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corner John concentrated hard on which way they turned and tried to see the corner in his mind. There was a place on the road through the forest the enemy general’s truck was following that it was of the greatest importance he jump out the back of the truck unseen. Some enemy soldiers were holding Priscilla Jenkins captive and going to torture her with red-hot irons. In his mind he saw Priscilla, a great lady now, standing tied to a tree, her clothes torn clear off of her and the enemy soldiers stepping up to put a red-hot iron against her thing—just as he leaped into the circle of firelight wearing his fringed buckskins of a scout and the two enemy soldiers were deaders and Priscilla was very happy to be saved from a fate worse than death and they did it there in the firelight with the two deaders staring open-eyed at the sky. When his father stopped the car it was the spot, and it was of the greatest importance that he know where it was, and he picked Meeker’s Restaurant. He waited till his father got out and was gone and then peeked over the bottom of the window. Instead of Meeker’s Restaurant they were in front of the old American Legion. It was very bad, because Priscilla was a deader unless he could figure something out.
    He lay there on the floor a long time, wishing his father would hurry up and come back with the hot-assed bitch so he could see them do it, he had never seen anybody do it, but he was tired of laying on the floor and he was getting sleepy. He lay with the sleepiness and the Saturday night noises coming loud suddenly, then going far away, and coming and going and coming and going and he heard his father speak from behind a curtain and far away the car doors opened and his father and someone else got in. Then suddenly he was back inside himself again and listening hard. None of the kids had ever really seen anybody do it. They wouldn’t care if he was a drunkard’s son or not, if he told how he had seen them do it and just what they did.
    “Give me the bottle,” he heard his father say. “You mark what I’m saying, Lab. It won’t be ten years.”
    John recognized with disappointment the other voice that answered. It was no hot-assed bitch at all, it was only old Lab Wallers from the American Legion, and he felt he had been cheated of a great adventure. “I still say she wouldn’t want you to go, Doc,” it said.
    “I don’t know,” his father said. “Sometimes I think she would. I know she would. She’d be damned glad to get rid of a no-good like me. And I guess I don’t blame her any. Anyway,” he said, “I’ll be too old.”
    “There won’t be another war anyway,” Lab Wallers said. “Thas why we won the last one, so there wouldn’t be no more. Wilson was a good man, and he knew what he was doin’.”
    “He couldn’t do anything with a Republican Congress,” his father said. “Well, he was smarter than this Coolidge. Doc, you don’t want your boys to grow up and get drug into something like we did,” Lab Wallers said.
    “Hell, no,” his father said. “But there’s no way out. Give your son luck, and throw him into the sea. That’s what the Spaniards say. That’s all any man can do. I tell you it won’t be ten years.”
    That’s me, John thought, they’re talking about me. He was a little surprised because everybody knew there wouldn’t be any more war. He had always been sorry when he thought how he would never get to be in a war like his father. He lay there, excited, thinking how he would save Priscilla Jenkins from the enemy just as they were about to burn her thing with the red-hot iron. He would come home a great hero and everybody would think he was a fine upstanding man. He wouldn’t drink at all, and maybe he would marry Priscilla Jenkins.
    Following the pictures in his mind the sleepiness came back and the voice talking began to come and go, loud and faint, like the band concert across town sounded in a shifting summer wind.
    “She’s a fine