'Don't you worry about nothing,' he said with fake cheerfulness. 'I'm going to take care of everything.'
If there was pain on her face, he didn't pause to note it. He turned, reached to his neck and removed the berib-boned medal, wadded it and stuffed it in his pocket. He reached the street, turned to the left and was soon among the anonymous crowds of a hot Washington late afternoon.
REDS KILL 4 MARINES IN CHINA, a headline on the Star screamed.
Nobody cared.
'UNTOLD MILLIONS' LOST IN WAR FRAUD the Times Herald roared.
Nobody paid any attention.
NATS DROP TWO yelled the Daily News.
OPA OKS 11 % PRICE HIKE announced the Post.
Earl pushed his way through it all, among anonymous men in straw fedoras and tan suits and women in flower print dresses with their own huge hats. Everybody seemed so colorful. In his years in the Marine Corps he had adjusted to a basically monochromatic universe: OD and khaki and that was it. Yet America was awaking from its long commitment to wartime austerity, the windows were suddenly full of goods, you could buy gas again, makeup on the women was expected, and the men wore gay yellow ties against their white shirts, as if to speak to a springtime of hope.
The medals on Earl's chest and the darkness of his deep blue tunic excited no attention; everybody was familiar with uniforms and the medals meant little. They'd seen heroes. Many of them were heroes. He joined their anonymity, just another nobody meandering up Connecticut toward who knows what. Soon enough he came to a splurge of freedom, which was Farragut Square, with its trees, its benches, its stern admiral staring toward the White House. Pigeons sat and shat upon the naval officer and young men and women sat on the park benches, talking of love and great hopes for tomorrow.
A low growl reached the park, and people looked up, pointing.
'Jets!'
A formation of the miracle planes flew high overhead, southwest to northeast, each of the four trailing a white feathery contrail, the sunlight flashing off the sleek silver fuselages.
Earl had no idea what specific type of plane they were and found the concept of a silver airplane fairly ridiculous. In the Pacific, the Japs would zero a bright gleamy bird like that in a second, and bring it down. Planes were mottled brown or sea-blue, because they didn't want you seeing them until they saw you. They weren't miracles at all, but beaten-up machines for war, and there were never enough of them around. But these three P?whatever's blazed overhead like darts, trailing a wall of sound, pulling America toward something new. Pretty soon, it was said, they'd be actually going faster than sound.
'Bet you wish you had them babies with you in Berlin,' a smiling bald guy said to him. ' You'd have cooked Hitler's ass but good, right, Sarge?'
'That's right,' said Earl.
He walked ahead, the echo of the jets still trembling in his ear. The walls of the city closed in around him, and the next exhibit in the freak show of civilian life was something in a window just ahead, which had drawn a crowd. It appeared to be a movie for free streaming out of a circle atop a big radio. On its blue-gray screen a puppet jigged this way and that.
'Look at that, sir,' said a Negro woman in a big old hat with roses on it and a veil, 'that's the television. It's radio with pictures.'
'Don't that beat all?' said Earl.
'Yes sir,' she said. 'They say we-all goin' own one, and see picture shows in our own homes. Won't have no reason to go out to the movies no more. You can just stay home for the picture show. They goin' show the games there too, you know, the baseball and that like. Though who'd stay home to see the Senators, I declare I don't know.'
'Well, ma'am,' he said, 'the president himself told me it's just going to git better and better.'
'Well, maybe so. Wish my Billy was here to see it.'
'I'm sorry, ma'am. The war?'
'Yes sir. Someplace in Italy. He wasn't no hero, like you, he didn't win no medals or nothing. He was only a hospital orderly. But he got kilt just the same. They said it was a land mine.'
'I am very sorry, ma'am.'
'Hope you kilt a lot of them Germans.'
'No, ma'am, I did fight the Japanese, and I had to kill some of them.'
'Same thing,' she said bitterly, then forced a broken smile upon him, and walked away.
Billy's death on some faraway Neapolitan byway stayed with Earl. Billy was part of the great adventure, one of the hundreds of thousands who'd died. Now, who cared? Not with jet planes and the television. It was all going away.
Get your mind off it, he told himself.
He was feeling too much again. He needed a drink.
He walked along until he found stairs that led downward, which he followed into a dark bar. It was mostly empty and he bellied up to the edge, feeling the coolness of the air.
A jukebox blared.
It was that happy one about going for a ride on the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. That damn Judy sounded like she was about to bust a gut with pleasure. A train ride. A big old fancy train ride.
Back in Ohio where I come from
I've done a lot of dreamin' and I've traveled some, But I never thought I'd see the day when I ever took a ride on the Santa Fe.
The only trains he remembered took him to wars or worse. Now he had a few hours that would take him back to a train ride to?well, to who knew what?
'Poison, Sarge? Name it, and it's yours. One drink, on me for the USMC. Made a man out of my son. Killed him, but made a man out of him.'
It was the bartender.
'Sorry about your boy,' said Earl, confronting another dead man.
'Nah. Only good thing he ever did was stand up to the Japs at Okinawa. You there?'
'Missed that one.'
'Well, he was a bad kid, but he had one good day in his life, when he didn't run from the goddamned Japs. Marines taught him that. I never could. God bless the Marines. What'll it be?'
'You carry Boone County?'
'Never heard of it.'
'Must just be an Arkansas liquor. Okay, I'll try that Jim Beam. With a bit of water. Some ice.'
'Choo choo ch'boogie,' said the barkeep, mixing and serving the drink. 'Here's your train, right on time.'
Earl took a powerful sip, feeling the muted whack of the booze. It made his fears and his doubts vanish. He felt now he was the equal of the world.
'No, he wasn't no good,' said the bartender. 'Don't know why he was such a yellow kid. I rode him but good, but he ran from everything. How he ended up in?'
'Mister,' said Earl, 'I much appreciate this here free drink. But if you say a Marine who stood and fought on Okinawa was no good one more time, I'm going to jump over this bar and make you eat this glass, then the bar, then all the stools.'
The bartender, a very big man, looked at him, and read the dark willingness to issue endless violence in Earl's eyes, and swallowed. Earl was a big man too, made almost of leather from his long hard years under a Pacific sun. He was dark and glowery, with leathery pouches under his eyes from too much worry, but he had a bull's neck and those eyes had the NCO's ability to look through you and pin you to the wall behind. His jet-black hair was close-cropped but stood up like barbs of wire on his skull. Under his tunic, his rangy body, though full of holes, was well packed with lean muscle. His veins stood out. His voice didn't speak so much as rumble or roar along, like the Santa Fe. Heated up, he would be a fearsome sight and then some. When he spoke in a certain tone, all men listened, as did the bartender now.
The bartender stepped back a bit.
'Look, here's a twenty,' Earl said, peeling off his last big bill. 'You put the bottle on the bar, then you go be
