Read In War Times for Free Online Page B

wooden seats, met the passenger trains and buses and ran back into the living areas. On the day I arrived…
    It was a wildly sunny day, false spring, his mother would call it, with white clouds scudding across a brilliant blue sky and bare tree branches waving as if their reawakening was already a fact, though snow was predicted in a few days.
    Sam took a seat and surveyed his new waypoint as the train made slow progress inward—barracks, offices, test facilities, labs, and big guns. Lots of them.
    After a short walk from where the AB&F dropped him off, Sam stepped into a barracks room about a hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet wide, with a worn wooden floor and many tall, narrow windows. He checked his orders: This was the right place, and a loud one. Soldiers shouted back and forth to one another, meeting and greeting and arranging their belongings, as they banged open their footlockers, cursed and bantered with cigarettes hanging from their lips, bluing the air with smoke.
    He saw two rows of very public cots, and at one end of the barracks a private room for the senior NCO, which had a very luxurious appointment: a door, presently closed. Sam stood next to the shower room and toilets. The whole place smelled of a thorough, recent cleaning with bleach.
    It was more promising than Camp Sutton, where there had not been a minute of time nor an appropriate place to examine Hadntz’s papers or even properly mourn his brother’s death. His entire hometown had turned out for Keenan’s memorial service, but he’d been accorded only two days to travel there and back. Keenan still seemed strangely alive, still present, somehow. Perhaps that was the importance of seeing the body of the deceased—to fully know that life, whatever it was, had departed. By now, a black-marbled school composition book that held his missives to Keenan was almost full. He’d have to pick up a few more at the PX.
    But right now he had a non-canvas roof over his head, and heat that would not rage out of control and kill them, as had happened to some unfortunate soldiers in Camp Sutton when a jammed stovepipe set a tent on fire. After he’d threaded through his fellow soldiers, chosen a cot beneath a window, made the bed, and arranged his belongings in the footlocker, he got out his book of the moment, The Thin Man . Lying on his cot, he became absorbed in the novel, able to ignore the surrounding curses, the dull, constant boom of munitions, and any tone of voice that might presage his being asked to perform some task. When lost in a book, he could sometimes even stop thinking about Keenan.
    When a duffel bag thumped onto the cot next to him, he didn’t look up.
    “This sure as hell beats a tent in the pouring rain.”
    Sam had never actually seen the man who possessed this particular voice—a nasal New York accent, used heartily, full of good cheer and humor, though often tinged with dark irony. But he had heard it every morning for weeks at Camp Sutton, often in the same scenario: Freezing rain creeps down Sam’s neck. It is still dark at Camp Sutton; the appellation “morning” seems misapplied. The first sergeant barks out names down the line while the company clerk holds an umbrella over him.
    “Wellman.”
    “Here, sir!”
    “Winklemeyer.”
    Silence.
    “WINKLEMEYER!”
    The spring-stretching sound of a screen door opening. “Yo!” Slam .
    It had been like that every morning, rain or shine. The man with the New York accent never did get out of bed for roll call.
    Winklemeyer, in the flesh, had put in an appearance.
    Of medium height, slightly stocky. Sandy hair, reddish complexion. A short, faint scar above his left eye. Sam later learned it was the result of an imprudent mixing of certain chemicals in his father’s lab when he was fifteen. Mischievous blue eyes, which he turned on Sam.
    “Al Winklemeyer. Wink for short.”
    “Sam Dance.”
    “Good book?”
    Sam held it up so he could see the title.
    “Hammett is a