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mirror in the John, somebody had taped an “Off the Record” cartoon of a GI in his skivvies standing outside a Pullman lavatory with his shaving gear. He fingers his stubbly jaw. “ Great Scott! ” he barks. “ I must’ve shaved the guy next to me! ” Every seat in every coach was taken; every aisle was a logjam.
    I got up once, and a sergeant took my place. So I squeezed my way through the clicking coaches till I found the only empty seat in the last five Pullmans. I sat next to a PFC whose head looked like the bowling-ball jaw of the guy in the cartoon. A hulk, with a mug like a skinned Pekingese’s.
    “How you know that seat’s not saved?” he asked me.
    I wanted to say, “Screw you,” but the snarl in the PFC’s challenge had taken all my sand away. I hadn’t exactly had a quarryful to begin with.
    The PFC said, “Nice ears, yokel. Buy em by the yard?”
    I went “Duh” like the yokel he’d pegged me and laid a hand on my Adam’s apple to indicate my speech problem.
    “Tonsillitis?” he said. “Strep throat? You got some kinda contagious damned communicative disease?”
    “I have a st-st-stammer.”
    “You do, huh? And astigmatism too if you couldn’t see I was holding this seat for Pumphrey.”
    “P-P-Pum—?”
    “P-P-Pum yourself,” he mocked. “What’s your name? I’d like to meet your whole yokel cl-cl-clan.”
    He was probably from a real metropolis like Coffeyville or Enid, but I was a yokel.
    “B-B-Boles,” I said. “D-D-Danny Boles.”
    “Where from?”
    “Tenkiller, Oklahoma.” No stammer. Give me a medal. Send me to radio-announcer’s school.
    “Well, Boles, ya goddamned Okie, move your skinny ass fore I line it with teeth.” The guy bumped me with his elbow. His nose floated in front of me like an elevator button I didn’t dare mash. “Hey, you’re still in Pumphrey’s seat.”
    “B-but where can I g-g-go?”
    He laughed. He couldn’t believe me, a kid innocent as bottled water. He put his thumb into my chin dimple, to show he meant for me to hop up. I jerked away and stumbled into the aisle—which jostled with foot traffic, landlubbers trying to get their rail legs.
    I went enginewards. GIs, recruits, MPs with gunbelts sat jammed into their seats, not one tender female among them. Every car smelled of dried sweat, scorched khaki, cigarette smoke, caked boot polish.
    I finally stopped on a platform between two coaches. An accordion-pleated rubber hood was supposed to join the cars (to keep passengers out of the wind and coal dust), but the train people hadn’t hooked it up. I rode the coupling. The wind felt good. So did being alone. The countryside had gentle hills, dogwoods and redbuds still showing color in amongst the evergreens. It got prettier the farther from Cherokee County we chugged. Had Congress designated the Injun Territories for their flatness and lack of trees? Probably.
    I’d stood there a couple of minutes when a baby-faced GI banged through from the forward car. He scowled and patted his pockets. He shouted, “Got a smoke, buddy?”
    “N-no, I d-d-don’t.”
    “Screw you!” he shouted. Did he think I’d mugged a Red Cross lady for her cigarettes, then squirreled away my booty from regular Joes like him? I just stared at him. Maybe a 4-F civilian had snaked his girl, or a recruit had short-sheeted his bunk. Running into such meanness just then felt like having grain alcohol poured into a cut. My stare got harder. I lifted my fists to my ribs. The kid saw them shaking. He spit down at the tracks, easy-like, and returned to the coach he’d come from. That should’ve boosted my morale. I’d shown my steel and a GI had backed off. Problem was, he’d looked like a Campbell’s Soup kid.
    In all the wind and clatter, I began to cry. The platform had me for good, then. I couldn’t go back in with tears on my face. The GIs would’ve ridden me all the way to Georgia.
    Our train wasn’t an express. It crawled through every podunk crossing,