Whistle

by James Jones

  So when his jealousy and envy of Winch with Carol Firebaugh came up in him so strong, it came as a shock. Obviously, he badly wanted to fuck her himself. And once he had seen the desire in him for Carol, he began to see it in him for others, in other places.

  That he did not do anything about it was mostly due to his feelings about Linda and the restaurant and their savings. But it was also due to his concern and preoccupation with the final medical status of his hand wound. All through the business of Prell’s legs Strange had waited for some word from Col Curran about his own disposition and first operation. But every day at morning rounds the surgeon would only look at the hand, move it a little, and ask how Strange was doing.

  Strange had tried to stay with Curran’s instructions about forcing himself to use the hand, even when it hurt and he did not want to. Finally he was obliged to tell Curran it hurt almost too much. Curran nodded, silently pursing up his mouth as if about to whistle, with that polite interested look on his face, and told him to stop using it.

  Then about a week after the big awards ceremonies, at which Strange standing alongside Prell and Winch had received his absurdly unjustified Purple Heart, Curran had stopped by his bed at morning rounds and without even looking at the hand had told him he wanted to see him in his office beside the three big surgeries at twelve o’clock that same day.

  Strange had been planning on spending the day in town after morning rounds. But there was no begging off from a summons like this one.

  Curran was as immaculate as usual, with his starched doctor’s smock and scrubbed hands, behind his little desk in the cubbyhole office. But his face looked tired and wan and in the corner an open GI laundry bin overflowed with what looked like bloody surgeon’s aprons.

  “I’m sorry about those,” Curran said with his bright almost lip-less smile. “They were supposed to pick them up. But of course they haven’t done it.”

  “Blood doesn’t bother me,” Strange said. “I’ve seen a lot of it, Doc.”

  “I expect you have.” Curran rubbed his well-kept, manicured hands over his face for a moment.

  “You’ve had a pretty heavy work schedule today, hunh?” Strange said.

  “Yes,” Curran said. “Now. About your hand.”

  “Yes, sir.” In a ridiculous way, Strange felt responsible for not upsetting Curran. He didn’t want to do anything that might tire or distress the surgeon. He listened while Curran went over it all. Every now and then as he talked Curran’s hands moved the papers about on his desk aimlessly.

  “I’ve probably given you more loose time than was good for your hand. This hand of yours is a ticklish piece of business. But I couldn’t help it,” he said, looking up. “We’ve had a heavy schedule of operations lately, and this hand of yours is a pretty delicate thing to operate. There are an awful lot of ligaments in there that can’t be nicked or cut. In any case, I’m prepared to do the first job on it tomorrow.”

  He leaned back in his swivel chair. “We’ll go in and take out the metal fragment first. And I’ll see how it looks in there. I probably won’t try to do anything about the bone growth this time. Unless I see that it looks easy. I have no reason to expect that it will look easy.

  “I want to get at you early in the morning while I’m still fresh. So I’m going to have them give you a mild enema tonight, and a sedative. You won’t get any breakfast in the morning. They’ll probably wake you around six. All right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Strange said and grinned. He felt a necessity to make it a tough grin. Then he added, “Uh, sir. Will it be all right if I go see my buddies tonight? At the snack bar?”

  Curran nodded slowly. “It will be all right. But I don’t want you drinking any coffee, or eating.” He leaned back again in his chair. “You know, you people amaze me. You’re really as thick as a bunch of fleas, aren’t you?” He placed the tips of his fingers together and stared at Strange over them.

  Strange stared back at him, suddenly irritated. It wasn’t any of Curran’s business how thick they were. What was he picking at now? And why? Strange ran his tongue judiciously over his teeth before framing an answer.

  “Well, sir. I guess we are,” he said slowly. “We been through a lot of shit together. But probably more than that, you got to remember we come out of an old Regular Army outfit together. Don’t forget, we spent like two to three years together. Before we ever got into this war. We know each other pretty good.” He stopped, debating whether to go on and tell the surgeon more. But immediately something in him decided not to tell more to Curran. It was an intimacy Curran didn’t deserve from him, big-shot surgeon who was going to cut on him tomorrow or no.

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Curran said, and swung his chair back up level. “But you probably won’t notice it. They’ll be giving you a light injection tomorrow, to calm you down a little. Before they roll you in.”

  Outside, Strange felt distinctly peculiar, as he made his way back to his ward. He felt as he used to feel when he boxed, or played football. Suddenly he felt he had to piss. Though he knew his bladder was empty. He headed back in his issue bathrobe to find Winch and Landers and Prell and tell them the news.

  Winch, of course, did not show up that evening. He was out with his little girlfriend. Couldn’t stay away, couldn’t get enough of her, likely. When Strange went by to tell him at 12:45 he had just barely caught him, all dressed in uniform to go to town. Strange noted, but did not comment on it, that Winch was finally wearing those brand-new 1st/sgt’s stripes of his. That was what a woman would do for you, he thought to himself wryly.

  Landers and Prell did show up. At the snack bar. Landers limping and with his cane. Prell in his wheelchair: with new, white casts on his legs, in which now his knees had been slightly bent. “My knees are what are going to do me in,” he told them. “I can’t even move them. Christ, they’re like a couple of rusty old, seized-up, frozen, door hinges.” Prell, of course, wasn’t going anyplace off hospital. So it was not such an effort for him to arrange to be at the snack bar to see Strange. It was a big event for him. Landers, though, had clearly missed a date in town, to be with his old mess/ sgt on the night before his operation. Strange, who had never been that close to Landers, felt a new warmth for him.

  Prell, though he could not get off hospital grounds to go in town, had not been wasting his time. They found out as they talked that he had found himself a girlfriend. Right on his own ward.

  “Hell, yes,” he grinned at them. “She’s some sweet little country girl from some little town just outside of Luxor. Her daddy’s off overseas somewhere so her and her momma come into town every day to volunteer as Gray Ladies out here. I aint met her momma. But she got assigned to our ward, so every afternoon she spends the whole afternoon reading to me. She’s reading me Treasure Island, right now.”

  Prell’s eyes sparkled, as he laughed for them. “She thinks I’m the cat’s meow. Big Medal of Honor winner. I can’t do much of nothing yet. I couldn’t fuck, with these legs. But I’ll give anybody ten for five I’ll have her blowing me out in the back of the ward before the month’s out,” he added smiling. “Or at least tossing me off.”

  But when they mentioned Winch, Prell’s face got stiff and frozen. He refused even to mention Winch’s name, nor would he talk about or listen to anything about him.

  Landers, when Strange asked him, apparently did not mind that Mart Winch had taken over his Red Cross girl. “More power to him,” he said. There were more women in town than you could beat off with a ball bat. “If he can get into her, good for him.” Landers had been back to see his new acquaintance, the Naval lieutenant commander Jan Mitchell, who kept the suite at the Peabody. Apparently there was a party there every night. “Those Navy flyers,” Landers said, “and Army flyers. They don’t give a damn whether you’re an enlisted man or not. They don’t pull rank. As long as you’re fun at a party.” He wanted Strange, and Prell, when Prell was finally able to get around, to come up there with him.

 
Strange accepted tentatively. But he wasn’t thinking about that as much as about the operation. He sat and talked with them until the snack bar closed. He promised Landers he would go down to the Peabody in a week or so. Before they separated outside the darkened snack bar, and went off along the dimly lighted walkways to their wards, Strange shook hands with both of them warmly. Since they both went the same way toward the leg wards, Landers hung his cane on the back of Prell’s wheelchair and pushed it along leaning on it with his limp. Strange stood looking after them as they dimmed and darkened and then brightened under the series of overhead lights.

  They caused his swallowing mechanism to choke up, and made a lump come in his throat.

  As he turned toward his own ward his stomach flipped over and he had that sensation of needing to piss again.

  In the morning that was all they gave him time to do. They did not even let him get out of bed, but passed him a glass duck to use. Then the guy was pricking his arm with the injection. In the operating room the anesthetist went right to work on him. Curran, already in a gauze mask and white cap, smiled with his eyes and winked and explained about the sodium pentothal the anesthetist was letting into his vein. Counting backward Strange got from ten to six before there was a sudden vast explosion of terrible-tasting fumes in the roof of his mouth. He tried to shake his head, but no longer had one.

  Coming out of it, there was a lot of noise, and huge flashing revolving lights like artillery searchlights. They flashed on in a brilliant white glare, and then off in a darkness the eyes had no time to adjust to. But if it was an air raid, why were they blinking? Then it wasn’t an air raid, but a grand court, and at the far end a huge figure shrouded all in white sat on a great white marble chair atop a huge white marble base. In the flashing lights, seeing it all in broken lines as if reflected in a splintered mirror, Strange stood and waited in front of all the crowds. Until the white figure, its face covered, slowly extended one huge arm, the index finger pointing. There was a vast sigh of “Ah!” from the crowd and Strange knew that he had lost. Whatever it was. Whatever it was that was at stake. Then he realized that someone, the anesthetist, was talking, shouting at him, in capital letters.

  “THERE WE GO, THERE WE GO, HE’S ALL RIGHT. SURE. HE’S ALL RIGHT. YOU’RE ALL RIGHT. THERE, NOW.” The anesthetist was smiling at him.

  Strange managed to wink at him but the white figure still filled his mind, more real than any of the reality around him and it stayed with him all the groggy way back to the ward rolling along the corridors on the meat wagon and it stayed with him the next two days that they kept him partially doped up. It stayed sharply between his eyeballs and everything he looked at.

  Curran was not one to be stingy with dope and painkillers when somebody was in pain. When he stopped by that first afternoon to see him, he said he did not believe with Maj Hogan and Col Baker that standing pain was the essence of a man. Strange only nodded and looked at him and smiled, seeing in front of him that great white figure and pointing arm. Curran still seemed less real.

  It had had a profound effect on him, the dream. Or vision. Or whatever it was. It seemed so real it took on the quality of a revelation almost. But what was it supposed to mean? All Strange knew was that, somewhere, he had been tried and found wanting. But he did not even know what the trial was for. He had the feeling that in the vision he had not been told, either. He had simply been judged. No defense. It did not matter. The judgment was fair. In the dream he had felt a great sense of guilt, and then relief. An enormous sorrow, and relief. Relief that at last somebody knew.

  Vaguely now, but sharply in the vision, he had the feeling he was being sent back somewhere he had hoped to be allowed to leave. That was what the silent finger seemed to indicate: you are sent back, and must stay. But Strange did not know sent back to where.

  Even when he was back on his feet and the painkillers withdrawn, the powerful image of the white figure and pointing arm would not leave him and he could not get away from the feeling that he was being told something.

  In the fact of it and because the painkillers they gave him weren’t all that strong, he was not off his feet all that long. On Curran’s orders, the ward attendants had him up and out of bed and moving around the ward before the afternoon of the first day was over.

  Curran did not like to use plaster casts, and had had a molded plaster plate made and bandaged underneath the hand so that only the knuckle joints themselves were held immobile. Curran maintained that casts had caused more cripples than the wounds that had required their use.

  “We’re such a long, long way from what we could do in surgery and orthopedics,” he said with his mild smile. “God only knows how long it’s going to take. And only God knows what lovely advances will come out of this beautiful war.” Curran’s eyebrows hooked upward over his pale eyes.

  Then, sitting on the bed edge, he turned and with a sharp twinkling grin asked Strange to come out with him sometime and have a few drinks, and to bring his buddies. Strange said that he would.

  Strange did not know what had caused him to take such an interest in the four of them. Probably it was the saving of Prell’s legs. “That first sergeant of yours, Winch, must be quite a guy,” Curran said. “What he did for Prell and the way he arranged that medal for him are really something. I’d like to meet him.” Strange said he would try to arrange it. He did not know what Curran meant by the way Winch “arranged that medal.”

  But he didn’t really care. He already knew pretty much what Winch would say. Which was a flat No. He and Winch saw pretty much eye to eye about officers. Officers were of a different caste, and ought to stay there. But of course he and Winch were old Regulars. And this was the wartime Army. Full of civilians. Strange made up his mind privately that he would not even mention the invitation to Winch, and that he would not take it up himself, either. He liked Curran, more and more, and admired him, but he did not intend ever to become a buddy of his.

  He felt exactly the same about the officers at the Hotel Peabody when Landers took him there.

  Because of Col Curran’s postoperative treatment he was able to go much sooner than he had expected, the third day after instead of a week. Curran told him only that he should be careful of the hand. “When you’re on top of some girl,” Curran grinned, “make sure you support yourself on the plaster plate on your palm. Not on your finger knuckles.” Strange had only grunted.

  He had no intention of picking up some woman. And yet, when he got there, he found himself in bed with one almost before he had time to get a few drinks down him. And before the afternoon and after it the evening were over he had been to bed with four different women. Of course so had Landers. But he would have expected that of Landers. He would not have expected it of himself.

  But the operation seemed to have changed him in some deep-down basic way. Either the operation itself, or perhaps it was that damned vision or dream or revelation or whatever it was he had had coming out of the anesthetic.

  Being strapped down and put to sleep and made helpless while some guy opened up and cut on a part of you to try and repair it could do a lot of damage to a man’s self-esteem.

  And Strange could not shake off the picture of the judging figure, its hand pointing. And he couldn’t shake off the way it made him feel. There had been no anger or frustration or outrage at the figure. No crying of unfair. You could no more be outraged at the figure than you could be outraged at the universe. Both were there, both existed, it was the way things were. It had to be accepted. In the dream he had felt a compassion. Compassion for himself and for everything. He had always been compassionate. Why else would the old company nick-name him “Mother Strange.” But this new compassion was different and deeper and included everything in God’s created universe. And yet deep underneath it in him was an indigestible despair. And way down deep under the despair was a fiery-red, sneaky little anger. Over the fact that things must be the way they were. This tiny little white-hot core made him rebellious.

&nbs
p; His rebelliousness included Linda. If Linda didn’t care much about fucking him any more, and probably never had done, Strange guessed that was her privilege. But there were plenty who would. And if some of these excited him, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t take advantage of it.

  He had not felt like that before the operation. But if the white figure had judged against him and pointed him away, back to whatever it was he must go back to, what did he have to lose?

  It was silly perhaps, but he was taking the dream quite seriously, in a grinding sort of way. And his sexual proclivities were a long way from being washed up, as he had thought two weeks ago.

  None of that had anything to do with his commitment and loyalty to Linda Sue, and her crazy defense-plant family, and her dream restaurant. He would stand by that.

  Thus Strange sat and figured it out for himself with a drink in his hand, in the loud, crowded, smoke-filled, booze-fumed sitting room of the Peabody hotel suite Landers had brought him to, before swiftly becoming entangled and intertwined with his first female body of the afternoon. He realized there was some question whether he had chosen it, or it had chosen him.

  The place was so crowded a certain protocol had to be followed. The suite had a bedroom on either side of the sitting room. With doors that closed. The sitting room had a double bed. So the management could rent that room singly, if needed. This bed was a necking, feel-them-up way station while waiting for a bedroom, and couples were always sprawled on it. You were supposed to note how many couples were already there waiting when you got on the bed, and to keep track of your place in the lineup.

  Both bedrooms had single cot beds placed against the wall in addition to their big beds, so that each bedroom could accommodate two couples when a serious party was in progress, like today. Propriety demanded neither couple should look at the other while arriving or departing or while at play themselves. Strange, when he entered a bedroom the first time, found it impossible not to stop and stare. “Hey. You’re not supposed to look,” the girl welder who was with him cried cheerily. “No. You’re not,” a muffled voice said from the cot. The girl welder added, “You’re supposed to look only at me.”