by James Jones
“Goddamn bedsores are starting to kill me,” he said. He paused, but only for a second. “How’s Winch?”
“He’s all right as far as I know. I don’t see much of him.”
“That son of a bitch will always be all right. As long as there’s anything to steal. He hasn’t been in here to see me once.”
“Hasn’t he?” Strange said. “I thought he said he was coming in to see you.”
Prell’s obsidian eyes looked up into his rearview mirror a moment, scanning the hall behind him. “Landers has been in to see me six times.”
“He has? I haven’t even seen Landers since we got on board. I ought to look him up.”
Prell ignored that. “You’ve been in to see me seventeen times.”
“I have? What are you, keeping some kind of a scoreboard or something?”
“I sure am. Sure, I am. I aint got anything much else to do,” Prell said authoritatively.
“How’s your crossword book coming?”
“I finished it.”
“I’ll have to rummage around, see if I can’t find you another one.”
Prell pressed his elbows into the bed, and moved himself an infinitesimal inch. “I’d appreciate it. It sounds kind of empty in here, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Strange said. “It does. I was just going to say the same thing.” He raised himself up and looked around the lounge, again. There weren’t all that many empty beds.
“They took out a little less than one-third. But it makes an awful difference with the acoustics,” Prell said, watching him look. His voice got more casual, a little hollower. “Where do you think they’re going to send us?”
“Got no idea,” Strange said, squatting again, then sitting down. On the bare floor. “And nobody seems to know. Doesn’t seem to be any system to it. They say they’re supposed to send you to the hospital nearest your home. In principle. But that’s only if you can get the medical service you need, there. If you can’t, they send you where you can get the medical attention.”
“That means they’ll be splitting us all up,” Prell said.
“Yeah. I suppose so.”
“I don’t like that. You’d think they’d know enough to send all the guys from one outfit someplace where they’re together. At least until we all get used to it.”
“I guess they aint got time to be worrying about shit like that,” Strange said lightly.
“It’s funny, you know,” Prell said after a moment. “We never really knew what happens to them, after they get hit and leave the outfit. And now we’re doing it ourselves. They get hit and they walk off the field, or get carried off, and that’s just sort of the last we ever see of them. Some go to Efate, some to New Zealand, some to New Caledonia. And then they get flown or shipped back to the States and they—just sort of disappear into thin air. And we never know. And now it’s happening to us.”
“Some of the guys got a couple of post cards,” Strange said.
“I know. Yeah. I ran into so-and-so at such-and-such. And such-and-so lost his arm. But we never knew what it was really like.”
“Well, now we’ll know, I guess.”
“You’ll probably go somewhere in Texas,” Prell said. “I don’t know where I’ll go. Where will I go? I’m from down on the Big Sandy on the Kentucky border. But I aint been back there in twelve years. Wheeling? Washington? Baltimore? I don’t even know where all the general hospitals are.”
“You and me might wind up together after all,” Strange grinned. “I won’t go to Texas, I don’t think. My wife’s family all moved back to Kentucky, to work in the defense plants in Cincinnati. And she moved with them. I aint got any family left in Texas.”
“I haven’t any either in West Virginia,” Prell said.
“You and me may wind up in Cincinnati.”
“Where’s Winch from?” Prell asked.
“Somewhere in New England, I think.”
“That’s good, anyway,” Prell said. He settled himself in the bed with his elbows. “I think they’re about to turn the lights out.”
“Yes,” Strange said. “I think so. I better get to going. It feels to me like maybe we’re under way again. I’ll stop in tomorrow.”
“Don’t do it if you don’t feel like it,” Prell said, stiffly.
Strange gave him a grin. “Okay. I won’t. If I don’t.” He was already back on his feet. Down the way some of the medical personnel were stripping some of the emptied beds. The sight gave him a sudden lonely feeling. He waved his hand and walked away. At the big double swing doors he stopped and looked back.
A little over halfway down, Prell was watching him in his rear-view mirror, and stuck his arm up in the air. Strange realized that if he had not looked back, Prell would probably have held that against him. He raised his arm in a wave and went outside onto the deck’s promenade. As he walked, he clenched and unclenched his crippled hand, although it hurt to do it.
Something about Prell had the ability to make Strange feel guilty whenever he was around him. It certainly wasn’t anything Prell did. But he always came away from Prell’s bedside with an elevated sense of his own inadequacy. It was a rare feeling for Strange.
It was very similar to the feeling he had had when he looked at Linda back in Wahoo, after the war had started.
The glass windows of the deck’s promenade were lined two deep with men watching the American shoreline in the night light. Strange stopped and watched them a long moment, still clenching and unclenching his bad hand, then walked on down the passageway.
Of all the woundings Strange knew about, Prell’s was the best and the most enviable. The most warrior-like. The most soldierly, in any serious, valuable way. Leading his squad on a long jungle patrol he had not volunteered them for (Prell never volunteered his men for anything), and still a half a mile inside Jap territory on the way back, Prell had stumbled onto a troop concentration in a valley. The Japanese were in the middle of preparing an unsuspected attack, and with them was General Sasaki.
Sasaki was the Jap New Georgia commander, and his picture had been circulated around the Division with a bounty placed on him. So Prell had sent his squad back along the trail and crawled in to try and get a shot at him. He hadn’t. They had been discovered, and in the firefight and the run out he had been hit, and had lost two of his men killed and two others wounded. Bleeding badly and unable to walk at all, he nevertheless had organized the escape from the Jap search parties and the walk back, and had brought all fourteen men out including the two dead. He had delivered the intelligence report about the attack himself, before passing out.
It was for this patrol that the Division commander was reputedly recommending him for the Congressional Medal. And it was this patrol that Winch was down on him for.
Compared to that, Strange felt his own wounding had been little more than a dirty cosmic joke.
His had happened back on Guadalcanal. Way back. In January. It was just at the time when the company had successfully terminated its first big combat and first big attack against the Japs. Strange and a couple of his cook force had walked up with a resupply to visit the company. They were bivouacked on top of a hill they had taken two days before. Some staff colonel had named it the Sea Horse. They sat around on the slope talking, the guys filling Strange and his cooks in on all that had happened, and Strange had noticed how they were all somehow changed. He did not know exactly how they were changed. They just were different. Then suddenly there was the soft, almost soundless shu-shu-shu of mortars coming in, and someone squawked, and everyone hit the dirt. Strange threw himself flat. There was a yell from somewhere, during the explosions. When he sat back up, he noticed the palm of his hand was burning hot. A sharp, hot, toothy little piece of fragment half the size of your little fingernail had hit him in his palm between the knuckles of his middle fingers but hadn’t come out the other side. There it was, sticking in his palm, just above the center. While the wounded man who had yelled was being taken care of, Strange started showing h
is hand around. He had been briefly terrified, his heart somewhere up between his ears, but when he found himself to be all right, and the man who was wounded was found to be okay, neither maimed nor killed, he began to laugh. And soon they were all laughing. It was a great joke, his hand. Mother Strange had come up to visit the company and had got himself a Purple Heart. There was no blood on his hand. The hot metal apparently had itself cauterized the wound. Carefully they pulled the piece of fragment out, and Strange put it in his pocket. No blood followed it out. There was only this longitudinal little blue slit. Like a miniature pussy, someone said. They took him around to the command post, everybody laughing, and showed it to the company commander to make sure of the Purple Heart and then a medic put a Band-Aid on it. A little later, still laughing, he and his two cooks left and walked back with another, returning resupply.
Later on, though, he hadn’t laughed. When he thought about it, it was with a sense of irritated anger. What he remembered was the sense of fear, and the momentary feeling of total helplessness. He hadn’t liked either worth a damn.
Along the ship’s promenade, Strange spotted a window that was empty and went over and stood and watched the American coastline himself for a while.
It was summer here back home, mid-August, and the glass was open. He pulled up the sleeves of his bathrobe and leaned on the glass and let the light breeze of passage along the glass riffle the hairs on his forearms.
It was enough to bring the fear back to him, just for him to think that if it had been a little harder, it would have gone right on through his hand; and if it had hit hard enough to do that, and had hit him in the head, he would be dead. And none of it meant a damn thing. Not to anyone but Johnny Stranger. It just hadn’t happened to hit him in a vital spot, and that was all it meant. It was at that point that the irritated anger always rose up on him.
Each time he clenched and unclenched the hand it hurt him and inside his head he could hear it grate. The doc had said there was still a tiny piece of metal in it. And that a tendon was rolling over the piece of metal, or over a bone growth. But getting the metal out was the least of it. The trauma and continued use had caused a degenerative arthritis to set in in the hand, in the six months since he got it.
Studying the black, hilly shore, Strange drew a deep breath of the sea air, and then blew it back out into the sea airspace, through which the ship was again moving steadily now, across the flat uninhabited wastes of moving salt water. Strange was not at all averse to being home.
In the clear, calm, moonless night the shore and the sea seemed to be illumined by a lemon-pink night light that did not come from anywhere. Behind both the mountains made a black presence, visible only in silhouette, by the stars they blocked. Once, the lights of a city made a dull glow on the shore. And Strange thought of all the blackouts he had seen, as far south as New Caledonia.
After six months, he had let one of his cooks talk him into going on sick call with his hand. They had immediately clapped him in the hospital for evacuation, and had flown him out. In Efate they had said they would not even attempt to operate on it there. So they would have to send him home. The doc there said there were only a few men in the States who could do the operations. He would need more than one. It would be a long painful process, but he ought to have an 80 to 90 percent recovery, when it was finished. The whole thing was the result of his not having come in with it when it first occurred. He should have reported it when it happened. The doc went on to say that, fortunately, the Army would still do all this for him. And the government would pay for it all. But if he had been an industrial worker, his negligence would have cost him the insurance. Strange could not tell him he had been ashamed to report it, embarrassed to go to the hospital, where so many badly mangled men were lying stretched out moaning and would see him. He had only nodded, repeatedly, and said nothing.
Nor could he claim to anybody, even to himself, that he was miserable and unhappy when he heard all this terrible news about his hand.
Way back on the Canal, in the very beginning, Strange had decided early that he was not going to get his ass shot off unless it was absolutely necessary.
When the company went up into its first combat on Guadalcanal’s Hill 52, everybody who could had grabbed his rifle and wanted to go along. Cooks and bakers, supplyroom men, drivers, clerks, and Strange and his kitchen force. Everybody wanted to be in combat. Two days of it was enough for Strange. Nobody but a nut would get himself shot at when he didn’t have to. And when Strange left and went back down, most of his cooks and the supplyroom men went with him. The rest came down the next day. They were under no orders to stay up there. Their orders were to stay back in the rear and guard the company baggage and try to get hot food up to the men, and Strange saw to it that they did just that. They didn’t have much luck with the hot food part. But they did keep the company’s “A” and “B” bags from being rifled by a new outfit who had just arrived. And when the battalion moved up to New Georgia for the invasion, Strange had held himself to the same principle. He would follow his orders, and follow them to the letter. But no more. And he would see that everybody under him did the same. If their orders required them to go on up on the line in the New Georgia jungle, they would go. But not unless.
You could always get yourself knocked off in one of the air raids that came over every day. Without going up on the line to the company. But the percentages were minuscule, compared to what could happen to you up there with the company.
And Strange, like most intelligent men trained in the various logistics disciplines, had realized right away that the wins and losses of this war were going to be governed by industrial percentages and numerical averages, not by acts of individual heroism. And that included survival.
And yet he stayed. When at any moment he could have turned himself in with his bad hand and been evacuated, he had stayed. And even now he felt terrible about leaving. Strange was perceptive enough to understand the paradox of that.
At the window, Strange straightened up from watching the night sea and the dark coastline, and looked around. Most of the men were beginning to drift away, bored as the newness wore off of watching the homeland coast. He leaned down on his elbows again.
His move with Winch from Fort Kam to Schofield back there in Wahoo, and his subsequent marriage, had changed more than Strange’s life. It had changed his ambitions. Strange spit out the window into the sea’s airspace, and watched the breeze grab it. Or at least it had changed Linda Sue’s ambitions. As Linda liked to say, she wasn’t always going to be married to an Army staff/sgt. The two thousand dollars savings they had collected was going to be stashed away until after the war and then it was going to go into a restaurant and Strange, who up until two years before had always considered himself a thirty-year man in the Army, was going to become a restaurateur.
Linda had bought a car with the first of the money and taken a job downtown in Honolulu as cashier in a big restaurant, and started taking courses in restaurant management. As much of their joint savings had come from her salary as from Strange’s pay. By the end of the fall of 1941 Strange was calculating that one more three-year hitch would do it for them. They’d be able to leave the Army, and give Linda Sue her restaurant.
Then the Japs had arrived in December, with their sneak attack. But the two thousand bucks was safe at home with Linda. And Linda was working and adding to it. She was also getting the biggest pay allotment Strange was allowed to send her, to add to the rest.
Strange had never told anybody in the company about the restaurant. Something about leaving the Army, and particularly about leaving the company, made him too uncomfortable. A couple of times he almost had told Winch. But Winch’s reaction to the earlier news that he was getting married stopped him. Winch had hooted and howled and pranced around the orderly room, and roared with laughter and sneered at him with insulting contempt. It was the nearest he ever came to an open falling out with Winch.
He knew of course that Winch was marri
ed and had a wife somewhere. Or was divorced. Although apparently nobody else knew it. But back at Fort Riley Strange had seen the tall, long-necked, broad-hipped woman, Winch’s wife, walking around the post. And the fact that Winch had not brought her to Wahoo with him indicated that something had happened to them. So once again he had given Winch the benefit of the doubt and made allowances for him.
Strange was aware that his reluctance to mention the restaurant was unusual. That the idea of quitting the Army for good embarrassed him and left him feeling uncomfortable. Sighing, he stood up straight again from the open window-port, his hand hurting. Most of the coast watchers were gone now. The ship was moving farther out from shore, and soon even the high mountains behind the coast would be unnoticeable.
The constant clenching and unclenching of his hand had caused a dull, deep ache in his palm, which had spread all across the hand, then up into his wrist and on up through the wrist into his forearm. He would have to ask the medic for a pill to sleep tonight.
In six months he could be out of the Army, if he played his cards right. This war was going to last a lot longer than that. Six months in the hospital, an operation or two, wasn’t so very long. With his mustering-out pay, plus all his back pay and allowances, plus all the money Linda had been making working in the defense plants around Cincinnati, they could open the restaurant right there as soon as he got discharged. And get in on the wartime boom with it.
But the thought depressed him. At the same time that it made him both happy and glad, it depressed him.
And it hurt him physically, in his gut, to see Prell all trussed up that way. Prell was one of the people who should never be laid up like that. And yet Prell was one of the ones who would always get hurt the worst, and the most often, in his life. He was too young to know that, yet. Or maybe he was just learning it, now.
How old was Prell? Twenty-three or -four. Strange was twenty-seven.
Getting hit wasn’t so bad. As long as you didn’t get killed. It only took a second, and you didn’t really feel anything. It was all that time afterward, that it took you to get over it, that really did you in.
