He caught her doing it. “Don’t let it worry you,” he said. “Money’s one thing I’ve got plenty of. Enough to get by on, anyway. I draw a Veterans’ Disability Pension.”
“Oh,” she said, and looked at him. He seemed untouched.
“I was wounded in the war. Kara something-or-other, I think it was called. It was an island.”
“Tarawa,” she said impatiently. “You were there but you don’t know the name. We learned about it in high school.”
“We were dying, not studying geography,” he rebuked her mildly. “I can still see it, though,” he went on. “Just a little patch of hell stuck out there in the ocean. Never knew why the Japs wanted it, or why we wanted to take it away from them. I can get sick thinking of all the boys who died for islands that were never any use to anybody, and never will be.” His eyes challenged her. “A lot of boys died,” he said.
“I know.”
“And they were the lucky ones,” he said. “Do you know that too?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s worse things than dying, but I don’t expect you to believe that.”
She thought of Starr, dying, and of herself, with a leftover life to live. “I believe it,” she said, softly.
He didn’t seem to have heard her. “Tarawa,” he said. “Guys left their arms there. Or their legs. Or came away blind or deaf or with their brains scrambled. They were lucky too. Not as lucky as the dead ones, but luckier than some.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I wasn’t so lucky.”
She stared at him. “You’ve got your arms and legs,” she said. “And your hearing and your eyesight. What makes you the unluckiest man at Tarawa?”
“Do you know the difference between a bull and an ox?”
“Not exactly. An ox is bigger, isn’t it? And stronger, I guess.”
He laughed sourly. “You must be a city girl,” he said. “A farm girl would have the picture by now. How about a ram and a wether? A rooster and a capon?”
“I—”
“Or a stallion and a gelding. How about that?”
“You don’t mean—”
“Don’t I? We were on patrol. From out of nowhere, a Jap threw a grenade at us. My buddy dove for it to throw it back. It went off in his hand and killed him. The lucky bastard.”
“And—”
“And I got to keep my arms and my legs and my sight and my hearing. All I lost was what makes a man a man.”
“My God,” she breathed.
“When I came back, my wife walked out on me. I didn’t blame her. She would’ve stood by me in anything else, if I was on crutches, if I was blind. She was a good wife. But she was entitled to a husband.”
She looked over at the picture on the wall. The soldier in his helmet, the girl looking up worshipfully from his shoulder. It couldn’t have been Starr, then. Tarawa had been in 1943. But maybe Starr had come along afterward, unsuspecting. Who knows what this terrible tourniquet had turned into later on?
“At first it wasn’t so bad for a little while. I went out on dates like I had before I got married. Plenty of dates. Plenty of girls. Some wanted to marry. Some were ready to settle for less. But there always comes a time in an evening when the two of you are alone by yourselves. I used to tell all kinds of lies to cover myself up.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I even told one girl I was contagious.”
“What’d she say?”
“She told me she didn’t mind, not to let it stop me, because she was contagious herself.”
He went over to the vicinity of the washbasin and picked up a flat brown-glass bottle from somewhere near it, she didn’t quite see where. “I don’t suppose I can offer you a drink?” he said uncertainly.
“That might only lead to trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Trouble for me. And trouble for me spells trouble for you too,” she told him coolly. “You know that, don’t you?”
Even his answer was the perfect answer — for her line of inquiry. “I ought to by now,” he said with a heavy sigh.
He tipped the bottle up, pulled the cork with his teeth, held it fast there, let some liquor run into his mouth alongside of it, then reinserted the cork, still with his teeth only. She’d never seen that done before.
“It started in gradually, the bad part of it. I found myself starting to hit them, to get a little rough, to throw them around and swing at them. One or two even stood for it, but not too long. Most ran away. Then the stray slaps and knocks became regular beatings. I beat one girl up very badly one night. I had to throw cold water on her before she came around. I put some money in her hand, all I had on me, and kissed her and beat it away. She never preferred charges against me, but she used to duck out of sight if she saw me on the street after that.”
She gave him a look of antipathy. “You hated them because of what had happened to you. Is that why you roughed them up?”
“No, no. You’ve got it turned around. I only did it because I loved them. I couldn’t show them I loved them like other guys can. And you have to show it, you have to express it, it has to come out, it can’t be kept back. I could only show it by violence at the end of my hands. Those were my caresses. It was the only way I could find my peace and satisfaction. I had no other way of going through to the end.”
This is the one, she told herself inexorably. He’s the one — knew Starr.
“But I knew it wouldn’t stop there. I knew sooner or later I was going to kill one of them.”
“And have you?”
His answer was bloodcurdling in its simplicity. “Not yet.”
“Why don’t you have yourself placed under treatment before that? Before that happens?”
“There is no treatment for this. Maybe you didn’t understand me right. This isn’t something mental, that a headshrinker can work on. I went through all those tests in the beginning, and they found me normal. This is a physical dismemberment. As physical as a busted arm would be. Only, a busted arm can be put back in business again. This can’t.
“What year is this?” he asked at a tangent.
“Sixty-one.”
“That don’t mean my memory’s failing,” he defended himself. “It’s just that I lose track every now and then. I was nineteen when I was on Tarawa. That means I’m still only thirty-seven today. At thirty-seven you still get restless every week or so. You wouldn’t know it, but you do.”
She lowered her head, strangely touched for a moment.
“You want to go out for a stroll, be a part of the world again, the world you once knew. You see other fellows with their girls. You want a girl too. Nothing dirty about it, unhealthy about it. It’s as normal, as natural, as that. But that’s when the trouble comes in.”
He poked his thumb over his shoulder. “Do you see that pipe back there?”
“I noticed it when I first came in.”
“I’ve set up a system. You know, like a fire-protection system. The superintendent of this building is a Norwegian, his name is Jansen, husky as an ox. He has the apartment right over this one. He used to live down here in the basement, but when I came in he turned this one over to me and moved upstairs. You see, he likes me. His son and I were buddies in the war. Well, one night we were having a few beers around the corner, and I told him about it: how I was afraid I was going to end up in serious trouble if things kept on going the way they were; maybe even do away with someone altogether.
“So we rigged up this signal between us. When I start getting restless, and know that I’m about to go out and roam around, I hit that pipe a wallop with that monkey wrench over there, and he comes down here and keeps me from going. Sits down and plays cards with me, and we have a few drinks, and when I start to get sleepy he locks the door from the outside and goes back upstairs. Next day I’m all over it.”