“You ever been laid?” Jordache said.

“No.”

“That the truth?”

“I’d tell you.”

“I suppose you would,” Jordache said. He walked silently for awhile, with his rolling limp. “What’re you waiting for?”

“I’m in no hurry,” Rudolph said defensively. Neither his father nor his mother had ever mentioned anything about sex to him and this afternoon was certainly the wrong day to start. He was haunted by the sight of Miss Lenaut, dissolved and ugly, weeping on her desk, and he was ashamed that he had ever thought a silly, shrill woman like that worthy of his passion.

“When you start,” Jordache said, “don’t get hung up on one. Take ’em by the dozen. Don’t ever get to feel that there’s only one woman for you and that you got to have her. You can ruin your life.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said, knowing that his father was wrong, dead wrong.

Another silence as they turned a corner.

“You sorry I hit her?” Jordache said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve lived all your life in this country,” Jordache said. “You don’t know what real hating is.”

“Did you really kill a Frenchman with a bayonet?” He had to know.

“Yeah,” Jordache said. “One of ten million. What difference does it make?”

They were nearly home. Rudolph felt depressed and miserable. He should have thanked his father for sticking up for him that way, it was something that very few parents would have done, and he realized that, but he couldn’t get the words out.

“It wasn’t the only man I killed,” Jordache said, as they stopped in front of the bakery. “I killed a man when there was no war on. In Hamburg, Germany, with a knife. In 1921. I just thought you ought to know. It’s about time you learned something about your father. See you at supper. I got to go put the shell under cover.” He limped off, down the shabby street, his cloth cap squarely on top of his head.

When the final marks were posted for the term, Rudolph had an A in French.

Chapter 4

I

The gymnasium of the elementary school near the Jordache house was kept open until ten o’clock five nights a week. Tom Jordache went there two or three times a week, sometimes to play basketball, sometimes merely to shoot the breeze with the boys and young men who gathered there or to play in the mild game of craps that occasionally was held in the boys’ toilet, out of sight of the gym teacher refereeing the permanent game on the basketball court.

Tom was the only boy his age allowed in the crap game. He had gained entrance with his fists. He had found a place between two of the players in the ring and had kneeled on the floor one night and thrown a dollar into the pot and said, “You’re faded,” to Sonny Jackson, a boy of nineteen waiting to be drafted, and the guiding spirit of the group that congregated around the school. Sonny was a strong, stocky boy, pugnacious and quick to take offense. Tom had chosen Sonny purposely for his debut. Sonny had looked at Tom, annoyed, and pushed Tom’s dollar bill back along the floor toward him. “Go way, punk,” he said. “This game is for men.”

Without hesitation, Tom had leaned across the open space and backhanded Sonny, without moving from his knees. In the fight that followed, Tom made his reputation. He had cut Sonny’s eyes and lips and had finished by dragging Sonny into the showers and turning the cold water on him and keeping him there for five minutes before he turned the water off. Since then, whenever Tom joined the group in the gymnasium, they made room for him.

Tonight, there was no game in progress. A gangling twenty-year-old by the name of Pyle, who had enlisted early in the war, was displaying a samurai sword he said he had captured himself at Guadalcanal. He had been discharged from the Army after having malaria three times and nearly died. He was still alarmingly yellow.

Tom listened skeptically as Pyle described how he had thrown a hand grenade into-a cave just for luck. Pyle said he heard a yell inside and had crawled in with his lieutenant’s pistol in his hand to find a dead Jap captain, with the sword at his side. It sounded to Tom more like Errol Flynn in Hollywood than anybody from Port Philip in the South Pacific. But he didn’t say anything, because he was in a peaceful mood and you couldn’t beat up on a guy who looked that sick and yellow, anyway.

“Two weeks later,” Pyle said, “I cut off a Jap’s head with this sword.”

Tom felt a tug at his sleeve. It was Claude, dressed in a suit and tie, as usual, and bubbling a little at the lips. “Listen,” Claude whispered, “I got something to tell you. Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “I want to hear this.”

“The island was secured,” Pyle was saying, “but there were still Japs hiding out, coming out at night, and shooting up the area and knocking off guys. The C.O. got pissed off and he sent out patrols three times a day. He told us to clean every last one of the bastards out of the area.

“Well, I’m on one of those patrols and we see one of ’em trying to wade across a creek so we let him have it. He was hit but not bad and he’s sitting up, holding his hands over his head, saying something in Jap. There wasn’t no officers on the patrol, just a corporal and six other guys, and I says, ‘Hey, listen, you guys, just hold him here and I’ll go back to get my samurai sword and we’ll have a regular execution.’ The corporal was a little chicken about it, the orders were to bring in prisoners, but like I said, there were no officers present and after all, that’s what the bastards did all the time to our guys, cut off their heads, and we took a vote and they tied the fucker up and I went back and got my samurai sword. We made him kneel down in the regular way and he did it just like he was used to it. It was my sword so I got to do the job. I picked it up way over my head and clunk! there was his head rolling on the ground like a coconut, with his eyes wide open. The blood spurted out, it must have been close to ten feet. I tell you,” Pyle said, touching the edge of the weapon lovingly, “these swords are something.”

“Horseshit,” Claude said loudly.

“What’s that?” Pyle asked, blinking. “What’d you say?”

“I said horseshit,” Claude repeated. “You never cut off no Jap’s head. I bet you bought that sword in a souvenir shop in Honolulu. My brother Al knows you and he told me you haven’t got the guts to kill a rabbit.”

“Listen, kid,” Pyle said, “sick as I am, I’ll give you the beating of your life, if you don’t shut up and get out of here. Nobody says horseshit to me.”

“I’m waiting,” Claude said. He took off his glasses and put them in the breast pocket of his suit. He looked pathetically defenseless.

Tom sighed. He stepped in front of Claude. “Anybody wants to pick on my friend,” he said, “he has to go through me first.”

“I don’t mind,” Pyle began, handing the sword to one of the other boys. “You’re young, but you’re fresh.”

“Knock it off, Pyle,” said the boy who now was holding the sword. “He’ll murder you.”

Pyle looked uncertainly at the circling faces. There was something sobering that he saw there. “I didn’t come back from fighting in the Pacific,” he said loudly, “to get into arguments with little kids in my home town. Give me my sword, I’m due back at the house.”

He beat a retreat. The others drifted off without a word, leaving Tom and Claude in possession of the boys’ toilet.

“What’d you want to do that for?” Tom asked, irritated. “He didn’t mean no harm. And you know they wouldn’t let him take me on.”

“I just wanted to see the expression on their faces,” Claude said, sweating and grinning. “That’s all. Power. Raw power.”

“You’re going to get me killed one day with your raw power,” Tom said. “Now what the hell did you have to tell me?”

“I saw your sister,” Claude said.