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He’d just grabbed a shoelace when someone scratched at the door. “Who’s that?” Yeager wondered out loud. It had to be something to do with the Lizards, he thought, but whatever it was, couldn’t it wait till morning? The scratching came again. Evidently it couldn’t. Muttering under his breath, he got up and opened the door. “Oh,” he said. It wasn’t anything to do with the Lizards. It was Barbara Larssen.
“May I come in?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said again, and then, “Sure. You’d better, in fact, or all the heat will get out.”
There was no place to sit but the cot, so that was where she sat. After what had happened on the Caledonia and the way she’d acted since, Yeager didn’t know if he ought to sit down beside her. With the instincts of a man who automatically moved back a few steps to prevent the extra-base hit in the late innings, he decided to play safe. He paced back and forth in front of the stove.
Barbara watched him for a few seconds, then said, “It’s all right, Sam. I don’t think you’re going to molest me. That’s what I wanted to talk about with you, anyway.”
Yeager perched cautiously near the head of the cot, at the opposite end from Barbara. “What is there to talk about?” he said. “It was just one of those crazy things that happens sometimes. if you want to pretend it never did-” He started to finish with that’s all right. But it wasn’t, not quite. He tried a different phrase: “You can.” That was better.
“No. I owe you an apology.” She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the worn, grayish-yellow boards of the floor. “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did afterward. I’m sorry. It’s just that after we-did it, I really realized Jens is, is dead, he has to be dead, and that all came down on me at once. I am sorry.” She covered her face with her hands. After a few seconds, he realized she was crying.
He slid down the cot toward her, put a hesitant hand on her shoulder. She stiffened at his touch, but then spun half around and buried her face against his chest. His arms could hardly help folding around her. “It’s okay,” he said, not knowing whether it was okay or not, not even knowing whether she heard him or not. “It’s okay.”
After a while, her sobs subsided to hiccups. She pushed herself away from him, then reached into her purse and dabbed at herself with a hanky. She ruefully shook her head. “I must look like hell.”
Sam considered that. Tears still glistened on her cheeks and brimmed in her eyes. She wasn’t wearing any mascara or shadow to streak and run. If her face was puffy from crying, it didn’t show in the lantern light. But even if it had, so what? “Barbara, you, look real good to me,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought so for a long time.”
“Have you?” she said. “You didn’t really let on, not until-”
“Wasn’t my place to,” he answered, and stopped there.
“Not as long as there was any hope Jens was still alive, you mean,” she said, filling it in for him. He nodded. Her face twisted, but she forced it back to steadiness. “You’re a gentleman, Sam, do you know?”
“Me? I don’t know anything about that. All I know is-” He stopped again. What had started to come out of his mouth was, All I know is baseball, and I’ve spun my wheels there for too damn many years. That was true, but it wasn’t what Barbara needed to hear right now. He gave another try: “All I know is, I’ll try to be good for you if that’s what you want me to do.”
“Yes, that’s what I want,” she said seriously. “Times like these, nobody can get through by himself. If we don’t help each other, hold onto each other, what’s the use of anything?”
“You’ve got me.” He’d been on the road by himself for a lot of years. But he hadn’t really been alone: he’d always had the team, the pennant race, the hope (though that had faded) of moving up-substitutes for family, goal, and dreams.
He shook his head. No matter how deeply baseball had dug its claws into his soul, this was not the time to be thinking about it. Still wary, still a little unsure, he put his arms around Barbara again. She looked at the floor and let out such a long sigh, he almost let go. But then she shook her head; he had a pretty good idea what she was telling herself to forget. She tilted her face up to his.
Later, he asked, “Do you want me to blow out the lamp?”
“Whichever way you’d like,” she answered. She was probably less shy about undressing with it burning than he was; he reminded himself she was used to being with a man. They got under the covers together, not for modesty but for warmth.
Later still, after they’d warmed themselves enough to kick most of the blankets onto the floor, they lay with their arms wrapped around each other. The cot was so narrow it gave them little choice about that. Yeager ran a hand down Barbara’s back, learning the shape and feel of her. There hadn’t been time for that aboard the Caledonia; there hadn’t been time for anything except raw, driving lust. He’d never known anything to match that, maybe not even the night he lost his cherry, but this was pretty fine, too. It felt somehow more certain, as if he could be sure it would last.
Barbara’s breasts slid against his chest as she leaned up on one elbow. She lay between him and the lamp, so her face was full of shadow. When she spoke, though, her words weren’t quite what he thought of as romantic: “Do you want to see if you can buy some rubbers tomorrow, Sam? This place seems in good shape; the drugstore may still have a supply.”
“Uh, okay,” he said, taken aback. She was indeed used to being with a man, he thought. He did his best to sound matter-of-fact as he went on, “Probably a good idea.”
“Certainly a good idea,” she corrected. “We’re all right about the first time-I know-and I don’t mind taking a chance now and again, but if we’re going to be making love a lot, we’d better be careful. I don’t want to be expecting going cross-country in a wagon train.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’ll try and find some. Uh-what happens if I don’t?” He wished he hadn’t said that. It would make her think he only wanted to lay her. He did want to lay her, but he’d learned you seldom got anywhere treating a woman like a piece of meat, especially not a woman like this, who’d been married to a physicist and had plenty of brains herself.
He was in luck-she didn’t get mad. Her hand wandered now, or rather moved, for she knew where it was going. It closed on him. “If you don’t,” she said, “we’ll just have to figure out something else to do.” She squeezed gently
.
He couldn’t decide whether he wanted some Detroit Lakes drugstore to have rubbers or not.
Behind Mutt Daniels, the Preemption House was burning. His heart felt like breaking for several reasons. It was always sad to see history go up in smoke, and the two-story Greek Revival frame building had been one of Naperville, Illinois’, prides since 1834. More immediately, it was far from the only burning building in Naperville. Mutt didn’t see how the Army could hold the town-and there wasn’t a hell of a lot behind Naperville but Chicago itself.
And more immediately still, the Preemption House had been Naperville’s leading saloon. Daniels hadn’t been in town long, but he’d managed to liberate a fifth of good bourbon. He wore three stripes on his sleeves these days; just as kids had looked to him on how to be ballplayers, now he had to show them how to be soldiers. These days he borrowed his precepts from Sergeant Schneider instead of his own old managers.
Every half a minute or so, another liquor bottle inside the Preemption House would cook off, like a round inside a burning tank. Looking back, Mutt saw little blue alcohol flames flickering among the big lusty red ones from the burning timbers. He sighed and said, “Hell of a waste.”
“You bet, Sarge,” said the private beside him, a little four-eyed fellow named Kevin Donlan, who, by his looks, would probably start shaving one day fairly soon. Donlan went on, “That building must be more than a hundred years old.”
Daniels sighed again. “I wasn’t thinkin’ so much about the building.”
A whistling roar in the sky, growing fast, made both men dive for the nearest trench. The shell went off above ground level fragments hissed through the air. So did other things that pattered and bounced off the hard ground like hailstones.
“You gotta watch where you put your feet now, son,” Daniels said. “That bastard just spit out a bunch o’ little bombs or mines or whatever you want to call ’em. First saw those out around Shabbona. You step on one, you’ll walk like Peg-Leg Pete in the, Disney cartoons the rest of your days.”
