Slam the Big Door Read Free Page B

papers, the other from a slick magazine.
    “You been out here long, son?” the fat one asked him.
    “Quite a while.”
    The thin one looked him over and said, “You’ll learn it’s a hell of a lot different than Stateside.”
    “I guess it is,” Mike said. They wore helmet liners, canteens and trench knives.
    And just then Colonel Billy Brice, the Corps artillery specialist, wearing only the important bits of fruit salad, came barreling up, scowling like thunder, and gave Mike a punishing smack on the biceps and said, “If I’d known what you were going to send off Saipan, you son of a bitch, I’d have shot you myself.”
    “Always a pleasure to write up one of my heroes, Colonel, sir.”
    Brice gave him a tight grin. “Or maybe you could have saved me the trouble on the Canal, zigging instead of zagging. Say, I got an old drinking buddy of yours on my staff. Jamison. I took him off the line three months ago. He’d had his share.”
    “Where is he?”
    “Stick around. He should show.” Brice strode off.
    “Isn’t that Billy Brice?” the fat one said.
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t think I caught your name,” the thin one said hesitantly.
    “Mike Rodenska.”
    “Bell Syndicate?”
    “Yes.”
    “Jesus Christ!” the fat one said. “I thought you’d be older. You been out here since the Crusades. Was I telling you all about island warfare? Jesus Christ.”
    It was one of the pleasurable moments in a long war.
    Captain Troy Jamison arrived about twenty minutes later. By then the club had gotten too noisy for coherent conversation. They walked down and sat on the docks in the chilly night, with a bottle to keep the chill off. They talked half the night. Troy had seen more than his share. He was no longer ill at ease about being an officer. He had lost a lot of his people. It had rarely been his fault. And he had protected and saved a lot of his people, and that had always been his design, within the range of his orders.
    It was, Mike thought, a narrow maturity, an encapsulated and forced version which left the eyes old and the mouth still young. He had seen a lot of it, and seen it in death when the eyes were merely empty, and the mouth forever young.
    “One last island,” Troy said in the night, “the biggest one of all, and that ends it. I feel so goddamn remote. Once upon a time I wrote a hell of a lot of copy about a new shopping center. And kissed a girl named Bunny. Hell, Mike, I’ve got to go back into that and it’s got to become important again. That’s the deal. Is it going to become important?”
    “For nearly everybody.”
    Troy offered the bottle, then killed it and hurled it into Naha Bay. “I wanted a lot. But in a dreamy half-assed way. Now I’m going to want a lot—more than my share. And one damn way or another, I’m going to get it. What do you want?”
    “I didn’t have the same war you did, Cap.”
    “What the hell do you want?”
    “Mom’s apple pie.”
    “Screw you, Rodenska.”
    “Twice on Tuesdays. I’m a newspaper bum. All I want is my byline. And Buttons. And beer. Alliteration.”
    “Now without drama, Mike. Listen. Some of the guys I had, they’ll never even begin to find their way back. And there are some who’ll have no trouble at all. I can see them, but I can’t see me. I’d just like to know how I’m going to be.”
    “You’re going to be fine.”
    They were on the same dock with another bottle early in the evening when word came that it was over. Within a half hour the six hundred ships in the area and most of the shore installations were hurling bright hardware into the sky. By then they had a bottle apiece and they crawled under a Navy warehouse. Twenty-one men died that night when the fragments of celebration fell out of the sky and down on their joyous heads. There were a million men on the island, all suddenly technologically unemployed.
     
    “You seem to be breathing,” the girl said. Mike, startled, rolled up onto one elbow and stared at