by James Jones
Kurntz’s suite was laid out more or less on the same principles as Strange’s suite at the Peabody. Except that there was only one bedroom, and there was no “preparation station” bed in the living room. These ladies would never have gone for, would have been shocked by, something as open as that. But since the tour guys had their own rooms in the hotel to take the “Damsels of their choice,” as Kurntz called them, there was no problem.
Prell had ridden over in his wheelchair, and had the bellboy push him. He had found the wheelchair worked wonders of sympathetic limpness on the ladies, once the ladies realized he was no paraplegic and not paralyzed from the waist down.
The Kansas City lady’s name was Joyce. “Joyce, would you mind pushing me back to my own room in this thing?” he asked after they had talked awhile in Kurntz’s loud, crowded living room.
They always loved pushing him in the wheelchair. And they loved talking to him about the Medal of Honor, and how he had gotten it. Prell didn’t mind telling them. He simply soft-pedaled his own feelings of inadequacy about the whole thing. A feeling of inadequacy was not what they were after, at a time like that. Sometimes when he was telling them about it, it seemed that was the way it really was, had really happened.
Most of them liked undressing him, too. Prell always let them. He wasn’t ashamed of the scars, and if they wanted to inspect them and ask questions about them, well, the scars were very close to where he wanted to get their faces. And that almost always worked, too. If only with passionate kissing.
“What kind of outfit’s your husband in? Where is he?” he asked Joyce.
“He’s in England,” Joyce said drunkenly. “He’s in the Air Force. He’s an air-crew ground mechanic. He doesn’t fly. But he’s written me,” she said, running her fingertips over Prell’s thigh scars, “about some of the boys who’ve been flown back to base all terribly torn up. They’ve had two Medals of Honor in his squadron, he wrote me.”
They went to sleep with their arms around each other, Joyce performing a sort of contortionist feat, by keeping her breasts pressed against him up above, while lying away from him down below so as not to hurt his legs. There were no nightmares.
She woke up around five, cold sober. Prell had gotten pretty used to this, too. Her eyes were full of panic.
“My God. What on earth am I doing here?” she demanded, and pulled the sheet up over her breasts.
The lines were almost always the same. So was the action with the sheet.
“What ever will you think of me?”
That line was usually the same, too. Prell had learned how to handle them by talking gently and affectionately and sensibly. He wasn’t even sure they heard the words he said, only the tones. He wasn’t even sure they saw him.
The next little scene was to leap from the bed stark naked, while enjoining him not to look, which he always did, with pleasure and regret; and then rush for the bathroom to wash themselves, put on makeup, and dress. Usually with their clothes in arm. Or at least panties and bra.
Prell had the perfect excuse not to get up. A cripple didn’t have to get dressed, and see them home. But he would always offer to call down for the night bell captain to have a cab waiting. They always accepted that.
Then all he had to do was roll over, go back to sleep, and sleep until Jerry Kurntz would call him at nine and ask how he made out. To which Prell would always answer that he had not made out at all. To which Kurntz would laugh.
This time however, after Joyce blew him an affectionate kiss from the door (they always seemed to be in better control, once they got their clothes and makeup back on) he did not want to go back to sleep because of the nightmares. He got up and, smelling the delicious scent of sex all over him, sat in the wheelchair in his robe with the bourbon bottle. He was careful not to drink enough to incapacitate himself for tomorrow, just enough to relax. He must certainly have dozed some in the chair, whose wheels he had locked, but it was not enough to let the nightmares back in.
That night was his main talk from the stage of the big downtown auditorium. There was quite a large crowd and Joyce, who was one of the ladies helping with the invitation list, was there. When they had a moment alone, she wanted to know if they were going to see each other again that night. Politely Prell begged off and told her no. Women and sex were the furthest things from his mind right then. He had brooded about Strange all day. Strange, and Landers. But Strange had not called at all. Prell was still hoping to get a call from him.
Prell had had another, smaller talk to give in the afternoon, but that night in the auditorium his rehearsed speech got away from him and he suddenly found himself telling them the story of Landers. In the middle of talking, he found himself changing the story all around, to fit the circumstances, to fit the audience, so that Landers’ wound came out in his version as much worse, a leg amputation, and he told them that Landers had died as the result of an additional amputation operation. His points for the story, he told his audience, were two. One, that Landers had received no medals for his sacrifice, nor had wanted or expected any. And that two, Landers had not become famous for it and there were going to be a lot more like him. Who, if they survived at all, were going to take a lot of work, here at home.
Prell had no idea at all why he had done it, and thought he might be losing his mind. It was, he supposed, his own personal tribute to Landers, and had just popped out of him.
Kurntz told him later it was a huge success and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when he finished. The pledges and subscriptions which Joyce and the other ladies were taking in the lobby were the biggest of the tour to date.
“Jesus, fella,” the producer said earnestly, “it was a very moving little routine. You even had me shedding a tear. But you got to tell us about these little ideas when you get them. Before you try them out. We got to write them in, and prepare for them.”
“Well it just came to me while I was up there,” Prell said, “I didn’t know I was going to do it.”
Kurntz nodded sympathetically. “Luckily, the lighting man up in the back was listening to you, and was able to follow your mood.” Kurntz coughed. “Listen. Was, uh, was that what that phone call was all about last night? That had you so upset for a while?”
“In a way, yeah,” Prell said. “Yes. It was.”
Kurntz patted his back lugubriously. “I thought maybe so. Well, we’ll just work it in. Into one of the speech variations. I’ll get Frank on it tomorrow.”
Prell was not sure whether he wanted his “Thing” on Landers incorporated into his speech or not. But he did not feel much like discussing it right then.
The worst fight he and Kurntz had had on the entire tour had been over the wheelchair, whether they should use it to wheel Prell onto the big auditorium stages. Jerry wanted to use it and have Prell get up out of it himself, and then walk three or four halting steps to the reading lectern. Prell was furiously against it.
But Kurntz had made a strong case for his idea. “Look, kid. I know how you feel about the wheelchair. And I know you think it’s phony to use it. But those people don’t have any way of knowing that you have to use a wheelchair. I know it. But they don’t. Don’t forget we’re here to move these people, to entertain ’em. And instruct ’em. When you get up out of that wheelchair and walk bravely to the lectern, there’s not a person in the crowd who’s not going to love you. And that’s what we’re here for. If we make them love you, they’ll buy more bonds. That’s why we’re here. That’s our assignment.”
There was no arguing with the logic. It was easy to see why Kurntz was a major. And Prell finally had agreed. And once he began doing it, there was no question that it worked.
Now the same thing was going to happen with his little Landers story. He was going to have to go on telling it. The oftener he told it the less it would be his. The less it would really mean, to him.
Even so, Prell didn’t feel like fighting about it right now. All he really wanted was to get back to the hotel and find out if
Strange had called.
But there was no call. Strange had not called while they were away at the auditorium, and he did not call after they got back.
So instead of another affectionate night with Joyce and no nightmares, Prell spent the night with the nightmares.
The newly reactivated dreams woke him three times, sweating and fearful, during the course of the night. In the morning they, the whole tour group, flew off in the big Army plane to Lincoln. Two days later they flew on to Denver for their engagement there, last stop on the outward leg of the tour.
Lincoln was a pretty small town, so there hadn’t been much hanky-panky there. But Jerry Kurntz was promising a rousing debacle for Denver.
By Denver the nightmares had begun to dim.
CHAPTER 30
STRANGE HAD NOT CALLED Prell back because he hadn’t thought it was worthwhile.
Besides, his new outfit was going out in the field for ten days of field problems and he had an enormous amount of work to do then and the next day getting his field kitchens ready.
Prell’s indifference over the phone had shocked Strange. It had never occurred to Strange that someone, especially among themselves, wouldn’t care about Landers. He might have expected it among the company remnants as a whole, but not from the old hard-core nucleus. It meant that now even the nucleus was breaking up, its parts going off in different directions, pushed by new interests, new loyalties.
The worst part of all that was that it made Strange find his own loyalty suspect. It wasn’t really loyalty, apparently. It was a commodity to be sold, traded off, exchanged, according to the whims of the Army in a war, an Army too big to worry about loyalties except in very large bundles. Winch had told him this once.
What was it he had said? Where had it been? On the hospital ship. The day of the big home landfall. They were pulling into San Diego.
What had he said? Johnny Stranger, all that shit of the old outfit is over. You better believe it. You better get it through your thick Texas head. Something like that.
Winch had been right, as he always was. He had just been ahead of time, ahead of everybody, was all. As he usually was.
It must be hard on the sanity, seeing things ahead of time like Winch. Seeing. And knowing. And telling people. Who never listened. Damned hard on the sanity. Strange was glad it was a talent he didn’t have.
But now it was catching up to Strange, like a slap in the face. While Winch was already prepared.
Strange had no loyalty to his new outfit at all. It was just a bunch of people, brought together from scattered parts. Officers, some ambitious, some not. Enlisted men, some ambitious, the rest just putting in time, hoping to survive. The ambitious ones, officers and EM, kept moving on, out and upward to somewhere, but of the outfit.
The outfit itself was a communications unit. A bunch of wooden switchboards (they would get metal ones in England, they were told), destined to be set up out in the woods somewhere, and become the link between some Division and its sister Divisions, or some corps of tanks and another corps. Nobody knew exactly what yet. That was the kind of stuff they were going to be practicing on their field maneuvers. Strange was one of the company mess/sgts.
How could you have any loyalty to that? You could have loyalty to your work, but that was all. Perhaps the fire and the strains of combat would combine them and squeeze them into one big self with one big loyalty, when they got to Europe. But they weren’t that now. And Strange felt no loyalty to any of them.
He had had some loyalties left, back at the hospital. He had developed a strong loyalty there to Col Curran, for example. And there had been the loyalty to the old-company men who had met at his suite in the Peabody; it was a thinning and diminishing loyalty, true, as more and more of them went back to duty and were scattered, and as he himself got more involved with Frances Highsmith, but it was still a countable loyalty. Frances herself was a serious loyalty, if not an Army one. And then there had been his prime loyalty of all, to the nucleus of four he had been a part of and had come back home with. Strange had never believed that that could break apart.
But the hospital appeared to have been the breaking and thinning point of all a man’s loyalties. His own last session with Curran was indicative of all of Strange’s, it seemed.
Curran had called him in, one morning during morning rounds, for what he laughingly said might be their last conference, Strange’s heart had begun to beat in his ears. He had wondered, lately, about the fact that only he and Prell were left. First Winch with his heart problem or whatever it was, then Landers with that really bad ankle of his, both had gone. Even Prell with his two horribly crippled legs was being set up for hospital discharge to start his war bonds tours. All of them had been worse off than Strange, with his minor hand wound. And yet Strange still languished on his ward, with no word one way or the other. How come?
Curran wasted no time disabusing him. “Your hand hasn’t healed as well as we expected. That’s why I’ve kept you as long as I have.”
“What do you mean, hasn’t healed? It isn’t sore, isn’t infected. It feels fine to me.” He held it up and wiggled it, clenched and unclenched it. A panic ran all through him at the idea of being discharged from the Army, now.
“I don’t mean the physical healing. That’s fine. I’m talking about the internal healing, the mechanics, the thing we went in there to correct. We had such a success with the operation we thought we had every right to assume it would heal perfectly. But it hasn’t.” Curran held out his own hand for Strange’s wrist.
“Here,” he said. “Clench it. Now unclench it. You feel that little pull, that little hesitation?”
Strange had to nod. “Yes.”
“Well that’s what I mean. It could be,” Curran looked at him a moment, as if he were about to list every possible thing it might be, then shrugged, “—it could be a lot of things. It could be something that will go away.
“But my hunch is that it won’t. My hunch is it’ll get worse. Certainly it’s going to bother you later in life.”
“Well, what does that mean for right now?” Strange asked. “Does that mean I’m not going to get out of here and back to duty?”
Curran began to laugh. “You still want to get overseas to England, like you said?”
“That’s what I’m after,” Strange said stiffly.
“I’m not going to keep you here. Just what your hand does not need now is another operation. No, I’m sending you back to duty in a day or two.”
“That’s great,” Strange said. “You had me scared.”
“But I’ve got to warn you about the hand,” Curran said sharply. “It could start up tomorrow. Or a week from now. My advice to you is to favor it because of this.”
It was Strange’s turn to grin. “I can fake it. I went on working with it for six months the first time.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to. You saw what happened to it in six months the first time.”
“I ought to be able to fake it a year this time.”
“In any case, I have to send you back as limited duty,” Curran said.
“Actually my job as a mess/sgt isn’t all that much different,” Strange said cautiously, “whether I’m with an infantry line company or some limited duty outfit.”
Curran smiled, and shook his head. “Makes no difference. I’ve got my orders and I follow them.”
“Sure.” You couldn’t argue with that.
“If it starts to act up, you’ll be right back in the hospital.”
“I’ve got a question,” Strange said.
“Shoot.”
“Say it did start to act up. Say, while I’m still on this side. In the East someplace. Where would they send me?”
Curran shrugged. “Theoretically, to the nearest hospital that had a good hand-surgery man. In actual practice, to your post hospital and if you refused to let some joker there play around with it and operate on it himself for fun, then you’d go to the nearest general hospital. Whether they had a good
hand-surgeon man or not. And they would operate on it there.”
“What if it happened right here, at O’Bruyerre?”
“Then you would come back here.”
“And you would handle it.”
Curran didn’t answer for a moment. “No. I wouldn’t.”
“Well, Jesus. Why not?”
“Because we’re undergoing a reorganization here. We’re expanding. We’re getting ready for D-Day and the European campaign.” Curran shrugged. “The surgery department is being doubled. That means Col Baker and myself are going to become the administrators of two whole new surgery sections. We’re being pulled off the operating tables, to do it. We’re being kicked upstairs. You know the phrase? I doubt if either of us will have the time to handle any operations at all.
“Well, Christ. Then whatever I do or don’t do isn’t going to make that much difference anyway, is it?” Strange was angry.
“No, I suppose not, in reality. At least you have learned enough here so that you can say no to some eager young wise-ass who wants to operate on you.”
“You know how far that will get me.”
Curran had grinned. “I’m not even supposed to be telling you this much. There are no bad surgeons in the Army. You know that.”
He had stood up from his big black swivel chair Strange had become so familiar with, and thrust out his hand. “Of course, if you do come back here, I’ll see that you get everything I can get for you.”
“Sure, of course,” Strange said, and shook the delicate strong hand. “But I don’t expect we’ll be seeing each other again, Colonel.”
Curran had looked at him a long moment. “No, I expect not,” he said. “Not in this war.”
And it seemed to happen like that with all of Strange’s loyalties. When he left Kilrainey for O’Bruyerre, they all were cut. Precisely, sharply. Even his relationship with Winch, which had been mostly by telephone and about Landers for some time now, seemed to diminish and be cut when he moved to O’Bruyerre.
