The lieutenant made four ritual appearances every day, at 0600, 1200, 1800, and 2400 hours. He stayed about ten minutes, making sure that every prisoner had eaten, washed, and shaved, and had washed his previous day's uniform and underclothing.

McCoy managed to eat in the dining car only once. The waiters made it perfectly clear by lousy service and exaggerated courtesy what kind of shit they considered the guards to be. He didn't need any more reminding.

He took every other meal in the U.S. Army Troop Car, which meant that he ate nothing but sandwiches and coffee all the way across the North American continent.

It wasn't what he had dreamed about on the Pacific: a plush seat in a Pullman car and meals and drinks in the club car, as America the Beautiful rolls past the windows.

But that, of course, was fantasy. This was reality. This was the fucking United States Marine Corps.

(Two)

Boston, Massachusetts

1630 Hours 16 July 1941

McCoy had to change trains at Boston for the Philadelphia train. He had plenty of time. The Boston Maine from Portsmouth had put him into Boston at five minutes to three. By quarter after three, he had a reserved seat on the club car. They'd given him a train voucher to Philly and two meal tickets at the Portsmouth Naval Prison, but he'd torn them into tiny pieces and thrown the pieces into a trash bucket.

He didn't want a fucking thing to do with anything concerning the Portsmouth Naval Prison. Or, more importantly, with the Fucking United States Marine Corps. He had made that decision somewhere between Diego and Chicago and still wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. For his own sake. Not in connection with any dumb fucking ideas he had about doing something with Ellen Goddamn-the-Bitch Feller. He had five thousand fucking dollars. There was absolutely no reason he had to stay in the Marine Corps and put up with all the shit.

He could buy his way out of the Corps and get a job. Things were better now, and he had a high school diploma. Maybe even go back to Shanghai and see if he couldn't work something out with Piotr Petrovich Muller, or the "General."

Five thousand simoleons plus was a lot of money. Even if he spent whatever it cost for passage back to Shanghai; he would have enough left over not to have to worry about getting a job right that minute. He could look around, see what looked good, and move into that.

So it was really a good thing in the end that the fucking Corps had sent him home as a fuck-up for doing what he was supposed to do, and even a better thing that he had gotten involved in the prisoner-escort detail. It had convinced him to get the hell out of the fucking Corps. Otherwise, he would have stayed in China sticking his neck out, and sooner or later the Japs would have done to him what they tried to do to Sessions.

The prisoner-escort detail had gotten worse toward the end after they'd changed trains in Boston for New Hampshire, and really rough when they actually got to Portsmouth.

There had been another bus with bars over the windows waiting for them along with three Marines carrying pistols in white web gear and three-foot-long billy clubs they kept slapping in the palms of their hands.

All the prisoners were scared shitless, and two of them- one of the fairies and the great big guy who was going to do ten years before he was dishonorably discharged for slugging an officer-had actually cried.

There was a little ceremony when the prison signed for the prisoners. Then one of them tried to ask a question and got the end of a billy club in his gut for it. Hard enough to knock the wind out of him and knock him down.

And that fucking lieutenant just stood mere and made believe nothing had happened. He knew goddamned well it was a violation of Rocks and Shoals (The Disciplinary Code for the Governance of the Naval Services) to hit somebody with a billy club like that, but the chickenshit sonofabitch didn't do a thing about it.

He was more concerned with important things like taking McCoy aside and telling him he was willing to admit a mistake about him and that he had probably been put off by McCoy's Tijuana chevrons. Anyhow, the lieutenant went on, he wanted to tell McCoy his deportment during the trip was all and more that could be expected of a good Marine noncom and that when he got back to San Diego he was going to write his commanding officer a letter of commendation.

What that was going to mean after he got to this fucking truck company in Philly (and McCoy believed the chickenshit sonofabitch was serious about writing the letter) was that whenever some poor sonofabitch had to be transported to Portsmouth, that shitty detail would go to Corporal McCoy since he was so good at it. But fuck that. The first thing he was going to do when he got to the 47th Motor Transport Platoon was ask the first sergeant for the forms to buy himself out of the Corps.

There was a bar in the station in Boston, and McCoy walked by it half a dozen times waiting for the Philly train without going in. He wanted a drink. He wanted lots of drinks, but he was going to wait until he was safe on the train-had left Portsmouth Naval Prison behind him for good- before he took one.

The first time he noticed the guy looking at him was on the platform. He was a regular candy-ass, about his age, wearing a regular candy-ass seersucker suit; and McCoy thought he was probably a kid going home from college, except that it was now the middle of July, and colleges were closed for the summer.

The candy-ass wasn't just looking at him, he was sort of smiling at him, as if goosing up his courage to talk to him. Christ, there were fairies all over. Goddamn-the-Bitch Ellen Feller's husband wasn't the only one. And he never would have guessed that hairy machinist's mate second on the Whaley was a cocksucker. And now here was this kid making eyes at him who looked like an Arrow Shirt Company advertisement for a choirboy Boy Scout.

On the train the club car steward put McCoy in a velvet plush chair by a little table and handed him a menu. Fifty cents (not counting tip) was a hell of a lot of money for one lousy drink of Scotch whiskey; but he didn't give a fuck what it cost, he was entitled. He'd been thinking about this drink practically from the moment he went aboard that fucking fleet oiler in Shanghai. Just as the waiter was about to take his order, the guy who had been making eyes at him on the platform walked up.

"This free?" he asked, putting his hand on the back of the velvet plush armchair on the other side of the table.

"Help yourself," McCoy said.

How am I going to get rid of this pansy without belting him?

"Scotch," McCoy said to the waiter. "Johnnie Walker. Soda on the side."

"Same for me, please," the pansy said.

McCoy gave him a dirty look.

"I'm about to be a Marine myself," the pansy said.

"You're what?" McCoy asked, incredulously.

"I'm about to join the Marine Corps," the pansy repeated.

"I'm about to get out of the Marine Corps," McCoy said.

"You are?" the pansy-who-said-he-was-about-to-enlist asked, surprised. "I thought all discharges were frozen."

"I'm getting out," McCoy said firmly. He remembered hearing rumors of a freeze, or a year's extension, or something like that, but he hadn't paid a hell of a lot of attention.

Jesus Christ! What if this candy-ass is right? Then what?

"You sound as if you're not happy in the Marine Corps," the young pansy said.

He doesn't talk like a pansy, and wave his hands like a woman, but then, neither did the machinist's mate second.

"Do I?" McCoy replied, unpleasantly.

"Then you're just the guy I want to talk to," the young man said. "The way the recruiters talk, it's paradise on earth. All the food you can eat, all the liquor you can drink, and all the prettiest girls throwing themselves at you."