Whistle

by James Jones

  “Yes there was. My friend just went out to the pisser.” Still politely. But the red fire ball had already exploded.

  “Didn’t you hear him?” the second chief, who was younger and in blues, said contemptuously. “If it was an empty seat, it was free.”

  “Yeah. You want it, take it,” the old chief said, and grinned down the table at his mob.

  “Okay. I will,” Landers said evenly. The rage in him was threatening to overflow.

  But he held it in. And waited. He waited, until he saw Strange come in through the outside door. A full minute, or minute and a half. Strange of course marked them right away. When he saw Strange had seen them, he signaled him with his eyebrows. Meanwhile, the Navy personnel all just stood or sat, however they had been before, looking at him, waiting too. Waiting for him.

  “Well?” the younger chief said, smiling with contempt. “You going to take it?”

  They really don’t know, Landers thought. Who we are. While Strange came on, he studied them. The old chief in white on his left was still seated. The younger chief was on his right, standing. Landers was between them. Beyond the younger chief was the new man, his hand still on the stolen chair. The others were all seated.

  Behind him Landers heard Strange say softly, “Go ahead. Bust him.”

  He swung with his right hand first at the old chief. It went in accurately alongside the nose just under the right eye, cutting deep. Without bothering to look at the effect, he swung with his left at the chief in blues, rolling his body, like a whip, a punch that was half hook, half uppercut. It caught the young chief two inches back from the point of his chin. Landers heard his teeth clap together. He went down.

  Landers swung his body to take care of the third man coming in, but Strange had already accounted for him. Swinging his good, left hand in a hook to the belly that swung the moving man back toward himself, Strange clapped him alongside the head and jaw with the plaster plate bound to the open palm of his right hand. The third man went down.

  Meanwhile, Landers’ second chief was coming back up, valiantly but slowly. Landers hit him with both hands, hook and short rights, in the belly and in the face. One, two; one, two; one two three four. Faster than the eye could count. And as he landed each punch Landers shouted insanely.

  “Pay!” he yelled. “Pay! Pay, goddam you! Pay, pay, pay!”

  The chief in blues sagged down.

  Beyond him Strange grabbed a water pitcher by its handle from a table, ready to crack it in half on a table edge and turn it into a weapon. His right hand was held ready to slap again. “Just come on,” he warned in a hiss, as insanely. “Just come on.”

  The four seated Navy men looked up at the two insane men, astonishment spread over their faces. None was inclined to get up, and wisely they sat still. It had happened with murderous speed and a blinding violence.

  Behind Landers a tall, kindly-looking soldier got awkwardly to his feet, and put one arm half around Landers. Landers spun, ready to hit again.

  “No, no. Don’t swing. Don’t swing,” the kindly-looking soldier said. He looked worried. “Don’t swing. You guys better get out of here. Right now. The MPs will be here in seconds. I’ve seen them.”

  Landers swung back to the table. He had one satisfying look at the old chief sprawled against the wall, his chair overturned, bright blood red from below his eye down over the dress whites. “Pay!” he screamed at all of them. “Pay, you cocksuckers! Goddam you, pay!”

  Strange had heard the kindly-looking soldier, too, and carefully put his uncracked water pitcher back on its table. He started backing toward the door, his good hand gripping Landers’ arm and pulling him.

  “You girls go on, you leave,” he called to the table. “Meet us upstairs.”

  Landers followed him. “Don’t forget my cane,” he called, “don’t forget my cane.”

  At the door a huge MP already blocked the way, his hand on his black holster, and stopped them. He looked in at the now-quiet bar, inspecting the carnage, then looked at the two of them.

  “God damn,” he said wearily. “You guys. All right, go on. Git. Out that way.” He pointed on down the corridor, away from the lobby. “It goes to the street. Move it, damn it.”

  “We got a room in the hotel,” Strange said breathlessly. “A suite, we got.”

  “Then go around the block, and come back the other way,” the MP said. “My partner’ll be here in a minute, damn it. He aint as sympathetic.”

  Strange was already moving, pulling along with his good hand Landers who was limping without his cane, Strange breathlessly already beginning to laugh. Landers was not laughing.

  “Appreciate it,” Strange called.

  “Go fuck,” the MP called back, and stepped inside.

  “Those dirty fuckers,” Landers was muttering, “those dirty fuckers.”

  “Come on,” Strange said, laughing. “We got to move it.”

  “Let them see something,” Landers muttered. “Let them see something.”

  It was difficult, going clear around the block with Landers limping so badly. He had pulled or turned something in his ankle, and the pain was bothering him. So Strange led them through an alley beyond the hotel, which went around it and came back out on Union.

  Thus as they slipped in through the revolving door and across the lobby, they were able to see the MPs and some medics leading the battered Navy group out from the bar. The old chief in his bloody dress whites was on a stretcher, out.

  “You don’t think I really hurt him, do you?” Landers whispered anxiously in the crowded elevator.

  “No,” Strange said. “He was just knocked out.” Strange was still laughing, and still breathless. Suddenly his eyes glinted meanly. “And what if you did?”

  “He was the one who took the chair,” Landers whispered. “Just like that. Without so much as a by your leave. But I wouldn’t want to hurt him.”

  Fortunately Strange had already given Annie a key and the girls were in the suite waiting. And immediately there were all the breathless, laughing recapitulations of battle. Everybody had a viewpoint and story of his own to expound.

  Landers came out as the unquestioned hero, but Landers was not taking part. He sat off by himself quietly, nursing his ankle, ministered to by Mary Lou who brought him drinks. He kept popping his knuckles and said nothing. “Let them learn something,” he would mutter to no one every so often, “let them learn something.” The knuckles of his right hand had been seriously barked but he would not let anybody doctor them. “You must have hit teeth somewhere,” Strange said happily.

  Very shortly after, the four other old-company men and their girls came back in, and the stories had to be told again.

  “I tell you,” Annie Waterfield said, “I never saw anything like it. It was all so fast. After you left, that tall soldier? Who warned you against the MPs? He went over to them where they were pickin’ up that poor chief petty officer in blues, and tryin’ to bring the old one to, slappin’ his face, and he told them who you all were.”

  “What do you mean, told them who we were?” Strange said. “He didn’t know us.”

  “He figured it out because of Marion’s cane and your hand plaster. You don’t want to mess with them, he told those sailors. Those are overseas men from the hospital, who’ve been wounded. Don’t ever fuck with them. They’re all crazy. That’s exactly what he said. Someone asked him how he knew, and he made this awful grin and said, ‘Because I’m one of them.’ Then he pulled up his pants leg, and showed them his artificial leg.

  “It was just awful. Terrible.”

  “Maybe he’s seen us around the hospital,” Strange said. “But I’ve never seen him. Have you?” he asked Landers.

  Landers only shook his head. “No.”

  “What did you mean?” Annie Waterfield asked him, “when you kept hollerin’ Pay?”

  “Hollering Pay?” Landers said. “Pay?”

  “Yes. Every time you hit somebody you kept hollerin’ Pay! Every time, Pay!
‘Pay, you sons of bitches! Pay, pay, pay!’ ”

  “I don’t know,” Landers said hollowly. “I don’t remember saying that. I don’t know what I meant.” He accepted another drink from Mary Lou.

  But he thought he did know. It was easy to say it was because of the booze they had put away. That they were drunk. But Landers knew there was something more. Something inside him. Aching to get out. There was something in him aching to get out, but in a way that only a serious fight or series of serious fights would let it get out. Anguish. Love. And hate. And a kind of fragile, shortlived happiness. Which had to be short-lived, if he was going out of this fucking hospital and back into the fucking war. It had just built up in him.

  There was no way on earth to explain it to anybody, though. Not without sounding shitty. There was no way to say it.

  It had been building up in him ever since that episode on the train with the Air Force sergeant, on his trip home. It was in his fight with his father over the medals. In that time he had tried to talk to Carol Firebaugh and failed so abominably. It had grown and built in him at an even quicker pace, since his awful boo-boo he had made with Prell.

  Landers thought that, probably, it had been building in him even longer. Growing. Ever since he was sitting on that damned evil hilltop in New Georgia, with all those other weeping men with the white streaks down their dirty faces, watching the men below in the valley whanging and beating and shooting and killing each other, with such stern, disruptive, concentrated effort.

  Anguish. Love. And hate. And happiness. The anguish was for himself. And every poor slob like him, who had ever suffered fear, and terror, and injury at the hands of other men. The love, he didn’t know who the love was for. For himself and everybody. For all the sad members of this flawed, misbegotten, miscreated race of valuable creatures, which was trying and failing with such ruptured effort to haul itself up out of the mud and dross and drouth of its crippled heritage. And the hate, implacable, unyielding, was for himself and every other who had ever, in the name of whatever good, maimed or injured or killed another man. The happiness? The happiness was the least, and best, and most important, because the most ironic. The happiness was from those few moments in the fight, when the bars were down, when the weight of responsibility lifted, and he and every man could go in, and destroy and be destroyed, without fear of consequences, with no thought of debt. In short, do all the things they shouldn’t and couldn’t want to do, or want others to do, when they were responsible.

  What a melange. All tossed up in the air and churned around until one element was indistinguishable from another, and the steam from the whole boiling stew seethed and billowed until its pressure forced a safety crack in even the strongest self-control.

  Landers suspected something like that was pushing Strange on, too, from the thin explosive laugh he had heard behind him, as Strange had called in a soft but ringing voice, “Go ahead. Bust him.”

  It was somewhat the feeling that if all of these awful things had been done to so many of them, somebody was going to have to pay, pay, pay, including himself, themselves. What better way was there for all to pay, pay than in a fight, in which he himself, they themselves, were taking lumps and damage, and getting smashed around, too.

  It didn’t make any sense. None whatsoever. That was why you couldn’t tell it to anybody. You couldn’t tell that, even to Strange. Landers was about resigned to never being able to tell it.

  Did it mean the two of them had a future of such episodes to look forward to? Landers knew somewhere inside of him that he hadn’t had enough of it, even yet. And he didn’t think Johnny Stranger had, either. It seemed to promise ill for any future.

  When everything in the suite had quieted down, though he had to wait quite a long time, he took Mary Lou (Salgraves, was it?) and hobbled to bed and locked the door and fucked her and made love to her until her tongue was hanging out and even Mary Lou didn’t want any more. He was pretty sure Johnny Stranger was doing the same thing on the other side of the suite, behind the other locked door.

  That great sage who had said so wittily that a man didn’t want sex after he had had a fight, didn’t know what he was talking about.

  On the way home in the cab at five in the morning, drunk like the others and riding with all four of them, Landers felt Strange lean against his shoulder and put his mouth against his ear.

  “She wanted it, too.” Strange coughed a drunken hiccup.

  “I didn’t do it,” Strange whispered, drunkenly, so the other drunks couldn’t hear. “I didn’t do it. I almost did. But I just couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.”

  CHAPTER 20

  JOHNNY STRANGER HAD made up his mind to go back to town the next day. Strange had decided that point before he left the hotel.

  He had to get this thing settled with Frances Highsmith.

  In the taxi, after he had drunkenly whispered his predicament to Landers, he drunkenly roared his intention to the other old-company men.

  “Everybody’s invited. Anybody who’s free and wants to come, is welcome. On any day. If there are days I can’t be there, somebody will have a key to the suite. Enough’s been paid for two weeks, and it might as well be used. After two weeks, we’ll see. But I see no reason why not keep it. As long as any of us are here. Trynor will go ahead in tomorrow and open up. Trynor’s got a morning pass.”

  Trynor was an old-company pfc, a short blocky muscular man from Springfield, Illinois, who was riding in the front seat.

  It was a pretty long statement to declare at a full roar. Strange did it by chunks, waiting to breathe and continue, whenever he was interrupted by the cat calls, Yankee screams, and Rebel yells that kept issuing from here and there in the cab. When he finished, there was a concerted shout of all three types of yell by everyone.

  They were all six riding back together in the same taxi. Four were in the back seat, two were with the driver in front. They had bought three bootleg pints off the driver, who didn’t carry fifths, and were plying the laughing driver with drink, as well as plying themselves. Arms were thrust out of the open windows waving the illicit bottles, and the calls and Rebel yells followed them down the boulevard like a fading memory. The yells were meant to wake the sleeping civilians whose peace and rest they had all fought so hard for, and paid out so much blood to preserve.

  Strange, drunk, looking at them, and squeezed into the back seat beside Landers, felt a choky sensation in his throat, which he swallowed and carefully put down.

  Frances Highsmith ought to see this. See and understand it.

  It was entirely possible Strange’s chief surgeon Col Curran would not allow Strange to go in, tomorrow. Strange had not tried to get in touch with him since returning from Cincinnati, and Curran had not joined the morning rounds group in person. So Strange had not really seen him. Even so, unless he had strict direct orders from Curran himself not to go, Strange meant to go and track down, find, get together with, and have this whole damned thing out with damned Frances Highsmith.

  It had been two days now since Strange had acquired his Peabody suite. It had been four more days that he had waited to get it. Add one more day, that it had taken him to get the check deposited in a bank, get organized, start spending money and writing checks, and it was a week since he had last seen Linda, or talked to her, in Cincinnati.

  The shock should be beginning to wear off by now. But Strange could not see that it had.

  He still was much better off when he was around lots of other people, for example. If the people were having a big drunken party, he was better off yet. If he himself was drunk too, as was usually the case, it was even better. And if he himself had a woman or choice of women to be drunk with at the drunken party among all the people, it was the best of all for him.

  But he had to get this other thing, with Frances Highsmith, settled.

  It was only when Strange was not with a woman, was sober, not at a party, and not around lots of people, that he brooded. But, then! Then, it could be a ver
itable fucking living hell. Brooding over Linda Sue. And her Air Force lt col. Who went down on her, and things like that. And came from Southampton or wherever the hell that place was on Long Island, New York.

  Since all this always happened to him when he was at the hospital, Strange had gotten to hate the hospital.

  When he checked in at his ward, it was nearly six A.M. All around on the dark ward were the quiet, breathing sounds of deep sleep.

  The sleepy night ward man, bent over his check-in roster under the shaded lamp on his desk, shook his head. “Jesus. I don’t see how you guys do it.”

  Strange could have told him, but didn’t. Strange felt a little fuzzy at morning rounds. And his face felt puffy. But as soon as he saw Curran wasn’t there, only Maj Hogan, he was more than ready to rush into a clean uniform and pick up his day pass and get the hell out of there.

  “You’re getting in later and later, Strange,” Hogan called irascibly. “Since you got back from Cincinnati this last time.”

  They both knew there was nothing Hogan could do about it. And anyway Strange had this thing with Frances Highsmith that was deviling him, haunting him.

  In the cab going back in he was alone. He didn’t like it, but there was nobody else waiting at the cab stand. And the thought of waiting around until someone he knew showed up was unbearable.

  He sat back and tried to enjoy the delicious November weather, but he couldn’t. Pleasant hot sunshine pouring down over everything, drenching the park woods and the trees and lawns. The trees turning their last shades of bronze and yellow and red. The grass still bright green in the expanse of park sward and the private lawns. How long was it going to keep up? Not a cloud in the long stretch of sunny Mississippi sky.

  It was no good. He could enjoy it mentally, but he could not enjoy it with his insides. He bought an illegal half pint from the driver, and began guzzling it, taking sips and hot pleasant gut-burning swallows of the raw whiskey. One of the things that rode up on the waves of alcohol fumes mounting his nasal passages was that he had liked the fight of last night. And that he would like another for tonight.