The door banged open, without having been rapped on. X raised his head, turned it, and saw Corporal Z standing in the door. Corporal Z had been X’s jeep partner and constant companion from D Day straight through five campaigns of the war. He lived on the first floor and he usually came up to see X when he had a few rumors or gripes to unload. He was a huge, photogenic young man of twenty-four. During the war, a national magazine had photographed him in Hurtgen Forest; he had posed, more than just obligingly, with a Thanksgiving turkey in each hand. “Ya writin’ letters?” he asked X. “It’s spooky in here, for Chrissake.” He preferred always to enter a room that had the overhead light on.
X turned around in his chair and asked him to come in, and to be careful not to step on the dog.
“The what?”
“Alvin. He’s right under your feet, Clay. How ‘bout turning on the goddam light?”
Clay found the overhead-light switch, flicked it on, then stepped across the puny, servant’s-size room and sat down on the edge of the bed, facing his host. His brick-red hair, just combed, was dripping with the amount of water he required for satisfactory grooming. A comb with a fountain-pen clip protruded, familiarly, from the right-hand pocket of his olive-drab shirt. Over the left-hand pocket he was wearing the Combat Infantrymen’s Badge (which, technically, he wasn’t authorized to wear), the European Theatre ribbon, with five bronze battle stars in it (instead of a lone silver one, which was the equivalent of five bronze ones), and the pre-Pearl Harbor service ribbon. He sighed heavily and said, “Christ almighty.” It meant nothing; it was Army. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out, then put away the pack and rebuttoned the pocket flap. Smoking, he looked vacuously around the room. His look finally settled on the radio. “Hey,” he said. “They got this terrific show comin’ on the radio in a coupla minutes. Bob Hope, and everybody.”
X, opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, said he had just turned the radio off.
Undarkened, Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit. “Jesus,” he said, with spectator’s enthusiasm, “you oughta see your goddam hands. Boy, have you got the shakes. Ya know that?”
X got his cigarette lit, nodded, and said Clay had a real eye for detail.
“No kidding, hey. I goddam near fainted when I saw you at the hospital. You looked like a goddam corpse. How much weight ya lose? How many pounds? Ya know?”
“I don’t know. How was your mail when I was gone? You heard from Loretta?”
Loretta was Clay’s girl. They intended to get married at their earliest convenience. She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. All through the war, Clay had read all Loretta’s letters aloud to X, however intimate they were—in fact, the more intimate, the better. It was his custom, after each reading, to ask X to plot out or pad out the letter of reply, or to insert a few impressive words in French or German.
“Yeah, I had a letter from her yesterday. Down in my room. Show it to ya later,” Clay said, listlessly. He sat up straight on the edge of the bed, held his breath, and issued a long, resonant belch. Looking just semi-pleased with the achievement, he relaxed again. “Her goddam brother’s gettin’ outa the Navy on account of his hip,” he said. “He’s got this hip, the bastard.” He sat up again and tried for another belch, but with below-par results. A jot of alertness came into his face. “Hey. Before I forget. We gotta get up at five tomorrow and drive to Hamburg or someplace. Pick up Eisenhower jackets for the whole detachment.”
X, regarding him hostilely, stated that he didn’t want an Eisenhower jacket.
Clay looked surprised, almost a trifle hurt. “Oh, they’re good! They look good. How come?”
“No reason. Why do we have to get up at five? The war’s over, for God’s sake.”
“I don’t know—we gotta get back before lunch. They got some new forms in we gotta fill out before lunch. . . . I asked Bulling how come we couldn’t fill ’em out tonight—he’s got the goddam forms right on his desk. He don’t want to open the envelopes yet, the son of a bitch.”
The two sat quiet for a moment, hating Bulling. Clay suddenly looked at X with new-higher-interest than before. “Hey,” he said. “Did you know the goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place?”
X said he knew all about it, and covered his tic with his hand.
Clay stared at him for a moment, then said, rather vividly, as if he were the bearer of exceptionally good news, “I wrote Loretta you had a nervous breakdown.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She’s interested as hell in all that stuff. She’s majoring in psychology.” Clay stretched himself out on the bed, shoes included. “You know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your whole goddam life.”
X bridged his hands over his eyes—the light over the bed seemed to be blinding him—and said that Loretta’s insight into things was always a joy.
Clay glanced over at him. “Listen, ya bastard,” he said. “She knows a goddam sight more psychology than you do.”
“Do you think you can bring yourself to take your stinking feet off my bed?” X asked.
Clay left his feet where they were for a few don’t-tell-me-where-to-put-my-feet seconds, then swung them around to the floor and sat up. “I’m goin’ downstairs anyway. They got the radio on in Walker’s room.” He didn’t get up from the bed, though. “Hey. I was just tellin’ that new son of a bitch, Bernstein, downstairs. Remember that time I and you drove into Valognes, and we got shelled for about two goddam hours
, and that goddam cat I shot that jumped up on the hood of the jeep when we were layin’ in that hole? Remember?”
“Yes—don’t start that business with that cat again, Clay, God damn it. I don’t want to hear about it.”
“No, all I mean is I wrote Loretta about it. She and the whole psychology class discussed it. In class and all. The goddam professor and everybody.”
“That’s fine. I don’t want to hear about it, Clay.”
“No, you know the reason I took a pot shot at it, Loretta says? She says I was temporarily insane. No kidding. From the shelling and all.”