Whistle Read online

  We were like the dim early human who watched his mud hut destroyed by lightning and created God to explain it. Our God could be likened to a Great Roulette Wheel, more than anything.

  We had thought the God looked warmly on us, or at least our company. Now it seemed the Wheel was rolling the other way.

  There was nothing to do about it. As superstitious men, we understood that. That was part of the rules.

  We could only not step on the crack, not walk under the ladder, try not to let the black cat cross our line of advance in front.

  But it was difficult to accept, without fear. That the old company could change so completely. Become the home, the family, the company of some other group. It was about the last thing we had left.

  “Well—” one of us said, and cleared his throat massively. It sounded like a shotgun fired in a barrel. We all knew what this man meant, too. He did not want to pursue it. Otherwise, might not some of the bad luck rub off?

  “But all four of them at once,” someone said.

  “Do you think one of them might get shipped here?” someone else said.

  “If we could get Winch here,” one said.

  “Yeah, it would be like old times,” another said.

  Anyway, we could get some inside scoop firsthand,” someone said. “Instead of letters.”

  “Speaking of letters,” another said, and got up. “Speaking of letters, I guess we might as well get on with our chores. Huh?”

  At once, two or three men got up with him and moved away toward a couple of clean tables. Almost at once, two other men followed and joined them. Paper, pens, and pencils appeared, and post cards, envelopes, and stamps.

  In the sweet, reassuring, late-summer slant of Southern sun which exploded in a dazzle below against all that white, they began to write the letters that would pass the news on to the other hospitals across the country. Some wrote with their tongues sticking out of their mouth corners.

  The rest of us went on sitting. There was curiously little talk for a while. Then there was a sudden wave of signals for more coffee. Then we went on sitting. Most of us stared at the white walls or the white ceiling.

  We were all thinking about the four of them. The four of them could legitimately be said to be almost the heart of the old company. Now those four were making the same strange trip home. We had all of us made it. It was a weird, strange, unreal voyage. We had made it either on the big fast planes, or on the slow white ships with the huge red crosses on their sides, as these four were doing.

  We sat there in our demiworld of white, thinking about the four men making it as we ourselves had done. We wondered if those four were feeling the same peculiar sense of dislocation, the same sense of total disassociation and nonparticipation we ourselves had had.

  CHAPTER 2

  WINCH WAS LOAFING in his cabin when the word passed that Stateside landfall had been made. Some breathless hysterical trooper stuck his head in, bawled out the news, and rushed away.

  At once it seemed the whole ship was galvanized. Winch listened to steps running back and forth across the transverse corridor outside. His four cabinmates put down their cards, and began tightening their bathrobes to go on deck.

  They were all staff/sgts or above in the crowded cabin. Morning rounds, about which the day was strictly centered in Army hospitals, and which on this Godforsaken meat wagon were only a grotesque formality anyway, were over. They were free to do anything they wanted for the rest of the day. Winch watched them, and did not move. He arbitrarily had decided he was not going to take part. Nor talk about it.

  “Aint you coming, Winch?” one of them asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, come on,” one growled. “It’s home.”

  “No!”

  Winch swiveled his head toward them. He did not really know which one had spoken. They were all strangers anyhow. He flashed a freakish kind of cannibal’s flesh-hungry grin at them. “I’ve seen it.”

  “Not like this time,” one said, and gestured at his other arm encased in plaster, “not like this time.” The plaster went up to and around the shoulder and held the arm out at right angles above an aluminum frame. The uncovered hand looked purple.

  “Oh, leave him be,” one said. “You know how he is. You know what he’s like. He’s a goofy.”

  They traipsed out, dragging themselves, two of them leg-wounded and hobbling, all four of them moving slowly with the caution of damaged men. A goofy. It was the kind of reputation he had tried to establish with them. It was the kind of reputation he had tried for years to establish everywhere.

  Them gone, he stretched out in his berth and, alone, stared up at the smooth underside of the berth above. He had no desire to go on deck and look at the American coastline.

  Home. Home, they’d said. It did not mean anything to him. Could it really mean something to them?

  We all of us feel the same way at some point, he told himself. All of us who knew anything. Home could get to be very unreal. Besides, it didn’t seem fair, to us. All of us being so lucky. Getting to lose a leg or an arm or an eye and come back home out of the fire to all the bars and pussy. While the others, the healthy ones, had to stay out there and try to live and breathe in the smoke.

  Winch felt for his worn musette bag and unfastened the catches and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and brought it up to him. He told himself not to drink from it. He told himself he was not allowed. Then he uncapped it, and took a long, hot double swallow.

  Well, so long out there, you! Toast, you fuckers!

  He dipped the neck of the bottle in salute of his toast. If booze was a poison, a particular poison for him now, it was sure one hell of a marvelous poison.

  This thing of reputations. It was peculiar. People were always talking about command presence. They said, either someone had command presence, or he did not have it. They said, if you did not have command presence, you could not learn it. A lot of bullshit.

  A new word for it, which was really a very old word for it, was beginning to be popular again after five hundred years. An old Church word out of the Middle Ages, charisma. You either had charisma or you didn’t, and if you had it you could do anything you wanted, demand anything, and people would follow you and obey you.

  What people did not understand about command presence was that it did not come from the inside but was imposed upon some object person, from the outside, by the followers themselves. They wanted something to look up to. They wanted someone to tell them what to do. Command presence was created by the eyes of the commanded. A land of massive human conspiracy. Maybe it also existed in the eyes of foolish commanders. But no smart commander believed it. He merely utilized it. Hadn’t he been doing it himself for years?

  Winch sighed and put one hand behind his head. Winch had been one of the charisma people, one of the “stars” of his Division for years. So much so that he was known in other Divisions, across the Army. What he had learned from it was that all celebrities were alike. They were a secret club of thieves. They recognized each other on sight, and they never attacked each other in any depth. The club’s secret password was a look of shrewdness in the eyes with you, a look of complicity. They never talked about charisma. What Winch had learned from charisma people, from being one, was that charisma people were a race, a den, a nest of Super-liars.

  When you learned that, it took away everything. It took away the satisfaction and it took away whatever had given you the drive in the first place. It made it all worthless. And ludicrous. It put you right back down there in the barnyard, looking like—and smelling like—the rest of the livestock. The livestock you had wanted to avoid being one of.

  And he was supposed to be his own company’s hero. Damn them, damn them, Winch thought suddenly and savagely, God damn them. They weren’t worth the turds to put in a sock and thump them over the head with. Why should he give a damn about them?

  The bottle was still sitting on his chest. He let the hand holding it slide away down
over the berth edge and put it away.

  God damn their souls, cannon fodder was what they were. He couldn’t be expected to keep them all alive forever, could he?

  Winch raised up on his elbow and stared through the open door, across the passageway. Across the passageway was what had once been the ship’s main lounge. There was your cannon fodder.

  There were easily several hundred of them. All the chairs and tea tables had been removed and replaced with hospital beds. In ranked rows. Here in the one huge room were the serious cases which needed constant attention. White-jacketed figures moved among them under the high ceiling. Here and there a medic squatted, supervising the giving of glucose or plasma from a glass jug hanging on a white stand. The room had not been repainted, and all its gay gilt and vermilion and mirrors stared down on all the slow quiet pain.

  Only four of Winch’s company were on board this trip, four including himself. And only one of them was in there in the lounge.

  His first look at the main lounge had made him weak in the stomach. We all of us feel that way when we first see it, he thought. It made such a clear, concise picture of the cost for you. The only ones of us who didn’t notice the lounge were those who traveled in it, and only those who traveled in it failed to notice the smell it gave off.

  Apparently the news of landfall had passed that way, too, because a murmur was fluttering weakly across the lounge. Many of the reclining figures had raised up in their bandages. It was an eerie picture. Some of them had their entire heads bandaged, as they peered about. Winch went on staring at them, rapt. The smell from it was almost insupportable.

  Man-stink. How used to it he had gotten over the years. And all its various flavors. What was that word? Effluvia. Sweaty male armpits and smelly male feet. Socks and underwear. Fetid breath. Uninhibited belches and farts. Ranked open toilet bowls and urinals in the early morning. It mingled with the smell of toothpaste and shaving soap from the row of washbasins all down the other side.

  And now he could add a new one. Suppuration. Suppuration and granulation. The sweet foul smell of injured flesh trying slowly, painfully to heal itself down there under the lymph-stained bandages. It diffused itself throughout every part of the big lounge, and overflowed its doors. It would stay in his nose with the others the rest of his life.

  Which in the case of Mart Winch might not be too fucking long. If he didn’t take care of himself. He wasn’t supposed to drink. He wasn’t supposed to smoke, either. Defiantly, he reached down for the musette and pulled the bottle up and had another, and lit a cigarette.

  Neither gesture helped. He was still standing at the same junction as before. A night junction. Trailer trucks whammed by. Nobody stopped. How unmanly could you get, here at the end of the string? Where there wasn’t any audience. An aging, pitiless, tough, old infantry 1st/sgt, looking desperately everywhere for a shot of pity. It was laughable.

  Hell, he wasn’t even wounded. He was only sick. An unaccustomed hollowness opened up in him at the word. Shit, he had never been sick a day in his life. Under the hollowness, the booze seeped through him its insidious, seductive, golden-honey, poisonous message of sunshine and good will.

  He looked over again at the lounge. He only had one of his people in there this trip, thank God. That fucking Bobby Prell.

  He wanted another drink. But this time he drank water, from a loose uncoupled canteen in its canvas cover that was lying under the berth.

  “You’ll get over the dengue fever,” Col Harris had told him. Col Harris was the Division Surgeon. He had come out into his jungle tent hospital personally to see Winch. “Everybody does. Though it’s painful.”

  “Thanks a lot, Doc,” Winch had growled.

  It was the dengue that had brought him down. Like a green-ass recruit, he had fainted dead away across his makeshift desk.

  “And you’ll get over the falciparum malaria,” Doc Harris said. “That’ll take longer. It’s the worst kind. You should have reported it, Mart.”

  Winch had managed to keep his malaria secret for over two months. Lying in the hospital field cot with his bright red, swollen palms and the rash of dengue all over him, he had been through the first bone-breaking fever, the twenty-four-hour euphoria, and the second fever period. He felt terrible.

  “Okay, Doc, okay. What the hell? What the hell? So?”

  Doc Harris had begun to tap his prominent front teeth with the eraser of a fresh long yellow pencil. Fresh long yellow pencils were a thing of his.

  “I’m afraid there’s more, Mart,” he said. “You’ve got high blood pressure.”

  Winch for once had no answer. Finally, he laughed. “High blood pressure? Are you kidding?”

  “And I would guess a pretty serious case of it. Usually, fever makes it go down. They’ll check it out down the line after we ship you out. But I’m pretty sure. If I’m any judge, they’ll find you’re suffering from what we call primary hypertension.”

  “What’s that?”

  “High blood pressure,” Doc Harris said. “Just what I said.”

  He came back in a couple of days and they talked about it more. Winch could move around a little bit by then. But Winch was feeling peculiarly unmanned, lying there in his cot. Why did intelligent men feel the need to measure everything by physical vitality? But they all did.

  “You’ve had it with the Infantry, Mart. You’re going to have to watch your diet. Must not drink. Must not smoke. Don’t drink coffee or tea. Don’t get overexcited. If I could, I’d put you on a salt-free diet right now. I certainly can’t send you back up.”

  “Christ, that sounds great,” Winch said. “Like some old lady’s school for girls. Coffee and tea.”

  “I sure can’t send you back to any line outfit,” Doc Harris said.

  “I’m a lucky man, huh?” Winch said.

  “How old are you, Mart?”

  “Forty-two. Why?”

  “A little young for hypertension.”

  “So?” He certainly did not feel lucky. Only half of you wanted to go. The rest wanted to stay, and felt a failure. Ashamed, and guilty, for leaving. No matter how badly you were sick or shot up. All of us, Winch thought. “Just what is this disease, Doc?”

  Hypertension? They did not know everything about the disease, that was the truth. It was one of those usually bland diseases whose course could not be measured easily. You could have a heart attack or stroke tomorrow or you could go on living till you were eighty. In Winch’s case it was Doc Harris’ opinion that a constant very high intake of alcohol could be a lot of the cause. That, and smoking. But there had been some interesting research on effects of alcohol recently.

  “What a fucking joke,” Winch said bitterly.

  This was not to accuse him of being an alcoholic. No alcoholic could hold down his job. But his alcoholic capacity was a legend. How much did he drink a day?

  “Yeah. Some legend,” Winch said.

  How much? Half a bottle? A bottle?

  “Easy,” Winch said staunchly.

  “A bottle and a half?”

  “Oh, sure,” Winch lied. “If I can get it.” The truth was he didn’t really know.

  How much did he smoke? Two packs a day? Three? In any case, Doc Harris predicted that once he had recuperated, and gotten rid of these fever ailments, they were going to find his blood pressure shooting way up.

  Winch only nodded. For the first time he could feel somewhere in himself a beginning to give up. It was like hanging onto a high window ledge by your fingertips and feeling your fingers begin to straighten. In one way, a vast relief. Every cripple feels that, finally, all of us, he thought.

  “You really mean I’m really through.”

  “I’m afraid so. In the Infantry.”

  That was how it had turned out. Winch had known Doc Harris for over six years. Harris pretty well knew his stuff. He predicted it exactly. The high blood pressure had mounted. The stranger doctors down the line were more secretive and circumspect about it with him. But that was the upsho
t of it

  Apparently their theory was, Do not tell them anything you do not have to and you will not frighten them. Winch had very little use for the bulk of the medical profession.

  That was why, shrewdly, he asked Doc Harris about it all one time more before he left.

  Death usually occurred from congestive heart failure in the fifties. That was assuming it was fairly well contained and there was no heart attack or stroke. On the other hand, long survival was not at all a rarity. Congestive heart failure was a gradual failure of the heart. It became enlarged and feebler, and the pulse got faster. Finally this caused a congestion of fluids in the body called edema. In the final stages the lungs themselves filled up with fluids. It accounted for death in about 50 percent of the cases. It wasn’t so much a disease as a condition. And in that sense, it was incurable. But still there was a vast extreme of difference in life expectancy running from a few years to several decades. “I’m trying to tell you that very likely you can still live a long time if you take care of yourself,” Doc Harris said.

  Winch had listened intently. We all of us did that, when it was our own personal diagnosis, and our own prognosis, he thought briefly. It was at that point that you felt distinctly peculiar. Like the man in the movie standing up before the judge. While the solemn judge, after an excellent breakfast, pronounced word by slow word some horrible sentence on you, for having done some damned thing or other.

  “There is a lot to be said for clean living,” Doc Harris said.

  “Clean living!” Winch exploded. “Sure. Okay, Doc, look. You’ve explained it all to me. I understand all about it now. Why don’t we just forget this talk we’ve had? And why don’t you just mark me fit for duty and send me back up there to my company? Huh?”

  “You know I can’t do that,” Doc Harris said angrily. “I swear I don’t understand you, Mart. Most of the people around here are bucking their heads off to get shipped back home to the States, and can’t.”