In the suite the party was already going full Hast. Though it was only two-thirty in the afternoon. Strange had given Corello a key to come on ahead with the other guys from the company.
Winch was not there. Prell immediately looked all around for him. Later on Winch did come in apparently without Prell seeing him and stationed himself quietly in a corner with, peculiarly, a glass of water. But he did not stay long, and Prell did not see him leave.
Landers had asked his Navy flyer friends and their gang from the floor below and immediately Prell was in the room Jan Mitchell, the lt cmdr, started a roaring chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and the other flyers joined him and finally, in a more embarrassed way, the men from the old company joined in. When the song finished, Mitchell raised his arms for quiet and raised his glass toward Prell in a toast.
“To the only Medal of Honor winner I have ever had the honor of getting drunk with.” “Hear, hear!” cried several of the flyers.
Suavely Prell shook hands with all of them, and accepted the first drink that was offered him, something he might not have done a month before.
From Landers he found out that Commander Mitchell held the Navy Cross, won at Guadalcanal.
Prell was about three-quarters drunk when Mitchell began auctioning him off, to the various girls in the suite. Had he not known about the Navy Cross, or had he been cold sober, Prell might have balked. Instead, he went along with it and with Mitchell. Nobody who had won a Navy Cross over Guadalcanal could be all bad.
What he garnered by keeping his mouth shut was to find himself in a bedroom with the prettiest girl, getting himself the best blow job he had had since River Street in Honolulu, if not the best he had had ever.
Mitchell hadn’t really auctioned him off. The girls had not been asked to pay for him. But Mitchell had appealed to their patriotism, using just the right amount of appealing grace and a carefully leavened sincerity, in a way that would have made the hardest-hearted hooker jump in with a gratis offer to take Prell to bed. And these girls weren’t hookers. “Here’s a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, girls,” the lt cmdr called, from on top of one of the little cocktail tables, after hollering for silence, “Do you people know what that means? You may never live to meet another one in your whole lives. This is the highest decoration the good old U.S. of A. can bestow upon one of her sons. Can you do less?”
It was a rhetorical question. Warming to his own oratory, Mitchell clapped his hands. “The problem here is that in order to do and complete the mission he was so carefully entrusted with, our new friend was so thoroughly butchered up in his legs by those dirty Japs that, for the moment at least, he is completely incapacitated in a certain delicate but important physiological, muscular way. Let us say the spirit is willing but the flesh of the thighs for the moment is weak. But what he can’t do for himself, just now, can be done for him. In any of a certain number of delicate but immensely laudatory ways. And he is on his first pass in a matter of some seven or eight months. He hasn’t even seen a girl close up in that terrible long length of time. Do I have to say more, ladies?
“Just remember. Probably the only chance any of you will ever have at a Medal of Honor winner.
“NOW. What am I bid for him? Who wants him? First come, first served. In that good old traditional American fashion.”
Mitchell cleverly had made it a joke, and yet, equally cleverly, it wasn’t a joke. Five girls responded. Out of the eleven or twelve. First one, then another, then as the idea became less embarrassing, three others. They pushed their way forward and leaped out into the center of the room, laughing and striking poses. Then two others, emboldened by the five, tried to get into the act but were disallowed by Mitchell. The first five Mitchell decided would have to draw straws. There was a long concerted hunt and confused search for a cleaning broom with straws. This was finally found and brought forward and handed over to Mitchell. The winner was a girl named Ann Waterfield who worked in town, tall, pageboy blonde, stacked, and exceedingly beautiful. Annie had come with one of the Navy flyers, but was not his special girl. Prell suspected Mitchell of having manipulated the broom straws in his favor, but wisely said nothing. Drunk, blushing and embarrassed, and stiff-faced, until Annie rolled his chair away from the others into the bedroom, Prell felt he would owe her a debt for the rest of his natural life.
When they finally came back out, after a long time away there, where under strictest orders nobody was allowed to occupy the secondary bed, and where Annie Waterfield had been so accomplished, tender, and sweet, Annie Waterfield started laughing.
“Y’all been sayin’ this young man hasn’t had a pass for only seven or eight months? He acts like he hasn’t had a pass in a year and a half! Would you believe three times?”
Three, in the fact of it, was correct. And the second time Annie Waterfield had been able to accomplish something Delia Mae Kinkaid never had done. By rolling him on his side and pushing two pillows against his behind for him to roll back on, and then getting her knees astraddle of him, Annie had been able to get onto her feet and squat slowly down over him and fuck his cock without putting any weight at all on his thighs. Delia Mae Kinkaid had never done that. The position made his legs ache, but it was worth it.
Back out in the crowded, yelling sitting room she did not leave him. She stayed close to him the rest of the evening, always touching him with one hand or the other. This warmed Prell enormously. He certainly hadn’t wanted to let her go. To somebody else.
Delia Mae Kinkaid. Prell had thought about Delia Mae several times. When he was in the bedroom with the highly accomplished Annie Waterfield. He had wished it was Delia Mae doing all these marvelous things to him.
But the main bent of his thoughts about Delia Mae was quite blunt. It was to hell with Delia Mae and let everybody look after himself. All that talk about marriage. That was a lot of shit. Delia Mae was bending his ear.
If Delia Mae wanted to marry, she should find herself some other Medal of Honor winner.
Still, it occurred to him it would be great if, relatively quickly, he could teach her that semigymnast’s trick Annie Waterfield had used on him that second time.
It was while he was sitting in the chair with Annie Waterfield beside him touching his arm that Johnny Stranger came over from somewhere and from slightly behind Prell put his good hand on Prell’s shoulder. Prell turned his head to look up at him and grin. Strange, drunk and red-faced, grinned back down; and then over one drunkenly bulging eye brought down the eyelid with an almost audible click.
“Everything all right?”
“Everything’s great.”
“Good.”
Slowly, swaying ever so slightly, he leaned over till his mouth was almost at Prell’s ear.
“We’re gonna blow every damn nickel of it. Every fucking dime. Nobody’s gonna want for anything, as long as there’s one fucking damn fucking dime of it left.”
Prell felt the pressure from the hand increase on his shoulder as Strange pushed himself back erect. Then he sensed rather than saw, because he couldn’t see that far behind him, that Strange took two paces rearward as the pressure left his shoulder.
When he moved his wheelchair to steal a glance a moment later, Strange was standing there, arms folded, leaning on the point of one shoulder against the wall. The stance was so exactly the same way Prell had seen him stand so many times—leaning against his kitchen wall back in Wahoo; against the tent pole of his kitchen fly on the Canal; against a cocopalm beside his mess tent in New Georgia—that it called up not so much a single memory response as a whole syndrome of memory response.
Right now, the drunken red face was suffused with a peculiar look, both above and below his bulging eyes. It was a look of happiness on the surface. But underneath that butter was something hard and bitter and so flinty it seemed to Prell a bayonet would not have chipped it.
Prell didn’t know what it was. And he didn’t care very much. It seemed to him now that, without realizing it, out
of the corners of his eyes, he had been seeing Strange standing in that same position in one part of the room or another all afternoon and evening. Strange had not been off with a single one of the girls, as far as Prell had noted.
Then, while he was thinking this, the heavy hand pressure came on his shoulder and he felt Strange’s mouth come down beside his ear again.
“Did you ever eat a pussy?”
“Well, I—” Prell began, and then stopped, because he realized he was hedging. He did not know what was going on but he knew enough to know that this was not some joke question. The intensity of the voice precluded that. “Hell, yes,” he said, and grinned up into the red face.
“Hell, yes. It’s great. I loved it,” Prell said valiantly. Which was true. Not only with Annie Waterfield, but with a not unworthy number of other girls. But it was not so long ago that he would have refused to admit it to anyone.
The pressure on his shoulder increased again as Strange pushed himself erect once more. When Prell felt he could risk a look, the mess/sgt was standing as before, leaning against the wall. He appeared to be watching what was going on out in the center of the room.
Prell put his own gaze back onto the room. The zany Navy flyer Mitchell was in the middle of pulling off some other kind of a crazy college-boy stunt. Suddenly, without preparation, the old movie roster of Prell’s mud-smeared squad, the dead along with the living, began to parade across behind Prell’s eyes. He had not had the apparition for so long now that its sudden appearance shook him. Slowly, each hollow-eyed face turned back to smile wistfully, sadly, before it moved on and faded. Faded into whatever Godawful night. God, what they wouldn’t all of them have given, Prell thought, just to have been here.
Probably it was the memory syndrome Strange had called up in him which had caused it. The only sane answer to it was to point out forcefully, as forcefully as possible, that he was here and they were not.
On the metal arm of the wheelchair his right hand holding his drink began to tremble, so that the ice in the glass made a faint, constant tinkling. Beside him Annie Waterfield put her own right hand over his and stopped the tinkling, and made a quick motion with her mouth to him that was like a kiss. Prell threw her a wink.
In the cab going back at two in the morning drunk, Prell felt no anguish at all when he was stuffed into the front seat-well, or when he was pulled bodily from it to be stuck back into the unfolded wheelchair by Landers and Strange. The driver of this second cab was not nearly so nice or so helpful as the first driver had been. It didn’t matter. “It was one of the best nights of my life,” Prell told them, and the driver, again. For maybe the twentieth time. “I wish it had gone on forever.”
It was while Landers, drunk too, was pushing him back to the leg wards, with his cane hung over the back of the chair, that Landers told him Winch was going back to limited duty in a couple of days. Winch was going to Second Army Headquarters as chief of the G-1 personnel section, probably with a raise in grade to junior warrant officer.
To Prell, still drunk as he was, the new news about Winch sounded like a deep knell tolling the beginning of the end. On his ward he went about getting out of his new uniform with the help of the night man. Finally in bed and alone, he lay awake awhile thinking about it.
What was going to happen to him, when all the others were gone? First Winch would go. Then, Landers. Then, Strange. Finally, Prell would be left. To continue with his painful leg therapy to see whether, finally he would walk on them again. Still going through the goddam daily therapy. Still trying to learn to goddam walk.
What on earth was going to become of him? All he had ever wanted to do was stay in the Army. How were you going to stay in the Army without legs to walk?
Next morning, as if in answer to his question, he was delivered a typed invitation direct from Col Stevens this time, to go downtown and make another speech. This one was to the Luxor Ladies Clubs, Combined. The first had been hugely successful and the Ladies Clubs had asked for him expressly. It was for that afternoon.
Badly hungover though he was, of course he accepted. There wasn’t really a choice. It occurred to Prell that this was to be his future way of life apparently, his future path of duty, if he wanted to stay in the Army. Nobody had said so yet. But Prell could smell it coming, the way an animal can smell snow, or a storm coming.
CHAPTER 19
LANDERS WOKE WITH much less of a hangover than Prell. More used to the heavy drinking luxury than Prell was by now, his body was getting better at assimilating it.
But as he pulled the GI blanket and sheet up to his neck and lay listening to the ward man going down the line waking the guys, he was transfixed by something far worse than a hangover. The big bell at the head of the ward was ringing its short, hard, frightening blasts, but it wasn’t that. He was used to that. His whole system was infused with a sharp pure panic.
Landers knew why. There was no need to think back over the whole big party to remember what it was he had done so wrong. It was right there in the forefront of his mind. He remembered that he drunkenly had told Prell all about Winch going back to duty, on the way pushing him back to the wards. And he had been asked precisely not to do just that.
Jerkily, with nerves made jumpy by both hangover and a deep, hollow, awful guilt, Landers yanked on his pajama pants and slippers to hurry up and get to the bathroom first and shave.
It was Strange who had told Landers about Winch’s impending return to duty. Landers had been sitting with him outdoors loafing in the fall sunshine, while the two of them waited for Prell to get his folding wheelchair. Winch had told Strange he would be leaving within a week. Then, after telling Landers, Strange had expressly asked Landers not to talk about it. Particularly, he did not want Landers to tell Prell.
Landers had asked him why. Strange had shrugged and moved his head, and in that inarticulate way Landers had come to associate with all of Strange’s more complex, profounder ideas, he said he did not think Prell was up to it yet. Prell was still drawn too tight, still too much up in the air. About what might happen with his legs. He wouldn’t be able to digest the idea that Winch finally might be leaving them, leaving the company, moving on.
Landers had simply nodded. He was not so sure he was up to it himself. The idea that Winch might not be there for aid and advice when Landers needed him left a big empty hole in Landers. But he had never believed Prell felt that same way about Winch. Astonishingly, it was as if Strange read his mind. Again, inarticulately, Strange had moved his head and shrugged. That Prell hated Winch did not mean Prell thought Winch was an incompetent, Strange said with no prompting. Just the reverse. Prell would never have hated a man whose professional opinions he had contempt for. No; Prell would miss Winch. Badly. Hate, or no hate.
They should give Prell a week, Strange said, or two weeks. Before they told him. He needed sufficient time for the therapy on his legs to start to work. Besides, in the second place, if it was an accomplished fact, with Winch already gone, there would be a fatality about it that would make it more acceptable to Prell.
Landers had nodded again. And had promised he would not mention Winch’s leaving to Prell. Privately, he remembered how more than once it had struck him how intricate and complicated these relationships were between these Regular Army men, which seemed so simple on the surface. And he marveled again at the really deep understanding of them Strange seemed to have.
College people. College people, like himself, who had a tendency to think of themselves as more sensitive, and called men like these guys ignorant, and uncomplicated, and insensitive, didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. And had probably never known any. Landers had never known any himself, until this fucking war. But Landers would rather have been like them, than any college people he had ever met. Drunk, happy, he had gone to bed last night after the party thinking these same thoughts over again, a second time.
And had waked up to most unwelcome this.
It appeared that his mind had blanked ou
t, on certain parts of the big, riotously boisterous party. There were whole stretches he had no memory of. But his mind had not blanked out this most awful, most irresponsible thing he’d done. His mind had kept it right there, all ready for him, to stew and seethe and fret and agonize over this morning, with this sense of awful guilt.
How could he possibly have made such a gaffe? How could he possibly have forgotten, ignored his promise?
Shaved, he bolted down his breakfast so fast and nervously, he gave himself a bad bellyache. Then he sat, nursing the bellyache, tapping his feet in their slippers on the polished floor, waiting for morning rounds. As soon as that was over and he was free, he took off across the half-mile width of the hospital to Strange’s ward, as fast as his bad leg would carry him, to see Strange and confess what he had done. Maybe there was some way Strange could fix it.
Luckily he hurried. Strange was already in uniform, preparing to take off for town and his new suite. He had already given a key to one of the guys from the company, who had a morning pass and had gone in ahead to round up some women.
“Come on along,” the mess/sgt said. “The more the merrier. I’ll wait on you while you change.”
Landers stopped him with a raised hand. “I’ve got to tell you what I did,” Landers said, and bubbled it all out breathlessly. “It was a terrible thing. A terrible thing. I was drunk. But that’s no excuse. It was on the way back to the wards.”
Strange took it better than Landers thought he would. All he did was smile a sad little half-smile with the corner of his mouth, and make his shrug. To Landers the rebuke seemed greater because of that. He would have preferred a storm of abuse.
“I guess he’ll just have to live with it,” Strange said. “A little sooner, is all. We all got things we have to live with a little sooner than we’re ready for, I reckon.”
“I suppose. I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Landers added in a low voice. Nothing he could find to say seemed to loosen that awful guilt.