BOOK FOUR
THE CAMP
Chapter 2
MART WINCH HAD BEEN at Camp O’Bruyerre three weeks when he first heard Marion Landers had been fighting people and was in trouble because of it. By that time winter finally had set in, it was the first week in December, and Luxor had had its first cold and its first light snow.
The word on Landers came to Winch via a telephone call from big Jack Alexander at the hospital. Landers had gotten into a fist fight with an injured, wounded 1st/lt, had beaten him up in the post recreation hall, had then proceeded to have a violent altercation with Maj Hogan, the administrative chief, in which he had threatened and verbally insulted the major, and then had gone AWOL for five days.
Landers was now under ward arrest, Alexander said. Maj Hogan was preferring charges, on all four counts. The 1st/lt had declined to prefer charges. But Hogan’s charges would be enough to get Landers a special court-martial and a three to six months sentence.
If Landers had not come back on his own, and instead had been picked up by the MPs and been brought back, he might easily have drawn a general court.
“Well, what the f*ck am I supposed to do about that?” Winch said, in a kind of exasperated bawl.
For a second he let his eye go to his office windows outside which so much was going on at the moment.
“I dunno. Nothing,” Alexander said. “Nothing at all.” His clipped, hard, thickened voice came over the phone in exactly the same way his blue eyes fixed you. Winch had a sudden wild vision of his hard-edged turtle’s mouth, eating its way up the phone mouthpiece crunch by slow, ruminative crunch. “He’s one of your original bunch of boys, aint he? I thought you’d want to know.”
“Wait a minute,” Winch said. “Don’t hang up. What is there I can do about it? What does your Col Stevens say?”
“Col Stevens,” Jack Alexander said, very slowly and very precisely, “aint said anything about it.” He did not say “his” Col Stevens, this time, Winch noted. “I don’t know he even knows about it.”
“He must know about it,” Winch said. “If Hogan’s preferred charges.”
“I suppose he must know about it. Yeah,” Alexander’s voice said. “But he aint said a thing to me.”
“Do you think it would be worthwhile to talk to him?”
“I don’t have an idea.”
“Well would it be bad, if I talked to him?”
“I don’t see how it could do Landers any harm. But I don’t know.”
“Now what the f*ck is that supposed to mean?” Winch cried. He was getting frustrated. Here was supposed to be one of the most important men the US Army in the middle area of the United States was supposed to have. A man who could get done just about anything he wanted done, the word said. A man who was supposed to be making deals and money right and left and backward. And Winch was soliciting him. Begging him, and asking him not to hang up. And he—after making the call in the first place—was playing footsie and being coy. “Do you think I can be of any help to him, or don’t you?”
“I don’t know if you can be any help to him, or not be any help to him,” the hard, scarred, old sea turtle’s voice said. “I only called you. You know as well as I do, just how uptight things have been getting in all the services lately. All around the Horn. And you know why.
“Don’t you?” the voice said sharply.
A little thrill ran up Winch’s back. But he did not want to think about any of that, right now. He glanced again at his windows.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Jack. I know why. You think that might affect this thing on Landers? Well, do you think if I came in there to see you?”
“I’m not in this,” the voice said immediately. “Not in it.”
“Okay. Then I’d better see Col Stevens here at the club. If I want to get involved. He comes out just about every evening, at cocktail time.”
“Fine. If you want to get involved. And I’ll see you in town up at the Claridge. I’ll be coming in the next few nights.”
“I’m not sure I do want to get into it,” Winch said. He thanked him, for the call, before he hung up. For a moment he stared down at the black instrument. Then he went over to look out his big picture-glass windows. They were among the only third-floor windows in the only three-story building on the post.
The view that met his eyes was a little breathtaking. As far as his eyes could see from his third-floor windows, through the rising mists of a sunshiny winter morning, collections of one-story hutments and two-story barracks stretched in various lines, encompassing muddy drill fields and parade grounds. Secondary gravel roads and streets, their holes and low spots glinting back watery reflections of the winter sun, divided them. A few main arteries of asphalt, streaked with muddy vehicle tracks and smeared with the snail-like exudations off the feet of marching columns, weaved among them. Over everything lay a pall of coal smoke, adding to the mists. Far off over the huge rolling plain that seemed to begin at the foot of his building, but in fact began some two miles behind him out of visibility, clumps of taller treetops were apparent in the horizon-band of the woods. That was what all this area was like, before some astute citizen had got hold of his congressman and sold his piece of badlands to the government for a camp. Among the distant trees, way beyond the newest group of tarpaper hutments that they were building, geysers of black cloud rose silently, blowing up dirt and chunks of trees as heavy artillery units practiced range firing. Nearer in, companies and platoons and occasionally a full battalion of drab-clad men, helmeted and under slung arms, moved along the gravel streets of wet holes, exhaling streams of steam that matched the steam emitted by the strings of vehicles.
And Winch was, theoretically at least, the chief overseer of them all. At least until they left Second Army Command.
Everything had happened just as old T.D. Hoggenbeck had said it would. Just as old T.D. had envisioned it and set it up. The perfect sinecure. All you had to do was keep your nose clean.
It was everything Winch had dreamed about, back in his misspent youth, back when he was bucking for his first staff rocker, to add to his stripes. Now he had it.
Below his hands on the low sill a radiator sent a stream of hot air up at him. It merged with others, to warm the air of the office so that he would not feel the cold the men outside were feeling. Warmed enough to where his trim winter blouse with its new w/o insignias could be hung neatly over a chair back, the two rows of ribbons throwing color splinters.
Winch continued to stand at his windows, rapt.
If he had it, had it all so handily, so nicely, why didn’t it make him happy?
Two full divisions were under training out there. Getting ready to go to northern Europe—not Italy.
Two full divisions. That was 18,000 men. And God knew how many other single, autonomous QM and Ordnance and Signal units.
Winch could let himself think now about the allusion Alexander had made on the phone. Because Winch was looking right at it, out there. Canny, closemouthed, old Jack Alexander, the ex-pug, had alluded to the tightening-up that was going on in all of the services.
The same little thrill ran up Winch’s back again. The United States was finally going into Europe. The United States, helped by Great Britain, was going to invade France. A few thousand men involved with command knew it. The public announcement, and the command designations for it, was going to come any day now. Men like himself and Alexander were not even told and taken into the secret. But they knew. Just about everybody knew.
The public announcement wasn’t supposed to come until around Christmas time. But these civilian draftees out there in the winter mud of Camp O’Bruyerre knew where they were going, and what they could expect.
European invasion. There had been rumors of it as far back as September, before the Salerno landings. Light rumors and heavy talk had flowed up and down the corridors of Kilrainey General about it. Any man who went back to duty would be getting back just in time for it.
Now it was no longer rumor. It was definitely coming next spring or summer. In about six months or so. With it coming, as Alexander had pointed out, every service was tightening-up on AWOLs and insubordinations.
That was the time Landers had to pick to get himself in trouble. Still staring raptly out his windows at the steam-exhaling marchers, Winch watched the winter Mississippi rain begin to fall on them as the winter sunshine clouded over.
It seemed almost the last straw to lay on them. But a lot worse than that lay ahead of them. He wondered how many of them would die in the coming big affair. Go down, disappear forever. A lot.
Winch didn’t really care. His overlordship was only theoretical; on paper. And only temporary, at that. Let them die. Somebody had to.
He cared more whether Marion Landers got his ass in trouble. Just as he cared more about damned Bobby Prell. And his mess/sgt, Johnny Stranger.
Winch did not feel that strongly about the other old-company men. Perhaps it was because the rest had already been back awhile and had changed, before he and Strange and the other two had arrived. Or perhaps his life had become entangled with those three, on the long road back.
The three of them meant more to him now than all these other men outside his window, sweating and blowing steam like broken-down, ruined horses in the winter cold.
These others must have problems. And disrupted private lives. And wives, and kids, and maybe parents who lay awake nights worrying over them. Winch didn’t really give a damn.
Prell and Landers and Strange were what was left to him of his real life.
Somewhere down in the deepest part of his mind, in some place he wished neither to investigate nor explore, but consciously knew was there, was a strong feeling, a superstition, that if he could bring Strange and Prell and Landers through, without them dying or going crazy, and make them come out the other side intact, he himself might come through. And Winch’s nightmares had been getting worse and worse, lately.
It angered him into a fury, that Landers would let himself get into a bind at a time like this. Winch did not know whether he ought to get involved or not.
Even Jack Alexander didn’t want to be involved with it. Not right now.
Any fool should know better. Times like this were the times when everybody’s righteousness came into play. Every cheap, mean prick like that Hogan got all puffed up and went looking for a victim, just to make himself some points. Hell, even honest men couldn’t help doing it.
Maybe, probably, it would be good for Landers. Let Landers serve his three months, or six months, and learn a lesson.
That evening, after work at cocktail time, Winch cornered Col Stevens just the same, and held him captive against the bar at the Camp O’Bruyerre officers club.
Stevens knew about Landers and his special court, right enough. And he didn’t think much of it or of Landers. That came out at once, as soon as Winch brought the subject up. Winch did not bring the subject up until he had bought the old man at least three drinks.
Winch had learned long ago how to handle officers in their own terrain. And being a warrant officer, with club membership privileges and the right to mingle on privileged ground and be an equal, was only carrying the old principle one step further.
Respect was the secret. No matter what you really thought. All any old West Pointer wanted from you was the right to be fatherly. The higher the rank, the greater the father. All you had to do was keep on Sir-ing them, and not be cocky because you had moved up into officer country. Cockiness was something they watched for narrowly.
Respect. Not with obsequiousness, either, but with charm. Fortunately, Winch had not been standing behind the door when the charm was portioned out. He used all of it on Col Stevens. As he had been using it on everybody, since moving up into this rarefied atmosphere.
“He was one of your old outfit, I guess. Wasn’t he? On Guadalcanal?” Col Stevens said dubiously. He leaned against the bar familiarly, at his ease. He liked to come out here from town because of all the old West Point buddies he had in Second Army Command.
Winch was not unwilling to lie. When it was absolutely necessary. In a way, lying might be called the history of his life. “Yes, sir. Guadalcanal,” he lied. “But he was hit on New Georgia.”
Stevens nodded. That had to count. “We have a lot of men out there who’ve been hit on some island or some continent,” he added nevertheless, mildly.
“True, sir. And most of them are a little goofy for a while.”
“But not quite like that. Just what is your point, Mart?” Stevens picked up his glass, and smiled at it. “Do you mind if I call you Mart? I’ve heard a great deal about you, here and there.”
“My pleasure, sir,” Winch said promptly, and smiled his most charming smile. Till his jaws ached. “I’ve heard a good deal about you too, sir, or I wouldn’t have approached you. My point is, I hate to lose his ability and his intelligence. That’s it, in a nutshell.”
“Yes, of course there’s that,” Stevens murmured. “And what you tell me carries a lot of weight. I don’t want to do any good man in.” He shook his head. “But I’ve decided that I don’t intend to interfere. I don’t really think it’s my place.”
“Nor would anybody ask you to, sir. Least of all me,” Winch said. “But we all of us know, all us old Regulars, that the good civilian doctor Maj Hogan is—shall we say—a little overzealous.”
It was funny how you could pump yourself up till you fell into their way of talking; their language. It was just a different way of saying things. Less direct. But you had to be careful then not to overdo it, and let them catch you.
Stevens had smiled, then broken into an unwilling laugh, and now he blushed a little, embarrassedly. Cleared his throat.
“Hogan’s certainly not a Regular,” Winch said. “Nor does he know how to handle Regulars.”
“Your man Landers is not a Regular, either, I think, is he?” Stevens smiled.
“No, sir. He’s not. And as a matter of fact, he’s a three-and-a-half-year college student. That’s another reason I hate to see us lose him. But he acts more like a Regular than a draftee.”
“I don’t know what to make of a man like that,” Col Stevens said, his brows knitted. “He ought to be putting his shoulder to the wheel. Especially at a time like this.” He eyed Winch, narrowly.
“He probably doesn’t even know anything unusual is going on, sir,” Winch said.
“Everybody knows,” Stevens said. “Even my wife knows.” He bit his lip, then exploded. Politely. But his gray eyes, which matched his hair, flashed. “I’ve only had two courts-martial since I’ve been out there. And both were only summaries.”
“Well, there’s another way you could do it. You could bust him down to private, sir.” Stevens’ glass was on the bar, empty, and Winch signaled the enlisted barman for another. Stevens held up his hand and shook his head, demurring. Winch motioned the barman to bring the whiskey anyway. “If you don’t want it, somebody else will, sir.”
“You’re not drinking, yourself?”
“No, sir,” Winch said cheerily. “I’m not. I can’t. The doctors won’t let me. But don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t missed. I miss it like hell.”
The old man snorted his laughter softly.
The glass delivered, Winch suddenly stood away from the bar and held his arm out toward the room. It was getting more crowded now, more smoke-filled. “I’m not keeping you, am I, sir? I didn’t mean to do that,” Winch lied.
“No, no. No, no,” Stevens said. “Go ahead. I want to hear your point out.”
“Well, it wasn’t much, sir. I just thought that you could bust him to private,” Winch said. “He’s a buck sergeant, you know. I made him myself. He was my company clerk for a while. Before my battalion colonel stole him to make him his communications sergeant.” He smiled again. Winch did not wink, but he did something with his eyes that was almost that. To clinch it, he added, “That was only a few days before he was hit. The battalion colonel didn’t even have time to promote him.”
“I’m afraid busting him is beyond the authority I have,” Stevens said faintly. “These men are all transit casuals, you know. I don’t have unit authority over them. It would have to go all the way to Washington.”
“It would still be better than a court-martial, sir,” Winch said.
The colonel smiled. “I suppose it would at that,” he admitted. “But the point. You haven’t made any point, Mister Winch.”
“I don’t have any point, sir. At least, no point except the one I made, which is to save the man.” Winch studied his half-finished glass of ice cubes and grapefruit juice on the bar. “It did seem a little strange to me though that the first lieutenant who was involved, the other man in the fight, did not think it worthwhile to prefer charges himself.”
Stevens was staring at him, and continued to stare. “That’s true. You’re right. He didn’t, did he?” he said after a moment.
“Did you talk to him at all, sir?”
“No. No, I didn’t. Perhaps I ought to talk to him.”
Winch picked up his lousy grapefruit juice and drained the glass to the ice, staring straight ahead. “It might be worth a shot, sir,” he said as he set the glass down. “Under the circumstances.”
That was the way they left it. Winch knew when to quit. Col Stevens offered a promise that he would talk to the 1st/lt patient who was involved, tomorrow. Then he smiled a slightly crooked smile, before he spoke.
“You know something, Mart? I would be pleased to have had a commanding officer like you. I did have one, for a while once.”
“Why, thank you, sir,” Winch said, and put up all that he could raise of the humility they thought you were supposed to have, into his most loving, most respectful smile. All he could think of at the moment was how quick he could get the f*ck out of there.
“Did you ever think of trying for a commission?” Col Stevens asked.
“No, sir. I didn’t. I’m not sure my health would be up to it,” Winch smiled cheerily. “Anyway, why should I start taking orders from everybody as a second lieutenant, when as a w/o I can give them.”
Stevens smiled. “I suppose you’re right, at that.”
“I think so, sir,” Winch smiled, with the same cheery smile.
Outside, he walked to his little Dodge through the cold winter rain. It was still falling. The Dodge was in the middle of the big new asphalt parking lot for the club. Winch felt as though he had expended as much energy as if he had played the full sixty minutes of a football game, and his knees were shaking. In the car he turned on the windshield wipers and just sat a minute. Grateful he did not have to compose his face into a cheery smile, again. The lights from the club, where he could not stand to be, shone out at him and glinted across the wet asphalt, and prismed through the rain-smeared windshield glass, sardonically promising comfort where he already knew there was none. He could not remember ever having felt so desolate. He would have given everything he had ever owned for a drink, right now.
Out in the air the rain had felt good on his face but in the car he was chilled. He was wearing his new $150 tailored trench coat and one of those brimless overseas caps which were required by regulations now (called cunt cap by the troops, because of what the seam across the top made them think of). Ruefully Winch thought about the old campaign hats of before the war, and wished he had had one in the rain. The trench coat had a longer skirt than was usual and was green, the color that was “in,” now. The Dodge was the result of a deal Jack Alexander had engineered for him. In town in Luxor was a cozy apartment Alexander had known about, and Carol Firebaugh should be waiting for him there, soon. He should be saving his money, and not spending it on all this ritzy shit, Alexander had told him, or else how could he buy in on anything? Any of the deals?
After a while, he started the car and the heater and drove home to his quarters. In the tiny room he drank the two remaining glasses of white wine in a bottle he had there, and without taking off any of his clothes except the trim winter blouse, fell on the bed and went sound asleep.
He was awakened by the phone, ringing. He woke confused, thinking it was the sound-power field phone from the battalion command post; Col Becker. He was out in the big open field again. And f*ck Col Becker. Col Becker couldn’t help. Col Becker couldn’t even see them, from where Becker was. The mortars were falling on them fore and aft, again. He could see that from where he stood. He was shouting and waving at them frantically and screaming again, “Get them out of there! Get them out of there! Can’t you see what they’re doing? They’re bracketing in on them! Get them out of there!” He bit it back with his teeth, as he sat up and looked at the ordinary, everyday phone as if it were some foreign, alien object on the little bedside stand. Even from this far away, he could see the great white eyes of the platoons, white-white in their muddy faces, looking back at him. For help.
When he picked up the black phone out of its cradle, and cautiously asked who it was, clearing his throat so it would not sound husky, it was Jack Alexander.
He had not cried out. He was sure he hadn’t. As long as he didn’t cry it out loud, the sentence, as long as he didn’t tell anybody about it, or need to tell anybody about it, as long as nobody knew, he would be all right, he was sure he would be.
“Well, what do you want?” he said, more sharply than he had meant to say it.
“Don’t bite my head off,” the thick voice said. “I just called up to congratulate you. I don’t know what you said to the Old Man but you sure sold him.”
“I got him to promise to talk to that lieutenant,” Winch said.
“Yes. No, I don’t mean about Landers. I mean about you. I don’t know what you said, but he came away thinking you’re about the greatest guy that ever lived,” the voice said dryly.
“I didn’t tell him anything about me,” Winch said.
“I of course did not tell him the truth,” the heavy voice said coyly, in a ponderous try at a joke.
Winch tried to get hold of himself. “Yeah. I’m glad you didn’t give me away.”
Alexander didn’t waste breath on any laugh. “I’m to get hold of that lieutenant tomorrow. The Old Man even called me at home. But I’m on call to him all the time, anyway. So we’ll talk to the lieutenant tomorrow. Things are looking a good deal better for your boy Landers.”
“But what we’ve got to do is to get Hogan to withdraw all those charges. That’s the main thing.”
“That a*shole,” Alexander said. “He’s so anxious to get in good with Stevens, he’ll squat and strain if Stevens hollers ‘shit.’ Don’t worry about him.”
“Well, then it looks pretty good.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does. Say, listen, are you coming on into town tonight? Because—”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Winch said cautiously.
“There’s a couple of guys from out of town going to be here,” Alexander said. “Important guys. It would be a good thing for you to meet them.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Winch said. “But I’ll try to get in.”
“Do it if you can. We’ll be at my game at the Claridge. They carry a lot of weight in certain places. Know senators and people.” The voice seemed to know that he wasn’t going to come, anyway, but nevertheless felt required to go on and do its duty just the same. “Okay, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, otherwise.” The voice and the phone went dead.
Winch put the phone down and sat and looked at it. The nightmare, so familiar now in all its details, was as strong in his mind as the real conversation. He had no desire to be with Alexander tonight, and no intention of going to the Claridge. Desolation ran all through him and was like the taste of biting on some old copper coin, in his mouth. In this mood he wanted only to be with Carol.
His uniform was wrinkled from being slept in. He put the new winter blouse on over it anyway, without changing. Outside, it was still raining.
It was about thirty-five miles in to Luxor. In the rain, peering out through the slow fan of the wipers, it would take him fifty-five minutes, driving on the old-fashioned, white-concrete highway. Alongside the concrete ran the two-lane blacktop road the government was building. Together they would make a four-lane highway for the convoys into the city’s railroad station from O’Bruyerre. Winch settled into the driving, not wanting to think, wanting not to think. About Carol. Or about Alexander.
Alexander was right, of course, with his advice. There was nothing very tricky, or even very dishonest, about the way they were all making money. They did not do anything that your average businessman, after a government contract, didn’t do. Mostly it was just knowing the right people. Knowing the right people, and passing along or picking up the right piece of information at the right moment. Occasionally, very occasionally, it might mean slipping a small chunk of money along, too, at the same time.
But mostly it was just knowing the right thing to buy. And to buy at the right time you had to have money, cash. Somebody had to own the Coca-Cola and Budweiser delivery systems that carried all the Coke and beer to all the PXs in the area. Somebody had to own the beer and soft drinks distributorships that supplied them.
T.D. Hoggenbeck had explained it all quite clearly. Buy a bar, he had said. People will always drink. Come hell or high water, depression or boom. People will drink. But before you could buy a bar you had to have that kind of money. And Jack Alexander had the means of acquiring that kind of money. That was why T.D. had sent him to Jack. Jack had the contacts, he knew the people involved. Jack was also, Winch knew, dead right about his advice.
His advice, mainly, was to put by every nickel you could get your hands on. Then when the chance came to buy into some item, you would have the cash. Parts of enough such items, and you would begin to have the kind of money that could buy a bar, or two bars, or three, and pay off the politicians under the counter to get your package-store licenses, and pay for the high-priced licenses themselves. That was all there was to it. It was easy. And, all that was just exactly what Winch was not doing.
Alexander apparently knew there was some woman involved. But he did not know who Carol was. And he wasn’t interested in finding out. He wouldn’t even ask Winch about it. As far as Alexander was concerned, it had to be some woman. What else would make Winch spend all his cash like some drunken dockside sailor. Who she was did not matter.
“You’re going to regret it,” he would say mildly, with his scarred larynx. “Now is the time to buy in. These deals will all be gone, before long.”
Winch would always shrug, and promise that the next time he would have the money. Faithfully, Alexander would come and tell him when the next deal opened. Faithfully, Winch would say he didn’t have the cash again.
“A cunt aint worth it,” Alexander said phlegmatically.
Tacitly Winch agreed. A woman wasn’t. None of them was.
“If it wasn’t for old T.D., I’d write you off,” Alexander said mirthlessly. “And let you go to hell.”
Winch could not disagree with that, either. If it were not that he felt he owed T.D. some favors, Alexander would probably do it, too. But it was T.D. who had helped him put it all together.
It was not that Winch was buying Carol fur coats and jewelry. It was not even that he cared that much for Carol, or was madly in love with her. Winch knew, now, already, how all that was going to end.
Winch did not know where all the money went. He knew he spent it. Mainly it was spent in maintaining a certain life-style. A life-style which made his affair with Carol comfortable, and easy, for both of them. A life-style which made their affair, in a word not usual to Winch because he didn’t think that way, un-dirty. Un-grubby.
And underneath that truth was another truth, which was that Winch did not really give a damn. Down deep, half of him was glad whenever he could tell Alexander truthfully that he did not have the money for some deal. Half of him was pleased he did not have it. So why not dispense it all on and around Carol? What difference did it make? It was not that he expected some return from it.
Carol. She was quite an interesting girl, Carol was. In her own right. And so now, sitting over the wheel, behind the sweep of the wipers in the rain, he was thinking. Exactly what he had hoped not to do,
Was there ever a woman who did not always already have some man on the string, in her own right, that she was committed to? None. Or very damn few. They were just like men. The idea of being alone, really alone, terrified them. So they clung onto whatever man they had, until they found another that suited them better.
So, the only real alternative to taking a woman away from some other man (who might not want her any more than she wanted him, until he found her being taken away) was the rebound. And she was rare. A woman who had broken up with someone, and was really free. For a short while. Usually the life-span of a rebound did not exceed three months, at the outside. By then she would have found a new one. Rebounding was all in the timing. You had to know, quickly, when not to waste your time. Winch had been quite a rebounder in his day, back when women really meant something to him.
It was right after the first time he had gone down on Carol that she had first mentioned her boyfriend to him.
They were both lying nude on the bed in the Claridge hotel room. He had not yet taken the little apartment. Carol was lying all sprawled out flat, arms and legs spread wide, staring at the ceiling. “Most men don’t like to do that,” she said faintly.
Winch had to smile. “You mean, most American men. I suppose not. I like it. I like doing it, and I like giving pleasure.”
She had such a magnificent young body. Young breasts, flat hips, prominent crotch bone mound. So unworn by living.
“Why do you think they don’t like it?”
“Oh,” Winch said lazily. “I suppose it’s our American religious training. American Christianity. Sex is all scrambled up in with our religion. Evil, dirty, filthy. Guilt. It shouldn’t be. It’s all very primitive. Medieval. But it’s all tied in with our puritanism.”
“I never thought of it quite like that,” she said. He felt a certain pause of intensity in the air, before she spoke on. She was still staring at the ceiling. But stiffly now. “My boyfriend—up at school—doesn’t like it at all, and won’t do it,” Carol said.
Instinctively Winch sensed he was expected to react to this. A test balloon. From where he lay on his elbow, looking over, looking down at her, he saw her eyes roll toward him once, then flick back to her close scrutiny of the ceiling. Her one cockeye seemed to waver around for a focus up there, on it.
He smiled. “He won’t?” he said, easily. “He doesn’t?” He let a little pause develop. “Well, he’s very young yet.”
“Yes he is!” Carol said vehemently. Her eye focus never left the ceiling. “Did you ever go to a whorehouse?”
Winch had to laugh. “Me? Yes. Sure. A lot of times.”
“He goes to a whorehouse a great deal.”
Winch chewed on this a moment. He was, for no reason he could isolate, enjoying himself immensely. No jealousy, no anguish. No pain. “He probably tells you he goes a great deal more than he actually does,” he said.
“Why?”
“To show off.”
“It’s the only way I can climax,” she said. “What you did. Unless I play with myself.”
“In my experience, my vast experience,” Winch smiled, “very few women can come from simple f*cking.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, then?”
Winch shook his head. Climax. That must be one of her college words. He had noted that she never would say the word come. It had struck him, suddenly, that perhaps she might be lying to him about the boyfriend’s whorehouses. Could she be lying to him about the boyfriend, too, then?
She wasn’t lying. “I like to do it that way, too,” she said. “Like it. Like to do it. But I’d never dare try it, with him. Never dare even suggest it.”
“We can arrange that easy enough,” Winch grinned.
“Do you mind if I talk to you about him? Tell you about him?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
He had learned a great deal about him. Then, and since then. He had been Carol’s boyfriend, off and on, since high school. He was the second boy she had ever slept with. The first was a secret. Still a secret, even now. She had pretended to be a virgin with the boyfriend. She thought he had believed her. She had quit him once in high school for a while. For an older boy, a college boy. Then she had gone back to him. She had gone to Western Reserve up north largely on the suggestion of the college boy, who did not go to Reserve, but who was studying to be an actor. The boyfriend had followed her. He had intended to go to Mississippi down at Oxford. But he had found out he could study business administration at Reserve. And he said he could not stand to be away from her. At Reserve, she had left him twice, after stormy quarrels, but had always come back to him.
It had been hard for the boyfriend. The men of his family had always gone to Ole Miss. Once he decided to follow her, though, he had fought his family hard. But he was so insular. And so fixed. And stubborn. He was exactly like all the parts of Luxor she had wanted to get away from.
At school both times she had left him she had had affairs with older persons. Once with a senior boy, when she was a sophomore. Once with an English instructor, a married man, when she was a junior. Both, of course, had been impossible situations. Untenable. Both times the boyfriend had accepted her back, without any questions. He had been a perfect gentleman. Half of her, or some fraction less than half, had wished he had not been.
He always had wanted them to marry, as soon as they both graduated, when he came back home to go into business.
She had never agreed. She had refused to become engaged officially.
He was just so damned insular. When he was drunk, he was absolutely crude. That was when he talked about going to a whorehouse.
Lying naked on the bed beside Winch that first night she talked about him, Carol had suddenly blushed, all the way down into her breasts.
Once at a party, when he had gotten drunk and crude and jealous, and had passed out, in a fit of anger she had gone off with a lone dateless man, and had slept with him, outside, in the back seat of one of the cars. The boyfriend had never suspected.
“I’ve never told that to anyone.”
“It’s safe with me,” Winch smiled.
“I don’t want to be a Southern belle,” Carol said. She paused a moment thoughtfully. “But I’m afraid I’m a Southern belle, anyway.”
“You’re a beautiful Southern belle,” he said, emphasizing the descriptive adjective.
She raised her head off the sheet and looked appreciatively down along her nudeness, blushing again. “Not like in any of the War of the Rebellion lithographs, I’m not,” she said.
This had been in mid-November. And quite soon after, it came out that the boyfriend was coming home from school for Thanksgiving. She would not be able to see Winch for a few days. Perhaps a week. She hoped Winch would not mind. She hoped he would not hold it against her. She hoped he would not be jealous. And that it would not—change anything.
Winch had smiled. “No. It won’t. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”
“You won’t be lonely?”
“No, I won’t be lonely.”
Suddenly she laughed. “Damn you.”
He smiled. “Well, maybe I’ll be a little lonely.”
That was better, she had said. “You see, I can’t help being a Southern belle.”
When she came back from Thanksgiving, the first thing she said was that the boyfriend had said he “knew I had a lover.”
Winch laughed. “How do you think he knew?”
“He said he could tell by the way I acted. I was too happy. Of course, I denied it.”
And now the same thing had come up again lately, about Christmas. The boyfriend was coming home for Christmas vacation from school. She would not be able to see Winch for quite a while. Maybe three weeks. And of course by now Winch had the apartment.
“I’ll try to sneak away and slip off at least once,” Carol said.
“Don’t worry,” Winch had smiled. He was back to duty by now, out at O’Bruyerre, and busy in a very real way.
He did not really know what he thought about the boyfriend. He apparently was just a good, solid, generally good-natured, thoroughly f*cked-up, upper-class Southern boy. Winch certainly did not envy him his marriage to Carol—if and when it came to pass. And Winch felt pretty sure it would come to pass. He felt a certain sympathy for the boy, more than anything.
“He wants me to be like his mother,” Carol said about him once. “And at the same time, he halfway wants me to be his whore.”
“But if you’re his whore, you can’t be like his mother,” Winch smiled.
“Exactly!”
But it was curious Winch was not jealous. He wasn’t. The time she spent with the boyfriend at Thanksgiving did not bother him. He did not conjure up painful pictures of her in bed with him, and brood about them. Instead, he felt he was very lucky. More than anything. A lucky weekender.
Perhaps it was just age. And his physical condition. But, what the hell, he was getting it up with her now more than he ever had with any woman, for quite some time. She was blowing him well, he was teaching her. And he was blowing her well. Apparently. And the f*cking they had going was of a superior quality.
What better deal could a man of his years ask for?
Suddenly, a picture of his white-eyed platoons, wherever they were, blossomed in his head. And with it, screamingly, came up the single, silent sentence of his nightmare. Get them out of there! Damn it! Get them out of there! Winch bit it back. But on the wheel, his hands were slippery.
The apartment Alexander had found for him had been the biggest single item of expense. He had had to pay a large sum under the counter, in cash, to get it. The monthly rental was high. The next biggest item was the car Alexander had put him on to. And the black-market gas Alexander had made him privy to.
Lately, after her revelation of the expected Christmas visit, Carol had begun asking his advice about various things. This tickled a fatherly perversity in Winch. For the moment, it was the boy’s military status. He had a deferment, until he graduated in the spring. Then, his father had it fixed to keep him out on a bogus local deferment. But the boyfriend wanted to enlist right now. Quit school and enlist. It was going to be the big fight of their Christmas.
Winch had told her to tell him to stay out. Whatever else happened, stay the hell out. And if he did go in, he should get his father to get him some kind of a commission, preferably with a job in Washington attached to it.
Suddenly, under the wipers, a white picture formed on the windshield glass in the rain, as though it had been etched by Steuben or one of those big glassmakers. It interfered with Winch’s vision of the road in the headlight beam. Winch stared at it, engrossed, as it took clearer shape, and recognized it.
It was Jacklin. Pfc Freddie Jacklin? He was one of the men, one of the dead, from the platoons. The forever beleaguered platoons of Winch’s mind. The glass picture of him was an exact replica of the way Winch had seen him last. Winch had been going down the gently sloping forward slope of a knoll. Not much grass. Winch had glanced back once, a scanning look, before going into the jungle that came part way up. Jacklin had been lying there.
He was facing downhill, on his back, his head thrown back, one arm out one arm in, a grimace of intense effort on his face, above the open mouth and eyes, his big chest extended as if still trying vainly to draw air. Winch had not known where he was hit. Had not even known he’d been hit.
Now he was on the windshield, etched in white bevels and lines and grooves, and he was obstructing Winch’s vision. Wherever he moved his head or eyes, the figure moved in front of them. A f*cking obstructionist!
By peripheral vision Winch could see the car was edging toward the road edge. He tried to adjust his steering, but could not do it fast enough. The right front wheel, then immediately the right rear, caught in the soft, rain-soaked shoulder.
There was the scream of rubber, and the rending of metal, and then the car was halfway in the roadside ditch, front end down, but turned clear around and there was silence, the motor turning over and ticking in the quiet.
Automatically, Winch turned off the ignition. Then just sat in the stillness for a while. It was the first time any of his nightmares had actually impinged upon his outside physical world and affected it. That would bear some thinking about.
As he sat, he realized slowly that there was nobody at all around, anywhere.
Fortunately, he was able to back out. The metal damage was negligible, mostly a bent headlight, fender and bumper. He could still drive it. Luxor was still five miles off.
Nothing happened the rest of the way. As if satisfied, the figure of Jacklin did not return.
At the apartment, which was the upstairs of a private home downtown not too far from the Peabody, he parked the damaged car and hurried up the outside stairs in the rain to the upper floor.
Inside, Carol put down the book she was reading and stood up. All the lights were on, the way he liked it. She was fully clothed. She hated to undress herself or lie around half-nude, and always waited for him to come and do it. She looked very young. Incredibly young. She held out her arms for him to come and begin undressing her. Winch did so.
“What happened? What’s wrong?” she said when she saw his face.
Winch did not answer and buried his face in her young, un-wounded, hungry shoulder.
“Oh, whatever is going to become of us?” she said, in her emotional child’s voice.
“Nothing,” Winch said. “Hush. For God’s sake, just don’t talk.”