by James Jones
He was not sure the boy believed him, anyway. As the boy pointed out, he wore no ribbons.
But if the ride itself was a not entirely unpleasant nightmare, it was as nothing to the unpleasant nightmare he found in Covington when he arrived.
He did not know if it was his fault, or Linda’s fault, or neither’s. Maybe it was something that happened to every dogface who came home from overseas. But he had no genuine contact with any of them. They never paid any attention much to the newspapers and the battles that were going on abroad, for example. He could think of nothing else.
When he first arrived at the house (he had had the address, but no description or apartment numbers) it was midafternoon and he had thought there was nobody home. He had knocked and gotten no answer, so he sat on the front steps for two hours, waiting for somebody to show up, until one of the three people who were asleep in the house had waked up and come outside and found him. The three were all asleep because they were all working the night shift. One was Linda’s paternal uncle, who owned the house, one was Linda’s older brother who was 4-F, one was Linda’s maternal cousin, the son of Linda’s mother’s sister, who had the top floor. All the others were at work, or already out, going to work on the swing shift, and that included all the adult females. Strange had sat with them in the kitchen while the three men fixed themselves breakfast (or lunch; or dinner) and asked him in their various-sounding drawls (two Kentucky, one Texas) how it was over there. Strange said it was all right.
One of them asked him what he had done to his hand, and when he explained he had been shot in it, they all wanted to see it so he showed it to them. After examining it, the cousin drawled, “That bullet sure didn’t make much of a hole.” Strange explained that it was done by a mortar shell fragment. But none of them seemed much interested in mortars.
It was about the same with the women, and the other males, when they all came home. The trouble was, they never all came home at the same time. It was hard to sort them out and keep any track of them, with all the coming and going. Not once, while Strange was there, was the whole family ever all together. In the kitchen some meal or other—breakfast, or supper, or noonday dinner—was always in process of preparation or was being eaten, and quite often they overlapped. So that, while those on the swing shift were at work, those going on night shift might be eating breakfast at the same time those coming off day shift might be preparing or eating evening dinner. All told, there were eleven working adults living in the house, and four children.
The house itself was a three-story frame structure belonging to the paternal uncle, on a shady street in Covington. The uncle and his wife had the ground floor and their oldest son, who was unmarried, lived with them. Linda’s father and mother had the second floor and Linda and her unmarried older brother and her younger brother, who was still in high school, lived with them. The married maternal cousin and his wife had the top floor with their two children, a boy of four and a baby of one, and with them lived also the divorced female cousin, and her girl of seven. It was crowded. But since they all worked, and the two older children went to school, it was never actually overcrowded. Of course, now it was summer vacation and the two older children weren’t in school. But they were generally outdoors in the daytime playing, or running around, and never came in except at night. The kitchen took the heaviest wear and tear, and sort of served also as the living room. The living room itself was the bedroom of the oldest, unmarried cousin. The dining room had been converted to the bedroom of the uncle and his wife.
In a way it was like separate apartments. Each family’s floor was its own domain. Except, of course, they all had to use the same kitchen downstairs. When Strange asked why, since they were all working, they did not sell or rent this place and all get themselves separate apartments, it was explained that they were all saving their salaries. When asked what for, Linda’s father and the uncle told him they were thinking of all pooling their combined savings and buying a big nice farm out in western Kentucky. When pressed as to where, they were vague and didn’t know exactly where. Nobody had time to go out there and look, they were too busy working. Linda’s father explained kindly in his sober, slow way and his Texas drawl that none of them had ever seen such a boom time in their lives, and that included the 1920s, and after the Depression they had all lived through, the point was not to spend but to work and save the money, and worry about spending it later, after the war.
Linda’s kid brother, who was listening, chimed in here, to say that next year when he got out of high school he was going to work too and add his salary to the pool. He was already taking some night courses in machine work at an aircraft parts plant.
Strange was welcome to come in with them, Linda’s father added in his slow way, if he and Linda ever changed their minds about having a restaurant. Strange, feeling a little as if someone had punched him in the back of the neck, and stunned him, did not know what to answer.
Linda’s savings, of course, were her own. Her own and Strange’s. Almost the first thing she did when she first saw him, after giving him a perfunctory kiss, was to take him aside and show him their bank book. They had a total of a little over six thousand dollars. She had a separate bedroom on the Darrells’ second floor next to the two brothers who had another, and that was where she kept her bank book, locked up. She offered it to Strange almost as if it were some votive gift. One made in atonement. Perhaps for all he had suffered in Wahoo and overseas in the Pacific for so long. His allotment payments were part of it, of course. She had fixed up her bedroom with new chintz curtains and pillow covers, and a chair cover to match for the one overstuffed chair, when she knew he was coming. It was all very wifey. She had not been able to meet him at the Greyhound station, when he arrived, because she had been working the day shift. That night when they first went to bed together in the chintz-covered bed, it turned into a nearly complete fiasco. Right in midpassion, so to speak, Strange lost his hard-on and could not get it back.
Strange didn’t know what was happening to him. He tried to mumble some kind of an apology. After a little while, when nothing happened, Linda Sue patted him sympathetically on the back and rolled over with her back to him and swiftly went to sleep. She had to get up early and go do the shopping for the house before going to her job at the plant.
Deeply troubled and humiliated, Strange lay awake beside her, and wondered fearfully what was happening to him. He had dreamed of this moment so long, and so many times, it seemed absolutely unbelievable that he would not be able to perform. When he thought of all the times, and of all the places—the slit trenches, the bomb hole shelters, the kitchen fly, out in the edge of the woods behind the encampment—that he had tossed himself off and dreamed of this moment, it was not possible that he could have failed to perform.
There were plenty of excuses. It was true she had not helped him any, but then she never had. He had always been the one to start things. Which was the way it ought to be. Only once or twice had she ever asked him to make love to her, in their whole married life. She had never been that passionate.
It was also true that the kid brother was asleep just beyond the thin wall in the next room. And that the parents were asleep in the room on the other side. But that would never have bothered Strange before. Something had happened right in the middle of it, all the excitement had gone away, and he found he was bored.
Lying in the bed, red with the humiliation, he squirmed under the covers. And thought of himself at the last of the company’s Guadalcanal bivouacs, standing just inside the edge of the jungle, peering out through the screen of leaves at the sleeping tents in the moonlight, his throbbing cock in his hand, fantasizing this night with Linda Sue hot and all over him, clawing his back, shoving it up to him, groaning and gasping with her long-suppressed desires. That was not the way it had ever happened with them, but that was the way he always fantasized it. And under the covers he felt his hard-on coming back. Looking down from the pillow, he could see it slowly thrusting up the co
vers between his legs.
After a minute, Strange threw off the covers and grabbing a towel padded down the hall to the bathroom and locked the door and tossed himself off in the bathroom sink, fantasizing himself out there in the fantastic night jungle. After he orgasmed he cleaned it all up neatly, feeling weird, and disturbed. When he climbed back into bed, he found himself almost hating his wife for her closed-in lack of passion. He had never been able to draw her out of it. He was furiously angry with her. And he had to keep telling himself it wasn’t her fault. But what had happened to him in eighteen months away, out there?
The second night was a great deal better. But then he had spent most of the day over in Cincinnati drinking beer. So he was a lot more aggressive, and less apologetic. For that matter, with all the men around the house, there was a great deal of beer always there, too. He drank a lot of that also. There was very little else for him to do, with her at work all day. Over in Cincinnati, it was as wild and high-living and open as it apparently also was in Luxor. Servicemen with money were everywhere, and a uniform—any uniform—was a ticket into the best hotel bars and the ritziest places. You didn’t have to be an officer. Everybody loved you. Or said they did, as they took your money.
That night when they went to bed, he was conscious of how beery his breath smelled, but he didn’t give a damn. And Linda Sue did not complain. Half drunk and with more than enough aggressiveness now, he thought suddenly that his wife smelled funny. It was as if he could smell another man on her. When he sniffed her breasts, her skin, he of course couldn’t. But it made him uneasy. Anyhow, he performed. After that, he tried several times to get her to go out with him in the night, at least to a movie. She was always too tired, always said she had to get up too early to get to work. Her job seemed to have become an obsession.
They did talk some about their savings. Or rather Strange did. Linda seemed strangely passive about it. She no longer seemed so passionately desirous of a restaurant. When he suggested, just to see how she would react, that they should maybe put it all in with the family pool and go in with them on the farm, she only smiled at him, sweetly, a little sadly, and said that if that was what he wanted, it would be fine with her.
In the end he left four days early. He had never told them exactly how many days he had, that he had exactly two weeks. It was easy enough to tell them he had only ten days, and Strange could not stand the house any longer, with its constant comings and goings and the smells and agitation of meals always in preparation.
The four extra days he spent in downtown Luxor. He discovered a nonstop poker game in a third floor room at the ritzy Claridge Hotel on North Main Street, where he got himself a room and picked up four hundred dollars in the game. He spent almost all of it, drinking and running around, either at the Claridge bar or at another hotel, the Peabody, on Union Street. He avoided picking up any women, although it would have been easy. But he felt he owed it to Linda not to.
On the last day, at the very last minute, he reported back to Kilrainey General to find out what Col Curran was going to decide about his hand. And whether that Major Hogan had been able to cook up some bad news for him.
He did not feel he had been home at all.
CHAPTER 10
LANDERS HAD HAD FOURTEEN days in which to start getting along without his new buddy Strange. In civilian life or at college, he might have sat in his room brooding and deteriorating and forgotten. That wasn’t possible in the hospital. But he remembered their hours in the train car, and the uproarious semidrunken conversations, with a kind of grinding hunger.
When he finally did run into Strange, in the corridor outside the big recreation center, Strange acted as though nothing had happened, that there was no special bond between them, and seemed preoccupied.
As so often happened in Landers’ life, he appeared to take his relationships with people much more seriously than they ever did.
In the meantime, during Strange’s absence Landers had had his cast removed and a new one fitted. He had explored and gotten somewhat to know the huge labyrinth that was the hospital. He had had his first pass into Luxor and gotten himself laid—still with his cast on. And he had fallen in love—or fallen halfway in love. The girl he had fallen for was the dark, superb-legged, college-student volunteer Red Cross girl who handed out the games equipment in the recreation center. But it appeared he was not alone in this.
The removal of his cast was a near trauma. By luck he too had drawn young Col Curran. Curran, after studying his X-rays, decreed the removal of the old cast so he could get a look at the ankle, and the refitting of a new one. Landers had hobbled on his crutches with an orderly along the covered walkways to the orthopedics lab with its collection of huge scissors, big rolls of gauze and buckets of plaster of Paris. Since the first cast had been put on right after the operation while Landers was still under the anesthetic, Landers had never seen the ankle. When the lab orderly cut down through the length of plaster and the elastic stocking underneath with the big shears, and then cracked it open and worked it off, the sight that met Landers’ eyes was about the most horrible he had ever seen.
The smell of it and the look of it together were enough to stultify Landers. The purplish foot had whole pieces of gray skin pulling away. The skin of the calf was scabby and flaking. The muscle of the leg had just disappeared, it was nothing but a stark shin bone covered with hanging skin. Near the end of this, attached to the bony clawlike foot, the ankle was a swollen red blob of contused bone. Landers was reduced to dumb shock. This was his own leg. It felt dangerously exposed and feeble, out of the plaster. Try as he would, he could not move it, at all. In any direction. He felt fragmented.
The lab orderly had apparently seen worse. So apparently had Curran, who came in a few minutes later, whistling softly to himself some unrecognizable tune. He picked it up, moved it a little this way and that while Landers inhaled sharply, put it down and said, “Well, you’ve got yourself an excellent job here.” His happily cheerful mood was not at all in conjunction with Landers’ mood. “Who was the surgeon?” he asked. Landers told him the major’s name. Curran shrugged and smiled. “Whoever he is, he’s got damned good hands.” Then he told the lab orderly to wrap it right back up again and then get a new set of X-rays. This time, he told Landers, they would give him a walking iron. So he could get off the crutches. Then he left.
It was a great relief to feel the new cast go back on over the fragile, feeble member. Not only did it beg for the protective cocoon but he no longer had to look at it. The poor damned battered thing. The lab orderly chewed gum and had a way of cracking his gum with his back teeth while he worked. The wet plaster of Paris heated the leg uncomfortably as it set. The orderly explained that the walking iron he had worked into the cast could not be used until the plaster had set for twenty-four hours. So Landers would have to keep the crutches at least another day.
Landers was glad. He was so unstrung by the whole cast-changing operation that the crutches seemed like trusted old friends. He was so shaken that he was not sure he could make it back to the ward by himself. The lab orderly had anticipated this. They were often like that, the first time they saw them, he said. He had already called for an orderly to go with Landers. Back on the ward Landers lay down awhile, then gathered all his resources to make himself get up and go ask the ward nurse if he could not keep the crutches even longer. When Curran came through a little later, to look at some other patients, he heard the request, looked at Landers with narrowed thoughtful eyes, and okayed it. But only for three more days, he said; then Landers would have to start using the leg. Landers immediately became another of the partisans who adored Col Curran. But the next day, when Maj Hogan came through the ward checking new developments, he looked at Landers’ chart hanging on the bed foot and ordered the crutches removed. It was only when Landers protested vigorously, and was backed up by the nurse, that he relented and left the ward furious over Curran’s softness.
So it was still with his crutches that Land
ers made his first overnight pass into town. But he, too, knew he had made an enemy.
The pass was an automatic development, once he was all through with his surgical check-out. It was signed by Curran, but was okayed by Hogan. According to Curran, all Landers had to do was wait now, for the leg to heal. There might be a month, or six weeks, in the cast. Curran thought he would have very nearly full articulation in the ankle. And if it was the least little bit stiff, it would nonetheless be absolutely solid. In the meantime Landers would not even have to be at the hospital, except to be present for morning rounds at ten. When he had an overnight pass, he did not even have to do that. After the cast came off, he would have to start the therapy that would bring the leg back to normal shape. So, Curran grinned, he had at least three months to do almost nothing but play. “And Luxor is a great town to play in,” he said.
This last was certainly true. All the same, Landers was of two minds about his pass. Col Curran’s happy, hopeful prognosis for his leg was the basic cause of this. Even during the worst moments, when he had first looked at the fragile battered mess of his leg, a part of Landers’ mind hidden away far at the back was saying with sly cunning, Christ! if it’s this bad, they’ll never he able to send me back to duty! they’ll have to discharge me! He remembered the conversation with Strange in which Strange had suggested hopefully that perhaps he would be permanently disabled. Now, Curran’s sanguine prognosis seemed to preclude that. So with the pass in his pocket, he swung out the big main door on his crutches to the cab rank outside to go to town with mixed feelings about all of it. About everything. There was a kind of wild rage in him, and half of him hated himself for the way his mind calculated.