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keep from screaming. She tore her coat on the fence hurtling past it, leaving a swatch of it on the wire. Take a deep breath, she told herself as she stumbled up the steps. Don’t faint. Don’t fall. The door swung from her grasp, the wind clamoring through the house. She forced it closed, the glass plate tingling, and bolted it. She thrust the flashlight on the table and caught up the phone. She clicked it wildly.
    Finally it was the operator who broke through. “I have a call for you from Mr. Gerald Shepherd. Will you hold on, please?”
    Sarah could hear only her own sobbing breath in the hollow of the mouth piece. She tried to settle her mind by pinning her eyes on the stairway. But the spokes of the stairway seemed to be shivering dizzily in the circle of light, like the plucked strings of a harp. Even the sound of them was vibrant in her head, whirring over the rasp of her breath. Then came the pounding footfalls and Joyce’s fists on the door. Vainly she signaled the operator. And somewhere in the tumult of her mind she grasped at the thought that if she unlocked the door, Joyce would come in and sit down. They might even light the fire. There was plenty of wood in the basement. But she could not speak. And it was too late.
    Joyce’s fist crashed through the glass and drew the bolt. With the door’s opening the wind whipped her coat over her head; with its closing, her coat fell limp, its little pressure about her knees seeming to buckle them.
    “I’m sorry,” came the operator’s voice, “the call was canceled ten minutes ago.”
    She let the phone clatter onto the table and waited, her back still to the door. Ten minutes was not very long ago, she reasoned in sudden desolate calmness. She measured each of Joyce’s footfalls toward her, knowing they marked all of time that was left to her. And somehow, she felt, she wanted very little more of it.
    For only an instant she saw the loop he had made of the electric cord, and the white cuffs over the strong, gnarled hands. She closed her eyes and lifted her head high, expecting that in that way the end would come more quickly…
1952

Born Killer
    T HERE IS A SORT of legend about Corporal George Orbach. More than one man of his outfit has summed him up as the only person he ever met who didn’t know what fear was. They have a good many pat explanations, the way men will when they have nothing to do between patrols but pin labels on one another. “A born killer” is a favorite. A lieutenant called it “a suicidal complex.” This particular phrase did not take with the men. A handful of sleeping pills, a loaded .32, they figure, and he could have died in bed without scurvy, without frostbite, and without Migs.
    He was up once for rotation and asked to stay. Forced into regulation five-day leaves in Japan, he walks the streets there, striding along them like a farmer behind a plow who sees neither birds nor trees nor sky except to measure the daylight left in them. The one piece of information about himself which he ever volunteered was the remark: “I bet I’ve walked more than any goddamn soldier in the infantry.”
    No one doubted it, which is strange only in the fact that George Orbach is just nineteen years old. He lied about his age when he signed up. At sixteen he said he was twenty-one, and the recruiting officer studied him trying to decide which way he was lying. He was bent like a man with something on his back and his eyes were old; but his skin was smooth and his dirty, nervous hands boy’s hands.
    “Home?”
    “U.S.A.”
    “Where were you born, wise guy?”
    “Masonville, Wisconsin. Ever hear of it?”
    “They’ll clip your tongue in the army, farm boy. Why don’t you take a haircut?”
    “I don’t have any money.”
    “Family?”
    “Don’t have any.”
    “That’s a shame. You ought to have an insurance beneficiary.”
    “What insurance?”
    “What they make you take out before you go overseas.”
    “Look,