Naked Came the Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page A

The
boys used to save milk bottles for the refunds and it was always a
big day when you could carry three of them over to Jake Rubenstein's.
Everybody hated old Jake. Not because he always kidded about them
bringing in three milk bottles. But because he was a Jew.
Ernie delighted in tormenting Jake's son, Harvey, but Ernie never
started a fight. It would have been no fight and Ernie was never that
much of a bully when he was in high school.
    Ernie had picked the University of Indiana. It had been a tough
choice because there were forty-six schools competing for the
pleasure of educating him. He picked Indiana for a simple reason:
They paid more than anyone else. Still, Ernie would have flunked out
after that last season if he hadn't joined the Marines before
exams.
    The war was the best thing that ever happened to Ernie Miklos.
Better than the football games and better than getting laid by a
cheerleader named Donah. Once, knee-deep in mud at Cape Gloucester,
sharing his foxhole with six dead land crabs, he said to himself
– and Ernie always spoke the truth when he spoke to himself
– "There are days when I'm sorry this war has to end."
    Ernie loved that war and he loved what his drill instructor at
Parris Island had told him: "Boy, I'm gonna make a paid fucking
killer out of you." And the sergeant would have been proud. Ernie won
the Silver Star at Bougainville by wiping out three Japanese strong
points with a handful of grenades and a BAR. He was wounded twice and
his face still bore the scar of a jap bayonet. But when Ernie was
telling war stories, that wasn't the one he liked to tell. He liked
to tell about the time he broke into a hut and found a Japanese
lieutenant about to commit hara-kiri. Ernie helped him along, but he
performed the ceremony by inserting the knife eleven inches into the
lieutenant's rectum.
    Ernie's wounds on Bougainville got him returned to Honolulu
– something he considered worse than a Section 8. It was in
Honolulu that Ernie got the scar that no one saw, the scar he carried
on his brain. It was in a slop jar off Hotel Street that Ernie found
his absolution. The whores had been thick along Hotel Street that
night; but they always were. It was like Piccadilly in London or
Pigalle in Paris except that the women sat in bars instead of under
street lamps or in doorways. Whores, Ernie discovered, were wonderful
when you felt the need of dying quickly with the reasonable assurance
you'd rise again from a quick grave. Ernie didn't actually survive
that night, not wholly. He had really been buried, and so he still
felt, forever. And his executioner was a half-caste little girl with
bad teeth, a girl who couldn't have been more than eighteen. In a way
Ernie felt it was retribution for what he had done to the Jap
lieutenant. He'd known that was wrong, but he couldn't help himself.
And while the lieutenant had been fortunate enough to look forward to
his Imperial Heaven, Ernie would spend the rest of his life looking
forward to absolutely nothing.
    Even now he sometimes woke up screaming. Laverne assumed it was
the sound of guns and the calls of dying men that echoed through his
sleep. But Ernie heard only his own screams – his screams and
the sound of water falling on a bare wooden floor in a dingy room in
Honolulu.
    The perspiration even now was rolling off Ernie's forehead. He
hoped his shuddering there in the dark night would not awaken
Laverne. Laverne. Ernie had married her because she was one of the
few women he could remember saying no to him. Maybe, he reflected, it
was because she was one of the few women he had ever bothered to ask.
"Not until you marry me," she had said. Ernie didn't believe her, not
at first, but he soon learned that Laverne was a threshold girl, able
to stop repeatedly just this side of fulfillment. He couldn't stand
it any more and, out of curiosity, agreed to marry her.
    She wasn't bad looking then and not much worse now. She had
maintained through two births a pair of