is coming. We simply can’t not invite him.”
It was clear to Prell Strange had enlisted Landers to help him, about Winch. And from the way his heartbeat speeded up in his ears Prell could tell his face had gone white. Strange knew how much Prell admired and respected Landers’ opinions. “Well, just keep him away from me,” was all Prell said. “Keep him at the other end of the room. Or I’ll brain him with a chair leg.”
Strange looked relieved. “He aint going to cause you trouble. Nobody believes that stuff he said.”
“No thanks to him,” Prell said. He felt frustrated. Suddenly he gripped the rubbered hand wheels of the big-wheeled chair, and rolled himself back and forth a foot or so, repeatedly and furiously. Back and forth, back and forth.
It was much more difficult to go in a taxi, rather than in the ambulance. In the ambulance they had had the big back door to slide him in, and a cot for him to lie on. Prell discovered this right away, at the front gate, before he even got out of the folding wheelchair Maj Hogan had so reluctantly and ungraciously provided.
Landers and Strange were able to get him out of the chair well enough, but then one of them had to let go of him to fold up the chair. At this point the cab driver, when he saw what was going on, leaped out and came running around the cab, following his paunch like a train following a cow-catcher, to help.
Together, the three of them got him into the front seat beside the meter and got the folded chair into the back beside Landers and Strange. Back behind his steering wheel, sweating and puffing, the driver shook his head. “Jesus! What you guys won’t go through to get drunk and get laid.”
Beside him, Prell was sweating too. But from pain, rather than exertion. He agreed with the driver wholeheartedly. He had no more business here than he had in a pole-vaulting contest, Baker was right. The four extra days of therapy had helped, especially in loosening up his knee joints, but he was in no shape for this. If it had not been for Landers and Strange witnessing it, he would have given up on the spot and asked to be taken back.
All he could do was keep his teeth clenched, and his lips pressed tight together over them. Mainly it was his knees, which were bent and compressed in the short space of the seat-well with its meter, but his thighs ached, too. As if he had been an hour with the therapist. He noted the driver giving him uneasy looks from time to time, as the cab rolled along through the Luxor streets Prell had never seen before. In the ambulance, the only other time he’d been out, he had been lying flat.
It was fall now in the Southland of Luxor and the big maples were just beginning to turn. In the huge city park men ambled along the fairways of the golf links swinging their clubs, and young people strolled under the big trees. In the poorer Negro sections and poorer white sections men and women sat quietly on the ramshackle porches, or on the grass of their yards. Every house, even the poorest, had trees. At one spot they passed a high school football field surrounded by trees. On it boys in uniforms scrimmaged and bawled at each other and threw forward passes or punted the ball.
Prell tried to smile with his clenched teeth at the driver. “Hurtin’ you, hunh?” the driver said, and reached down under the seat and brought up a pint bottle of whiskey. “Here.” Prell risked relaxing one of his fists which were pressed down into the seat on both sides of his buttocks for support and took a slug of the raw whiskey that burned his nose and throat and made his eyes water but felt marvelous. He was afraid of the whole thing turning into some kind of nightmare.
He had one more bad moment getting out of the taxi, and another in the elevator. The elevator came the nearest to becoming the nightmare. It was small, and slow, and they had to drop the chair’s leg supports in order to close the door. There was only room for himself and the black elevator man. By the time they reached the eighth floor Prell’s bent knees seemed to have been in the closed space for a century.
But once