Chapter 31
STRANGE’S DISAPPROVAL WAS not lost on Winch, at the big round table. If Strange thought it was, or thought Winch was unable to sense it and appreciate it, he was dead wrong.
On the other hand Winch was not in agreement at all with the way Strange had chosen to run out his string. The $7000 loss blown on the Peabody and its suite and parties was a ridiculous gesture, to Winch. Strange’s set determination to get himself to England and Europe, when he did not have to, was even crazier. But to come down here and ask to have himself transferred out of an outfit he now more or less dominated, back into the infantry, was a clear insanity.
There had to be something insanely self-destructive in it. Strange had to have gone off his rocker and a little crazy, over that dumb wife of his. Winch may have gone a little odd, a little peculiar, himself. But not so much that he could not notice and analyze something as flagrant as those choices.
Winch might be a little crazy. But he wasn’t that crazy. Statistically, they both knew, the mess/sgt of an infantry company stood a better chance of getting himself knocked off in Europe than the mess/sgt of a Signal Corps unit. For a large variety of reasons.
As for Strange’s opinion about Landers, Winch did not go along with that either. All that bullshit about the springtime. Landers was not the springtime, or anything near like it. Landers was a human man, with arms, and legs, and blood, and a kooky, kinked-up, little-bit-crazy brain. And as such he could have been saved. Winch just had not known the combination. And neither had Strange. To say anything else, like that guff about the springtime, was to lie to yourself.
You could go on and say Landers was crazy. But that was no excuse either. Everybody was crazy. Strange, and Prell, those two crazy chief surgeons at the hospital, Winch himself. Every first-three-grader who came to this big round table in the beer hall was a nut. If the war hadn’t made them crazy, they had brought the craziness with them from before. Which was probably the most likely in any case.
Winch and Strange had f*cked up on Landers. That was all there was to say. Just as Winch, right now, was also f*cking up on Strange himself. Because there was nothing to do but go ahead and put through his request for transfer. As soon as the two new Divisions began to show up. Strange would fight anything else like a crazy man.
What could you do with a crazy man? The only real answer was to convince him not to do what he wanted to do, or thought he ought to do. And Winch was not crazy enough to think he could do that with anybody as stubborn as Strange.
Shit, he hadn’t even been able to do it with Landers.
Three days before Strange had come down there to the PX to see him, Winch had gone wild-ass crazy in Jack Alexander’s nonstop poker game at the Claridge, and had won $12,000. For no appreciable reason he had begun to hold cards, and seemed unable to draw a bad hand. Hidden full houses at seven card high. Concealed lows in seven high low. Wired pairs that filled to trips against two pair in five stud. Winch had bet them wildly, crazily, making the other players think he was bluffing (nobody could believe he could keep on drawing such hands), and finally had broken the game. Everybody had quit, and dropped out of the game over such high losses, or else had gone flat broke. Until the game had closed down for the night. An almost unheard of thing. Winch and Alexander had even had a fight, an argument, while the game was still on, over the way Winch was playing.
“You damn fool,” Jack who never played had said heatedly in front of the other players, his innate conservatism incensed by such extravagance. “You’re going to lose all your f*cking damn players, all your competition, if you don’t play like a f*cking damn human being.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Winch had bellowed, and made his crazy, green-eyed smile. “The f*ck do I care?”
Alexander was right, of course. And afterward the two had an even bigger argument, while the other players drifted off.
Winch had decided he did not want to carry the money away with him. That was what the disagreement was over.
“I want you to keep it and invest it for me,” Winch said.
“Look,” Alexander said. “I’ll take all or part of it and keep it in the safe for you. If you don’t want to carry that much on you. You can pick it up in a couple of days. But I don’t want to take charge of it for you.”
The two of them were completely alone in the two-room suite by now. Winch checked the bedroom to be sure.
“No, that’s not what I want,” he said. “I want you to keep it. For me. When the first good deal turns up, buy me into it. I don’t want the f*cking money.”
“I won’t take care of your money. I’m not your investment broker.”
“Sure you are,” Winch said, and grinned his sly grin.
Alexander shook his massive head. “No. I’m f*cking not. There aint any deals coming up right now as far as I know. Take the money and put it in a bank. A safe deposit box, is preferable. Soon as something comes up, you give me what it needs. That’s sensible. There’s a lot of money there.”
That much was true. It was a not inconsiderable stack of greenbacks, although Alexander had changed all the small bills for Winch that he could manage. It made a thick, unfolded sheaf, bound in its rubber band. Winch took it and dropped it on the green felt playing surface under the white, green-shaded light hanging over the table.
“There. There it is. I don’t want it. And I aint taking it.” He turned and walked to the door. “You can give me an IOU, if you want.”
“God damn you,” Alexander said. But he got a slip of paper and commenced writing the IOU. “Now, here. I’m keeping it. But I’m not going to invest it. Not without I talk to you first. If something shows up, I’ll give you a call. And you can tell me to buy in, or not buy in.” He tore the slip off the pad. “But that’s the only way I’ll do it.”
“Okay. Fine.” Winch accepted the slip and went back to the door, and then turned back to wink and make his grin.
The big, hard turtle’s face stared back at him icily. “Damn you,” Alexander said, “you’re the biggest goddamned problem I ever got from old Hoggenbeck. I don’t know why you don’t act more sensible. Now get the f*ck out of here. And don’t come back and play in my game unless you can act like a human being.”
Winch laughed, low in his throat. But outside in the dark street he took out the little IOU slip and burnt it with a match. When the last white corner withered into ash, he snapped it away off his fingers into the night’s spring breeze. What did he need with an IOU from Alexander? As long as Alexander knew he had one, it was the same thing. And even if Alexander knew he didn’t have one, he knew Alexander wouldn’t crook him. Or what if he did? It would be interesting.
But it wasn’t any kind of craziness like Strange had shown with his $7000. Winch wasn’t crazily taking his $12,000 and blowing it, on a bunch of parties and a ritzy hangout for a bunch of f*ckheads who would never appreciate it anyway.
Along Luxor Main Street, almost empty now at 3:00 a.m., compared to earlier in the night, the soft Southern spring breeze had taken over the city as well as the country and in the parks the buds were out on the trees and cracking into leaf. Winch walked along it, looking at his watch. There were still servicemen and their girls abroad, or lonely men in uniform alone, meandering along Main Street, or down the hill on Union where Main crossed it in a T. The influx of servicemen in the past weeks had been enormous. But everything was closed. Winch wished there was a joint open, or even a hashhouse, where he could waste an hour before going home to the apartment. Carol would be getting up at four, to go home. Winch had been doing this kind of thing more and more lately, to avoid having to go to sleep beside Carol in the apartment when she was there.
It was hard on him, physically. All the fatigue. But he could not stand having her wake and hear him talking through his nightmares. He didn’t like her waking him out of them.
But all the after-hours joints were scattered, hidden away out in the lowlife residential areas of the town. There weren’t any down in the downtown section. Mostly they were places that sold barbeque, which he could not eat any more, little joints, run by blacks, where you could get beer, and which sold pints and half pints of bootleg out in the back under the branching trunks of huge old elm trees.
Winch no longer had much drive to go to places like that. And Carol did not like them. Standing in front of the Peabody, he decided to walk home to the apartment. It was only ten blocks. If he took it easy and walked slowly, he could do it without much discomfort. And Carol would just about be getting up when he got there.
Winch had been getting more and more of this breathlessness lately, but had not told anyone about it yet. Carol was the hardest one to fool. Especially if they had sex together. Which was just about every day, if Winch got up to the apartment soon enough. The high, open, outside staircase up to the apartment was giving him more trouble now, too. He had to stop twice now, to breathe, when he climbed it. If Carol was with him, he pretended he was looking off at the scenery, which was certainly beautiful enough to stop for. Fortunately Carol hadn’t been with him that night.
Sitting in the beer hall after Strange had left, with the Wurlitzers blaring out conflicting tunes, Winch had pushed back his chair and got to his feet.
He favored his assembled stripers with his grin. It was running through his mind that he would love to drop a couple of hand grenades into those screaming jukeboxes. They were really the world of the future, it suddenly occurred to him. Chrome, and pipe, and plastic, and whirling iridescent lights, and jarred, canned music. To soothe the souls of men as they went to fight and die against other men, equally rabid and intent on saving their own canned tunes. Pho-o-o-ey-y-y! He wanted to shout it aloud. But he made himself hold back.
He wanted to stay, too. But he had promised Carol he would take her out to a nice dinner tonight.
“Well, gentlemen. Much as I love your illustrious company. But, as usual, I’ve got a lot of heavy work to do tonight,” he grinned down at them.
“What’s up, Mart?” one of them bawled. “Got some heavy duty cunt lined up tonight?”
“Hell,” Winch said slyly. “I haven’t seen one of those in so long I don’t remember whether you play them sideways like a harmonica, or straight in like a tuba mouthpiece.”
It got a big laugh all around, and was a good point to leave on. Outside beside his car he stopped, standing straight up in the spring night for a couple of minutes, to get his breath. In a kind of desolate way he knew that soon he was going to have to go up and turn himself over to them again at the hospital, where they might decide to keep him awhile or not decide to, but he did not want to think about that at the moment.
Strange had been right about one thing, anyway. Winch was not in good shape. Strange had not said what he thought, but Winch had read it in his eyes. Landers’ death had hit Winch worse than he would admit to anyone, even to Strange. Even to Carol.
One evening in town at the apartment he had broken down, and had tried to tell Carol about it. About all of Landers, and what had happened, and where he Winch had failed. She had simply stared at him. Then after a little while tears had come in her eyes. For him Winch. Not for Landers.
It had been a mistake. To talk to her. Perhaps he had not been able to communicate very well. But people like Carol didn’t really want to know that the Winches of the world cared. They preferred them to be tough and funny.
Anyway, he had learned enough so that he would never try to do it again.
She was waiting for him at the apartment when he got in, and pulled the little car up, and climbed those stairs. He waited a couple of minutes on the high outdoor landing before opening the door, to get his breath. But for some unaccountable reason he was feeling in much better shape tonight than usual. Maybe it was the glasses of wine he’d had.
In the beginning dusk off through the tall trees the spring was coming on furiously, like a madly galloping horse. People were out working in their yards and Victory gardens.
“I thought maybe you weren’t going to be able to come tonight,” Carol said lightly, when he’d shut the door. She had gotten herself all dolled up for the evening in a new spring dress he hadn’t seen before. Off behind her somewhere, in an unobtrusive corner, were sitting two lady’s suitcases, side by side.
“Are you kidding?” Winch grinned. She came to him and put herself into his arms, her breasts pushing against his blouse, and Winch felt the youth of her again, as he kissed her.
The kiss went on, and then further on, and Winch felt the old familiar ache in the back of his throat. But there was no way to possess a woman, really. Skin. Skin was as close as you could really get. Even the inside of the vagina was still skin.
“What do you say we have a drink first?” he said, breaking away.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course. No rush. There’s no rush.”
“Have we still got any of that sauterne for me?”
“It’s in the icebox. I’ll get it. I’ll have a Scotch and soda, will you make it for me?” She went off in that long, willowy, youthful stride.
“I’ve got two bits of news to tell you,” she said, when they had their drinks and were seated on the couch, and she had snuggled up to him.
Winch had his arm around her. He smiled. “Let’s let it wait till later. What do you say?”
With their drinks they went over to the bed. On the bed Winch began slowly undressing her out of her new outfit, and himself out of his uniform. That was one of the great things about her, she didn’t give a damn about mussing her clothes. There was very little of his breathlessness. But there almost never was, before, and during. It was always afterward.
This time there was no breathlessness in Winch afterward. When Carol rolled out from under him to go and wash herself, as she invariably did, patting him on the ear and neck, Winch lay in the bed lazily and enjoyed his not having to get up and walk around the room quietly, to get his breath.
He had no idea at all why it should happen like that. He felt almost good. The only thing that was bothering him, now, was the distention in his belly that he got, whenever he tried to eat a meal. Lying nude in the bed, watching the closed bathroom door, he let out a long, quiet, but enormous fart.
Carol hadn’t come. Not at all. Hadn’t had any orgasm. Winch hadn’t gone down on her and she hadn’t masturbated, and those were the only two ways she could make it. Winch did not mind. Winch had learned long ago that this stuff of women coming and coming over and over, multiple orgasms, was largely a lot of baloney out of men’s imaginations more than it was the truth out of women themselves. Carol seemed to have had enough apparent satisfaction out of his penetration of her. His using her. His coming himself satisfied her and gave her all the pleasure she needed this time.
She was quite a girl, Carol. But he would rather have taken a beating, than to have to go out for dinner.
They had quite a discussion, finally, about where they were going to go to eat.
She came out of the bathroom, nude, and began collecting her strewn clothes and getting dressed. Putting on the dress she started to laugh in a sort of half giggle. “I’m going to look like just what I am, and just what I’ve been doing.”
“Does that bother you?” Winch grinned from the bed. He got up himself, and began collecting his warrant officer’s uniform.
“You haven’t let me tell you my two pieces of news,” Carol said while they were dressing.
“Won’t they keep till later?” Winch said. “Till after we’ve had dinner, say?”
“Well won’t you let me tell you the one?” Carol said. “Or didn’t you notice the suitcases?”
“I noticed them. You planning on going on a trip someplace?”
“No. No, that’s just it. Those suitcases are because I’m moving in here, with you.”
Winch did not honestly know whether to be happy, or pissed off. He decided to grin, while playing for time. “You’re moving in here with me? What about your parents?”
Carol was trying, without total success, to smooth the wrinkles out of her skirt in front of the mirror. She brought her eyes up to her face in the mirror and took a deep breath like someone about to begin a reading in front of a declamation class. “It just seemed to me to be silly to keep on getting up at four in the morning and getting all made up and all dressed up to go home and try to get an extra hour and a half of good sleep. Nobody was ever waiting up for me. Nobody ever asked me about when I got in.”
“So?”
She turned away from the mirror. “So I had it out with them. I got them together and sat them down and told them I had a lover. And that it seemed dumb to me to lose all that good sleep.”
“You tell them about me?”
* * *
Carol had told Winch that she was going to move in with him in his small apartment in Luxor. Having found it ridiculous, finally, that she should wake up every morning at 4:00 a.m., get dressed, and go home, she had informed her parents in a moment of defiance that she had a lover and intended to live with him. She told Winch she had lied to her parents that he was a commander in the Navy. Winch did not know whether he should have been happy or unhappy over this new state of things.
Winch and Carol were preparing to go out for dinner. He had noticed the two suitcases which she had brought with her. She had explained that they were part of her move into the apartment. It had been implied that Winch thought these suitcases meant she was ending their affair and leaving Luxor, which was why he had first told her he did not want to hear her “two bits of news” until later.
They left the apartment and decided to have dinner in the rather staid and chic family-type restaurant of the Peabody Hotel rather than one of the Army hangouts. Winch tipped the waiter for a good table, and they were seated among the quiet, respectable citizens of Luxor.
Winch had an acute stomach discomfort which accompanied his heart ailment. What ensued in the restaurant was both a sign of his suffering and of his increasing craziness.
While sitting in conversation at the dinner table with Carol, he leaned forward slightly and let loose this enormous loud rippling fart which reverberated from the walls of the restaurant. There was a pronounced though short silence all over the place, a discreet turning of heads, and then the people at the surrounding tables went back to their dinners. Carol did not know how to react since this was a social gaffe she was incapable of coping with. Winch continued talking as though nothing had happened, although he watched Carol’s eyes—they did not widen, they might have narrowed just the slightest bit—but she gave no indication that she had heard this enormous fart, and she, too, continued talking. Later, back at the apartment, after a cab ride through the beautiful April night, Carol told Winch the other bit of news. She had decided to go to summer school. Her new boyfriend, whom she had already told Winch about, who suited her so much better than the proper Luxor boy whom she had inveigled into going up to Western Reserve with her, wanted her to come back up to Ohio to get married. Carol told Winch she was about ready to agree with this, and had in her mind already.
So in essence this was the beginning of their good-by—a good-by that would take place in late May. Winch had been anticipating something of this sort for quite a long time. He knew, in fact, that had he wanted to keep her he could have talked her at any time into marrying him. She was still in love with him in a special private way, and enjoyed and had learned from their sexual relationship, but like him, and because of his reticence, she realized that for them to marry would be catastrophic.
Winch handled this news well enough, and near the end of this chapter he saw himself facing up to a future without Carol, all of this augmented by his approaching insanity. As he thought it all over, he seemed more concerned with having Carol not wake him up at night during his nightmares than he did with the fact that soon he would lose her.
At the end of the chapter Winch’s thoughts turned to Bobby Prell, who appeared now to Winch—after Johnny Strange had told Winch of the telephone conversation with Prell from Kansas City—to have been the only one of the four old-company men to have found “peace” for himself in the wartime noncombat areas.