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lit that night by a lion-colored moon. I stopped for a moment to lean against a wall. And felt a baby’s fingers entwine themselves about my little finger.
    Looking down I saw an Algerian child, no more than eleven or twelve. She looked up at me with darkly solemn eyes. “Come,” she told me. “Come.” As though “come” were the single word of English she knew.
    She led me down the Rue Phocéen to a door the moonlight lay across, whose knob was no higher than her head. She went in before me, and I
did not follow. At the foot of a staircase I could see only dimly, she turned and stood with her back to an unshaded bulb.
    She did not ask me again, but merely waited. I shook my head, “No.” And went on down the Rue Phocéen, with a great length of time seeming to have elapsed since she had taken my hand. And the moon burned darker now.
    When I looked back, the door she had entered was still standing open.
    Or the time that, feeling well fed, well groomed, and well endowed, the epitome of the successful private, one who had come through the war (for the war was then done) without being court-martialed, and wearing a wallet on either hip. I was on my self-contented way, at 1800 hours, to see Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. I stopped, in the after-chow light, to pick up the dice at an acey-deucy table. And returned to my tent at 2400 hours with both wallets emptied, feeling ill fed, badly groomed, and sadly endowed. And never have gotten to see To Have and Have Not yet.
    Or the time the Tennessee private on the cot next to my own got the letter from his wife saying, “Honey, Don’t Come Home.” Upon which he said simply, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder for somebody else,” and tore the letter in two.
    I went down to U-68 to ask the steward how much he’d gotten for my clothes.
    Apparently he hadn’t had a decent bid, because all he’d done was hang up my topcoat, a new experience for the coat. If I had a needle and thread I’d sew you up myself, you sonofabitch, I told it, so at least you’d hang straight; you’re trying to make people think I’m a bum. I went to the mirror and, sure enough, I’d made it.
    It wasn’t because I needed a shave so much that I made my next move, but from curiosity about the rapport of my electric razor and the bathroom current. It worked fine. I cleared the dresser, took the typer out of its kennel, and plugged it in. At the first jump of smoke I thought, Women and children first, but after I got the plug loose it kept jumping smoke at me, and if that wasn’t lead I smelled burning I can whip Chico Vejar. A lucky thing I didn’t bring a dish dryer, I thought; half the crew would have been washed overboard.
    â€œYour dirty current blew up my nice typewriter,” I accused the steward, who had, it was plain, anticipated that event.

    â€œLots of people do that lately,” he assured me contentedly.
    It just wasn’t a friendly ship; that was all there was to it.
    Â 
    Should evening ever bring you the need of an apple at sea, either go to bed or keep your fat mouth shut. All I did was to make some casual inquiry about where I might buy one, and went for a short stroll. To find, on returning, a basket heaped with apples, three hues of grapes, pears, bananas, oranges, kumquats, and litchi nuts. My first thought was that I must have an admirer aboard, probably the captain.
    Now, if I could smuggle this heap down to tourist class, I thought, I might make the price of my ticket back in the greatest seagoing financial coup on record. Finally, I felt I was being treated better than I, or anyone else, deserved. A feeling from which I recovered by eating my way through the heap down to the wood. It didn’t occur to me that this could happen twice in my life. Actually, it happened thereafter every time I left U-68. I couldn’t take a ten-minute stroll without returning to find