said.
“That’s why she’ll make a good wife,” Charlie said solemnly.
Landers thought briefly that vaguely, like some transparent apparition, he could see the fine faint hand of Blanche in this somewhere. But then he thought he couldn’t.
“Well, Jesus, Charlie. I don’t know,” he said finally.
“You think about it,” Charlie smiled. “Let me tell you something. I know you’re a friend of Annie’s. But that won’t matter. Annie’s a rover. Always been. She’s always going to be on the run. Loucine’s not. Loucine’s a regular homebody. You give Loucine a home and she’ll never stir. She just aint got any home, yet.
“Let me tell you something else. About being a father. A father is the garbage pail of a family. Everything that’s getting a little old, or getting to smell a little, or is going bad, or is upsetting, is dumped on him. Just like a garbage pail. That’s what he’s for.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready to be a father.”
“Well, nobody is,” Charlie said.
It was a munificent offer, in its way. Almost unbelievable. Charlie didn’t even ask that he marry Loucine and give the kid his name. Of course, Charlie probably figured that he would, if he simply stayed around long enough. Landers promised that he would think it over for two days. But even before he promised, even from the very beginning of it, he had known he was not going to accept. He did think it over for the two days. But nothing he thought changed.
“Charlie, I just can’t,” he said when the two days were up. “Too many things aren’t finished. I’ve got to run out the string, you know?”
“You’re going back?” They were in one of the four or five joints Charlie had first introduced him to. It was late in the night. The Tex Beneke Band was singing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”
“I have to, Charlie,” Landers said.
“Well, the offer still holds. I don’t know how long it’ll be open. Like I said, you move away a few feet, and they focus on somebody else.”
“Sure. I know. And if it had all happened a month from now, well maybe.” But he didn’t really believe that. “I’ll leave on the bus tomorrow.”
When he said good-by to Loucine, she put her arms around his neck, and began to cry. “Oh, I’m going to miss you so, Marion.” Landers was startled.
Charlie delivered him to the one o’clock bus. As the big door closed, and the bus’s air hissed, Charlie called one last thing to him.
“Remember!” he yelled.
CHAPTER 28
THERE WAS AN AWFUL, frightening depth to the depression that hit Landers when the taxi from Luxor carried him back inside O’Bruyerre. The sprawling, grimy, coal-smoke-smeared, mud-greased areas of the huge camp stretched for miles. From miles away, the pall of coal smoke that hung above it was visible like a flat, gray umbrella. The place seemed to have grown in even the weeks Landers had been away.
To come back into it as an unidentifiable nonentity among tens of thousands of other nonentities was unbearable.
And yet, under the depression was the orange-colored pick of excitement in his chest, as his frantic adrenal glands poured into him the juices for his coming combat. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
Landers hated himself for coming back to it when he could have stayed away. But he could no more have stayed away than he could have changed himself into a genuine deserter.
There had been no trouble getting in, at the main gate. On the ride out from town he had thrown away the precious block of blank pass forms, in case he should be searched, and kept only the current one, filled out for the past three days. But the MPs at the gate paid no attention to him, and he hadn’t even needed it.
Once back inside under his own steam he was no longer a deserter. He was only an AWOL.
Once inside, he told the driver to drive him right on down to the 3516th’s barracks. After the expense of the ride out from town, it didn’t cost that much more. In Luxor, he had not even gone around to the Peabody to see Strange, partly out of shame for having lied to him, but partly because he did not want Strange to get on the phone to Winch, and have Winch involved with planning his return. But now some instinct of self-preservation, once he was back inside on his own, made him change his mind about Winch.
He told the driver to take him up to