Whistle

Chapter 26


THERE WAS NO WAY not to be involved in it, for Landers.

They had had vague rumors about Mayhew. So they were not unprepared. And the night before, Prevor had talked to the company noncoms. But Landers was both stricken and infuriated by the sick, sad smile on Prevor’s face, the afternoon when Mayhew appeared in the orderly room to take over Prevor’s company.

The reason Landers had not gone to Prell’s wedding was that he was working. Now that he was a s/sgt and section leader on the 3516th’s T.O. he had a section to take care of as well. And all his late afternoons, which was when the wedding was, as well as his evenings, were spent teaching the cadre their jobs, and checking or doing over the paperwork of the day. To keep the 3516th with Prevor, and away from the Mayhews. His emotional commitments were no longer with Bobby Prell, they were with Prevor and the 3516th. Though he often felt Prevor had been unwise in giving him a staff sergeancy, and a section to handle.

But his heart went out to Prevor with a violent lurch, when Mayhew arrived.

At the same time a little thrill of recognition slid through Landers, exciting him. Here was something really happening. To somebody else. This wasn’t the heated imaginings of some psycho-neurotic. Here was a case of Hitler’s Germany, and the world of the Japanese, alive and kicking, breathing and well, in the good old US of A. Here was something that could be acted against. Landers’ excitement was almost greater than his sorrow for Prevor.

And next morning, when the company tumbled outside into the cold dark for reveille, the same sick, sad smile was on Prevor’s Mongolian face, when he was forced to stand as executive officer, five paces behind the new captain as the captain took the reports. By then Landers was in an outrage of righteous fury.

The night before the takeover Prevor had called his little clerk force and his mess sergeant and supply sergeant together in the orderly room (his cadre plus Landers, in effect), and given them a lecture and a little speech. Then he called the company noncoms together with them, and gave them another, slightly watered-down version.

He told them, in essence, that he did not want them to make any trouble. “I don’t know how much of your personal loyalty is to me. I’ve never asked. But I don’t want any of you to let personal loyalty to me get in the way of your loyalty to the company. That’s what’s important. We’ve taken a bunch of unattached, uncommitted fellows . . . not all of them too happy with what was happening to them”—he smiled his wry smile—“and we’ve made a dependable outfit with pride in itself and each other. Men who can depend on each other. That’s the best anybody can do, and we’ve done that. I don’t want to see us, the outfit, lose it. We’re getting a change of command, and a change of command means a change of style. That’s natural. But a change of style is only modal. It doesn’t affect the essentials, and we’ve got those. Let’s not lose that.”

Landers thought it was a nearly perfect speech. Prevor may have used a few big, intellectual’s words like modal that the rank and file would not know, but the quality was there, and the heart of it was the truth. Landers couldn’t fault him. He himself would certainly not have been so generous.

Prevor was a little less circumspect with the cadre. “I know you guys can cause him a lot of trouble, if you want to. I’m asking you personally, as a personal favor to me, not to do it. I don’t know what he’s like, any more than you do. But he can’t be all that different and bad.”

Landers found out, almost immediately, that this was wrong. What Mayhew was like was about as bad as you could get.

He was one of those tough-guy officers. The ones who would not ask their men to do anything they wouldn’t do. The trouble was Mayhew would do anything. And he had a company of men who could do very little, and wanted to do even less. He apparently never understood this. His arrogance was insufferable.

He, too, made a little speech. It alienated the company immediately. His central theme was: “We have played around enough. We are going to shape up around here.” In the first place, they hadn’t been playing around. In the second, they knew there was nothing much to shape up. He was not talking to a bunch of green men. He was talking to men who had been through the mill, over and over and back again. Nevertheless Mayhew expanded on this at some length to the company standing at attention on the freezing parade ground. Mayhew did not stand at attention but moved around, and a couple of times even slapped himself with his arms against the chill. When he did stand at attention, for a little while, nobody gave a damn.

Mayhew had come up from the ranks, he told them. So he knew how enlisted men thought. So nobody need expect to get by with anything. Landers, standing at attention and listening, had a vivid mental picture of the crowds of heads Mayhew must have stepped on, crushing a number, during his climb.

He must have been on the defensive. Coming into an outfit with a relatively well-liked commander and taking over, as he was. But it did not matter. Certainly not to Landers. And not to much of anyone else. The result was only to make Prevor, who had not been all that well-loved really, seem like a saint.

One of the things that distressed the whole company more than anything else was the leaving of Prevor in it as its executive officer. There was no need to have done that. There was no way the former commander could avoid losing face, in such a position. Simply being there, with nothing to do, was a loss of face. That Mayhew was a captain, and therefore able technically to come in over Prevor, meant nothing to the company. Whatever it meant to Second Army. The company had to look at Prevor’s face. And it made them angry. The whole deal offended them, and offended their sense of fair play. Even Second Army should have known better than to do that. That was not the kind of reward a man should receive.

The company began to disintegrate immediately. Performance levels dropped in the training exercises. Formations became sluggish. Bickering and insubordination with noncoms grew. And the noncoms did nothing about it. There were always plenty of ways to drop a monkey wrench in the machinery and not get caught, and everybody now had the same common enemy. When Prevor had made them do stupid things, like the basic training, they had had Second Army to hate. Now they blamed Mayhew. Guilty or not. And were swiftly on their way back to being an unorganized gang of malcontents.

Landers sat back and watched and kept his mouth shut. He still had in front of him his tacit promise to Prevor not to make trouble. But he felt ready to make trouble.

The second or third day after his takeover Mayhew had called him into the commander’s office for a private talk. “We have some things we have to straighten out,” was the way he began.

The commander’s office had changed. Under Prevor it had been a place where the noncoms dropped in for a cup of hot coffee and a discussion. Now noncoms were not welcome, and the coffee was reserved for officers. Unfortunately, the only telephone was in there and Landers or the 1st/sgt had to go in there to use it. But the coffee was not free even to the clerk force.

“I know what a key man you are around here, Sergeant,” Mayhew said from behind his desk, “You have not,” and he smiled, “escaped even the eyes of Second Army.

“But I am not happy with that rating you wear. The rating for an assistant clerk on the T.O. is a corporal. You’re on the T.O. as a section sergeant. But you’re not really handling the section you’re assigned to. You’re mostly in here, doing clerical work. We’re going to have to do something about that. Lt Prevor was inclined to be sloppy with his designations.” He smiled again.

Landers did not trust himself to answer for a moment. Rage was charging through him. “Yes, sir,” he said evenly, after a few seconds. “I suggest you bust me back down right away, then. I didn’t ask for the rating I’m wearing. And in fact, didn’t want it. You can bust me to corporal, and I’ll function as your assistant clerk. Or you can bust me down to private and I’ll go back to straight duty.

“Matter of fact, I’d just as soon be a private doing straight duty, in your outfit, sir.”

Mayhew’s face could not help registering surprise. Then it stiffened sharply. “No. That’s not what I want. You will continue as you are. We’ll see about all the rest, later. Do you think the first sergeant and clerk are capable of handling their jobs yet?”

“No, sir,” Landers said. “They’re certainly not. Nor are the mess sergeant and supply sergeant, without help.”

“Then I want you to keep on what you’re doing. Forget about your section and spend your time teaching the cadre. That’s all, Sergeant. You’re dismissed.”

“Yes, sir,” Landers said. Then he decided to be sarcastic. “Thank you, sir.” But it appeared lost on Mayhew.

Landers had to go somewhere by himself and sit down to cool off. Was the man stupid? Was he some important person’s nephew? He clearly knew, from Second Army if from no other, how much Landers had done and was doing to keep the 3516th running. Then why go out of his way to antagonize a man he needed?

From that moment on there was a sort of generic hatred between them, hidden and covered up by Landers, but open and openly expressed by Mayhew. Landers began to slack off in his evening work, and evening teaching. There was no way in the world Mayhew or anybody could order him to do office work after supper, not without risking an investigation. Anyway, the 1st/sgt and clerk did not relish working evenings, unless pressed to it by Landers. Besides, Mayhew kept the commander’s office locked by key, and that was where most of the work material was. Landers began going to movies in the evenings, or getting drunk on beer at the small sectional local PX, or just sitting around thinking about women. The lack of women was beginning to get to him now, after all these weeks.

One time he was able to talk to Lt Prevor about it, out in the freezing cold company area, just at dusk one freezing cold evening. Landers wanted to be released from his tacit promise not to make trouble. Prevor reluctantly released him, but at first refused to.

“What do you mean, make trouble? What more trouble can you make, if you’ve stopped teaching the cadre? Anything more would have to be open sabotage of the office work. You can’t do that.”

“I can quit. Go back to straight duty as a private,” Landers said. “That would make plenty of trouble.”

“But you’d be cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“You don’t want to go back to straight duty.”

“I wouldn’t mind straight duty. Tossing gas cans around in the trucks would be heavenly, compared to working for that son of a bitch.”

“You wouldn’t feel like that after you’d been doing it a little while,” Prevor said.

There was something else, too, he could do. But Landers instinctively shied away from mentioning it to Prevor. He could go over the hill: desert. That could cause Mayhew the worst trouble. Landers felt like laughing. But he did not want to mention it to Prevor. Anyway, after talking to Prevor, he did not feel quite so bad. Although Prevor in effect released him from the so-called promise, he decided not to do anything for a while.

It was the f*cking telephone that was the last straw, and finally drove him over the line. Since the beginning it had been situated in the company commander’s office. In the days of Prevor it had not been a problem. When it rang, whoever was near it picked it up and answered it. Since his very first arrival Mayhew had taken to never answering the phone personally. Even when he was in his office alone at his desk, where the phone sat, doing nothing, he would call out, “Sergeant, get the phone.” And whoever was in the outer office, usually Landers or the clerk, would have to stop whatever work they were doing and go into the commander’s office and answer it. Just about always the call was for Mayhew.

One day, a week after Landers’ talk with Prevor, Mayhew did this, “Sergeant Landers, get the phone,” and Landers exploded. That the explosion was entirely internal did not make it any less powerful. Maybe it made it more. Mayhew was leaning back in his swivel chair with his boots up on his desk, smoking one of his cigars. It seemed to Landers that he looked at Landers with hatred and amused contempt.

After he had answered it (it was for Mayhew) and handed it over, he went back to his own desk in the outer office and sat looking at his trembling hands. “What’s the matter with you?” the cadre clerk whispered nervously. He had been looking at Landers more and more nervously, lately. “Are you all right?”

“Me?” Landers said. “Me? Fine. Just fine. I’m just fine. Why?”

It was nearly five-thirty and quitting time, and when Mayhew left, locking the inner office, and the 1st/sgt and the others left the outer office, Landers did not even go back to the barracks but walked through the cold down to the little local PX and from one of those freezing cold little pay telephone booths outside under the front door floodlights, called Johnny Stranger in Luxor at the Peabody suite.

“I’m coming in,” he said, the phone beginning to shake against his ear with cold. “I want you to have everything ready for me.”

“You’re what?” Strange asked. “Have you got a pass?”

Landers did an abrupt about-face. He hadn’t even been thinking about Strange. Strange would only try to talk him out of it, if Strange knew he was going over the hill. “Of course,” Landers said scornfully. “Do you think I’d come in if I didn’t have a pass? Is Mary Lou there?”

There was some rustling.

“I’m taking off,” Landers said harshly, as soon as she came on. “I’m going over the mountain. Do you want to run away with me? Have you got someplace to go?”

“You’re what, you’re what?”

“Hush!” Landers barked. “I don’t want Strange to hear this. Or even know about it. Are you where he can hear you?”

“No. No, I’m in the bedroom.”

“Then, listen. I’m skipping. Pulling out. Do you want to go away somewhere with me?” She must have somewhere she could take him that was safe, some home, some place.

“But, Marion, I can’t do that,” Mary Lou wailed. “I’ve got a boyfriend. I’m in love. He’s on his way up here, right now. We’re going to get married, I think. We’re—We’re in love.”

“Oh,” Landers said, “well.” He stopped, at a loss. It had not occurred to him Mary Lou would not go, and he had no other resources. He should have guessed it about Mary Lou. But there must be somebody. In the world. Who was willing to hide him. The cold was beginning to get to him so badly his teeth were chattering into the phone. But he couldn’t think of anyone.

“I could maybe get Annie Waterfield for you,” Mary Lou said. “She’s back.”

“Is she there?”

“No. But she’s supposed to be coming over. I could try to get hold of her for you.”

“You have her phone number?”

“I have her home number here in town.”

“All right, get her for me. And I mean, get hold of her. Don’t f*ck around. Don’t tell her I’m going AWOL. I want to tell her. But you get hold of her for me, hear? Or I’ll—Now, give me Strange. And keep your mouth shut. To Strange and everybody.”

Cold as he was, and shaking uncontrollably, he talked to Strange for several minutes, to kill Strange’s suspicions. If he had any. It appeared that he had some, and when Landers hung up he did not think he had allayed any.

He was too cold now to stand out on the cab stand and wait for a cab. He went inside the little local PX and drank three cold mugs of beer at the bar. They warmed him and gave him some spirit. He had a full half pint of whiskey back at the company barracks, and wished he had brought it, but did not want to go back there after it. Lucidly he had on his regular ODs and had his GI overcoat, instead of a field jacket uniform.

The little local PX, one of five on the big post, was nowhere near the size of the big main PX beer hall. But it still had plenty of room, and plenty of beer drinkers. It was warm and funky with the smell of tobacco smoke and damp GI wool and stale beer. There was a magnificent feeling of safety in numbers about it and its crowded interior. It was an illusion. But at least these guys here, bitter and sour or happy and acting up, were on the right side of the line. They would at least die in bunches and groups, not alone. Landers had a distinct feeling of hating to leave its warmth, as he buttoned up his GI overcoat and turned up its high collar. He went outside.

It was a long, chill ride in the taxi. There was no trouble getting out of the post’s main gate, in a cab. He found nobody had kept their mouths shut to anybody, when he got to the Peabody.

Rather than argue it out with Strange, Landers claimed his rights with Annie Waterfield first. Mary Lou had gotten hold of her and she was there waiting. Nobody could argue against that with him. When they had locked themselves in the bedroom, he thought he had better tell Annie the truth. Until they made their way to the door and got inside, and shut the door and locked it, he took refuge in the statement that he was only taking a little AWOL vacation of a few days, or maybe a week, and that he was being covered for, in his company. But inside he told Annie the truth.

He did not tell her before the sex was taken care of, though. Annie had her own rights. “You’re in much better shape than you were before you went out to O’Bruyerre,” she said, running her hands over his bare shoulders. Landers had to admit he did not require much urging, mental distress or not. After they had sixty-nined awhile and come that way, and he had gone down on her while she had a multiple orgasm of at least two or three, he f*cked her and came again himself and they lay on the bed side by side replete while he fondled one of those gorgeous breasts.

“Have you got any money?” she said.

“A little over eight hundred dollars. In a bank.”

“That should last us a week or ten days,” Annie said. “We can go up to St. Louis.”

“I can probably get a few hundred more off of Strange,” he said.

“Say two weeks, then,” she said. She sat up and leaned on her elbow, and her young breast became heavy in his cupped palm. “But I have to say,” she said, looking down at him, “that I don’t think it’s such a good idea. I don’t think you ought to do it, Marion. Besides.”

“Besides, what?” Landers said.

“Besides, I’ve got this trip to New Orleans I can take, if I don’t go with you. That’s what. I’ve got this Navy flyer I met here who’s being transferred to New Orleans. He wants me to go down there with him and stay three weeks or a month. I hate to give that up to go off with you, with practically no money, and the chance of you getting picked up always hanging over our heads. I have to admit it.

“Have you got anyplace we could go and be safe? Some kind of refuge, or place only you know about? That was more what I had in mind.”

She didn’t answer. She continued to sit, leaning on her elbow. “Don’t do that. I’m trying to think.” She took his wrist and moved his hand away from her breast.

“You know,” she said, “it’s kind of crazy, but I do have a place like that. I don’t go there much.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s my dad’s.”

“No good,” Landers said. “If somebody here told on us, that you were with me, that’d be the first place they’d look.”

Annie’s voice trilled with a young, bright laughter. “And a f*ck lot of good it would do them. My dad’s the sheriff.”

It was almost square in the middle of west Tennessee, way west of Nashville. No cities around anywhere. Did Landers have any idea how country west Tennessee was? There was no reason why Landers couldn’t go up there and stay as long as he liked. All she would have to do would be to call her dad, and give Landers a note to him. Her daddy had been sheriff there since before she could remember. Actually, since the county law was that a sheriff could not succeed himself, her daddy and his number-one deputy traded places every four years, and the deputy would be sheriff for a term. “But there’s never any question who the real sheriff is,” Annie laughed. “That’s my daddy.” Barleyville was the county seat, her hometown. “A great name,” she laughed, “for the county seat of a dry county. In Barleyville, the saying goes, there’re two kinds of people. Baptists and drunks.” There were also a lot of Holy Rollers.

“It doesn’t sound like the swingingest place in the world,” Landers said.

“You’d be surprised. Booze and juke joints may be illegal, but there are plenty of them around,” Annie laughed. “And my daddy knows them all. He owns half of most of them.”

“Any Army camps around there?”

There was one. Fort Dulane. About fifteen or twenty miles from Barleyville. But that wouldn’t matter. Her daddy would know every provost marshal and MP there. “He’ll get you a pocketful of blank pass forms, if you want them,” she laughed.

“But you wouldn’t be going with me,” Landers half asked.

“No, I don’t think so.” She really wanted to make this trip down to New Orleans. And she didn’t go up to Barleyville much any more. She had taken a boyfriend up there for a week a couple of different times, but it upset her daddy so and made him so sad she had about stopped it. “And if I go up there alone, there’re five or six old flames of mine from back in high school, who come buzzing around like bees around a sugar cube,” Annie laughed. Her bare breasts swayed deliciously, and quivered. “Of course, they’re all of them married, if only to stay out of the draft. It tends to create a certain havoc. While I’m there.”

Landers studied her. “Do you f*ck them?”

Annie laughed again. “Well, it doesn’t really matter if I do or not. Believe me. It doesn’t.”

“I guess not.”

“I have,” she said. “Have f*cked them all. At one time or another. In the past. And all that kind of upsets daddy, too.”

She got up off the bed and went to the spindly little hotel desk and got a sheet of hotel stationery out of its drawer. Carefully she tore the hotel letterhead off the top, using the big desk blotter edge as a straightedge. Then she tore off the bottom line that carried the hotel’s name, address, and phone number. She held what was left up to the light. While she did all this, she went on talking gaily, about her family.

“I never knew a man who understands women like my daddy. But maybe that’s natural, with him having four daughters.” She was nineteen, her next youngest sister sixteen. The two younger ones, who had come along ten years later, were now nine and eight. “Love babies,” Annie laughed. “You know. When people almost break up and then get back together, they often have a baby or two.” That was what happened to her folks. Her daddy had had a mistress, or at least that was the local story. Now they were separated, though still married, and her mother lived on the other side of town with the two younger girls in a fine old expensive brick house, and was the mistress of one of the local politicians who was a bigwig in the state senate in Nashville. His wife, a Barleyville girl, and their kids lived in Nashville. Loucine, the sixteen-year-old sister, lived with their daddy in their big old house across town that their daddy had bought for them when Loucine was born. Loucine, at the moment, was about eight months pregnant and still unmarried.

“Sounds like a wild wide-open place, Barleyville. For a country town,” Landers said from the bed.

Annie stopped writing the note to her father and looked up, nude, her face laughing. “Are you kidding, country town? It’s country people who really know what people are like. That’s why they’re all Baptists.”

“Or drunks,” Landers said.

“Or drunks.” She finished the note, and signed it and folded it up. “I don’t want to put this in a hotel envelope,” she said. “It would just make daddy sad. Will you get a plain white envelope and put it in it?”

Landers took it and put it away carefully. When he looked back up, Annie still in the desk chair, still nude, had begun to laugh outrageously. “What’s the matter, now?” he said.

“Nothing. Nothing. Just laughing. I was just thinking how you won’t be there three days probably, before you’ll be f*cking my pregnant sixteen-year-old sister. Old Loucine.” She began to laugh again.

Landers felt shocked. “Oh, no. No, no. I wouldn’t do something like that.”

“I don’t see how you’re going to avoid it.” She stared at him, her face grinning more. “You’re shocked,” she said.

Landers felt irritated. “No, I’m not. Not shocked.” He made himself grin. “But I don’t want your daddy the sheriff to throw down on me with his shooting iron.”

“My daddy would be more likely to throw down on you if you didn’t,” Annie laughed. “I told you he understood women, didn’t I? Well, women are going to get love made to them. One way or another. And it doesn’t matter what they call it. Or if they don’t call it at all. Or don’t mention it even, which is more likely. Well, my daddy was born knowing that, from a baby. I guess that’s why women have always found him so attractive.”

Landers found he had no answer.

“Come on,” Annie said. “We might as well get dressed. I still have to call daddy for you.”

“Listen, don’t call from out there. I don’t want Strange and those others—”

“Don’t worry. I read your plans. You don’t want Johnny Strange to know where you are, or to tell your Sergeant Winch.” She smiled. “In actual fact, I was planning on taking you home with me to my place. I’ll call daddy from there, and you can listen. Then I thought I’d see you off at the bus station.”

“Well,” Landers said, at a loss, “fine. But why are you so nice to me?” He felt perturbed. There had been whiskey available up here at the suite, and now he had drunk enough to make his courage considerably reinforced. But he was upset by the extravagance of her help. It made him want to look around for exits. “Why?” he said, and made himself grin. “Tell me why?”

Annie laughed. “I suppose it’s partly because I’m not going to Barleyville with you. I feel a little guilty.” She paused. “But I’ve had to run a couple of times in my life,” she said more seriously, “and I know what it’s like. Especially if you have no place really to run to.”

“Let’s get something straight,” Landers said stiffly. “I’m not running anyplace. I’m leaving an untenable position.”

“That was what I meant,” Annie smiled. “Besides, you’re a nice boy.” She took a deep breath, and sighed. “But before you go through with this, I wish you’d think twice, Marion.”

“I’ve thought twice,” Landers said shortly. “More than twice.”

While they dressed, she went on talking to him, about her sister Loucine. Now that they were moving, Landers wished that she would shut up about it all. It was as if having once got started talking about her family, she did not want to stop. Loucine had come down here to Luxor for a while to stay with her, she said, when the baby began to show, but Loucine had hated Luxor. After two months she had gone back home, to face it out. She preferred that to staying in Luxor.

“Nobody said anything to her?” Landers asked, tying his shoes.

Annie laughed. “What are they going to say? They’ve all seen unmarried pregnant girls. About as many as married.” She was putting on her lipstick. “You know, times have changed, even since you’ve been away overseas. This old war has changed everything a lot.”

Landers guessed that was true, but didn’t care very much. He did not answer her. “Now you just let me handle Strange,” he said.

But it wasn’t that easy to handle Johnny Stranger. Landers pretended that he was just going off somewhere for a few days with Annie, and that he was being covered for in his outfit at O’Bruyerre, but Strange wasn’t buying that.

“Listen, you crazy son of a bitch, Landers. I know exactly what you’re trying to pull. And you’re never going to get the f*ck by with it. They’ll trace you down, and they’ll get you. They’ll get you, and they’ll do you in. So I’ll goddamn follow you, if I have to.” He reached and grabbed his own GI overcoat. “You crazy son of a bitch, I’ll follow you and camp right outside your f*cking doorstep, until you come back.”

By this time it had all become a big joke to just about everybody in the suite, except Strange and Landers.

“You can’t do it. You’ll never get away with it,” Strange half shouted. “You’re ruining your f*cking life. I’m not going to let you.”

Several people tried to shout him down. In the end Landers had practically to tear himself out of Strange’s arms, to get out of the door. It was only through the ministrations of Annie, plus some help from Frances Highsmith, that Strange was kept from following.

“I’m only taking him to my place, Johnny. I promise I’ll call you from there. I swear I promise.”

“Where is this place that’s your place?” Strange demanded, shouting. “Nobody knows where the f*ck you are. I’d never find him.”

“No. And not just anybody’s going to know, where my place is. Either,” Annie said. “A girl’s got to have some privacy. In her life. Around this stinking mess.”

It was only on the strength of the promise to call that they were finally able to get outside.

And they did call him, after Annie had talked to Charlie Waterfield in Barleyville. Strange insisted on talking to Landers. Landers talked to him for five minutes, but was unable to convince him he was only taking a small AWOL vacation. He could only get off the line by promising faithfully that he would call tomorrow.

“I hate to lie to him,” he said heavily, when he finally hung up.

“Come on,” Annie said. “If you don’t hurry, we’ll miss your bus.”

At the bus station he waved to her in the sea of faces until the bus turned out from the stall, and her face swung away with the others into invisibility. Then he was off on his single-handed, one-man adventure, alone. As soon as she was out of sight, it was curiously as if she had never existed. And deep down, he felt very righteous and very Christian, if a little sick.

But he couldn’t help wondering what kind of a looking guy Charlie Waterfield must be.