San Diego. They’ve got the best men in the world there. If anybody can save your legs, they will. And they promised you your mother would be there to meet you.”
“Do you believe that? Anyway, the doctor told me yesterday there wasn’t any hope,” the boy said in a tiny voice.
This was an out and out lie, and Landers knew it. “I was here,” he said. “I didn’t hear him say that.” Usually when they changed his dressings, everybody stampeded like a herd of cattle out the narrow door. But at least once in a while Landers felt morally bound to stay and pretend he did not have an olfactory nerve.
“Well, he did.”
“No, he didn’t either, God damn it! I was here!”
“Yes, he did. You just didn’t hear him. Look. You’re the only college man in here. The only college man in this whole deck, probly.”
“I heard every word he said. Anyway, my three and a half years of college didn’t do me much good. Not for this. No good at all. I’ll send the ward boy to you,” Landers said, and swung around and fled.
He could not flee quite fast enough, on crutches. The boy’s cursing followed him. Then it changed to crying again. Landers felt anyone would agree the kid was going beyond all code rights.
He signaled the Army medic ward boy, who shrugged irritably but put down his comic book. Landers commenced laboriously to struggle up the steep, iron, ship’s stairs. Climbing them could be seriously dangerous, to a man on crutches.
He came out on the long glassed-in Main Deck. It had no open deck forward like the Promenade, and was deserted of troops now. Usually it had half a dozen poker games going on the deck, down its long perspective. Landers swung himself over to an opened glass and stuck his head out into the sea breeze.
For a while the sea air was enough. It took a little while for even a sea breeze to blow that awful smell out of the back of your throat. For a moment he wrestled with himself whether he had been cruel with the Air Force boy. Where did responsibility end? To your fellow human being?
But it was not the kid that had driven him up on deck. Something else had done that. When the news passed that home was sighted, a terrible reaction had seized him. An evil, awful depression. The worst thing was that he did not know what it represented, or what caused it. Also, it was totally unanticipated. Yesterday he would have bet all his unpaid back pay, which was considerable, that home landfall would have delighted him.
Now he stared at it, the faint, blue coast. From the ship’s side he could only see dimly a very short length of it. Then it faded swiftly into invisibility to the south. And such a violence of not caring raged through him that he wanted to yell out loud. It was such a mammoth, massive country. He was realizing that fact for the first time, with the shock of seeing clearly something known vaguely before but never defined. It was so big that how could you care? And all his life Landers had been taught that to care was important, that caring was the most important thing of all, whatever it was you were involved in.
There was certainly no place for a twenty-one-year-old Landers there, in it. Not Landers, staring at it from a hole in the huge side of this big ship. This ship that was now carrying toward it such a load of human meat. It frightened him, frightened him down to an unreadable depth. And at the same time, like some deep contrabass figure repeated over and over, was the thought that he did not deserve it, this return to safety.
Two men passed by behind him. They had come down from the Promenade Deck. One of them clumped along in leg plaster, his walking iron ringing on the metal deck. Their presence broke Landers’ concentration.
“Hey, Landers,” one of them said. “Thinking about all that homegrown pussy we’ll all be shafting?”
Landers only waved. He did not trust himself to speak. He saw that the second man had plaster on his arm and body, the bent arm held out rigidly and horizontal from the shoulder in the case. There seemed to be so many arm and shoulder cases like that on board. Perhaps they were just more conspicuous.
The men went on.
Over the sea the coast did not