The Night In Question Read Free

head.
    “I’ll break your neck if I have to,” I told him.
    “Let go,” he said.
    “If something happened to you right now, your obituary would be solid news. Then I could get my job back.”
    He tried to pull away again but I held him there.
    “It’d make a hell of a story,” I said.
    I felt his arm go slack. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “Yes.” Just that one word.
    This was the best I was going to get out of him. It had to be enough. When I let go of his arm he turned and ducked his head and took his place in the stream of people walking past. I started back to Tad’s for my box. Just ahead of me a mime was following a young swell in a three-piece suit, catching to the life his leading-man’s assurance, the supercilious tilt of his chin. A girl laughed raucously. The swell looked back and the mime froze. He was still holding his pose as I came by. I slipped him a quarter, hoping he’d let me pass.

Casualty
    B .D. carried certain objects. He observed in his dispositions and arrangements a certain order, and became irritable and fearful whenever that order was disrupted. There were certain words he said to himself at certain moments, power words. Sometimes he really believed in all of this; other times he believed in nothing. But he was alive, and he gave honor to all possible causes.
    His name was Benjamin Delano Sears, B.D. for short, but his friends in the unit had taken to calling him Biddy because of his fussiness and the hennish way he brooded over them. He always had to know where they were. He bugged them about taking their malaria pills and their salt tablets. When they were out in the bush he drove them crazy with equipment checks. He acted like a squad leader, which he wasn’t and never would be, because Sergeant Holmes refused to consider him for the job. Sergeant Holmes had a number of sergeant-like sayings. One of them was “If you don’t got what it takes, it’ll take what you gots.” He had decided that B.D. didn’t have what it took, and B.D. didn’t argue; he knew even better than Sergeant Holmes how scared he was. Hejust wanted to get himself home, himself and his friends.
    Most of them did get home. The unit had light casualties during B.D.’s tour, mainly through dumb luck. One by one B.D.’s friends rotated stateside, and finally Ryan was the only one left. B.D. and Ryan had arrived the same week. They knew the same stories. The names of absent men and past operations and nowhere places had meaning for them, and those who came later began to regard the pair of them as some kind of cultish remnant. And that was pretty much how B.D. and Ryan saw themselves.
    They hadn’t started off as friends. Ryan was a lip, a big mouth. He narrated whatever was happening, like a sportscaster, but the narration never fit what was going on. He’d complain when operations got canceled, go into fey French-accented ecstasies over cold C-rats, offer elaborate professions of admiration for orders of the most transparent stupidity. At first B.D. thought he was a pain in the ass. Then one morning he woke up laughing at something Ryan had said the night before. They’d been setting out claymores. Sergeant Holmes got exasperated fiddling with one of them and said, “Any you boys gots a screwdriver?” and Ryan said, instantly, “What size?” This was regulation blab, but it worked on B.D. He kept hearing Ryan’s voice, its crispness and competence, its almost perfect imitation of sanity.
    What size?
    Ryan and B.D. had about six weeks left to go when Lieutenant Puchinsky, their commanding officer, got transferred to battalion headquarters. Pinch Puchinsky saw himself as a star—he’d been a quarterback at Penn State, spoiled, coddled, illegally subsidized—and he took it for granted that other men would see him the same way. And they did. He never had to insist on an order and neverthought to insist, because he couldn’t imagine anyone refusing. He couldn’t imagine anything disagreeable, in