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rattled to a chain-reaction stop in every town with as many as two letters to its name. Passengers lurched back and forth between coaches, but I clung to the coupling’s guard rail and ignored them.
    It took an hour and a half to get to Fort Smith and another thirty minutes to pass through Fort Chaffee, the post southeast of it. Recruits off, GIs on. A trackside do-si-do. Finally, we clacked off through Arkansas again.
    Later, in the dining car, I sat with three other guys who seemed to be loners too. A swabbie going to Pensacola and two dogfaces. We’d all been strangers, but the other fellas struck up a friendly debate about the credentials (Ol’ Diz would’ve said differentials ) of the Cards without Enos Country Slaughter and the Dodgers without Pistol Pete Reiser, who ran full-tilt into outfield walls and knocked himself out.
    My kind of debate. Except my vocal cords had a clamp on them. All I could do, like some kind of chimp, was point, nod, grunt, and grin. The other guys—the friendliest servicemen I’d yet bumped into—must’ve figured me for a runaway from the Oklahoma Institute for Hayseed Dummies. I paid my check and stumbled back to the coupling platform.
    And stayed there, where my kidneys began to feel like hip-hugging cocktail shakers. In the fields whipping by, I could make out pole beans, snap beans, alfalfa, cotton. The soil had the richness of devil’s food cake. We drove deeper into the unreconstructed South. The air thickened, smells got odder, the unfamiliar crops sort of scared me.
    A soldier came out onto my platform. I bent over my rail, but he didn’t go away. I could feel his stare seeping through the back of my shirt and up my arms—like kerosene through a pile of rags. Finally, I faced him.
    An older guy. Stripes on his sleeves, ribbons on his breast pocket, heavy lips. His coloring reminded me of a slice of Spam. A sergeant. A vet of some combat theater, probably. I relaxed. Battle-tempered noncoms showed themselves hard-noses in training camps, but teddy bears with kids and women and well-meaning civilians.
    “Your name Boles?” the sergeant shouted. This scared me, but I nodded. “I’m First Sergeant Pumphrey. Private Overbeck told me about you! Described you to a T! You from Tenkiller, in Oklahoma?”
    “Y-y-yessir!” I yelled back. Shaking again, not just from the rattling of the train.
    “Sergeant!” he corrected me. “I’m not an officer! I’m not a gentleman! I’m damned sure no egg-sucking sir!”
    “N-n-nosir!”
    Pumphrey gestured at the train, the flashing rails, the marching ranks of cotton. “This is horseshit! Come on!” He yanked me into the sudden hush of the passenger car.
    My ears gulped at the quiet. Pumphrey prodded me down the length of the coach, and then the length of another one, and so on until we reached a car with a lavatory. Pumphrey pushed me inside. Did he have queerish tendencies? Coach Brandon had warned us boys in fifth-period hygiene about that sort of crap, but I still didn’t get it. Half our male seniors had thought hygiene was a dirty word.
    We had that lavatory almost to ourselves. The only other guy in there had his tailbone on the back edge of a toilet seat, his toes over the seat’s front edge and his arms around his knees to keep his shoes from slipping off and jolting him awake. His open mouth hissed softly. Pumphrey ignored him like he would a water stain and backed me up against a sink.
    “I know your dad, Boles,” he said. “Until two weeks ago we served in the same goddamned support group at an Army airfield in the Aleuts. Ever hear of Otter Point?”
    I shook my head.
    “It’s on Umnak. Cold as a polar bear’s prick. Windier than Chicago. Foggier than a dry-ice factory.”
    I couldn’t figure what Pumphrey wanted me to do. He seemed to blame me—or my daddy, if the part about knowing him wasn’t a lie or a smokescreen—for the Aleutian weather. His red lips flapped. Threads of spit webbed them.
    “Cold, cold,