by James Jones
“It is if it’s bad enough.”
“And now you’re getting over it?”
“Just about.”
“Is that why you don’t drink?” She had had two whiskeys out of the bottle on the table. “I didn’t know drinking was bad for malaria.”
Winch shrugged. He wanted badly to change the subject. “They told me not to,” he said shortly.
“And soon you’ll be going away again. Off somewhere.”
“Probably,” Winch lied. “Actually,” he added, “I may be stationed here for a while. In Second Army.”
“That would be great,” Carol smiled.
“Let’s dance awhile,” he said.
It had been so long since any sexual desires had moved him. Not since Frisco. They said the digitalis and the diuretics caused that. Holding her against him dancing, her breasts lying heavy against the chest of his shirtfront, he felt no sexual stirrings. That didn’t bother him. It wasn’t sex he was after with her. It was that incredible, unbelievable youth. It stung him, like some furious insect.
When he took her home to her parents’ house on the big, tall tree shaded avenue, he did not attempt to kiss her and told the taxi to wait as they got out.
“Let him go,” she said. “Don’t you want to come in for a while?”
Winch shook his head. “I’m too old to go around necking with girls on the sofas of their mamas’ parlors,” he said as they walked up the walk.
“Oh, there might be more to it than that,” Carol smiled promptly.
“Not on any living room sofas, with papa and mama upstairs,” Winch said. “Not for me. But next time I take you out I can have a place to take you. If you want.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No threat,” he said. “A promise.”
They were at the door and instead of answering she put back her head, closed her eyes, and pushed out her lips for him to kiss her. Winch waited, deliberately, until she opened her eyes looking startled, before he leaned forward and put his lips on hers. When he did, she immediately popped her tongue into his mouth and rubbed it around hard all over the inside of his mouth in a mechanical way.
“When?” she said, when their mouths parted.
“How about tomorrow night?” Winch said, and when she nodded, added coldly, “First thing, I’m going to have to teach you how to kiss.” Before she could answer that, he was on his way down the walk to the cab.
He sat quietly on the ride back. He was feeling the first sexual stirrings he had felt since the heart failure attack in Letterman and old, what was her name? Arlette. Carol pretty clearly didn’t know any but the most obvious things about sex and it could be great sport to teach her. In his khakis which he never wore underwear with he could feel his cock crawling and extending itself a little, tentatively. His breathing deepened. He sat quietly in the cab and savored the sensations all the way back to the hospital, watching out the window the rich, well-off lawns and trees and avenues and then the poorer places and suburban juke joints of Luxor’s Southern city landscape.
It was easy enough to arrange for a room at the Claridge. Jack Alexander kept two rooms there for players to rest or sleep or drink in, as well as the suite in which he ran the big-time, high-stakes poker game for the big winners of the Army’s monthly payroll. Alexander called the Claridge for him. Jack made sure the room was on another floor from the one his game was on.
“You knew exactly how to handle me, didn’t you?” Carol said with a triumphant little smile, when he took her there after another dinner at the Peabody’s Plantation Roof. “I’ll bet you’ve done that many times before, with women.”
Winch sensed she wanted him to grin. So he did, briefly. “If you want to know the real truth,” he smiled, “I’m just too old to fart around any more.”
“You intrigued me. You said you’d teach me how to kiss. I thought I knew how.”
“Well, you don’t,” he grinned. “The first thing to remember is never to use heavy pressure. And never be mechanical, never keep repeating the same movement. The whole art of sex is to tease just ever so slightly. That way you want more. And more. Come here. But first, let me show you how I undress you.”
The covered parts of her were as deliciously, unbelievably youthful as the uncovered parts. There wasn’t an excess ounce of fat on her. With that black, black hair and pale, pale skin of the black Irish she had a thick black luxurious bush against her white belly. She played a lot of tennis and golf, she said. Her father was a big-time lawyer in Luxor, she told him.
“How old did you say you were?”
“I’m uh twenty-two.” The slight hesitation betrayed her. “I will be. Soon.”
“How soon?”
“In seven months.” She blushed.
“I’m old enough to be your father.”
“I think of you as something else. You make me think of a smart, tough, wise, old elephant, who’s been roaming his forests forever,” she whispered.
“I do, hunh?” Winch said.
She did not seem to mind at all that he was extraordinarily slow in achieving an erection.
“I don’t know why I’m drawn to you so, the way I am.” Holding his head against her, she added in a breathy voice, “I’ll have to go home later, you know. I can’t stay out all night.”
He found, as he had suspected, that she knew very little about sex at all. He was sure she had not, for example, ever had anyone go down on her before. But he decided that that could wait for some future session.
“Do you think I’m attractive?” she whispered as he raised himself over her to enter her, and stretched out her long-waisted, long-legged pale black-Irish body for him on the bed.
“Yes.” Winch didn’t feel it necessary to elaborate. In any case Winch was discovering for the first time in his life, to his surprise and disbelief, fatigue in sex. As he worked on her carefully in the bed. He had always been in good enough shape, before, that he had never had to worry about becoming tired. Now was different.
“Oh. Oh. It was never like this.” She whispered it with her eyes closed. How many women had said that line to how many new men? Winch wondered. To each new man. He had never been much at long-dicking them but he knew he had a more than usual circumference.
While they were lying side by side afterward, after he had come, though he was sure she hadn’t, Carol said, “What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us?”
Winch thought that that, to say the least, was a little bit premature. “Well, for one thing, we can have a hell of a great time together for a while,” he said softly.
But after two weeks of her he found he too was beginning to think distastefully about his having to move out to Camp O’Bruyerre and Second Army some time soon. It was only thirty miles from Luxor but that thirty miles meant he would not find it that easy to meet her in town every night.
But by that time Johnny Stranger was back from Cincinnati and Winch knew about his old mess/sgt that, some way or other, Johnny Stranger had seen the shit hit the fan.
CHAPTER 17
WHEN HE LEFT LUXOR for Cincinnati with his two three-day passes in his pocket, Strange was so used to the long crowded bus trip by now, had done it so many times, that he about had it memorized and hardly bothered to look out.
He had hoped to doze but in the moving vehicle full of breathing bodies it was impossible to sleep. The air of the big bus was clogged with exhaled body moisture, and a kind of perpetual murmur. Strange sucked at a pint bottle of whiskey he had bought for the trip, stretched in the cramped seat, and let his mind run over the story and catastrophe of Billy Spencer. His mind had been wanting to do that since the day Billy had first shown up. Strange had known he would have to come to grips with it eventually.
The arrival of Billy at Kilrainey had been as much a torture for Strange as it was for Winch. It was perhaps even worse for Strange, because Strange could not come to terms with it in the way Winch apparently had. Billy Spencer was the first so-called basket case the com
pany had had. And while everybody understood theoretically that such things could happen, nobody really believed it would happen to him. And nobody ever really believed it would happen to anyone in their company. They had all heard of them in other companies.
Winch seemed able to cope with that. But Strange couldn’t. The unparalleled distress Strange felt when he thought about his own having survived relatively untouched, in comparison to Billy, made the skin on his back twitch, and his buttocks tighten with guilt.
Whenever he thought of poor Billy a wild irrational hatred for all civilians who had never been out there and been through it slammed through him and made him want, unreasonably, to smash in the face of any civilian that might present itself to him. It was unreasonable, and Strange knew it was unreasonable.
But even worse than that for Strange was the story Billy had told them about the disintegration of the company. Strange had been willing enough to leave the company, willing in fact even when he knew leaving it and shipping back to the States would mean being assigned to some new outfit and never going back. But that did not mean he wanted it to fade away, be broken up, disappear. It was losing its identity and personality under other officers and new non-coms shipped in from outside. It was becoming another, no longer recognizable unit. That was a calamity.
Somewhere in the back of Strange’s mind there had always been the idea that someday, when the war was over they would all of them all get together again somewhere. Become again the unit it once had been, only grown wiser and more experienced by war service.
Strange had been too embarrassed ever to speak of this to anyone, but he nevertheless had clung to the idea.
The idea had always been a pipe dream, of course. But as long as the company was still out there, with some semblance of its old roster and original organization intact, he could still hold on to and at least play with the idea. Now, with the company no longer there, and filled up and loaded down with strangers, Strange felt uprooted, homeless. He suffered from feeling naked and alone and orphaned with a severity he had never experienced before. Not even when he left home, or when his parents died. The existence of his civilian wife and her civilian family where he was accepted as a member was no help for this feeling at all.
In the wet-aired bus Strange sucked disconsolately at his pint of whiskey. What the hell, it wasn’t something that was going to kill him. He had been in the Army long enough to get used to changing outfits. He had done it a number of times.
But there was something special about this outfit. And he saw clearly enough that it was the war had done it. Death—death, and maiming—had pulled it together in a way the peacetime Army had never done with outfits. Shared deaths, shared woundings, shared terrors had given it a family closeness it wouldn’t be easy to find again.
And Strange did not know if he had the courage to start over from scratch and knowing what he knew now, go through the process a second time.
Outside the bus at the rest stops, when he got down occasionally to relieve himself, there was a chill of October in the fresher air.
When he finally got to the house in Covington it was midafternoon, and almost exactly the same time of day that he had arrived all the other times. Linda’s paternal uncle, 4-F older brother, and maternal cousin were all still sleeping preparatory to going off on the night shift. This time when they all began straggling down they found Strange already in the kitchen, drinking beer. Strange sat with them again in the kitchen while they made their breakfast, and had some bacon and eggs himself. None of them seemed much interested that his hand had been operated on and that he now wore the plaster plate on it, since they had seen him last.
He soon found out that Linda Sue, who should have been working the day shift and therefore should be coming home soon, had in fact been transferred to the swing shift. Instead of coming home she had just gone off to work, and would not be getting off until midnight. Strange hung around the house till some of the other women began coming home from work and from shopping, and then had to get out. The women filled up the kitchen so with their gossip and their preparations for cooking dinner that he couldn’t stand it. The only other place available was Linda’s little chintz-covered bedroom, which was too small for loafing and too small for anything else except sleeping, and maybe fucking.
He went to a lousy war movie. In it some green young Navy kid, stranded in Bataan, kept letting the spoons fly off of hand grenades and counting to three before he threw them, usually just across a coconut log where evil-looking Japanese were shooting point-blank at him. It was so outrageous that finally about halfway through he had to leave. As he walked up the aisle he looked at the faces of the people bathed in the flickering light from the screen as they chewed handfuls of popcorn and watched the fighting with avid eyes, and for a brief insane moment wished he had two or three grenades with him, to toss in among them. And see how they liked it.
After that, he simply went around from bar to bar drinking. When he finally went back to the house at twelve-thirty, he was three-fourths tight and went to bed in the little chintz room. Two others of the family who were on the swing shift were already home in the kitchen, and he talked to them for a while. Linda did not get home until after three.
Of course, she had not known he was coming. She was terribly apologetic when she found him, just waking up, in the little bedroom. Linda was about half-crocked herself, and explained she had been with a few of the girls for some drinks. When he wanted to make love to her, she was warm and kind and receptive. But she certainly wasn’t what Strange could call hot. When he was humping her, she stroked his head. He would have preferred her to be passionate.
But there was no inkling of anything else. Not that Strange could feel. Why should there be? Their lovemaking was the same as it had always been. Perhaps it was even just a little better than usual. But when, after he had come, he tried to talk to her about what Curran had said concerning the new, second operation and what this could mean to them with the restaurant, she begged off from hearing about it and wanted to go to sleep. When he went on talking anyway, she broke down and began to cry.
“But, Linda, honey, don’t you understand?” he persisted. “You can have your restaurant. All I have to do is say no to this second operation and they’ll discharge me.”
“I don’t want to hear about it now,” she wept. “I’m too fuddled and too tired and too sleepy. Can’t we talk about it tomorrow? Please?”
“Sure, sure. Of course. Don’t cry. Don’t cry, for God’s sake,” Strange said, and stroked her shoulder. After she was asleep, he lay awake a long time with his arms behind his head, thinking. It certainly wasn’t the reaction he had expected.
He suggested that he take her out for a nice high-class lunch somewhere, when she came down at eleven the next morning, because he thought she looked peaked and worn down. Certainly the kitchen, with its ebb and flow of family workers preparing or cooking one meal or another, was no place for a discussion. But Linda instead of being pleased gave him a sharp look, and then after a moment said she couldn’t have lunch with him. Though she did not say why. Instead, she wanted him to pick her up at a bar near her job after she got off at midnight. She gave him the address. Then around two she got dressed and went off. Shopping, she said.
So Strange found himself with another whole day to put in. He was soured on war movies but there did not seem to be anything else playing anywhere. Across the river the whole town of Cincinnati seemed full of nothing but war films. Finally he found a theater that was showing a rerun of The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, and went to see that. He remembered the outfit had seen that on Guadalcanal, and had loved it. But, now, the richness and wealth and high life of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was so foreign to anything he knew and so out of step with his mood of now that he left that one, too, before it was half over. Hell, even when they were poor they lived rich.
He tried not to drink too much, because he wanted to have his brains sharp. But it was hard not to. It seemed ever
ybody everywhere who wasn’t working was drinking. He decided to take a taxi to the bar because he did not know the town well enough to trust trying the bus system.
He had already arranged where to take her to dinner. Across the river in Cincinnati during his lone drinking hours he had checked around, and found a ritzy hotel which had a place like the Peabody’s Plantation Roof that served good steak dinners till very late. Strange was proud of the sophisticated tastes he had developed during his two-month stay in Luxor, and decided to take her there and show her. Only when they were arriving and getting out of the taxi did it occur to him that such a high-class place might embarrass Linda and make her uncomfortable. She had never gone to ritzy places, even back in Wahoo. But of course, by the time he thought of this, it was already too late and they were at the door.
He needn’t have worried. Linda seemed at least as at home in the place as he was. When he tipped the head waiter three dollars to get them a nice quiet table off to themselves, she noted it with approval. She accepted the big menu with all the French words and ordered her dinner as smoothly and calmly as if she had been doing it right along. Strange ordered drinks for them, and she said she’d take a martini. After he’d ordered the drinks, he sat back and looked around, without really thinking that he had never known Linda Sue to drink a martini before. The big place was jam-packed and they were surrounded by servicemen and their women. The few civilian men in the place appeared drowned in the big sea of khaki and blue.
On the bandstand a sixteen-piece orchestra played through both “Little Sir Echo” and “Racing with the Moon” while Strange sipped at his drink and tried to collect his thoughts. He had never been much of a ballroom dancer so it did not occur to him to ask Linda to dance.
Since she would not mention the operation or bring it up, Strange was forced finally to bring it up himself.
“Well, where shall I begin?” he said finally.
Linda only looked at him. “Don’t you want to ask me to dance first?” she said.