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