Whistle

BOOK THREE





THE CITY





CHAPTER 15


IT WAS HARD to make any real friends in a hospital ward. As their medical status changed, men moved from one ward to another. There was a constant shuffling process going on that kept moving men away from each other. Men who made friends with the men in the beds beside them would look up and find them gone, replaced by newer strangers.

John Strange found this had a tendency to throw men back for friendship onto other members of their old outfits, if they were lucky enough to have any around. If they didn’t, they just sat around and brooded and withdrew. Just when they should be starting to forget their old emotional attachments and build new ones.

Strange had watched the beginning of Winch’s romance with Carol Firebaugh at first with amusement, then with irritation, and finally with downright envy.

Like everyone else who went in and out of the big basketball-court lounge of the recreation building, Strange had lusted after the sweet youthfulness and shy grace of the Red Cross girl who handed out the Ping-Pong balls and paddles, and had wanted to f*ck her. But being a properly married man just returned to his wife from overseas Strange put it out of his mind. Still she was, as some forthright, bathrobe-clad Government Issue had said, eminently f*ckable.

Some female thing about her every movement said so, and her shy self-awareness of her sex in front of so many male eyes underlined it. Her one kooky eye that kept looking off in a wrong direction half the time made her even sexier. For some odd screwball reason.

Strange had paid attention when she seemed interested in Landers, and thought that all right and in keeping with the fact that they were both college people. But when in Landers’ absence she attached herself to Mart Winch twenty years her senior, Strange’s mind balked. When he saw them together in town up at the Plantation Roof on the top of the Peabody Hotel, sitting together right in front of everybody, Strange was suddenly intensely jealous. If he had known she went for older fellows, he would gladly have offered himself. Only, he hadn’t. Leave it to shrewd old Mart Winch to wheel in there, and sop up the gravy.

Up to now, Strange had studiously avoided other women in Luxor. He felt he owed that to Linda. But it was not nearly so easy to do as it sounded. It required more effort not to pick up women in town in Luxor than it did to meet them and take them out and screw them. The city was full of unattached women. Riveters. Welders. Lathe operators. All sorts of minor assembly-line workers. And all of them hellbent on picking up some in-transit serviceman for a one-night stand or one-week fling. Since their work shifts ran right on around the clock, it was just as easy to run into one at eight o’clock in the morning as in the evening. A lot of them didn’t work at all, had quit it, or had never done it, and just went on and on, from one party to another, from one hotel suite to another hotel suite. It was hard work not to pick them up, or be picked up by them.

Just the same, Strange had resisted. He had been home—home?—to Cincinnati one further time after his second trip while Bobby Prell was mending. Making a total of three visits in all. He had not found anything there had much changed. Linda Sue was just as cold and indifferent to his bedroom advances as she had been the first time. Though she never turned him down when he asked. But Strange found it harder and harder to ask with any real excitement. He found it easier to just roll over and go to sleep. Or go downstairs to that never-vacant kitchen and drink more beer.

Maybe at the age of twenty-eight he was outgrowing sex excitement. The way his parents had done. He only knew that for the marriage and their dream of a restaurant to be maintained required fidelity. On both sides, his as well as hers.

So when his jealousy and envy of Winch with Carol Firebaugh came up in him so strong, it came as a shock. Obviously, he badly wanted to f*ck her himself. And once he had seen the desire in him for Carol, he began to see it in him for others, in other places.

That he did not do anything about it was mostly due to his feelings about Linda and the restaurant and their savings. But it was also due to his concern and preoccupation with the final medical status of his hand wound. All through the business of Prell’s legs Strange had waited for some word from Col Curran about his own disposition and first operation. But every day at morning rounds the surgeon would only look at the hand, move it a little, and ask how Strange was doing.

Strange had tried to stay with Curran’s instructions about forcing himself to use the hand, even when it hurt and he did not want to. Finally he was obliged to tell Curran it hurt almost too much. Curran nodded, silently pursing up his mouth as if about to whistle, with that polite interested look on his face, and told him to stop using it.

Then about a week after the big awards ceremonies, at which Strange standing alongside Prell and Winch had received his absurdly unjustified Purple Heart, Curran had stopped by his bed at morning rounds and without even looking at the hand had told him he wanted to see him in his office beside the three big surgeries at twelve o’clock that same day.

Strange had been planning on spending the day in town after morning rounds. But there was no begging off from a summons like this one.

Curran was as immaculate as usual, with his starched doctor’s smock and scrubbed hands, behind his little desk in the cubbyhole office. But his face looked tired and wan and in the corner an open GI laundry bin overflowed with what looked like bloody surgeon’s aprons.

“I’m sorry about those,” Curran said with his bright almost lip-less smile. “They were supposed to pick them up. But of course they haven’t done it.”

“Blood doesn’t bother me,” Strange said. “I’ve seen a lot of it, Doc.”

“I expect you have.” Curran rubbed his well-kept, manicured hands over his face for a moment.

“You’ve had a pretty heavy work schedule today, hunh?” Strange said.

“Yes,” Curran said. “Now. About your hand.”

“Yes, sir.” In a ridiculous way, Strange felt responsible for not upsetting Curran. He didn’t want to do anything that might tire or distress the surgeon. He listened while Curran went over it all. Every now and then as he talked Curran’s hands moved the papers about on his desk aimlessly.

“I’ve probably given you more loose time than was good for your hand. This hand of yours is a ticklish piece of business. But I couldn’t help it,” he said, looking up. “We’ve had a heavy schedule of operations lately, and this hand of yours is a pretty delicate thing to operate. There are an awful lot of ligaments in there that can’t be nicked or cut. In any case, I’m prepared to do the first job on it tomorrow.”

He leaned back in his swivel chair. “We’ll go in and take out the metal fragment first. And I’ll see how it looks in there. I probably won’t try to do anything about the bone growth this time. Unless I see that it looks easy. I have no reason to expect that it will look easy.

“I want to get at you early in the morning while I’m still fresh. So I’m going to have them give you a mild enema tonight, and a sedative. You won’t get any breakfast in the morning. They’ll probably wake you around six. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” Strange said and grinned. He felt a necessity to make it a tough grin. Then he added, “Uh, sir. Will it be all right if I go see my buddies tonight? At the snack bar?”

Curran nodded slowly. “It will be all right. But I don’t want you drinking any coffee, or eating.” He leaned back again in his chair. “You know, you people amaze me. You’re really as thick as a bunch of fleas, aren’t you?” He placed the tips of his fingers together and stared at Strange over them.

Strange stared back at him, suddenly irritated. It wasn’t any of Curran’s business how thick they were. What was he picking at now? And why? Strange ran his tongue judiciously over his teeth before framing an answer.

“Well, sir. I guess we are,” he said slowly. “We been through a lot of shit together. But probably more than that, you got to remember we come out of an old Regular Army outfit together. Don’t forget, we spent like two to three years together. Before we ever got into this war. We know each other pretty good.” He stopped, debating whether to go on and tell the surgeon more. But immediately something in him decided not to tell more to Curran. It was an intimacy Curran didn’t deserve from him, big-shot surgeon who was going to cut on him tomorrow or no.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Curran said, and swung his chair back up level. “But you probably won’t notice it. They’ll be giving you a light injection tomorrow, to calm you down a little. Before they roll you in.”

Outside, Strange felt distinctly peculiar, as he made his way back to his ward. He felt as he used to feel when he boxed, or played football. Suddenly he felt he had to piss. Though he knew his bladder was empty. He headed back in his issue bathrobe to find Winch and Landers and Prell and tell them the news.

Winch, of course, did not show up that evening. He was out with his little girlfriend. Couldn’t stay away, couldn’t get enough of her, likely. When Strange went by to tell him at 12:45 he had just barely caught him, all dressed in uniform to go to town. Strange noted, but did not comment on it, that Winch was finally wearing those brand-new 1st/sgt’s stripes of his. That was what a woman would do for you, he thought to himself wryly.

Landers and Prell did show up. At the snack bar. Landers limping and with his cane. Prell in his wheelchair: with new, white casts on his legs, in which now his knees had been slightly bent. “My knees are what are going to do me in,” he told them. “I can’t even move them. Christ, they’re like a couple of rusty old, seized-up, frozen, door hinges.” Prell, of course, wasn’t going anyplace off hospital. So it was not such an effort for him to arrange to be at the snack bar to see Strange. It was a big event for him. Landers, though, had clearly missed a date in town, to be with his old mess/ sgt on the night before his operation. Strange, who had never been that close to Landers, felt a new warmth for him.

Prell, though he could not get off hospital grounds to go in town, had not been wasting his time. They found out as they talked that he had found himself a girlfriend. Right on his own ward.

“Hell, yes,” he grinned at them. “She’s some sweet little country girl from some little town just outside of Luxor. Her daddy’s off overseas somewhere so her and her momma come into town every day to volunteer as Gray Ladies out here. I aint met her momma. But she got assigned to our ward, so every afternoon she spends the whole afternoon reading to me. She’s reading me Treasure Island, right now.”

Prell’s eyes sparkled, as he laughed for them. “She thinks I’m the cat’s meow. Big Medal of Honor winner. I can’t do much of nothing yet. I couldn’t f*ck, with these legs. But I’ll give anybody ten for five I’ll have her blowing me out in the back of the ward before the month’s out,” he added smiling. “Or at least tossing me off.”

But when they mentioned Winch, Prell’s face got stiff and frozen. He refused even to mention Winch’s name, nor would he talk about or listen to anything about him.

Landers, when Strange asked him, apparently did not mind that Mart Winch had taken over his Red Cross girl. “More power to him,” he said. There were more women in town than you could beat off with a ball bat. “If he can get into her, good for him.” Landers had been back to see his new acquaintance, the Naval lieutenant commander Jan Mitchell, who kept the suite at the Peabody. Apparently there was a party there every night. “Those Navy flyers,” Landers said, “and Army flyers. They don’t give a damn whether you’re an enlisted man or not. They don’t pull rank. As long as you’re fun at a party.” He wanted Strange, and Prell, when Prell was finally able to get around, to come up there with him.

Strange accepted tentatively. But he wasn’t thinking about that as much as about the operation. He sat and talked with them until the snack bar closed. He promised Landers he would go down to the Peabody in a week or so. Before they separated outside the darkened snack bar, and went off along the dimly lighted walkways to their wards, Strange shook hands with both of them warmly. Since they both went the same way toward the leg wards, Landers hung his cane on the back of Prell’s wheelchair and pushed it along leaning on it with his limp. Strange stood looking after them as they dimmed and darkened and then brightened under the series of overhead lights.

They caused his swallowing mechanism to choke up, and made a lump come in his throat.

As he turned toward his own ward his stomach flipped over and he had that sensation of needing to piss again.

In the morning that was all they gave him time to do. They did not even let him get out of bed, but passed him a glass duck to use. Then the guy was pricking his arm with the injection. In the operating room the anesthetist went right to work on him. Curran, already in a gauze mask and white cap, smiled with his eyes and winked and explained about the sodium pentothal the anesthetist was letting into his vein. Counting backward Strange got from ten to six before there was a sudden vast explosion of terrible-tasting fumes in the roof of his mouth. He tried to shake his head, but no longer had one.

Coming out of it, there was a lot of noise, and huge flashing revolving lights like artillery searchlights. They flashed on in a brilliant white glare, and then off in a darkness the eyes had no time to adjust to. But if it was an air raid, why were they blinking? Then it wasn’t an air raid, but a grand court, and at the far end a huge figure shrouded all in white sat on a great white marble chair atop a huge white marble base. In the flashing lights, seeing it all in broken lines as if reflected in a splintered mirror, Strange stood and waited in front of all the crowds. Until the white figure, its face covered, slowly extended one huge arm, the index finger pointing. There was a vast sigh of “Ah!” from the crowd and Strange knew that he had lost. Whatever it was. Whatever it was that was at stake. Then he realized that someone, the anesthetist, was talking, shouting at him, in capital letters.

“THERE WE GO, THERE WE GO, HE’S ALL RIGHT. SURE. HE’S ALL RIGHT. YOU’RE ALL RIGHT. THERE, NOW.” The anesthetist was smiling at him.

Strange managed to wink at him but the white figure still filled his mind, more real than any of the reality around him and it stayed with him all the groggy way back to the ward rolling along the corridors on the meat wagon and it stayed with him the next two days that they kept him partially doped up. It stayed sharply between his eyeballs and everything he looked at.

Curran was not one to be stingy with dope and painkillers when somebody was in pain. When he stopped by that first afternoon to see him, he said he did not believe with Maj Hogan and Col Baker that standing pain was the essence of a man. Strange only nodded and looked at him and smiled, seeing in front of him that great white figure and pointing arm. Curran still seemed less real.

It had had a profound effect on him, the dream. Or vision. Or whatever it was. It seemed so real it took on the quality of a revelation almost. But what was it supposed to mean? All Strange knew was that, somewhere, he had been tried and found wanting. But he did not even know what the trial was for. He had the feeling that in the vision he had not been told, either. He had simply been judged. No defense. It did not matter. The judgment was fair. In the dream he had felt a great sense of guilt, and then relief. An enormous sorrow, and relief. Relief that at last somebody knew.

Vaguely now, but sharply in the vision, he had the feeling he was being sent back somewhere he had hoped to be allowed to leave. That was what the silent finger seemed to indicate: you are sent back, and must stay. But Strange did not know sent back to where.

Even when he was back on his feet and the painkillers withdrawn, the powerful image of the white figure and pointing arm would not leave him and he could not get away from the feeling that he was being told something.

In the fact of it and because the painkillers they gave him weren’t all that strong, he was not off his feet all that long. On Curran’s orders, the ward attendants had him up and out of bed and moving around the ward before the afternoon of the first day was over.

Curran did not like to use plaster casts, and had had a molded plaster plate made and bandaged underneath the hand so that only the knuckle joints themselves were held immobile. Curran maintained that casts had caused more cripples than the wounds that had required their use.

“We’re such a long, long way from what we could do in surgery and orthopedics,” he said with his mild smile. “God only knows how long it’s going to take. And only God knows what lovely advances will come out of this beautiful war.” Curran’s eyebrows hooked upward over his pale eyes.

Then, sitting on the bed edge, he turned and with a sharp twinkling grin asked Strange to come out with him sometime and have a few drinks, and to bring his buddies. Strange said that he would.

Strange did not know what had caused him to take such an interest in the four of them. Probably it was the saving of Prell’s legs. “That first sergeant of yours, Winch, must be quite a guy,” Curran said. “What he did for Prell and the way he arranged that medal for him are really something. I’d like to meet him.” Strange said he would try to arrange it. He did not know what Curran meant by the way Winch “arranged that medal.”

But he didn’t really care. He already knew pretty much what Winch would say. Which was a flat No. He and Winch saw pretty much eye to eye about officers. Officers were of a different caste, and ought to stay there. But of course he and Winch were old Regulars. And this was the wartime Army. Full of civilians. Strange made up his mind privately that he would not even mention the invitation to Winch, and that he would not take it up himself, either. He liked Curran, more and more, and admired him, but he did not intend ever to become a buddy of his.

He felt exactly the same about the officers at the Hotel Peabody when Landers took him there.

Because of Col Curran’s postoperative treatment he was able to go much sooner than he had expected, the third day after instead of a week. Curran told him only that he should be careful of the hand. “When you’re on top of some girl,” Curran grinned, “make sure you support yourself on the plaster plate on your palm. Not on your finger knuckles.” Strange had only grunted.

He had no intention of picking up some woman. And yet, when he got there, he found himself in bed with one almost before he had time to get a few drinks down him. And before the afternoon and after it the evening were over he had been to bed with four different women. Of course so had Landers. But he would have expected that of Landers. He would not have expected it of himself.

But the operation seemed to have changed him in some deep-down basic way. Either the operation itself, or perhaps it was that damned vision or dream or revelation or whatever it was he had had coming out of the anesthetic.

Being strapped down and put to sleep and made helpless while some guy opened up and cut on a part of you to try and repair it could do a lot of damage to a man’s self-esteem.

And Strange could not shake off the picture of the judging figure, its hand pointing. And he couldn’t shake off the way it made him feel. There had been no anger or frustration or outrage at the figure. No crying of unfair. You could no more be outraged at the figure than you could be outraged at the universe. Both were there, both existed, it was the way things were. It had to be accepted. In the dream he had felt a compassion. Compassion for himself and for everything. He had always been compassionate. Why else would the old company nick-name him “Mother Strange.” But this new compassion was different and deeper and included everything in God’s created universe. And yet deep underneath it in him was an indigestible despair. And way down deep under the despair was a fiery-red, sneaky little anger. Over the fact that things must be the way they were. This tiny little white-hot core made him rebellious.

His rebelliousness included Linda. If Linda didn’t care much about f*cking him any more, and probably never had done, Strange guessed that was her privilege. But there were plenty who would. And if some of these excited him, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t take advantage of it.

He had not felt like that before the operation. But if the white figure had judged against him and pointed him away, back to whatever it was he must go back to, what did he have to lose?

It was silly perhaps, but he was taking the dream quite seriously, in a grinding sort of way. And his sexual proclivities were a long way from being washed up, as he had thought two weeks ago.

None of that had anything to do with his commitment and loyalty to Linda Sue, and her crazy defense-plant family, and her dream restaurant. He would stand by that.

Thus Strange sat and figured it out for himself with a drink in his hand, in the loud, crowded, smoke-filled, booze-fumed sitting room of the Peabody hotel suite Landers had brought him to, before swiftly becoming entangled and intertwined with his first female body of the afternoon. He realized there was some question whether he had chosen it, or it had chosen him.

The place was so crowded a certain protocol had to be followed. The suite had a bedroom on either side of the sitting room. With doors that closed. The sitting room had a double bed. So the management could rent that room singly, if needed. This bed was a necking, feel-them-up way station while waiting for a bedroom, and couples were always sprawled on it. You were supposed to note how many couples were already there waiting when you got on the bed, and to keep track of your place in the lineup.

Both bedrooms had single cot beds placed against the wall in addition to their big beds, so that each bedroom could accommodate two couples when a serious party was in progress, like today. Propriety demanded neither couple should look at the other while arriving or departing or while at play themselves. Strange, when he entered a bedroom the first time, found it impossible not to stop and stare. “Hey. You’re not supposed to look,” the girl welder who was with him cried cheerily. “No. You’re not,” a muffled voice said from the cot. The girl welder added, “You’re supposed to look only at me.”

The third of the four women he took to bed during the afternoon and the evening wanted him to go down on her, make her come by licking her p-ssy. She was willing, more than willing, to go down on him, too. Her name was Frances Highsmith. She was a metal lathe operator, had dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis to do war work after her brother was lulled in the Air Force over England, and made Strange think a little bit of Carol Firebaugh. Which was why he had singled her out. Years before Strange might have slapped her in the jaw and thrown her out of there. Instead now he only smiled and refused. Politely.

“What’s the matter?” Frances said. “Haven’t you ever eaten cunt before?”

“No,” Strange said. “No, I haven’t.”

“You mean you think it’s dirty? Filthy? Perverted? Something like that?” Frances demanded. “A perversion?”

They were on the narrow cot bed this time, lying side by side, and Strange could feel his heated erection beating with his heartbeat against her slim belly.

“I guess so,” he said. “Something like that.”

“Boy, have you got a lot to learn,” Frances Highsmith said. “I’ve heard about fellows like you. But I didn’t think I’d meet one up here.”

Strange felt irritated. “Well. It’s the same thing as being queer. Isn’t it.”

“Queer?” Frances Highsmith said. “Queer?” She peered at him. “You must be a real country boy. Didn’t you ever watch dogs? It would be queer if I went down on a girl. Or if you went down on a boy. But it’s not queer for boys and girls together.

“Well, haven’t you ever even thought about it? In a fantasy?”

“No, I never have.”

“Hey, listen. Are you married?”

“Yes,” Strange said stiffly.

“Boy, am I sorry for your wife. How do you think women come?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“Wow. You never even thought about it?” Frances said. “Well, maybe I better explain it to you. You know what a *oris is?”

“Sure.”

“Are you sure? It’s a woman’s penis. Women come from stimulating that. They don’t come from having cocks shoved into them.” She stopped. “Well, maybe a few do. But it’s very rare. Physically, it’s next to impossible. —You sure you don’t want to try it?”

“No. No doubt in my mind,” Strange said.

“Well, I think there’s something seriously wrong with you.”

“Listen,” a muffled male voice said from the other bed. “If you two want to argue philosophy, will you kindly do it outside?”

“You shut up,” Frances said.

“But don’t let that stop you,” Strange said.

“No,” Frances said. “Oh, no. No, sir. Let’s just f*ck. I’ll find somebody else to come with later. I’m not going to blow some fellow that won’t blow me.”

“Well, f*ck him then, honey, and shut up,” a muffled female voice said from the big bed.

“I guess she’s right,” Frances said. “If we’re going to do anything at all, we better get on with it.”

“I’m ready,” Strange said. “For everything but licking you.”

She had already turned flat on her back, and now she made a practiced little sideways motion that seemed to slide her right under him, legs apart, like a card in a deck. Like the burn card going onto the bottom of a poker deck.

Later on, later in the evening, he saw her going off with Landers. He wondered if Landers would make her come by licking her p-ssy for her. Maybe Landers might, he was an educated college boy. Well, every man to his own taste.

Like many another boy, Strange had stared heatedly and hungrily at all the photographs and drawings of wide-open vaginas that were available just about everywhere across America in his youth. He had sat and watched the stag films that always, somehow or other, found their way to all the NCO clubs across the country. But all the photos of wide-open pussies had never destroyed the ultimate mystery of woman for him. Nothing had ever destroyed the mystery of women for him. Not even marriage had. Maybe that was the trouble. Sometimes he wished something had.

But grown men did not get down and lick women’s cunts. That was just as much a perversion as being a fag. It was sick in the head. The truth was he had never even seen Linda Sue’s p-ssy wide-open. Or closed for that matter. He’d seen her naked. But my God, what would Linda Sue say, if he asked her to let him see her p-ssy wide-open? Or asked her to let him lick it? He couldn’t imagine it.

The trouble with women was when you had had them you still hadn’t had them. He had had four, and hadn’t had any. He was right back where he started before he came up here, only now he was lonelier than he was before.

While Landers was off with Frances Highsmith, he told somebody to tell Landers he would be back, and went off down to the setups bar off the lobby before they closed it at midnight, and sat by himself in a corner with a bottle.

The place was jammed with servicemen drinking. And of course with women. But no matter how many women there were, anywhere, they were always more servicemen, lonely, looking. The bar had them all the way from bald grizzled old Navy chief petty officers in whites with hash marks all the way up to their shoulders, to boys in the ill-fitting unworn uniforms of the newly drafted. Strange felt more at home here with them.

Once, upstairs—it was while he was lying on the way-station bed in the sitting room waiting with his fourth friend of the day—he had looked around at everybody standing and drinking and shouting and singing; and suddenly the mud-weary, eye-baggy, scared platoons of the company appeared before him in ghostly form, slogging away at the swampy jungle of New Georgia. And briefly, crazily, Strange wished he was back with them.

You had to be crazy to wish you were back in a place like that.

But as he sat in the downstairs bar and drank more and more in the midst of the uproar, that was where he wished he was. With a kind of horrified, aghast longing, he pictured their faces one by one, all of them more sharp, more detailed, more clear, than any of the faces he had seen since. Or before.

When they locked down the bar at twelve, he took his bottle and went back upstairs to collect Landers and go back out to the hospital.

He didn’t collect him, of course. Landers was still making out, or flirting, with one woman after another. As the night wore on and people dwindled away, finally there was left only a tight hard-core little group of drunken male singers, with whom he and Landers sang drunkenly for a while, all the old songs. Nobody in the hotel ever complained about noise, to anyone’s knowledge. At five-thirty with dawn coming up across the plains in the east they left to go back and sleep just enough to sober up before morning rounds. In the taxi Landers gabbled and gabbled about all the women he had f*cked.

Two days later, from Curran, Strange had the deposition of his surgical status. The upshot of it was that Curran simply did not know what to do. It was possibly the best news Strange could have been given, if he had selected his own.

Curran switched on the little light screen and put the X-rays up for him to see.

“See where those knots are? All ligaments and tendons in there. Very ticklish. I don’t honestly know if I can do it for you. So I’m not recommending the operation. You will have to decide if you want it done.”

“And if I don’t?”

Curran shrugged. A strange quiet smile came over his face. “Then I’ll recommend you for a disability discharge. That won’t set too well with Maj Hogan and Col Baker. But they can’t overrule me.”

“And if I do want it?”

Curran shrugged again. “I won’t promise. If it works, you’ll be fit for limited duty, or even full duty. If you’re lucky. So I guess it all depends on whether you want to stay in the service. You’re a thirty-year man, aren’t you? If it doesn’t work, you won’t be any worse off than you are. You’ll have about the same partial use of the hand. But the two middle knuckles will be partly frozen in a slightly different way than they are now. It’s up to you to decide.”

“Are you trying to give me some kind of an out if I want out of the service?” Strange said.

“No. Not at all. I’m presenting you with the proper medical prognosis. I know the Army wants men, all the men it can save, and preferably trained men. You’re a trained man. But I can’t let that override a proper medical decision.”

“Can I have a few days to think it over?”

“Sure. All the time you want. It’s your hand. And it’s your life.”

Suddenly, he held his surgeon’s hands up between his face and Strange’s, and flexed them. “I know a lot about hands.”

“You’ve been pretty square with me, Colonel,” Strange said. “And I want to thank you for it.”

“I’m a doctor,” Curran said. “I was a doctor before I was a colonel in the Army.”

“Which is more than you can say for some,” Strange said. “I’ll get back to you soon, sir.”

Somehow he felt like saluting. It wasn’t much of a salute, with the plaster plate still on his hand. Then he went to find Winch and see if Winch would fix it up with his pal Jack Alexander to arrange another consecutive double three-day pass to go up to Cincinnati and talk it over with Linda.

When he saw Winch, he thought Winch looked better than he had seen him look in quite a long time. Way back, in fact. Since before they left Wahoo for the Canal. More relaxed, less acid, less hard-faced.

The little girl was apparently quite good for him.