Whistle

by James Jones

  It was more of a mood projection than the contemplation of an actual journey. Just to be going somewhere, anywhere. To be unknown. To be on the move. To be simply a watcher. With no loyalties and no commitments. He decided to wear one of his shirts that didn’t have stripes. Go incognito. The mood was one of floating. Of being bodiless. Unattached to anything, or anybody. Unconcerned. It would be great.

  Two hours after the idea hit him he was on his way. He had to check it out with his doc, requisition a hypodermic and the medication to use in it, take a ten-minute course in how to stick himself in the back of the arm or in the side of the ass, pack a satchel with his medical gear and an extra uniform. It was late afternoon when he was first penetrated by the idea and he arrived at the Luxor Greyhound station just at dusk, as the night trips were beginning.

  It was not dark enough yet to turn on night lights, but was dark enough to make the eyes scratchy. Things looked indistinct in the thinner outdoor and thicker indoor glooms. People were beginning to move around restlessly, or eat sandwiches they did not really want, in the restiveness that comes with the basic change of light from day to night.

  It all fit in perfectly with his mood of bodiless disinvolvement. He had no idea what he would do in St. Louis. And didn’t care. And in fact, might just as well have been going to Chicago or Detroit. Anyplace where he was not known.

  On the sleeping, breathing, crowded bus he did not sleep. There was a full moon out but he did not look at the night scenery. Only once on the 300-mile trip, at Cape Girardeau, did he rouse himself to look out over the big river. He was supremely content simply to be and to sit, and feel the motor vibrations and road tire-thumps under his thighs.

  For the length of time the trip lasted there was nothing in the world Winch wanted.

  The feeling was so similar to what he had felt in Frisco during the worst part of his heart failure attack, when he had felt another him outside himself, that it set him to brooding over this sense of another self outside. What was it? He didn’t know. Was there really another him outside somewhere waiting to be rejoined to this part? He didn’t know. Had it been a real sensation, or only his delirious imagination? He didn’t know that. There were in fact no questions Winch could ask himself and give satisfactory answers for. He was left with only the haunting memory of the sensation. Under his feet and thighs the big tires thudded and scrambled against the roadway.

  Billy Spencer had brought back the reality of the boggling, gasping, mud-swallowing platoons in a way that gave the mind a start. Somewhere there was a mistake, because Winch should have been right up there with them, right now. He was too sophisticated to think he could change what was happening to them. But he could have cushioned it and molded it so that some semblance of the old personality remained. Instead, he was here. And they were floundering. He felt a total failure.

  Billy’s talking had brought back the violent brutality and gushing insanity of combat in a shocking fashion. It made Winch aware of how strikingly it all had faded. He had never believed that it could fade, all that brutalizing. He had never wanted to be a father substitute for kids like Billy. Where did your responsibility end? Nowhere, apparently. Never. It never ended.

  What kind of a thought was that to have to live with?

  Beside him in the next seat a young soldier slept like a baby, cradling a Seagram’s whiskey bottle.

  In St. Louis Winch took a room in one of the hotels in the sleazy section down by the river. He had never served at Jefferson Barracks, but once he had stopped off there to see an old buddy and he knew the area. Whores and pimps and hustlers and muggers walked the crowded streets and hung out in all the low bars. Just as they’d always done. Naturally, soldiers were everywhere.

  Once installed, he went straight to bed and slept for sixteen hours, all through the next day till eight o’clock at night. When he woke, he shaved and dressed and went out and bought himself a bottle of dry California wine and brought it back with him to the room. Feeling very like a man having a clandestine meeting in a cheap hotel, which in a way he was, he poured half a water-tumblerful and held it up to the light, then took the first sharp, tingling sip. Nothing happened. He did not drop dead. Then methodically, sitting at the cheap desk with his feet up on the bed, he drank the entire bottle, all six sharp, saliva-starting glasses of it. Nothing he had eaten or drunk in a long time tasted as sharp and appetizing and delicious.

  When it was finished, he went out to eat. He had had no alcohol in so long the wine made him about half drunk for ten or fifteen minutes. It felt marvelous. He did not even mind having to ask the waitress for food cooked without salt. After he had eaten, he walked out into the street and did what he had known he was going to do all along. He flagged a cab and gave the driver his wife’s address out in the western part of the city.

  Winch had never seen the house, or the street. She had moved to St. Louis, after Winch left her for overseas, because her father the old master/sgt had retired there before he died. She had cousins there, she said. It was way out in one of those rambling residential sections of the city. The streets were in square blocks and shaded by big trees. The houses were big and square-shouldered and thick-waisted. They seemed to stand in row after row for miles, like hundreds of old rotund master/sgts in ranks on parade.

  There was a tin panel with four apartment doorbell buttons let into the wood beside the door. The big old residence had been converted. Hers was the second floor left. From across the street, under the shade of an old large-leafed soft maple in the soft September night air, Winch set up his vigil and began to wait. After an hour and a half, when he had begun to think she must already be home and in bed, a taxi drove up and Winch watched her get out with a serviceman.

  By his cap the man was an officer and a flyer. Wings and some fruit salad were visible above his left pocket. The round white insignia of a lt/col glinted from his shoulders in the street lamp. Both of them looked about three-fourths drunk. Giggling and laughing, they made their way up the short walk to the steps. At the door the man kissed her deeply, before she got out her key and opened the door. In a couple of minutes lights went on in the second floor left, and did not go out. The taxi had driven off.

  Under his maple Winch set himself to wait another half hour. The lights did not go off. Nobody came out. He supposed the two brats were asleep in their own room. That was where they used to be. What the hell, they were ten and eleven now. Old enough to take care of themselves when mommy went out for the evening. After the half hour was up and there was no change, he started walking toward where he thought the nearest main thoroughfare ought to be.

  It took quite a while. Winch walked slowly, and took his time, and did not get any shortness of breath. He thought he remembered the route the cab had taken but apparently he didn’t. Finally he saw brighter lights down a street to his right, walked toward them to a traffic avenue and hailed a cab.

  Back in the riverfront section he walked around to a few bars. He did not drink any alcohol. Finally he went back to the hotel and to bed around four.

  For the next three days Winch made his small pilgrimage out to his wife’s western residential section every night. It was the main anchor of his daily routine. He slept or loafed till late afternoon or the evening, before going out for his single big meal and then flagging a cab. Each day he went out for a bottle of wine and drank it sitting at his cheap hotel room desk, before going out to eat. Each night he arrived at her address by about twelve-thirty. Each of the first two nights she came home with the same Air Force lt/col.

  But then on the third night she came home with another man. This one was also an officer. But he was shorter and fatter, pudgy, and wore the gold oak leaves of a major on his shoulders. Giggling and laughing, they walked up to the door the same way. At the door they kissed the same way. Again the lights went on. Again nobody left. As if released from some devil’s bargain he had made, Winch turned on his heel and walked over to his traffic artery, caught a cab back to his hotel, packed his s
atchel, paid, and left. He caught another cab to the Greyhound station. The next bus south to Luxor did not leave for another hour. Winch spent it in a nearby bar, celebrating over a second bottle of wine for the day.

  This time he slept most of the way. Only once did he wake with any seriousness, to stare out at the dark of the great brooding river rolling alongside the highway, on his left side now. Staring, he thought about how the company in the midst of its anguish of change was forgetting them. Forgetting him. He could see how it could not be any other way. Consciously he thought it a good thing, and dozed again. Until suddenly something, a dream, woke him up wanting to shout a command, “Get them out! Get them out of there! Fast! Move them left! Can’t you see the mortars got them bracketed!”

  With the first word already a shout in his throat, he was able to cut it off so that aloud he only grunted. Winch shook his head. It had been something about the attack on Hill 27 that day on the Canal. Only the terrain had looked different and strange. New. Winch shook his head again. But after that he slept, until dawn and the coming of the Southern sunlight woke him. Really awake now, he stared out at the Arkansas flatlands without depression. He did not feel satisfied, and he didn’t feel free. But he knew now that the disintegration of his company was final and complete, blown away. Ahead the city loomed over him, high up on its bluff, a presentiment. Any future he had at all was around there somewhere. There was no other way to look at it.

  Back at Kilrainey, which he hated, and which looked more and more like a prison as the taxi delivered him through the brick gates to the main door, he found that during his four-day junket Billy Spencer’s parents had been and gone. That was all to the good. Billy’s mother had thrown a terrible scene, Billy told him.

  That same day Winch’s doctors gave him another full check-out examination and found that he was in better shape than they had yet seen him. They could give no reasons why. But his EKG readings were better than any they had taken of him. And if things continued like that, and kept on improving, they saw no reason why he could not be returned to duty soon. Winch only grinned bitterly, and did not tell them about the bottles of wine.

  Two days later he had his first serious meeting with Carol Firebaugh in the big rec hall. She challenged him to a game of Ping-Pong.

  Winch had seen her around there, to say hello to, from time to time. And actually had been introduced to her once, by Landers. But Winch had never spent much time in the rec hall, and had never had a conversation with her.

  This time, he had wandered in because he had just been with Billy again and did not want to go back to the heart ward and sit and brood. But after he had taken one turn around the place, he was ready to leave it

  It was a place that had been created and engineered strictly for stupid men. Some smart guy, a Corps of Engineers officer no doubt, had designed it and laid it all out to be serviceable to what he thought of as stupid men, the enlisted classes.

  If you were a fifteen-year-old high school student, it would no doubt have seemed great. Two Ping-Pong tables stood at the near end near the doors, neither in use. The basketball hoops and backboards had been drawn up on their pulleys and tied there parallel to the floor. They would only be let down when the collapsible bleachers were put up for an intramural game. The one-legged men, say, against the one-armed men, Winch thought evilly. Or when the Globetrotters came to play for the crippled. The theater stage was darkened, its red plush curtains drawn closed. It would be opened and the folding chairs put up on the basketball court when Bing Crosby or somebody came to entertain the injured troops.

  For now, men sat around uncomfortably on the comfortable sofas, and stared off at the high windows screened on the inside to keep the basketballs from hitting them.

  Thinking about cunt, probably. A few bathrobed men played checkers on the low tables. Two pairs of intellectuals engaged in chess games. In a far corner a volunteer worker in her sexless, motherly Gray Lady outfit conducted a listless class in basket weaving. As he was about to go out, Carol came up to him with a Ping-Pong ball and two paddles.

  “How about a game with me, Sergeant?”

  She was smiling. The sheer beauty of just her youth alone was an insult, like a slap in the face. In addition she was quite beautiful in herself, in a nonmovie star way. But had anybody ever been that young, ever? Winch wondered. Had he? There was a certain coquettishness in her eyes and in her attitude that was very Southern.

  Winch had to hold himself tightly, not to respond with a cocky male truculence.

  He heard his own voice saying, “Sure. Okay. Why not?”

  There were a number of things Winch had done well in his career, as Landers ruefully found out when in a moment of misbegotten intellectual superiority he’d challenged Winch to a game of chess. In addition to football, basketball, springboard diving, track, checkers, and chess there was Ping-Pong. At Forts Bliss and Houston he had been one of the Army’s top players in the late nineteen thirties.

  He took off his maroon issue bathrobe and duck slippers and played her barefoot in his gray issue pajamas. He was able to play her three games before he had to quit. His heart was pounding unbelievably but the unaccustomed exercise made him feel good. He beat her 21—12, 21—17, 21—18. She was a good player, and obviously had slyly believed she would beat him.

  “You’re really a fine player,” she said, laughing breathlessly. Her pale, black-Irish complexion was flushed and rosy under the raven black hair framing her forehead. “Don’t you want to play a few more?”

  “No,” Winch said. He was trying to hide his own breathlessness. “You better practice up with somebody your own class, before you try me again.”

  “Oh!” But she laughed. Winch wanted mostly to sit down someplace for a few minutes, but would not let himself. Instead, he put back on his maroon issue bathrobe and duck slippers. He walked over with her while she put away the paddles and the ball.

  When he asked her to have dinner with him that night, she accepted almost before he could get the words out of his mouth.

  He wanted her to meet him in the bar lounge of the Claridge Hotel. He thought that would be better than the bar at the Peabody. But she was hardly inside and seated before it was plain she did not like being in the place.

  “I haven’t been in this place since my high school senior prom,” she said nervously.

  “And is that such a long time ago?”

  “Three and a half years.” She paused a moment. “Actually, it’s not that long. I’ve been here since then. But I haven’t been here since the war, and all the servicemen descended on Luxor.”

  “I don’t know any bar to take you where there aren’t servicemen,” Winch said.

  “There are a few,” she said. She looked around the place again.

  “You find this place too low-brow for you, now?”

  “No. But on the other hand it’s not the real Luxor any more, either.” She hunched her shoulders and then pulled them back down, skittishly. “I don’t like the way they look at me when they’ve been drinking. Out at the hospital it’s a different thing.”

  When they got around to discussing where to go for dinner, over their drinks from Winch’s brown-sacked bottle, she suggested a place she knew: Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room. There wouldn’t be servicemen there. Winch didn’t know it was the same place she had suggested to Landers. But Winch vetoed it immediately, anyway.

  “Let’s get something straight. If I’m going to be taking you around to places, I’m not going to take you to places where you’re well known. Your own local places. I’m going to take you places where you’re not known. My places.”

  Carol smiled. “Is that an order, sir?”

  “Call it that.”

  “You’re ashamed to be seen with me? Is that it?”

  “No. Certainly not. I’m thrilled and delighted,” Winch said. “Let’s just say I don’t want people you know in Luxor to think you’re robbing the cradle.”

  She laughed at that. “Yes. You’re some cradl
e rider.”

  Winch grinned, briefly. “I might be able to show you some places in your city you didn’t even know existed.”

  “I’ll bet you could,” she said. “But I’m not sure I want to see them.”

  For the dinner he took her to the Plantation Roof of the Peabody. She hadn’t been there in a long time, either. But after a little while she seemed to like it.

  “It’s certainly got energy,” she smiled, looking around. “I didn’t know there were that many servicemen in Luxor.”

  Winch suddenly noticed she was not wearing her glasses. Her irises were dark, almost black. Her one sometimes uncontrollable eye was more prominent without them, and kept looking at him briefly and then looking guiltily away while the good eye went on smiling at him coquettishly. It was enormously sexually exciting somehow.

  “Booze,” he said grimly. “It’s the energy of the doomed. Most of these people will be shipping out of here soon. Either east or west,”

  “Please. Let’s don’t talk about that.” Her brother, her younger brother, Winch now found out, was a fighter pilot in Florida, finishing up his training before heading for Europe. That was why she was home from college this year.

  She was a good ballroom dancer, it turned out, light and supple and easy to lead. Winch paced himself carefully, sitting out as many dances as they danced so he would not get out of breath.

  “Why are you in the hospital?” she asked when they were sitting out some dances. “What did they send you back to America for?”

  Looking at him with that one unmanageable eye, she reached out a youth-smooth hand and placed it over his calloused one on the table.

  Winch had been anticipating this question, and wondering how he could handle it. He could not bring himself to tell her he had heart trouble.

  “Dengue fever and malaria,” he said, promptly and laconically.

  “Is that enough to get sent home for?”