The stout, worried captain gets the men lined
up and marches them to the clubmobile. Swing music is still shrieking from the
loudspeaker on the roof. A single file of men passes a little counter on a side
of the truck and each one gets a big cup of coffee and two doughnuts. Then they
break their ranks and stand about drinking the coffee and looking lost. The big
girl comes out of the truck and works on them.
“Where you from, boy?”
“Michigan.”
“Why, we’re neighbors. I come from Illinois.”
A local wolf, a slicker at home, a dark boy
with sideburns, says wearily and just from a sense of duty, “What you doing
tonight, baby?”
“What are you doing?” the big girl asks, and
the men about laugh loudly as if it were very funny.
The tired wolf puts an arm about her waist.
“Plant me,” he says, and the two do a grotesque shag, a kind of slow-motion
jitterbug.
A blond boy with a sunburned nose and red
eyelids shyly approaches a lieutenant. He has his coffee in one hand and his
two doughnuts in the other. Too late he realizes that he is in trouble. He
balances the two doughnuts on the edge of his cup and they promptly fall into
the coffee. He salutes and the lieutenant returns it gravely.
“Excuse me, sir,” the boy says. “Aren’t you a
movie star?”
“I used to be,” the lieutenant says. “I used to
be.”
“I knew I’d seen you in pictures,” the boy
says. “I’ll write home about seeing you here. Say,” he says with excitement,
“would you write your name here on something and I could send it home and then
they’d have to believe me and they could keep it for me.”
“Sure,” the lieutenant says, and he signs his
name with a pencil on the back of a grubby envelope from the soldier’s pocket.
The boy regards it for a moment.
“What’re you doing here?” he asks.
“Why, I’m just in the Army, the same as you
are.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I see you are. Well,
they’ll have to believe I saw you now.”
“How long have you been over?” the lieutenant
asks.
“We’re not supposed to say anything about stuff
like that.”
“Sure, I forgot. Good boy to remember it.”
The doughnuts in the coffee have become
semi-liquid by now. The boy drinks the coffee and the doughnuts without
noticing.
“Do you suppose we’ll ever be let to go to
London?” he asks.
“Sure. When you get a pass.”
“Well, that’s a long way off, isn’t it?”
“Not so far. You could make it on a forty-eight
hour pass easy and have lots of time.”
“Well. Are there lots of girls there?”
