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woman, Doc,” Lab Wallers said. “They don’t come any finer. My wife’s always talkin’ about how fine she is.”
    “I know she is,” his father said. “Everybody knows it. Nobody has to tell me that. I know it’s my fault. I know I’m a bum and a drunk.”
    “We don’t deserve the women we got, Doc,” Lab Wallers said, his voice thick. “Neither one of us. None of us.”
    “If it wasn’t for the kids I’d light out tonight,” his father said. “Give her a chance. But it’s awful hard to leave your kids, your own kids. What you’ve done lives on in your kids, if nowhere else.”
    “She loves you though,” Lab Wallers said. “Don’t you forget it.”
    “No she doesn’t,” his father said, “and I don’t blame her. I know what I am,” he said. “I know what I’ve done.”
    “Give me the bottle,” Lab Wallers said. “I don’t know where I’d be if it wasn’t for my wife. Or you either. Where would the world be, without the wives? Where would our kids be, if it wasn’t for their mothers? Where would this nation be, if it wasn’t for the women?”
    “She was the most beautiful woman in this part of the country when I married her,” his father said. “I was lucky to get her. Everybody says so. If she just wouldn’t devil me so. Goddam it, Lab, someday the men will be free.
    “What time is it? I have to be back in town by ten. I have to see somebody. Goddam it, a man has to live, Lab …”
    John didn’t hear the rest. He was very sleepy and none of it made sense. He just shut his eyes for a minute, only a minute, because he really had to stay awake.
    He woke up surprised, because he wasn’t in the car any more. As he came awake he realized he was being carried. His father was carrying him in his arms. John noticed sleepily that his father was wearing some funny kind of sweet shaving lotion. He did not know where they were at first, but then he saw they were at home at the house. His father carried him inside.
    Upstairs, his father laid him down on his bed in his own room and began to undress him, fumbling the buttons. He lay very still, his eyes shut, letting his father undress him and put him to bed. It made him feel good. When he was under the covers, he opened his eyes and smiled at his father. His father smiled back, and John could tell by his eyes that he was pretty drunk.
    “Here,” his father said, reaching in his pocket. “Put this under your pillow. You earned it. You’re a damned good man. You’ve got a lot of guts and I’m proud you are my son.”
    John reached out his hands and took it. He rolled over sleepily in the bed. Gee, he thought, a quarter and two half dollars both. Gee. But he held them in his hand and did not put them under his pillow, because he was suddenly thinking of his mother. I really oughtn’t to take them, he thought, thinking guiltily about his brother Tom. I ought to give them back.
    “Guts are what a man needs,” his father said. “You’re going to need a lot of guts, Johnny boy, someday. Someday you’ll need guts bad.”
    His father paused and patted him on the head and then he rubbed his strong stubby-fingered hand over his chin that needed a shave. He got up from the bed slowly. “Always remember: If a man’s got guts, he’ll come out all light. You got to have the guts to stand up for yourself, even when you’re bad and wrong,” he said, “or you’re dead. You’ll never be a man again.” He stood beside the bed looking down and smiling sadly.
    There was Priscilla, the soldiers getting ready to put the hot iron against her thing, in her thing, hard; and there was the general and he was handing him $2,000, to go away and forget he seen it, like every good spy should. And it wasn’t even Priscilla. It was just some woman. And a good spy had work to do at the front
    But this time it didn’t work, because over the scene in the forest John could see his mother’s face with her bright bright eyes looking at him. He wished it