“I didn’t know it had gone that far.”
“How far is far? There doesn’t seem much point in calling her, does there?”
“Is that why you never wrote?”
“You know about that?”
“She told me. She was always asking what I’d heard, where you were…”
“There didn’t seem to be much point in writing, either.”
“She won’t marry me either, for whatever that’s worth,” Carstairs said. “But I haven’t given up on asking.”
Pick looked at him, and his mouth opened. But he shut it again when Major Frederick Dunn reappeared on the porch, carrying a quart bottle of sour-mash bourbon and three glasses.
“Let the rector have the fruit juice,” Major Dunn announced. “I got us some of Daddy’s best sipping whiskey.
[THREE]
Jefferson City, Missouri
1710 Hours 1 November 1942
Second Lieutenant Robert F. Easterbrook, USMCR, sat at the wheel of a 1936 Chevrolet Two-Door Deluxe, his father’s car, and stared out at the Mississippi River. He was parked with the nose of the car against a cable-and-pole barrier; he’d been parked there for three quarters of an hour. In his hand was a bottle of Budweiser beer, now warm and tasting like horse piss. Two empty Bud bottles lay on the floor on the passenger side, and three full bottles, now for sure warm, were in a bag beside it.
He’d bought a six-pack. Except they didn’t come in a box anymore- to conserve paper for the war effort. And to conserve metal, they came in bottles. And to conserve glass, they were deposit-returnable bottles, not the kind you could throw away. And he hadn’t been able to purchase the beer on the first try, either. Or the second. There was some kind of a keep-Missouri-clean-and-sober campaign going on. They checked your identity card to see if you were old enough to drink. In the first two places, they seemed overjoyed to learn that he wasn’t.
It’s pretty fucking unfair. You ‘re old enough to get shot at, and you can’t buy six lousy bottles of fucking beer. You ‘re a goddamned commissioned officer, for Christ’s sake. People have to salute you, and you still can’t buy a beer.
At the third place he tried, a saloon, the bartender said he was supposed to check IDs, “but what the hell, you’re a soldier boy, and what the cops don’t see can’t hurt me; but don’t make a habit of it, huh?” and gave it to him.
I’m not a “soldier boy”; I’m a Marine. I’m a goddamned officer in The Marine Corps. Not that anybody around here seems to know what that is, or give a good goddamn.
On the Mississippi, an old-fashioned tug with a paddle wheel was pushing a barge train upriver. Although the paddle wheel on the tug was churning up the water furiously, it was barely making progress against the current.
Back when he was in high school (something like nine thousand years ago), he waited impatiently for his sixteenth birthday so he could get a job working the boats on the river. You could make a lot of money doing that. And he knew he’d need money after he graduated from high school if he was going to study photojournalism at U of M. But it turned out he didn’t get a boat job. They told him he should come back when he got his growth.
Later, when he was working for the Conner Courier as a flunky with photojournalist dreams, he would have shot pictures of the tired old paddle-wheel tug pushing the barges up the river. In fact, he would have broken his ass then to get pictures of it. And he would have been thrilled to fucking death if Mr. Greene, to be nice to him, found space for one of them on page 11 of the Courier. Now, even though he had Sergeant Lomax’s 35mm Leica on the seat beside him, he couldn’t imagine taking pictures of the paddle-wheel tug and its barge train if the tug and all the barges were gloriously in flame and about to blow up.
He’d wondered earlier why he sort of had to keep carrying Lomax’s Leica around with him. Christ knew, no one was going to use anything he shot with it, not that there was anything worth shooting.