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dollars?” he asked wistfully.
    â€œNot to gamble with,” I told him.
    â€œI didn’t think so.”
    â€œCome on, Kid. I’ll buy you a drink.”
    â€œSure,” he said.
    The two of us walked on down the swaying aisles to the club car. I got myself about half in the basket, and I felt better.
    In Chicago there was another mob of relatives waiting, and there was a general repetition of the scene on the dock back in New York. Once we changed trains though, we highballed right on through.
    I spent a lot of time in the club car with my heels hooked over the rung of a bar stool, telling lies and war stories to a slightly cross-eyed Wave with an unlimited capacity for Budweiser and a pair of tightly crossed legs. At odd moments, when I got sick of listening to her high-pitched giggle and raucous voice, I’d ease back up the train to my seat and sit staring at North Dakota and Montana sliding by outside. The prairie country was burned yellow-brown and looked like the ass-end of no place. After a while we climbed up into the mountains and the timber. I felt better then.
    I had a few wild daydreams about maybe looking up the guy Sue had told me about in her last letter and kicking out a few of his teeth, but I finally decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort. He was probably some poor creep her mother had pickedout for her. Then I thought about blousing her mother’s eye, and that was a lot more satisfying. It’s hard to hate somebody you’ve never met, but I could work up a pretty good head of steam about Susan’s mother.
    I generally wound up back at the club car. I’d peel my cockeyed Wave of whomever she’d promoted to beer-buyer first class and go back to pouring Budweiser into her and trying to convince her that we were both adults with adult needs.
    Anyhow, they dropped us off in Tacoma about five thirty in the morning on the fourth day after we’d landed in New York. My uniform was rumpled, my head was throbbing, and my stomach felt like it had a blowtorch inside. The familiar OD trucks from Fort Lewis were waiting, and it only took about an hour to deliver us back to the drab, two-story yellow barracks and bare drill fields I’d seen on a half dozen posts from Fort Ord to Camp Kilmer.
    They fed us, issued us bedding, assigned us space in the transient barracks, and then fell us out into a formation in the company street. While they were telling us about all the silly-ass games we were going to play, my eyes drifted on out across the parade ground to the inevitable, blue-white mound of Mount Ranier, looming up out of the hazy foothills. I was dirty, rumpled, hung over, and generally sick of the whole damned world. The mountain was still the same corny, picture-postcard thing it had always been—a ready-made tourist attraction, needing only a beer sign on the summit to make it complete. I’d made bad jokes about its ostentatious vulgarity all the way through college, but that morning after having been away for so damned long, I swear I got a lump in my throat just looking at it. It was the first time I’d really felt anything for a long time.
    Maybe I was human after all.

2
    T HEY weren’t ready to start processing us yet, so they filled in the rest of the day with the usual Mickey-Mouse crap that the Army always comes up with to occupy a man’s spare time. At four-thirty, after frequent warnings that we were still in the Army and subject to court-martial, they gave us passes and told us to keep our noses clean. They really didn’t sound too hopeful about it.
    I walked on past the mob-scene in the parking lot—parents, wives, girlfriends, and the like, crying and hugging and shaking hands and backslapping—and headed toward the bus stop. I’d had enough of all that stuff.
    â€œHey, Alders,” someone yelled. “You want a lift into town?” It was Benson naturally. He’d been embarrassingly grateful when