The Dream Merchants Part 26

Joe nodded again.

"What's the matter?" Johnny asked nervously. He was beginning to sweat a little. "Cat got your tongue?"

Joe grinned at him. "I'm too scared to talk," he said. He raised himself to his hands and knees. "Come on kid," he said. "Let's break their a.s.ses!" And then he was running zigzag across the field.

Johnny huddled there for a second, then he followed him.

8.

He lay quietly on the bed listening to the music that came in the open window. His eyes were wide and staring, yet they saw nothing. He didn't turn them toward the window. He didn't want to see the kind of day it was, the sky so soft and blue, the sunlight so golden on the fresh spring green of the trees. With one hand he clutched the sheet that covered him to his chest as if he were afraid it would be torn from him.

The music stilled, leaving a quiet that echoed in his mind. Unconsciously he listened for the next tune. He knew what it would be, they always played it just when the bus was pulling out.

He reached for a cigarette on the little table next to the bed. He put it in his mouth and lit it. He drew deeply on it, waiting for the music to begin again.

The sound of voices came to him. They floated lightly and softly on the breeze. Men's voices. Women's voices. Nice words. Soft words. Tender and somehow gruff words.

"So long nursey, if yuh wasn't a looey I'd kiss yuh!"

A soft warm laugh and then the answer: "Go ahead, soldier, but watch that arm. Don't forget what the doctor said!"

Other voices. Men's voices. Man talk. "I coulda got in, bud. Honest. But then she had to go an' pull her rank on me!"

Disgusted agreement. "Yeanh. They only put out for officers."

The first two. His voice: "I'll miss you."

Her voice: "I'll miss you too."

"Kin Ah come back an' see yuh sometimes?"

A second's hesitation, and then the reply: "What do you want to do that for, soldier? You're going home!"

One at a time the voices faded away. For a moment there was a silence, then the roar of a motor being started.

His free hand tightened on the sheet. Now. Now it was coming. The music hit him like a wave in the ocean. It rolled over him until he felt he was drowning in it. It was loud. It was bra.s.sy. It was written to torment him.

"When Johnny comes marching home again, tra la, tra la."

He put his hands to his ears to shut out the sound. But the music was loud and it pushed its way past his hands. He heard the gears being meshed, the cries of farewell, and over it all beat the loud, pulsing, dissonant sound of the music.

At last the music died away. He took his hands down from his ears. They were damp with the sweat that had run down his face. He took the cigarette from his mouth and put it in the ashtray on the little table. He dried his hands on the bedsheet.

Slowly the tension seeped from him. His eyelids drooped and almost closed. He was tired. His breathing slowed. And after a while he slept.

The sound of dishes rattling in a tray awakened him. With the same motion with which he opened his eyes, he reached for a cigarette. Before he could light it, a steady hand held a match under it.

Without looking up, he dragged deeply on the cigarette. "Thanks, Rock," he said.

"I got your lunch, Johnny. D'yuh want tuh get outta bed to eat it?" Rocco's voice was as steady as his hand had been.

Instinctively Johnny's eyes turned to the crutches at the foot of the bed. They leaned against the bed, a constant reminder of what he had become. He shook his head. "No."

He lifted himself with his hands as Rocco straightened the pillow behind him and bolstered it so that it would support his back. Rocco put the little stand on the bed across his thighs. He looked down at the plate and then away.

"I'm not hungry."

Rocco pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down and looked at him. He took out a cigarette and lit it. He let the smoke out his nostrils slowly. "I can't figure you out, Johnny," he said quietly.

Johnny didn't answer.

"You're supposed to be a buggin' hero, an' yet you're afraid to get out of bed," he continued in the same quiet voice. "You're the same guy that charged a German machine-gun nest single-handed. They pinned a medal on yuh. In fact, two medals. Ours an' the Frenchies'." His voice filled with quiet wonder. "An' yet yuh won't get outta bed."

Johnny uttered one violent ugly word. He turned and looked at Rocco's impa.s.sive face. "Let them go walk on their friggin' medals. They gave 'em to Joe too, but it don't do him any good now. I tole yuh enough times that I didn't go alone. If I'da known Joe got it, I woulda quit right there. I didn' wanna be a hero."

Rocco didn't answer and they sat there silently smoking their cigarettes. Johnny was the first to break the silence.

He gestured toward the seven empty beds in the room with him. "When is the new batch comin' in?" he asked.

Rocco turned and looked at the beds and then turned back to him. "Tomorrow morning," he answered. "Till then yuh got a private room." He looked at Johnny speculatively. "What'sa matter, Johnny, getting lonely?"

Again Johnny didn't answer.

Rocco stood up and pushed his chair back. He looked down at Johnny. The sympathy that showed on his face was not apparent in his voice; it was studiedly casual. "Yuh could've gone with 'em if yuh wanted, Johnny."

Johnny's face froze into a mask. His voice was as casual as Rocco's had been. "I like the service here, Rock. I think I'll stay awhile."

Rocco smiled slowly. "This is a transient hotel, Johnny. It ain't my idea of a place to settle down."

Johnny squashed his cigarette in the tray. He looked up at Rocco. His voice was bitter. "You can afford to have your ideas, Rock. n.o.body's makin' you stay here, but if you do, keep 'em to yourself."

Rocco didn't answer; he picked up the tray silently and put it back on the little wagon. He pushed it toward the door of the room, walked back to the bed, and picked up the crutches. He looked at them and then turned to Johnny.

"We got guys here who'd think they was lucky if they kin use these. Get wise to yourself, Johnny. You can't lay in bed all your life."

Johnny turned his face to the wall, away from him.

Rocco stood there a moment. Something inside him wanted to cry. It had been that way ever since he came across Johnny lying in the little ditch where the machine gun had been.

A few yards away was Joe's body and in the trench near the gun were three dead German soldiers. Johnny was almost unconscious, but he kept saying over and over in a mad sort of delirium: "My leg, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds stuck it with a lot of needles!"

He knelt swiftly at Johnny's side and rolled him over. Johnny's right trouser leg was soaked with blood. He swore quietly to himself as he quickly cut the trouser from it and saw the line of perforations made by the bullets just above the knee. The blood seemed to pulse its way through the opening.

He cut a strip from his blouse and made a rough tourniquet, which stopped the bleeding. It was after that he first tried to move the leg.

He could still hear Johnny's scream ringing in his ears. It was a sound of pain and horror. It hung high in the air over the now almost quiet battlefield.

"Rocco!" Johnny had screamed in a sudden burst of recognition. "Don't take my leg off!" Then Johnny's body had gone limp. He had fainted.

Rocco had carried him back to the medical officer. He stood there while the medic shook his head. He watched while the medic cut the flesh away above Johnny's knee and exposed the splintered bone. He watched the doctor almost casually take the amputated leg and throw it on a pile made up of others and then draw the skin of the stump down as tight as he could over the raw flesh and st.i.tch it together, leaving only a small opening for suppuration.

It was while Rocco trudged along beside the stretcher as they took Johnny back to the small hospital after the operation that he felt Johnny's hand grabbing at his sleeve. He looked down.

Johnny's eyes were wide and staring at him. "Rocco, don't let them take my leg off. Stay with me. Don't let them!"

Rocco's eyes had filled with tears. "Go to sleep, Johnny," he said, "I won't let them hurt you."

The war was over and Rocco did not go home with the others. He transferred to the medics and followed Johnny from the hospital in France to the hospital on Long Island. He had made a promise to himself that he would stay with Johnny as long as Johnny needed him. Maybe it was because he felt that it was his fault to begin with. Because he had issued the order that had sent Johnny on the mission. But it wasn't his fault that it got mixed up. Everything was wrong that day. He still couldn't figure out how, with everything going wrong, the attack could work out right. But it did.

And now he stood beside the bed looking down at Johnny. Pity surged within him and moved his hand. He placed it on Johnny's shoulder.

"Johnny," he said softly, "Johnny, look at me."

Slowly Johnny turned around, drawn by some inexorable warmth flowing from the hand on his shoulder. He looked into Rocco's face.

Rocco's eyes were deep with understanding. "I know how you feel, Johnny. But you're gonna have to face it. Yuh got things to do an' friends tuh meet on the outside. An' I'm not gonna let yuh hide from 'em in here." He drew a deep breath. "You're gonna walk because I'm gonna find the thing that will make you want to."

Johnny looked into his eyes and found himself slipping into their depths. Instinctively he pulled himself back. "If you want to find the thing that will make me walk," he said bitterly, "go find me my leg." He turned back to the wall.

Rocco's hand fell to his side. There was a pain inside him, a deep quiet hurt that was born of Johnny's repulse. Quietly he left the room.

At night Johnny had a dream. He was running down a long familiar street. It was a long street and its end was nowhere in sight. Yet Johnny knew what lay at the end of that street and he wanted to go there. He had been running for hours and hours and now the end of the street was coming into view. A girl was standing there. She was only a slim figure, but he knew who it was even though he could not distinguish her features.

Just then the street filled with people. They stood and looked at him running and they laughed and pointed. "Look at that one-legged cripple trying to run," they laughed.

At first Johnny didn't pay any attention to them. His mind was on that girl who was standing there waiting for him. But as he drew nearer and nearer to her, the people began to laugh louder and louder. At last he stopped. "What's so funny?" he asked.

"You," one of them answered derisively. "Everybody knows a one-legged man can't run!"

"I can too!" Johnny said.

"You cannot!" a chorus of voices answered him mockingly.

"I can, I can!" he screamed at them. "I'll show you!"

He turned and started to run, but suddenly he realized he wasn't running at all, he was hopping. He tried desperately to run, his heart pounding, suddenly frightened. And then he fell.

The crowds of people gathered around him. "See," they said, "we were right. You can't run." They laughed at him.

"I can run, I can run, I can run," he sobbed, struggling to get to his feet. He looked down the street toward the girl. She had turned and was walking away from him. "Wait for me!" he cried desperately. "I can run!" But she was gone.

He opened his eyes in the night; they were wet with his tears. He took a cigarette from the table with trembling fingers and put it between his lips. He was looking for a match when suddenly one glowed in front of him.

He dragged on his cigarette and then looked up. Rocco's face was limned in the dim glow from the match. Johnny took another deep drag from the cigarette. "Don't you ever sleep, Rock?" he asked.

Rocco blew out the match. In the dark his teeth shone as he smiled. "How can I," he replied, "if I have to keep chasing you up and down the halls all night?"

Johnny looked at him in sudden surprise. "What do you mean?"

Rocco smiled again. "I heard yuh yelling an' decided to look in. You were poised there on the end of the bed, ready to take off. I pushed you back an' you started to holler: 'I can run.'"

"I must've been dreaming," Johnny said.

"Not for my money you weren't," Rocco said quietly. "It wouldn't s'prise me at all to find yuh doin' it. Some day maybe." He picked up the crutches and tapped them together. "After yuh learn to walk!"

9.

The recreation hall was crowded as Rocco pushed the wheelchair toward a small s.p.a.ce on the floor where Johnny could see the screen. Johnny looked around him. The faces he saw were eager, expectant, bright with antic.i.p.ation.

Ever since the news had got around a week ago that they were going to see a moving picture in the recreation hall, the talk around the hospital had been about nothing else. Men who had not displayed interest in anything heretofore were suddenly interested, alive.

Johnny had been one of these, much to Rocco's surprise. When he had heard about it, he had straightened up in bed. "I want to see the picture," he said to Rocco.

Rocco looked at him. There was a look on Johnny's face he hadn't seen for a long time. A look of antic.i.p.ation, of excitement. "Sure," he said, "sure. Walk or ride?"

Johnny looked at the crutches and then back at Rocco. "I think I'll ride," he said, trying to smile. "It's got more cla.s.s and besides it guarantees a seat."

Rocco laughed. Suddenly he began to feel better. It was the first time in a long while he had heard Johnny try to joke.

During the week that followed, Johnny plied Rocco with questions. Did he know what picture it was? Who was in it? What company made it? Who directed it?

Rocco didn't know any of the answers. It seemed no one did. All they knew was that they were going to see a picture. He thought it was strange that Johnny should ask all these questions. "How come you're so curious about the picture?" he asked.

But Johnny didn't answer and Rocco thought he had fallen asleep. But he hadn't. He lay there, his head on the pillow, his eyes shut, but his mind was awake-vividly awake with an excitement he never thought he would know again. He had not written to Peter or anyone since he had been hurt. Their letters had been unanswered. He didn't want any sympathy, any acts born of charity. If he had been unhurt, he would have gone back gladly, but this way, crippled, he could not envision himself as being anything less than a burden to them. So he had not written and had closed his heart and mind to the past.

He looked around the hall. The projection machine was not too far behind him. Lovingly he let his eyes dwell upon it with all the fondness a man might look at his home. And it was true. Suddenly he was homesick. Homesick for the smell of the celluloid strips as they ran through the projector and came out warm. For the thin, tangy, crackling ozone-like smell of the carbon arc lights in the machine itself.

He gestured to Rocco. "Push me over to the machine," he said, "I want to see what it looks like."