the ladder, try not to let the black cat cross our line of advance in front.
But it was difficult to accept, without fear. That the old company could change so completely. Become the home, the family, the company of some other group. It was about the last thing we had left.
“Well—” one of us said, and cleared his throat massively. It sounded like a shotgun fired in a barrel. We all knew what this man meant, too. He did not want to pursue it. Otherwise, might not some of the bad luck rub off?
“But all four of them at once,” someone said.
“Do you think one of them might get shipped here?” someone else said.
“If we could get Winch here,” one said.
“Yeah, it would be like old times,” another said.
Anyway, we could get some inside scoop firsthand,” someone said. “Instead of letters.”
“Speaking of letters,” another said, and got up. “Speaking of letters, I guess we might as well get on with our chores. Huh?”
At once, two or three men got up with him and moved away toward a couple of clean tables. Almost at once, two other men followed and joined them. Paper, pens, and pencils appeared, and post cards, envelopes, and stamps.
In the sweet, reassuring, late-summer slant of Southern sun which exploded in a dazzle below against all that white, they began to write the letters that would pass the news on to the other hospitals across the country. Some wrote with their tongues sticking out of their mouth corners.
The rest of us went on sitting. There was curiously little talk for a while. Then there was a sudden wave of signals for more coffee. Then we went on sitting. Most of us stared at the white walls or the white ceiling.
We were all thinking about the four of them. The four of them could legitimately be said to be almost the heart of the old company. Now those four were making the same strange trip home. We had all of us made it. It was a weird, strange, unreal voyage. We had made it either on the big fast planes, or on the slow white ships with the huge red crosses on their sides, as these four were doing.
We sat there in our demiworld of white, thinking about the four men making it as we ourselves had done. We wondered if those four were feeling the same peculiar sense of dislocation, the same sense of total disassociation and nonparticipation we ourselves had had.
CHAPTER 2
WINCH WAS LOAFING in his cabin when the word passed that Stateside landfall had been made. Some breathless hysterical trooper stuck his head in, bawled out the news, and rushed away.
At once it seemed the whole ship was galvanized. Winch listened to steps running back and forth across the transverse corridor outside. His four cabinmates put down their cards, and began tightening their bathrobes to go on deck.
They were all staff/sgts or above in the crowded cabin. Morning rounds, about which the day was strictly centered in Army hospitals, and which on this Godforsaken meat wagon were only a grotesque formality anyway, were over. They were free to do anything they wanted for the rest of the day. Winch watched them, and did not move. He arbitrarily had decided he was not going to take part. Nor talk about it.
“Aint you coming, Winch?” one of them asked.
“No.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, come on,” one growled. “It’s home.”
“No!”
Winch swiveled his head toward them. He did not really know which one had spoken. They were all strangers anyhow. He flashed a freakish kind of cannibal’s flesh-hungry grin at them. “I’ve seen it.”
“Not like this time,” one said, and gestured at his other arm encased in plaster, “not like this time.” The plaster went up to and around the shoulder and held the arm out at right angles above an aluminum frame. The uncovered hand looked purple.
“Oh, leave him be,” one said. “You know how he is. You know what he’s like. He’s a goofy.”
They traipsed out, dragging themselves, two of them leg-wounded and hobbling, all four of them moving slowly with the caution of damaged men. A goofy. It was the kind of reputation he had tried to establish with them. It was the kind of reputation he had tried for years to establish everywhere.
Them gone, he stretched out in his berth and, alone, stared up at the smooth underside of the berth above. He had no desire to go on deck and look at the American coastline.