Chapter 2

Six days later her letter found me, written that night at a hotel desk, and God help me, it was the best I ever got…

I was on a bunk in a staging camp back East with my boots off, and a corporal had just thrown it at me at mail call.

The paper said Morrison Hotel across the top, and the postmark said Chicago, that same Tuesday night.

"I couldn't face our room, so I took one at the Morrison like a millionaire," she wrote. "I'll make it up in hamburger."

I had a fair idea who had driven her there.

"I stood out on that platform till there was nothing left to see, and then I stood some more."

I knew that wasn't so, and outside of Ted Lenihan I may have been the only man alive who did.

Then, at the bottom of the page:

"I don't want a hero. They give heroes a street. Be late for everything, Chet. Late is how a man gets old. If somebody hollers at you to hurry up, stop and tie your boot."

I read it nine times.

Nobody had ever told me anything that kind, not my mother and not the priest at St. Josaphat's.

I meant to tear it up.

I folded it along its own folds and put it in a White Owl cigar box, and I put the envelope with her picture in there too, still sealed, because I knew what she looked like from a quarter mile.

I'd like to say somebody clever fooled me, but I helped.

The Servicemen's Center on West Washington was the old Elks club, with free sandwiches and a dance floor, and I'd been coming down on passes from Fort Sheridan on the North Shore line.

Ted Lenihan used to wait out front with a maroon Buick, giving fellows a lift to their trains.

He had a C sticker on the windshield, for the car pool at the war plant where he was a timekeeper.

Everybody wondered why a fit man of thirty-one wasn't in uniform, so he saved you asking.

He tapped his left ear. "Punctured eardrum," he said. "Uncle Sam won't have me."

You had to sit on his right side and talk up.

"You got people in Chicago?" he asked me, that first night.

I told him no, just my mother up in Milwaukee and a dog named Pulaski with a bad hip.

He laughed like that was the best thing he'd heard all week, and at the curb he took out a little notebook and wrote down his mileage, the way you had to.

"My cousin pours the coffee Saturdays," he said. "Go tell her it's weak. She likes that."

So I told her it was weak.

She was looking at my hands. "What's that under your nails?"

"Paint."

"What kind?" she said.

I was twenty-five years old, and nobody had ever asked me what kind.

It was Ted who brought up the allotment, over chop suey on Randolph Street, the week after the judge married us, because a fellow ought to fix up his papers before he shipped.

I thought he was looking out for me, and I suppose he was, the way you look out for a car you're still paying on.

So at the staging camp I put on a clean shirt and went to the orderly room to stop it.

"Stop a wife's allotment," the first sergeant said. "She die?"

"No, Sergeant."

"You divorced?"

"No, Sergeant."

"Then you go tell the captain why."

The captain looked up from his desk, with two clerks typing behind him and the door standing open.

"What is it, Pawlak?"

I had the sentence all ready: Sir, I saw my wife kiss her cousin.

I ran it through my head one time, in front of those two typewriters.

"Sir," I said, "I was wondering about the boots."

He looked at my boots, which were fine, and he signed for a new pair, a half size small.

I paid twenty-two dollars a month rather than say one sentence to a captain, and that's on nobody but me.

Nothing I wrote home was any braver, because all our mail went through my lieutenant, a polite fellow from Ohio who sat on a crate with a razor blade.

"Dear Gen, I am fine, the weather is fine, I got your letter. Chet."

"Pawlak, you write the dullest letters in the United States Army," he told me. "What does she see in you?"

"I couldn't tell you, sir."

Hers came in bunches, four at once and then nothing for three weeks, but the dates never missed a week.

"It rained Tuesday, so I stood out in my coat to find out what you meant about wet wool. You were being polite."

"How is Pulaski's hip? Don't tell me fine. You say fine about everything."

By Christmas we were in Italy, in the mud, and the fellows in my squad had started asking me to read them out.

"Do the one about the wool, Pawlak."

So I read them, in a tent, in the rain, to men who had quit expecting anything.

They were all in love with her by New Year's, and a sergeant from Scranton asked me to tell her his feet were better.

Here's what I've never been proud of.

For as long as it took to read a page out loud, I was the man she was writing to, and I liked it.

Then came a morning in February of '44, on a road I won't name, with the company loading up for a bridge job at seven o'clock.

Four letters had come up in the night.

I was standing by a stack of ration crates with the top one open when the sergeant from Scranton started hollering for me to get on the truck.

I could have read it on the truck, and I've gone over that plenty.

I put my foot up on a crate and untied my left boot, the one that pinched, for no reason except that a liar in Chicago had told me to.

I was still tying it when the truck went up the road without me.