company? But if they offer me gunnery sergeant and I turn it down, and get out, they damned sure won’t call me back as a captain.
But I’m a Marine, and Marines are supposed to go— what’s that line?—“to the sound of the musketry”—not the other way, to build houses on golf courses on islands for well-to-do people.
“Why do I get the idea you’re not listening to me?” Zimmerman asked, bringing him back to The Colonel’s study.
“I’m thinking, Ernie, I’m thinking,” McCoy said.
Then think of something.
“Does The General know about this get-rich-quick scheme of yours?” he heard himself ask.
“It’s not a get-rich scheme, Ken—” Banning said, offended.
“Fuck you, Killer,” Zimmerman interrupted . . .
“—and yes, he does. He said that whenever we’re ready for an investment, to let him know.”
“I apologize for the wiseass remark,” McCoy said. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“Because you’re a wiseass, and always have been a wiseass,” Zimmerman said.
“And with that profound observation in mind, we forgive you,” Banning said. “Right, Ernie?”
“Why not?” Zimmerman said.
[TWO]
“We have a small problem,” Ernie McCoy said to her husband in the privacy of their room. “I couldn’t figure out how to say ‘no’ again.”
“No to who, about what?”
“Apparently, Ernie and Ed are starting some kind of real estate development . . .”
“They told me.”
“And Luddy thinks it would be just the thing for us when you get out of the Marine Corps.”
“And?”
“They’re going to propose at dinner that we go to the island—”
“Which island? I think there’s two islands.”
Ernie threw up her hands helplessly.
“—to look at it.”
“General Pickering apparently did not tell them why I was sent home from Japan,” McCoy said.
“I picked up on that,” Ernie said. “I almost blew that too, honey.”
“ ‘Almost’?” he parroted.
“They don’t know,” Ernie said.
“Good. And we can’t tell them, obviously.”
She looked at him curiously.
“They would try to help,” he explained. “Especially Ed Banning, and there’s nothing he could do, except maybe get himself in trouble.”
“So what do we do?”
“When Luddy proposes we go look at the island, we say, ‘Gee, what a swell idea!’ ”
“They’re not talking about much money,” Ernie said. “A couple of hundred thousand.”
“You know how much I make in the Corps, made in the Corps. ‘A couple of hundred thousand dollars’ is not much money.”
“You sign the Internal Revenue forms, you know what our annual income is,” Ernie said. “Not to reopen that subject for debate, I hope.”
They met each other’s eyes for a moment, then Ernie went off on a tangent.
“What I was thinking, honey, is that we don’t have any place to go when . . . if . . . you get out of the Corps. Not about going in with them, but this Hilton Head Island place. It might be a nice place to build a house.”
“We could probably pick up a nice little place for no more than a couple of hundred thousand, right?”
She didn’t reply, but he thought he saw tears forming.
“Baby, I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“I asked Zimmerman if he would go back to wearing stripes, and he said no, he wouldn’t. I had already decided that I wasn’t going to either, but it was nice to hear that I wasn’t alone.”
“I told you that was your decision,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. I remember,” he said.
“And I meant it,” she said.
“I know, baby. But it wouldn’t have worked. It just wouldn’t have worked. For me, or for you.”
She nodded but didn’t speak.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if I’m wrong,” he said.
“About ‘the worst-case scenario’?”
He nodded.
“I hope I am wrong,” McCoy said. “I hope that there is no war, that I get separated 30 June, that—”
“We could come back here and go in the real estate development business?”
“Either that, or to Jersey, and the executive trainee position your father offered me.”
“He means well, sweetheart. . . .”
“I know, and for all I know, I might find Personal Pharmaceuticals a real challenge.”
“Ken, for the last goddamn time, that was Daddy’s idea of trying to be a nice guy. If I had known he was going to propose that, I would have stopped him.”
“You told me that, and I believe it,” he said. “But to get back to the point, the worst possible scenario may be what happens. If I’m out of the Marine Corps should that happen . . .”
“You’re out, right? There’s no way they can call you back in?”
“There was a light colonel, a nice guy named Brewer, in the G-1’s office at Pendleton. He had me in his office,