“Sure. Plenty.”
“And will they, will they talk to a guy?”
“Sure they will.”
“Hot damn!” says the boy. “Oh, hot damn!”
“Fall in,” the stout, worried captain shouts,
and, “Fall in,” the sergeants shout. The blond boy gets in line, still holding
his cup. The big girl yells at him over the music, “Hey, sonny. We need those
cups.”
She rushes fiercely up to him and grabs the cup
and then quickly pats him once on the shoulder. The men on both sides of him
laugh loudly, as if it were very funny.
A HAND
LONDON, July 29, 1943—The soldier wears
a maroon bathrobe and pajamas and slippers, the uniform of the Army hospital.
He is a little pale and shaky, the way convalescents are. His left arm he
carries crooked and high, and the fingers of his left hand hook over helplessly.
In front of him on a table is a half-built model of a Liberator. Not covered
yet, but a mass of tiny struts and ribs and braces. And he has a sheet of balsa
wood, stamped with the patterns, and he has a razor blade and a little bowl of
glue, with a match sticking out of it.
“I got hurt in Africa,” he says. “Got hit in
the stomach, but they fixed that up pretty good.” He holds up his left arm.
“This is what bothers me,” he says. “That was broke awful bad. I haven’t been
out of a cast long.” He moves the fingers slightly. “Not much feeling in them,”
he says. “I can’t make a fist. I can’t grab hold of anything. At least, I
couldn’t. It’s kind of numb.
“I got hold of this model,” he says. “I can
hold things down with my hand, like this.” He puts the side of his hand down on
the sheet of balsa. “I did all of that with my right hand. I guess it’s lucky
I’m right-handed.” He regards his left hand and moves the fingers. “The doctor
says I’ll be able to use it to grab hold of things if I just exercise it. But
it’s hard to exercise it when you can just barely feel it’s there.
“A funny thing happened yesterday,” he says.
“Here, I’ll show you the exact place.” He takes a pencil and sticks it into the
maze of tiny braces. “There, you see that piece in there? The one with the
little pencil mark on it? I marked it so I’d remember which one it was.
“Yesterday I was trying to get that set in
right, and you can see it’s a hard place to get at. You’ve got to hold it here
and work it up under. Well, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I came to, and I
was holding that little piece in my left hand.” He regards the wizened finger
with amazement. “I told the doctor about it and he said that was all right and
I should try to use it every bit I could. Well, sir, when I think about it I
can’t do it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I can later, a little bit at a time. I roll
a pencil under my fingers. They say that’s a good thing to do. I can feel it some,
too.”
