The Collected Stories

  Tonight it developed that a reasonably good skate, a Miss Berger, was on duty until midnight, but that they’d have to watch their step after that because old Fosdick had the twelve-to-eight shift. Coyne did most of the talking, his chair tilted back against the tiles and his pajama pants hiked to the knee while he scratched a white leg. “Hell, I don’t think we got to worry about old Fosdick, long as we keep the noise down. She’s been pretty good lately.”

  “You want to watch her, though,” Costello said. “She’s all right as long as she thinks you’re scared of her, but she won’t take any crap.”

  “Well,” Coyne said, grinning over at Garvey and Lynch, “I guess our boy Costello’s the expert on that subject all right. Ha-ha-ha goddamn! Any of us tried raising the kind of hell he does around here we’d be on Report five times a week.” Costello chuckled, pleased, and swilled the beer around in his half-empty can. “Ah, it’s all in knowing the angles, lad. Some things can’t be taught, that’s all.”

  Lynch looked all alone, hunched on one of the toilet bowls in his faded pajamas, staring at the floor. He had eaten almost none of the supper, drank the coffee and nibbled at the cake that was for dessert, that was about all. Garvey was trying to think of something to say, trying to get him to talk.

  “What’s the matter with old Lynch over there,” Coyne demanded. “He sick or something? Got a slight case of TB or something?”

  “I think he needs a new beer,” Garvey said. “That’s his trouble.”

  “By God, Professor,” Costello said, “that’s my trouble too.” And he went to the shower stall.

  By the time the first case was gone the party had divided into two groups; Mueller and several other old-timers at one end of the room, comparing reminiscences of hospitals they had known, and Lynch, Garvey, Coyne and Costello at the other end, talking about homosexuality. Garvey didn’t know how the subject came up; he hadn’t been listening to all of it. The beer had numbed his senses a little and he had removed and wiped his glasses several times before he realized they weren’t really misted; he was getting drunk.

  “—So when he said that,” Coyne was saying, “about coming up to his room, I figured ‘oh-oh, I don’t want no part of this,’ so I told him no thanks, I had to go, and I took off. But it was a funny thing, to look at him you’d never think he was any different from you and me.” It was the end of a long story, Coyne’s contribution.

  “Sure,” Costello said. “That’s the way a lot of them are. Look and act just like anybody else.”

  “That’s the kind you want to look out for,” Lynch said. “I hate them sneaky bastards.” He bore down heavily on the opener, piercing a fresh can, and the foam slopped over his fingers onto the floor.

  “No reason to hate ’em,” Costello said, shrugging.

  “Oh, no?” Lynch glared at him. He looked tough sitting there, his pajama top open across his chest, a tiny religious medallion swinging on its damp silver chain among the hairs. “Well, I do. I hate their guts, every one of ’em. Like that Cianci bastard, that attendant. ‘Member, Frank? I told you about him. Comes creeping around one night when I’m taking a shower, starts talking about how lonely the boys must get here, giving me that goddamned smile of his. “You lonely, Lynch?’ he says. I told him, ‘Look, Jack—you want to play games, you picked the wrong boy. Think you better keep outa my way from now on.’ That’s the only way to talk to them bastards. I hate ’em all.”

  “Oh, what the hell,” Costello said. “They’re psycho cases, that’s all.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Lynch said. “Oh, yeah? Well if you like ’em so goddamn much I’ll fix you up with Cianci.”

  Costello laughed softly. “Jesus, he gets nasty when he’s drunk, doesn’t he? I didn’t know you were one of these nasty drunks, Lynch.”

  “I want everybody out of there in five minutes,” Mrs. Fosdick called through the door.

  “Okay, Mrs. Fosdick,” Costello called back. “Just breaking it up now.” The old-timers began tiptoeing to the shower stall to deposit their empty cans.

  “Damn,” Coyne whispered. “We still got half a case in there.”

  “So?” Costello said, yawning and getting to his feet. “Go in and lay down for half an hour, then come back and finish it up if you want to. Me, I’m going to sleep.”

  “Well, Christ, we can’t let it go to waste,” Coyne said. “How about you, Garvey?”

  “I think I’ve had enough too.”

  “Lynch?”

  “What?”

  “Want to come back?”

  “Hell,” Lynch said. “I’m just beginning.”

  They filed out and felt their way to bed in the darkness. Garvey lay down gratefully and closed his eyes, but opened them quickly when he felt a sudden rush of dizziness. For a long time it was necessary to lie with the pillow folded tight under the back of his neck and concentrate on the dim white outline of the foot of his bed. Whenever he closed his eyes or lost sight of the outline, the sickly dizziness returned. His concentration was so intense that he scarcely noticed when Lynch got up, whispering to Coyne, and the two of them went back to the latrine. Sleep settled over him in uneasy, fitful waves, each heavier than the last. He fought them off at first and then gave in, like a man drowning.

  “—Garvey. Garvey.” It was Coyne’s voice, low and urgent. “Garvey.” Something was digging into his shoulder; Coyne’s hand. The folded pillow was a painful lump under his skull, and there was another streak of pain over his eyes. “Garvey.” His mouth felt swollen, too dry for speaking. “What time is it?” he said at last.

  “Jesus, I don’t know.” Coyne’s voice had a sharp whiskey smell. “About four, I guess.”

  “Four?” he said, tying to make it mean something.

  “Listen, your boy Lynch is in bad shape. We been out to a couple gin mills and he’s loaded. Sitting in the latrine, won’t take off his clothes. You wanna gimme a hand with him?”

  “All right,” Garvey said. He was fully awake now, moistening his lips. “Be right in.” Coyne hurried off and Garvey sat up painfully, holding his head. He found his glasses on the bed stand and fumbled on the floor for his slippers.

  The latrine lights shocked his eyes, but in a moment he made out Lynch, slumped on one of the chairs in his blue suit, and Coyne hovering over him. Lynch looked terrible. His face shone bright red, the mouth loose and wet and the eyes filmed over. “Come on, boy,” Coyne was saying. “Lemme take your coat off.”

  “Ah, lea’ me alone, lea’ me alone, will ya?” Lynch tossed his head and pushed Coyne’s hand away from his shoulder. “There’s old Frank. Wha’ya say, Frank? Listen, Frank, tell this sunvabish to lea’ me alone, will ya?”

  “Okay, Tom,” Garvey said. “Take it easy now.”

  Coyne took one lapel of Lynch’s coat and Garvey the other, but Lynch tightened his arms. “Lea’ me alone, gah damn it! Both you bastards, lea’ me alone!”

  “Keep your voice down, Tom,” Garvey said. They managed to work the coat down around his elbows when suddenly he stopped resisting, his eyes fixed glitteringly on the latrine door. Garvey looked up. Cianci, the night attendant, had just come in, blinking under the lights. The linen mask hung loose under his chin, revealing a childish mouth.

  “Well,” Lynch said. “Speaka the devil.”

  “Somebody speaking of me?” Cianci asked in mock concern, and then he smiled knowingly at Garvey. “Look, do you gentlemen want some help?”

  “No thanks,” Garvey said. “We can handle him.”

  Lynch glared at the attendant. “Thought I tol’ you keep outa my way.”

  “Oh, he’s really blind, isn’t he?” Cianci said, smiling. He looked very small, very blond and pale in his white duck uniform.

  “Thought I tol’ you keep outa my way.”

  Coyne told Lynch to take it easy, and Garvey said, “You better leave, Cianci,” but Cianci didn’t move.

  Lynch’s eyes were slits. “Get that gah damn smile off your face and get outa here! Get outa here, yo
u fairy bastard!”

  “Oh, now, Lynch,” Cianci said, taking a step forward, “you don’t mean that.”

  Before they could grab his arms Lynch whipped out of the coat sleeves, sprang across the floor and drove his big right fist into Cianci’s neck, just under the ear. Cianci crumpled quickly but Lynch’s left caught him in the face before he sprawled to the floor. Coyne had one of Lynch’s arms now and Garvey seized the other, pulling back on it with all his strength. In the unfamiliar shock of effort, Garvey’s arms and shoulders burned; the muscles fluttered in his thin, invalid’s legs. Lynch’s voice was a high child’s whimper: “Lemme go, lemme go—I’ll kill ’im, I’ll kill ’im—”

  Cianci groped to his feet, holding his red-blotched face, just as the blood began to course from his nose and dribble on his uniform. “For Christ’s sake, get out!” Garvey yelled, but he stood there, absurdly smiling through the blood, and said, “Let him go. It’s all right.” It couldn’t have been that he wanted to fight—it seemed almost that he wanted to be hurt. Lynch advanced on him with a terrible struggling slowness, locked against Garvey and Coyne but pulling them along, while Garvey’s slippers slid and scrabbled on the tiles.

  “Let him go,” Cianci said again.

  Lynch broke from Garvey first, freeing his arm with a lunge that sent Garvey’s glasses flying, and then he twisted away from Coyne. Whimpering and sobbing for breath, he seized Cianci’s arm, wrenched it, swung him around like a flail and sent him crashing against the wall. Then he fell on him, sank one knee into his belly and both blunt thumbs into his throat. They had just hauled him off when Mrs. Fosdick burst in, wide-eyed, and said, “What’s going on here?”

  For an instant they all froze under her shocked eyes, Cianci half-risen against the tile wall, Lynch squatting spread-eagle in the arms of Garvey and Coyne. Then Coyne sat down, Garvey picked up his broken glasses, and Lynch stumbled over to one of the toilets and began to vomit. “I’ve got to have a doctor,” Cianci said in a tight, breathless voice. “I think my arm is broken.”

  It was all over, then. The rest of the night, or morning, fell into the inevitable sequence of aftermath: the attendants taking Cianci away to the emergency ward; Mrs. Fosdick stumping around with her flashlight, ordering them to bed and then hurrying back to put it all into the Report; the hours of lying there in the dark—Lynch, lying quietly with a Kleenex wrapped around his raw knuckles and the red coal of a cigarette illuminating his eyes: “I’m sorry about the glasses, Frank”— and finally the turning on of the ward lights at seven o’clock, and Costello, scrubbing his eyes and looking around with a sleepy grin: “Jesus, what was all that commotion last night?” Breakfast, then, and the fresh starch, the early-morning efficiency of Miss Baldridge: “Lynch, that was the most disgusting exhibition I’ve ever heard of. You’d better start packing your things, because you can be sure the doctor will want you out of here and on the bus before noon.”

  But Lynch was not kicked out, to everyone’s surprise. The doctor gave him a severe dressing-down, that was all, and then went into a conference with the other doctors, after which Lynch was removed from the ward and placed in one of the quiet-rooms—single-bed cubicles reserved for the very sick—to spend the remaining weeks until he would be taken to surgery. Miss Baldridge was plainly dumbfounded, and assured everyone that Lynch had been inordinately lucky, that it was only because his case was of unusual interest to the surgeons, which was probably true. For days there were conflicting rumors on what had become of Cianci, the most authoritative being that his arm had been sprained, not broken, and that after treatment he had been returned to duty on a different ward. Coyne and Garvey were cleared from the Report by Lynch’s testimony that both had come into the latrine only after the trouble began, though Coyne made sure that everyone in the ward knew the real story, which he told with relish long after the men had stopped asking to hear about it.

  Soon, except for the fact that Lynch was gone, everything seemed just about the same in the ward. At least that was the way Garvey described it to Lynch whenever he went to the quiet-room to visit him.

  “How’s everything in the ward?” Lynch would ask, lying very flat and still. He seemed to lie like that for hours in his tiny room, reading nothing, looking at nothing, talking to no one except during these brief, awkward visits. All he apparently did was finger the cord of the venetian blind that dangled near his pillow; it was stained a sweaty gray from handling.

  “Oh, just the same, Tom,” Garvey would say. “Same dull business. Got a new man in your bed, an elderly guy. Coyne’s going out a lot lately; three nights so far this week.”

  “How about Costello? Still got that shack job of his? Car still come around for him all the time?”

  “Seems that way. Nothing’s really changed since you left.”

  And that, broadly, was the truth, since no one but Garvey could see any connection between Lynch’s departure and the fact that Costello had begun hogging the portable telephone again. Only Garvey, lying across the aisle and listening, could find it significant that he began each call by reciting a New Jersey telephone number ending in J, and that his half of the ensuing conversation, more careless and confident than before, contained sentences like “Be around tonight, honey?” and “Sure I do, baby; you know I do.” Lover Boy, they called him.

  Bells in the Morning

  AT FIRST THEY were grotesque shapes, nothing more. Then they became drops of acid, cutting the scum of his thick, dreamless sleep. Finally he knew they were words, but they carried no meaning.

  “Cramer,” Murphy was saying. “Let’s go, Cramer, wake up. Let’s go, Cramer.”

  Through sleepy paste in his mouth he swore at Murphy. Then the wind hit him, blue-cold as Murphy pulled the raincoat away from his face and chest.

  “You sure like to sleep, don’t you, kid.” Murphy was looking at him in that faintly derisive way.

  Cramer was awake, moistening the roof of his mouth. “All right,” he said. “All right, I’m all right now.” Squirming, he sat up against the dirt wall of the hole slowly, like an old man. His cold legs sprawled out, cramped in their mud-caked pants. He pressed his eyes, then lifted the helmet and scratched his scalp, and the roots of his matted hair were sore. Everything was blue and gray. Cramer dug for a cigarette, embarrassed at having been hard to wake up again. “Go ahead and get some sleep, Murphy,” he said. “I’m awake now.”

  “No, I’ll stay awake too,” Murphy said. “Six o’clock. Light.”

  Cramer wanted to say, “All right, then, you stay awake and I’ll go back to sleep.” Instead he let his shivering come out in a shuddering noise and said, “Christ, it’s cold.”

  It was in Germany, in the Ruhr. It was spring, and warm enough to make you sweat as you walked in the afternoon, but still cold at night and in the early morning. Still too cold for a raincoat in a hole.

  They stared toward where the enemy was supposed to be. Nothing to see; only a dark area that was the plowed field and then a light one that was the mist.

  “They threw in a couple about a half hour ago,” Murphy was saying. “Way the hell off, over to the left. Ours have been going over right along; don’t know why they’ve quit now. You slept through the whole works.” Then he said, “Don’t you ever clean that?” and he was looking, in the pale light, at Cramer’s rifle. “Bet the son of a bitch won’t fire.”

  Cramer said he would clean it, and he almost said for Christ’s sake lay off. It was better that he didn’t, for Murphy would have answered something about only trying to help you, kid. And anyway, Murphy was right.

  “Might as well make some coffee,” Murphy said, cramming dirty hands into his pockets. “Smoke won’t show in this mist.”

  Cramer found a can of coffee powder, and they both fumbled with clammy web-equipment for their cups and canteens. Murphy scraped out a hollow in the dirt between his boots and put a K-ration box there. He fit it, and they held their cups over the slow, crawling flame.

  In a little while they
were comfortable, swallowing coffee and smoking, shivering when fingers of the first yellow sunlight caressed their shoulders and necks. The grayness had gone now; things had color. Trees were pencil sketches on the lavender mist. Murphy said he hoped they wouldn’t have to move out right away, and Cramer agreed. That was when they heard the bells; church bells, thin and feminine in tone, quavering as the wind changed. A mile, maybe two miles to the rear.

  “Listen,” Murphy said quietly. “Don’t that sound nice?” That was the word. Nice. Round and dirty, Murphy’s face was relaxed now. His lips bore two black parallel lines, marking the place where the mouth closed when Murphy made it firm. Between the lines the skin was pink and moist; and these inner lips, Cramer had noticed, were the only part of a face that always stayed clean. Except the eyes.

  “My brother and me used to pull the bells every Sunday at home,” Murphy said. “When we was kids, I mean. Used to get half a dollar apiece for it. Son of a bitch, if that don’t sound just the same.”

  Listening, they sat smiling shyly at each other. Church bells on misty mornings were things you forgot sometimes, like fragile china cups and women’s hands. When you remembered them you smiled shyly, mostly because you didn’t know what else to do.

  “Must be back in that town we came through yesterday,” Cramer said. “Seems funny they’d be ringing church bells there.”