doing for years at the university, in the homes of girls in Bloomington, or in the homes of girls back home in Imperium. She put on some records. She liked Ray Eberley. She had taken off her glasses, which she seldom wore, and tears came into her slightly fuzzy, slightly unfocusing eyes when “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” came on. Her eyes were violet-colored. And then they were necking—but not necking, really: love-kissing—on the sofa.
“What about your parents?” Landers said.
“Are you kidding?” Carol said with a sad smile. “They’re in bed asleep half-drunk. They never wake up.”
When the record player ran out of discs and shut itself off, she left it. But every time Landers tried to get his hand under her blouse onto her breasts or push his hand up along her stockings under her skirt, she pushed him away and fought him off hard. Once he managed to get two fingers far enough up her skirt to touch her panties and feel the cushion of pubic hair beneath. But that was all.
After two hours of this, sporting a powerful throbbing erection so swollen that it hurt him, wet in the crotch from all the unutilized lubrication fluid that was pouring out of him, Landers disentangled himself and got up and blew out his breath and looked at his watch. Had to be getting back to the hospital. Carol got up too, with a questioning look in her slightly unfocusing eyes. But she made no protests. At the door as she let him out, she said in a soft voice, only, “You’re not very forceful.” Landers was across the porch and down the steps and halfway down the walk before he realized what she had said and what it meant. But when he turned back to look and debate going back, the lights went out as he watched.
All the way back to the hospital he felt outraged, and filled with that wild, directionless rage he had been getting so often lately.
It was directionless, because there was nothing to point it at. Aim it at like a rifle. And because it was so directionless, it became wilder. For several days he avoided her by staying away from the big recreation center where she worked. It was hard on him to stay away from the rec center, because it was where everyone went to meet and where everything was going on. When he did reappear, she immediately called him over and wanted to know why she hadn’t seen him. She seemed to think they would, or should, be having another date soon. But Landers did not ask her. When he looked at her and thought about his evening with her, and about their dinner at Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room and its safe genteel interior, the rage filled him, making him want to rip their safe quiet genteelness all apart and show her, show them, the understructure of blood and lopped-off bone their genteelness was built on. Prell’s bone. Corello’s blood.
Anyway, Landers did not feel like making any more dates with her or anybody right then. Let her wait. Let them all wait. That morning Curran had told him they were going to take his cast off tomorrow or next day. Not only that, Curran said, they were not going to give him back his crutches. He would have to get along the best way he could on the uncased leg with his cane. The mere thought of it filled Landers with a nameless, helpless terror. What if he fell on it? Let Carol Firebaugh, and her three widow ladies, try to empathize with that. Empathize, she was always saying. If Carol Firebaugh and her three widow ladies wanted a piece of his hot body, they could damn well wait. Maybe he would see her later, and maybe not.
The awards ceremony was a week after the day they took his cast off. Although his therapy sessions in the labs seemed to be progressing, Landers was sure he would not be able to walk to it, and claim the Purple Heart he was supposed to get. But he did. Though it tired the leg terribly, going and standing up there all that time in the sun. And when he got his Bronze Star in addition, he was dumbfounded. He knew he did not deserve it. There was no question of that. Lots of other men deserved it more than he did.
When Curran offered him the ten-day furlough a couple of days later, Landers accepted it immediately, although it was probably too soon for his leg, because he could not stand to think any more about the cushiony pubic hair of Carol Firebaugh.
Although Imperium had always been a hard place to reach by train, Landers took the train. Two little branch lines served Imperium. Going by train meant a lot of changing. But the thought of taking the Greyhounds, where he would be unable to move around at all for hours on end, was more than Landers could tolerate with his leg as weak as it was and his ankle so stiff.
As it turned out, the train was no help. Almost before they moved out of the station a wild party developed in the day coach Landers was riding, so that he was terrified and unnerved and unable to move around much. He did not have a sleeping car berth. Pullman berths were reserved long in advance, and anyway he did not want to spend the money on a sleeping car. He did not even know if there were Pullmans on this train, since he was too scared of his leg to try and negotiate the steel-plate couplings between the cars to go back to the club car. But if his own coach with its bottle-toting servicemen was any example, the club car must have been a pandemonium anyway.
Soldiers sprawled all over the seats and squatted or sat in the aisles. Pint bottles passed from hand to hand. Two groups at opposite ends began singing conflicting songs. The few women in the car laughed, but nervously.
Finally one of the Air Force sergeants who were whooping it up in the middle of the coach came over and asked him drunkenly why he wasn’t joining in.
“I’ve got a bum leg,” Landers said, showing him his cane. “I can hardly walk. That’s why.”
“What the hell?” the Air Force sergeant said. “We’re all shipping out. We’ll all be dead in a couple of months. So come on.”
“Well, I’m just shipping back. And I’m not dead. So f*ck off,” Landers said. His new wild rage, righteous, flaming and lethal, suddenly boiled up all over him.
The Air Force man leered. “You trying to tell me you’ve been overseas already and wounded, Mack? Or something like that?”
“Yeah. That’s right. I was wounded.”
“Hey, fellows. Here’s a guy claims he’s been wounded,” the sergeant called.
“If you’ve been wounded, Mack, where’s your Purple Heart?”
Landers carefully moved his hand on his cane to just below the curve, ready to jab or to slash with it. “Up my ass. You want to look at it?” he said. He looked up into the Air Force man’s eyes.
He didn’t really know what was happening to him, or care. He was as surprised as the Air Force man. He gave him a cannibalistic smile that, although Landers did not know it, was strangely like Winch’s.
The Air Force sergeant’s eyes widened and seemed to grow flat. “No. I guess not. Thanks.” He was trying to appear hurt, and civilized. In contradistinction to Landers.
“Listen,” Landers raged. His voice was low key but vibrating. “You know what this is?” He pointed to his Combat Infantryman’s Badge, over his left pocket. “You know how you get one of those? You go away and get yourself one of those, and then you come and talk to me. Until then shut up and get the f*ck away from me, flyboy.”
Wooden-faced, the Air Force sergeant walked away. Landers was almost sorry. At the same time a small, still reasonable part of him was glad. He was almost sobbing. In two seconds he would have started to cry with rage. And if he had started to cry, he would have struck with the heavy hospital-issue cane. Right alongside the skull.
Across from him, a tired-looking young woman, worn-out from traveling and somehow clearly and obviously newly married, tried to strike up a sympathetic conversation with him.
“Listen, lady,” Landers said. “Just leave me alone, will you? I didn’t say anything to anybody. I didn’t try to talk to you. So just leave me alone. Okay?”
After that everybody in the car ignored him as if he weren’t there. This made Landers feel hurt and angered. He smoked and stared out the window. When it came time to change trains, he would not let anybody help him, and insisted on getting off by himself. Fortunately, he was carrying only a canvas hand satchel with an extra uniform in it. Later he would have to change again.
The little two-car local train, in contrast to the main line flyers, had almost no passengers. Landers sat by a window and watched the flat undulating countryside roll by. This was close to home. He knew almost every tree. He had come this way when he came home from school.
As usual, there was nobody and nothing at the little weather-beaten green station. And Landers’ problems began there, immediately. A couple of old men sat on the weatherbeaten green bench along the front of the station platform, chewing tobacco and spitting down on the gravel. Inside, the agent-dispatcher sat behind his telegraph desk, wearing black sleeve covers and a green eyeshade. Not another soul was there. Landers suddenly did not want to talk to anyone, only to slip away and sneak off home without seeing anybody at all. But the thought of the mile-long walk in to the center of town, with his heavy limp and his cane, was too much. The walk was more than he could physically handle. So he had to go inside and ask the dispatcher to call a cab for him. But before he could even open the door, one of the old men sidled over to him.
“Say, aint you Jeremy Landers’ boy, Marion?” he asked, “Welcome home, son, welcome home.”
Landers wanted to say Go to hell, but instead said only, “Thanks,” and kept his eyes lowered. The dispatcher said almost the same words to him. He called the cab (there were two in Imperium) for him gladly, but could not resist telling the cab man who it was he was picking up. Landers stood and listened to the dispatcher’s glowing report of the returned wounded hero, feeling abysmal.
That was the way it was going to be. Everybody was going to be treating him as the returned war hero. And suddenly he saw a vivid mental picture of the company’s waterless platoons, with their fear-haunted eyes under their helmets and dirt on their faces and the stubbles of beard. It blanked out everything, the station, the dispatcher, the cab.
It would be all over town before he could even get home, Landers thought. And indeed it was. His mother was already weeping into the telephone when he walked in. Someone had called her. His father came home early from the law office. Somebody had called him, too. Both of them were upset because Landers had not written to them. The news of his return had been printed in the local paper.
Fortunately, Landers felt, his sister was already away at school. She had gone up a week early to get settled in for her last year, his mother said. But his mother was going to call her to come down. Landers told her not to bother, thinking of Carol Firebaugh and her last year.
Almost immediately he had his first run-in with his father, when he refused to wear his Bronze Star and Purple Heart ribbons. His father could not understand why. Once, just once, Landers tried to explain it to him, that it was obscene, immoral, with the rest of them still out there, still dying, but his father wouldn’t agree. Landers forgot that he could easily have left the medals in Luxor, that he had brought them deliberately to bug his father, and silently wished that his father might try to understand him. “We don’t any of us wear them,” Landers said angrily, “at the hospital. This is the only thing we wear.” His father glared at the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and wanted to know why that meant so much. He began to expostulate in his lawyer’s courtroom voice. Landers’ mother stood wringing her hands. Landers silenced him with an authoritative wave of his hand. His father wasn’t used to that, either. Then his father broke out a bottle for a celebratory drink, and Landers began to drink.
A little later in the evening he had his first major fight with his father, when he refused to make a date to come down to the American Legion and tell the boys from World War I about his experiences. His father refused to take no for an answer. Landers flatly refused to go. By then Landers was drinking almost nonstop. So much his father complained about it. But Landers did not stop, or even slow down. Instead, he drank more.
It was easy enough to drink. Later on, when he escaped from the big house on West Main and limped the two blocks to the Elks Club, everybody there wanted to buy him a drink. Landers started by accepting half of the offers, but quickly progressed to accepting all of them. Everybody he met everywhere in town wanted to buy him a drink. It would begin early in the day, depending on when he got up, at one of the poolrooms or bars on the square, and progress through the afternoon and evening until late at night Landers would stumble home from the Elks Club or bum a ride in from the Country Club and fall into bed and sleep till noon the next day. Dimly, he slowly became aware that everyone was afraid of him, for some reason, but by then had usually progressed far enough in his drinking that he would forget or ignore it. He saw little of his family. His sister did not come home.
On one of these earlier evenings Landers was asked to make a speech at the Elks Club. It had become a local custom to give each new batch of departing draftees a free farewell dinner at the Elks Grille, and the local Chamber of Commerce secretary, who organized the dinners, on the spur of the moment had the bright idea of inviting Landers to talk to them. This was undoubtedly a mistake but the secretary, who was also the newshawk for the local paper, was noted for making gaffes. Landers, who was sitting alone in the club bar and grille, drinking quietly and minding his own business when the secretary came over and slid into his booth, thought about it awhile and then said sure he’d be glad to talk to them. They were having one of the local ministers, the secretary explained, to talk to them about religious responsibilities; and the principal of the high school to talk about social responsibilities; and the football coach to talk about patriotic responsibilities. He thought it would be nice if Landers, who had been over there, could talk to them about a soldier’s responsibilities. “Sure, that’s a great idea,” Landers said.
The draftees were just coming in and Landers looked over at them. There were twenty of them. Landers had been to school with some of them. All of them but one were poor boys whose fathers were farmers or plant workers and too poor to be members and, unless they had played varsity football or basketball, they had probably never seen the inside of the club, and so were suitably dazzled by their surroundings. This, too, offended Landers’ social conscience. He nodded at the secretary.
While the draftees ate their farewell dinner, Landers drank more and prepared his speech on a soldier’s responsibilities.
Landers was to follow the coach. The secretary introduced him, with a highly laudatory introduction, mentioning that though he did not wear them Sgt Landers had the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Craftily, when he stepped up on the little orchestra stand in the corner, Landers got hold of the microphone so they couldn’t shut him up. Even so, he had decided he had better make it short. He began by saying he had listened to the other speeches with interest, but that he was not sure just how much all those responsibilities applied to a soldier in a war.
“You don’t think much about God, or the Four Freedoms, or loving your country, when you’re in a fight.” He grinned at them. “It is true that a lot of fellows pray a lot. But that is not quite the same thing as thinking of your religious responsibilities. I can tell you for one thing that that man who said there are no atheists in foxholes was wrong. Mostly you think about getting your ass out of there, and about killing those other people so they won’t kill you.” Down below the secretary had sat up straight in his chair and was blinking his eyes behind his thick glasses. Landers grinned at him, too. “I’ve been asked to talk to you about a soldier’s responsibilities,” he said into the mike, which seemed to carry much louder and much farther than he had anticipated, “and I think I can safely assure you that the soldier’s first responsibility is to stay alive.” He felt he was warming up. “In the first place, a dead soldier is no good to anybody. And second place, a wounded soldier takes two or three other men away from fighting to take care of him. So, theoretically, it’s better to wound a man badly than to kill him. I can’t in honesty tell you that you will be fighting for freedom, and God, and your country—as all these other gentlemen have told you. In combat you don’t think about any of that. But I can assure you that you will be fighting for your life. I think that’s a good thing to remember. I think that’s a good thing to fight for. And remember, if you have the choice—which you may not—always try to wound a man badly instead of killing him. Good luck, fellows, and God bless.”
When he let go of the mike, the secretary seized it. “And now, boys, there will be drinks over at the bar, so cluster round, gather round,” he said quickly.
Feeling pleasantly red around the ears, Landers stepped down and went to his booth and sat down with his drink. Let the sons of bitches ask him to make some more speeches. None of the draftees came over to thank him. Landers did not mind, and beamed at all of them indiscriminately. Naturally, he was not asked to make other speeches. And when his father heard about it, they had another fight.
It was not that he was the only wounded vet back home in town. There were several others. Two boys had been to North Africa as ambulance drivers, and had come back home. Another, whose father ran a drugstore on the square, was an Air Force sergeant and had been shot down in a bomber over Italy, and was being discharged. But in September 1943 there were not all that many, and each was a celebrity. Landers did not like it. It made him feel guilty, and as if he were masquerading under false pretenses.
He did not make out well with the girls either. They were all either with somebody who might soon be drafted, or were waiting for somebody who had already gone, or else they were scared of Landers. He was not the Marion Landers who had gone away a year and a half ago, one of them told him nervously. At the hospital, when he first arrived, Landers had received three letters—one from his folks, one from his sister, and one from an old girlfriend who wrote she had read of his return in the paper and wanted him to know that she would be glad to see him if he got home, that all the men like him coming back should be treated with admiration and understanding and if there was anything she could do for him she would. So on the fifth or sixth night he was there, Landers called her and asked her to go to the basketball game that was being played that night. Frances said she would love to go.
It was early in the year for basketball, but Imperium was especially a basketball town, and was playing this big exhibition game ahead of the regular schedule. Landers of course did not know then, when he invited her, that Frances Mackey had been writing in only a purely social way, when she wrote she would do anything for him that she could.
At the basketball game he endeared himself to everyone by refusing to stand up for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” when it was played before the game. But nobody said anything. This not standing up for the national anthem had become quite a big thing with the guys at the hospital, where every night at closing it was played at the Starlight Roof of the Hotel Peabody and other bars in Luxor. The theory was that if you had a Purple Heart, you shouldn’t have to stand up. And besides, everybody knew he had a bum leg.
After the game, it was raining. As he and Frances came out of the big gym, a little Dodge pulled up in front of them and stopped short, so violently it rocked a little. Inside it was a large older woman named Marilyn Tothe, who worked for one of the other law firms in town as a clerk. And who was a notorious bull dyke, though it was thought impolite to say so. Landers had known her all his life, too. She had come to pick them up, she said brusquely. Landers could only stare at her wonderingly. She was at least as broad in the shoulders as he was, and, at least at this moment anyway, considerably stronger. She could certainly beat him up if she wanted, and she seemed to know it. Frances Mackey got meekly into the front. Landers was invited to sit in the back. “Where do you want us to drop you?” Marilyn Tothe said harshly. Landers said he guessed the Elks Club would be good enough. When the car stopped in front of it, Frances turned back to wave but the car started forward almost before he was out, so that she was jerked back around to the front. Landers stood looking after them in the rain, feeling bemused and left out of everything.
Perhaps that was why he got more drunk that night than usual. If he was more drunk than usual. He could remember leaving the Elks when it closed at three. He could remember deciding to walk up town to the square for some food at the all-night restaurant. He could remember crossing the treeless courthouse lawn in the rain. And he could remember coming upon the old brass Civil War cannon in its marble pedestal on the courthouse lawn with a sense of shock and surprise, just as if it had not been there all his life since he could remember and he had not known about it there. He could remember putting his arm around the cannon and rubbing his cheek against the brass, and shedding a few drunken tears—or was it raindrops—for this other old soldier, whose reward for faithful service it was to be left to stand and molder in the rain. Every year all his life on Memorial Day the fake red poppies were thrust into the courthouse lawn, and the white crosses were driven into the grass in rows, and somebody read “In Flanders Field.” Every f*cking year. Who would write the poem for them? What would they call it? Who would read it?
Landers remembered standing up and looking across the square through the drizzle at the lights of the restaurant, in the middle of a great stillness, and that was the last he remembered. When he woke up, he had a terrible hangover, and the dazzling sun was pouring into his eyes through the barred window, and he was in a cell in the city jail with the cell door unlocked and open.
His cane was lying on the cot beside him, and he got it and walked outside and yelled, “Hey, where is everybody?”
“Down here, Marion,” the chief of police’s voice called from the anteroom. “You finally wake up? Come on out.”
The chief, a big Swede named Nielson, was sitting behind his desk with an embarrassed look on his face.
“What the hell happened?” Landers said.
Several loafers were standing around grinning.
“Well, you know old Jeremy,” the chief said with an embarrassed smile. “Charlie Evans, the night cop, took you home and the old man said to let you sleep it off in the jail.”
“Well, did I do something terrible?” Landers asked.
“No, no. You went into the all-night restaurant and ordered some bacon and eggs and passed out cold. They couldn’t wake you, so they called Charlie Evans. When Charlie couldn’t wake you, he took you home. That’s all. But old Jeremy told him to bring you down to the jail.”
“My father did that?”
“Well, you got a good night’s sleep out of it,” the chief smiled. “You don’t look so bad.”
Landers looked down at himself. “I’m pretty messy. Well, what do I owe you, Frank?”
“Nothing. There’s no fine or anything.” He hesitated. “We would have left you at home. But you know old Jeremy. He wouldn’t accept you. You’re not going to hold it against him, are you?”
“Against my father?” Landers said. “Call me a cab, will you, Frank?”
“I know the Landers,” the chief said, looking perplexed. “There’s a cab right outside, Marion.”
Landers shook hands all around. “Thank you for a pleasant stay.” In the cab the driver kept grinning back into the rearview mirror so broadly that it was obvious he must already know the story. Landers only winked at him.
Back at home he showered and shaved and put on his other uniform. Then, with his mother pleading and moaning behind him, and trying to hold him back, he telephoned his father at his office.
“Listen, you son of a bitch,” Landers shouted into the instrument, “I just want you to know—”
“Don’t you hang up on me, you son of a bitch!” he raged at the phone. Then he slammed it down and turned on his mother. “All right then, you tell him. You tell him I said to forget he ever had a son named Marion. Jeremy Landers has no son named Marion. You tell him that. And I’ll forget I ever had him for a father. You understand? You got that?”
“Marion,” his mother wailed. “Marion. Please, Marion, please.”
“Go to hell,” Landers shouted and grabbed his canvas satchel.
At the station he had to wait an hour and a half for the next train. He waited on the green bench out in front, alone. Landers could hardly wait to get back to Prell and Winch and Strange and the others. He wondered how Prell’s legs were doing. Also, they were going to have to do something about Strange’s hand some time soon.
On the train the ride back did not seem nearly so difficult. Maybe the six days using it had helped the leg. Landers was even able to negotiate the steel plates between the cars and go to the club car for some drinks. As might be expected, it was full of drunken servicemen. He sat on the couch with his drink in his hand, thought about his family briefly, his ex-family, and could hardly wait to get back to Luxor.
When he reported back in to his ward, four days earlier than necessary, he found that Mart Winch had been taking out the girl Carol Firebaugh every single night since he had left.