shaved with the lieutenant commander’s wet razor. He was sure the lieutenant commander wouldn’t mind. Then he came back out and made another bourbon and water.
But after a while alone in the room, the bone-white loneliness was stronger than ever. And with it came the sense of guilt, and the wild rage. He felt he had not earned all this. But at the same time, he did not want to go back. He dressed and left and went down to the bar to drink. But before he did, he went to the state package store off the lobby and bought three bottles of bourbon and left them and the key with the Negro bell captain. He gave the bell captain his name.
When he showed up at the hospital snack bar in his official uniform of bathrobe and pajamas, after reporting back in, he found that several of the guys from the old company—as well as a number of others—already knew about Martha—Marty. The autographed cast was impossible to hide. The leg of the pajamas had had to be split too, and the red of the lipstick showed up brightly. She had done the same thing to Corello’s cast, when he first arrived.
“She’s a great blow job.” Corello, the Wop from McMinnville, grinned. “Did she try to get you to eat her pussy?” A couple of the others who knew her laughed.
“Any broad’d ask me that I’d break her goddamn jaw,” Alvin Drake the tall boy from Alabama growled.
Landers looked at all their faces, and lied. “No. She didn’t. Why?”
Corello hooted, and then laughed. “She asks everybody. Or nearly everybody. But nobody admits they did. I certainly didn’t.”
“Well, she didn’t ask me,” Landers said. All of the others laughed.
“You’re the only one,” Corello grinned. “She’s a great blow job, all the same.”
They knew everything about her. It was true that she came from Montgomery. It was not true that her fiancé had been shot down in Africa. She didn’t have a fiancé. And never had had. One of the men who was not from the company was from Montgomery, and knew her and her family. It was an excellent family, apparently. Apparently she never went with the same man twice. And she apparently picked her men carefully. She had never tried to pick up Drake, for example.
“And she better never,” Drake snarled with an evil grin. “I can’t stand cunts like that. She’s a fucking pervert.”
When he could get away from them, Landers went into the big recreation center and flung himself down on an overstuffed couch to think about it. He had already noted that his night with Marty had made him even lonelier than before. All this other added on top of it made it even worse. Their coarseness made him sick.
The recreation center had been built as a basketball court and gym, with a theater stage at one end. When there were no basketball games, the demountable bleachers were taken down and furniture was strewn all around. Every night the folding chairs were put up on the court for a movie. After a while Landers got up from the couch and went over to talk to the pretty Red Cross girl in her cubbyhole with the Ping-Pong paddles and athletic equipment. Maybe it was at just that moment that he fell in love with her—or fell halfway in love with her.
Her name was Carol Ann Firebaugh. She was a Luxor girl, and was going to Western Reserve in Cleveland, where she was studying acting. In the summer she was a volunteer Gray Lady for Red Cross. And she had one eye, her right, which every now and then did not track quite straight. This coupled with her long, clean-lined legs gave her a sexual attractiveness that was almost insupportable. A great many of the other patients had noted her, too, but she liked Landers because he had gone three and a half years to Indiana at Bloomington.
Landers had been talking to her ever since he was let out into the hospital proper off his ward. Now he began to importune her steadily and stubbornly for several days until finally—on the same day when he first saw Strange after his return from furlough—she agreed to have a date with him outside.
Strange, when Landers saw him, was on his way to visit Prell.
CHAPTER 11
FOR THE FIRST FOUR days after his arrival Prell had done very little but sleep. Flat on his back and all trussed up again, there wasn’t that