perfection, shaping herself, willing herself into tighter being.
She opened the window and lit a cigarette and sat there blowing streams of smoke into the cool night air.
His mother didn't want him playing cards on the corner, even with Catholic school boys, and she waited until he came upstairs and told him.
He played a game called
But before she told him this he sat there in the cold memorizing the cards and making his bets. When he got seven and a half, which was the best score you could get, he turned over his hole card and said, '
But when the dark seeped down around the players he had to quit the game and go to the butcher to pick up the meat his mother had bought earlier in the day.
The butcher was nicer to him now, with Nick upstate. The butcher asked him if he was old enough to get it up and Matty said thirteen, almost, and the butcher said
The butcher said he needed someone to tell him what it was like to get it up because he couldn't remember anymore and this was the same thing the butcher used to say to Nick, more or less, when Nick was the one who went for the meat, and Matty felt good about this, smelling sawdust and blood.
When he was walking home with the meat a woman came out of the bread store and gave Matty a tweak with her fingers, a twist of the flesh on his cheek, affectionate, like turning a key, and she told him to give regards to his mother.
He reached his street and the kids were still playing cards in front of the grocery, in the dark, some of the same kids who used to taunt him for his chess when he played chess, or because he had no father, and he sat in for a couple of hands, figuring the meat could not go bad in the freezing cold, and he memorized the cards as they fell.
Then he went upstairs and she told him she didn't want him gambling. She told him even if it was only pennies. She said it didn't look good and led to other things and other kinds of company and she told him she didn't want to say anything in front of the other boys, whether they were Catholic school boys or not, and he stood there with the meat in his arms.
They were the two of them alone and he wanted to obey He felt the solemn weight of the situation, the size of Nicky's going, but there were always kids playing cards on the stoops and corners and he wasn't sure, when they dealt him in, that he'd say no. And not because he could memorize the cards. It wasn't so sneaky as that. It was another kind of thing completely. He was a little bit of a hero with his brother upstate, doing what he'd done, and boys from blocks around wanted to know him.
This is why he thought it might be hard to obey her, with the lamb chops knobby in his arms.
You can't fight a war without acronyms. This is a fact of modern combat, according to Louis T. Bakey.
And where do these compressed words come from?
They come from remote levels of development, from technicians and bombheads in their computer universe- storky bespectacled men who deal with systems so layered and many-connected that the ensuing arrays of words must be atomized and redesigned, made spare and letter-sleek.
But acronyms also come from the ranks, don't they, at least occasionally? Look at old Louis strapped and cramped in his aft-facing ejection seat in the lower deck of the forward fuselage, going through the checklist. And the crews in alert barracks worldwide waiting for the klaxons to sound. And the guys on the line who load the ordnance and juice the engines. These are men who feel an armpit intimacy with the weapons systems they maintain and fly. This gives their acronyms a certain funky something.
And this is why the high-altitude bomber sitting on the ramp out there, crew of six including Louis, a great, massive, swept-winged and soon-to-soar B-52-this aircraft is known as a BUFF to tens of thousands of men throughout the command, for Big Ugly Fat Fuck.
In the cockpit the pilot and copilot hacked their watches for the second time. The crewmen at their separate stations went through the standard hundred-headed procedure, the gunner floating alone in the tail turret at the end of a crawlway, the EW officer shoehorned into a cubicle at the rear of the upper deck, and down in the squat black hole Louis Bakey let a yawn come rolling out and looked at the panels, switches and monitors that encased him in a more or less total monopoly of avionic jargon and he half nudged the navigator pressed in next to him.
'Chuckman, I find myself in a very pussy-minded mood today.'
'Hell of a time to be thinking such thoughts.'
'I don't think no thoughts. They just come.'
'Being we're strapped in this tube for the next.'
'That's the fucked-up beauty of the thing. How thoughts just come. Of and by themselves.'
'Not counting debrief. Twelve hours, Louisman.'
'In other words you're saying.'
'Hold that thought.'
'Hold that thought,' Louis said. 'Put it on the back burner.'
'Exactly.'
'First we bomb them.'
'Then we fuck them,' said the navigator.
Whatever the bluntness of the acronym, there was nothing ugly about the nose art that adorned the area of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows. A tall young leggy blond, a cheerleader type in a skimpy skirt and halter with hands on hips and feet apart and a dare-me look on her face, she wants to be sexy but isn't sure she knows how, very girl-next-doorish. And her name painted in script just above the line of mission symbols that numbered thirty-eight.
The pilot taxied to the runway and the tower cleared the plane for takeoff.
The copilot said, 'Five, four, three.'
The pilot had the throttles gang-barred to full-on position.
The copilot said, 'One, zero, rolling.'
When the plane rumbled past marker 7, for seven thousand feet of runway, the copilot said, speaking with a sense of enormous buffeted mass that caused his teeth to feel uprooted because this is nearly half a million pounds of Big Ugly Fat Fuckness laboring to lift itself over the marsh grass-the copilot said, '
And then the dark body began to loom like some apparition of the mists, long wings bending and flaps extended and wheels breaking contact and then the gear coming up and the smoky spews of trailing black alcohol and the storm-roar shaking the flats.
In the hole the navigator, Charles Wainwright Jr., called Chuckie, continued to scan the skaty-eight meters and switches and disconnects, a whole lifetime of indicators clustered in front of him and above him and to one side- the side not occupied by Louis Bakey, the radar-bombardier.
Chuckie scanned the switches and harassed his buddy, encouraging marriage to a decent woman with church affiliations.
'Don't start in with me,' Louis said. 'I don't need a wife. I don't need a church.
'I already, Louis, have had a wife.'
'Who you didn't appreciate mentally.'
