“Oh, it was, but looking back on it now, I suppose it could have been worse. I missed Giuseppe for a while, but I was lucky that the theater job opened up. I’ll be the first to confess that I have no skills whatsoever. By the time the taxes were settled and the funeral paid for, Mother didn’t have anything left but the house and some jewelry.”
They sat there for a while without speaking, and then, through the open window, Bovard heard some men passing by in the alley below. They were talking loudly and he thought he heard Wesley Franks’s voice among them. He stepped over and pushed the dirty curtain back just enough to peek out, but they had already disappeared around the corner.
“Something wrong?” Lucas asked.
“No, I just thought I heard a familiar voice. One of my men.”
Lucas smiled and pulled open the drawer on the nightstand. He withdrew the small brown bottle the pharmacist had brought over the other night. “Some of this will help you forget all about him,” he said. “At least for tonight.”
The lieutenant hesitated. He was already a little drunk. “Not too much,” he said. “I damn near missed reveille the other morning.”
Lucas spilled a little into both their glasses and they drank. Then he stretched out on the narrow bed and lit another cigarette. Taking a drag, he patted the empty place beside him, and Bovard thought of the ugly slattern in the hotel room in Columbus. She had done exactly the same thing. Lucas blew smoke rings at the ceiling while he watched the lieutenant fumble with the buttons of his uniform. After dropping his pants, Bovard happened to glance over at the dead actor’s face on the wall, and was suddenly stricken by his merry, eternal gaze. Evidently, the old boy was still having a ball when he had posed for the poster. Bovard stared back at him for a long moment, vaguely wondering if he had been up to this room, too, then stepped unsteadily to the edge of the smelly mattress. Time seemed to slow down, and he thought of Odysseus’s men, drugged by the lotus-eaters. Perhaps, he thought dreamily, if he survived the war by some quirk of fate, he and Wesley could settle down on an island somewhere in the Aegean Sea. They could become simple farmers or fishermen, live in a stone house filled with golden sunlight. He heard Lucas sigh, felt a hand come to rest on his leg. His mouth felt dry, and the last thing he remembered was wetting his lips with his tongue.
In the middle of the night, he awoke feeling as if he had been wrapped in gauze, his head as dull as a wedge of cheese. Lucas had rolled off the bed and lay passed out on the floor. He dressed hurriedly, and then, after taking one last glance around the shabby room, made his way down the dark stairs. He found a cab parked at the corner of Paint and Second, and had the driver let him out a block from the foggy camp entrance. As he sneaked past the three sleeping guards, that stupid song comparing life to a fucking pie started up in his head again, but now it didn’t sound quite so bad. In fact, he was humming it softly to himself a few minutes later when he tripped over a boot that some bastard had left in the aisle of the barracks and damn near broke his neck.
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