The major cleared his throat again. "Well, the policy is not to allow any leaves or passes until a man has finalized his potential operative surgical status."
"As far as I'm concerned, Sergeant-uh?-Stranger?-Sergeant Strange here has a finalized operative surgical status. At least for two weeks. So will you see to it, Doctor Hogan?"
"Yes, sir, Doctor. I will." Hogan's voice was stony. "But I'm sure the colonel realizes it's unorthodox. You come see me," he said to Strange, "when your wife arrives."
Strange kept his eyes down. Though he knew he had made an enemy. "Thank you, Major, sir. My wife'll appreciate it as much as me." Col Curran's eyes were still laughing.
But then Linda Sue hadn't come. She had telephoned instead.
Taking a personal phone call on a crowded ward, especially a call that carried an embarrassing message, was as frustrating as it was unpleasant. You couldn't really say anything you wanted to say. There was a small office with a phone in it on each ward, but it was kept locked and only the ward intern and the nurse had the keys. So Strange had to take the call at the ward boy's desk.
She could not get away from her job, was the upshot of Linda's call. The job was in a defense plant making precision parts for 105 howitzers and they wouldn't let her off. Yes, she'd told them it was because her husband had just returned from overseas, wounded. They still wouldn't let her off. Strange thought her voice sounded distant and sullen. And it occurred to him suddenly that she had sounded a little bit that same way, too, when he called from San Francisco. But he had been too elated to notice. Something picked stiffly at the back of his mind. Well, why didn't she just quit the damned job? he demanded. She could get another easy enough; in wartime. No she couldn't, Linda came back. The good jobs were not all that easy to get. She had taken special training for this one. If she quit, she would have to start all over at the bottom in something else. Besides, she had made friends there. She liked the job. Strange suddenly stopped talking. He was aware without looking that faces were turned toward him on the ward. Besides, quite suddenly, he could see her point, her side of it. There was no reason to suspect her of anything. Well, what if he could get himself a two-week convalescent furlough, would that please her? There was a pause. Of course it would, she'd be overjoyed, Linda said, did he think he could? "I don't know," Strange said. "But I'll try. I'll call or send a wire when I find out." She said she loved him. He said he loved her. In a low voice. Then he hung up and walked away toward his bed trying not to show any unhappiness on his face. It was then he decided to go straight to Curran. He, Strange himself, on his own.
He knew it would make an even greater enemy of Hogan, but fuck the chain of command. He waited on the surgeon outside his little office next to the big surgery theaters. There were three of them. Curran came out from somewhere, whistling to himself with some deep satisfaction, his hands and the rest of him spotlessly clean. He was still in his "cutting" apron. "Ah, yes. Sergeant Strange, isn't it?" Yes, he could arrange to let him go. But for two weeks only. And he could not give the order. He could only recommend. Everyone was theoretically entitled to a month's convalescent furlough after getting back. But much depended on the situation at the moment. Some got a month, some got none at all. If Strange took two weeks now, he would probably not get two further weeks later on. Strange said he would waive that. Curran would want one more much fuller examination, would take him down to the therapy lab where they had machines to check the hand more thoroughly. Then he would recommend the leave. But during the two weeks Strange must use the hand as much as possible. Make himself use it. Pick up glasses, light cigarettes, pull change from his pocket. Things like that. Even if it hurt him. And it would hurt him, a lot. He smiled at Strange merrily, and pursed his lips again for whistling.
"Look at these hands," he said suddenly, holding them up. They spread themselves, at the ends of the slim muscled forearms, bespeaking in their shape and movement all the delicacy and reflexes that made them. "They're worth a fortune, did you know that." Curran grinned. "And no credit to me at all. I just happen to be the one to have them. Did you know I can't even go out and get drunk and get in a fight? For fear of hurting them?" He whistled a little, silently. "We're ghouls. Parasites. This war is a great boon to us. This war, and you people." He gripped Strange by the arm above the elbow, and smiled merrily. "But it's tough on you. We should show our appreciation occasionally. Strange, eh? A strange name, huh?" He laughed happily at his own joke.
In the taxi heading into town to the Greyhound station Strange could not decide whether he liked him or not. But at least, anyway, he told the absolute truth. He didn't try to doll it all up in phony propaganda about duty and service to humanity, like Hogan. Hogan had been furious, red in the face when Curran's recommendation came down approved by the head of Administration.
The big Greyhound station was jammed. Servicemen with or without their families, families with or without their servicemen, were in transit toward just about every point around the compass. Ranks of the big blue and white buses stood in echelons in their stalls, under the protective roofing. A loudspeaker's metallic voice intoned their arrivals and departures. Loading or unloading, or just sitting silent waiting on their huge wheels, their mass dominated everything, making the people around them insignificant and small. Heading mostly northeast toward Nashville, or into the Deep South for Birmingham, Atlanta, Montgomery, and Jackson, they rolled cumbrously in and out of the main entrance with clockwork regularity.
Both the Negro and the White waiting rooms were crowded, and both the Colored and White drinking fountains had lines waiting at them. The Negro waiting room was less crowded, and lacked the preponderance of uniforms visible in the White. Tired, sweating people crouched on their suitcases or sat on the dirty floor near the overcrowded seats. A jukebox in a corner blared out "Pistol Packin' Mama," competing with the loudspeaker. Born and raised in Texas, Strange was used to the separation of waiting rooms and fountains and accepted it as natural. But having been away overseas so long, the segregation made a bizarre pictorial effect on his eye. He paid for his ticket, fumbling the money because he was conscientiously using his bad hand, and sat on the floor with his back against a wall to wait.
Strange had often daydreamed about his homecoming. He had imagined himself returning carrying one of those sharp green folding airman's valises, full of uniforms, his other arm full of packages of presents for everyone. He had bought fanciful presents in Guadalcanal, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia and Australia, but they had all been stolen or lost or broken or just thrown away until now he had nothing. He had no suitcase. He had only the clothes he stood up in. A small zipper bag carried an extra summer uniform. He didn't mind. He was content, and sat against the wall waiting happily in the crowded steaming White waiting room, among the squalling babies and exhausted young mothers coming from or going to their husbands in the service.
Strange had traveled the Greyhounds all his adult life. It never would have occurred to him to try to go by train.
Anyway, the trains were hardly better.
The ride itself was a long half-waking nightmare of heavy-smelling bodies, paper-wrapped bologna sandwiches, swollen feet, toilet stops, beers, half pints of whiskey, oncoming headlights flashing uneasily over the sleeping faces in the darkened interior. Stopovers and changes late at night in Nashville and Louisville. He made the acquaintance of a young sailor in the seat next to his who was going home on leave from the Luxor Naval Air Station, before shipping out to the West Coast for duty in the South Pacific. When he learned Strange was just back from there, he plied Strange with an endless stream of questions. But it was hard to explain to him. Nothing was like or fit in with what the boy had already imagined. In the midst of describing the fleet base in Noumea in New Caledonia to him, Strange fell fast asleep back into his nightmare of paper-wrapped bologna sandwiches and swollen feet.
He was not sure the boy believed him, anyway. As the boy pointed out, he wore no ribbons.
But if the ride itself was a not entirely unpleasant nightmare, it was as nothing to the unpleasant nightmare he found in Covington when he arrived.
He did not know if it was his fault, or Linda's fault, or neither's. Maybe it was something that happened to every dogface who came home from overseas. But he had no genuine contact with any of them. They never paid any attention much to the newspapers and the battles that were going on abroad, for example. He could think of nothing else.
When he first arrived at the house (he had had the address, but no description or apartment numbers) it was midafternoon and he had thought there was nobody home. He had knocked and gotten no answer, so he sat on the front steps for two hours, waiting for somebody to show up, until one of the three people who were asleep in the house had waked up and come outside and found him. The three were all asleep because they were all working the night shift. One was Linda's paternal uncle, who owned the house, one was Linda's older brother who was 4-F, one was Linda's maternal cousin, the son of Linda's mother's sister, who had the top floor. All the others were at work, or already out, going to work on the swing shift, and that included all the adult females. Strange had sat with them in the kitchen while the three men fixed themselves breakfast (or lunch; or dinner) and asked him in their various-sounding drawls (two Kentucky, one Texas) how it was over there. Strange said it was all right.
One of them asked him what he had done to his hand, and when he explained he had been shot in it, they all wanted to see it so he showed it to them. After examining it, the cousin drawled, "That bullet sure didn't make much of a hole." Strange explained that it was done by a mortar shell fragment. But none of them seemed much interested in mortars.
It was about the same with the women, and the other males, when they all came home. The trouble was, they never all came home at the same time. It was hard to sort them out and keep any track of them, with all the coming and going. Not once, while Strange was there, was the whole family ever all together. In the kitchen some meal or other-breakfast, or supper, or noonday dinner-was always in process of preparation or was being eaten, and quite often they overlapped. So that, while those on the swing shift were at work, those going on night shift might be eating breakfast at the same time those coming off day shift might be preparing or eating evening dinner. All told, there were eleven working adults living in the house, and four children.
The house itself was a three-story frame structure belonging to the paternal uncle, on a shady street in Covington. The uncle and his wife had the ground floor and their oldest son, who was unmarried, lived with them. Linda's father and mother had the second floor and Linda and her unmarried older brother and her younger brother, who was still in high school, lived with them. The married maternal cousin and his wife had the top floor with their two children, a boy of four and a baby of one, and with them lived also the divorced female cousin, and her girl of seven. It was crowded. But since they all worked, and the two older children went to school, it was never actually overcrowded. Of course, now it was summer vacation and the two older children weren't in school. But they were generally outdoors in the daytime playing, or running around, and never came in except at night. The kitchen took the heaviest wear and tear, and sort of served also as the living room. The living room itself was the bedroom of the oldest, unmarried cousin. The dining room had been converted to the bedroom of the uncle and his wife.
In a way it was like separate apartments. Each family's floor was its own domain. Except, of course, they all had to use the same kitchen downstairs. When Strange asked why, since they were all working, they did not sell or rent this place and all get themselves separate apartments, it was explained that they were all saving their salaries. When asked what for, Linda's father and the uncle told him they were thinking of all pooling their combined savings and buying a big nice farm out in western Kentucky. When pressed as to where, they were vague and didn't know exactly where. Nobody had time to go out there and look, they were too busy working. Linda's father explained kindly in his sober, slow way and his Texas drawl that none of them had ever seen such a boom time in their lives, and that included the 1920s, and after the Depression they had all lived through, the point was not to spend but to work and save the money, and worry about spending it later, after the war.
Linda's kid brother, who was listening, chimed in here, to say that next year when he got out of high school he was going to work too and add his salary to the pool. He was already taking some night courses in machine work at an aircraft parts plant.
Strange was welcome to come in with them, Linda's father added in his slow way, if he and Linda ever changed their minds about having a restaurant. Strange, feeling a little as if someone had punched him in the back of the neck, and stunned him, did not know what to answer.
Linda's savings, of course, were her own. Her own and Strange's. Almost the first thing she did when she first saw him, after giving him a perfunctory kiss, was to take him aside and show him their bank book. They had a total of a little over six thousand dollars. She had a separate bedroom on the Darrells' second floor next to the two brothers who had another, and that was where she kept her bank book, locked up. She offered it to Strange almost as if it were some votive gift. One made in atonement. Perhaps for all he had suffered in Wahoo and overseas in the Pacific for so long. His allotment payments were part of it, of course. She had fixed up her bedroom with new chintz curtains and pillow covers, and a chair cover to match for the one overstuffed chair, when she knew he was coming. It was all very wifey. She had not been able to meet him at the Greyhound station, when he arrived, because she had been working the day shift. That night when they first went to bed together in the chintz-covered bed, it turned into a nearly complete fiasco. Right in midpassion, so to speak, Strange lost his hard-on and could not get it back.
Strange didn't know what was happening to him. He tried to mumble some kind of an apology. After a little while, when nothing happened, Linda Sue patted him sympathetically on the back and rolled over with her back to him and swiftly went to sleep. She had to get up early and go do the shopping for the house before going to her job at the plant.
Deeply troubled and humiliated, Strange lay awake beside her, and wondered fearfully what was happening to him. He had dreamed of this moment so long, and so many times, it seemed absolutely unbelievable that he would not be able to perform. When he thought of all the times, and of all the places-the slit trenches, the bomb hole shelters, the kitchen fly, out in the edge of the woods behind the encampment-that he had tossed himself off and dreamed of this moment, it was not possible that he could have failed to perform.
There were plenty of excuses. It was true she had not helped him any, but then she never had. He had always been the one to start things. Which was the way it ought to be. Only once or twice had she ever asked him to make love to her, in their whole married life. She had never been that passionate.
It was also true that the kid brother was asleep just beyond the thin wall in the next room. And that the parents were asleep in the room on the other side. But that would never have bothered Strange before. Something had happened right in the middle of it, all the excitement had gone away, and he found he was bored.
Lying in the bed, red with the humiliation, he squirmed under the covers. And thought of himself at the last of the company's Guadalcanal bivouacs, standing just inside the edge of the jungle, peering out through the screen of leaves at the sleeping tents in the moonlight, his throbbing cock in his hand, fantasizing this night with Linda Sue hot and all over him, clawing his back, shoving it up to him, groaning and gasping with her long-suppressed desires. That was not the way it had ever happened with them, but that was the way he always fantasized it. And under the covers he felt his hard-on coming back. Looking down from the pillow, he could see it slowly thrusting up the covers between his legs.
After a minute, Strange threw off the covers and grabbing a towel padded down the hall to the bathroom and locked the door and tossed himself off in the bathroom sink, fantasizing himself out there in the fantastic night jungle. After he orgasmed he cleaned it all up neatly, feeling weird, and disturbed. When he climbed back into bed, he found himself almost hating his wife for her closed-in lack of passion. He had never been able to draw her out of it. He was furiously angry with her. And he had to keep telling himself it wasn't her fault. But what had happened to him in eighteen months away, out there?
The second night was a great deal better. But then he had spent most of the day over in Cincinnati drinking beer. So he was a lot more aggressive, and less apologetic. For that matter, with all the men around the house, there was a great deal of beer always there, too. He drank a lot of that also. There was very little else for him to do, with her at work all day. Over in Cincinnati, it was as wild and high-living and open as it apparently also was in Luxor. Servicemen with money were everywhere, and a uniform-any uniform-was a ticket into the best hotel bars and the ritziest places. You didn't have to be an officer. Everybody loved you. Or said they did, as they took your money.
That night when they went to bed, he was conscious of how beery his breath smelled, but he didn't give a damn. And Linda Sue did not complain. Half drunk and with more than enough aggressiveness now, he thought suddenly that his wife smelled funny. It was as if he could smell another man on her. When he sniffed her breasts, her skin, he of course couldn't. But it made him uneasy. Anyhow, he performed. After that, he tried several times to get her to go out with him in the night, at least to a movie. She was always too tired, always said she had to get up too early to get to work. Her job seemed to have become an obsession.
They did talk some about their savings. Or rather Strange did. Linda seemed strangely passive about it. She no longer seemed so passionately desirous of a restaurant. When he suggested, just to see how she would react, that they should maybe put it all in with the family pool and go in with them on the farm, she only smiled at him, sweetly, a little sadly, and said that if that was what he wanted, it would be fine with her.
In the end he left four days early. He had never told them exactly how many days he had, that he had exactly two weeks. It was easy enough to tell them he had only ten days, and Strange could not stand the house any longer, with its constant comings and goings and the smells and agitation of meals always in preparation.
The four extra days he spent in downtown Luxor. He discovered a nonstop poker game in a third floor room at the ritzy Claridge Hotel on North Main Street, where he got himself a room and picked up four hundred dollars in the game. He spent almost all of it, drinking and running around, either at the Claridge bar or at another hotel, the Peabody, on Union Street. He avoided picking up any women, although it would have been easy. But he felt he owed it to Linda not to.
On the last day, at the very last minute, he reported back to Kilrainey General to find out what Col Curran was going to decide about his hand. And whether that Major Hogan had been able to cook up some bad news for him.
He did not feel he had been home at all.
CHAPTER 10.
LANDERS HAD HAD FOURTEEN days in which to start getting along without his new buddy Strange. In civilian life or at college, he might have sat in his room brooding and deteriorating and forgotten. That wasn't possible in the hospital. But he remembered their hours in the train car, and the uproarious semidrunken conversations, with a kind of grinding hunger.
When he finally did run into Strange, in the corridor outside the big recreation center, Strange acted as though nothing had happened, that there was no special bond between them, and seemed preoccupied.
As so often happened in Landers' life, he appeared to take his relationships with people much more seriously than they ever did.
In the meantime, during Strange's absence Landers had had his cast removed and a new one fitted. He had explored and gotten somewhat to know the huge labyrinth that was the hospital. He had had his first pass into Luxor and gotten himself laid-still with his cast on. And he had fallen in love-or fallen halfway in love. The girl he had fallen for was the dark, superb-legged, college-student volunteer Red Cross girl who handed out the games equipment in the recreation center. But it appeared he was not alone in this.
The removal of his cast was a near trauma. By luck he too had drawn young Col Curran. Curran, after studying his X-rays, decreed the removal of the old cast so he could get a look at the ankle, and the refitting of a new one. Landers had hobbled on his crutches with an orderly along the covered walkways to the orthopedics lab with its collection of huge scissors, big rolls of gauze and buckets of plaster of Paris. Since the first cast had been put on right after the operation while Landers was still under the anesthetic, Landers had never seen the ankle. When the lab orderly cut down through the length of plaster and the elastic stocking underneath with the big shears, and then cracked it open and worked it off, the sight that met Landers' eyes was about the most horrible he had ever seen.
The smell of it and the look of it together were enough to stultify Landers. The purplish foot had whole pieces of gray skin pulling away. The skin of the calf was scabby and flaking. The muscle of the leg had just disappeared, it was nothing but a stark shin bone covered with hanging skin. Near the end of this, attached to the bony clawlike foot, the ankle was a swollen red blob of contused bone. Landers was reduced to dumb shock. This was his own leg. It felt dangerously exposed and feeble, out of the plaster. Try as he would, he could not move it, at all. In any direction. He felt fragmented.
The lab orderly had apparently seen worse. So apparently had Curran, who came in a few minutes later, whistling softly to himself some unrecognizable tune. He picked it up, moved it a little this way and that while Landers inhaled sharply, put it down and said, "Well, you've got yourself an excellent job here." His happily cheerful mood was not at all in conjunction with Landers' mood. "Who was the surgeon?" he asked. Landers told him the major's name. Curran shrugged and smiled. "Whoever he is, he's got damned good hands." Then he told the lab orderly to wrap it right back up again and then get a new set of X-rays. This time, he told Landers, they would give him a walking iron. So he could get off the crutches. Then he left.
It was a great relief to feel the new cast go back on over the fragile, feeble member. Not only did it beg for the protective cocoon but he no longer had to look at it. The poor damned battered thing. The lab orderly chewed gum and had a way of cracking his gum with his back teeth while he worked. The wet plaster of Paris heated the leg uncomfortably as it set. The orderly explained that the walking iron he had worked into the cast could not be used until the plaster had set for twenty-four hours. So Landers would have to keep the crutches at least another day.
Landers was glad. He was so unstrung by the whole cast-changing operation that the crutches seemed like trusted old friends. He was so shaken that he was not sure he could make it back to the ward by himself. The lab orderly had anticipated this. They were often like that, the first time they saw them, he said. He had already called for an orderly to go with Landers. Back on the ward Landers lay down awhile, then gathered all his resources to make himself get up and go ask the ward nurse if he could not keep the crutches even longer. When Curran came through a little later, to look at some other patients, he heard the request, looked at Landers with narrowed thoughtful eyes, and okayed it. But only for three more days, he said; then Landers would have to start using the leg. Landers immediately became another of the partisans who adored Col Curran. But the next day, when Maj Hogan came through the ward checking new developments, he looked at Landers' chart hanging on the bed foot and ordered the crutches removed. It was only when Landers protested vigorously, and was backed up by the nurse, that he relented and left the ward furious over Curran's softness.
So it was still with his crutches that Landers made his first overnight pass into town. But he, too, knew he had made an enemy.
The pass was an automatic development, once he was all through with his surgical check-out. It was signed by Curran, but was okayed by Hogan. According to Curran, all Landers had to do was wait now, for the leg to heal. There might be a month, or six weeks, in the cast. Curran thought he would have very nearly full articulation in the ankle. And if it was the least little bit stiff, it would nonetheless be absolutely solid. In the meantime Landers would not even have to be at the hospital, except to be present for morning rounds at ten. When he had an overnight pass, he did not even have to do that. After the cast came off, he would have to start the therapy that would bring the leg back to normal shape. So, Curran grinned, he had at least three months to do almost nothing but play. "And Luxor is a great town to play in," he said.
This last was certainly true. All the same, Landers was of two minds about his pass. Col Curran's happy, hopeful prognosis for his leg was the basic cause of this. Even during the worst moments, when he had first looked at the fragile battered mess of his leg, a part of Landers' mind hidden away far at the back was saying with sly cunning, Christ! if it's this bad, they'll never he able to send me back to duty! they'll have to discharge me! He remembered the conversation with Strange in which Strange had suggested hopefully that perhaps he would be permanently disabled. Now, Curran's sanguine prognosis seemed to preclude that. So with the pass in his pocket, he swung out the big main door on his crutches to the cab rank outside to go to town with mixed feelings about all of it. About everything. There was a kind of wild rage in him, and half of him hated himself for the way his mind calculated.
As far as Landers was concerned, there were only two places to go in Luxor. In the few days he had been loose out in the hospital proper, he had already spent enough time in the snack bar with the six or eight other members left of the old company to have learned that. One was the Claridge Hotel on North Main Street, and the other was the Hotel Peabody on Union Avenue.
In the several days he had spent around the other members of the old company, drinking coffee or milkshakes in the snack bar, or loafing in the big recreation center, Landers had discovered what it was that had made the others all look so different when he first had seen them. So much like strangers whom he did not know that he hadn't recognized them. It was that they had all lost their sense of shock. All of them who were still here had been wounded back on Guadalcanal seven or eight months ago. They had never even seen New Georgia. And the peculiar numbness of soul that combat caused in everybody (which could be multiplied a hundred or a thousand times by being seriously wounded; and which carried with it its own kind of disclaiming innocence of new experience) had departed from them in the ensuing months at home. He and Strange and Prell hadn't lost theirs yet. And that was why he hadn't recognized them. They weren't shocked any more, and they weren't innocent any more. All that had been burned off. And in being burned off had left behind a kind of ashy residue on them that carried the sour, bitter, acid smell of furnace cinders. The kind his father used to call clinkers, and which as a boy it was one of his chores to shovel out of the furnace bottom during the long Indiana winters and carry outside and dump on the trash heap. The experience of recovering from being wounded had scorched out of them whatever innocence the experience of being wounded had given them.
Those that were going to be discharged were already discharged and gone (the lucky-or unlucky-bastards). Those that were left were all going back to duty, full infantry duty or some other. And they all knew it. And it showed on their faces. They were the ones who knew where to find the most whiskey, and the cheapest. Where to find the easiest and best girls, and the least expensive. Even freebies, if you were lucky. They were the ones who, with caustic grins, told Landers to go to the Claridge or the Peabody bar-if he had money. If you had money, those were the places to be.
Landers had the money. Although he had not written to his family, he had sent home to his bank account for $600 of the allotment money he had been saving since his enlistment.
The others, of course, didn't have the money any more. They had long since collected their eight months' or their ten months' back pay, and drawn their allotment payments, and spent them, and were now back on their regular monthly pay (less the combat pay) for their spending money. And so were reduced to the cheaper, less ritzy bars and dives. But the Claridge and the Peabody were the joints to hit if you had the loot, they said with their caustic grins.
The whole town seemed to have the same acerb, caustic grin, it seemed to Landers. The cab driver who drove him in from the hospital had it. The Negro doorman in his elegant though frayed hotel uniform, who helped him and his crutches through the revolving door of the Hotel Peabody, had it. The desk clerks and the soldiers and sailors trying to get rooms all had it. The man in the lobby package store had it as he sold him the bottle in its brown paper sack that he would need in the bar. It was the only way you could buy booze. The two barmen in the bar off the lobby, and all the drinkers at the bar tables, had it. The women, sitting with or without men at the bar tables with their own paper sacks, had the look too. It was 11:15 in the morning when Landers arrived but the time of day was not bothering anybody's drinking. About nine-tenths of the men drinkers were in uniform. There were all types and grades and service branches of uniforms. It did not take Landers very long to pick up a girl.
Usually, even as far back as high school, Landers had been excessively shy about approaching women. He always wanted to fuck them, and was afraid they knew this. This time, in the Peabody bar, he simply went straight up to a blonde girl sitting alone and asked her if she would like to have a drink. She said yes. It was only after he sat down with her, and she smiled, that he thought he recognized her as the blonde who had done the bumps and grinds for the truck convoy on the way from the station to the hospital. So he asked her. "You do some bumps and grinds for a convoy of casualties going out to the hospital a few days ago? On the street?" Somehow he knew she would know what the word casualties meant.
"How long ago was it?" she said with a rich Southern drawl.
Landers had to count. "Ten, eleven days ago?"
She shrugged, and smiled with the same white-white teeth. "I could have. It's possible. I don't know. Why?"
"Nothing," Landers said. "I was on it."
Her name was Martha-Lee. But she preferred to be called Martha. She worked for a big insurance outfit up the street, as a claims analyst. She was unmarried, she had come up here from Montgomery, and she loved Luxor and was never going to go back. Since it was a weekday, Landers wondered if she didn't have to be at work. He didn't mind buying booze but he hated to waste the time, if she did. A little amazed at his own temerity, he asked her. She had been thinking about going in, Martha said, but now she had about decided she wouldn't. She gave him her big white smile. Her mouth, Landers noticed suddenly, was really extraordinarily sensitive and beautiful. After about five drinks, he offered to buy her lunch somewhere. Martha said she did not feel like eating anything right now. He had not done anything about getting a room yet, Landers told her, but he would go and see about getting one, if she would wait right here, and they could continue drinking up in the room.
"You'll never get one," Martha said, and gave him her smile.
"What do you mean, I'll never get one?"
"They're booked solid. They always are by eleven. Or even ten-thirty. What do you think all those unhappy-looking boys are standing out there at the desk for?"
Landers just looked at her. "Looking for a room?"
"And failin' miserably."
Some sure instinct made him cover up, and hide his disappointment. He gave her back a grin he hoped was acerb and caustic, like all the other grins around. "You haven't got an apartment we could go to and drink, have you?"
"Not one I can take anybody to," Martha said, and smiled the white smile again. "This your first time in town on pass? It is, isn't it?"
"It's my first time on pass anywhere. For almost seven months." She put her hand over his on the table, and smiled. "Wait here a minute. I oughtn't to be very long. But if I am, you wait. Hear?"
"Okay."
It was more than a minute. It was more than ten minutes. He had time to finish his drink and pour them both another bourbon and water. And had time to drink his new one. He occupied himself with thinking about his sudden new finesse with women, wondering where it had come from. Then she was back still smiling her white smile, and handed him underneath the table a hotel room key with a big leather tab attached to it. Landers put it in his pocket and started to pay the check.
"Take your time," Martha smiled. "There's no hurry. It's not going to go away. Let's have another here, first. Have you already got a bottle?"
Landers shook his head. "Just this one," he said, and lifted the bourbon bottle in its paper sack from the floor by the table leg.
"Did you buy it at a package store just outside the bar in the corridor, at the top of the stairs down into the lobby?" Martha said. Landers nodded.
"Can you maybe buy another? Or maybe two?" Martha smiled. "We might need it."
Landers nodded. "Get it on the way out. Where did you get the key?"
"It's a friend's. Someone I know," Martha said. "Don't worry about it. It's perfectly safe. Nobody will be there."
"Fine," Landers said.
"What did you do to your leg, soldier?" she smiled. "Fall off a ladder?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. That's exactly what I did do," Landers said, and was suddenly reminded of a day when he had been carrying a message across the floor of the valley for his pet colonel. He had looked up to watch a platoon attacking the crest, and had seen a man turn and jump out from the side of the hill exactly like a man jumping off a ladder. A Jap hand grenade had exploded black, seconds later, at the spot where he jumped. He had watched the man get back up and start toiling back up toward the crest.
"I guess you won't be able to dance for a while, will you?" Martha smiled.
Landers shook his head. After they finished their drinks, and picked up the new bottles, they made their way down the steps to the lobby and straight across to the elevators. They rode up in an elevator packed with servicemen. Several of these, even ones who had girls, bent envious looks upon Landers.
"Hi, Martha," one of the men behind them said.
"Oh, hi, there," Martha smiled.
The room was a big, old-fashioned, high-ceilinged suite on the seventh floor. The windows were open and it was cool. In the bathroom big fresh white towels hung on the rack. In the open closet four neatly pressed Naval officer's uniforms were hung on hangers. The blues carried two-and-a-half gold stripes. Landers wasn't sure about Naval insignia but thought two-and-a-half stripes was a lieutenant commander. Pilot's wings were pinned over the pockets. Landers looked, but said nothing.
"Those are my friend's," Martha said. "He keeps this place by the week. When he's here, there are parties all the time. But he's not here very often. He teaches out at the Naval Air Station."
After pouring a drink which they did not finish, Martha wanted to autograph Landers' cast. This was not hard to do, since to get the pants on, the pantsleg had been split up the seam to above the knee. Making up her mouth afresh with her lipstick, she pressed her lip print to the cast and then signed under it. Martha-Lee Prentiss. Her hands strayed up his flanks to his shoulders. A few kisses made them both begin to pant a little. Martha insisted on going into the bathroom to take her clothes off. There was nothing quite as ungraceful-looking, she insisted, as a woman getting out of her clothes and all her gear. Landers did not argue. When she came back out, she had draped one of the huge towels around her. Drawing herself up straight like a model, she pulled it loose and let it fall to the floor. "There. Isn't that better?" Then she walked to the bed and threw it back and lay down.
"I'll let you fuck me-if you want-but you mustn't come in me," she whispered. "But what I really want is to suck you. I'm a cock-sucker. I'm a marvelous cocksucker. Did you ever go down on a girl?"
"Sure," Landers said. And while this was the truth, it was only just barely the truth. He had experimented a few times in college with girls as equally unknowledgeable and embarrassed as himself. He was having difficulty getting undressed because of the cast and Martha came from the bed and helped him. She helped him hobble back across the floor to the bed. "Your poor leg," she said. "Can you get on top of me? Or shall I get on top of you?" After a while she took her mouth off of him and whispered, "Do it up at the top more. Talk to me. Tell me I'm a cocksucker. Tell me I'm a marvelous cocksucker." When his loins finally exploded into orgasm, making his eyes go crossed, Martha had already come four times.
The second time around he put it inside her for a while. Then she instructed him, in and about how to go down on a girl. Landers didn't mind that at all. It was valuable instruction. After the second time, they went back to their drinks for a while. Later on that evening they ordered food up from room service. But they only stopped long enough to eat about half of it. Landers did not know about Martha, but he was catching up for many months of dry season. Late that night, just about when the early summer dawn was cracking through, Landers woke up in the dark to find a nude Martha weeping beside him.
When he put his arm around her, she leaned her face against his shoulder, and wet his armpit thoroughly with her tears.
"What is it? What's the matter?"