Dog Tags Read Online Free PDF Page B

fork upraised. “Benny! A doctor! Of course!”
    Benny dug him in the ribs and said, “It’s those nurses, sport.”
    Some nights they talked, and some nights Benny roamed the streets. Days were lazy; princeling, he rose late, ate well, perused reports from city and province, and proceeded by easy stages to the Polo Grounds for the vaudeville of war-torn baseball. Or walked to Wall Street, to the Brooklyn Bridge, to Central Park. His leg grew firm, his limp vanished. Scars faded. Old friends were long gone but he found a girl, black-haired, pouting, and stoked her every few days with steak, movies and rye whiskey, in return for which she consented to further stokings. She wanted to be a singer. Benny approved. Her voice was indifferent but her figure was good. “I’d like to learn Latin,” she said, and Benny jumped a foot. “What for?” “So I can sing Latin-American songs.” Benny told Jacob, who was reproachful: “No need to tell your father tall stories, in an age of monstrosities.” Benny said, “When did I ever lie to you?” Jacob said, “You’re serious. You mean this.” Benny nodded and Jacob grinned in unholy triumph: “Shiksas.” But Benny loved her; what else could he call it? The warmth that suffused him as he invaded her was the heat of prehistoric swamps, of ancient suns, of the primeval soup. “Don’t move,” she whispered. “Let’s don’t move for as long as we can,” and for many minutes they simmered at the edge of madness, of the vast hot nothing, and slipped in and out of deep dreams and steaming landscapes; they quit time. Then she moved, or he, and they strained and burst and traveled the universe; and she liked him, and he liked her.
    A hot night in early August; father and son paused for orange crush. Jacob wore a blue sports shirt, Benny a Vassar T-shirt acquired by swap. They stood at the stand. “We’ll stand at the stand and drink our drink,” Jacob said, and while they drank a rumor limped toward them. They sensed event. Cars stopped. Windows opened. Shouts flew. The vendor asked, “What’s up?” Benny said, “I don’t know. A fire?” The vendor said, “Let me see on the radio.”
    And so Benny heard of Hiroshima. Amid rejoicing he stood with Jacob. “A whole city,” Jacob said. “What’s this atomic bomb? Do you know?”
    â€œI have an idea. A thousand tons of ordinary bombs, the man said. Einstein had something to do with it.”
    â€œThat’s all right then,” Jacob said.
    â€œIt changes things.”
    â€œFor the worse?”
    â€œAll change is for the worse,” Benny said, and they laughed.
    â€œThen the war is over.”
    â€œIt must be.”
    â€œLife begins again.”
    â€œLife begins again.”
    Benny’s singer thought it was marvelous and served them right. “Look what they did to the Jews,” she said. When her husband was discharged Benny stopped seeing her. By then he was a senior at City College. He and Jacob supped off brisket and horseradish; winter winds beat at their walls and they sighed and shivered intellectually, morally, staring out at the cold lights of the capital of the world. “I was twelve,” Jacob said, “and not big, naturally, even shorter than now and ninety pounds. They gave me letters for Uncle this and Uncle that, and I crossed from Russian Poland into Germany—a refuge then, you understand, a place of light and freedom—and took a boat to London. I ate like a pig, like a real pig, paying no attention to kosher. In London I delivered the letters and found that I was a courier for the socialist Bund. A labor hero at twelve. You see why I hated the goons. If the Russians had searched me I would now be sewing buttons on flies in Verkhoyansk.”
    And the war, always the war, echoes, memories. On a rainy night Benny said, “We