But he did get a chance to see the print of the shot he took of Lieutenant Dunn shaking Secretary Knox’s hand when Knox gave him the Navy Cross. They’d run that on the front page of The Kansas City Star. He didn’t get a credit line for it, though. All it said was OFFICIAL USMC PHOTO. But he knew he took it.
Even though he told Mr. Greene that, it was pretty clear that Mr. Greene thought he was bullshitting him.
Still, there was no reason now to be carrying Lomax’s Leica around; he wasn’t going to use it. So why wasn’t he able to just put the fucking thing in his bag? Or maybe see if he could find out where Lomax’s wife was, so he could send it to her?
It’s funny, he thought to himself now and again, if Lomax didn’t get himself blown away, he wouldn’t be able to call me “Easterbunny” anymore; he’d have to call me “Sir. ”
You weren’t supposed to talk ill of the dead, but the truth was that on occasion, Lomax could be a sadistic prick.
When he pointed out the picture of Dunn to his mother and told her he took it, she smiled vaguely and said, “That’s nice.” Meaning: “You always wanted to be a photographer; photographers take pictures. What’s the big deal?”
For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure that his mother really believed he was an officer, and that she didn’t privately suspect he just bought the goddamned gold bars and pinned them on to impress people. At breakfast this morning, she’d made a point of making a big deal about his cousin Harry, who was four, five years older than he was and a graduate of Northwestern University. Harry had been drafted and was going to Officer Candidate School in some Army post someplace; he’d written home that it was nearly killing him, but he was going to try to stick it out, because if he could, he was going to be an officer in the Ordnance Corps.
In other words, here was an older guy than you are, with a goddamned college degree, who had to go through OCS, which was nearly killing him…. So how come you’re an officer?
As for his father, he wouldn’t even let him use the goddamn car. He claimed it was because of the gas rationing and the tire shortage, and because he didn’t know what he’d do without it. But the Easterbunny just happened to notice in The Kansas City Star that ran his picture on page one that servicemen on leave could go to the ration board and get gas coupons. So he’d gone down to City Hall, and it turned out that the guy on the ration board was in the Corps in World War I. And one thing ran into another: The guy asked where he’d been; and when he told him, he asked about the ‘Canal. And so the Easterbunny walked out of the ration board with coupons for sixty gallons of gas (you were supposed to get only twenty), and coupons for four new tires (you weren’t supposed to get tires at all).
And even then, before he’d let him borrow the goddamn car, the old man gave him a “don’t speed, don’t drink, be careful” speech as if he was seventeen and got his license the day before yesterday.
Once he had the car, he looked up the kids he’d gone around with in high school, of course. But that was a fucking disaster, too.
It was partly his own fault, he was willing to admit. He should have kept his fucking mouth shut. There was no way they were going to believe he’d just been in Hollywood, staying in a place on the ocean in Malibu… much less that he not only met Veronica Wood there, but that he and she were now friends… and that she took him to Metro-Magnum Studios one morning in a limousine and let him watch them make the movie she was in.
It was partly, too, that they all seemed to be very young and very stupid. They didn’t want to know about the ‘Canal. That was so far away that it was nowhere, as far as they knew. They wanted to know shit like Eddie Williams asked him: “Since you’re in the Marines,” he said, “did they ever let you shoot a tommy gun like Robert Montgomery did in Bataan?” The Easterbunny hadn’t seen that movie, but that didn’t matter.