Whistle

by James Jones

  Down below somewhere, he knew, another man called Marion Landers stood gazing with eyes widened in a trance. Landers knew that if that other man blinked the vision, dream, revelation, whatever it was, would disappear. But this could not scratch or dent his pleasure. That was part of it, too.

  And far off, the white breakers clashed gently on the unpeopled sands of that long blue coast, where forests of great green-leafed trees and green supple grasses remained the only living things. That continent which, uninhabited, enigmatic, unfathomable and vast, loomed beckoning. And upon which no ship would ever make its landing.

  Landers did not blink. He refused to. He would not let himself. But it didn’t matter. Slowly he felt himself coming back into himself, anyway. He felt a part of him pouring back in slowly in a thick solid untrickling stream like liquid chocolate poured from a bowl. Then he did blink.

  What was happening to him? A jerky panic ran all through him like a jolt of electricity. Slowly he turned away, and limped off to look for Winch. Somebody, anybody, to talk to.

  But before he reached the top of the flight of ship’s stairs to Promenade Deck, he had changed his mind. Winch was Landers’ hero. And had been, since Landers was first assigned to the old Regular Army outfit, and because of his clerical knowledge been dragooned to work for Winch as clerk. But Winch would be no help to him in the things Landers was wrestling with now. And maybe no help to him ever. That was another new revelation.

  So at the top of the stairs, he veered off and headed for the main lounge. Where Bobby Prell would certainly still be. Prell, all trussed up in traction like a chicken going to market, was not about to go on deck.

  As he approached the door, Landers began preparing himself for the soft sick smell that would engulf him. The only thing to do was to breathe it in, and not try to avoid it. As he opened the door, it hit him in the face with a warm, wet, slippery splash like glissading sewer water.

  Then, as he stood still inside the door a moment, to get used to it, he saw the old company’s former mess/sgt Johnny Stranger was leaning over the end of Prell’s bunk halfway down the big room, laughing and talking.

  After standing indecisively a moment, Landers opened the door and went back outside. He did not want to talk to Strange. He had not really wanted to talk to Prell. Rather hopelessly, but cautiously, he started back down the steep ship’s stairs on his crutches.

  Going down the steep, slippery iron stairs was even more dangerous than climbing them, to a man on crutches.

  CHAPTER 4

  THEY DOCKED LATE THAT NIGHT, in San Diego. No one felt like sleeping, but it would have been impossible anyway. Dago was where the Navy and Marine Corps wounded were being taken off.

  The little ship, dwarfed now by the Navy fighting ships nearby, blazed with lights. Shore-based stretcher-bearers and the whiteclad shipboard medics moved down the aisles and passageways, calling to each other in loud voices. Berth after berth in the staterooms and bed after bed in the main lounge were emptied, and the occupants carted away. Some of them were coming from as far away as the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Australia, from New Zealand. From New Guinea, the Solomons, the Coral Sea.

  On shore under the dockside floodlights there was a great bustle, as ambulance after ambulance drove up, was loaded, and pulled off into the darkness. In the big harbor packed with wartime shipping, lights shone everywhere, on ships, in shore installations, from cars and buses and trucks.

  And above the harbor the lights of the city blazed as if for a festive occasion, or as if welcoming the wounded home. To the men on board, used to blackouts and brownouts, the sight was breathtaking. Some began to weep again.

  When the unloading was over, and the lights on board began to dim down again, a third of the berths and beds were empty. The rest, the Army personnel, would have to wait for San Francisco. Frisco was another two days run up the coast. Those last two days, in the partially empty ship, were going to seem the longest, and the worst. And everybody knew it.

  John Strange certainly knew it. When things settled down, Strange made his way back to Bobby Prell’s bed in the diminished-seeming main lounge. Strange leaned over Prell’s bed foot again and tried hard one more time to think of something funny to say. He had hoped once again, because of the greatness of the occasion, to get Winch to come with him to visit Prell. If he had, it would be the first time. The first in fact since Winch had suddenly appeared at the Naval base hospital in the New Hebrides, on his way out apparently, but not looking wounded and not even looking particularly sick. Even back there, Winch had flatly refused to visit Prell or have anything to do with him.

  Because of Prell, Strange had spent a lot of time in the ship’s main lounge. They hadn’t called him Mother Strange for nothing, back in the old company. But he had never gotten used to the lounge, or gotten so he did not feel uncomfortable in it.

  Long afterward, Strange noted, they all of them still spoke about how during the voyage the main lounge was never far from anyone’s thoughts. No matter where they went, or what Stateside hospital the post cards and letters came back from. They all of them said or wrote the same thing about the lounge. All of us, Strange thought. It was as if all of them, hunting, casting around, were trying to find the common factors that would hold the whole experience together for them. And the voyage was the final act of the play, the dividing line. Like the International Date Line, when they crossed it.

  Among themselves, they had calculated that 13 percent were damaged bad enough to have to travel in the lounge. The statistics of being wounded fascinated Strange as much as they did the rest of them. And on board, it was their biggest game. Next to card playing. Blackjack. And poker.

  Of the 13 percent of them in the lounge, one-fifth, or 2.6 percent of the total, had to go into the extra-care unit. The 2.6 percent were almost all lung wounds. Only about a sixth of them were abdominals or head wounds. Because the head wounds almost always died before they got on board, and the abdominals either died or recovered sufficiently to travel out in the open lounge with the others. Among the infantry, us infantry, Strange thought with a chief cook’s smile, it was an interesting note that 75 percent of the lung wounds were caused by rifle or machinegun bullets, but only 50 percent of the abdominals were bullet wounds. They did not know why, and they did not know whether these figures also applied to other types of outfits.

  Strange found it a well-run, put-together place, the main lounge. Once your nose got over its outrage at the smell. And once the dark part of your mind got over its supernatural, witches-and-broomstick feeling about it. The feeling that right here, traveling with you, was the true hell of your Christian grandmother. It even looked like it. Pincers, and needles, and tubes and scissors. With its working imps, and gory damned ones. All of them paying out or receiving the punishment for human sins. It could seem the repository, the collection-place and bank, of all human evil. It often gave Strange that feeling.

  Strange was not a religious man. Or at least, not a very religious man. Better to say, a poorly religious man. Who wasn’t much good at living up to it. But Strange believed in God. And believed he would pay someday for his lapses. And it was not too big a jump of the imagination for him to see the main lounge as the hell where he might someday be paying.

  Like so many others, he carried a big reluctance to enter it or breathe its air, or even to touching the door handles that opened its doors. Out of a superstitious fear of contamination. But once you got past all that, it was remarkable how well it did and ran the things it was supposed to do and run. As no doubt hell did, too, Strange thought.

  The extra-care unit was in one corner. It was cordoned off from the rest by curtain screens. Generally silence prevailed there. But all sorts of gruesome medical noises kept issuing from it. Enhanced perhaps by the silence. Liquid gurglings. Soft hissings of air. Louder air blasts. Peculiar tickings. Heavy breathing. No visitors were allowed in it.

  If you wanted to carry the hell idea further, you could think of the extra-care
unit as the seventh level of your grandma’s Christian hell, Strange often thought. The lowest. The worst of all.

  If it had not been for Prell, Strange might never have gotten to know the lounge as well as he did. He spent a good part of every day in there with Prell, talking and laughing and trying to cheer him up. He doubted if he would have done as much for another man. Not in that lousy place. He hadn’t even bothered to look up Landers, Winch’s clerk, during the voyage. But Landers was a wartime volunteer. And Prell—like Winch—was from the old outfit.

  Strange with his bad hand had preceded Winch by a week to the Naval base hospital at Efate in the New Hebrides. And when he left the company up in New Georgia, Winch to all appearances had been healthy and in good shape. Bobby Prell of course had preceded both of them by several weeks, when the New Georgia campaign was getting up to its peak of fighting.

  Strange would not have put it past Winch to simply decide he had had enough combat, and simply have himself shipped out back to America. Winch was perfectly capable of it, and Strange was convinced he had enough pull to do it. If that was what he decided he wanted to do.

  Gossip around the New Hebrides base hospital said that Winch had something wrong with his heart. Just as gossip in the hospital had it that Prell was going to lose one or both of his legs. But Winch did not look or act like a man who had had a heart attack, any more than Bobby Prell looked or acted like a man who was going to let them take off one or both of his legs.

  Gossip around the hospital also had it that Prell was being recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor by the Division’s commander. But when Strange told this to Winch, Winch only snorted with outraged disgust. If anybody knew anything definite about Prell’s potential recommendation, it would be his own 1st/sgt, Winch. But Winch refused to admit he had heard about it. Prell himself had heard nothing about it, apparently. And Strange had felt that if he could get Winch to back-up the fact of the recommendation, it might do Prell a world of good.

  It was not that Prell was depressed, or defeated, or suicidal. Or anything bad like that. That wasn’t Prell’s style, any more than it was Winch’s. Prell was just as mean and ornery as he’d ever been. He’d always been a stubborn, proud West Virginia hardhead, which was part of why Winch had never liked him. It was why Strange liked him.

  But underneath Prell’s toughness about being wounded, Strange was acute enough to sense a canker. A sort of well-encrusted, walled-off cyst of despair. Which had hardened, and been sealed off. But which might flare up. Or burst, and pour out its morbid fluid. And if that happened, Prell would be in trouble. Some news, even unconfirmed, about a Congressional Medal would be damn good medicine for that.

  But Winch was not about to come through with it, even if he had it.

  Strange had learned to live with Winch. It wasn’t so hard. You just had to understand that he was a little crazy, and make allowances for it. In fact, just about everything good that had happened to Strange in the past three years Winch had been responsible for. Strange couldn’t forget that.

  Back in early 1940, when the old peacetime Division was stationed inland at Schofield Barracks on Wahoo, long before the sneak attack, Strange had been a second cook in the Coast Artillery at Fort Kamehameha, with a 4th CI specialist’s rating and no prospect of advancement. Winch, who as a staff/sgt had been in the same outfit with him at Fort Riley, Kansas five years before, had come down to see him and invite him to transfer into his infantry outfit at Schofield. It was a crazy thing to ask. Fort Kam was close to Honolulu, and had its own swimming beaches, and Strange was drawing down a spec 4’s pay. But Winch had promised him that within three months he would be mess/sgt of his company. Winch had a mess/sgt he wanted to get rid of. This was back in the days when mess/sgts and 1st/cooks reenlisted in place, just to keep their jobs. Strange had accepted. And Winch had come through. Exactly as he’d said.

  The move had changed Strange’s life. After his big jump in pay, he had sent home to Texas for his girlfriend and brought her out and married her. This was something Strange had not expected to be able to do for another three years. But with the grade of staff/sgt he could get married NCOs’ allowances, and quarters on the post. He had stopped his wild living, and spending his pay on booze and the whores and running around, and had settled down. With Linda Sue with him it was easy. She had even started them saving some money. By the end of 1941, when the sneak attack came and the war, they had saved two thousand dollars.

  All of this had been directly due to Winch. Strange figured he owed him more than he could ever hope to make up to him. And if Winch wanted to be a nut and an eccentric, and do his crazy, bitchy things every now and then, Strange was not going to intervene and try to put him straight. Anyway intervening with Winch was like trying to intervene with a force of nature like a line squall. You couldn’t do it.

  Between them (with a little help from some NCOs they had gotten made), they had turned Winch’s company into one of the best the Division had had. Maybe the best the Division had ever had. Strange for one at least would never forget it the rest of his whole life. Now the war was ruining it. Mangling it, tearing it to shreds. But that was what it had been designed and put together for. It couldn’t go on forever. And when he had left it, and then Winch left it, Strange was sure it had virtually ceased to exist. Their old outfit. But Strange would not forget it.

  Whatever else, we were pros, Strange thought with grim satisfaction for the five-hundredth time. Whatever else they could say about us, we were professionals. He was unaware, again, that he had used the past tense.

  And whatever the company was, it was crazy Mart Winch who had made it. Winch might be unorthodox, and cheat, and even be downright dishonest on occasion, in his methods. But the results he got were phenomenal, and amounted to a kind of crazy genius. Strange had to love him for that.

  But if he was willing to back up Winch and make allowances for Winch, Strange also had a very special feeling about Bobby Prell.

  There had been a couple of moments right after the war began in Wahoo when Strange had looked at his wife and regretted being married. Prell made him feel a little bit like that.

  Strange had wanted to kick himself in the ass, for feeling that way about Linda. He had not even seen all that much of her, after the sneak attack. The company had moved out right away to defense positions. Soon after, all the wives and dependents had been sent back to the States. Twice before her ship left, he got an overnight pass from Winch to meet her in town in a hotel. Both times, with the war all around them, he had a sense of regret at having hurried into his marriage. It would have been so nice and easy and relaxed, if it had just been some hooker. Instead of all this weeping and carrying on about being parted. She had not understood why he wanted to stay, or why he felt the way he did about the company.

  And Strange realized, that if he had only known this war was coming, he would not have married her in such a hurry.

  It tore his heart for her to sail off home, but half of him was relieved to see her go. He felt it would be different and like the old days again, with her out of the way. But it wasn’t. The one time he had gone to the whores in town with a bunch of the guys, after things loosened up in Wahoo, he had been both bored and guilty. He no longer liked to go out on pass and get drunk with the guys. And when the outfit arrived in Guadalcanal to relieve the Marines, Strange found a new caution and new thoughtfulness in him had replaced the old desire to take risks. And he missed his wife terribly.

  Not Prell, though. There had always been a streak of the heroics-lover about Prell. With his unbending West Virginia pride. Prell wasn’t a gay carefree laughing-boy type. He was dead responsible, and steady, cool, calculating. But he was vain to a fault. He took bigger risks than the motorcycle-jockey, wild-ass kind. He had done unbelievable things on the Canal. Like walking all night through the jungle alone out beyond the lines, to get back to the company which was cut off somewhere a mile up ahead. And had never blinked an eye about it afterward. Strange envie
d him, even before the outfit left the Canal for New Georgia.

  Small, slight, with long hollows under his high cheekbones and narrow eyes, Prell now was emaciated. There were huge purple circles under the coalblack eyes. He had been broken from sergeant twice in the past two years, the last time after the Canal campaign ended. But before New Georgia, he had worked his way back up to corporal. And to acting squad leader, in addition. He was too good a soldier, and everybody knew it. Then, to get all torn up in a crappy little campaign like New Georgia. Back home in the States nobody had ever heard of New Georgia, apparently.

  Oddly enough, Prell was cheerful about being hit so bad, more than Strange had ever seen him be about anything. As if he felt it was required of him. He had raised his head up off the pillow and grinned, behind the terrible fragile hollows under his eyes, as Strange came up to the bed.

  “Won’t be long now, hunh?”

  Strange made himself grin. “Two days they say. Two days, and then the old Golden Gate, and the Bridge, and the old Presidio.” He looked around the lounge. “Looks pretty empty in here.”

  “It was a big scene in here,” Prell said. “People sniffling. And crying.”

  “I bet. But not you.”

  “No, not me. I been around the Horn before.”

  “You been out and back. You’re no cherry. And you wouldn’t show it if you were.”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  Strange squatted, a countryman’s squat, his haunches on his heels. There were no chairs. There wasn’t any room for chairs. Prell had, with a medic’s help, rigged up a rearview mirror for himself out of a shaving mirror and some coat-hanger wire, so that he could see the part of the lounge that was behind him. Now he looked in his mirror, and shifted himself slightly with his elbows, before he spoke again. With his legs both hanging from the pulleys, he could only move himself a few inches.