Richard Marsten - Murder in the navy

When he heard footsteps again, he thought it was the pharmacist’s mate returning, and then he recognized the hushed whisper of the hospital slippers that were generally handed out to ambulatory cases.

A boy poked his head around the doorjamb tentatively.

He was a tall boy with brown hair and blue eyes, a kid of no more than eighteen or nineteen. He wore the faded blue hospital robe and the fabric slippers, and his face was very pale, as if he’d been isolated from the sun for a long time.

“You just check in?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“My name’s Guibert. You sick?”

“I’m in the hospital, ain’t I?”

Guibert entered the room. “Mind if I come in?”

“Well...”

“I’m the official welcoming committee. I been here for eight months now. I see everybody who comes and goes. Guibert the Greeter, they call me. Ain’t I seen you around before?”

“Maybe,” he answered. Goddamnit, was the whole hospital full of spies?

“What’s your name?” Guibert asked.

“What difference does it make?”

“I just like to know.”

“It’s on the chart,” he said frostily.

Guibert looked briefly at the chart “What’s wrong with you?”

“Cat fever.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Am I?”

“Sure,” Guibert said. “I been here for eight months now, like I told you, and they still don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Yeah?” he said dubiously.

“God’s truth, s’help me. I been looked over by every doctor in the Navy practically.” Guibert shrugged. “They can’t figure it out.”

“Are you contagious?” he asked suddenly.

“Me? No, don’t worry about that. They thought so in the beginning, but no more now. They had me isolated for three months, figuring I was carrying a dread disease or something. But I ain’t. They just don’t know what I got.”

“That right?” he asked, interested now.

“Yeah,” Guibert said sadly. “I just run a fever all the time. A hun’ one, a hun’ two, like that. Never goes no higher. But it’s always there, day and night. Man, a fever like that can drain you, you know it?”

“I can imagine,” he said. “And you been here eight months?”

“Eight months and six days, you want to be exact about it. The doctors think I got bit by a bug or something. I was in the Pacific before I come here, on the Coral Sea. They think I got bit by some rare tropical bug. Man, I got a disease unknown to medical science. How’s that for an honor?”

“Nobody else has this disease?” he asked.

Guibert shook his head, a little proudly, a little in awe. “Not that they know of. How’s that for something? You know, they thought I was goofin’ off at first. Malingering, you know? But they couldn’t just pass off the thermometer readings. Every damn day, a hun’ one, a hun’ two. Puzzled the hell out of them.

“So they finally sent me over to see a psychiatrist. He give me that Rorschach test, and a lot of other tests, puttin’ arms and legs on a torso, and fittin’ pegs into holes, things like that. They even give me an electroencephalograph test. You ever hear of that?”

“No,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s a test measures brain waves. They put these little wires on your skull, like they’re gonna electrocute you or something, and this measures your brain waves. They can tell from that whether you got a illness or not, like a tumor or something, you know? Well, I ain’t got nothing like that. My brain waves are perfectly O.K. And the psychiatrist says he never saw nobody as normal as me. Which is why they are all so puzzled. If I ain’t goofing, and if I ain’t nuts, then what’s wrong with me?”

“Search me,” he said.

“Sometimes I wonder myself. I never got bit by no bug, I can swear to that. There was a lot of bugs on Guam, but I never got bit. So how come I run this fever all the time? The way I got it figured, I’ll be in this damn hospital for the rest of my life!”

“Do they give you liberty?”

“No. Hell, no, how can they do that? I’m a walking guinea pig. They find out what’s wrong with me, man, they can lick cancer and the common cold.” Guibert shook his head sadly.

“Well, it can’t be too bad here.”

“Oh, no, it ain’t bad at all. Bunch of nice guys, and some real doll nurses. We got a honey on this floor, wait’ll you meet her. We got four of them, you know, but this one is a real peach. A nice girl.”

“Yeah?” he asked, interested again.

“Yeah, you’ll see her. Hey, are you from Brooklyn?”

“No.”

“Oh. That’s a shame. I’m from Brooklyn. I keep asking guys where they’re from, like in boot camp. When you can’t get out, you’re anxious to meet guys from your neighborhood, you know?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What ship you off?”

“U.S.S. Sykes,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A tin can.”

“That’s good duty, ain’t it?”

“Well, it’s not bad,” he said.

“The Sykes,” Guibert said. “That sounds familiar. Why should it sound familiar?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, shrugging.

Guibert thought about it for a moment, and then he shrugged, too. “Well, no matter.”

“This nurse...” he started.

“I’m a fire-control man, you know that?” Guibert said.

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. Went to school for it. You been on a carrier?”

“No.”

“What’s your rate?” Guibert asked.

“I’m a—”

“This is a sick man we got here, Guibert,” a voice from the doorway said.

He turned his head. The pharmacist’s mate was back again.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Guibert said. “I didn’t realize it, Greg.”

“Yeah, he’s very sick,” the pharmacist’s mate said. “Very, very sick.”

“Well, then, I’ll be running along, Greg.”

“I think you’d better,” Greg said.

“Nice meeting you, mate,” Guibert said.

“Same here,” he answered.

Greg looked at him, and then smiled broadly. “You better get that rest you need. The doc’ll be around in the morning.”

He smiled back at Greg. “Sure,” he said. And he thought. And the nurses, too. The nurses, too.

She stood before the full-length mirror in her room, not wanting to awaken her roommate and not yet wanting to go to bed.

She looked at herself as if she were meeting the reflection for the first time, and she felt rather idiotic about the sudden bursting feeling within her.

She had never met anyone like Chuck Masters before, never in all her life.

She’d been born on a farm in Minnesota, the proverbial farmer’s daughter, except that her father was a strict, Godfearing man who wouldn’t have allowed a salesman within four acres of his property. She could still remember the wheat fields, even now far away from them, the slender rods of grain swaying on the afternoon breeze, the sky a solid mass of blue beyond it, the sun glaring in the sky overhead. She had loved to walk in the wheat when she was a young girl, her head almost covered by the swaying golden wands.

She was a quiet, introverted child, Jean Dvorak. She loved the farm animals, and her favorite stories were those in which animals figured largely. She had never liked boys much. There was a nice boy living on the neighboring farm, a boy called Sven. He would often come to visit with his father, and he’d hop down from the wagon and they would face over the fields together, barefoot, laughing at the sun. This was when they were both very young, before she fully realized there was a difference between boys and girls.

When she was twelve, and her breasts began to pucker with adolescence, her mother explained what was happening to her. She could still remember her mother quite clearly, her hair as golden as the wheat fields, her eyes as blue as the sky beyond. Her mother was a gentle woman who put up with the harsh ways of her father patiently, and she remembered 90 now the extreme sense of loss she’d felt when her mother died. They had laid her to rest in the rich Minnesota earth, and she had wept silently, and her heart had gone out then to the woman who had been her friend all her life.