trouble. Sometimes he wished something had.
But grown men did not get down and lick women’s cunts. That was just as much a perversion as being a fag. It was sick in the head. The truth was he had never even seen Linda Sue’s pussy wide-open. Or closed for that matter. He’d seen her naked. But my God, what would Linda Sue say, if he asked her to let him see her pussy wide-open? Or asked her to let him lick it? He couldn’t imagine it.
The trouble with women was when you had had them you still hadn’t had them. He had had four, and hadn’t had any. He was right back where he started before he came up here, only now he was lonelier than he was before.
While Landers was off with Frances Highsmith, he told somebody to tell Landers he would be back, and went off down to the setups bar off the lobby before they closed it at midnight, and sat by himself in a corner with a bottle.
The place was jammed with servicemen drinking. And of course with women. But no matter how many women there were, anywhere, they were always more servicemen, lonely, looking. The bar had them all the way from bald grizzled old Navy chief petty officers in whites with hash marks all the way up to their shoulders, to boys in the ill-fitting unworn uniforms of the newly drafted. Strange felt more at home here with them.
Once, upstairs—it was while he was lying on the way-station bed in the sitting room waiting with his fourth friend of the day—he had looked around at everybody standing and drinking and shouting and singing; and suddenly the mud-weary, eye-baggy, scared platoons of the company appeared before him in ghostly form, slogging away at the swampy jungle of New Georgia. And briefly, crazily, Strange wished he was back with them.
You had to be crazy to wish you were back in a place like that.
But as he sat in the downstairs bar and drank more and more in the midst of the uproar, that was where he wished he was. With a kind of horrified, aghast longing, he pictured their faces one by one, all of them more sharp, more detailed, more clear, than any of the faces he had seen since. Or before.
When they locked down the bar at twelve, he took his bottle and went back upstairs to collect Landers and go back out to the hospital.
He didn’t collect him, of course. Landers was still making out, or flirting, with one woman after another. As the night wore on and people dwindled away, finally there was left only a tight hard-core little group of drunken male singers, with whom he and Landers sang drunkenly for a while, all the old songs. Nobody in the hotel ever complained about noise, to anyone’s knowledge. At five-thirty with dawn coming up across the plains in the east they left to go back and sleep just enough to sober up before morning rounds. In the taxi Landers gabbled and gabbled about all the women he had fucked.
Two days later, from Curran, Strange had the deposition of his surgical status. The upshot of it was that Curran simply did not know what to do. It was possibly the best news Strange could have been given, if he had selected his own.
Curran switched on the little light screen and put the X-rays up for him to see.
“See where those knots are? All ligaments and tendons in there. Very ticklish. I don’t honestly know if I can do it for you. So I’m not recommending the operation. You will have to decide if you want it done.”
“And if I don’t?”
Curran shrugged. A strange quiet smile came over his face. “Then I’ll recommend you for a disability discharge. That won’t set too well with Maj Hogan and Col Baker. But they can’t overrule me.”
“And if I do want it?”
Curran shrugged again. “I won’t promise. If it works, you’ll be fit for limited duty, or even full duty. If you’re lucky. So I guess it all depends on whether you want to stay in the service. You’re a thirty-year man, aren’t you? If it doesn’t work, you won’t be any worse off than you are. You’ll have about the same partial use of the hand. But the two middle knuckles will be partly frozen in a slightly different way than they are now. It’s up to you to decide.”
“Are you trying to give me some