Whistle

by James Jones

  Almost before the music ended, as the place was beginning to clear out, the biggest and apparently highest ranking of the three w/os appeared at his table.

  “I think you had better learn to stand up for the national anthem, soldier,” he said.

  Landers glanced up at him, and then down. The red tickle was beginning to burn in him. “Fuck off, bud,” he said.

  “Okay. I want your name, rank, and organization,” the w/o said, “and that’s an order, soldier.” He pulled out a pencil and notebook.

  Inside, Landers was beginning to chortle. Down deep underneath, the red ocean breaker was swelling and growing in his ears. This time, he looked up and didn’t drop his gaze. “How would you like my fist in your face, instead?”

  Without a word, the young pilot put away his notebook, turned on his heel, went back to his table, and sat down. He began to argue with his buddies. One was on his side, and one apparently wasn’t. Landers sat and grinned at them.

  By this time their two tables were the only two still with occupants. At the entry, the two elevators were swiftly siphoning off the crowd. Behind Landers, the civilian headwaiter was hovering nervously. “Who are them bums?” he asked. He had a New Yorkese accent.

  “Out-of-towners,” Landers said, “flying through. College boys from the Ferry Command. Don’t worry.” He paid his bill and left the headwaiter his big tip with a wink. He got almost as far as the elevators, before he was hailed by the same w/o.

  “Hey, soldier. I want that organization of yours. And your name.”

  The three of them were coming toward Landers, all in a resolute row. The biggest one had won the debate apparently.

  Landers pushed the elevator button, and then stood, quietly watching them. His mind was totally blank, totally empty. When they were almost at punching range, he drove himself at them like a catapult. Some belated instinct told him to go for the reluctant one first.

  From that point on, things happened very fast, though they seemed to be in slow motion. They weren’t expecting a rush and scattered, away from him. A mistake. He hit the reluctant one, who went down, and stayed down. As Landers’d hoped. He swung around, and the big one was rushing him. Landers stepped to meet him, and hit him with everything he had, a left that knocked him sideways back against the elevator doors.

  But just as the w/o touched them, his arms flung wide to catch himself, the elevator Landers had summoned arrived, and the doors opened. The w/o stumbled back across the elevator interior, his feet working fast, a look of surprise on his face, and hit the back wall of the elevator with a crash, and started to go down.

  Landers was almost as surprised as he was. He stepped after him, hoisted him by his shirt, hit him hard on the jaw, and saw his eyes glaze. He turned, pushed the ground-floor button, and stepped back out before the doors closed.

  The third one was rushing him, but looking reluctant now that he was alone. Landers hit him once, twice, three times, four, driving him back across the entry and following him, until he went down, lolling against some antique loveseat.

  Landers’ drive was so hard it carried Landers clear on past him. The red roar was in his ears, and inside him the huge, red ocean breaker was topping over. He could hear his own voice shouting something or other.

  Then he saw the elevator arrow was rising again and went past the third one who was struggling to get up, kicking him carefully in the side of the head as he passed, and met the elevator as the doors opened. He hit the biggest w/o as he came out, followed, and hit him twice more, then pushed the ground-floor button again, and stepped out.

  Everything was silence. The one elevator was still going down. Landers pushed the second elevator button, stepped into the empty elevator when it arrived, got off at the eighth floor, and went back to the suite. He was limping from where he had hurt his bad ankle again, one side of his jaw was sore, and the knuckles of both hands were barked. But the MPs would never find him. He did not tell anybody in the suite what had happened, he said to Strange. And he was sorry that it was over.

  Strange had been moved from the semiprivate room back out to the open ward, by this time. Landers told him this particular tale on the fifth day after the operation. Strange sat on his bunk, flexing his weak fingers inside their new plaster cast, and watched Landers’ calm, matter-of-fact face, wondering what was going on in Landers’ head while he told his fight tales so matter-of-factly.

  Strange was having trouble knowing what was going on in his own head. Certainly, one part of him wished hungrily that he had been there, and in it. Another part of him devoutly was glad he had not had the chance.

  Strange did not know what was happening to himself, either. Any more than he knew what was happening to Landers. Strange only knew he no longer had his old self-control. That frightened him a little. He was unable to judge, for either of them. And that made him a little scared.

  Landers did not know it, but Strange had had another version of the fight with the three pilots. Two of the old-company men had slipped away from the suite and gone upstairs to look for Landers, to make sure he was all right. Everybody was a little worried about him, so with the benediction of everyone Corello and Trynor had gone after him. They happened to be standing against the back wall with the headwaiter when it started. Landers had not seen them. It was Trynor who told Strange since, naturally, Corello never told anybody about anything, if he could help it.

  “I never seen nothing like it,” Trynor said, with a kind of unwilling, irate protest. “I don’t think nobody could of stopped him. Five men, seven men couldn’t of whipped him. It was like some unbeatable power or force in him. When he went at them, them three fellows didn’t know what hit them. It was like they had grabbed a damn tiger by his tail.”

  Trynor cleared his throat. “Do you think maybe he’s losing his mind, Sarge?”

  Strange did not answer. He did not trust himself to. He had felt the same power or force in himself.

  Trynor held up his hand. “I’m not sayin’ he wasn’t right. He was. But it was the way he went about it. I know all of us got some of that feeling in us,” he said, in his lumbering way. “But not like that.” Suddenly Trynor laughed, reluctantly. “My God, them fellows scattered like a covey of birds.”

  “I don’t know,” Strange had said to Trynor. “Anyway, as long as he was right,” he wound up, inconclusively.

  And sitting with Landers, Strange felt just as inconclusive. Strange did not know if he was equal to bringing it up, and going into it. In depth. Smart, Landers was. He knew Landers was smart. But he did not know if Landers had his, Strange’s, powers of analysis.

  “Anyway, Marion,” Strange said, “I’ll be out of here in a couple of days now. We’ll go in together. You’ve done a wonderful job of taking care of things.” It was the first time Strange had ever called him by his first name.

  Landers grinned at him. “We’ll have to find old Frances Highsmith.” He shrugged. “I don’t have any idea where she could be. But for the two days I’ll keep looking.”

  “Yes,” Strange said. “Well, I guess that don’t matter so much,” he said. “As long as she’s all right.”

  Of course, he was lying. It did matter. Strange did not know if Landers knew he was lying. But he did not want Landers to know, or want to admit to Landers, that Frances Highsmith and the idea of going down on her had become an obsessive preoccupation with him. To an unreasonable degree.

  In the end it was Strange himself who found her, finally. Landers had not turned up any signs of her. The day Strange went back into town, the two of them together hunted but did not turn her up either. Frances Highsmith had disappeared off the face of the earth as far as the Peabody and Claridge hotels were concerned. For four more days Strange hunted for her, half-heartedly, by himself. The most of his hunting was confined to the night hours. During the day he assumed she was working. Somewhere. Wherever it was she worked. It was on the fifth day, the night of the fifth day, that he found her.

  Strange had left the
suite and its nonstop party, then after a quick look in the bar had left the hotel, and walked the two blocks up Union to Main St. He was looking for her, and he was not looking for her. He had about given up. He no longer expected to find her. But the suite bored him. Landers had given him a quick wink as he left.

  At the corner of Main, he turned vaguely by the big Walgreen’s to walk the five blocks to the Claridge. But not because of Frances. There was a melancholy hunger in him that was palpable, in the night air. There was nothing of love in the melancholy. No love of a lost Linda Sue, no love for a misplaced Frances Highsmith. The hunger was so general, so diffuse, so a love for all females, all women, that it was essentially without object. It was a hunger for unknown, forbidden, sexual adventure.

  The fall air was chill against his summer uniform. He crossed the street to look in the unlighted shop windows. Strange felt exactly as he used to feel as a boy when he got all dolled up and went into Houston to hit the whorehouses.

  The shop windows on the other side, the Claridge’s side, were loaded with stuff for women. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff. For pretty women, pretty girls.

  Who the hell could afford to buy it all? Businessmen. Only the businessmen, who had stayed home, and were making fortunes off the good old war.

  Strange walked on along, looking in the women’s shops’ windows. He had not been without women the past four nights. Each night he had had at least one, out of the Peabody covey. But it hadn’t worked. He had performed well enough, but there was no excitement. The irony was that now there was the excitement, but no girl.

  One of the first things he had found out from them was that not all the girls were sexually as free as Frances, and her pal Annie Waterfield. They didn’t go down on you and they didn’t expect you, didn’t want you, to go down on them. Strange would even have gone for Annie Waterfield this time, but Annie had gone off with some new officer from the Navy flyers’ suite. For an unspecified period. Annie had become somebody else’s girl for the moment. For this week.

  Strange ambled on along. So here he was, Frances-less, and Annie-less. His head had just finished the thought about Annie when his eye caught a figure. It had detached itself from among the figures on the opposite sidewalk and moved out into the street to cross it diagonally, going away from him.

  His eye recognized it as Frances before he himself did. Automatically, he filled his lungs and bellowed. “Hey! Frances!”

  The excitement in him swelled. Strange couldn’t believe his luck. Inside his belly, something got all slippery and greasy and seemed to slide around with grease on it. A thickness filled his throat until it altered the sound of his voice.

  The figure had stopped and was looking at him. It was Frances. But how he had recognized her he didn’t know.

  She was dressed presentably enough, in a light dress with a light fall coat. But there was something furtive and scuttling, something crablike, about the way she moved and stood. No longer was there the free-swinging stride and breast-jutting posture. She was hunched down inside her coat as if trying to hide.

  Strange’s heart gave a huge, twinging lurch. He hoped there was nothing wrong with her face, to have caused the change in her. He gulped air. Jesus, that would be terrible.

  His eyes moved away sideways to go over the façade of the low-life bar she apparently had just come out of. It was one they had not even bothered to look in for her.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said in a low voice when he got close to her. She seemed to straighten up a little. “How are you?”

  There was nothing wrong with her face structurally, he saw. And a great, silent whoosh of relief sprouted in him. The broken nose had healed perfectly, not twisted, no flattened bridge, no ugly lump.

  Only in the very deepest bottoms of her eyes, when he was close, was there any indication of change in her. Down there, way down, something slippery seemed to move and change shape, and refuse to let him come close to it or put a finger on it.

  “The important thing is how are you?” Strange said. He was smiling hard.

  “I’m fine,” she said. But there was no give in her, no letting down.

  “I’ve worried like hell about you,” Strange said, in his noticeably choked-up voice.

  “You have?” A sudden strange, wise, greedy grin cracked her face from side to side. “Well, I’m fine. I’m in great shape. I don’t think I could be better.”

  “I’ve been looking for you.” When he thought of why, his throat got choked up more. It sounded in his voice. And the grin on her face seemed to get wider and greedier. She stared straight at him, and the slippery thing in her eyes moved. She didn’t answer. “Why didn’t you ever come back to the hotel? To the suite?” Strange asked.

  The grin did not go away, but her words were hard and cold as iron. “I don’t ever want to go back to that place again.”

  “Oh, come on,” Strange said. “Why not?”

  Her eyes looked away from him, then her face turned away. She was no longer smiling. “Everybody knows everything about what happened.”

  “No, they don’t. Landers and I haven’t told anybody. And we swore Trynor to secrecy. He hasn’t told anybody. None of us have.”

  “Well, they know about your having chosen Annie over me.” She seemed to slump again, into that crablike position, half turned away. Ready to scuttle.

  “Oh, come on, now,” Strange said, uneasily. “You girls have never been that way about anybody else. You’ve never cared who had who first.”

  “I don’t ever want to go back there,” Frances said, anyway.

  “Fine. Then don’t.” Too angry. Strange could see himself blowing the whole thing sky high. Nothing was coming out right, and he didn’t know what to say to make the proper effect. He tried again. “I don’t like it much any more myself. That’s why I’m out here. That’s why I left it.”

  She did not respond.

  “Come on over to the Claridge with me and have a drink and let’s talk about it,” he said.

  She did not answer. Neither yes nor no.

  Flattery, damn it. Always remember flattery, Strange belabored himself. Flattery always works with women. Always. When nothing else will. Simple flattery. Even when they know it.

  “That’s a lovely outfit you’ve got on,” Strange said. “Listen. I’ve been going nuts, looking for you. I’ve been looking for you for a whole week. Come on. Have a drink?”

  She did not answer that. “What were you doing the other week?” she said.

  Strange suddenly felt dumb, and empty. “What other week?”

  “The first week,” she said.

  Strange felt reprieved. He held up his cast. “I was getting my hand operated. The day after the—The day after I last saw you, they pulled me in and did my hand again. I’ve been in the hospital. I was laid up for a week. They wouldn’t let me out.

  “But I had Landers looking for you.”

  “He never found me,” Frances said.

  Somehow, without having answered him, without having ever said either yes or no to his offer of a drink, she now had him by the arm, and they were moving. Toward the Claridge. It was the right direction.

  “You’re the most attractive girl I’ve seen,” Strange said, in a husky whisper. “You’re the most attractive girl I’ve met since I’ve been here.”

  “You want to go down on me,” Frances said.

  There was an audible pause. “Yes,” Strange whispered in a choked-up voice. It seemed to him the answer had been torn out of him.

  “All right,” Frances said briskly.

  Against him Strange felt her pace quicken in a brusque, purposeful way. That oddly wise, greedy smile was back on her face. Everything seemed to have gone into a pink haze of unsubstantiality in front of his eyes, as if his blood pressure suddenly had risen alarmingly, and motion took on a slowed, languid quality that made everything dreamlike and unreal. They hurried slowly toward the Claridge.

  “I knew you would,” Fr
ances said with her greedy smile, holding on to the arm tightly. “I knew you’d want to, eventually.”

  The sense of dreamy unreality stayed with Strange through all the preliminaries. Luckily, there were rooms available at the Claridge. He did not have to call Jack Alexander upstairs at the poker game. Luckily, the liquor store had not quite closed. He was able to get them a bottle. In the room, Frances did not even wait to get her stomach a drink, before she began taking off her clothes.

  She did not have a bad little figure. Strange made drinks of bourbon and ice and a little water, and noted as he did that she was not wearing either a brassiere or panties. Well, she didn’t need a bra. And maybe she didn’t need the pants. Vague thoughts of the low-down bar he was sure she had just come out of tipped dreamily through his mind, and whether she had been with somebody already tonight. He thought briefly about the clap, and syph. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He didn’t give a damn. He could feel his heart beating slower, and slower, and slower in his ears.

  He handed her the drink and, nude, she drank it off in one long pull and put the empty glass down and sat down in an armchair. She pulled her legs up, opening herself, and put her heels on the chair edge against her buttocks, experimentally, and then put her legs down and crossed them.

  Strange was almost frantically getting out of his own clothes. The tie, the shirt, the T-shirt, the shoes, the pants, the underpants, the sox. It seemed an endless process.

  It occurred to Strange, as he toiled, that nude photos and paintings of women did not matter and did not really expose women, and that secretly women knew this. A woman was not really exposed until she opened herself, as Annie—as Frances, had just done. But men did not know this about women and women were never going to let out the secret.