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By Root 13890 0

about. He would play through the records, and run through all the books, and go around feeling the furnishings, and feel the tile floor and the Jap mats on the porch with his bare feet, and in the evening he would make his own evening meal himself in the shining white kitchen where he knew just exactly where everything was. All the books with their brightly colored jackets (Georgette had been in the Book of the Month Club three years and she always took every book, plus all the dividends) were very pretty in the recessed bookcase over the divan. The record albums were fine clean parallel lines of gold print on black in the mahogany cabinet. And there was all the time in the world. And there was the bar, the lovely big well-stocked bar, where you can make yourself a drink whenever you want, he would think happily, mixing himself a scotch-and-soda that he was finally beginning to like the taste of now. And all the time in the world. It was, all of it, as near to being a full-fledged 24-carat civilian as any thirty-year-man ever could get.

Then he would remember he was not a thirty-year-man any more.

Chapter 46

PREWITT HAD BEEN gone two days when the 1st/Sgt of G Company came back from furlough.

It is an aged proverb in the Regular Army that guys come back from furlough in order to rest up, or otherwise they would have gone right on over the hill. And Milt Warden was no exception. He came in shakily after two days of earnest drunkenness, his prize $120 Brooks Bros, powder-blue tropical suit crumpled and dirty. Acting 1st/Sgt Baldy Dhom met him in the orderly room with the hoary joke that he was four hours late and already marked AWOL on the Morning Report.

Warden did not even bother to laugh. He had been falling-down slobbering drunk for two days, but it was not enough, and he would have preferred more. The two days’ drunk had come out of the admission that his ten-day idyll with his future wife had developed into a profound and absolute bust, and for an admission like that a man needed at least a week of it. Two days was not nearly enough. But then neither was it a pleasant thought to know your Company Administration was being strangled by the sausage fingers of a stupid ox like Baldy Dhom for fourteen days.

He had hardly collapsed himself into his swivel chair, still in his prize $120 Brooks Bros, powder-blue tropical suit, before Baldy was briefing him on the peculiarities of the new Company Commander. Baldy had not wanted the Company Administration any more than Warden had wanted him to have it.

Warden listened in bitter silence. Dynamite had put through the furlough the day before he left for Brigade, just like he promised, so that Warden had not even met 1st/Lt William L. Ross. He had not, in fact, known anything about him except that he was coming. Neither his rank nor his name nor that he was going to be Jewish. Typical, he told himself sourly, typical. The well known Warden luck. No sooner do I get rid of one screwball Jewboy who at least was decent enough to commit suicide than I get another one. Only this time its an officer. Company Commander, no less. And now I’ll have my tempermental Jewish race complexes right with me in my own orderly room, instead of in the rear rank. Jesus Christ.

Then, while he was still trying to digest that one, Baldy informed him of the next new development. Prewitt had been absent for two days.

“What!”

“Thats right,” Baldy said guiltily.

“Why, the son of a bitch wasnt even out of the Stockade yet when I left!”

“I know it. He come out three days after you took off. Acted meek as a lamb. He was ony back nine days, all told.”

“Well, Jesus Christ.”

Warden felt something stronger than the Jewish Problem come over him and displace the contemplation of Lt William L Ross. It was somewhat the same feeling you get watching a line squall moving across the sky and covering the face of the sun on a hot day with a wind-chill sense of rain.

“A hell of a fine mess you made of my orderly room, Baldy. Its pretty goddam bad when a man cant even go on a goddam furlough without having