Whistle

by James Jones

  Carol. She was quite an interesting girl, Carol was. In her own right. And so now, sitting over the wheel, behind the sweep of the wipers in the rain, he was thinking. Exactly what he had hoped not to do,

  Was there ever a woman who did not always already have some man on the string, in her own right, that she was committed to? None. Or very damn few. They were just like men. The idea of being alone, really alone, terrified them. So they clung onto whatever man they had, until they found another that suited them better.

  So, the only real alternative to taking a woman away from some other man (who might not want her any more than she wanted him, until he found her being taken away) was the rebound. And she was rare. A woman who had broken up with someone, and was really free. For a short while. Usually the life-span of a rebound did not exceed three months, at the outside. By then she would have found a new one. Rebounding was all in the timing. You had to know, quickly, when not to waste your time. Winch had been quite a rebounder in his day, back when women really meant something to him.

  It was right after the first time he had gone down on Carol that she had first mentioned her boyfriend to him.

  They were both lying nude on the bed in the Claridge hotel room. He had not yet taken the little apartment. Carol was lying all sprawled out flat, arms and legs spread wide, staring at the ceiling. “Most men don’t like to do that,” she said faintly.

  Winch had to smile. “You mean, most American men. I suppose not. I like it. I like doing it, and I like giving pleasure.”

  She had such a magnificent young body. Young breasts, flat hips, prominent crotch bone mound. So unworn by living.

  “Why do you think they don’t like it?”

  “Oh,” Winch said lazily. “I suppose it’s our American religious training. American Christianity. Sex is all scrambled up in with our religion. Evil, dirty, filthy. Guilt. It shouldn’t be. It’s all very primitive. Medieval. But it’s all tied in with our puritanism.”

  “I never thought of it quite like that,” she said. He felt a certain pause of intensity in the air, before she spoke on. She was still staring at the ceiling. But stiffly now. “My boyfriend—up at school—doesn’t like it at all, and won’t do it,” Carol said.

  Instinctively Winch sensed he was expected to react to this. A test balloon. From where he lay on his elbow, looking over, looking down at her, he saw her eyes roll toward him once, then flick back to her close scrutiny of the ceiling. Her one cockeye seemed to waver around for a focus up there, on it.

  He smiled. “He won’t?” he said, easily. “He doesn’t?” He let a little pause develop. “Well, he’s very young yet.”

  “Yes he is!” Carol said vehemently. Her eye focus never left the ceiling. “Did you ever go to a whorehouse?”

  Winch had to laugh. “Me? Yes. Sure. A lot of times.”

  “He goes to a whorehouse a great deal.”

  Winch chewed on this a moment. He was, for no reason he could isolate, enjoying himself immensely. No jealousy, no anguish. No pain. “He probably tells you he goes a great deal more than he actually does,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “To show off.”

  “It’s the only way I can climax,” she said. “What you did. Unless I play with myself.”

  “In my experience, my vast experience,” Winch smiled, “very few women can come from simple fucking.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, then?”

  Winch shook his head. Climax. That must be one of her college words. He had noted that she never would say the word come. It had struck him, suddenly, that perhaps she might be lying to him about the boyfriend’s whorehouses. Could she be lying to him about the boyfriend, too, then?

  She wasn’t lying. “I like to do it that way, too,” she said. “Like it. Like to do it. But I’d never dare try it, with him. Never dare even suggest it.”

  “We can arrange that easy enough,” Winch grinned.

  “Do you mind if I talk to you about him? Tell you about him?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  He had learned a great deal about him. Then, and since then. He had been Carol’s boyfriend, off and on, since high school. He was the second boy she had ever slept with. The first was a secret. Still a secret, even now. She had pretended to be a virgin with the boyfriend. She thought he had believed her. She had quit him once in high school for a while. For an older boy, a college boy. Then she had gone back to him. She had gone to Western Reserve up north largely on the suggestion of the college boy, who did not go to Reserve, but who was studying to be an actor. The boyfriend had followed her. He had intended to go to Mississippi down at Oxford. But he had found out he could study business administration at Reserve. And he said he could not stand to be away from her. At Reserve, she had left him twice, after stormy quarrels, but had always come back to him.

  It had been hard for the boyfriend. The men of his family had always gone to Ole Miss. Once he decided to follow her, though, he had fought his family hard. But he was so insular. And so fixed. And stubborn. He was exactly like all the parts of Luxor she had wanted to get away from.

  At school both times she had left him she had had affairs with older persons. Once with a senior boy, when she was a sophomore. Once with an English instructor, a married man, when she was a junior. Both, of course, had been impossible situations. Untenable. Both times the boyfriend had accepted her back, without any questions. He had been a perfect gentleman. Half of her, or some fraction less than half, had wished he had not been.

  He always had wanted them to marry, as soon as they both graduated, when he came back home to go into business.

  She had never agreed. She had refused to become engaged officially.

  He was just so damned insular. When he was drunk, he was absolutely crude. That was when he talked about going to a whorehouse.

  Lying naked on the bed beside Winch that first night she talked about him, Carol had suddenly blushed, all the way down into her breasts.

  Once at a party, when he had gotten drunk and crude and jealous, and had passed out, in a fit of anger she had gone off with a lone dateless man, and had slept with him, outside, in the back seat of one of the cars. The boyfriend had never suspected.

  “I’ve never told that to anyone.”

  “It’s safe with me,” Winch smiled.

  “I don’t want to be a Southern belle,” Carol said. She paused a moment thoughtfully. “But I’m afraid I’m a Southern belle, anyway.”

  “You’re a beautiful Southern belle,” he said, emphasizing the descriptive adjective.

  She raised her head off the sheet and looked appreciatively down along her nudeness, blushing again. “Not like in any of the War of the Rebellion lithographs, I’m not,” she said.

  This had been in mid-November. And quite soon after, it came out that the boyfriend was coming home from school for Thanksgiving. She would not be able to see Winch for a few days. Perhaps a week. She hoped Winch would not mind. She hoped he would not hold it against her. She hoped he would not be jealous. And that it would not—change anything.

  Winch had smiled. “No. It won’t. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

  “You won’t be lonely?”

  “No, I won’t be lonely.”

  Suddenly she laughed. “Damn you.”

  He smiled. “Well, maybe I’ll be a little lonely.”

  That was better, she had said. “You see, I can’t help being a Southern belle.”

  When she came back from Thanksgiving, the first thing she said was that the boyfriend had said he “knew I had a lover.”

  Winch laughed. “How do you think he knew?”

  “He said he could tell by the way I acted. I was too happy. Of course, I denied it.”

  And now the same thing had come up again lately, about Christmas. The boyfriend was coming home for Christmas vacation from school. She would not be able to see Winch for quite
a while. Maybe three weeks. And of course by now Winch had the apartment.

  “I’ll try to sneak away and slip off at least once,” Carol said.

  “Don’t worry,” Winch had smiled. He was back to duty by now, out at O’Bruyerre, and busy in a very real way.

  He did not really know what he thought about the boyfriend. He apparently was just a good, solid, generally good-natured, thoroughly fucked-up, upper-class Southern boy. Winch certainly did not envy him his marriage to Carol—if and when it came to pass. And Winch felt pretty sure it would come to pass. He felt a certain sympathy for the boy, more than anything.

  “He wants me to be like his mother,” Carol said about him once. “And at the same time, he halfway wants me to be his whore.”

  “But if you’re his whore, you can’t be like his mother,” Winch smiled.

  “Exactly!”

  But it was curious Winch was not jealous. He wasn’t. The time she spent with the boyfriend at Thanksgiving did not bother him. He did not conjure up painful pictures of her in bed with him, and brood about them. Instead, he felt he was very lucky. More than anything. A lucky weekender.

  Perhaps it was just age. And his physical condition. But, what the hell, he was getting it up with her now more than he ever had with any woman, for quite some time. She was blowing him well, he was teaching her. And he was blowing her well. Apparently. And the fucking they had going was of a superior quality.

  What better deal could a man of his years ask for?

  Suddenly, a picture of his white-eyed platoons, wherever they were, blossomed in his head. And with it, screamingly, came up the single, silent sentence of his nightmare. Get them out of there! Damn it! Get them out of there! Winch bit it back. But on the wheel, his hands were slippery.

  The apartment Alexander had found for him had been the biggest single item of expense. He had had to pay a large sum under the counter, in cash, to get it. The monthly rental was high. The next biggest item was the car Alexander had put him on to. And the black-market gas Alexander had made him privy to.

  Lately, after her revelation of the expected Christmas visit, Carol had begun asking his advice about various things. This tickled a fatherly perversity in Winch. For the moment, it was the boy’s military status. He had a deferment, until he graduated in the spring. Then, his father had it fixed to keep him out on a bogus local deferment. But the boyfriend wanted to enlist right now. Quit school and enlist. It was going to be the big fight of their Christmas.

  Winch had told her to tell him to stay out. Whatever else happened, stay the hell out. And if he did go in, he should get his father to get him some kind of a commission, preferably with a job in Washington attached to it.

  Suddenly, under the wipers, a white picture formed on the windshield glass in the rain, as though it had been etched by Steuben or one of those big glassmakers. It interfered with Winch’s vision of the road in the headlight beam. Winch stared at it, engrossed, as it took clearer shape, and recognized it.

  It was Jacklin. Pfc Freddie Jacklin? He was one of the men, one of the dead, from the platoons. The forever beleaguered platoons of Winch’s mind. The glass picture of him was an exact replica of the way Winch had seen him last. Winch had been going down the gently sloping forward slope of a knoll. Not much grass. Winch had glanced back once, a scanning look, before going into the jungle that came part way up. Jacklin had been lying there.

  He was facing downhill, on his back, his head thrown back, one arm out one arm in, a grimace of intense effort on his face, above the open mouth and eyes, his big chest extended as if still trying vainly to draw air. Winch had not known where he was hit. Had not even known he’d been hit.

  Now he was on the windshield, etched in white bevels and lines and grooves, and he was obstructing Winch’s vision. Wherever he moved his head or eyes, the figure moved in front of them. A fucking obstructionist!

  By peripheral vision Winch could see the car was edging toward the road edge. He tried to adjust his steering, but could not do it fast enough. The right front wheel, then immediately the right rear, caught in the soft, rain-soaked shoulder.

  There was the scream of rubber, and the rending of metal, and then the car was halfway in the roadside ditch, front end down, but turned clear around and there was silence, the motor turning over and ticking in the quiet.

  Automatically, Winch turned off the ignition. Then just sat in the stillness for a while. It was the first time any of his nightmares had actually impinged upon his outside physical world and affected it. That would bear some thinking about.

  As he sat, he realized slowly that there was nobody at all around, anywhere.

  Fortunately, he was able to back out. The metal damage was negligible, mostly a bent headlight, fender and bumper. He could still drive it. Luxor was still five miles off.

  Nothing happened the rest of the way. As if satisfied, the figure of Jacklin did not return.

  At the apartment, which was the upstairs of a private home downtown not too far from the Peabody, he parked the damaged car and hurried up the outside stairs in the rain to the upper floor.

  Inside, Carol put down the book she was reading and stood up. All the lights were on, the way he liked it. She was fully clothed. She hated to undress herself or lie around half-nude, and always waited for him to come and do it. She looked very young. Incredibly young. She held out her arms for him to come and begin undressing her. Winch did so.

  “What happened? What’s wrong?” she said when she saw his face.

  Winch did not answer and buried his face in her young, un-wounded, hungry shoulder.

  “Oh, whatever is going to become of us?” she said, in her emotional child’s voice.

  “Nothing,” Winch said. “Hush. For God’s sake, just don’t talk.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE SUMMONS TO REPORT to Col Stevens in his office came when Landers had been on ward arrest for over a week.

  Landers had no way of knowing Winch had gotten involved in his case. And if he had known, he would not have been elated. Landers had decided lately he no longer liked Winch so much. He wanted no help from Winch. He did not know Winch had called Strange about him that same morning, on Strange’s ward, and that in fact Strange was supposed to get him a message about the developments. So he went up to the lion’s den with a daredevil’s, I’ve-got-nothing-to-lose attitude that was not really in keeping with all that had transpired.

  Strange would kick himself in the tail, later in the day, for not having gotten to him before he went. But then later still, Strange wondered whether it could have helped.

  Being on ward arrest was not actually all that bad. Even Landers had to admit that. There were no chains or handcuffs to wear. The ward door was not locked. It was more like some sort of school honor system. But if you stepped outside the door, or went off walking away somewhere, you immediately became officially a fugitive. In practice, it did not work out that way and Landers was often outside the door, talking to somebody or other, and when he was sent to his medical appointments outside in the hospital he went alone, not under guard. If he stopped off a few minutes to see somebody, nobody checked up on him. He was required to eat all his meals on the ward, and not allowed to go and stand in the long line at the big messhall, but this was a gain, a great boon, as far as he was concerned. He had total freedom of the ward itself. And he was allowed to have visitors.

  On the other hand, he was not for some reason allowed to make or receive phone calls. He had never made or taken phone calls on the ward, nor wanted to. So the restriction didn’t hurt him. But it irritated him because of its unreasonable, Army nonsensicality.

  Another thing that irritated Landers was that his uniforms were locked up, in the lockup closet with the uniforms of the medically restricted patients. If he did walk off the ward without permission, where the hell was he going to go? In pajamas and bathrobe and slippers?

  But mainly it was that he had no more all-day, all-night passes which got to Landers the most. He
had grown accustomed to getting fucked every night, at least once. And the absence of human females afflicted him sorely. He had become used to these exceptional, wounded-patient hospital passes, they seemed one of his natural rights. Now it struck him, forcibly, that when he did go back to duty with the ordinary, everyday Army, even on limited duty, he would no longer have them.

  He did not like the attitude the others on the ward had developed toward his incarceration. His restriction had become a joke to them, instead of the basic, mean tragedy that it was. “Hey, Landers,” one would call, “I’ll think of you tonight, when I’m deep-humping my big juicy wet slippery pussy.” Or, “Hey, Landers. I’ll dip a finger for you tonight. Bring it back and let you sniff it. A dollar a sniff.”

  Then they would finish dressing, and all troop out into the noon day in uniform and Landers would stay behind in the empty-seeming ward with the medically restricted, who could not go out, and who were continually coming in with new batches of lower-leg wounds from some battle front or other, but who were certainly not much sport, no great shakes, to talk to.

  The winter weather change affected him strongly, in his locked-up state. Affected him very adversely. Free, or relatively so, with the hospital day passes, he had moved into town and around the city, watching the lingering Southern fall change to the rains of winter, with a melancholy that matched the drooping leaves, and whispered to him privately that this was the last autumn he would be seeing. There was no question now that he would go back to duty. And no question in Landers’ mind that he would do so just in time to be killed, murdered, in the big European push that had to be coming. Mournfully he accepted it. But Strange’s suite at the Peabody, with its kaleidoscopic changing of women, was a great, if temporary, antidote for this.

  Now that was gone and lights were being left burning longer and longer in the mornings, and being turned on earlier and earlier in the late afternoon, And Landers would sit around on the little, glass-enclosed dayroom porch, playing solitaire or trying to read, and watch the lights being switched on in the other porches down the way, on his own side, and across the way, in the other bay.