“Just come to you?”
“Hell, no, it come to me three days later when he give me a week’s restriction in Tsingtao. I been sorry ever since.”
“No. It’ll smell you out, Charley. You wait.”
Casey was shadow boxing down the middle of the ward as I shuffled back to my bunk.
It must’ve been spring because the days were longer. One night, right after the nurse come through, Casey and Carnahan and me helped Slop Chute walk to the head. While he was there he had another hemorrhage.
Carnahan started for help but Casey got in the way and motioned him back and we knew Slop Chute didn’t want it.
We pulled Slop Chute’s pajama top off and steadied him. He went on his knees in front of the bowl and the soft, bubbling cough went on for a long time. We kept flushing it. Casey opened the door and went out to keep away the nurse.
Finally it pretty well stopped. Slop Chute was too weak to stand. We cleaned him up and I put my pajama top on him, and we stood him up. If Casey hadn’t took half the load, we’d’a never got him back to his bunk.
Godalmighty! I used to carry hundred-kilo sacks of cement like they was nothing.
We went back and cleaned up the head. I washed out the pajama top and draped it on the radiator. I was in a cold sweat and my face burned when I turned in.
Across the ward Casey was sitting like a statue beside Slop Chute’s bunk.
Next day was Friday, because Pink Waldo made some crack about fish to Curly Waldo when they formed up for sick call. Mary moved closer to Curly Waldo and gave Pink Waldo a cold look. That was good.
Slop Chute looked waxy, and Uncle Death seemed to see it because a gleam come into his wooden eyes. Both Waldos listened all over Slop Chute and told Uncle what they heard in their secret language. Uncle nodded, and Casey thumbed his nose at him.
No doubt about it, the ways was greased for Slop Chute. Mama Death come back soon as she could and began to loosen the chocks. She slobbered arthurs all over Slop Chute and flittered around like women do when they smell a wedding. Casey give her extra special hell, and we all laughed right out and she hardly noticed.
That afternoon two orderly-masks come with a go-to-Jesus cart and wanted to take Slop Chute to X-ray. Casey climbed on the cart and scowled at them.
Slop Chute told ‘em shove off, he wasn’t going.
They got Mary and she told Slop Chute please go, it was doctor’s orders.
Sorry, no, he said.
“Please, for me, Slop Chute,” she begged.
She knows our right names—that’s one reason we love her. But Slop Chute shook his head, and his big jaw bone stuck out.
Mary—she had to then—called Mama Death. Mama waddled in, and Casey spit in her mask.
“Now, arthur, what is this, arthur, you know we want to help you get well and go home, arthur,” she arthured at Slop Chute. “Be a good boy now, arthur, and go along to the clinic.”
She motioned the orderlies to pick him up anyway. Casey hit one in the mask and Slop Chute growled, “Sheer off, you bastards!”
The orderlies hesitated.
Mama’s little eyes squinted and she wiggled her hands at them. “Let’s not be naughty, arthur. Doctor knows best, arthur.”
The orderlies looked at Slop Chute and at each other. Casey wrapped his arms around Mama Death and began chewing on her neck. He seemed to mix right into her, someway, and she broke and run out of the ward.
She came right back, though, trailing Uncle Death. Casey met him at the door and beat hell out of him all the way to Slop Chute’s bunk. Mama sent Mary for the chart, and Uncle Death studied Slop Chute’s reflection for a minute. He looked pale and swayed a little from Casey’s beating.
He turned toward Slop Chute and breathed in deep and Casey was on him again. Casey wrapped his arms and legs around him and chewed at his mask with those big yellow teeth. Casey’s hair bristled and his eyes were red as the flames of hell.
Uncle Death staggered back across the ward and fetched up against Carnahan’s bunk. The other masks were scared spitless, looking all around, kind of knowing.
Casey pulled away, and Uncle Death said maybe he was wrong, schedule it for tomorrow. All the masks left in a hurry except Mary. She went back to Slop Chute and took his hand.
“I’m sorry, Slop Chute,” she whispered.
“Bless you, Connie,” he said, and grinned. It was the last thing I ever heard him say.
Slop Chute went to sleep, and Casey sat beside his bunk. He motioned me off when I wanted to help Slop Chute to the head after lights out. I turned in and went to sleep.
I don’t know what woke me. Casey was moving around fidgety-like, but of course not making a sound. I could hear the others stirring and whispering in the dark too.
Then I heard a muffled noise—the bubbling cough again, and spitting. Slop Chute was having another hemorrhage and he had his head under the blankets to hide the sound. Carnahan started to get up. Casey waved him down.
I saw a deeper shadow high in the dark over Slop Chute’s bunk. It came down ever so gently and Casey would push it back up again. The muffled coughing went on.
Casey had a harder time pushing back the shadow. Finally he climbed on the bunk straddle of Slop Chute and kept a steady push against it.
The blackness came down anyway, little by little. Casey strained and shifted his footing. I could hear him grunt and hear his joints crack.
I was breathing forced draft with my heart like to pull off its bed bolts. I heard other bedsprings creaking. Somebody across from me whimpered low, but it was sure never Slop Chute that done it.
Casey went to his knees, his hands forced almost level with his head. He swung his head back and forth and I saw his lips curled back from the big teeth clenched tight together… Then he had the blackness on his shoulders like the weight of the whole world.
Casey went down on hands and knees with his back arched like a bridge. Almost I thought I heard him grunt… and he gained a little.
Then the blackness settled heavier, and I heard Casey’s tendons pull out and his bones snap. Casey and Slop Chute disappeared under the blackness, and it overflowed from there over the whole bed… and more… and it seemed to fill the whole ward.
It wasn’t like going to sleep, but I don’t know anything it was like.
The masks must’ve towed off Slop Chute’s hulk in the night, because it was gone when I woke up.
So was Casey.
Casey didn’t show up for sick call and I knew then how much he meant to me. With him around to fight back I didn’t feel as dead as they wanted me to. Without him I felt deader than ever. I even almost liked Mama Death when she charlesed me.
Mary came on duty that morning with a diamond on her third finger and a brighter sparkle in her eye. It was a little diamond, but it was Curly Waldo’s and it kind of made up for Slop Chute.
I wished Casey was there to see it. He would’ve danced all around her and kissed her nice, the way he often did. Casey loved Mary.
It was Saturday, I know, because Mama Death come in and told some of us we could be wheeled to a special church hooraw before breakfast next morning if we wanted. We said no thanks. But it was a hell of a Saturday without Casey. Sharkey Brown said it for all of us—“With Casey gone, this place is like a morgue again.”
Not even Carnahan could call him up.
“Sometimes I think I feel him stir, and then again I ain’t sure,” he said. “It beats hell where he’s went to.”
Going to sleep that night was as much like dying as it could be for men already dead.
Music from far off woke me up when it was just getting light. I was going to try to cork off again, when I saw Carnahan was awake.