Free Whistle by James Jones Page B

that one more three-year hitch would do it for them. They’d be able to leave the Army, and give Linda Sue her restaurant.
    Then the Japs had arrived in December, with their sneak attack. But the two thousand bucks was safe at home with Linda. And Linda was working and adding to it. She was also getting the biggest pay allotment Strange was allowed to send her, to add to the rest.
    Strange had never told anybody in the company about the restaurant. Something about leaving the Army, and particularly about leaving the company, made him too uncomfortable. A couple of times he almost had told Winch. But Winch’s reaction to the earlier news that he was getting married stopped him. Winch had hooted and howled and pranced around the orderly room, and roared with laughter and sneered at him with insulting contempt. It was the nearest he ever came to an open falling out with Winch.
    He knew of course that Winch was married and had a wife somewhere. Or was divorced. Although apparently nobody else knew it. But back at Fort Riley Strange had seen the tall, long-necked, broad-hipped woman, Winch’s wife, walking around the post. And the fact that Winch had not brought her to Wahoo with him indicated that something had happened to them. So once again he had given Winch the benefit of the doubt and made allowances for him.
    Strange was aware that his reluctance to mention the restaurant was unusual. That the idea of quitting the Army for good embarrassed him and left him feeling uncomfortable. Sighing, he stood up straight again from the open window-port, his hand hurting. Most of the coast watchers were gone now. The ship was moving farther out from shore, and soon even the high mountains behind the coast would be unnoticeable.
    The constant clenching and unclenching of his hand had caused a dull, deep ache in his palm, which had spread all across the hand, then up into his wrist and on up through the wrist into his forearm. He would have to ask the medic for a pill to sleep tonight.
    In six months he could be out of the Army, if he played his cards right. This war was going to last a lot longer than that. Six months in the hospital, an operation or two, wasn’t so very long. With his mustering-out pay, plus all his back pay and allowances, plus all the money Linda had been making working in the defense plants around Cincinnati, they could open the restaurant right there as soon as he got discharged. And get in on the wartime boom with it.
    But the thought depressed him. At the same time that it made him both happy and glad, it depressed him.
    And it hurt him physically, in his gut, to see Prell all trussed up that way. Prell was one of the people who should never be laid up like that. And yet Prell was one of the ones who would always get hurt the worst, and the most often, in his life. He was too young to know that, yet. Or maybe he was just learning it, now.
    How old was Prell? Twenty-three or -four. Strange was twenty-seven.
    Getting hit wasn’t so bad. As long as you didn’t get killed. It only took a second, and you didn’t really feel anything. It was all that time afterward, that it took you to get over it, that really did you in.
    After a last look out the window-port, Strange turned away and headed toward the iron stairs, thinking he ought to get to sleep, if he wanted to get up early and go see if there was anything he could do for Prell.

CHAPTER 5
    T HEY CAME IN JUST AT six o’clock. Behind them the sun was lowering in the west. It turned everything in front of them a reddish gold. The great red bridge with its great bellying bight of cable and flimsy-looking roadbed suspended under it, visible from miles away out at sea, was golden in the sun. So were the hills at both ends of it. It was indeed a golden gateway into America, its twin supports towering up. Time seemed to hang as the ship slid along, homing to it. Facing it, tough grizzled old troopers with years of service broke down. Restrictions limiting the open