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By Root 14091 0

The days had arranged themselves into a comfortable pattern that seemed to have been like this always and promised to go on like this forever. If there was work in the afternoons he let Mazzioli do it and to hell with it. It was all routine stuff and he could always straighten it out later and the kid was supposed to be in there to learn. Leva could handle the supplyroom, and he did not have to worry about Stark’s kitchen. He would meet her in town along the bright hot tourist-crowded streets and they would drive her husband’s battered old Buick club coupe around and around the Island, him in trunks and barefooted, her in a legless briefbra-ed swimsuit that was as sensual as her bare pointed toenails, taking every new back road they had not driven, stopping to swim whenever they felt like swimming. They stopped to love whenever he felt like loving, although Karen felt he was inclined to stop too often and insisted that while sometimes she liked it it had no place in her love and she could have done as well, or better, without any of that which was such a vulgar way of proving your love; but still she did not try to dissuade him from stopping, and those afternoons, like all the rest of the time he spent with Karen Holmes, seemed to elongate themselves into infinity like a backward telescope until nothing else existed. If there was anything lacking that kept them from being absolute perfection, it was that her husband’s Buick was not a convertible.

There were no stormy sessions, not a single argument, because they had already settled it between them (the day they came back together hungrily after the two weeks at Hickam Field) that Milt would put in for officer’s extension course. They settled it in the following manner:

Karen made it plain that she would never ask it of him. He then volunteered it. Karen said no, understanding and sympathizing with the way he felt about Officers, she could not ask or expect it of him, that he was not to do it on her account, ever, even if it meant her losing him. Whereupon Milt insisted he would too do it, and do it on her account, and only on her account, and nothing she could say would deter him. She cried, and he almost cried, and that was how they left it. He did not do anything about putting in the application.

When she asked him about it later on, he told her it was already in the mail (he would have told her a lot worse things than that, to keep those afternoons) and made a mental note to make it out and have Holmes sign it and get it in the mail tomorrow, but he did not get around to it. It would have been easy, because after they decided it she had started working on Holmes some at home and Holmes had started urging him to put in for it, but he could not get around to it. He did not intend to undertake a course of stupid lessons that might interfere with those afternoons, those hot bright swim-cool afternoons, that seemed to be more dream than reality and that he wanted to go on like that forever. The future was too vague of an investment to risk all the capital he had. Let the future look out for itself, like everybody else. It was of age, wasnt it? To hell with the future, as long as these afternoons go on like this forever.

And for a while, after he had cleared up Prewitt’s trial, it almost looked as if they would. He could even believe it, that they would.

There were things that were beginning increasingly to come up—like next week every rifle in the Company less ten had to be turned in for the new M1 Garands that had finally come in and were sitting over at S-4 waiting to be issued, and that Leva would need help with. There was the crisp new War Department Circular that had just come out authorizing for the first of next month the much-rumored new TO which would make S/Sgts out of mess and supply and raise all field NCOs one grade; that would necessitate a whole flock of Company Orders and Service Records entries, not counting the wholesale salvage of old chevrons that he would also be expected to take care of for O’Hayer.

Did they think that exchange of chrome bayonets