Chapter 28
THERE WAS AN AWFUL, frightening depth to the depression that hit Landers when the taxi from Luxor carried him back inside O’Bruyerre. The sprawling, grimy, coal-smoke-smeared, mud-greased areas of the huge camp stretched for miles. From miles away, the pall of coal smoke that hung above it was visible like a flat, gray umbrella. The place seemed to have grown in even the weeks Landers had been away.
To come back into it as an unidentifiable nonentity among tens of thousands of other nonentities was unbearable.
And yet, under the depression was the orange-colored pick of excitement in his chest, as his frantic adrenal glands poured into him the juices for his coming combat. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
Landers hated himself for coming back to it when he could have stayed away. But he could no more have stayed away than he could have changed himself into a genuine deserter.
There had been no trouble getting in, at the main gate. On the ride out from town he had thrown away the precious block of blank pass forms, in case he should be searched, and kept only the current one, filled out for the past three days. But the MPs at the gate paid no attention to him, and he hadn’t even needed it.
Once back inside under his own steam he was no longer a deserter. He was only an AWOL.
Once inside, he told the driver to drive him right on down to the 3516th’s barracks. After the expense of the ride out from town, it didn’t cost that much more. In Luxor, he had not even gone around to the Peabody to see Strange, partly out of shame for having lied to him, but partly because he did not want Strange to get on the phone to Winch, and have Winch involved with planning his return. But now some instinct of self-preservation, once he was back inside on his own, made him change his mind about Winch.
He told the driver to take him up to the Second Army Command building, instead. The numbers of men and vehicles and amounts of matériel that were on the move in the camp were overwhelming. When they passed the section of camp where the old Division had been which had left for England, he saw that a totally new Division with a different patch had moved in.
On the third floor of the Command building, Winch came out to get him. He led him past the acre and a half of clerks outside his private office, then shut the door and looked at him with a somber grin.
“So you’re back.” His voice sounded strangely faint.
“Back,” Landers said. “Yeah. I’m back.”
“At least you got back on your own hook. That will help some.” Winch hauled the bottle of Seagram’s up out of its desk drawer. “Make yourself a drink.”
Landers had intended to refuse a drink. But now it was in front of him, he accepted. “Thanks,” he said stiffly. It was so hard to know at any given time exactly what Winch was really thinking. It always had been. “Just how much do you know about all this?” he asked.
Winch stared at him a moment, with what appeared to Landers to be irritated disbelief. Then he said mildly, “I only know what Johnny Stranger told me when he phoned. And what Mayhew told me.”
“Mayhew!” Landers said. “You know Mayhew?”
“I went down there and talked to him, after I talked to Strange.”
“A shit,” Landers said. “An absolute shit.”
“Listen,” Winch said, “wake up. I’ve known everything about you since you went to that outfit. Where do you think those fouled up Morning Reports came, when those boys filled them out? Who do you think sent them back? Where do you think that payroll came, before it went on to Finance?”
“I don’t know,” Landers said with bravado. “Where? Here?”
“Do you have any idea at all of what is going to happen to you?” Winch said.
For the first time since he had come in the outside door, Landers looked at him seriously, the way he should have first looked at him. Winch looked pallid to him. He had lost the too thin, sharp look he had had. His face looked heavier, and his paunch had begun to come back. Office life was agreeing with him. Or wasn’t agreeing with him.
Landers grinned. “No. I don’t.”
“Mayhew wants to make an example of you. He’s going to send you to the stockade, and have you transferred overseas immediately, as a replacement. A recalcitrant replacement, is what they call them, secretly.”
“Fine,” Landers said. “Even better than I’d hoped.”
“You got any idea what it’s like to be shipped overseas like that? I don’t have to go into it, do I? A new outfit? You don’t know anybody? The dirtiest jobs. The most dangerous assignments. You’ll be on probation. No rewards, or thanks. No f*cking Medals of Honor. You’re a marked man.”
Landers made himself grin. “All this was your idea?”
“I tried my level best to talk him out of it. To no avail. You hit him right where he lives. His outfit has fallen apart all around him.”
“Well,” Landers said. “At least there’s that. Second Army will—”
“Second Army will nothing. Mayhew is the favorite pet of some clique at Second Army HQ in Luxor. Nothing’s going to hurt him.”
“What about Prevor?”
“Prevor? If Prevor’s lucky, he’ll be sent overseas with the outfit, as Mayhew’s exec. If he’s unlucky, he’ll be reassigned right here. If Prevor’s very lucky, he’ll be able to hang on overseas until that fool Mayhew gets himself killed, and then Prevor will reinherit his old outfit and, if it isn’t totally ruined, make it back into something. But you won’t be there to see any of it.”
“I don’t care,” Landers said, and forced another grin. “At least I’ll have made that a*shole Mayhew think a little.”
“No. Men like Mayhew don’t think much. They more run on pure instinct, like a dog does. The only trouble is, right now all that instinct is in hatred, and directed right at you.”
Winch suddenly turned clear around, turning his back on Landers, and sat down at his desk. He appeared to be breathing heavily. Angrily, Landers thought. But after a moment he leaned back in his expensive-looking swivel chair and appeared to grow calmer. Landers wanted to kick him in the balls.
“There’s only one way to get you out of this,” Winch said.
“Yes?” Landers breathed, sarcastically. “How?”
“We’ve got to get him to agree to let you go up to the hospital first, for a few days.”
“Hospital? What for?”
“For observation,” Winch said, calmly. “Before he sends you to the stockade.”
“Oh, no,” Landers said. “Oh, no.” He was standing, but he thought he was sitting down. So that when he put his hands behind him and pushed, and jumped up to his feet, he actually simply jumped straight up in the air and came back down on his heels. It looked peculiar, to say the least. “No, sir. Not me. You’re not going to pull any of that shit on me.”
“Well,” Winch said reasonably, “it’s either that, or off you go to the stockade immediately.”
“Not me,” Landers said. “No, sir. I’m not going to play psycho. Not for you. Not for anybody.”
“Well,” Winch said, “there’s not much to doing it.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to go about it.”
“Just act crazy,” Winch said. He was staring at him mildly. His face was wide open, receptive.
“Mayhew’s the one who’s crazy, not me,” Landers raged. “Look at the way he came into that outfit, and balled it all up. Antagonizing everybody.”
“I agree. But unfortunately we don’t have any way to handle Mayhew,” Winch said. The blandness left his face, and it knotted up. “Listen,” he hissed, “I haven’t mothered you f*ckers, and babied you, all this time and all this way, for you to go and get yourself into a sure-death situation. I won’t goddam f*cking put up with it. See?”
“Do you really think I could do it?” Landers said. Despite his bravado, he did not really want to ship out like that. He knew what it meant, as well as Winch. What he wanted was to creep into somebody’s arms, and be held. “You really think I could?”
“Tell them about your nightmares,” Winch said, his face calm again.
Vaguely, Landers wondered how Winch knew about that.
“Now listen,” Winch said, fast. “You go on down to your outfit. Take one of these camp cabs, outside the office here. No use in walking up, and letting them spot you a mile off. You go straight on in to your own barrack, to your own bunk. You fall out for the next formation, just like you never were away,” Winch looked at his watch, “next formation ought to be evening chow. If they don’t come for you, you fall out for evening chow. Okay?”
Before Landers could answer or even knew what was happening, Winch had him by the arm and was shooing him out. “I’m going to call Mayhew. And ask him to meet me. I’ll talk to him as best I can. I think he will agree. Okay? Now, scoot.”
“I can’t do it,” Landers said hopelessly, at the door. “I don’t know how to act crazy.” Once again he thought how impossible it was ever to know what Winch was thinking.
“Well, just try,” Winch said, looking at him. From the doorway, he watched Landers thread his way out through the desks and desks of clerks.
He went back inside and called Strange at the Peabody. He wasn’t sure Strange would be there, but after a moment Strange came on.
“I got him to go,” Winch exulted. “He’s agreed to go up to the hospital. Now I’ve got to talk f*cking Mayhew into sending him.” He listened as Strange gabbled on, on the phone. “Hold it, hold it.” Strange asked an urgent question. “No, I don’t think there’s any doubt they’ll think he’s crazy. I think he’s crazy.” Suddenly Winch felt like giggling. He suddenly wanted to let his voice go deep and begin to talk gibberish, in a profound tone, to Strange on the phone. “Listen, I can’t talk now. I’ve got to call Mayhew. I’ll call you later. Will you be there?” He hung up and asked the operator to get him Mayhew at the 3516th.
In his way Winch had been preparing Mayhew for this moment. Mayhew had been belligerent, and excessively aggressive, at their first meeting. Winch had made himself stifle his own natural anger until he could get a fix on things. What he found out was that Mayhew was surprised and a little shaken that Landers would dare to go AWOL on him. Mayhew was much more concerned with what Second Army HQ would think of Mayhew. And Mayhew was more than a little impressed that the famous W/O Mart Winch would come to talk to him about it. Winch had let him run on a little bit and simmer down, then he had hit him with the story of Landers, Mayhew, and the telephone. Strange had told it to Winch. The reaction on Mayhew was phenomenal. His neck got visibly thicker, and he began to bristle again. Not a man who took well to criticism. At least not from anyone not his immediate superior.
Winch had all this well in mind, when he telephoned him this time. He said only that he had news of his wayward AWOL. And he suggested they meet at the officers’ club bar. Mayhew said he would meet him right away.
Winch had the barman set them up at a two-table off by itself, where they could talk. But it wasn’t where they would not be seen. It was just at the close of the working day. That fit in, too. He did not waste time on any amenities. “I’ve brought your boy back.”
“Yeah, I know. I saw him come in on my way out to come meet you.”
No element of surprise. Winch had hoped to have that. “Are you going to let him go up to the hospital for observation?”
Mayhew shook his bullet head. “It’s a stockade case. Already made up my mind. He deliberately did it to make me look bad.”
“I think it would be wise to let him.”
Mayhew shook his head. “In my mind there’s a question whether he’s a deserter. He was gone three weeks.”
“Nobody’s a deserter, if he comes back on his own and turns himself in.” “That’s not an absolute regulation.”
“It seems to me,” the celebrity Winch said, “that you’re more concerned with what Second Army HQ will think of you, than you are with anything else.”
Mayhew’s jaw came out and he began to bristle.
“Don’t be angry. But it seems to me a stockade case would make you look worse than having a nut, a real psycho, on your hands.”
“I don’t care. He did it deliberately. To make me look bad. I want him to get what’s coming to him.”
“All that’s personal,” Winch said sternly. “A personal vendetta.”
Mayhew shook his head. “Legally I’m right.”
But he was not as at ease as he seemed. Mayhew kept looking brightly around the bar. Winch knew he did not frequent the main officers’ club bar. A lot of colonels and lieutenant colonels were coming in now, most of them waving hello to Winch. Almost all of them knew him because they had to work through his Personnel office. Winch waved at a couple of colonels from Second Army, then waved for them to come on over. He stood up to introduce them to Mayhew, who jumped up right away.
Then what he had been waiting for came in the door. It was Col Stevens from the hospital. The thin, white-haired, dignified old West Pointer walked in. There was an air about Stevens that stood out everywhere. But now he was wearing the single star of a brigadier. His generalcy had gone through a month before. And he came right over, right away, without being waved to. “Hello, Mart,” he smiled warmly. “How are you? I haven’t seen you in a long while.” There was no question of the depth of his liking. When Winch introduced him to Mayhew, he nodded politely. “How is that young protégé of yours, Mart? What was his name? Landers?”
“Just fine, sir,” Winch grinned. “Just fine.” When he went on off and the two of them sat back down, Mayhew’s round head was stubborn.
“Then I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Winch said. “I’m going to go over your head, Captain. You send him to the stockade as an overseas replacement, and I’m going to put in for him and have him transferred to me.”
It was a grand slam poker bluff. Winch did not himself believe he had that much pull anywhere.
Mayhew looked disbelieving. “You’d really do that?” Then he stumbled over what to call Winch. And he chose the formal address. “Do that, Mr Winch?”
“I sure would. I trained him. He was in my old outfit with me.” Mayhew’s neck was redder than when he had been angry. “All right,” he muttered, as if to himself, “okay.” He downed the rest of his drink. “Okay. All right, Mr Winch. I’ll go down to my orderly room and have them take him to the hospital.” He looked as if he badly wanted to stay, and have another drink or two. And meet another general. But he got to his feet. “I hope we’ll see each other around, Mr Winch.”
“We will,” Winch said. Like hell. He watched him walk off to go to his orderly room. He was thinking that he must go and call Strange right away with the good news, from the pay phone in the club foyer. But he felt unaccountably worn down and tired.
Landers was already in Mayhew’s orderly room, under guard, when Mayhew got back. Landers had done everything exactly as Winch had told him. But Mayhew had come hustling out of the orderly room on his way to see Winch just as Landers was crossing the frozen mud to the barracks, and had seen him. Mayhew had sent a man back.
Landers had gone on. But when he got inside to his old bunk, he found it completely dismantled. Blankets and sheets gone, mattress folded on the bar springs. The sight brought on Landers an acuter sense of homelessness than he had ever felt. The guys around the barracks, who had their blankets and beds, looked at him with noncommittal faces. The two guards Mayhew had ordered sent met him by the bunk.
Mayhew, when he came in from Winch, was his own inimitable self. He was hard and cold and tough and businesslike. “I’ve agreed to send you up to the hospital for observation. Some people seem to feel you should do that.” Mayhew himself did not agree, and he made that clear.
All of this was said in front of the other company officers who were clustered around, warming themselves at the space-heater stove, just in off duty. Landers thought he caught a sympathetic glint in the Mongolian eyes of Lt Prevor; and Lt Burns, Prevor’s former exec, gave him a genuine if terribly fleeting smile. Landers wondered if he had sensed a wave of relief pass among the officers at the mention of the hospital, or if it had come from just himself.
Young Lt Mathieson, one of the newer officers, was told off to the assignment of delivering him to the hospital prison ward, with the two guards.
The ride up in the jeep seemed to pass before Landers in a series of humiliating flashes like still-camera shots flashed on a screen.
And if you had seen and been in one hospital, you had seen and been in them all. They weren’t that different, Landers decided. Then the big steel door of the prison ward down at the end of the main corridor on the top floor clanged shut behind him.
At one point in the trip, as they descended from the jeep outside the hospital, Mathieson got a chance to speak to him alone, and did it quickly, looking around to see if he was being observed or overheard.
“I’ve been authorized to tell you that we’re all behind you. I was told to tell you we all know why you did it. And that we’re all going to do everything we can as officers, to get you out of this.”
Landers stared at him. If they knew why he did it, they knew a lot more than he did. Then he felt a powerful surge of emotion roll up through him to behind his eyes which almost brought tears to them. He managed to grin, and only nodded.
A little later when Mathieson was signing him in, one of the guards spoke to him. There was little or nothing the men could do but they wanted him to know. “The guys are all for you. That cocksucker should get every f*cking kick in the balls he’s got coming.” Landers made himself grin and said to thank them.
He ought not to feel so terrible, going in the way he was. He was going in with lots more people behind him than most men going to jail. But the truth was, he did not feel much like grinning, on the prison ward. After the big door clanged shut. And once he was fixed there.
He tried hard not to let anybody know that. One of the worst things was the being cut off from all the local war news and developments that went on in the camp, and with all of the outfits. The ward had newspapers and the radio speakers over the doors for the general war news. But the big iron door cut off all that other, individual news, as cleanly as it cut off the illusion of freedom that circulated on the other side of it. Freedom? Landers had to laugh sourly. It seemed like freedom from here.
Another bad thing, one that had to be fought against every minute if you wanted to avoid despair, was the sense of total abandonment you got on the prison ward. Outfits went on, the war went on. People in your outfit might have cared for you, yesterday. But the yesterday you remembered so vividly when locked up here was receding into their past. They couldn’t go on caring about you, even if they wanted.
In spite of what Mathieson had said to him, in confidence beside the jeep, there was no word at all from the officers of the 3516th. Nor was there any word from Winch. Or from Strange. Neither was there any word from Mayhew, or the stockade provost marshal.
He had almost no visitors. A good-hearted noncom or two came up and sat and talked awhile, embarrassed, obviously making duty calls. None of them knew what was happening with his case. Landers was intensely relieved when they left. They didn’t come back.
Time, the days, passed in a hurrying unidentifiable slide which could hardly be marked off on a calendar, punctuated only by the almost daily sessions with the psychiatrists, who asked him if he had ever sucked a cock, or if he had ever wanted to suck one, and whether he hated his father. Happily Landers got his weekends off from these, when all the doctors went in town on Saturdays and Sundays.
The life itself was not so bad, and not all that different from life on any hospital ward. The prison ward was one of four lockup wards in the hospital, all situated together at the end of the same corridor in a wing, two above, two below. The other three were the nut wards, for the psycho cases, called NP wards for neuropsychiatric, and while they were also restraining wards, their patients were not legally prisoners.
At night sometimes, when he had first come in, Landers heard a man screaming faintly from one of these wards on the floor below, and yelling over and over something like, “Get them out of there, goddam it, get them out of there.” It seemed very much in keeping with the whole place. But then one night he did not hear it any more, and the scuttlebutt came around that the old-timer 1st/sgt who had been doing the screaming had been discharged out of the Army and moved out to a Veterans’ Administration hospital somewhere. The rumor said he had been a sergeant in a company on Guadalcanal in Landers’ old Division.
Things like this made life a little more interesting.
The prison ward had its share of mental patients, of which Landers was one. But it also had prisoners who officially at least weren’t mental patients, and were there because of illness or some violent injury. This tended to liven things up a little, too. Most of the knife cuts from the knife fights on the post tended to end up there. So did the bad results of fist fights or club or rock fights, until their injuries healed enough for court-martial. It was sometimes difficult to know whether these men were also mental patients. A couple of times men were brought in badly injured from the stockade itself, where it was reported they had fallen off the back ends of trucks. When they were well enough to talk, they made no bones about saying their damage was the result of beatings. But nobody much listened. And Landers had to admit, after looking at their shifty faces, that they could easily have been lying. Another interesting item was a German Nazi prisoner who was on a hunger strike, and drank only one quart of milk a day for nourishment.
Landers took an insanely violent, murderous dislike to the German. The German had worked on one of the prisoner-of-war farms nearby, but now refused to because he wanted to be repatriated, to fight for the Führer and the Fatherland again. Heavy-footed, stolid, completely self-assured, he made Landers think more than anything else of Mayhew. To Landers the German was representative of everything about the human race that had sickened him since that day on the hilltop in New Georgia. His hatred reached such a point that he would have killed the German if it were possible.
The German had a habit of marching up and down the ward while he drank his one bottle of milk. Landers made up a fantasy in which he leaped on the German, smashed the milk bottle on the German’s head, and cut the German’s throat with the jagged edge of the neck. He would sit on the edge of his bed and play his fantasy while the German walked back and forth with his milk. In the night, the German was kept locked in a special cell, which doubled as a padded cell when needed, so that none of the Americans like Landers could get at him.
Another thing which could provoke Landers to instantaneous rage was the fact that on Sunday mornings the radio loudspeakers played Christian religious sermons. The sermons were blasted all over the ward, everywhere, and there was no escape. Being forced to listen to such honeyed bullshit and obvious falsehoods about love of man threw Landers into such a state of fury he could not sit down, or stay still. After the first time, he went to the ward man and complained about it. He was an atheist, and his rights were being infringed on. The Sunday ward man hastened to agree with him. But he pointed out that he did not have control over radio volume or the choice of programs; all that came from hospital HQ. All he could do was send them a note. He doubted it would do much good. Landers noticed that while he talked, he was also writing detailed notes on sheets of paper which went into Landers’ thickening file.
“What are you doing that for?”
The ward man shrugged. “Orders. From the head head shrinker.”
The sermons were never stopped. But after three Sundays of violent complaining, Landers was allowed to shut himself up in the padded cell on Sunday mornings—the same cell in which the German prisoner spent his nights of protective custody. The sermons did not bother the German. Who it turned out was an ardent Catholic, and anyway spoke no English. In the cell Landers could still hear the sermons, but a lot less clearly. It was a minor triumph of sorts, to sweeten his days.
There was also the problem of where to masturbate when it became necessary. There was not a lockable door in the place. The toilet stalls in the shower room did not even have doors. There was nothing for it but to do it in bed at night and try not to make the springs squeak, then lie with the cold wetness of drying semen on your belly so as not to have telltale spots on the sheet. Only a desperate man would jerk off that way, and slowly bit by bit the greatness of Christian thought triumphed.
Then, suddenly, Strange came to visit, and things began to open up very quickly. Strange brought words from Winch.
Winch was not coming himself because he didn’t think it would look good for the case, Strange said. But Winch could now assure him that no punitive measures would be taken. In other words, he would not be court-martialed or sent to a stockade and he would not be sent overseas as a cannon-fodder replacement. What he must do, though, now, was some serious thinking. What he must do the serious thinking about, was whether he wanted to be discharged out of the Army completely, or not.
To be discharged would be the easiest, Strange said. But if he wanted to stay in, Winch could guarantee him with a seventy to seventy-five percent surety that he would be transferred to Winch’s outfit. But Winch would not guarantee it one hundred percent. Too many other things might still happen.
Surely, Landers had the time and place for some serious thinking, Strange grinned as he left.
The discharge, Strange hastened to reassure him, would not be dishonorable. Not a yellow one. Not a Section Eight. Not even a blue discharge. It would be clean and clear and a white one. A Section Two Medical, Winch said to tell him. A Section Two was for neuropsychiatric reasons, service-connected; no loss of citizenship; no loss of voting; no taint, in other words.
That kind of a discharge, Landers realized, really would require some serious thinking.
The place Landers used for serious thinking was the window behind his bed. Fortunately his bed butted against a window in the ward. Only one out of every four beds got a window. That was where Landers did his serious thinking, usually late at night, after lights out. He would sit on the pillow at the head of his bed, his arms propped on the sill, and look out through the heavy wire grid at the lights of the camp and think. Think seriously. About all of it. Everything.
Although he never came up with any satisfactory answers. Or even any unsatisfactory ones.
It had taken awhile to get permission to do it. The first week the night ward man kept making him get back into bed, and trying to give him a pill. Then finally he gave up, and became more sympathetic. Or else was ordered to by one of those wily psychiatrists.
But the thousands of lights of the camp through the window gave Landers a pleasant melancholy. They left him with a tranquillity and sense of objectivity he never had in the day, when he was constantly reminded how insane everybody and everything was, and kept flying into rages because of it. Out there, thousands of men were going through lives at least as bad as his was.
Up until Strange’s visit, he had not trusted Winch. All this time there had been no word from him, any more than there had been word from the 3516th’s officers. From his window Landers could see one corner of the tall three-story Command building. The lights in the third-floor corner office were on late every night, and Landers liked to think he was watching Winch’s office. It was too bad the Venetian blinds were closed. Even so, if he had a rifle he could put a round just about where the desk chair would be, closed Venetian blinds and all. Having been there.
But he didn’t really hate Winch.
What Landers hated were the war and humanity. And people. People like Mayhew, and the German prisoner. He thought a lot about Mayhew, and the German, and what it was that made them like they were. Landers guessed he would never find out what that was. But there were certainly a great many more like them in the world, than there were people like Strange, say, or Prevor. And they were the human race which sickened Landers, and filled him with this despair, and made him into this terrible, lonely thing of being an outsider.
The ones who wanted power. Who cared about having power, more than they cared about how they got it, or what they did with it when they got it. Like Mayhew. The ones who wanted to die for some glorious cause. Like the German. And Winch? Winch did not count. Winch was an anomaly. But now he had something else to think about. A discharge. A real discharge. A clean one, a white discharge. And Landers did not really know if he wanted a discharge or didn’t. When he thought about Mayhew, and that German, he wanted a discharge. He wanted nothing to do with humanity, or with humanity’s war.
But when he looked at those thousand lights out there; and thought about Winch, and Strange, and Prevor, and those two good-hearted sergeants who had come up to see him; when he thought of all that, he did not want the discharge. He wanted to be with them.
Landers simply could not make up his mind if he wanted the discharge from Winch or not.
And he wasn’t given all that much time to mull it over. Two days after Strange’s visit, one of the officers from the 3516th was brought in to see him.
They talked sitting on his bunk. The officer was Lt Drere, a thin, blond, slight man in his thirties. He was one of the newer officers brought in later to fill out Prevor’s company, like Mathieson. Drere was quietly incapable of coping with anything physical or manual, but always in good control of his head. As out of place in the 3516th as it was possible to be. He had wound up as the company intellectual, whom the other officers always went to with their paper problems. That he was also warm, genuine, and generous was just an extra.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t get up to you sooner,” he said. “But we thought it was best to wait until we had something specific we could do.”
Landers just nodded. “Yeah, well. How are things going down there?”
“We’re surviving.” Drere smiled. “Your case is coming up before the Medical Board for review and a final decision. All of us officers have been asked to write personal reports on you. To go to the Medical Board.”
“Yeah, great. I know these f*cking Medical Boards,” Landers said sourly.
“No, no. Don’t be discouraged. By the way, how are you?” Drere said kindly.
Landers shrugged. “I’m all right. It’s not the best place for a vacation.”
Drere looked around the ward curiously, and nodded brusquely. “Naturally, we all know what kind of report Capt Mayhew will write. And we pretty much know what Lt Prevor will write, which will be laudatory. The rest of us have decided among ourselves we will write the best reports we can to help you. According to what you want to do. To do that, we need to know how you want us to slant them.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if you want to stay in the Army. Or if you want a discharge. We can write them either way, and slant them toward either objective. But we need to know from you which way you want us to write them.”
“This was your idea?”
“Mine,” Drere assented. “More or less. But the other officers all created the idea. I only formulated it.”
Landers was looking out of his window. From here it was a different angle, and he could not quite see the Command building. But he could see the thousand hutments. “I don’t know,” he said disconsolately. “I just don’t honestly know. Which way. I don’t know whether I want out or not.”
“Well,” Drere said. “We have to know. If we’re going to write the reports.”
“Can I tell you later?”
“I don’t see how. We need to know today. That’s why I’m here. The reports have to be written tonight. They go in tomorrow.”
Landers still did not answer, for a long moment. “All right,” he said, looking up. “Tell them to slant the reports toward a discharge. I’d rather be out of this f*cking mess. Than in it.” He sighed. “As long as the Mayhews of the world are in it.”
“I’m afraid the Mayhews of the world will always be with us,” Drere smiled. “That’s the human race. Imperfect, to say the least.”
“Always?” Landers said, and he began to laugh. He was able to get hold of it in a moment, the laughter, and choke it down.
Drere was looking at him curiously. “You’re sure, now? You sure that’s the way you want it?”
“No, I’m not sure,” Landers said, beginning to get angry. He shrugged, swallowing down the anger, too. “Look, Lieutenant. What I’m thinking is that if I want to change the decision, in front of the board, it will be a lot easier to change it toward staying in the Army, than to change it toward wanting to get out. Right?”
“Yes. That would certainly be true,” Drere said. “So you want the reports slanted strongly toward a discharge?” he said. “Then that’s what I’ll tell them?” Drere said.
“Yes.”
Drere made a small precise note on a paper, then put all of the unused papers together in his little briefcase. His preciseness irritated Landers, and he stood up.
Drere got up with him, and thrust out his hand. “I’ll be on my way, then.” His face took on a peculiar look, for him, of embarrassment. “You know, you’re a real hero, Marion. In the 3516th.”
“Some hero,” Landers said sourly.
“It’s nice to know, I think,” Drere said. “I just want you to know it’s been a pleasure knowing you.”
Landers watched the big steel door shut behind him, wishing too late that he himself had said other, nicer things. But that wouldn’t have mattered to Drere.
It was amazing to see the change that occurred on the ward, almost immediately. Nobody ever knew how the word got around on these things, but it always did. Somebody always knew, somehow, and told somebody, and that somebody told somebody else. It was the same jungle telegraph that existed in every outfit. Landers told no one but by evening everybody on the ward knew: Landers was on his way out, to a clean, white discharge. An honorable.
Landers was disgusted, and infuriated. Particularly since he himself did not know whether or not he wanted out of the Army. Even the mean, crazy-headed stockade prisoners began treating him differently, with great respect. To the other mental patients he was a sort of shining example, a real American success story, that they could look up to, and model themselves after.
Even the ward boys were kinder to him. And the night man offered to sit down and go over his file with him, on the idea that there might be something in it Landers could use to help him with the board. Landers refused this categorically. In the back of his mind was the idea that this, too, might be another ploy of the crafty psychiatrists, testing him.
In the end it did not even take as long as Drere had suggested it might. It took more than the week, but less than the ten days Drere had postulated.
The ward boy came to him, grinning hugely, on the Monday. He would go before the board tomorrow at their regular Tuesday meeting. A clean new pair of MC pajamas, a clean maroon robe, clean duck slippers would be waiting for him in the morning.
It was so similar to the previous time at Kilrainey that Landers had a weird, eery sense of déjà vu. There was the same dark, formalized room. There was the same group of five civilian-looking men wearing lots of hardware on their collars, behind the same long table. It had the somber smell of a criminal courtroom. And Landers suddenly knew he desperately wanted out of the Army.
It had the distinct feel of a repeat performance. Except that now as Landers went up against this kindly, middle-class, bourgeois enemy, it was with all the pessimism and experience he had not had at his fingertips the first time out. Landers knew now that all the fine promises they made would have nothing to do with him once he was out in the field again, in the real world. They might not know that, but Landers did; now. He was prepared at any moment to tell them he wanted to stay in the Army.
But the moment would not come. That was apparently what they were trying to get him to say. But everything they said to him, every question they asked him, seemed to drive him away from the point of wanting to say it.
All the questions they asked him about his abilities and intentions were the same questions the five men at Kilrainey had asked him. All the statements they made about wanting to use his talents, his experience, were the same statements made at Kilrainey.
Finally the round-faced, jowly man in the middle wearing glasses, a full colonel among three other full colonels in the five but plainly the chief, asked him in a perplexed, slightly amused voice, “Well, Sergeant, what kind of job in the Army would you like?”
Drawing himself up, his voice fluting with the rage he was trying to hold down, Landers gave the only answer he felt he could give them. “Sir, there’s no job in the Army I want,” he said stolidly.
“All right, that’s all. You may go,” the bespectacled colonel said.
The word was around the ward almost before he could get back to it. Landers was out. The board had voted, unanimously, to discharge him. So many other prisoners, who saw this as a major triumph, rushed over to him to congratulate him and slap him on the back that the morose Landers finally insulted them and ran them all off, cursing.
After that, he was even more of a marked man. Not only was he out while all of them were still in, but they did not like it because he had rejected their well-meant congratulations. All of them left him strictly alone.
It didn’t really matter. The winding-down, the mechanics, took only five days. Five days, from the meeting of the board till Landers was out on the street, a free man. The wheels ground slowly, but once they got started, they rolled very fast. And much of the last three of the five days was spent out of the ward, signing releases in first one office then another. Landers wasn’t in the ward that much to suffer his new rejection. Anyway, he didn’t care what they thought. He wasn’t like them.
He went to the Finance office, to sign his last payroll. He went to the QM office, to turn in the last of his gear. To the Insurance office, to keep or cancel his GI insurance. Landers decided to cancel his. If he was going out, he did not want any more to do with the Army than was obligatory. Most of the rest was done in offices in the hospital HQ section itself.
As was required by the regulations, everywhere he went an armed guard had to go with him. He was still a prisoner. But it was indicative of his status that the pistol-wearing MP joked with him and hardly bothered to watch him. No guy who was going out in two days was going to run off from a guard.
In retrospect it seemed like a wild, fantastic rush, the last five days. Then on the morning of the sixth he was signing his last paper, which was the receipt for his engraved, pure, white Honorable Discharge which was tendered to him. That took place in the hospital clerical office itself.
Then, totally unprepared for it, he was suddenly out in the street in front of the hospital, in uniform, with an old blue barracks bag half full of personal gear, a free man able to go anywhere he pleased to go.
He walked the three blocks down to the bus stop, and waited there. After a moment, he set the bag on the frozen ground. A bus for Luxor should be along in a little bit. It was a dry day, but cold, and a little snowy on the ground.
Landers huddled down into his GI greatcoat. In front of him on the asphalt main street a long column of men in fatigues and field jackets marched by, wearing the Divisional patch of the new infantry Division, their faces gaunt and haunted and worn-down looking. It took them a long time to pass, and Landers watched them.
It had been running through his mind all the places he was now free to go. Places these guys couldn’t go. He would probably wind up going home, to Indiana, in the end. To his lousy family. The thought of going home filled him with anguish. But he didn’t have to do that yet.
Normally he would have gone into Luxor to the Peabody to see Johnny Stranger. But Strange had told him during his visit that in two or three days’ time, from then, he would be coming back to duty himself. Somewhere here on the post at O’Bruyerre. That meant Landers would have to go up to see Winch at the Command building and say good-by to him, in order to find out where Strange was. And Landers didn’t have the stomach for that at the moment. Of course, he could always go in to the Peabody by himself. Though Strange was giving up the suite, Strange had said, having run out of money.
In front of him the last of the troop column had made their right turn off of the main road, and were dwindling away down one of the hole-pocked gravel side roads. Behind them on the main road, coming fast, was a civilian car, but with post plates. Driven by a woman. Women were so important.
Landers watched the last of the troops dwindle, getting smaller and smaller, their breaths throwing out the same plumes as before, but now at this distance the plumes seemed bigger than they were. Landers was devoutly glad he wasn’t one of them. On the other hand, he had no desire really to go in to the Peabody all by himself. Even if he could get a room, this late.
Landers watched the woman coming on in the car. She was very good-looking, even at a distance. Probably some officer’s wife. But she was really going too fast. Landers bent with the tie rope of the barracks bag he was holding, and rolled it meticulously down and around onto the top of the bag, and then stood teetering on his heels and watching her.
Just as she was about to come level with him on the road, Landers stepped out off the curb in front of her.
As he stepped out, he realized he would not have done it if she had been a man, driving a jeep or a GI truck. But she really was so beautiful. Her coat was thrown back open in the heat of the car, and in the sweater under it her breasts swelled out thrusting their weight against the lapels deliciously. So delicious. And her hair fell to the collar of the coat with an equally delicious feminine grace.
Landers heard the wild squeal of the brakes. And perhaps a cry. And then the crash of glass and tear of headlight metal. And a loud thumping thud.
He saw or thought he saw the look of horror that came across her face in back of the windshield. Because she thought she was doing something wrong, and he wanted to laugh. The mouth a wildly spread O of lipstick. Eyebrows arched up. Eyes staring. He hated to do all that to her. But, by God, at least she knew she had hit something. Then the helicopter moved away from the ship.
The big red crosses were still on its white flank. And the sea still moved backward along its waterline. Everything was still silence.
Far off, the great blue continent still stood. Uninhabited. Green with the silent, unpeopled forests and soft grasses. The breakers clashing on the white, unpeopled sands. And the silence of home.