“You don’t look so bad.”
Landers looked down at himself. “I’m pretty messy. Well, what do I owe you, Frank?”
“Nothing. There’s no fine or anything.” He hesitated. “We would have left you at home. But you know old Jeremy. He wouldn’t accept you. You’re not going to hold it against him, are you?”
“Against my father?” Landers said. “Call me a cab, will you, Frank?”
“I know the Landers,” the chief said, looking perplexed. “There’s a cab right outside, Marion.”
Landers shook hands all around. “Thank you for a pleasant stay.” In the cab the driver kept grinning back into the rearview mirror so broadly that it was obvious he must already know the story. Landers only winked at him.
Back at home he showered and shaved and put on his other uniform. Then, with his mother pleading and moaning behind him, and trying to hold him back, he telephoned his father at his office.
“Listen, you son of a bitch,” Landers shouted into the instrument, “I just want you to know—”
“Don’t you hang up on me, you son of a bitch!” he raged at the phone. Then he slammed it down and turned on his mother. “All right then, you tell him. You tell him I said to forget he ever had a son named Marion. Jeremy Landers has no son named Marion. You tell him that. And I’ll forget I ever had him for a father. You understand? You got that?”
“Marion,” his mother wailed. “Marion. Please, Marion, please.”
“Go to hell,” Landers shouted and grabbed his canvas satchel.
At the station he had to wait an hour and a half for the next train. He waited on the green bench out in front, alone. Landers could hardly wait to get back to Prell and Winch and Strange and the others. He wondered how Prell’s legs were doing. Also, they were going to have to do something about Strange’s hand some time soon.
On the train the ride back did not seem nearly so difficult. Maybe the six days using it had helped the leg. Landers was even able to negotiate the steel plates between the cars and go to the club car for some drinks. As might be expected, it was full of drunken servicemen. He sat on the couch with his drink in his hand, thought about his family briefly, his ex-family, and could hardly wait to get back to Luxor.
When he reported back in to his ward, four days earlier than necessary, he found that Mart Winch had been taking out the girl Carol Firebaugh every single night since he had left.
BOOK THREE
THE CITY
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS HARD to make any real friends in a hospital ward. As their medical status changed, men moved from one ward to another. There was a constant shuffling process going on that kept moving men away from each other. Men who made friends with the men in the beds beside them would look up and find them gone, replaced by newer strangers.
John Strange found this had a tendency to throw men back for friendship onto other members of their old outfits, if they were lucky enough to have any around. If they didn’t, they just sat around and brooded and withdrew. Just when they should be starting to forget their old emotional attachments and build new ones.
Strange had watched the beginning of Winch’s romance with Carol Firebaugh at first with amusement, then with irritation, and finally with downright envy.
Like everyone else who went in and out of the big basketball-court lounge of the recreation building, Strange had lusted after the sweet youthfulness and shy grace of the Red Cross girl who handed out the Ping-Pong balls and paddles, and had wanted to fuck her. But being a properly married man just returned to his wife from overseas Strange put it out of his mind. Still she was, as some forthright, bathrobe-clad Government Issue had said, eminently fuckable.
Some female thing about her every movement said so, and her shy self-awareness of her sex in front of so many male eyes underlined it. Her one kooky eye that kept looking off in a wrong direction half the time made her even sexier. For some odd screwball reason.
Strange had paid attention when she seemed interested in Landers, and thought that all right and in keeping with the fact that they were both college people. But when in Landers’ absence she attached herself to Mart Winch twenty years her senior, Strange’s mind balked. When he saw them together in town up at the Plantation