Slam the Big Door Read Free Page A

seemed to take almost as much pleasure in the pictures of Micky as Mike did.
    Troy had a girl in Rochester. Her name was Bonita Chandler, called Bunny. They wrote faithfully. Troy said he was going to marry her, and he called himself a damn fool for not marrying her before he left, in spite of her parents’ opposition.
    They talked about women in wartime, and how being unfaithful to girl or wife was so damn easy it was really a unique accomplishment to be true. Certainly unique in the Corps. But all that talk of virtue was before running into Marty and Liz. They were hearty, wholesome sisters of twenty-five and twenty-seven, with the typical buoyancy and easy laughter and sturdy bodies and bad teeth of most young Australian women. They were both from Broken Hill, and their men were in the African desert, and their kids—one belonging to Marty and two to Liz—were in Broken Hill with their parents while the girls did war work in Melbourne, clerical work connected with the port. They lived in a small apartment, and, on one Sunday afternoon, on their way to a date, they were energetically annoyed by two tipsy Marines in a small park. Troy put the fear of God into the Marines, and then the four of them sat in the park for a little while and talked, and then the Henderson sisters decided not to show up for their date and they all went back to the apartment.
    They were two good-tempered healthy women lonely for their men, and they were two lonely men with more islands in their future. The arrangement lasted through the remainder of the hospital time, and through the rest of camp time, right up until they returned to duty, Mike first and, as he found out later, Troy two weeks later.
    It was an indication of their special rapport that after the involvement with Marty and Liz had begun they did not talk with each other about either faithfulness or guilt. They accepted the situation. Troy had more time with the girls. Mike was by then writing color pieces on the Melbourne scene and wangling them through censorship, while Troy jeered at him, calling him a beaver.
    On the night before Mike was returned to duty Marty’s tears dropped hot on his throat in the bedroom darkness, but not many and not for long. She cried without making a sound. He was back in Melbourne eight months later, but somebody else was in the apartment. They knew the girls had gone back to Broken Hill. The husband of one of them had been killed, but the couple in the apartment did not know which one.
    In 1943, Mike got back to the States for three weeks, and when Tommy was born he was back in the islands, but that was 1944 and it was a different kind of war because by then you knew how it would end. You couldn’t be certain you’d live to see the end of it, but you did know how it would end. He knew he’d very probably see the end of it, barring some air-transport foul-up, because it was no longer necessary for him to prove to himself the things it had been important to prove in the beginning. He had learned that he could react adequately, though not brilliantly, to utter and desperate emergency. He had been to the well. And there was always a sameness about the well. And so he was able, without feeling any self-contempt, to start taking better care of the pitcher. And he had long since gotten over the juvenile affectation of trying to look like a combat type despite the correspondent insignia. It was the newcomers who had something to prove—more to themselves than to others. So he could prop up a bar, as neat as if he were on Pentagon duty, and be mildly and not unkindly amused by the hairy affectations of the new ones.
    But he could not keep himself from taking childish pleasure in moments of inadvertent revelation.
    Like at Naha, a couple of weeks before Hiroshima. He’d been at the officers’-club bar talking with two of them. He’d listened while they were being very profound about kamikazis and island warfare. One was from a little string of Texas