“But you still don’t think you’re a pervert,” Strange said.
“No. Absolutely not. I just like to suck cock.”
Strange felt himself beginning to laugh again, and when he left her the next day on the Sunday to go back to camp, he was feeling considerably better about the whole business of perversion.
It may have been partly those high spirits that caused him to go see Winch at the main PX and ask for a transfer out of the Signal Corps unit.
Strange had thought about doing it a number of times before. But the business with the fat first cook and the farm girls on that Saturday night had pushed him over the edge. The cook was never going to let up on it. He still insisted on calling Strange by his first name. Strange did not feel he should ask him to stop it. If he did, it might be taken the wrong way by the others. Strange had tried every silent way that he knew to let the cook know that he did not like it. But the cook had a hide like a rhinoceros. Or else he just chose to ignore it. Strange suspected it was the latter.
But the cook wasn’t the main factor. The cook was just the last straw. Strange never had liked the outfit. Two of the company commanders had moved away. Two other officers had moved off and been replaced. Two of the section sergeants had been transferred out, upward. Strange heard later that one of them was going to go to OCS. If there had ever been any esprit and unit loyalty, it had diminished visibly since Strange had come in.
He explained all this carefully to Winch, and a little apologetically, while Winch sat and grinned at him crazily.
“And just where would your fucking majesty like to go?” Winch said, when he had finished.
“I’d like to go back to the infantry.”
“You sure are a glutton for punishment. Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
They were seated at a small table a few feet from Winch’s big table, in the crowded roaring 6:00 p.m. interior of the huge beer-hall. Both of the Wurlitzers were going full blast. Winch had brought him over to the small table, after Strange had said he wanted to talk to him. It was Winch’s local private office, apparently.
Even in the 6:00 p.m. jam-up it was kept vacant for Winch’s use by the management.
“You know our old buddy Jack Alexander has a big piece of this place,” Winch said, with his crazy-grinning eyes,
“Sure, it figures.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you right at this moment,” Winch went on. “Both of these Divisions are moving out. One is leaving for England in a week, and the other not too long after. They both have had their final medical exams and there aren’t any vacancies.” He stopped to rub and pull at his ear, something Strange had never seen him do before. “But there will be two new Divisions moving right in on their heels as soon as they clear.”
“Sure. That’s fine. But what about my limited duty status?”
Winch grinned again. “Are you trying to put me on?”
Strange shook his head. “When is my outfit due to leave?”
“Not for a while. There’ve been no orders cut for it yet.
“But that doesn’t matter, either,” Winch said. “I can pull you out of it and hold you as a casual. If the orders are cut.”
“Okay, then. That’s fine.” Strange made as if to get up, but Winch put out a hand and held him down by his wrist
“What have you decided about Landers?” he said.
Strange ruminated. “I aint decided nothing,” he said. “Being out there in the field on maneuvers, I guess, makes it all seem pretty far away.”
“I guess,” Winch said.
Strange looked over at him, awkwardly. “You know, the spring came on while we were out there. I aint seen a real spring in a long time. Six years.”
“Yes?” Winch said. His eyes seemed to have lost their crazy energetic glint, and become more open.
“Everybody has to die sometime. In some particular way, or other.”
“Yes,” Winch said. “And generally, the later the better.”
“Yes,” Strange said. “Generally. But not always. I don’t honestly think there was anything anybody could have done.”
“That’s your considered opinion.” It was not a question, but more of a statement, made almost as if to Winch himself.
“It is,” Strange said. Winch had let go of his arm. He stood up. “I guess I better ought to be getting on.”
“No, no. No, no,” Winch cried, and his eyes began to heat up again. “You have to come over and have a few beers with this gang of bums. I want you to meet some of them.”
Strange went, but he didn’t want to. He felt he owed at least this much to Winch, but he did not like the quality, or the steady, sharply grinning faces around the table. He had never liked that kind of old-timer noncoms.
When he left, after two or three beers with them, Strange was careful to shake hands with every man he had been introduced to.
“You got to come back. You got to come back, Johnny Stranger,” Winch shouted after him, his face and hot eyes still twisted over some joke or other. “Any time. Any time. Tomorrow.”
Strange did not think Winch looked good at all.
CHAPTER 31
STRANGE’S DISAPPROVAL WAS not lost on Winch, at the big round table. If Strange thought it was, or thought Winch was unable to sense it and appreciate it, he was dead wrong.
On the other hand Winch was not in agreement at all with the way Strange had chosen to run out his string. The $7000 loss blown on the Peabody and its suite and parties was a ridiculous gesture, to Winch. Strange’s set determination to get himself to England and Europe, when he did not have to, was even crazier. But to come down here and ask to have himself transferred out of an outfit he now more or less dominated, back into the infantry, was a clear insanity.
There had to be something insanely self-destructive in it. Strange had to have gone off his rocker and a little crazy, over that dumb wife of his. Winch may have gone a little odd, a little peculiar, himself. But not so much that he could not notice and analyze something as flagrant as those choices.
Winch might be a little crazy. But he wasn’t that crazy. Statistically, they both knew, the mess/sgt of an infantry company stood a better chance of getting himself knocked off in Europe than the mess/sgt of a Signal Corps unit. For a large variety of reasons.
As for Strange’s opinion about Landers, Winch did not go along with that either. All that bullshit about the springtime. Landers was not the springtime, or anything near like it. Landers was a human man, with arms, and legs, and blood, and a kooky, kinked-up, little-bit-crazy brain. And as such he could have been saved. Winch just had not known the combination. And neither had Strange. To say anything else, like that guff about the springtime, was to lie to yourself.
You could go on and say Landers was crazy. But that was no excuse either. Everybody was crazy. Strange, and Prell, those two crazy chief surgeons at the hospital, Winch himself. Every first-three-grader who came to this big round table in the beer hall was a nut. If the war hadn’t made them crazy, they had brought the craziness with them from before. Which was probably the most likely in any case.
Winch and Strange had fucked up on Landers. That was all there was to say. Just as Winch, right now, was also fucking up on Strange himself. Because there was nothing to do but go ahead and put through his request for transfer. As soon as the two new Divisions began to show up. Strange would fight anything else like a crazy man.
What could you do with a crazy man? The only real answer was to convince him not to do what he wanted to do, or thought he ought to do. And Winch was not crazy enough to think he could do that with anybody as stubborn as Strange.
Shit, he hadn’t even been able to do it with Landers.
Three days before Strange had come down there to the PX to see him, Winch had gone wild-ass crazy in Jack Alexander’s nonstop poker game at the Claridge, and had won $12,000. For no appreciable reason he had begun to hold cards, and seemed unable to draw a bad hand. Hidden full houses at seven card high. Conceal
ed lows in seven high low. Wired pairs that filled to trips against two pair in five stud. Winch had bet them wildly, crazily, making the other players think he was bluffing (nobody could believe he could keep on drawing such hands), and finally had broken the game. Everybody had quit, and dropped out of the game over such high losses, or else had gone flat broke. Until the game had closed down for the night. An almost unheard of thing. Winch and Alexander had even had a fight, an argument, while the game was still on, over the way Winch was playing.
“You damn fool,” Jack who never played had said heatedly in front of the other players, his innate conservatism incensed by such extravagance. “You’re going to lose all your fucking damn players, all your competition, if you don’t play like a fucking damn human being.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Winch had bellowed, and made his crazy, green-eyed smile. “The fuck do I care?”
Alexander was right, of course. And afterward the two had an even bigger argument, while the other players drifted off.
Winch had decided he did not want to carry the money away with him. That was what the disagreement was over.
“I want you to keep it and invest it for me,” Winch said.
“Look,” Alexander said. “I’ll take all or part of it and keep it in the safe for you. If you don’t want to carry that much on you. You can pick it up in a couple of days. But I don’t want to take charge of it for you.”
The two of them were completely alone in the two-room suite by now. Winch checked the bedroom to be sure.
“No, that’s not what I want,” he said. “I want you to keep it. For me. When the first good deal turns up, buy me into it. I don’t want the fucking money.”
“I won’t take care of your money. I’m not your investment broker.”
“Sure you are,” Winch said, and grinned his sly grin.
Alexander shook his massive head. “No. I’m fucking not. There aint any deals coming up right now as far as I know. Take the money and put it in a bank. A safe deposit box, is preferable. Soon as something comes up, you give me what it needs. That’s sensible. There’s a lot of money there.”
That much was true. It was a not inconsiderable stack of greenbacks, although Alexander had changed all the small bills for Winch that he could manage. It made a thick, unfolded sheaf, bound in its rubber band. Winch took it and dropped it on the green felt playing surface under the white, green-shaded light hanging over the table.
“There. There it is. I don’t want it. And I aint taking it.” He turned and walked to the door. “You can give me an IOU, if you want.”
“God damn you,” Alexander said. But he got a slip of paper and commenced writing the IOU. “Now, here. I’m keeping it. But I’m not going to invest it. Not without I talk to you first. If something shows up, I’ll give you a call. And you can tell me to buy in, or not buy in.” He tore the slip off the pad. “But that’s the only way I’ll do it.”
“Okay. Fine.” Winch accepted the slip and went back to the door, and then turned back to wink and make his grin.
The big, hard turtle’s face stared back at him icily. “Damn you,” Alexander said, “you’re the biggest goddamned problem I ever got from old Hoggenbeck. I don’t know why you don’t act more sensible. Now get the fuck out of here. And don’t come back and play in my game unless you can act like a human being.”
Winch laughed, low in his throat. But outside in the dark street he took out the little IOU slip and burnt it with a match. When the last white corner withered into ash, he snapped it away off his fingers into the night’s spring breeze. What did he need with an IOU from Alexander? As long as Alexander knew he had one, it was the same thing. And even if Alexander knew he didn’t have one, he knew Alexander wouldn’t crook him. Or what if he did? It would be interesting.
But it wasn’t any kind of craziness like Strange had shown with his $7000. Winch wasn’t crazily taking his $12,000 and blowing it, on a bunch of parties and a ritzy hangout for a bunch of fuckheads who would never appreciate it anyway.
Along Luxor Main Street, almost empty now at 3:00 a.m., compared to earlier in the night, the soft Southern spring breeze had taken over the city as well as the country and in the parks the buds were out on the trees and cracking into leaf. Winch walked along it, looking at his watch. There were still servicemen and their girls abroad, or lonely men in uniform alone, meandering along Main Street, or down the hill on Union where Main crossed it in a T. The influx of servicemen in the past weeks had been enormous. But everything was closed. Winch wished there was a joint open, or even a hashhouse, where he could waste an hour before going home to the apartment. Carol would be getting up at four, to go home. Winch had been doing this kind of thing more and more lately, to avoid having to go to sleep beside Carol in the apartment when she was there.
It was hard on him, physically. All the fatigue. But he could not stand having her wake and hear him talking through his nightmares. He didn’t like her waking him out of them.
But all the after-hours joints were scattered, hidden away out in the lowlife residential areas of the town. There weren’t any down in the downtown section. Mostly they were places that sold barbeque, which he could not eat any more, little joints, run by blacks, where you could get beer, and which sold pints and half pints of bootleg out in the back under the branching trunks of huge old elm trees.
Winch no longer had much drive to go to places like that. And Carol did not like them. Standing in front of the Peabody, he decided to walk home to the apartment. It was only ten blocks. If he took it easy and walked slowly, he could do it without much discomfort. And Carol would just about be getting up when he got there.
Winch had been getting more and more of this breathlessness lately, but had not told anyone about it yet. Carol was the hardest one to fool. Especially if they had sex together. Which was just about every day, if Winch got up to the apartment soon enough. The high, open, outside staircase up to the apartment was giving him more trouble now, too. He had to stop twice now, to breathe, when he climbed it. If Carol was with him, he pretended he was looking off at the scenery, which was certainly beautiful enough to stop for. Fortunately Carol hadn’t been with him that night.
Sitting in the beer hall after Strange had left, with the Wurlitzers blaring out conflicting tunes, Winch had pushed back his chair and got to his feet.
He favored his assembled stripers with his grin. It was running through his mind that he would love to drop a couple of hand grenades into those screaming jukeboxes. They were really the world of the future, it suddenly occurred to him. Chrome, and pipe, and plastic, and whirling iridescent lights, and jarred, canned music. To soothe the souls of men as they went to fight and die against other men, equally rabid and intent on saving their own canned tunes. Pho-o-o-ey-y-y! He wanted to shout it aloud. But he made himself hold back.
He wanted to stay, too. But he had promised Carol he would take her out to a nice dinner tonight.
“Well, gentlemen. Much as I love your illustrious company. But, as usual, I’ve got a lot of heavy work to do tonight,” he grinned down at them.
“What’s up, Mart?” one of them bawled. “Got some heavy duty cunt lined up tonight?”
“Hell,” Winch said slyly. “I haven’t seen one of those in so long I don’t remember whether you play them sideways like a harmonica, or straight in like a tuba mouthpiece.”
It got a big laugh all around, and was a good point to leave on. Outside beside his car he stopped, standing straight up in the spring night for a couple of minutes, to get his breath. In a kind of desolate way he knew that soon he was going to have to go up and turn himself over to them again at the hospital, where they might decide to keep him awhile or not decide to, but he did not want to think about that at the moment.
Strange had been right about one thing, anyway. Winch was not in good shape. Strange had not said what he thought, but Winch had read it in his eyes. Landers’ death had hit Winch worse than he would admit to anyone, even to Strange.
Even to Carol.
One evening in town at the apartment he had broken down, and had tried to tell Carol about it. About all of Landers, and what had happened, and where he Winch had failed. She had simply stared at him. Then after a little while tears had come in her eyes. For him Winch. Not for Landers.
It had been a mistake. To talk to her. Perhaps he had not been able to communicate very well. But people like Carol didn’t really want to know that the Winches of the world cared. They preferred them to be tough and funny.
Anyway, he had learned enough so that he would never try to do it again.
She was waiting for him at the apartment when he got in, and pulled the little car up, and climbed those stairs. He waited a couple of minutes on the high outdoor landing before opening the door, to get his breath. But for some unaccountable reason he was feeling in much better shape tonight than usual. Maybe it was the glasses of wine he’d had.
In the beginning dusk off through the tall trees the spring was coming on furiously, like a madly galloping horse. People were out working in their yards and Victory gardens.
“I thought maybe you weren’t going to be able to come tonight,” Carol said lightly, when he’d shut the door. She had gotten herself all dolled up for the evening in a new spring dress he hadn’t seen before. Off behind her somewhere, in an unobtrusive corner, were sitting two lady’s suitcases, side by side.
“Are you kidding?” Winch grinned. She came to him and put herself into his arms, her breasts pushing against his blouse, and Winch felt the youth of her again, as he kissed her.
The kiss went on, and then further on, and Winch felt the old familiar ache in the back of his throat. But there was no way to possess a woman, really. Skin. Skin was as close as you could really get. Even the inside of the vagina was still skin.