Hanging on

And Beame would say, “Legs are legs.”

One day when he felt like teasing Beame, Kelly had gone his usual horny litany, then added, “She has the sexiest thumbs I've ever seen!”

And Beame had said, “Thumbs are thumbs.” Then he had realized what he'd said. He blushed. “Yeah,” he had added, “she does have nice thumbs.”

And she had a nice body, too. It was all breasts and hips and firm buttocks and legs. Very little waist. Right now, Major Kelly didn't care about her mind or her personality, her religion, politics, or even about her moderately bad breath. He only cared about her wonderful body. He lay beside her, kissing her forehead, her eyes, her pert nose, then her lips, sucking on her tongue until he thought he might swallow it. He took handfuls of her jugs which she offered him with a graceful arching of her back, and he pondered the engineering miracle of those breasts. They were engineering miracles. He should know: he was an engineer. He tested those jugs for solidity and texture, squeezing and releasing them, massaging them with his fingertips and palms. He swept his hands up their undersides to gauge their thrust, took the big hard nipples between thumb and forefinger and gently turned them this way and that, making them even larger. A miracle. Two miracles, perfectly matched. He caressed and bounced and licked those miracles until he felt he was ready to explode with an infusion of divine power.

Overhead, the pattering sound ceased and was replaced by the soughing of the wind.

Major Kelly let the wind help build the atmosphere of sweet sensuality, and when he felt that it had been built high enough, he took off his own fatigues. He seemed to be moving through syrup, undressing so slowly that he would never finally be unfettered and able to achieve penetration. A man on a slow-motion film, he peeled off his shirt and, an eternity later, pulled off his shoes and then his trousers. It was, he thought, like that old mathematical riddle: if a chair is ten feet from the wall, and if you keep moving it half the distance to the wall, how many moves will it take until the chair is touching the wall? The answer, of course, is that the chair will never be touching the wall. It will get closer and closer through an infinite number of moves but can never, theoretically, be finally there. Right now, as he pulled off his shorts, Kelly thought that he was the chair while Lily was the wall. They were never going to get together.

And then he was nude and between her legs. He lifted her buttocks, another pair of engineering miracles, and guided himself into her, all the way, moaning in the back of his throat as she moaned in the back of hers.

The gentle breezes above were punctuated by hard, regular gulping sounds, like something thick and wet being dropped down a pipe, sounds that did not belong here in the midst of romance. As these gulping noises increased, grew louder and more frequent and finally dominated the night, Major Kelly broke his embrace of Lily Kain with a wet, mournful sucking noise of rudely disengaged organs. He got to his feet and, utterly unashamed of his own nakedness, walked out of the shadow of the bridge floor, and looked up at the twenty or thirty men who were lying on the bridge and hanging over the edge watching the action.

“We can forget the patter of feet,” Kelly said, “and pretend it's only leaves rustling.”

None of the men replied. They just hung up there, wide-eyed, looking down at him and stealing quick glances at Lily Kain.

“And we have agreed to imagine that the breathing is the sigh of the wind.” He spread his arms imploringly. “But I can't deal with that sound. Is someone up there eating peanuts?”

Lieutenant Beame was eating peanuts. He grinned sheepishly.

Half a dozen of the other men, without saying a word, picked him up, took him to the end of the bridge, and beat the shit out of him. When they came back and stretched out again, the major returned to Lily Kain.

“Idiots,” she said.

“It was only the leaves,” he said.

“Morons.”

“Gentle breezes.”

“I suppose,” she said.

Lily had been sitting up, waiting for him to come back. Now, she lay down again, parted her thighs which were another pair of engineering miracles.

That was all Kelly needed to put him back in the mood. He walked forward on his knees, slipped his hands under her, lifted her, and got into her again as smoothly as a greased piston into a firing chamber. He thrust several times as she moved up against him, and when they were firmly joined, he rolled her over, holding her against him, until he was lying on his back and she had the dominant position.

Above them, many breezes worked across the bridge floor.

Lily began to bounce up and down on him. It was the most miraculous thing Kelly had ever seen. Her two big jugs worked round and round, slapped together, rose and fell, jiggled, quivered, swung, bounced. In the wash of yellow moonlight, those gyrating globes became more than twin miracles. They transcended the mere miraculous. They were a divine experience, a fundamental spiritual vision that stunned him and left him gasping.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” one of the breezes said, above.

Kelly ignored it. He raised his head and nipped at her jugs, took part of one of them between his lips and nearly suffocated himself in flesh.

Lily was climbing toward her brink, sliding up and down on him, her head thrown back, mouth open. She made little sounds in her throat. Little obscene sounds.

As he felt her reaching her crest, Kelly thrust up, jamming hard into her, trying to finish with her. He knew that he would never again endure such incredible pleasure. He was sure of it. Of course, he was sure of it every time that he had her, was convinced in every instance that this was the ultimate and final joy; but now, his certainty was nonetheless complete for its familiarity. He could not conceive of anything to match this. He could not imagine another bout of this wet, hot, soft, nibbling, licking, jiggling, sucking, bouncing, sliding, slipping, thrusting, exploding excitement. Wide-eyed and breathless at the sight of her, he rushed both of them toward completion. “Soon, soon, soon, soon,” he mumbled ardently into her right breast.

But it was just not their night. As Major Kelly felt himself swept toward the brink, as he redoubled his efforts so that he might reach his end with hers, the Stukas bombed the bridge.

4

The hospital bunker was full of wounded men. Nurse Pullit was holding cold compresses against the back of Private Angelli's neck, while Angelli bent forward and let his nose drip blood into a rag. Tooley was treating a man for minor burns of the right arm, and a dozen men waited for treatment. All ten cots were occupied, and four men sat on the damp floor with their backs against the wall, cradling their arms or legs or whatever was hit.

Fortunately, the attack had first been directed against the farside pier. The men lying on the bridge floor staring over the edge at Major Kelly and Lily Kain on the grass below had time to jump up and run before, on a second pass, the Stukas placed two hundred-pounders exactly where they had been. Their wounds, for the most part, were minor: scrapes, cuts, weeping lesions, nosebleeds from the concussion, second-degree burns from being too near the outward-roiling flash of an explosion, twisted ankles, pulled muscles.

“You should all be thankful you're alive!” Major Kelly told them as he paced back and forth in the crowded bunker. He was trying to keep up company morale. He recognized that company morale was constantly hitting new lows, and he felt he had to do something to check this dangerous slide into utter dejection, depression, and apathy. The only problem was that his own heart wasn't in it. His morale kept hitting new lows, too, and he just could not think of any way to improve things. Except to harangue the men. “You should be thankful you're alive!” he repeated, grinning fiercely to show them how thankful he was.

The wounded men stared at him. Soot-smeared, blood-dappled, eyes white and wide, hair greasy and twisted in knots, clothes filthy and tattered, they did not seem cheered at all. One of them, when Kelly's back was turned, muttered, “Shallow philosophy.” But that was the only response.

“What's a nosebleed?” Kelly asked them. “What's a little cut on the arm or a burn?” He waited for an answer. When no one said anything, he answered himself: “It's nothing! Nothing at all. The important thing is to be alive!”

One of the men started crying.