Striking the Balance Read Online Free PDF Page B

down at the end of the hall. That didn’t bother him. For one thing, Goddard was a VIP, while he was just an enlisted man doing what he could for the war effort. For another, the plumbing on the Nebraska farm where he’d grown up had consisted of a well and a two-holer out back of the house. He didn’t take running water, cold or especially hot, for granted.
    Walking up to his room was a lot more comfortable in winter than it had been in summertime, when you didn’t need to soak in the local springs to get hot and wet. As he headed down the hall toward room 429, he heard Jonathan kicking up a ruckus in there. He sighed and hurried a little faster. Barbara would be feeling harassed. So would the Lizard POWs who also lived on this floor.
    When he opened the door, Barbara sent him a look that went from hunted to relieved when she saw who he was. She thrust the baby at him. “Would you try holding him, please?” she said. “No matter what I do, he doesn’t want to keep quiet.”
    “Okay, hon,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s a burp hiding in there.” He got Jonathan up on his shoulder and started thumping the kid’s back. He did it hard enough to make it sound as if he were working out on the drums. Barbara, who had a gentler touch, frowned at that the way she usually did, but he got results with it. As now—Jonathan gave forth with an almost baritone belch and a fair volume of half-digested milk. Then he blinked and looked much happier with himself.
    “Oh, good!” Barbara exclaimed when the burp came out. She dabbed at Sam’s uniform tunic with a diaper. “There. I got most of it, but I’m afraid you’re going to smell like sour milk for a while.”
    “World won’t end,” Yeager said. “This isn’t one of your big spit and polish places.” The smell of sour milk didn’t bother him any more. It was in the room most of the time, along with the reek that came with the diaper pail even when it was closed—that reminded him of the barnyard on his parents’ farm, not that he ever said so to Barbara. He held his little son out at arm’s length. “There you go, kiddo. You had that hiding in there where Mommy couldn’t find it, didn’t you?”
    Barbara reached for the baby. “I’ll take him back now. If you want.”
    “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I don’t get to hold him all that much, and you look like you could use a breather.”
    “Well, now that you mention it, yes.” Barbara slumped into the only chair in the room. She wasn’t the pert girl Sam had got to know; she looked beat, as she did most of the time. If you didn’t look beat most of the time with a new kid around, either something was wrong with you or you had servants to look beat for you. There were dark circles under her green eyes; her blond hair—several shades darker than Sam’s—hung limp, as if it were tired, too. She let out a weary sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette and especially a cup of coffee.”
    “Oh, Lord—coffee,” Yeager said wistfully. “The worst cup of joe I ever drank in the greasiest greasy spoon in the lousiest little town I ever went through—and I went through a lot of ’em . . .  Jeez, it’d go good right now.”
    “If we had any coffee to ration, we ought to share it between soldiers in the front lines and parents with babies less than a year old. No one else could possibly need it so badly,” Barbara said. Frazzled as she was, she still spoke with a precision Sam admired: she’d done graduate work at Berkeley in medieval English literature before the war. The kind of English you heard in ballparks didn’t measure up alongside that.
    Jonathan wiggled and twisted and started to cry. He was beginning to make different kinds of racket to show he had different things in mind. Sam recognized this one. “He’s hungry, hon.”
    “By the schedule, it’s not time to feed him yet,” Barbara answered. “But do you know what? As far as I’m concerned, the schedule can go to the