Up in Honey's Room Read Free Page B

someone.”
    â€œI thought you wanted to talk about Walter. What if I asked if you’re married?”
    Having fun with him. She could tell he knew what she was doing and said no, he wasn’t married or planning to anytime soon. Honey wanted to call him by his first name but pictured a guy named Kevin as a blond-haired kid with a big grin. Kevin Dean had a crop of wild brown hair Honey believed he combed in the morning and forgot about the rest of the day. She knew he packed a gun but couldn’t tell where he wore it. She wondered if she should call him Dean, and heard lines in her memory, It was Din! Din! Din! You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been? Left there from a ninth-grade elocution contest. And saw Dean in the sofa waiting for her to say something.
    An easygoing type. He might not be her idea of a Kevin, but that’s what he was. She said, “Kevin, how long have you been a G-man?”
    See if she could find out how old he was.
    â€œI finished my training this past summer. Before that I was in the service.”
    â€œWhere’re you from?” Honey said. “I hear someplace faintly down-home the way you speak.”
    â€œI didn’t think I had an accent.”
    She said, “It isn’t East Texas, but around there.”
    He told her Tulsa, Oklahoma. He went to school there, the University of Tulsa, graduated midyear right after Pearl and joined the cavalry.
    Making him no more than twenty-five, Honey at least five years older than this good-looking boy from Oklahoma. She said, “The cavalry?”
    â€œI went to language school to learn Japanese, then spent the next year with the First Cavalry Division in Louisiana, Australia, and New Guinea, training for jungle combat, the kind they had on Guadalcanal. I made second lieutenant and was assigned to the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, the one J. E. B. Stuart commanded before the Civil War. He was always a hero of mine, the reason I joined the First Cav, not knowing we’d be dismounted in the Pacific theater. You know the Stuart I’m talking about?”
    â€œYou told me, Jeb Stuart.”
    â€œShot through the lungs at Yellow Tavern, the war almost over. Do you have a hero?”
    â€œJane Austen,” Honey said. “Where were you in the Pacific with the cavalry?”
    â€œLos Negros in the Admiralties, two hundred miles north of New Guinea, two degrees south of the equator. Destroyers dropped us off and we went ashore twenty-nine February of this year, to draw fire and locate enemy positions. I was with a recon unit so we were the first wave. We wanted an airstrip on Momote plantation, thirteen hundred yards from the beach, sitting in there among rows and rows of palm trees, coconuts all over the ground.”
    Honey said, “Were you scared to death?” at ease with him, able to say something like that.
    â€œYou bet I was scared, but you’re with all these serious guyssharpening their trench knives. On the destroyer taking us to the drop-off that’s what you did, sharpened your knife. Some of the guys had brand-new tattoos that said DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR and you start to think, Wait a minute, what am I doing here? What you don’t want to do is throw up or wet your pants. Right before you go in is a tricky time.”
    â€œWell, you made it.”
    â€œI made it with metal frags in my back. The evening of the second day a Jap threw a grenade I saw coming and it took me out of the war. I never did get to ride with the cavalry. But I got a Purple Heart out of it, an honorable discharge and a visit from the Bureau. They came to the VA hospital and got around to asking if I’d like to be an FBI agent, since I’d finished college, had taken accounting and spoke Japanese, sort of.”
    â€œSo they send you after German spies,” Honey said. “Tell me, does Walter still live in that house on Kenilworth? He’s rigid about his appearance, but he sure let