The cop ignored him. He took his arm and sort of shoved him out of the cell, then out of the cellblock. They stopped at the property room and picked up their revolvers, then ripped open a brown manila envelope. They tucked his wallet, handkerchief, cigarettes, matches and change in his pockets, and led him out of the building to a parking lot in the rear.

"When do I get something to eat?" Tommy asked.

The cops ignored that question too.

He wasn't so much hungry as thirsty, Tommy thought. He'd really put away the boilermakers the night before, and the only water in the cell had been warm, and brown, and smelled like horse-piss.

What he really needed was a couple of beers, maybe a couple of boilermakers, to straighten himself out.

They took him to the mill to the small brick building just inside the gate. It looked like a regular house but was the place where the mill security police had their office. In there was also a dispensary where they took people until the ambulance arrived.

They led him into the office of the chief of plant security. He wasn't surprised to see him, but he was surprised to see Denny Walkowicz, Assistant Business Manager of Local 3341, United Steel Workers of America, a big, shiny-faced Polack.

No one said hello to Tommy, or offered him a chair.

"What's all this?" Tommy asked.

"You broke his nose, you might like to know," the chief of plant security said. "He said you hit him with a beer bottle."

"Bullshit," Tommy said.

"What do they call that?" the plant security chief said.

"We got him charged with 'assault with a dangerous object,' " one of the cops said.

"That's all?"

"Public drunkenness, resisting arrest," the cop said. "There's more."

"Nobody's asked for his side of it," Denny Walkowicz said.

"His side don't mean a shit, Denny. Let's not start that bullshit all over again."

Another man came into the room. One of the fucking white-collar workers from Personnel. Little shit in a shiny blue suit.

He had an envelope in his hand, which he laid on the table.

"Denny Walkowicz stood up for you, McCoy, Christ only knows why," the plant security chief said. "Here's what we worked out. There's two weeks' severance pay, plus what you earned through last Friday. You take that."

"Or what?"

"Or they take you back to jail."

"You're facing ninety days in the can, kid," Denny Walkowicz said. "At least, maybe a lot more. And it ain't only the time, it's a criminal record."

"For getting in a fight?"

"You don't listen, do you, McCoy?" the plant security chief said. "You hit a guy with a beer bottle, it's not like punching him."

"I told you, I didn't use no bottle."

"Yeah, you said that, but other people say different."

"Well, fuck you!"

"I'm glad you were here and the cops are to hear that, Denny," the chief of plant security said. " 'Using profane or obscene language to a supervisor or member of management shall be grounds for dismissal for cause,' " he quoted.

"He's got you, McCoy," Denny Walkowicz said. "You gotta learn to watch your mouth."

"Take him back to jail," the chief of plant security said, and then picked up the brown envelope and handed it back to the white-collar guy from administration. "Do what you have to," he said. "No severance pay."

"Now wait a minute," Denny Walkowicz said. "We had a deal, we worked this out."

"Nobody tells me, 'fuck you,' " the plant security chief said.

Denny Walkowicz took the envelope back from the white-collar guy.

"You," he said to Tommy McCoy, "keep your fucking mouth shut!"

Then he led him out of the room, with the cops following.

The cops took the handcuffs off him.

"If it was up to me," the larger one said, "you'd do time."

"Yeah, well it ain't up to you, is it?" Denny Walkowicz said.

"If you're smart, McCoy, you won't hang around Bethlehem," the cop said. "You know what I mean?"

As Denny Walkowicz drove Tommy to the boardinghouse in his blue Buick Roadmaster, he said: "You better pay attention to what the cop said. They're after your ass. It took three of them to hold you down, and you kicked one of them in the balls. They're not going to take that."

"That was all the union could do for me?"

"You ungrateful sonofabitch!" Denny Walkowicz exploded. "We kept you from going to jail!"

Tommy went to bed the minute he got to his room. He slept the rest of the day, and except for going out for two beers and some spaghetti about ten that night, slept right around the clock.

At ten- thirty the next morning, he went down to the post office and talked to the recruiter. The guy was especially nice to him after he told him his brother was a Marine, too. He told Tommy that if he enlisted for the duration of the present emergency plus six months, he could fix it for him to be assigned to the same unit as his brother. And when Tommy said that he had always wanted to be a pilot, the recruiter said he could arrange for that, too.

Thomas Michael McCoy was sworn into the United States Marine Corps at 1645 hours that same afternoon. He was transported by bus to the U.S. Navy Yard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the next morning. At Philadelphia, he learned that the recruiter had been something less than honest with him. He wasn't going to be trained as a pilot, but as an infantryman. And the corporal in Philadelphia told him he stood as much chance of being assigned with his brother as he did of being elected pope.

But the corporal felt that professional courtesy to a fellow corporal required that he inform Corporal McCoy that his little brother was on the base awaiting transport to Parris Island. He called Post Locator, and they told him that Corporal McCoy had been the day before transferred to Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia.

Then the corporal made the connection. This dumb Mick's brother was the China Marine in the campaign hat driving the LaSalle convertible, the one they were sending to officers' school. They sure as Christ made little apples were not two peas from the same pod, he thought.

(Four)

Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel

Headquarters, United States Marine Corps

Washington, D.C.

29 August 1941

The wooden frame building-designed for no more than five years' usage-had been built during the Great War (1917-18). The Chief of Company-Grade Officer Assignments stood waiting in one of the doorways to catch the eye of the Deputy Chief, Assignments Branch. The doorway sagged.

The Chief of Company-Grade Officer Assignments, a balding, stocky man, had taken off the jacket of his cord suit and rolled up the sleeves of his sweat-soaked white shirt. Standing there with his suspenders exposed, he didn't look much like the captain of Marines he was. He held two documents at his side. One was that week's listing of actual and projected billet vacancies. The other was the service record of MACKLIN, John D., 1st Lt.

The Deputy Chief, Assignments Branch, had been reading with great interest an interoffice memorandum which compared projected Company-Grade Officer Requirements for Fiscal Year 1942 against projected officer recruitment for Fiscal Year 1942 and was wondering where the hell they were going to dig up the 2,195 bodies that represented the difference between what they needed and what they were likely to get. Finally he noticed the Chief of Company-Grade Officer Assignments standing in his door and motioned him inside with a wave of his hand.

The Deputy Chief, Assignments Branch, who had also removed his jacket, was a major-although he looked, and sometimes felt, more like a bureaucrat than a Marine officer.

"How would you like me to handle this, sir?" the Chief of Company-Grade officer assignments asked. He handed the major the documents in his hand.