Whistle by James Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

allowed himself his first, luxurious drink. Nothing had ever tasted better in his life than the warm, gritty canteen water.
    Standing among the prone members of the taut-faced, sick-faced advance platoon—as if being wounded once, already, made him invulnerable to being hit again—he thought of leaving the rest of the canteen with them. They were not even one of his own platoons. But they had been without water since midmorning. He had only to wait to drink until he was back at the aid station.
    Wacky from the concussion and from shock and fear, half-laughing and half-blubbering, standing on the wounded ankle he was still too much in medical shock even to know he was hurt, the issue hung in the air in balance for a long moment. Then he took another drink, letting the water run out of the corners of his mouth luxuriously, and put the canteen away, back in its cover.
    A number of them were looking at him, but there was no envy of his water on their faces. Perhaps there was a small envy of his wounding. Mainly there was a general look of sympathetic distaste. They wanted him to go away. He had been wounded, lucky bastard, he should leave. And quickly. They didn’t want to look at him. They didn’t want to be reminded.
    Back on the hilltop he had sipped at the canteen until jeeped out, as most of the wounded around him were doing, while down below in the hot valley the waterless platoons bungled ahead.
    This was the scene that kept presenting itself to Landers in the hospital bed. His mind seemed not to include the walk out, or the medical officer’s examination, or the discovery of his mangled ankle. Only the canteen part. He would wake in the night under the dope and babble about it to the night medic on duty. Because, in his dream, the men of the platoon wanted his water, looking at him silently with beseeching eyes, and he, Landers, would not give it to them. The night medic could never understand what he was trying to say and would always bring him water, which he always refused to drink. When they stopped the dope, it went away and he had not thought about it again.
    Not until just now, that is, Landers thought. In his berth. On this reeking hospital meat boat, with the news that they had sighted home. He sighed suddenly.
    The two emplastered men had passed on along the Main Deck promenade going forward. Landers had pulled his head back in out of the breeze.
    From inside, framed by the edges of the big, square port, the piece of dim blue coast was like a living painting. It seemed some kind of terrifying panacea to Landers, capable of remedying all your problems, but at a terrifying cost that would leave you permanently crippled.
    The air inside was tranquil, quiet. Just outside the wind caused by the ship’s passage still blew, and if he stuck out his arm his bathrobe sleeve would flap wildly. But Landers did not want to stick his arm out. The air of the long, deserted corridor gave a sense of security that washed against the feelings which fluttered wingless flutterings inside him.
    He was just thinking of going to look up goddamned Mart Winch, just for someone to talk to, when a hallucination took him. Fixed him, the way a man is frozen by some kind of seizure.
    Vision, illusion, waking daydream, dementia, whatever, Landers suddenly found himself outside the ship and moving up and away from it in the air.
    He could look down and see the big red crosses on its white flank. There was no breeze now; the air was still. It was just as if a big helicopter was hook-lifting him away from the ship. Except there was no noise. Everything was silence. And he was hanging free and moving upward—until from a great height he looked down upon both the immensely diminished ship and a far distant shore.
    Below him, slowly, the white ship moved soundlessly—and, curiously, with no smoke plume smudging the air—on toward its distant goal across the gently heaving blue expanse, whose swells ran on and on before the ship to crash in