Some Came Running Read Online Free Page B

replacement.
    He’s just a kid, Dave thought with surprise. He’s no more of a tough ex-vet than I am.
    “That air kind of hit me outside,” Freddy said, picking up the bottle and studying it. “Say, do you know Ned Roberts, the Second National cashier?”
    “Ned Roberts?” Dave said. “Ned Roberts. Yeah. Sure. He was two years ahead of me in school. Is he their cashier?”
    Freddy nodded. “He remembered you.”
    “He did, hunh?”
    “He looked funny,” Freddy said. It was clear he knew there was something a little out of the ordinary that he was not in on. “I couldn’t tell if he was surprised because it was you, or if he was surprised because it was that much money.”
    Dave grinned. “Probably both. Maybe he was thinking about my brother on the board of the other bank.”
    The clerk nodded, indifferent. But he was looking at Dave curiously. “You know, I’ve lived in this town almost four years, and I still don’t know anything about it,” he said. “It’s a funny kind of town.”
    “Not so funny,” Dave said. “Probably not much like Jersey City, though.”
    “No. Not much. Well, I’ll see you later,” Freddy said. He went to the door, and then turned back, his face closed up tight like a poker player making a big raise. “Mind if I ask you something?”
    “No. Shoot.”
    “You was in the QM.” He nodded at Dave’s shoulder patch.
    Dave nodded. “3615th QM Gas Supply Company. I was Company Medic.”
    “If you was in the QM, how’d you get that Combat Infantryman’s Badge?” He nodded again, at the emblem of the Kentucky rifle on its blue field with the silver wreath around it.
    “My outfit fought as Infantry during the Bulge,” Dave said. “They gave it to us by Division Special Order. We were up there gassing tanks, when the breakthrough came.”
    “That was a rough go,” Freddy said.
    “I didn’t get it in any Army store,” Dave smiled, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “Well,” the clerk said, “thanks for them drinks.” It sounded awkward, as if he felt he had gotten out of line.
    “What were you in?” Dave said. “Infantry?”
    “No. Air Corps,” Freddy said. “But my brother was. He got his in the Hürtgen Forest.” He went, his last sentence hanging in the air, an awkward attempt at explanation, embarrassed.
    Dave mixed himself a whiskey and water and sat down in the chair of the desk which had been placed in the corner between the windows. Tilting it back on two legs, he looked out the side window up the street to the square.
    It was such a funny thing, about soldiers. Funny, in a way that made you want to cry. Everybody always assumed the other guy had had it tougher than he did. The men in Europe thought the men in the Pacific had it tougher because of the jungle. The men in the Pacific thought the men in Europe had it tougher because of the firepower. And it carried right on down the line.
    It’s like some kind of a mass male guilt psychosis, he thought. Nobody thinks he has as much guts as he should, and the man who only lost one hand drops his eyes before the man who lost them both.
    He and Freddy had just made the same mistake, about each other. Now Freddy thought he had it tough. Well, ordinarily—except that he had been coming home to Parkman—he didn’t wear them, any of them (his Purple Heart was purely a technicality). But that could become a pose, too.
    Except for the Combat Infantry Badge. That he was truly proud of. But why? Because he had never been Infantry, of course.
    Will we ever get free of it all? Will we ever live it down? and get far enough away from it so we will be able to digest it? He doubted it. And then the next war would come along, with its crop of cripples, and oust us from our place we are reluctant to give up.
    From the window, he could see, up the street in the corner of the courthouse yard, the Cray County Honor Roll. With the war over almost two years, it was beginning to flake its paint just like all the