Chapter 19
LANDERS WOKE WITH much less of a hangover than Prell. More used to the heavy drinking luxury than Prell was by now, his body was getting better at assimilating it.
But as he pulled the GI blanket and sheet up to his neck and lay listening to the ward man going down the line waking the guys, he was transfixed by something far worse than a hangover. The big bell at the head of the ward was ringing its short, hard, frightening blasts, but it wasn’t that. He was used to that. His whole system was infused with a sharp pure panic.
Landers knew why. There was no need to think back over the whole big party to remember what it was he had done so wrong. It was right there in the forefront of his mind. He remembered that he drunkenly had told Prell all about Winch going back to duty, on the way pushing him back to the wards. And he had been asked precisely not to do just that.
Jerkily, with nerves made jumpy by both hangover and a deep, hollow, awful guilt, Landers yanked on his pajama pants and slippers to hurry up and get to the bathroom first and shave.
It was Strange who had told Landers about Winch’s impending return to duty. Landers had been sitting with him outdoors loafing in the fall sunshine, while the two of them waited for Prell to get his folding wheelchair. Winch had told Strange he would be leaving within a week. Then, after telling Landers, Strange had expressly asked Landers not to talk about it. Particularly, he did not want Landers to tell Prell.
Landers had asked him why. Strange had shrugged and moved his head, and in that inarticulate way Landers had come to associate with all of Strange’s more complex, profounder ideas, he said he did not think Prell was up to it yet. Prell was still drawn too tight, still too much up in the air. About what might happen with his legs. He wouldn’t be able to digest the idea that Winch finally might be leaving them, leaving the company, moving on.
Landers had simply nodded. He was not so sure he was up to it himself. The idea that Winch might not be there for aid and advice when Landers needed him left a big empty hole in Landers. But he had never believed Prell felt that same way about Winch. Astonishingly, it was as if Strange read his mind. Again, inarticulately, Strange had moved his head and shrugged. That Prell hated Winch did not mean Prell thought Winch was an incompetent, Strange said with no prompting. Just the reverse. Prell would never have hated a man whose professional opinions he had contempt for. No; Prell would miss Winch. Badly. Hate, or no hate.
They should give Prell a week, Strange said, or two weeks. Before they told him. He needed sufficient time for the therapy on his legs to start to work. Besides, in the second place, if it was an accomplished fact, with Winch already gone, there would be a fatality about it that would make it more acceptable to Prell.
Landers had nodded again. And had promised he would not mention Winch’s leaving to Prell. Privately, he remembered how more than once it had struck him how intricate and complicated these relationships were between these Regular Army men, which seemed so simple on the surface. And he marveled again at the really deep understanding of them Strange seemed to have.
College people. College people, like himself, who had a tendency to think of themselves as more sensitive, and called men like these guys ignorant, and uncomplicated, and insensitive, didn’t know what the f*ck they were talking about. And had probably never known any. Landers had never known any himself, until this f*cking war. But Landers would rather have been like them, than any college people he had ever met. Drunk, happy, he had gone to bed last night after the party thinking these same thoughts over again, a second time.
And had waked up to most unwelcome this.
It appeared that his mind had blanked out, on certain parts of the big, riotously boisterous party. There were whole stretches he had no memory of. But his mind had not blanked out this most awful, most irresponsible thing he’d done. His mind had kept it right there, all ready for him, to stew and seethe and fret and agonize over this morning, with this sense of awful guilt.
How could he possibly have made such a gaffe? How could he possibly have forgotten, ignored his promise?
Shaved, he bolted down his breakfast so fast and nervously, he gave himself a bad bellyache. Then he sat, nursing the bellyache, tapping his feet in their slippers on the polished floor, waiting for morning rounds. As soon as that was over and he was free, he took off across the half-mile width of the hospital to Strange’s ward, as fast as his bad leg would carry him, to see Strange and confess what he had done. Maybe there was some way Strange could fix it.
Luckily he hurried. Strange was already in uniform, preparing to take off for town and his new suite. He had already given a key to one of the guys from the company, who had a morning pass and had gone in ahead to round up some women.
“Come on along,” the mess/sgt said. “The more the merrier. I’ll wait on you while you change.”
Landers stopped him with a raised hand. “I’ve got to tell you what I did,” Landers said, and bubbled it all out breathlessly. “It was a terrible thing. A terrible thing. I was drunk. But that’s no excuse. It was on the way back to the wards.”
Strange took it better than Landers thought he would. All he did was smile a sad little half-smile with the corner of his mouth, and make his shrug. To Landers the rebuke seemed greater because of that. He would have preferred a storm of abuse.
“I guess he’ll just have to live with it,” Strange said. “A little sooner, is all. We all got things we have to live with a little sooner than we’re ready for, I reckon.”
“I suppose. I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Landers added in a low voice. Nothing he could find to say seemed to loosen that awful guilt.
“I reckon he’ll survive it,” Strange said, sadly, and laid his good hand on Landers’ shoulder with a light slap, “People do all sorts of things when they’re drunk they wouldn’t do sober. No avoiding that. It aint that bad.”
He flexed the fingers of the bad hand, that still wore the plaster brace. “Now you go and dress and get in uniform. I’ll wait for you outside at the taxi stand, in the sunshine. We aint going to have all that much more of it, I don’t think. Even here in the good old Southland.”
It was in the taxi going in that he told Landers about the checking account he’d opened, and the $7000 in cash. He told Landers he intended to blow every nickel of it while he and the remaining guys from the company were still here.
Landers still wasn’t over the other thing, but Strange seemed to have forgotten Prell. “That’s an awful lot of money to blow, and just burn up,” Landers said cautiously. “You can do a lot with seven thousand bucks.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you want. You could start buying a restaurant. You’re a cook, and restaurateur, aren’t you?”
“Don’t want anything like that,” Strange said. “Anyway, that amount of money aint going to last long, here. At a hundred bucks a day? For that suite? That’s only seventy days of suite, right there.”
“Did you ever ask them about paying monthly rates?” Landers said.
“No,” Strange said. “I haven’t.”
“Say,” Landers said, “listen. I’ve got something like two thousand bucks at home myself. What about me throwing mine in with yours?” Suddenly he felt elated, and excited. “That would give us twenty more days of suite, if we needed it.”
“All right,” Strange said. But then he raised one admonitory horny finger of his good hand. “Make certain you won’t be sorry.”
“Hell,” Landers said.
“Say, I’ll tell you what!” Strange said, excitedly. He had been looking out the window, at the big city park, Overton Park, that the taxis passed on their way into and out of town from the hospital. “Why don’t we have us a goddam picnic?”
Landers felt astonished. Apparently, Strange had put the matter of Prell totally out of his mind.
“Okay, why not?” Landers said.
“We’ll get the booze and the women and whatever guys are there, and buy some food, rent a taxi for the day, and come out to this damned park for the day,” Strange said. “How about that?” He too seemed elated, suddenly. “We’ll have ourselves a hell of a damned picnic day, by God.”
It was not till they had had three drinks, from the illegal pint Strange bought from the driver, that Strange brought up the other thing that apparently was on his mind.
He glanced nervously at the back of the driver’s head, as they moved through the streets of downtown. Then he leaned over to Landers with a conspiratorial air.
“Did you ever eat a girl’s p-ssy?” he whispered.
At first Landers thought he was going to some elaborate extreme as means for a joke. He began to frame in his mind some sort of joke answer. Then he saw, or sort of sensed, that Strange wasn’t joking. Strange was asking in deadly seriousness.
“Why do you want to know?” Landers asked in a normal tone, to buy time.
Strange made a violent braking motion with the open palm of his good hand, for softness of voice. “Don’t be embarrassed, God damn it,” he whispered. “I’m serious.”
“Well, if you put it that way. Well yes. I have,” Landers whispered.
“Did you like it?” Strange whispered.
“Well yes. I liked it. In fact, I loved it,” Landers whispered back.
Strange was nodding to himself. Thoughtfully. “Are you good at it?”
Everything was still in whispers, kept low by Strange’s constant admonition.
“Well. Well, I don’t know that there’s so much to being good at it. There’s this girl, Martha Prentiss? Who’s around the Peabody? That loves to suck cock.”
“I’ve had her pointed out to me, but I don’t know her. Never met her.” Whisper.
“I picked her up. She gave me a few pointers. But, hell. All it takes is a lot of gentleness, and a very wet tongue.” Whisper.
Strange nodded, but didn’t answer.
“I guess you know what a *oris is, I guess?” Landers whispered.
“Yes, damn it. I know,” Strange whispered.
“Well,” Landers shrugged lamely.
“Does it smell?”
“Sure. It smells. It smells good.”
“Doesn’t it smell fishy?”
“It smells fishy. But it’s not really fishy. It smells— Do you know the word fecund?”
Strange shook his head.
“Fecund means rich. Like rich earth. Rich for growing. Rich for growing all the rich things of summer. Ripe,” Landers whispered. He began to be afraid he was sounding too poetic, and stopped.
“Ripe,” Strange whispered sourly. “I’ll bet it smells ripe.”
Their faces were hardly a foot apart, and Strange stared into Landers’ eyes intensely.
“Doesn’t it smell pissy?”
“Well yeah. A little bit. But you don’t mind that. At least, I don’t. But that’s only at first. After a little, it doesn’t smell pissy.”
“Doesn’t it taste?”
“No. Doesn’t taste at all. Has no taste whatever. Tastes like whatever you’ve had in your mouth before. A cigarette. Whiskey. A steak.”
Strange nodded in silence, his intent eyes not budging from Landers’.
“Say, what is all this?” Landers whispered.
“Oh, there’s this girl,” Strange whispered with elaborate indifference. “Wants me to blow her. Keeps telling me I’ll like it. Says everybody does it.”
Landers grinned. “‘Show me the man who doesn’t eat cunt, and I’ll show you the man whose wife I can steal,’ ” he grinned, quoting in a whisper the ancient joke. Strange did not laugh. Strange just stared at him.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Landers whispered. “Too damn many of them taste like soap.”
“Taste like what?”
“Soap. So many girls are so ashamed of them, and so afraid they’ll smell, that they’re constantly scrubbing the hell out of them. And they taste like soap.”
“Aw, shit,” Strange whispered, “you’re a damned expert.”
“No, no. I learned it all right here. Or almost all.”
They were so close together, and Strange was staring so intently, that Strange’s eyes were like two bright blue searchlights, flooding Landers’ face. In that light, just about nothing could be hidden. In front of them, the back of the driver’s head was not cocked. By the back of his head, he was going right on driving, totally unconcerned. After a long moment Strange relaxed back into the seat, staring straight ahead. “Times are changing everywhere,” he said, to no one in particular. Though said in a normally loud tone of voice, it came out muffled.
The cab was already onto Union Street, still heading in, moving uphill toward Main Street and the big river, invisible beyond it. As the driver swung wide to make the U turn to stop in front of the Peabody, Strange grinned and said, without expression, in a normal tone, the one word, “Thanks.”
Strange had not forgotten about the picnic. The picnic, in fact, turned out almost exactly as Strange had imagined it. Except it was even more pleasant, more fun. There were four men from the old company waiting in the suite and they had picked up some girls in pairs and singles, both at the Peabody bar and at the bar of the Claridge up on Main Street. Landers noted that without exception the four were guys who had been at Kilrainey longer, and had run out of money. Strange was obviously concentrating his largesse and his giant spending on guys who no longer had money.
That part was okay with Landers. He was willing to do exactly the same with his smaller sum, as soon as he got it down here. And by that time, he thought, Prell would be further along with his therapy. He badly wanted to do something for Prell. Landers had tried to do what Strange apparently had done so easily with the faux pas of last night, and put it entirely out of his mind. But Landers couldn’t do it as well and Prell kept coming back to his mind in some comparative fashion almost all the time. And each time, Landers had the same awful feeling he had had that morning. Even to him, it seemed out of all proportion.
Then, when he had fallen asleep three-fourths drunk on the sunny side of one of the big trees in one of the big glades of the park, the dream or vision of the waterless platoons and his full canteen of water on the dry hill on New Georgia, suddenly came back to plague him. Again they were begging him for his water and he would not give them any. He woke suddenly, choking back a cry. The brunette girl who was with him, he did not remember which one she was or who, quickly grasped his biceps with her five fingers and smiled and winked down at him, and crooned soothingly. She apparently had done it many times before and knew what to do.
Landers sat up, and reached for another drink. It was the first time in a long time that that dream had imposed itself on him and he couldn’t help but wonder, Why now?
Fortunately, there was plenty still left to drink. If it had been a great, warm, sunny picnic, it had also certainly been a heavy drinking one. Strange had brought along just about every potable with alcohol in it that he could think of and get hold of. He had, at Landers’ instigation, even brought along a couple of bottles of French wine; but the wine had languished. Not even Landers drank it. Like everybody else, he preferred shots of whiskey with cold beer chasers. By the time it began to get chilly and they repaired to the hotel, they were all of them, including the girls, quite drunk.
Strange did not seem to show it as much as the rest. Though Landers was sure he had drunk just as much. Landers had been curious, after their conversation, and covertly watched him with the women. But it was hard to tell about Strange. Strange had divided his time about equally between Annie Waterfield, Prell’s girl of last night, and Frances Highsmith. Frances was a girl who had been around the bunch a lot, and whom Landers had made it with a few times, and whom he was sure Strange had been to bed with at least once. During all the booze buying and food buying, Strange had kept Frances with him and had ridden out to the park with her in one of the three cabs they had had to hire, and Landers had thought, Ah ha, that’s the one! But then halfway through the picnic he had redirected his attention to Annie and had gone off walking to sit with her across on the other side of the glade from where they had spread the blankets, and Landers had thought, Ah no, it was Annie! But before they left Strange went back with Frances, and rode back with her. But then when they were all settled in the suite, Strange left Frances again and sat with Annie and a bottle of bourbon that was beside them. Frances appeared to be getting irritated. But Annie Waterfield did not. At that point Landers went to bed and to sleep, not knowing who to bet on, or even whether he should bet on either. And not much caring.
He had been afraid to go to sleep again because of the dream. But the heavy drinking all day in the park, and all the hot sunshine, had done him in in a way that was more than he could handle. Even the thought of having the dream again in his sleep could not keep him awake. Besides, the girl, whose name was Mary Lou Salgraves it turned out, was there and went to bed with him, and was willing to hold his head against her naked breasts while he slept. Landers went straight off to sleep. Without even attempting to f*ck; without even a hard-on. And Mary Lou seemed to like it as well that way, or like it even better.
He slept for three hours before the dream woke him again, his conscious mind rising befuddled out of sleep but, even befuddled, already trying to choke off any noise or cry he might be making.
As he came awake, he realized Mary Lou had her hand over his mouth, and her other hand was stroking his head. It was she who had waked him, he realized, as his mind began to take messages from outside.
“Ah’m sorry to wake you,” she said as she took her hand off his mouth, “but you were beginnin’ to make noises and holler in your sleep. I thought you’d want me to.” It was curiously as though she had done it all so many times that she knew exactly what to do without asking any questions. They were alone in the big bedroom he noted, and that included the smaller cot-type bed turned endways by the door.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure. Thanks,” Landers said in a sleep-roughened voice. “Thanks.”
“It was all somethin’ about water,” Mary Lou said. “Water, water. Are you thirsty?”
“No,” Landers said, then corrected himself. “Yes. Yes, I’m thirsty for some whiskey and soda.”
“Comin’ right up,” Mary Lou answered, smiling at him. She got up slowly, and then put her dress on without bothering with the underwear.
Landers watched her and felt a stirring and thickening in his crotch. “You’re some girl, you know that, Mary Lou?”
“Why, thank you, sir,” she smiled. Her chin dimpled.
Outside in the suite’s sitting room Strange was still sitting with Annie Waterfield, talking. His voice sounded a little thicker, but his eyes were quick. The level in the bourbon bottle had gone down appreciably.
“Well,” the mess/sgt said from his seat. “You get some rest?”
Landers nodded, stretching. Mary Lou handed him his drink.
Strange and Annie were the only two left in the suite. The four other old-company men and their four girls had disappeared. Frances Highsmith also had disappeared. The door to the other bedroom was wide open, and nobody was in there. It was eight-thirty, and strangely quiet and peaceful.
Strange smiled at Landers fondly, from across the room. “The others all went off to get some nigger barbeque out on Poplar someplace. They were getting a little edgy. I slipped Corello some cash. They going to some movie.” He grinned, a little sheepishly. “Frances has left us, too. Frances was the girl, in fact, I was telling you about before.”
“I think Frances’ nose was a little out of joint,” Annie said. “She acted like she had some previous claim on Sergeant Strange.” She smiled with sweet feminine bitchery.
“She’ll be all right,” Strange grinned. “There’s plenty of fellows, and plenty of hotel suites, around.”
So Annie had won, Landers thought. Or Frances Highsmith had lost. At least, now he knew which one of them it was who had asked Strange to eat her.
All along, Landers had thought it was probably Frances. But he wanted to laugh. If Strange thought he was onto something different with Annie, Strange didn’t know what kind of tree he was barking up.
Landers stared at Annie, his mind struck suddenly empty. He had been abruptly penetrated by the blunt realization that these girls had their own fierce little pecking order going here, fought over with just as much blood thirst as any other group of young females. The only difference was that the time span was shortened by the war, and the pride of ownership telescoped to three days or five days, or one night. So they fought over the men night by night. Then they started over, like any divorcée.
Landers wondered who Mary Lou had nosed out, to get him. Or he to get her? Mary Lou had certainly made it a lot easier for him today.
Landers sat down in an overstuffed armchair with his drink, and motioned for Mary Lou to come sit by him on the arm. The new drink, on top of all the booze he’d put away already, hit him swiftly. He sat tasting the strange quiet in the suite, his arm around Mary Lou’s hips.
It was such a moment of peace, in all the hot scrambling for cunt, and liquor, and life. He winked over at Strange.
Johnny Stranger, deep in his own cups and already apparently well past Landers, winked back, his one eyelid closing and then opening very slowly. Strange appeared to be savoring the quiet peace, too.
Two hours later the two of them had had their first fight in Luxor, with some Navy personnel. About seven Navy personnel, to be exact. Fortunately, not all of the enemy became engaged.
It would be easy to say it was because of all the booze they had put away. But there was more to it than that for Landers.
The four of them had gone down for a quiet, peaceful dinner in the main dining room downstairs. The old-fashioned main dining room off the lobby, with its wall paneling and quiet old colored gentlemen waiters, had in general been kept back out of the way of the huge influx of wild-eyed, fire-breathing servicemen, and was the place for that kind of dinner. Old Luxor families still took their older and younger generations there for family dinner outings. And Strange and Landers were after a quiet dinner, in keeping with the mood they had had upstairs.
Afterward, they had gone across the lobby to the bar for a drink, Strange picking up a bottle at the package store in the corridor.
They could have gone back upstairs. And none of them knew why they went to the bar. The truth was, they were feeling affectionate and, if not in love, felt warm and close. Like lovers, they wanted other people around for contrast.
Needed the audience, Landers thought sourly, later.
The contrast they got in the bar was immediate and cataclysmic. The whole place was packed. And the noise level was commensurate. They got a table for four, luckily, because a party of four got up to leave as they came in. Right behind them crammed against the wall was a long table filled on the three open sides with these Navy people, ranging upward in rank and topped off with two chiefs, one of them an old duffer in his dress whites.
Strange got up to go out to the john, after they were seated and he had poured a drink. And at the same time, behind him, another sailor came in to the long table. It was then the old duffer in dress whites reached over a huge hand and grabbed Strange’s seat away from the table. The white uniform had lots of unfamiliar WW I ribbons above the left breast, and he had gold hash marks literally all the way up his left sleeve from the wrist to his insignia.
Something blazed up in Landers’ mind like a fire ball. Though the two girls hardly seemed to notice the theft. Keeping his voice carefully empty of rage, Landers stepped over to the long table.
“That seat’s taken.”
“There was nobody in it,” the old chief said.
“Yes there was. My friend just went out to the pisser.” Still politely. But the red fire ball had already exploded.
“Didn’t you hear him?” the second chief, who was younger and in blues, said contemptuously. “If it was an empty seat, it was free.”
“Yeah. You want it, take it,” the old chief said, and grinned down the table at his mob.
“Okay. I will,” Landers said evenly. The rage in him was threatening to overflow.
But he held it in. And waited. He waited, until he saw Strange come in through the outside door. A full minute, or minute and a half. Strange of course marked them right away. When he saw Strange had seen them, he signaled him with his eyebrows. Meanwhile, the Navy personnel all just stood or sat, however they had been before, looking at him, waiting too. Waiting for him.
“Well?” the younger chief said, smiling with contempt. “You going to take it?”
They really don’t know, Landers thought. Who we are. While Strange came on, he studied them. The old chief in white on his left was still seated. The younger chief was on his right, standing. Landers was between them. Beyond the younger chief was the new man, his hand still on the stolen chair. The others were all seated.
Behind him Landers heard Strange say softly, “Go ahead. Bust him.”
He swung with his right hand first at the old chief. It went in accurately alongside the nose just under the right eye, cutting deep. Without bothering to look at the effect, he swung with his left at the chief in blues, rolling his body, like a whip, a punch that was half hook, half uppercut. It caught the young chief two inches back from the point of his chin. Landers heard his teeth clap together. He went down.
Landers swung his body to take care of the third man coming in, but Strange had already accounted for him. Swinging his good, left hand in a hook to the belly that swung the moving man back toward himself, Strange clapped him alongside the head and jaw with the plaster plate bound to the open palm of his right hand. The third man went down.
Meanwhile, Landers’ second chief was coming back up, valiantly but slowly. Landers hit him with both hands, hook and short rights, in the belly and in the face. One, two; one, two; one two three four. Faster than the eye could count. And as he landed each punch Landers shouted insanely.
“Pay!” he yelled. “Pay! Pay, goddam you! Pay, pay, pay!”
The chief in blues sagged down.
Beyond him Strange grabbed a water pitcher by its handle from a table, ready to crack it in half on a table edge and turn it into a weapon. His right hand was held ready to slap again. “Just come on,” he warned in a hiss, as insanely. “Just come on.”
The four seated Navy men looked up at the two insane men, astonishment spread over their faces. None was inclined to get up, and wisely they sat still. It had happened with murderous speed and a blinding violence.
Behind Landers a tall, kindly-looking soldier got awkwardly to his feet, and put one arm half around Landers. Landers spun, ready to hit again.
“No, no. Don’t swing. Don’t swing,” the kindly-looking soldier said. He looked worried. “Don’t swing. You guys better get out of here. Right now. The MPs will be here in seconds. I’ve seen them.”
Landers swung back to the table. He had one satisfying look at the old chief sprawled against the wall, his chair overturned, bright blood red from below his eye down over the dress whites. “Pay!” he screamed at all of them. “Pay, you cocksuckers! Goddam you, pay!”
Strange had heard the kindly-looking soldier, too, and carefully put his uncracked water pitcher back on its table. He started backing toward the door, his good hand gripping Landers’ arm and pulling him.
“You girls go on, you leave,” he called to the table. “Meet us upstairs.”
Landers followed him. “Don’t forget my cane,” he called, “don’t forget my cane.”
At the door a huge MP already blocked the way, his hand on his black holster, and stopped them. He looked in at the now-quiet bar, inspecting the carnage, then looked at the two of them.
“God damn,” he said wearily. “You guys. All right, go on. Git. Out that way.” He pointed on down the corridor, away from the lobby. “It goes to the street. Move it, damn it.”
“We got a room in the hotel,” Strange said breathlessly. “A suite, we got.”
“Then go around the block, and come back the other way,” the MP said. “My partner’ll be here in a minute, damn it. He aint as sympathetic.”
Strange was already moving, pulling along with his good hand Landers who was limping without his cane, Strange breathlessly already beginning to laugh. Landers was not laughing.
“Appreciate it,” Strange called.
“Go f*ck,” the MP called back, and stepped inside.
“Those dirty f*ckers,” Landers was muttering, “those dirty f*ckers.”
“Come on,” Strange said, laughing. “We got to move it.”
“Let them see something,” Landers muttered. “Let them see something.”
It was difficult, going clear around the block with Landers limping so badly. He had pulled or turned something in his ankle, and the pain was bothering him. So Strange led them through an alley beyond the hotel, which went around it and came back out on Union.
Thus as they slipped in through the revolving door and across the lobby, they were able to see the MPs and some medics leading the battered Navy group out from the bar. The old chief in his bloody dress whites was on a stretcher, out.
“You don’t think I really hurt him, do you?” Landers whispered anxiously in the crowded elevator.
“No,” Strange said. “He was just knocked out.” Strange was still laughing, and still breathless. Suddenly his eyes glinted meanly. “And what if you did?”
“He was the one who took the chair,” Landers whispered. “Just like that. Without so much as a by your leave. But I wouldn’t want to hurt him.”
Fortunately Strange had already given Annie a key and the girls were in the suite waiting. And immediately there were all the breathless, laughing recapitulations of battle. Everybody had a viewpoint and story of his own to expound.
Landers came out as the unquestioned hero, but Landers was not taking part. He sat off by himself quietly, nursing his ankle, ministered to by Mary Lou who brought him drinks. He kept popping his knuckles and said nothing. “Let them learn something,” he would mutter to no one every so often, “let them learn something.” The knuckles of his right hand had been seriously barked but he would not let anybody doctor them. “You must have hit teeth somewhere,” Strange said happily.
Very shortly after, the four other old-company men and their girls came back in, and the stories had to be told again.
“I tell you,” Annie Waterfield said, “I never saw anything like it. It was all so fast. After you left, that tall soldier? Who warned you against the MPs? He went over to them where they were pickin’ up that poor chief petty officer in blues, and tryin’ to bring the old one to, slappin’ his face, and he told them who you all were.”
“What do you mean, told them who we were?” Strange said. “He didn’t know us.”
“He figured it out because of Marion’s cane and your hand plaster. You don’t want to mess with them, he told those sailors. Those are overseas men from the hospital, who’ve been wounded. Don’t ever f*ck with them. They’re all crazy. That’s exactly what he said. Someone asked him how he knew, and he made this awful grin and said, ‘Because I’m one of them.’ Then he pulled up his pants leg, and showed them his artificial leg.
“It was just awful. Terrible.”
“Maybe he’s seen us around the hospital,” Strange said. “But I’ve never seen him. Have you?” he asked Landers.
Landers only shook his head. “No.”
“What did you mean?” Annie Waterfield asked him, “when you kept hollerin’ Pay?”
“Hollering Pay?” Landers said. “Pay?”
“Yes. Every time you hit somebody you kept hollerin’ Pay! Every time, Pay! ‘Pay, you sons of bitches! Pay, pay, pay!’ ”
“I don’t know,” Landers said hollowly. “I don’t remember saying that. I don’t know what I meant.” He accepted another drink from Mary Lou.
But he thought he did know. It was easy to say it was because of the booze they had put away. That they were drunk. But Landers knew there was something more. Something inside him. Aching to get out. There was something in him aching to get out, but in a way that only a serious fight or series of serious fights would let it get out. Anguish. Love. And hate. And a kind of fragile, shortlived happiness. Which had to be short-lived, if he was going out of this f*cking hospital and back into the f*cking war. It had just built up in him.
There was no way on earth to explain it to anybody, though. Not without sounding shitty. There was no way to say it.
It had been building up in him ever since that episode on the train with the Air Force sergeant, on his trip home. It was in his fight with his father over the medals. In that time he had tried to talk to Carol Firebaugh and failed so abominably. It had grown and built in him at an even quicker pace, since his awful boo-boo he had made with Prell.
Landers thought that, probably, it had been building in him even longer. Growing. Ever since he was sitting on that damned evil hilltop in New Georgia, with all those other weeping men with the white streaks down their dirty faces, watching the men below in the valley whanging and beating and shooting and killing each other, with such stern, disruptive, concentrated effort.
Anguish. Love. And hate. And happiness. The anguish was for himself. And every poor slob like him, who had ever suffered fear, and terror, and injury at the hands of other men. The love, he didn’t know who the love was for. For himself and everybody. For all the sad members of this flawed, misbegotten, miscreated race of valuable creatures, which was trying and failing with such ruptured effort to haul itself up out of the mud and dross and drouth of its crippled heritage. And the hate, implacable, unyielding, was for himself and every other who had ever, in the name of whatever good, maimed or injured or killed another man. The happiness? The happiness was the least, and best, and most important, because the most ironic. The happiness was from those few moments in the fight, when the bars were down, when the weight of responsibility lifted, and he and every man could go in, and destroy and be destroyed, without fear of consequences, with no thought of debt. In short, do all the things they shouldn’t and couldn’t want to do, or want others to do, when they were responsible.
What a melange. All tossed up in the air and churned around until one element was indistinguishable from another, and the steam from the whole boiling stew seethed and billowed until its pressure forced a safety crack in even the strongest self-control.
Landers suspected something like that was pushing Strange on, too, from the thin explosive laugh he had heard behind him, as Strange had called in a soft but ringing voice, “Go ahead. Bust him.”
It was somewhat the feeling that if all of these awful things had been done to so many of them, somebody was going to have to pay, pay, pay, including himself, themselves. What better way was there for all to pay, pay than in a fight, in which he himself, they themselves, were taking lumps and damage, and getting smashed around, too.
It didn’t make any sense. None whatsoever. That was why you couldn’t tell it to anybody. You couldn’t tell that, even to Strange. Landers was about resigned to never being able to tell it.
Did it mean the two of them had a future of such episodes to look forward to? Landers knew somewhere inside of him that he hadn’t had enough of it, even yet. And he didn’t think Johnny Stranger had, either. It seemed to promise ill for any future.
When everything in the suite had quieted down, though he had to wait quite a long time, he took Mary Lou (Salgraves, was it?) and hobbled to bed and locked the door and f*cked her and made love to her until her tongue was hanging out and even Mary Lou didn’t want any more. He was pretty sure Johnny Stranger was doing the same thing on the other side of the suite, behind the other locked door.
That great sage who had said so wittily that a man didn’t want sex after he had had a fight, didn’t know what he was talking about.
On the way home in the cab at five in the morning, drunk like the others and riding with all four of them, Landers felt Strange lean against his shoulder and put his mouth against his ear.
“She wanted it, too.” Strange coughed a drunken hiccup.
“I didn’t do it,” Strange whispered, drunkenly, so the other drunks couldn’t hear. “I didn’t do it. I almost did. But I just couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.”