Across the dim interior of the tent Johnny’s body lay on another operating table, doctors curious over him in a sterile tableau.
“Johnny?” and this time Smith had a voice.
“Easy does it,” a doctor cautioned. The lips under the white mask moved. “that a friend of yours—over there?”
“Yeah. How is he?”
“Not so good. Head injury. Fifty-fifty chance.”
They concluded with Smith, stitches, swabbings, bandages and all. Smith watched the wound vanish under white gauze, then he looked at the assembled crowd of medics. “Let me help with him, will you?”
“Well, now, after all, soldier—”
“I know the guy. I know the guy. I know him. He’s funny. If it means keeping him alive, how’s about it?”
The scowl formed over the surgical mask, and Smith’s heart beat slow. The doctor blinked. “I can’t chance it. What can you possibly do to help me?”
“Wheel me over. I tell you I can help. I’m his bosom-pal. I can’t let him conk out now. Hell, no!”
The doctors conferred.
They transferred Smith to a portable stretcher and two orderlies delivered him across the tent where the surgeons were engaged with Johnny’s shaved, naked skull. Johnny looked asleep and dreaming a nightmare. His face twisted, worried, frightening, wondering, disappointed and dismayed. One of the surgeons sighed.
Smith touched one surgical elbow. “Don’t give up, Doc. Oh, God, don’t give up.” To Johnny: “Johnny-lad. Listen. Listen to me. Forget everything Melter said. Forget everything he said—you hear me? He was full of crap up to here!”
Johnny’s face still was irritated, changing like disturbed water. Smith gathered his breath and continued.
“Johnny, you gotta go on playing, like always. Go on ducking, like in the old days. You always knew how, Johnny. It was part of you. It didn’t take learning or teaching, it was natural. And you let Melter put ideas in your head. Ideas that may be okay for people like Melter and me and others, but don’t jibe for you.”
One surgeon made an impatient gesture with a rubber-gloved hand.
Smith asked him, “Is his head hurt bad, Doc?”
“Pressure on the skull, on the brain. May cause temporary loss of memory.”
“Will he remember being wounded?”
“It’s hard to say. Probably not.”
Smith had to be held down. “Good! Good! Look,” he whispered quickly, confidentially to Johnny’s head. “Johnny, just think about being a kid, and how it was then, and don’t think about what happened today. Think about running in ravines and through creeks and skipping pebbles on water, and ducking b-b guns, and laughing, Johnny!”
Inside, Johnny thought about it.
A mosquito hummed somewhere, hummed and circled for an endless time. Somewhere guns rumbled.
Someone finally told Smith, “Respiration improved.”
Someone else said, “Heart action picking up.”
Smith kept talking, part of him that wasn’t pain, that was only hope and anxiety in his larynx, and fear-fever in his brain. The war thunder came closer, closer, but it was only the blood hurled through his head by his heart.
Half an hour passed by. Johnny listened like a kid in school to an over-patient teacher. Listened and smoothed out the pain, erased the dismay in his expression, and regained the old certainty and youth and sureness and calm acceptance of belief.
The surgeon stripped off his tight rubber gloves.
“He’ll pull through.”
Smith felt like singing. “Thanks, Doc. Thanks.”
The Doc said, “You from Unit 45, you and Choir and a guy named Melter?”
“Yeah. What about Melter?”
“Funniest darn thing. Ran head on into a burst of German machine-gun fire. Ran down a hill screaming something about being a kid again.” The doc scratched his jaw. “We picked up his body with fifty bullets in it.”
Smith swallowed, lying back to sweat. Ice-cold, shivering sweat.
“That’s Melter for you. He just didn’t know how. He grew up, too fast, like all of us. He didn’t know how to stay young, like Johnny. That’s why it didn’t work. I—I gotta give him credit for trying, though, the nut. But there’s only one Johnny Choir.”
“You,” diagnosed the surgeon, “are delirious. Better take a sedative.”
Smith shook his head. “What about home? Are we going, Johnny and I, with our wounds?”
The surgeon formed a smile under the mask. “Home to America, the two of you.”
“Now, you’re delirious!” Smith let out a careful whoop of glee. He twisted to get a good look at Johnny sleeping so peacefully and easily and dreaming, and he said, “You hear that, Johnny?
We’re going home! You and me! Home!”
And Johnny replied, softly, “Mom? Oh, Mom.”
Smith held Johnny’s hand. “Okay,” he said to the surgeons. “So now I’m a mother. Pass the cigars!”
The End
