were connected to each other and to the center by strings of brick-porticoed concrete walkways. The sheer magnitude of it was disheartening.
At the outer extremities two new ward buildings were in the process of construction. Here and there a few spindly young trees stood weakly on the flat levelled expanse of new dirt and scant swatches of sparse grass struggled to make themselves a lawn.
Inexorably, the convoy turned into it led by the commanding officer’s jeep, between the brick columns that bore the name KILRAINEY ARMY GENERAL HOSPITAL, and Landers’ heart sank. Though he did not know what he had been expecting. Some shrewd, rich citizen who knew a senator had made himself a deal for a piece of no-good land on the edge of town. Some contractor (perhaps the same rich citizen) who knew a congressman had made another enormous profit building a hospital for the government on it. Landers would live in it. Once again, Landers felt cheated.
Landers was in almost as bad a way as Prell. If he had less physical pain, he suffered a much greater depression. The outsider-ness he had been afflicted with since his wounding, the sense of being all alone, had not diminished with the disembarkation on American soil. If anything, it had been enhanced. The impersonal way they had been handled and shipped off reinforced it. On the train, because of his crutches he was not allowed to leave the car he was assigned. The constant vibration of the train’s passage caused his ankle to swell in the cast. About all he could do was sit or lie in his berth and look out the window and brood. Salt Lake City. Denver. Omaha. Brood over all the beautiful and unbeautiful places in this great country of his, this great United States of America. Where he did not belong. Over the Sierra Nevada, down onto the Great Basin’s deserts, on through the Rockies and their emerald valleys, on across the hot dry Kansas plains. Reflect on the fact that in all of them there was not a single living soul who gave one damn whether he was alive or dead, including his own family back in Indiana.
Landers was also well aware that if he could have found one person who did care, or pretended to care even, he would gladly have punched them as hard as he could in the face with all of his strength. This didn’t make any sense, even to Landers.
That was the state—and the place—in which Johnny Stranger had found him on the morning of the second day, as the train came down into the desert of the Great Salt Lake.
Strange was far and away the best off of the three, Landers felt. Strange’s legs were in good shape. His hand was giving him no especial pain. He could travel up and down the train at will, without being restricted to one car. It was Strange who had discovered Prell in one of the hospital cars at the rear, and brought back the news that Prell was in a pretty bad way. Strange said Prell’s legs were giving him so much pain on the train that he was half-delirious, and did not want to see or talk to anyone, including Strange and Landers. Strange could also say with authority, since he had been everywhere on it, that 1st/Sgt Mart Winch was not even on the train at all.
Landers felt badly about Prell. But under the circumstances, with his own distress and despair, he did not have much emotion to expend on Prell. He was much more concerned about the fact that Winch was not on the train, because he had hoped to talk to Winch. Talk about himself and his problem. The four or five times he had been alone with Winch, he had not even been able to mention it. The trouble was, there was no easy handle with which to grasp it and present it. It was not as if he were physically crippled and had lost a leg, say, or like Prell, was in danger of losing a leg. Now, in lieu of Winch, he began to look at Strange as a possible receptacle.
Landers felt he had to talk to somebody, and there was about Strange the air of a man who might be receptive. But in the end there wasn’t really any choice. It was either Strange, or nobody. And Landers at twenty-one still had faith that in talking about things you helped them.
He broached