Chapter 30
STRANGE HAD NOT CALLED Prell back because he hadn’t thought it was worthwhile.
Besides, his new outfit was going out in the field for ten days of field problems and he had an enormous amount of work to do then and the next day getting his field kitchens ready.
Prell’s indifference over the phone had shocked Strange. It had never occurred to Strange that someone, especially among themselves, wouldn’t care about Landers. He might have expected it among the company remnants as a whole, but not from the old hard-core nucleus. It meant that now even the nucleus was breaking up, its parts going off in different directions, pushed by new interests, new loyalties.
The worst part of all that was that it made Strange find his own loyalty suspect. It wasn’t really loyalty, apparently. It was a commodity to be sold, traded off, exchanged, according to the whims of the Army in a war, an Army too big to worry about loyalties except in very large bundles. Winch had told him this once.
What was it he had said? Where had it been? On the hospital ship. The day of the big home landfall. They were pulling into San Diego.
What had he said? Johnny Stranger, all that shit of the old outfit is over. You better believe it. You better get it through your thick Texas head. Something like that.
Winch had been right, as he always was. He had just been ahead of time, ahead of everybody, was all. As he usually was.
It must be hard on the sanity, seeing things ahead of time like Winch. Seeing. And knowing. And telling people. Who never listened. Damned hard on the sanity. Strange was glad it was a talent he didn’t have.
But now it was catching up to Strange, like a slap in the face. While Winch was already prepared.
Strange had no loyalty to his new outfit at all. It was just a bunch of people, brought together from scattered parts. Officers, some ambitious, some not. Enlisted men, some ambitious, the rest just putting in time, hoping to survive. The ambitious ones, officers and EM, kept moving on, out and upward to somewhere, but of the outfit.
The outfit itself was a communications unit. A bunch of wooden switchboards (they would get metal ones in England, they were told), destined to be set up out in the woods somewhere, and become the link between some Division and its sister Divisions, or some corps of tanks and another corps. Nobody knew exactly what yet. That was the kind of stuff they were going to be practicing on their field maneuvers. Strange was one of the company mess/sgts.
How could you have any loyalty to that? You could have loyalty to your work, but that was all. Perhaps the fire and the strains of combat would combine them and squeeze them into one big self with one big loyalty, when they got to Europe. But they weren’t that now. And Strange felt no loyalty to any of them.
He had had some loyalties left, back at the hospital. He had developed a strong loyalty there to Col Curran, for example. And there had been the loyalty to the old-company men who had met at his suite in the Peabody; it was a thinning and diminishing loyalty, true, as more and more of them went back to duty and were scattered, and as he himself got more involved with Frances Highsmith, but it was still a countable loyalty. Frances herself was a serious loyalty, if not an Army one. And then there had been his prime loyalty of all, to the nucleus of four he had been a part of and had come back home with. Strange had never believed that that could break apart.
But the hospital appeared to have been the breaking and thinning point of all a man’s loyalties. His own last session with Curran was indicative of all of Strange’s, it seemed.
Curran had called him in, one morning during morning rounds, for what he laughingly said might be their last conference, Strange’s heart had begun to beat in his ears. He had wondered, lately, about the fact that only he and Prell were left. First Winch with his heart problem or whatever it was, then Landers with that really bad ankle of his, both had gone. Even Prell with his two horribly crippled legs was being set up for hospital discharge to start his war bonds tours. All of them had been worse off than Strange, with his minor hand wound. And yet Strange still languished on his ward, with no word one way or the other. How come?
Curran wasted no time disabusing him. “Your hand hasn’t healed as well as we expected. That’s why I’ve kept you as long as I have.”
“What do you mean, hasn’t healed? It isn’t sore, isn’t infected. It feels fine to me.” He held it up and wiggled it, clenched and unclenched it. A panic ran all through him at the idea of being discharged from the Army, now.
“I don’t mean the physical healing. That’s fine. I’m talking about the internal healing, the mechanics, the thing we went in there to correct. We had such a success with the operation we thought we had every right to assume it would heal perfectly. But it hasn’t.” Curran held out his own hand for Strange’s wrist.
“Here,” he said. “Clench it. Now unclench it. You feel that little pull, that little hesitation?”
Strange had to nod. “Yes.”
“Well that’s what I mean. It could be,” Curran looked at him a moment, as if he were about to list every possible thing it might be, then shrugged, “—it could be a lot of things. It could be something that will go away.
“But my hunch is that it won’t. My hunch is it’ll get worse. Certainly it’s going to bother you later in life.”
“Well, what does that mean for right now?” Strange asked. “Does that mean I’m not going to get out of here and back to duty?”
Curran began to laugh. “You still want to get overseas to England, like you said?”
“That’s what I’m after,” Strange said stiffly.
“I’m not going to keep you here. Just what your hand does not need now is another operation. No, I’m sending you back to duty in a day or two.”
“That’s great,” Strange said. “You had me scared.”
“But I’ve got to warn you about the hand,” Curran said sharply. “It could start up tomorrow. Or a week from now. My advice to you is to favor it because of this.”
It was Strange’s turn to grin. “I can fake it. I went on working with it for six months the first time.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to. You saw what happened to it in six months the first time.”
“I ought to be able to fake it a year this time.”
“In any case, I have to send you back as limited duty,” Curran said.
“Actually my job as a mess/sgt isn’t all that much different,” Strange said cautiously, “whether I’m with an infantry line company or some limited duty outfit.”
Curran smiled, and shook his head. “Makes no difference. I’ve got my orders and I follow them.”
“Sure.” You couldn’t argue with that.
“If it starts to act up, you’ll be right back in the hospital.”
“I’ve got a question,” Strange said.
“Shoot.”
“Say it did start to act up. Say, while I’m still on this side. In the East someplace. Where would they send me?”
Curran shrugged. “Theoretically, to the nearest hospital that had a good hand-surgery man. In actual practice, to your post hospital and if you refused to let some joker there play around with it and operate on it himself for fun, then you’d go to the nearest general hospital. Whether they had a good hand-surgeon man or not. And they would operate on it there.”
“What if it happened right here, at O’Bruyerre?”
“Then you would come back here.”
“And you would handle it.”
Curran didn’t answer for a moment. “No. I wouldn’t.”
“Well, Jesus. Why not?”
“Because we’re undergoing a reorganization here. We’re expanding. We’re getting ready for D-Day and the European campaign.” Curran shrugged. “The surgery department is being doubled. That means Col Baker and myself are going to become the administrators of two whole new surgery sections. We’re being pulled off the operating tables, to do it. We’re being kicked upstairs. You know the phrase? I doubt if either of us will have the time to handle any operations at all.
“Well, Christ. Then whatever I do or don’t do isn’t going to make that much difference anyway, is it?” Strange was angry.
“No, I suppose not, in reality. At least you have learned enough here so that you can say no to some eager young wise-ass who wants to operate on you.”
“You know how far that will get me.”
Curran had grinned. “I’m not even supposed to be telling you this much. There are no bad surgeons in the Army. You know that.”
He had stood up from his big black swivel chair Strange had become so familiar with, and thrust out his hand. “Of course, if you do come back here, I’ll see that you get everything I can get for you.”
“Sure, of course,” Strange said, and shook the delicate strong hand. “But I don’t expect we’ll be seeing each other again, Colonel.”
Curran had looked at him a long moment. “No, I expect not,” he said. “Not in this war.”
And it seemed to happen like that with all of Strange’s loyalties. When he left Kilrainey for O’Bruyerre, they all were cut. Precisely, sharply. Even his relationship with Winch, which had been mostly by telephone and about Landers for some time now, seemed to diminish and be cut when he moved to O’Bruyerre.
But of course Landers was already on his way out then, his final decision made. Or so they had thought.
His last, his only visit with Landers in the prison ward had been just a day or two after his conference with Curran. And Strange hadn’t moved to O’Bruyerre yet. As usual in the Army, everything was a week later than calculated. Even then Landers had looked so peaked, and pale, with such huge circles under his eyes that Strange should have known something wasn’t right.
Then his own move to O’Bruyerre had gone through and he had been so busy getting himself oriented and settled in that he hadn’t had time to go back up to see Landers and talk to him.
Strange, of course, in his move to O’Bruyerre had passed through Winch’s office too, like everybody else. And Winch had come out to meet him, also.
Landers had told him about the hidden whiskey bottle. Now he got the chance to see it for himself. He accepted the drink Winch offered, with alacrity.
“Well, what kind of an assignment do you want, Johnny Stranger?” Winch said expansively. “I’m in a position to give you just about anything you want.”
Strange had grinned. “Well it don’t really make much of a difference, old First Sarn’t.”
“It’s likely to,” Winch said thinly, “in a very short time. Now, listen.
“If you’re willing to take a bust from staff to buck sergeant, I’ve got a place I can put you here, in my outfit. As a first cook. But I can’t very well take you on as my mess sergeant. I’ve already got one. That will take two or three months. Will you take the bust?”
Strange hadn’t even had to think. “No, I don’t think so, First Sarn’t.” He grinned again.
“Then you mean to follow it right on through.” Winch’s eyes narrowed, and got a mad green glint in them. “All the way.”
“I aint got nothing much else to do,” Strange heard himself say. “And I aint never seen Europe.”
Winch said no more, didn’t argue. He sat down in his big chair and punched a button on his intercom phone. He asked into it for all the reassignment request forms for a mess/sgt in full grade of staff/sgt. There were only four of them, when the clerk brought them in. Together, the two of them went over all four. The communications unit was one of them.
“That’s not a bad outfit,” Winch said when Strange held the paper up. “At least it’s not a rotten one.”
“Then that ought to be just fine,” Strange said.
Winch called outside for another file and, when the clerk brought it, leafed through the sheets in the folder. “They’re due to go out on some field maneuvers some time soon. Then, not too long after that, they’ll be shipping out. For England.”
“That sounds perfect.”
“Then I guess that’s your slot. Is all your gear here?”
“Two barracks bags. They’re out there in that big barn you call a clerks’ office.”
“Well I guess they’re safe there,” Winch said dubiously. He looked outside through the curtained window. “Just sit down there for a minute and have yourself another drink. I’ll call the outfit for you. They can send a jeep up. For a man of your stature.”
“Why, thank you, First Sarn’t.”
They talked about Landers a little. Winch seemed to feel Landers was getting exactly what he wanted. And needed. “He’s come all apart at the seams,” Winch said. “A discharge is the only thing will help him. Otherwise. If he stayed in. Hell, he’d be no good to nobody.
“Besides,” Winch added, “a discharge is what he’s asked for. That was the way he told his company officers to slant their reports.
“How did you find that out?”
“From the officer. Who went up to talk to him.”
“Then I guess you got everything pretty well lined out for him.”
“I tried to. I hope so. Now, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you told your wife? Have you told Linda Sue about what you’re doing?”
“No,” Strange said. “I haven’t.”
“Well, don’t you think you ought to?”
“No. Not especially.”
“Has she still got your GI insurance?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Are you still married?”
“Yes. Still married. Legally. Officially.”
“You’re not divorced yet. Then it would seem to me that you owe it to her to tell her what you’re doing, what to expect.”
“I’ll decide that,” Strange said. Then, because he felt that sounded too harsh, he added, “Maybe I’ll drop her a little note. Before I pull out.”
“I think you at least owe it to her to tell her face to face. Or at least over the telephone.”
“I don’t owe her a f*cking thing,” Strange said.
“I think—” Winch began, but was stopped by the buzzing of his desk phone. He picked it up and listened for half a minute. Then when he put it down, he spread his arms. “Your jeep’s there.” He stood up, his arms still spread. “I don’t know what I think. That’s the f*cking truth.”
“Me neither,” Strange said. “Join the club.”
“Come on down to the main PX some night. I’m there almost every night. Five-thirty or six,” Winch said.
As with Curran, there was the finalizing handshake. Both of them seemed to know it was the end of some era or other. As he and Curran had known.
But as he picked up his two bags and followed the jeep driver down the stairs, Strange remained surprised at how much Winch knew about his personal affairs. Winch hadn’t seen or talked to Linda since back in Wahoo before the sneak attack. Yet here he was, seeming to know it all.
Strange had already made his good-bys to Frances. That had happened in town in Luxor, the day after his final conference with Curran. But it was something that had seemed to be coming on for a long time, too.
Partly that was due to his having run through his $7000 savings and allotment money, and having had to give up the suite at the Peabody. Maybe. Maybe it was partly that. Or maybe it wasn’t?
Strange hadn’t been staying there much for quite a long time, and had taken to renting a double room at the Claridge for himself and Frances, which Jack Alexander, Winch’s old buddy, had got for him. The only two old-company men who still frequented the suite were Corello with that ruined shoulder of his and Trynor who had come into Kilrainey a few days after Strange himself. The rest of the time now, when there was a party there, all of the other people who were there were strangers and outsiders. Strange no longer really wanted to go to the parties. He much preferred being off alone with Frances.
But Strange was not about to let go of the suite till he had spent on it every nickel of the $7000. He didn’t care who came to the parties every night. He didn’t care if he himself didn’t go to them. Not one dime of that $7000 restaurant money was going to walk away from the Peabody in Strange’s pocket. And not one dime of it did.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, for Strange the money ran out swiftly after Landers went over the hill, and then came back and turned himself in and went into the prison ward. It was really only then that Strange began to realize how much money Landers himself had been pouring into the Peabody suite. Without Landers and his money, the funds in the bank account he had opened with the $7000 began to dwindle with a wild speed.
Strange hadn’t wanted money from Landers. He and Landers had talked about it that one time he had visited Landers, and Landers had laughed and told him he had spent almost $4500 himself. All of his own allotments, all of his other savings. Until he was broke himself, or just about Landers certainly hadn’t seemed upset by it. No more than Strange.
In any case, it was when he closed out the suite at the Peabody, and the bank account he had created for it, that Strange learned how much Frances Highsmith had been depending on that money.
“Does that mean you’re broke?” she asked him, cautiously, “if you have to give up the suite?”
“Not exactly broke. Badly bent. I still got my salary as a staff sergeant. And a little bit of gambling money.”
“But that’s all? I thought you were a friend of Warrant Officer Alexander.”
“A friend. But not a business associate. Why? You want me to introduce you to Alexander?”
“That great big hulk? Are you kidding? Who would want to f*ck him? He’s the least attractive man I ever saw. But he’s certainly making a lot of money around Luxor.”
“He is. But I’m not one of his partners.”
“He looks like some kind of huge turtle.”
“You better believe it. If he ever gets hold of you and clamps down, you’ll think he’s a turtle.”
Frances tossed her head, irritably. “Then all those expensive lunches? And all those big dinners and shows at the ritzy places around town?”
“Yep. All gone,” Strange grinned. “Of course, I can probably still afford a night a week. Or two.”
“Listen, I’ve got a little bit of money of my own,” Frances said, cautiously. She smiled. “But all I’ve really got is my job and my little apartment. And the job doesn’t bring in all that much.” She smiled again. “Of course you’re welcome to whatever I’ve got.”
“I wouldn’t think of taking it,” Strange said. He had learned enough about her in the past three months to at least know what her job was. She was the buyer and assistant manager for a women’s store on Main Street called Three Wives, part of a chain through the South and Middlewest. Her apartment she shared with another Luxor girl whose husband was overseas and who didn’t run around, not very much.
“On the other hand,” Frances said, “I don’t want to just sit home every night and listen to the radio. Or go out to dumb movies.” She looked at him shyly.
“Of course not. You’ll just have to find yourself some other dates.”
“No, no. I’d never do that. But on the other hand, how long do you think this war is going to last?”
“Oh, two years?” Strange said lightly. “At least two years.”
“Exactly. Then everybody will have to go back to ordinary living again. To being—” She stopped.
“Sure. Cinderella. Like in the fairy tale. And the coach turns back into a pumpkin, and the horses turn back into mice.” Strange grinned at her. “I understand that.”
“It is a little bit like that,” Frances said. And that was how they had left it.
So there wasn’t much doubt in Strange’s mind what would happen when he took her the news of his move to O’Bruyerre.
“I don’t much see you wanting to move out to that village that’s near the camp,” he said.
“Oh, that little town?” She was trying hard not to say a down-right No, immediately. “I’d have to give up my job. And my apartment? I’ll bet the living arrangements there are horrible. I don’t see how I could give up my job.”
Strange didn’t say anything. The back of his throat hurt, a little.
“And you’ve never said anything about marrying me,” she said, cautiously.
“No,” Strange said. “I haven’t.”
He thought she looked relieved. “I don’t see how,” Frances said, “I can give up everything I have here, and have worked to build, to move out there.”
“No,” Strange said. “I don’t think it would be fair to ask you.”
“Sexually, I’m not so full of discipline I could sit on it and wait and wait. How often will you get off out there, to come in? Weekends?”
“Every other week. For one night.”
“You see?”
He nodded.
“But you could call me,” Frances offered. “Ahead of time. Any time. So we could make a date.”
“Sure. Sure, that’s it,” Strange said. “That’s what I’ll do.”
But he had no intention of ever doing any such thing. That night they had one of the most rousing sexual performances they had ever done. After it, Frances cried. Strange almost cried. She did not see how she could change her mind, though.
One of the odd things was that Winch had never mentioned her, Strange thought as he left Winch’s office behind the jeep driver. Winch had only talked about Linda. His wife.
It was as though he was looking into Strange’s mind.
Because if there were any love leftovers in Strange’s thinking, the residues were of Linda Sue. Not of Frances. If he was still in love with anybody at all, a proposition Strange devoutly wished he could respond to with an unqualified negative, it was with Linda. Strange didn’t know why he was. But Winch seemed to know that he was.
If he had any sexual fantasies about anyone, after he was installed at O’Bruyerre, they were about Linda. Not about Frances. If any angers and rages struck him and shook him, and some did, they were over Linda. Not Frances. If any fits of jealousy and highly graphic fantasy of one of them sleeping with somebody took him over, they were always of Linda and her goddamned Air Force colonel, not of Frances and some guy.
Anyway, sex took up very little of his time and thought at O’Bruyerre. Strange was too busy organizing his new kitchen and new kitchen force and getting them to work together. As Winch had said while they were looking for a unit for him up in Winch’s office, no outfit that requested a new mess/sgt to come in in grade could have a top-rated kitchen; otherwise they would have promoted one of their own first cooks and picked an apprentice second cook out of the ranks. This was almost exactly the case. The other mess/sgt had been badly burned by a pot of cooking grease, something that should never happen in a well-run kitchen anyway; and he left behind him a shambles that could not have been much better when he was there. One of the first cooks was fat and one was thin, but they were equally ineffectual, equally bad. It took a great deal of cajolery, flattery and complimenting, as well as a lot of order-giving and meanness that almost came to fistfights a couple of times, to get them into some kind of shape. But by the time orders came for their ten-day maneuver out in the field Strange had whipped them down and had them working as a team.
It was just three days before they were to move out that Winch called him about Landers.
It was one of the most emotional moments Strange had had since seeing the Golden Gate. It was just ten o’clock in the morning. Landers had been killed at about eight-thirty. They had taken him back up to the hospital, not knowing where else to take him. Then they had called Winch and Winch had gone up there. That was why he was so late in calling. “Can you meet me at the main PX?” Winch asked hoarsely. “In the senior NCOs section? Have you got a ticket to let you in the PX this early in the day? Never mind. I’ll make one out for you, and forge it.” When Strange turned away from the phone, his new 1st/sgt was looking at him with a distressed face.
“What happened? You look like you seen a ghost.”
“What? Oh. Yeah. Almost. Old buddy of mine from the Pacific just got killed here at O’Bruyerre.”
The 1st/sgt’s face got jumpy. “What was it? Artillery? MG ranges? Hand grenades?”
“No. No. He just got hit by a car.”
“You old guys.” The 1st/sgt shook his head. “Your old combat buddies are closer than family.”
“Here, sign this, will you? I got to meet my old first sarn’t,” Strange said, getting from the clerk’s desk a ticket that said he could be allowed in the PX bar before noon. The 1st/sgt looked perplexed, as if about to say an officer must sign the ticket, which Strange already knew; but then he signed it, with an illegible, scrawled flourish.
“I’ll be back in a while,” Strange said. “Anyway, everything is in shape in the kitchen and they’ve all got something to keep them busy.”
But he might as well not have bothered with the PX pass. No one stopped him, or asked to see it. This PX pass ticket was a new thing, put into effect since the training had gone up into high gear for the European D-Day. Finding Winch was easy, as uncrowded as the place was now. It was only the second time Strange had been in the big main PX.
Winch was alone. Strange sat down beside him at the big round table.
“Well,” Strange said. “Tell me.”
Winch did. Strange listened as he ran through all that the woman had told the authorities, and what she had said about it looking like a deliberate suicide. They talked about the possible suicide awhile. Winch did not think it was possible. But Strange was not so sure.
“What the hell?” Winch said harshly. “He was getting exactly what he wanted. That’s what he told that company officer of his he wanted. That’s not a suicide position.”
“I don’t think he knew what he wanted,” Strange said suddenly. It was as if he had seen it and read it, written on the pressed paper Budweiser coaster under his beer mug, and was reading it off the circular paper mat, “I think he wanted both equally. Exactly equal. That’s an unsolvable position.” He looked up from his coaster.
Winch looked at him, his eyes wondering. “Then there wasn’t anything anybody could do for him.”
“No,” Strange said. “Nothing.”
“So it was all of it. . . And I was just wasting my time,” Winch said, to himself.
Some man in the big empty hall got up and put some money in the tall, bubbling, whirling, lighted Wurlitzer machine. “Ciribiribin” by the Andrews Sisters began to play in the huge hall.
“By God, I hate those f*cking Wurlitzers,” Winch said viciously.
“Did you see him?” Strange said.
Winch drank down the glass of white wine that was sitting in front of him. Then he signaled the barman over behind the mahogany-colored bar for another. He drank two more in quick succession, Then he began to hem and haw around about how, and whether or not, he had seen Landers’ body. They wanted another identification signature, besides just the hospital people. They didn’t want to call his old outfit. Anyway, he didn’t have an old outfit any more. Somebody knew Winch had known him.
“Did you see him?” Strange said again.
“Yeah, yeah, I saw him. Or at least his face. Was no great thing. Just another dead guy. He had that pale, greenish color they get. Face wasn’t smashed up. Just one big bruise on the right cheekbone.”
“What are they going to do with the body?”
“Send it home to his family, I guess.”
“He never liked his family that much.”
“No. I know. He told me that, too. But they can give it one of those big old local military American Legion funerals, out in the old cemetery. Beside his grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather, and all that. Fire a couple of volleys over it.”
“Have some Boy Scout play his bugle over it.”
“What the hell?” Winch said. “It’s only a body. It’s as good a way to dispose of it as some other.”
“You going to write them a letter?”
“No,” Winch said.
“Me neither. I wouldn’t know what to say to them.”
Winch signaled for another white wine. “Listen, you never come down here. Come on down some evening, at five-thirty or six. If you get the blues or anything.”
“We’re going out in the field day after tomorrow,” Strange said.
“Then come down when you get back,” Winch said, harshly.
Strange had nodded. “Sure. It’s only ten days.”
He had telephoned Prell that night. Winch had found out for him from Jack Alexander that the tour was in Kansas City at the Muehlebach. But Prell’s reaction made him decide right away that there was no point to calling Prell back.
The ten days out in the field were probably the best thing that could have happened to him at the moment. First, it was an abrupt switch from the garrison living. And existing under canvas that had to be pulled down and put back up twenty miles farther on in some other patch of woods every two days did not allow you much time for thinking, except in snatches. Strange could handle snatches. From 3:30 in the morning to midnight he was constantly on the run; cooking, stretching kitchen flies, feeding, overseeing that the flies and tents were ditched properly against the rain on the wooded slopes. Strange loved every minute of it.
And spring came while they were out there. For the first three days it rained, dismal winter rains at first, then each day warmer and more humid. Then, suddenly, the sun came out, and stayed out for the remaining seven days, and the leaves popped out and everything turned green.
It was absolutely beautiful. And the incredible speed with which it happened was unbelievable. Strange would stand outside his kitchen fly in the soft mud of some bare woods, checking his Lister water bags, and look off at some western Tennessee hill farmer’s rough slab cabin through the hard black lines of the bare hardwood branches. Minutes later the cabin would be invisible through the screen of leaves which had popped out, uncurling on the budded limbs.
Not many of the other men seemed to notice, or to give much of a damn. When it rained, they complained about the wet. When the sun came out, they complained about the mud. But to Strange it was unbelievably beautiful. This was the first time in six years that he had seen an American spring come on. Before the war he had spent four years in Wahoo, where there was no real winter or spring, then another year in Wahoo after the sneak attack, then a year in the South Pacific in the tropics. He hadn’t seen a real American spring in a long time.
They were out in the western Tennessee hill country, west of the Tennessee River. It was nothing like the primitive mountain country of eastern Tennessee, but if you got back into it far enough, where they were, you still found the home-built cabins covered with home-split shakes, the well and the outhouse outdoors around them. The farmers in their dilapidated hats and gum boots had eyes like wild, secretive animals. They were always willing to sell you a pint or two of homemade white lightning, yellowish and oily and evil-looking. Inside above the front door there were always some home-grown tobacco twists hanging, rolled and bent double and the ends twisted around each other. They would not sell you the tobacco but would give you a twist. The women with their hatchet faces always looked at you with gentle, tender eyes above the seamed, tight slash of their mouths. Strange had not chewed home-twist tobacco since he’d been a boy in Texas.
In almost every home, behind the home-set, swirly glass window-pane, hung one of the blue star flags with one, or two, or more blue stars in its center indicating the male members of the family in the service.
If there were any daughters, you never saw them.
On the single Saturday night of their ten-day field assignment orders came down giving them the Saturday afternoon, the night, and the Sunday morning off. The nearest town was a dinky little burg called McSwannville, three miles away. Those who could not catch a ride in on some loosened company vehicle walked it, along the muddy country lanes. Strange had control of the company’s freed kitchen jeep, and was able to take his entire kitchen force in on it. Men hung from it like overfull grapes dangling from an overladen garden cluster. After he parked it in the town, Strange wisely walked to the one hotel, intelligently thinking he should have some place to take any windfalls, and it was well he did. He got the very last room.
Men had centered on the one available town from all over the maneuver area. Infantry. Artillery. Quartermaster. A few raucous, tough paratroopers; tankers; other Signal Corps units. They all were there. It did not look like there were going to be many windfalls. But there was plenty of booze. The town was the county seat of a dry county, but there were three bootleg joints on its outskirts, where you could get real bottle whiskey instead of the always available, powerful white lightning. Each joint clearly had been alerted to stock up. Each was crowded, with a line of servicemen that came out of its door down to and along the muddy edge of the county road. As Strange walked down the one main street in midafternoon, the fistfights had already begun. One here. One there. Another starting, as still another stopped.
Not many women were even visible. Most of them stayed completely indoors. A few local bad girls and hookers hung around the two little eating places where much of the “concealed” drinking was done, or sat at one of the few tables the bootleg joints had inside, always with some soldier. The men of the town went about with a sort of business-as-usual attitude, but apparently trying to stay off the streets as much as possible. MPs with jeeps hauled jeeploads of lax drunken bodies off to some staging area where they would be collected by their outfits. Strange decided quickly there weren’t likely to be any windfalls, and concentrated on drinking. Even bad bottle whiskey tasted delicious after the white lightning.
There was this odd feeling everywhere that it was one week before the end of the world, and Strange let it pick him up and carry him.
He no longer thought about Landers with pain. People, like the seasons, all had to end sometime. In one manner or another. Somehow, seeing the spring had straightened that out for him.
Amiably drunk and at peace with this ending world he wandered through, he ate some food somewhere. Then about eleven p.m., as he walked along the one main street, he was accosted by the fat first cook of his company. The cook was sweating profusely and breathing heavily, and came out of a darkened alley.
“Hey, Sarge. Is it true you got a hotel room?”
“Yeah. I got one. Why?”
The fat first cook had been the biggest troublemaker Strange had had to deal with in the company. Naturally, he had wanted Strange’s job, and had thought he was in line for it. Strange was not about to give him half an inch. But none of that seemed to be bothering the cook, now.
“I got these two cunts, two broads, down here. I’d like to trade one of them for half a hotel room.”
Strange paused to stare at him. Strange never had liked him. If he had brought his complaints out, and had done his fighting in the open. But he hadn’t. He had done it all under cover, using other people to do his dirty work, and getting them into trouble. Strange intended to break him as soon as he could.
“How much do they want?”
“They don’t want any money. They just want to get f*cked.”
“Do they know you’re trading one of them off?”
“Oh sure. It was them that suggested it. They’ll go off in the woods, or the park. But if we had a real place to take them, they’d stay all night.”
“How’d you find them?”
“I didn’t, really. They found me,” the cook said. “I was sitting out in the grass, drinking. By myself, And they just sort of came up out of the shrubbery. I don’t think they’re townie girls. I think they’re off some farm.”
“How old are they? Are they of age?”
“How the hell do I know? They look the right age.”
Strange looked down the dark alley. “What the hell are they hiding down there for, then? Why don’t they come on out here into the light?”
“They’re not hiding. They just don’t want to come out here where all these guys are. They’d have a mob of guys all over them, if they came out here with no men.”
“That makes sense. Okay, let’s have a look.”
Strange had made his mind up so strongly that there weren’t going to be any windfalls that he was finding it hard to shift gears.
In the dark of the alley the girls were waiting. They both wore faded print dresses that came just to the knees of their shapely legs. Each of them wore a shabby girl’s coat against the spring night’s chill. They certainly weren’t women, but they certainly weren’t underage girls, either.
Strange knew when he saw them that he wasn’t going to turn it down. The thickness in his throat when he swallowed and the breathlessness in his chest when he breathed told him that.
They didn’t mind walking along the lighted street when they had men with them. One’s name was Donna and the other’s was Ruby. Neither of them wanted anything, except to go to the hotel. Both Strange and the cook had bottles, but the girls didn’t want a drink. Neither girl drank. Nor did they want something to eat. Thinking of all the girls he had squired so grandly at the Peabody, Strange grandly offered to buy them a meal at one of the hash-houses. Neither of them wanted it.
At the hotel the boy behind the old, tiny, ramshackle desk in the tiny lobby looked at the girls with carefully widened eyes which did not seem to see them, and gave the key to Strange. In the room, which Strange had not inspected, there was one bed. This did not seem to bother the girls. Fortunately, it was a double bed. The fat cook began to get out of his green field uniform immediately. He was apparently already counting the available hours he would have.
Up to now the girls had not said more than three or four words apiece. Now they began to giggle over the naked cook with his erection, and made it plain they did not want to be watched while they undressed, or to be seen nude. The men were to turn their backs, and hide their eyes. As soon as the girls were established in the bed under the sheet, the men could come on.
Of course, both men peeked, and there was a good deal of squealing and giggling and scolding over this. What the men saw for their trouble were two lovely, firm-breasted, young slender woman bodies. Only on the tanned hands and faces were there any signs of that swift aging process that was so noticeable out here among the hill farms. Then the two girls tumbled into the bed, and told the men to come on.
And that was the way they stayed, more or less, till after seven the next morning, when the girls said they must get home in order to wash and get ready to go to church. Sometimes, rarely, they had slept, while outside the hotel around them the little town rocked and rippled with its influx of last-gasp, end-of-the-world servicemen. The shouts and fights and breaking of glass and harmony singing did not bother the girls, and it certainly did not bother Strange and the cook. It was amazing, how two couples f*cking in the same bed could spend so much time there, and still be so absolutely far away from each other.
Strange, who had developed a healthy hunger and was thinking of hotcakes, butter, syrup and sausage somewhere in the sunshine of the spring morning, wanted to buy them all a scrumptious breakfast, but the girls refused. Outside the hotel, without even a kiss (they had never been much for kissing, even when f*cking in the old brass bed), they said good-by and went away along the now-quiet street in the sunny morning, then off down a path, back into the shrubbery out of which they had come.
So Strange was left with his fat first cook for a breakfast companion. It did not ruin the breakfast, but it came close to ruining nearly everything else. The cook would not stop talking about what a great night they two had had. Strange wanted only to savor it in silence. Strange felt he ought to owe the cook a favor. Instead, Strange was only angry. Finally he told the cook savagely to shut up.
“Oh, okay. Okay, John, okay.”
It was the first time the fat cook had ever dared use Strange’s first name. Strange raised his eyes and gave him a cold, murderous, fishy-eyed stare.
But the cook couldn’t ruin everything. Strange had come away from the whole thing, the bizarre night, the two girls, the drunken revel outside the hotel, with a feeling that the girls were a mythical impersonation of the spring itself, and this feeling stayed with him even in spite of the cook. Strange felt that if the spring, which had told him so much in other voiceless ways, had not been there, the girls would not have existed, either.
Together, he and the first cook slowly rounded up the rest of his kitchen force, going from place to place and group to group until they found them all. In the hot spring sunshine they had to take off their field jackets and carry them. Then they began the three-mile ride back to bivouac in the overcrowded jeep, past woods and fields that had leafed out noticeably since yesterday. They had four more days of maneuvers ahead, before they went back to camp. Most of that time was spent talking about the Saturday.
Strange would not talk about it. But this did not stop the cook from bragging to everybody about what a luckout and great night the two of them had had together, with their two hot farm girls. But Strange refused to answer all questions, even the most rollicking.
Strange was not at all proud of having doubled up with his fat cook in the same bed with two country girls. But more than that, the truth was that Strange had begun to fantasize about it.
It all had to do with whether the two girls had had orgasms or not. As far as Strange could tell, neither of the girls had come, not even once, all during the all-night lovemaking session. But this had not seemed to bother them. Or frustrate them. They seemed perfectly happy and satisfied, to be f*cked over and over by the men who came on top of them.
They could not help but make him think of Linda Sue, when she was younger.
Strange had badly wanted to go down on his girl, and make her come that way. Maybe for perhaps the first time in her life. Frances Highsmith had told him that a come that way was twice as intense as a come from masturbating. But of course it had been impossible with the male cook present in the bed. And Strange himself was not so sure the girl herself would have accepted it without being shocked and horrified. It made the difference between himself and them intensely apparent.
Was he a pervert?
The whole thing was terribly distressing. And the following weekend when the company was back in out of the field, and he had gotten an overnight pass for himself into Luxor and had made a date ahead of time with Frances, he asked her about it.
They were lying in the bed with their arms around each other like two old buddies, after their first sexual thunderstorm, her breasts pressed deliciously against his stomach. Strange carefully had not questioned her about what she had been up to, or who she had been out with since he had seen her last.
“I want to ask you something,” he said, his chin on the top of her head. “Seriously. Am I a pervert?”
“Pervert why?” Her voice was muffled by his chest.
“Because I like going down on girls so much, damn it. Why else?”
Frances pushed away from him, to look into his eyes in silence. Then she smiled. “Well, are dogs perverts?” she said, finally.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Dogs lick each other’s genitals. Just about every animal does, as far as I know. And none of them seem to worry about being perverts.”
“They’re dogs. We’re people.”
“What I’m trying to say is I think it’s a perfectly natural act. I don’t know who first made the rules that it wasn’t, but I think they’re full of shit. So: I think you’re only a pervert if you think you’re a pervert.”
Strange did not answer for a long moment. “I guess I think I’m a pervert,” he said in a low voice. “For liking it so much. So I guess I am a pervert, hunh?”
“Okay, you’re a pervert,” Frances said. “If you think you are, you are.” She began to laugh, “Isn’t it great?”
Strange found himself beginning to laugh. “As a matter of fact, it is. I like it.”
Her sense of humor was contagious. And it wiped all the dark fog off all of the windows. She was so sensible, Frances, and so unguilty. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to have her sense of humor with him all the time, to fall back on. Especially after he left O’Bruyerre.
“But there are a lot of people who don’t think like you and me,” Strange said.
“Yes,” she said. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to pick your shots. Like I do.”
Strange nodded. He told her the story of the two girls, the fat first cook, and the one bed.
Frances was laughing through most of it. “Yes. I would say that was one of the times when it was better to keep it to yourself.
“Are you a Christian?”
Strange had to think about that one. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Any more.”
“But you were raised as a Christian. By religious people.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s your problem. So was I. And Christianity’s ideas about sex are as primitive as a bunch of witch doctors’. I don’t know where it all started,” Frances said, “I guess with those Puritans the damned English sent over here in 1620. The English were smart to get rid of them.”
“I’ll be going to England before long,” Strange smiled. “Maybe it’ll be a little different over there.”
“It ought to be, after the way they got rid of those Puritans. On the other hand, the Victorians didn’t do so good with it, either.” She shook her head. “I learned in college that in thirty-six of the forty-eight states it’s illegal for you and me to go down on each other. Actually against the law. All spelled out, in the particulars. I think it is, in this state. We could go to jail, if somebody caught us. All laws made by damned Christians.”
“But you still don’t think you’re a pervert,” Strange said.
“No. Absolutely not. I just like to suck cock.”
Strange felt himself beginning to laugh again, and when he left her the next day on the Sunday to go back to camp, he was feeling considerably better about the whole business of perversion.
It may have been partly those high spirits that caused him to go see Winch at the main PX and ask for a transfer out of the Signal Corps unit.
Strange had thought about doing it a number of times before. But the business with the fat first cook and the farm girls on that Saturday night had pushed him over the edge. The cook was never going to let up on it. He still insisted on calling Strange by his first name. Strange did not feel he should ask him to stop it. If he did, it might be taken the wrong way by the others. Strange had tried every silent way that he knew to let the cook know that he did not like it. But the cook had a hide like a rhinoceros. Or else he just chose to ignore it. Strange suspected it was the latter.
But the cook wasn’t the main factor. The cook was just the last straw. Strange never had liked the outfit. Two of the company commanders had moved away. Two other officers had moved off and been replaced. Two of the section sergeants had been transferred out, upward. Strange heard later that one of them was going to go to OCS. If there had ever been any esprit and unit loyalty, it had diminished visibly since Strange had come in.
He explained all this carefully to Winch, and a little apologetically, while Winch sat and grinned at him crazily.
“And just where would your f*cking majesty like to go?” Winch said, when he had finished.
“I’d like to go back to the infantry.”
“You sure are a glutton for punishment. Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
They were seated at a small table a few feet from Winch’s big table, in the crowded roaring 6:00 p.m. interior of the huge beer-hall. Both of the Wurlitzers were going full blast. Winch had brought him over to the small table, after Strange had said he wanted to talk to him. It was Winch’s local private office, apparently.
Even in the 6:00 p.m. jam-up it was kept vacant for Winch’s use by the management.
“You know our old buddy Jack Alexander has a big piece of this place,” Winch said, with his crazy-grinning eyes,
“Sure, it figures.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you right at this moment,” Winch went on. “Both of these Divisions are moving out. One is leaving for England in a week, and the other not too long after. They both have had their final medical exams and there aren’t any vacancies.” He stopped to rub and pull at his ear, something Strange had never seen him do before. “But there will be two new Divisions moving right in on their heels as soon as they clear.”
“Sure. That’s fine. But what about my limited duty status?”
Winch grinned again. “Are you trying to put me on?”
Strange shook his head. “When is my outfit due to leave?”
“Not for a while. There’ve been no orders cut for it yet.
“But that doesn’t matter, either,” Winch said. “I can pull you out of it and hold you as a casual. If the orders are cut.”
“Okay, then. That’s fine.” Strange made as if to get up, but Winch put out a hand and held him down by his wrist
“What have you decided about Landers?” he said.
Strange ruminated. “I aint decided nothing,” he said. “Being out there in the field on maneuvers, I guess, makes it all seem pretty far away.”
“I guess,” Winch said.
Strange looked over at him, awkwardly. “You know, the spring came on while we were out there. I aint seen a real spring in a long time. Six years.”
“Yes?” Winch said. His eyes seemed to have lost their crazy energetic glint, and become more open.
“Everybody has to die sometime. In some particular way, or other.”
“Yes,” Winch said. “And generally, the later the better.”
“Yes,” Strange said. “Generally. But not always. I don’t honestly think there was anything anybody could have done.”
“That’s your considered opinion.” It was not a question, but more of a statement, made almost as if to Winch himself.
“It is,” Strange said. Winch had let go of his arm. He stood up. “I guess I better ought to be getting on.”
“No, no. No, no,” Winch cried, and his eyes began to heat up again. “You have to come over and have a few beers with this gang of bums. I want you to meet some of them.”
Strange went, but he didn’t want to. He felt he owed at least this much to Winch, but he did not like the quality, or the steady, sharply grinning faces around the table. He had never liked that kind of old-timer noncoms.
When he left, after two or three beers with them, Strange was careful to shake hands with every man he had been introduced to.
“You got to come back. You got to come back, Johnny Stranger,” Winch shouted after him, his face and hot eyes still twisted over some joke or other. “Any time. Any time. Tomorrow.”
Strange did not think Winch looked good at all.