Chapter 4
THEY DOCKED LATE THAT NIGHT, in San Diego. No one felt like sleeping, but it would have been impossible anyway. Dago was where the Navy and Marine Corps wounded were being taken off.
The little ship, dwarfed now by the Navy fighting ships nearby, blazed with lights. Shore-based stretcher-bearers and the whiteclad shipboard medics moved down the aisles and passageways, calling to each other in loud voices. Berth after berth in the staterooms and bed after bed in the main lounge were emptied, and the occupants carted away. Some of them were coming from as far away as the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Australia, from New Zealand. From New Guinea, the Solomons, the Coral Sea.
On shore under the dockside floodlights there was a great bustle, as ambulance after ambulance drove up, was loaded, and pulled off into the darkness. In the big harbor packed with wartime shipping, lights shone everywhere, on ships, in shore installations, from cars and buses and trucks.
And above the harbor the lights of the city blazed as if for a festive occasion, or as if welcoming the wounded home. To the men on board, used to blackouts and brownouts, the sight was breathtaking. Some began to weep again.
When the unloading was over, and the lights on board began to dim down again, a third of the berths and beds were empty. The rest, the Army personnel, would have to wait for San Francisco. Frisco was another two days run up the coast. Those last two days, in the partially empty ship, were going to seem the longest, and the worst. And everybody knew it.
John Strange certainly knew it. When things settled down, Strange made his way back to Bobby Prell’s bed in the diminished-seeming main lounge. Strange leaned over Prell’s bed foot again and tried hard one more time to think of something funny to say. He had hoped once again, because of the greatness of the occasion, to get Winch to come with him to visit Prell. If he had, it would be the first time. The first in fact since Winch had suddenly appeared at the Naval base hospital in the New Hebrides, on his way out apparently, but not looking wounded and not even looking particularly sick. Even back there, Winch had flatly refused to visit Prell or have anything to do with him.
Because of Prell, Strange had spent a lot of time in the ship’s main lounge. They hadn’t called him Mother Strange for nothing, back in the old company. But he had never gotten used to the lounge, or gotten so he did not feel uncomfortable in it.
Long afterward, Strange noted, they all of them still spoke about how during the voyage the main lounge was never far from anyone’s thoughts. No matter where they went, or what Stateside hospital the post cards and letters came back from. They all of them said or wrote the same thing about the lounge. All of us, Strange thought. It was as if all of them, hunting, casting around, were trying to find the common factors that would hold the whole experience together for them. And the voyage was the final act of the play, the dividing line. Like the International Date Line, when they crossed it.
Among themselves, they had calculated that 13 percent were damaged bad enough to have to travel in the lounge. The statistics of being wounded fascinated Strange as much as they did the rest of them. And on board, it was their biggest game. Next to card playing. Blackjack. And poker.
Of the 13 percent of them in the lounge, one-fifth, or 2.6 percent of the total, had to go into the extra-care unit. The 2.6 percent were almost all lung wounds. Only about a sixth of them were abdominals or head wounds. Because the head wounds almost always died before they got on board, and the abdominals either died or recovered sufficiently to travel out in the open lounge with the others. Among the infantry, us infantry, Strange thought with a chief cook’s smile, it was an interesting note that 75 percent of the lung wounds were caused by rifle or machinegun bullets, but only 50 percent of the abdominals were bullet wounds. They did not know why, and they did not know whether these figures also applied to other types of outfits.
Strange found it a well-run, put-together place, the main lounge. Once your nose got over its outrage at the smell. And once the dark part of your mind got over its supernatural, witches-and-broomstick feeling about it. The feeling that right here, traveling with you, was the true hell of your Christian grandmother. It even looked like it. Pincers, and needles, and tubes and scissors. With its working imps, and gory damned ones. All of them paying out or receiving the punishment for human sins. It could seem the repository, the collection-place and bank, of all human evil. It often gave Strange that feeling.
Strange was not a religious man. Or at least, not a very religious man. Better to say, a poorly religious man. Who wasn’t much good at living up to it. But Strange believed in God. And believed he would pay someday for his lapses. And it was not too big a jump of the imagination for him to see the main lounge as the hell where he might someday be paying.
Like so many others, he carried a big reluctance to enter it or breathe its air, or even to touching the door handles that opened its doors. Out of a superstitious fear of contamination. But once you got past all that, it was remarkable how well it did and ran the things it was supposed to do and run. As no doubt hell did, too, Strange thought.
The extra-care unit was in one corner. It was cordoned off from the rest by curtain screens. Generally silence prevailed there. But all sorts of gruesome medical noises kept issuing from it. Enhanced perhaps by the silence. Liquid gurglings. Soft hissings of air. Louder air blasts. Peculiar tickings. Heavy breathing. No visitors were allowed in it.
If you wanted to carry the hell idea further, you could think of the extra-care unit as the seventh level of your grandma’s Christian hell, Strange often thought. The lowest. The worst of all.
If it had not been for Prell, Strange might never have gotten to know the lounge as well as he did. He spent a good part of every day in there with Prell, talking and laughing and trying to cheer him up. He doubted if he would have done as much for another man. Not in that lousy place. He hadn’t even bothered to look up Landers, Winch’s clerk, during the voyage. But Landers was a wartime volunteer. And Prell—like Winch—was from the old outfit.
Strange with his bad hand had preceded Winch by a week to the Naval base hospital at Efate in the New Hebrides. And when he left the company up in New Georgia, Winch to all appearances had been healthy and in good shape. Bobby Prell of course had preceded both of them by several weeks, when the New Georgia campaign was getting up to its peak of fighting.
Strange would not have put it past Winch to simply decide he had had enough combat, and simply have himself shipped out back to America. Winch was perfectly capable of it, and Strange was convinced he had enough pull to do it. If that was what he decided he wanted to do.
Gossip around the New Hebrides base hospital said that Winch had something wrong with his heart. Just as gossip in the hospital had it that Prell was going to lose one or both of his legs. But Winch did not look or act like a man who had had a heart attack, any more than Bobby Prell looked or acted like a man who was going to let them take off one or both of his legs.
Gossip around the hospital also had it that Prell was being recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor by the Division’s commander. But when Strange told this to Winch, Winch only snorted with outraged disgust. If anybody knew anything definite about Prell’s potential recommendation, it would be his own 1st/sgt, Winch. But Winch refused to admit he had heard about it. Prell himself had heard nothing about it, apparently. And Strange had felt that if he could get Winch to back-up the fact of the recommendation, it might do Prell a world of good.
It was not that Prell was depressed, or defeated, or suicidal. Or anything bad like that. That wasn’t Prell’s style, any more than it was Winch’s. Prell was just as mean and ornery as he’d ever been. He’d always been a stubborn, proud West Virginia hardhead, which was part of why Winch had never liked him. It was why Strange liked him.
But underneath Prell’s toughness about being wounded, Strange was acute enough to sense a canker. A sort of well-encrusted, walled-off cyst of despair. Which had hardened, and been sealed off. But which might flare up. Or burst, and pour out its morbid fluid. And if that happened, Prell would be in trouble. Some news, even unconfirmed, about a Congressional Medal would be damn good medicine for that.
But Winch was not about to come through with it, even if he had it.
Strange had learned to live with Winch. It wasn’t so hard. You just had to understand that he was a little crazy, and make allowances for it. In fact, just about everything good that had happened to Strange in the past three years Winch had been responsible for. Strange couldn’t forget that.
Back in early 1940, when the old peacetime Division was stationed inland at Schofield Barracks on Wahoo, long before the sneak attack, Strange had been a second cook in the Coast Artillery at Fort Kamehameha, with a 4th CI specialist’s rating and no prospect of advancement. Winch, who as a staff/sgt had been in the same outfit with him at Fort Riley, Kansas five years before, had come down to see him and invite him to transfer into his infantry outfit at Schofield. It was a crazy thing to ask. Fort Kam was close to Honolulu, and had its own swimming beaches, and Strange was drawing down a spec 4’s pay. But Winch had promised him that within three months he would be mess/sgt of his company. Winch had a mess/sgt he wanted to get rid of. This was back in the days when mess/sgts and 1st/cooks reenlisted in place, just to keep their jobs. Strange had accepted. And Winch had come through. Exactly as he’d said.
The move had changed Strange’s life. After his big jump in pay, he had sent home to Texas for his girlfriend and brought her out and married her. This was something Strange had not expected to be able to do for another three years. But with the grade of staff/sgt he could get married NCOs’ allowances, and quarters on the post. He had stopped his wild living, and spending his pay on booze and the whores and running around, and had settled down. With Linda Sue with him it was easy. She had even started them saving some money. By the end of 1941, when the sneak attack came and the war, they had saved two thousand dollars.
All of this had been directly due to Winch. Strange figured he owed him more than he could ever hope to make up to him. And if Winch wanted to be a nut and an eccentric, and do his crazy, bitchy things every now and then, Strange was not going to intervene and try to put him straight. Anyway intervening with Winch was like trying to intervene with a force of nature like a line squall. You couldn’t do it.
Between them (with a little help from some NCOs they had gotten made), they had turned Winch’s company into one of the best the Division had had. Maybe the best the Division had ever had. Strange for one at least would never forget it the rest of his whole life. Now the war was ruining it. Mangling it, tearing it to shreds. But that was what it had been designed and put together for. It couldn’t go on forever. And when he had left it, and then Winch left it, Strange was sure it had virtually ceased to exist. Their old outfit. But Strange would not forget it.
Whatever else, we were pros, Strange thought with grim satisfaction for the five-hundredth time. Whatever else they could say about us, we were professionals. He was unaware, again, that he had used the past tense.
And whatever the company was, it was crazy Mart Winch who had made it. Winch might be unorthodox, and cheat, and even be downright dishonest on occasion, in his methods. But the results he got were phenomenal, and amounted to a kind of crazy genius. Strange had to love him for that.
But if he was willing to back up Winch and make allowances for Winch, Strange also had a very special feeling about Bobby Prell.
There had been a couple of moments right after the war began in Wahoo when Strange had looked at his wife and regretted being married. Prell made him feel a little bit like that.
Strange had wanted to kick himself in the ass, for feeling that way about Linda. He had not even seen all that much of her, after the sneak attack. The company had moved out right away to defense positions. Soon after, all the wives and dependents had been sent back to the States. Twice before her ship left, he got an overnight pass from Winch to meet her in town in a hotel. Both times, with the war all around them, he had a sense of regret at having hurried into his marriage. It would have been so nice and easy and relaxed, if it had just been some hooker. Instead of all this weeping and carrying on about being parted. She had not understood why he wanted to stay, or why he felt the way he did about the company.
And Strange realized, that if he had only known this war was coming, he would not have married her in such a hurry.
It tore his heart for her to sail off home, but half of him was relieved to see her go. He felt it would be different and like the old days again, with her out of the way. But it wasn’t. The one time he had gone to the whores in town with a bunch of the guys, after things loosened up in Wahoo, he had been both bored and guilty. He no longer liked to go out on pass and get drunk with the guys. And when the outfit arrived in Guadalcanal to relieve the Marines, Strange found a new caution and new thoughtfulness in him had replaced the old desire to take risks. And he missed his wife terribly.
Not Prell, though. There had always been a streak of the heroics-lover about Prell. With his unbending West Virginia pride. Prell wasn’t a gay carefree laughing-boy type. He was dead responsible, and steady, cool, calculating. But he was vain to a fault. He took bigger risks than the motorcycle-jockey, wild-ass kind. He had done unbelievable things on the Canal. Like walking all night through the jungle alone out beyond the lines, to get back to the company which was cut off somewhere a mile up ahead. And had never blinked an eye about it afterward. Strange envied him, even before the outfit left the Canal for New Georgia.
Small, slight, with long hollows under his high cheekbones and narrow eyes, Prell now was emaciated. There were huge purple circles under the coalblack eyes. He had been broken from sergeant twice in the past two years, the last time after the Canal campaign ended. But before New Georgia, he had worked his way back up to corporal. And to acting squad leader, in addition. He was too good a soldier, and everybody knew it. Then, to get all torn up in a crappy little campaign like New Georgia. Back home in the States nobody had ever heard of New Georgia, apparently.
Oddly enough, Prell was cheerful about being hit so bad, more than Strange had ever seen him be about anything. As if he felt it was required of him. He had raised his head up off the pillow and grinned, behind the terrible fragile hollows under his eyes, as Strange came up to the bed.
“Won’t be long now, hunh?”
Strange made himself grin. “Two days they say. Two days, and then the old Golden Gate, and the Bridge, and the old Presidio.” He looked around the lounge. “Looks pretty empty in here.”
“It was a big scene in here,” Prell said. “People sniffling. And crying.”
“I bet. But not you.”
“No, not me. I been around the Horn before.”
“You been out and back. You’re no cherry. And you wouldn’t show it if you were.”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
Strange squatted, a countryman’s squat, his haunches on his heels. There were no chairs. There wasn’t any room for chairs. Prell had, with a medic’s help, rigged up a rearview mirror for himself out of a shaving mirror and some coat-hanger wire, so that he could see the part of the lounge that was behind him. Now he looked in his mirror, and shifted himself slightly with his elbows, before he spoke again. With his legs both hanging from the pulleys, he could only move himself a few inches.
“Goddamn bedsores are starting to kill me,” he said. He paused, but only for a second. “How’s Winch?”
“He’s all right as far as I know. I don’t see much of him.”
“That son of a bitch will always be all right. As long as there’s anything to steal. He hasn’t been in here to see me once.”
“Hasn’t he?” Strange said. “I thought he said he was coming in to see you.”
Prell’s obsidian eyes looked up into his rearview mirror a moment, scanning the hall behind him. “Landers has been in to see me six times.”
“He has? I haven’t even seen Landers since we got on board. I ought to look him up.”
Prell ignored that. “You’ve been in to see me seventeen times.”
“I have? What are you, keeping some kind of a scoreboard or something?”
“I sure am. Sure, I am. I aint got anything much else to do,” Prell said authoritatively.
“How’s your crossword book coming?”
“I finished it.”
“I’ll have to rummage around, see if I can’t find you another one.”
Prell pressed his elbows into the bed, and moved himself an infinitesimal inch. “I’d appreciate it. It sounds kind of empty in here, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Strange said. “It does. I was just going to say the same thing.” He raised himself up and looked around the lounge, again. There weren’t all that many empty beds.
“They took out a little less than one-third. But it makes an awful difference with the acoustics,” Prell said, watching him look. His voice got more casual, a little hollower. “Where do you think they’re going to send us?”
“Got no idea,” Strange said, squatting again, then sitting down. On the bare floor. “And nobody seems to know. Doesn’t seem to be any system to it. They say they’re supposed to send you to the hospital nearest your home. In principle. But that’s only if you can get the medical service you need, there. If you can’t, they send you where you can get the medical attention.”
“That means they’ll be splitting us all up,” Prell said.
“Yeah. I suppose so.”
“I don’t like that. You’d think they’d know enough to send all the guys from one outfit someplace where they’re together. At least until we all get used to it.”
“I guess they aint got time to be worrying about shit like that,” Strange said lightly.
“It’s funny, you know,” Prell said after a moment. “We never really knew what happens to them, after they get hit and leave the outfit. And now we’re doing it ourselves. They get hit and they walk off the field, or get carried off, and that’s just sort of the last we ever see of them. Some go to Efate, some to New Zealand, some to New Caledonia. And then they get flown or shipped back to the States and they—just sort of disappear into thin air. And we never know. And now it’s happening to us.”
“Some of the guys got a couple of post cards,” Strange said.
“I know. Yeah. I ran into so-and-so at such-and-such. And such-and-so lost his arm. But we never knew what it was really like.”
“Well, now we’ll know, I guess.”
“You’ll probably go somewhere in Texas,” Prell said. “I don’t know where I’ll go. Where will I go? I’m from down on the Big Sandy on the Kentucky border. But I aint been back there in twelve years. Wheeling? Washington? Baltimore? I don’t even know where all the general hospitals are.”
“You and me might wind up together after all,” Strange grinned. “I won’t go to Texas, I don’t think. My wife’s family all moved back to Kentucky, to work in the defense plants in Cincinnati. And she moved with them. I aint got any family left in Texas.”
“I haven’t any either in West Virginia,” Prell said.
“You and me may wind up in Cincinnati.”
“Where’s Winch from?” Prell asked.
“Somewhere in New England, I think.”
“That’s good, anyway,” Prell said. He settled himself in the bed with his elbows. “I think they’re about to turn the lights out.”
“Yes,” Strange said. “I think so. I better get to going. It feels to me like maybe we’re under way again. I’ll stop in tomorrow.”
“Don’t do it if you don’t feel like it,” Prell said, stiffly.
Strange gave him a grin. “Okay. I won’t. If I don’t.” He was already back on his feet. Down the way some of the medical personnel were stripping some of the emptied beds. The sight gave him a sudden lonely feeling. He waved his hand and walked away. At the big double swing doors he stopped and looked back.
A little over halfway down, Prell was watching him in his rear-view mirror, and stuck his arm up in the air. Strange realized that if he had not looked back, Prell would probably have held that against him. He raised his arm in a wave and went outside onto the deck’s promenade. As he walked, he clenched and unclenched his crippled hand, although it hurt to do it.
Something about Prell had the ability to make Strange feel guilty whenever he was around him. It certainly wasn’t anything Prell did. But he always came away from Prell’s bedside with an elevated sense of his own inadequacy. It was a rare feeling for Strange.
It was very similar to the feeling he had had when he looked at Linda back in Wahoo, after the war had started.
The glass windows of the deck’s promenade were lined two deep with men watching the American shoreline in the night light. Strange stopped and watched them a long moment, still clenching and unclenching his bad hand, then walked on down the passageway.
Of all the woundings Strange knew about, Prell’s was the best and the most enviable. The most warrior-like. The most soldierly, in any serious, valuable way. Leading his squad on a long jungle patrol he had not volunteered them for (Prell never volunteered his men for anything), and still a half a mile inside Jap territory on the way back, Prell had stumbled onto a troop concentration in a valley. The Japanese were in the middle of preparing an unsuspected attack, and with them was General Sasaki.
Sasaki was the Jap New Georgia commander, and his picture had been circulated around the Division with a bounty placed on him. So Prell had sent his squad back along the trail and crawled in to try and get a shot at him. He hadn’t. They had been discovered, and in the firefight and the run out he had been hit, and had lost two of his men killed and two others wounded. Bleeding badly and unable to walk at all, he nevertheless had organized the escape from the Jap search parties and the walk back, and had brought all fourteen men out including the two dead. He had delivered the intelligence report about the attack himself, before passing out.
It was for this patrol that the Division commander was reputedly recommending him for the Congressional Medal. And it was this patrol that Winch was down on him for.
Compared to that, Strange felt his own wounding had been little more than a dirty cosmic joke.
His had happened back on Guadalcanal. Way back. In January. It was just at the time when the company had successfully terminated its first big combat and first big attack against the Japs. Strange and a couple of his cook force had walked up with a resupply to visit the company. They were bivouacked on top of a hill they had taken two days before. Some staff colonel had named it the Sea Horse. They sat around on the slope talking, the guys filling Strange and his cooks in on all that had happened, and Strange had noticed how they were all somehow changed. He did not know exactly how they were changed. They just were different. Then suddenly there was the soft, almost soundless shu-shu-shu of mortars coming in, and someone squawked, and everyone hit the dirt. Strange threw himself flat. There was a yell from somewhere, during the explosions. When he sat back up, he noticed the palm of his hand was burning hot. A sharp, hot, toothy little piece of fragment half the size of your little fingernail had hit him in his palm between the knuckles of his middle fingers but hadn’t come out the other side. There it was, sticking in his palm, just above the center. While the wounded man who had yelled was being taken care of, Strange started showing his hand around. He had been briefly terrified, his heart somewhere up between his ears, but when he found himself to be all right, and the man who was wounded was found to be okay, neither maimed nor killed, he began to laugh. And soon they were all laughing. It was a great joke, his hand. Mother Strange had come up to visit the company and had got himself a Purple Heart. There was no blood on his hand. The hot metal apparently had itself cauterized the wound. Carefully they pulled the piece of fragment out, and Strange put it in his pocket. No blood followed it out. There was only this longitudinal little blue slit. Like a miniature p-ssy, someone said. They took him around to the command post, everybody laughing, and showed it to the company commander to make sure of the Purple Heart and then a medic put a Band-Aid on it. A little later, still laughing, he and his two cooks left and walked back with another, returning resupply.
Later on, though, he hadn’t laughed. When he thought about it, it was with a sense of irritated anger. What he remembered was the sense of fear, and the momentary feeling of total helplessness. He hadn’t liked either worth a damn.
Along the ship’s promenade, Strange spotted a window that was empty and went over and stood and watched the American coastline himself for a while.
It was summer here back home, mid-August, and the glass was open. He pulled up the sleeves of his bathrobe and leaned on the glass and let the light breeze of passage along the glass riffle the hairs on his forearms.
It was enough to bring the fear back to him, just for him to think that if it had been a little harder, it would have gone right on through his hand; and if it had hit hard enough to do that, and had hit him in the head, he would be dead. And none of it meant a damn thing. Not to anyone but Johnny Stranger. It just hadn’t happened to hit him in a vital spot, and that was all it meant. It was at that point that the irritated anger always rose up on him.
Each time he clenched and unclenched the hand it hurt him and inside his head he could hear it grate. The doc had said there was still a tiny piece of metal in it. And that a tendon was rolling over the piece of metal, or over a bone growth. But getting the metal out was the least of it. The trauma and continued use had caused a degenerative arthritis to set in in the hand, in the six months since he got it.
Studying the black, hilly shore, Strange drew a deep breath of the sea air, and then blew it back out into the sea airspace, through which the ship was again moving steadily now, across the flat uninhabited wastes of moving salt water. Strange was not at all averse to being home.
In the clear, calm, moonless night the shore and the sea seemed to be illumined by a lemon-pink night light that did not come from anywhere. Behind both the mountains made a black presence, visible only in silhouette, by the stars they blocked. Once, the lights of a city made a dull glow on the shore. And Strange thought of all the blackouts he had seen, as far south as New Caledonia.
After six months, he had let one of his cooks talk him into going on sick call with his hand. They had immediately clapped him in the hospital for evacuation, and had flown him out. In Efate they had said they would not even attempt to operate on it there. So they would have to send him home. The doc there said there were only a few men in the States who could do the operations. He would need more than one. It would be a long painful process, but he ought to have an 80 to 90 percent recovery, when it was finished. The whole thing was the result of his not having come in with it when it first occurred. He should have reported it when it happened. The doc went on to say that, fortunately, the Army would still do all this for him. And the government would pay for it all. But if he had been an industrial worker, his negligence would have cost him the insurance. Strange could not tell him he had been ashamed to report it, embarrassed to go to the hospital, where so many badly mangled men were lying stretched out moaning and would see him. He had only nodded, repeatedly, and said nothing.
Nor could he claim to anybody, even to himself, that he was miserable and unhappy when he heard all this terrible news about his hand.
Way back on the Canal, in the very beginning, Strange had decided early that he was not going to get his ass shot off unless it was absolutely necessary.
When the company went up into its first combat on Guadalcanal’s Hill 52, everybody who could had grabbed his rifle and wanted to go along. Cooks and bakers, supplyroom men, drivers, clerks, and Strange and his kitchen force. Everybody wanted to be in combat. Two days of it was enough for Strange. Nobody but a nut would get himself shot at when he didn’t have to. And when Strange left and went back down, most of his cooks and the supplyroom men went with him. The rest came down the next day. They were under no orders to stay up there. Their orders were to stay back in the rear and guard the company baggage and try to get hot food up to the men, and Strange saw to it that they did just that. They didn’t have much luck with the hot food part. But they did keep the company’s “A” and “B” bags from being rifled by a new outfit who had just arrived. And when the battalion moved up to New Georgia for the invasion, Strange had held himself to the same principle. He would follow his orders, and follow them to the letter. But no more. And he would see that everybody under him did the same. If their orders required them to go on up on the line in the New Georgia jungle, they would go. But not unless.
You could always get yourself knocked off in one of the air raids that came over every day. Without going up on the line to the company. But the percentages were minuscule, compared to what could happen to you up there with the company.
And Strange, like most intelligent men trained in the various logistics disciplines, had realized right away that the wins and losses of this war were going to be governed by industrial percentages and numerical averages, not by acts of individual heroism. And that included survival.
And yet he stayed. When at any moment he could have turned himself in with his bad hand and been evacuated, he had stayed. And even now he felt terrible about leaving. Strange was perceptive enough to understand the paradox of that.
At the window, Strange straightened up from watching the night sea and the dark coastline, and looked around. Most of the men were beginning to drift away, bored as the newness wore off of watching the homeland coast. He leaned down on his elbows again.
His move with Winch from Fort Kam to Schofield back there in Wahoo, and his subsequent marriage, had changed more than Strange’s life. It had changed his ambitions. Strange spit out the window into the sea’s airspace, and watched the breeze grab it. Or at least it had changed Linda Sue’s ambitions. As Linda liked to say, she wasn’t always going to be married to an Army staff/sgt. The two thousand dollars savings they had collected was going to be stashed away until after the war and then it was going to go into a restaurant and Strange, who up until two years before had always considered himself a thirty-year man in the Army, was going to become a restaurateur.
Linda had bought a car with the first of the money and taken a job downtown in Honolulu as cashier in a big restaurant, and started taking courses in restaurant management. As much of their joint savings had come from her salary as from Strange’s pay. By the end of the fall of 1941 Strange was calculating that one more three-year hitch would do it for them. They’d be able to leave the Army, and give Linda Sue her restaurant.
Then the Japs had arrived in December, with their sneak attack. But the two thousand bucks was safe at home with Linda. And Linda was working and adding to it. She was also getting the biggest pay allotment Strange was allowed to send her, to add to the rest.
Strange had never told anybody in the company about the restaurant. Something about leaving the Army, and particularly about leaving the company, made him too uncomfortable. A couple of times he almost had told Winch. But Winch’s reaction to the earlier news that he was getting married stopped him. Winch had hooted and howled and pranced around the orderly room, and roared with laughter and sneered at him with insulting contempt. It was the nearest he ever came to an open falling out with Winch.
He knew of course that Winch was married and had a wife somewhere. Or was divorced. Although apparently nobody else knew it. But back at Fort Riley Strange had seen the tall, long-necked, broad-hipped woman, Winch’s wife, walking around the post. And the fact that Winch had not brought her to Wahoo with him indicated that something had happened to them. So once again he had given Winch the benefit of the doubt and made allowances for him.
Strange was aware that his reluctance to mention the restaurant was unusual. That the idea of quitting the Army for good embarrassed him and left him feeling uncomfortable. Sighing, he stood up straight again from the open window-port, his hand hurting. Most of the coast watchers were gone now. The ship was moving farther out from shore, and soon even the high mountains behind the coast would be unnoticeable.
The constant clenching and unclenching of his hand had caused a dull, deep ache in his palm, which had spread all across the hand, then up into his wrist and on up through the wrist into his forearm. He would have to ask the medic for a pill to sleep tonight.
In six months he could be out of the Army, if he played his cards right. This war was going to last a lot longer than that. Six months in the hospital, an operation or two, wasn’t so very long. With his mustering-out pay, plus all his back pay and allowances, plus all the money Linda had been making working in the defense plants around Cincinnati, they could open the restaurant right there as soon as he got discharged. And get in on the wartime boom with it.
But the thought depressed him. At the same time that it made him both happy and glad, it depressed him.
And it hurt him physically, in his gut, to see Prell all trussed up that way. Prell was one of the people who should never be laid up like that. And yet Prell was one of the ones who would always get hurt the worst, and the most often, in his life. He was too young to know that, yet. Or maybe he was just learning it, now.
How old was Prell? Twenty-three or -four. Strange was twenty-seven.
Getting hit wasn’t so bad. As long as you didn’t get killed. It only took a second, and you didn’t really feel anything. It was all that time afterward, that it took you to get over it, that really did you in.
After a last look out the window-port, Strange turned away and headed toward the iron stairs, thinking he ought to get to sleep, if he wanted to get up early and go see if there was anything he could do for Prell.