made him a real pervert.
For the first time in what seemed a very long time, lying in the cool bed, between clean, smooth sheets, with the hump of Frances Highsmith’s sleeping ass under them beside him, Strange thought about the old company’s mud-hungry platoons, still out there, still fogging it, still sweating, still dying.
Nobody, until he had been out there with them, could appreciate sheets. And clear, clean water flowing out of a tap, on demand. Or the smell of a woman that wasn’t really his, sleeping next to him.
Strange wondered what they would say, if they ever found out that their old mess/sgt, Mother Strange, was a cunt-eating pervert.
Strange felt very undeserving. He was afflicted with a terrible guilt. But the guilt wasn’t sexual. It was military. Or, maybe it was both. He could no longer tell.
Finally, having decided nothing, he rolled over on his side and went to sleep, replete. More replete, more fulfilled, than he could remember ever having been in all his life.
To think that all those years, he had . . .
The next morning just at dawn (he had left a call downstairs in the lobby) Strange hoisted himself, and joggled Frances awake just enough to say good-by, and took off for the hospital and the regular reveille. It was still the prime guiding principle in his life.
At morning rounds, when Curran told him they would take the cast off in a day or two and see how successful they had been, Strange wondered if the surgeon, looking at him, could tell he was a pervert.
BOOK FOUR
THE CAMP
CHAPTER 2
MART WINCH HAD BEEN at Camp O’Bruyerre three weeks when he first heard Marion Landers had been fighting people and was in trouble because of it. By that time winter finally had set in, it was the first week in December, and Luxor had had its first cold and its first light snow.
The word on Landers came to Winch via a telephone call from big Jack Alexander at the hospital. Landers had gotten into a fist fight with an injured, wounded 1st/lt, had beaten him up in the post recreation hall, had then proceeded to have a violent altercation with Maj Hogan, the administrative chief, in which he had threatened and verbally insulted the major, and then had gone AWOL for five days.
Landers was now under ward arrest, Alexander said. Maj Hogan was preferring charges, on all four counts. The 1st/lt had declined to prefer charges. But Hogan’s charges would be enough to get Landers a special court-martial and a three to six months sentence.
If Landers had not come back on his own, and instead had been picked up by the MPs and been brought back, he might easily have drawn a general court.
“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?” Winch said, in a kind of exasperated bawl.
For a second he let his eye go to his office windows outside which so much was going on at the moment.
“I dunno. Nothing,” Alexander said. “Nothing at all.” His clipped, hard, thickened voice came over the phone in exactly the same way his blue eyes fixed you. Winch had a sudden wild vision of his hard-edged turtle’s mouth, eating its way up the phone mouthpiece crunch by slow, ruminative crunch. “He’s one of your original bunch of boys, aint he? I thought you’d want to know.”
“Wait a minute,” Winch said. “Don’t hang up. What is there I can do about it? What does your Col Stevens say?”
“Col Stevens,” Jack Alexander said, very slowly and very precisely, “aint said anything about it.” He did not say “his” Col Stevens, this time, Winch noted. “I don’t know he even knows about it.”
“He must know about it,” Winch said. “If Hogan’s preferred charges.”
“I suppose he must know about it. Yeah,” Alexander’s voice said. “But he aint said a thing to me.”
“Do you think it would be worthwhile to talk to him?”
“I don’t have an idea.”
“Well would it be bad, if I talked to him?”
“I don’t see how it could do Landers any harm. But I don’t know.”
“Now what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Winch cried. He was getting frustrated. Here was supposed to be one of the most important men the US Army in the middle area of the United States was supposed to have. A man who could get done just about anything he wanted done, the word said. A man who was supposed to be making deals and money right and left and backward.