Better Times Than These Read Online Free PDF Page B

over to the small porthole next to the bunks to watch the ship pulling away from the pier, and wondered why the Navy wouldn’t let people drink on their goddamned old scow. So what if the men got drunked up a few times? So what if they got into a few fights? What was it going to hurt? What’d they expect—their damned ship was going to be torn up by drunks?
    Just then the cabin door was flung open and a fireplug-shaped figure with a nose that resembled a summer squash mashed between two wide-opened Jerry Colonna eyes stomped in.
    “Shit, shit, shit, shit!” the figure bawled, slinging its fatigue cap with a gold second lieutenant’s bar onto a pile of gear already lying on the bottom bunk. The epithets continued to fill the air like a fog.
    “What’s your problem, Sharkey?” Kahn said nonchalantly, his back still toward the figure, which was now standing squarely in the center of the cabin, meaty hands jammed on its hips.
    “Guess what,” the figure demanded violently.
    “What?”
    “Kennemer’s going around with a list from the Old Man. It’s the duty.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Guess what.”
    “Damn, Sharkey, I don’t know. What?”
    “Guess what I am for the next month.”
    “How the hell should I know? Tell me.”
    “The goddamned Laundry Officer.”
    “You’re what?” Kahn said, the beginnings of a snicker welling up from his stomach and spreading along his high cheekbones into a grin.
    “Laundry—fuckin’ Laundry! Two thousand goddamn grunts gotta have their laundry done and Patch’s put my ass in charge of it.”
    “You mean you have to do their laundry for them?” Kahn asked casually.
    “Oh, for crissakes, Billy; there’s a big laundry room down there somewhere and a couple of swabbies to help out; but Brigade’s gotta staff the whole thing. Patch’s put me in charge.”
    In mock despair Kahn began to bang his head on his forearm on the porthole opening. “I guess somebody heard all your bellyaching about keeping clean after all.”
    “Can you imagine having to be in there with all that stinking stuff? And Patch’ll be chewin’ my butt every time somebody complains they didn’t get their skivvies back.”
    “Poor bastard,” Kahn said patronizingly. “Did you get a look at what I’m in for?” he asked, and dreaded the answer.
    “Nah, I didn’t see the list, but Kennemer’ll find you sooner or later.”
    “It’s relentless, ain’t it, Sharkey?”
    “It sucks,” Sharkey said.
    On deck, a stiff, cold breeze, accelerated by the course of the ship against it, whipped out of the west as the transport rounded the bight and cut into the whitecapped chop of San Francisco Bay, heading directly for the Golden Gate Bridge and the ocean beyond. On the port side, where Kahn and Sharkey had found a place at the rail, the city of San Francisco gleamed in pastels like the City of Oz pasted against the blue afternoon sky.
    “I’d of liked to have had time to get out to the fault,” Kahn said, flipping a cigarette butt over the side.
    “What in hell are you talking about now, Billy?” Sharkey said.
    “The San Francisco quake, fool—nineteen oh six. Tore this place apart—started a fire that burned it flat. Where you been, man?”
    “Jesus, Kahn, you mean you got fuck-else to worry about than something happened sixty years ago? You better worry about your ass and what’s gonna happen to it for the next year, that’s what you better start worrying about,” Sharkey said.
    He glared skeptically at the delicate, aquiline features of the company Exec, thinking that he didn’t really look much like an Infantry officer; that his lean, freckled frame would probably have been better off in the Finance Corps or Quartermaster, bent over a desk figuring on paper, instead of being second in command of a hundred fifty riflemen headed into jungle combat. It was a sheer stroke of luck that Kahn had been born a year earlier than he, and consequently graduated a year earlier, and therefore outranked