and across the lobby, they were able to see the MPs and some medics leading the battered Navy group out from the bar. The old chief in his bloody dress whites was on a stretcher, out.
“You don’t think I really hurt him, do you?” Landers whispered anxiously in the crowded elevator.
“No,” Strange said. “He was just knocked out.” Strange was still laughing, and still breathless. Suddenly his eyes glinted meanly. “And what if you did?”
“He was the one who took the chair,” Landers whispered. “Just like that. Without so much as a by your leave. But I wouldn’t want to hurt him.”
Fortunately Strange had already given Annie a key and the girls were in the suite waiting. And immediately there were all the breathless, laughing recapitulations of battle. Everybody had a viewpoint and story of his own to expound.
Landers came out as the unquestioned hero, but Landers was not taking part. He sat off by himself quietly, nursing his ankle, ministered to by Mary Lou who brought him drinks. He kept popping his knuckles and said nothing. “Let them learn something,” he would mutter to no one every so often, “let them learn something.” The knuckles of his right hand had been seriously barked but he would not let anybody doctor them. “You must have hit teeth somewhere,” Strange said happily.
Very shortly after, the four other old-company men and their girls came back in, and the stories had to be told again.
“I tell you,” Annie Waterfield said, “I never saw anything like it. It was all so fast. After you left, that tall soldier? Who warned you against the MPs? He went over to them where they were pickin’ up that poor chief petty officer in blues, and tryin’ to bring the old one to, slappin’ his face, and he told them who you all were.”
“What do you mean, told them who we were?” Strange said. “He didn’t know us.”
“He figured it out because of Marion’s cane and your hand plaster. You don’t want to mess with them, he told those sailors. Those are overseas men from the hospital, who’ve been wounded. Don’t ever fuck with them. They’re all crazy. That’s exactly what he said. Someone asked him how he knew, and he made this awful grin and said, ‘Because I’m one of them.’ Then he pulled up his pants leg, and showed them his artificial leg.
“It was just awful. Terrible.”
“Maybe he’s seen us around the hospital,” Strange said. “But I’ve never seen him. Have you?” he asked Landers.
Landers only shook his head. “No.”
“What did you mean?” Annie Waterfield asked him, “when you kept hollerin’ Pay?”
“Hollering Pay?” Landers said. “Pay?”
“Yes. Every time you hit somebody you kept hollerin’ Pay! Every time, Pay! ‘Pay, you sons of bitches! Pay, pay, pay!’ ”
“I don’t know,” Landers said hollowly. “I don’t remember saying that. I don’t know what I meant.” He accepted another drink from Mary Lou.
But he thought he did know. It was easy to say it was because of the booze they had put away. That they were drunk. But Landers knew there was something more. Something inside him. Aching to get out. There was something in him aching to get out, but in a way that only a serious fight or series of serious fights would let it get out. Anguish. Love. And hate. And a kind of fragile, shortlived happiness. Which had to be short-lived, if he was going out of this fucking hospital and back into the fucking war. It had just built up in him.
There was no way on earth to explain it to anybody, though. Not without sounding shitty. There was no way to say it.
It had been building up in him ever since that episode on the train with the Air Force sergeant, on his trip home. It was in his fight with his father over the medals. In that time he had tried to talk to Carol Firebaugh and failed so abominably. It had grown and built in him at an even quicker pace, since his awful boo-boo he had made with Prell.
Landers thought that, probably, it had been building in him even longer. Growing. Ever since he was sitting on that damned evil hilltop in New Georgia, with all those other weeping men with the white streaks down their dirty faces, watching the men below in the valley whanging and beating and shooting and killing each other, with such stern, disruptive, concentrated effort.
Anguish. Love. And hate. And happiness. The anguish was for himself.