Read Soldiers Pay for Free Online Page A

placing it on a table. She leaned against the foot of Mahon’s bed, fitting her long thigh to the hard rail, until he had finished.
    At last Lowe freed of his shoes turned sighing to the wall and she said:
    â€œHow drunk are you, Joe?”
    â€œNot very, ma’am. What’s wrong? Loot need something?”
    Mahon slept and Cadet Lowe immediately slept.
    â€œI want to talk to you, Joe. About him,” she added quickly, feeling Gilligan’s stare. “Can you listen or had you rather go to bed and talk it over in the morning?”
    Gilligan, focusing his eyes, answered:
    â€œWhy, now suits me. Always oblige a lady.”
    Making her decision suddenly she said:
    â€œCome in my room then.”
    â€œSure: lemme get my bottle and I’m your man.”
    She returned to her room while he sought his bottle and when he joined her she was sitting on her bed clasping her knees, wrapped in a blanket. Gilligan drew up a chair.
    â€œJoe, do you know he’s going blind?” she said abruptly.
    After a time her face became a human face and holding it in his vision he said:
    â€œI know more than that. He’s going to die.”
    â€œDie?”
    â€œYes, ma’am. If I ever seen death in a man’s face, it’s in his. Goddam this world,” he burst out suddenly.
    â€œShhh!” she whispered.
    â€œThat’s right, I forgot,” he said swiftly.
    She clasped her knees, huddled beneath the blanket, changing the position of her body as it became cramped, feeling the wooden head board of the bed, wondering why there were not iron beds, wondering why everything was as it was—iron beds, why you deliberately took certain people to break your intimacy, why these people died, why you yet took others. . . . Will my death be like this: fretting and exasperating? Am I cold by nature, or have I spent all my emotional coppers, that I don’t seem to feel things like others? Dick, Dick. Ugly and dead.
    Gilligan sat brittlely in his chair, focusing his eyes with an effort, having those intruments of vision evade him, slimy as broken eggs. Lights completing a circle, an orbit; she with two faces sitting on two beds, clasping four arms around her knees. . . . Why can’t a man be very happy or very unhappy? It’s only a sort of pale mixture of the two. Like beer when you want a shot—or a drink of water. Neither one nor the other.
    She moved and drew the blanket closer about her. Spring in an airshaft, the rumour of spring; but in the room steam heat suggested winter, dying away.
    â€œLet’s have a drink, Joe.”
    He rose careful and brittle and walking with meticulous deliberation he fetched a carafe and glasses. She drew a small table near them and Gilligan prepared two drinks. She drank and set the glass down. He lit a cigarette for her.
    â€œIt’s a rotten old world, Joe.”
    â€œYou damn right. And dying ain’t the half of it.”
    â€œDying?”
    â€œIn his case, I mean. Trouble is, he probably won’t die soon enough.”
    â€œNot die soon enough?”
    Gilligan drained his glass. “I got the low down on him, see. He’s got a girl at home: folks got ’em engaged when they was young, before he went off to war. And do you know what she’s going to do when she see his face?” he asked, staring at her. At last her two faces became one face and her hair was black. Her mouth like a scar.
    â€œOh, no, Joe. She wouldn’t do that.” She sat up. The blanket slipped from her shoulders and she replaced it, watching him intently.
    Gilligan breaking the orbit of visible things by an effort of will said:
    â€œDon’t kid you yourself, I’ve seen her picture. And the last letter he had from her.”
    â€œHe didn’t show them to you!” she said quickly.
    â€œThat’s all right about that. I seen ’em.”
    â€œJoe. You didn’t go through his things?”
    â€œHell, ma’am,