by Ed McBain
He had to admit that he was very clever.
Oh, sure, there were sluts in Norfolk, Christ knew there were a million sluts in Norfolk, but the day he had to pay for it, that was the day he’d hand in his jock. And there were Waves on the base, too, but the Waves were always surrounded by enlisted men, and you had to fight off ten guys before you got near one.
Nurses were the ticket, all right. Sure, nurses were of ficers, and as such were strictly reserved for other officers. That was a stupid rule, all right, that nonfraternization thing. That’s a rule against human nature, by Jesus! What is a man supposed to do? Can a man help it if he’s got a normal human appetite? Hell, no, of course he can’t. But try to tell that to the brass, just try to explain that to them.
Well, he was very clever about it all. And he was sure enough of his charm to know that once he got to meet a girl, the rest was in the bag. Sometimes he figured his being an enlisted man was in his favor. There was something pretty exciting about doing something that was forbidden. Like a stolen apple tasting better, that kind of thing. The nurses could get all the officers they wanted, but he guessed there was something dull about that. This way, there was an element of danger involved, and any girl liked that element of danger.
“Hi,” a voice said from the doorway.
He looked up, seeing the pharmacist’s mate again.
“Hi,” he answered.
“Got a chart for you,” the pharmacist’s mate said. “How you feeling?”
“Lousy.”
“You don’t look so lousy.”
“No? What’s that got to do with the way I feel?”
“Nothing. I just don’t trust people. ’Specially people with cat fever.”
“You the doctor here?”
“Nope.”
“Then it ain’t your job to diagnose. Besides, I’m the distrustful guy, remember?”
“Sure. I remember.” The pharmacist’s mate went to the foot of the bed and clipped the fresh chart there. “You been here before, ain’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said slowly.
“I thought I recognized you.”
“So?”
“So nothing. You’re a sickly type, I guess.”
“That’s right, I’m a sickly type.”
“Mmm,” the pharmacist’s mate said, nodding.
“When’s the doctor coming around?”
“You can relax,” the pharmacist’s said. “He’s made his last rounds for today. He won’t be around again till tomorrow morning. Not unless you’re dropping dead. Are you dropping dead?”
“No,” he answered.
“I didn’t figure. I heard you choking a while back, though, so I figured maybe you was ready to kick off. You want me to get the doc, I’ll be happy to do that for you.”
“I can wait until morning.”
The pharmacist’s mate smiled. “Don’t I know it,” he said.
“If you’re finished piddling around, I’d like to get some rest.”
“Sure,” the pharmacist’s mate said, smiling. “Got to let a sick man get his rest. Had to give you a chart, though, you understand that, don’t you? Can’t tell the sick ones from the fakers without a chart.”
“Are you looking for trouble, mate?” he asked suddenly.
“Me? Perish the thought.”
“Then get the hell off my back.”
“Sure.” He shook his head. “You sure talk tough for a sick man.”
“I’m not so sick that I can’t—”
“G’night, mate. Sleep tight.”
The pharmacist’s mate left the room, and he watched the broad back in the undress blues jumper turn outside the door and vanish. He cursed the bastard, and then leaned back against the pillow, wondering if the pecker checker would cause him any trouble. All he needed was a malingering charge against him. That would mean a captain’s mast, sure as hell. If not a deck court. Goddamnit, why’d people have to stick their noses into your business?
When he heard footsteps again, he thought it was the pharmacist’s mate returning, and then he recognized the hushed whisper of the hospital slippers that were generally handed out to ambulatory cases.
A boy poked his head around the doorjamb tentatively.
He was a tall boy with brown hair and blue eyes, a kid of no more than eighteen or nineteen. He wore the faded blue hospital robe and the fabric slippers, and his face was very pale, as if he’d been isolated from the sun for a long time.
“You just check in?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“My name’s Guibert. You sick?”
“I’m in the hospital, ain’t I?”
Guibert entered the room. “Mind if I come in?”
“Well …”
“I’m the official welcoming committee. I been here for eight months now. I see everybody who comes and goes. Guibert the Greeter, they call me. Ain’t I seen you around before?”
“Maybe,” he answered. Goddamnit, was the whole hospital full of spies?
“What’s your name?” Guibert asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“I just like to know.”
“It’s on the chart,” he said frostily.
Guibert looked briefly at the chart. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Cat fever.”
“You’re lucky,”
“Am I?”
“Sure,” Guibert said. “I been here for eight months now, like I told you, and they still don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Yeah?” he said dubiously.
“God’s truth, s’help me. I been looked over by every doctor in the Navy practically.” Guibert shrugged. “They can’t figure it out.”
“Are you contagious?” he asked suddenly.
“Me? No, don’t worry about that. They thought so in the beginning, but no more now. They had me isolated for three months, figuring I was carrying a dread disease or something. But I ain’t. They just don’t know what I got.”
“That right?” he asked, interested now.
“Yeah,” Guibert said sadly. “I just run a fever all the time. A hun’ one, a hun’ two, like that. Never goes no higher. But it’s always there, day and night. Man, a fever like that can drain you, you know it?”
“I can imagine,” he said. “And you been here eight months?”
“Eight months and six days, you want to be exact about it. The doctors think I got bit by a bug or something. I was in the Pacific before I come here, on the Coral Sea. They think I got bit by some rare tropical bug. Man, I got a disease unknown to medical science. How’s that for an honor?”
“Nobody else has this disease?” he asked.
Guibert shook his head, a little proudly, a little in awe. “Not that they know of. How’s that for something? You know, they thought I was goofin’ off at first. Malingering, you know? But they couldn’t just pass off the thermometer readings. Every damn day, a hun’ one, a hun’ two. Puzzled the hell out of them.
“So they finally sent me over to see a psychiatrist. He give me that Rorschach test, and a lot of other tests, puttin’ arms and legs on a torso, and fittin’ pegs into holes, things like that. They even give me an electroencephalograph test. You ever hear of that?”
“No,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s a test measures brain waves. They put these little wires on your skull, like they’re gonna electrocute you or something, and this measures your brain waves. They can tell from that whether you got a illness or not, like a tumor or something, you know? Well, I ain’t got nothing like that. My brain waves are perfectly O.K. And the psychiatrist says he never saw nobody as normal as me. Which is why they are all so puzzled. If I ain’t goofing, and if I ain’t nuts, then what’s wrong with me?”
“Search me,” he said.
“Sometimes I wonder myself. I never got bit by no bug, I can swear to that. There was a lot of bugs on Guam, but I never got bit. So how come I run this fever all the time? The way I got it figured, I’ll be in this damn hospital fo
r the rest of my life!”
“Do they give you liberty?”
“No. Hell, no, how can they do that? I’m a walking guinea pig. They find out what’s wrong with me, man, they can lick cancer and the common cold.” Guibert shook his head sadly.
“Well, it can’t be too bad here.”
“Oh, no, it ain’t bad at all. Bunch of nice guys, and some real doll nurses. We got a honey on this floor, wait’ll you meet her. We got four of them, you know, but this one is a real peach. A nice girl.”
“Yeah?” he asked, interested again.
“Yeah, you’ll see her. Hey, are you from Brooklyn?”
“No.”
“Oh. That’s a shame. I’m from Brooklyn. I keep asking guys where they’re from, like in boot camp. When you can’t get out, you’re anxious to meet guys from your neighborhood, you know?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What ship you off?”
“U.S.S. Sykes,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“A tin can.”
“That’s good duty, ain’t it?”
“Well, it’s not bad,” he said.
“The Sykes,” Guibert said. “That sounds familiar. Why should it sound familiar?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, shrugging.
Guibert thought about it for a moment, and then he shrugged, too. “Well, no matter.”
“This nurse …” he started.
“I’m a fire-control man, you know that?” Guibert said.
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Yeah. Went to school for it. You been on a carrier?”
“No.”
“What’s your rate?” Guibert asked.
“I’m a—”
“This is a sick man we got here, Guibert,” a voice from the doorway said.
He turned his head. The pharamacist’s mate was back again.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Guibert said. “I didn’t realize it, Greg.”
“Yeah, he’s very sick,” the pharmacist’s mate said. “Very, very sick.”
“Well, then, I’ll be running along, Greg.”
“I think you’d better,” Greg said.
“Nice meeting you, mate,” Guibert said.
“Same here,” he answered.
Greg looked at him, and then smiled broadly. “You better get that rest you need. The doc’ll be around in the morning.”
He smiled back at Greg. “Sure,” he said. And he thought, And the nurses, too. The nurses, too.
9
She stood before the full-length mirror in her room, not wanting to awaken her roommate and not yet wanting to go to bed.
She looked at herself as if she were meeting the reflection for the first time, and she felt rather idiotic about the sudden bursting feeling within her.
She had never met anyone like Chuck Masters before, never in all her life.
She’d been born on a farm in Minnesota, the proverbial farmer’s daughter, except that her father was a strict, God-fearing man who wouldn’t have allowed a salesman within four acres of his property. She could still remember the wheat fields, even now far away from them, the slender rods of grain swaying on the afternoon breeze, the sky a solid mass of blue beyond it, the sun glaring in the sky overhead. She had loved to walk in the wheat when she was a young girl, her head almost covered by the swaying golden wands.
She was a quiet, introverted child, Jean Dvorak. She loved the farm animals, and her favorite stories were those in which animals figured largely. She had never liked boys much. There was a nice boy living on the neighboring farm, a boy called Sven. He would often come to visit with his father, and he’d hop down from the wagon and they would race over the fields together, barefoot, laughing at the sun. This was when they were both very young, before she fully realized there was a difference between boys and girls.
When she was twelve, and her breasts began to pucker with adolescence, her mother explained what was happening to her. She could still remember her mother quite clearly, her hair as golden as the wheat fields, her eyes as blue as the sky beyond. Her mother was a gentle woman who put up with the harsh ways of her father patiently, and she remembered now the extreme sense of loss she’d felt when her mother died. They had laid her to rest in the rich Minnesota earth, and she had wept silently, and her heart had gone out then to the woman who had been her friend all her life.
She had three brothers and no sisters, and with her mother gone, there was no one to tell her things any more. Sven would still come over with his father, but he had begun to notice her as a girl now, and when he leaped down from the wagon bed, he would stand around and foolishly worry the ground with his big toe.
She preferred her books to Sven.
She went on to high school, and she was considered a quiet, studious girl. She was asked to join a sorority, but she refused. She was asked out often, but she rarely accepted dates, even though the boys never stopped trying. There was something exceptionally appealing about her dignified good looks, and she could have been the belle of the school had she tried, but she did not try.
Her mother had died of cancer, and the cruel injustice of her death had remained with Jean for a long while afterward. She wanted to do something to help. Her father was not a rich man, and so she abandoned any hope of becoming a doctor. But nursing was a worth-while profession, and she discussed it, with the student adviser at school, who suggested that she go into the Navy upon graduation.
She had been a good student, and she was a good nurse, highly respected at the hospital.
This thing with Chuck—she could not fool herself about this thing with Chuck. He was the first man who’d really captured her interest, but she wondered now if she were really in love with him, or if she were simply experiencing something she should have felt when she was fifteen.
She looked at herself in the mirror again, and then she began undressing, taking off her jacket and then her hat.
He was not really a handsome man. She had met handsomer men, and they had all left her cold. Nor was he more intelligent than most, or more sincere, or more trustworthy, or more anything, for that matter. He had simply appealed to her, and he still appealed to her, and that was the long and the short of it, she supposed.
She took off her blouse and her skirt, and then went back to the mirror, standing in her bra and half slip.
She supposed she was an attractive woman. Her bust was as good as most she’d seen—and God, she’d seen enough of them since she’d entered the Navy—and whereas she was a little hippy, she supposed her figure would do. Chuck seemed to like it, anyway. Or so she imagined.
That was the danger of a thing like this, the fact that a girl could let her imagination run away with her. She had met a lot of men in the Navy, and every man she’d met seemed to feel her nurse’s uniform was a symbol of promiscuity, or at least a promise of it. She really couldn’t understand this. She had heard stories about Waves, of course, and she had also heard stories about her sister nurses, but a uniform didn’t necessarily make its wearer a loose woman. She was, in fact, willing to wager that the uniform had nothing whatever to do with it. Those same girls would undoubtedly have behaved in the same manner in civilian dress. Claire, for example. Well, there was no sense thinking about Claire, God rest her soul.
The important person to think about was Chuck.
Was it possible that he was like all the rest? He had, after all, asked her out the moment he’d met her, practically, and that hardly spoke well for an enduring friendship. And the second time he’d met her, he’d been drunk, and he’d probably have settled for anything in a skirt.
She had been quite carried away with him that second time. There had been something immensely attractive about him, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Perhaps a stilted sort of mother complex, a protection of the poor drunk. But that didn’t explain her reaction to his kisses. No mother ever felt that way about her child.
Now let us draw up the reins, Miss Dvorak, she
warned herself. This may just be a grand little fling for the good lieutenant, and if it is, he’s going to be sadly disappointed.
It doesn’t seem as if he feels that way, but there’s really no way of telling. Not yet, there isn’t. And he has been a perfect gentleman, except for his kisses. No perfect gentleman kisses that way.
So let’s just take it easy. He’ll be in New Jersey for a while. Now, where in New Jersey? He didn’t even tell me, which shows how much he cares, but he did promise to write. What more can you expect of a fellow?
Still, and nonetheless, I really honestly feel we should bide our time and step forward cautiously. We’ve already exhibited our heart on our striped sleeve, and that was the wrong thing to do at this stage of the game.
Perhaps I should get to know some other men.
Perhaps I should go out more often. What’s wrong with me, anyway, falling like a silly adolescent for the first man that comes my way?
I’ll go out with other men.
Well, maybe I won’t. Chuck will only be gone for a short time, and he did say he’d write, though maybe he won’t. We’ll see, I suppose, and besides, who’d ask me out if he doesn’t?
Well, that’s silly. You’re certainly asked out often enough, so don’t make excuses for the Lieutenant. You know darned well you’re crazy about him already, so don’t tell yourself … Well, why not? What’s wrong with going out with some other men while he’s gone? Am I engaged to him or something? Am I married?
Mrs. Charles Masters.
Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely?
Go to sleep, you silly little fool, she told herself, and then she whipped off her underclothes and headed for her bed.
10
“You can call me Greg,” the pharmacist’s mate said. “All my friends call me Greg.”
“Thanks,” he answered.
“And I want you to consider yourself my buddy, mate. I really want you to consider yourself my buddy.”
He stared at Greg curiously. The pharmacist’s mate was driving at something, he was sure of that. He didn’t know what, though, and his uncertainty displeased him.