Gamma Gamma Gamma

Apparently there would be a party after all. It was already four days late and couldn't be called an initiation party, since all the pledges were now brothers. But that was really nobody's fault, unless it was Pomaczchek's. He had been a bit anxious, spending too many hours fussing in the attic over his 20-gallon barrel of home beer, until the fumes and fermentation got too much for his stomach to accept passively. Even then, it was simply a matter of poor judgment that everyone attributed to his lightheaded state. If he hadn't grabbed the edges of the barrel to steady himself or had turned his head away, they wouldn't have had to empty the whole mess out and start over again.

At any rate, there was going to be a party that night.

Yates sat in his unmade bed, his back nestled in a pillow against the headboard, and picked at the big toenail of his right foot. He had half given himself, for the moment, to Lady Macbeth, who lay open in his lap telling her husband to go screw his courage, she would get Duncan's officers so drunk with wine and wassail that they would leave Duncan, their memories and their reason unguarded—easy marks for a guilt complex. He read it again. It came out the same, so he committed his attention to the toenail, which had begun to tear too close to the quick.

Reimers was watching from his desk in the corner of the room. He grimaced.

"For crying out loud, hey. What's the matter with you?" he said finally. "Why do you leave your socks on the floor?"

"Because I've taken them off," Yates replied and freed the jagged crescent of nail from his toe. He inspected it and then began to peel the layers apart with his thumbnails.

"What if someone were to come into the room now and see you doing that? What would they think, for crying out loud?" Reimers said.

"They'd think I'd taken my socks off," Yates said, wiggling the toe to determine if it felt any lighter now.

"Well, use the wastebasket for that when you're done playing. I don't want to step on those damn things in the middle of the night." Reimers turned back to his work, meticulously entering tiny numbers into tiny green crosshatches on yellow paper.

Yates grinned. He liked Reimers, because Reimers was easy to get along with. Yates didn't have to worry about upsetting him, since Reimers was always upset anyway—he was fat, with little porcine eyes set deep in fleshy wallows, and he had high blood pressure, and it really didn't matter, because Yates didn't especially care to have him for a friend. Which was one of the things he liked about Reimers. Yates found it easier than rooming with someone he might care for.

Reimers was a good roommate. He was a business major and, what was even worse, he was a business major by his own choice. But that wasn't why Yates liked him, especially. He liked him because he had an irritating mania for cleanliness. Reimers would have replaced a desk blotter if a drop of ink had stained it. Yates enjoyed living comfortably, which meant that if anything of his in the room could be found in its logical place, it was because the law of probability had completed a revolution and the three monkeys at their typewriters had punched out another of Shakespeare's plays. It was a pleasant existence and it upset Reimers, so they got along together. They had known each other for four days.

• • •

It was a three-letter fraternity. Really, only one Greek letter repeated three times; but spelled out, it was three letters, and when spoken aloud, it sounded more like the stammering of an idiot than the name of a brotherhood: Gamma Gamma Gamma. Yates had heard the place mentioned only once or twice in connection with rush week, before he joined. He did recall that toward the end of his first semester, while he was still grappling with the slippery new concepts introduced in a survey course in physical science (Galileo to Fermi) and a course in world civilization (Babylonia to the Bomb), he had found the cryptic name scratched with a pen into the writing arm of a seat in class. At the time, it brought to mind the picture of a thunderstruck scientist, eyes popping, his left hand clutching his throat, his right hand pointing to a distant mushroom cloud: "Gamma, Gamma, Gamma-aahh!"

"It's a crummy house," Pribyl had stated flatly. Pribyl roomed with Yates in the dormitory. "They're on social probation for having girls in after hours and they're always in trouble for one crazy thing or another. Besides, the house is loaded with veterans, and you know what a house like that is like."

"Well, yes, of course," Yates had said, wondering.

One year out of high school, Yates was finally in college on what money and confidence he and his father had been able to pool, and he was intent on applying himself. He had considered carefully the orderly path of textbooks ahead of him and he had decided to avoid the stigma a narrow-minded approach to education might leave on him. It wasn't worth the risk, since it could lead only to knowledge or money. There had to be a wider path; he wanted to learn, too.

It was Publicover who showed him the way. One afternoon during rush week, Yates had been sitting alone at a table in the student-union cafeteria, reviewing for his next class, when a tall, lanky man with swollen eyes and a shiny face suddenly set a cup of coffee down before him. The shiny face was smiling a yellow smile.

"How are you, Yates?" He pulled out the chair next to Yates and sat down. "Good to see you're hitting the ol' books. That's the only way to get through this place without Uncle getting you."

Then Yates recognized Publicover. He hadn't seen Publicover in two years, since high school, when Publicover had come home from Vietnam stoop-shouldered with the weight of brass on his chest. They had held a special school assembly to present Publicover with the diploma he would have earned if he hadn't dropped out of school two years before he was drafted. That was the first time Yates had ever laid eyes on him, because he was just 12 and in grade school when Publicover had quit high school at 20. It was also the last time he had laid eyes on Publicover until that moment.

Publicover extended a hand and slapped Yates on the shoulder with the other, in the traditional greeting of old friends. "By God, Yates, long time, long time."

And then, after his cup of coffee and a quick trip through old times that neither had shared with the other, Publicover had solved Yates' dilemma.

"Look, Yates, I've got to run. But why don't you come over to the house for dinner tomorrow night?" he said, fishing a piece of folded paper from his shirt pocket and handing it to Yates with the flourish of a salesman offering his business card.

"Yeah, thanks, Harry. Love to," Yates said.

"Great seeing you again," Publicover said, rising and slapping Yates on the shoulder once more.

"Great me you, Harry."

Yates watched him set off across the cafeteria, weaving between tables, and stop four tables away, where a lone student sat myopically scanning a textbook. "Butts! How are you? Good to see you're hitting the ol' books."

When Yates opened the piece of paper, he found the rough handwritten invitation to dine with the 20 brothers of Gamma Gamma Gamma, and there was Publicover's signature at the bottom as president. His old home-town buddy!

• • •

Yates went to dinner anyway.

He shared it with 20 brothers and 30 other freshmen, seated at five long tables in the dining room of an old frame house. Pribyl had been right about the house being loaded with veterans. Its roster could have doubled as the roll for the local V. F. W. But, regardless of the impression he felt he wouldn't make, Yates knew the meal would be better than the fatty offerings of pork, canned peas and mashed potatoes that were common to the freshman dining hall. Food was always better at fraternities; they had the money to spend on it. T-bone steaks, artichokes, wild rice. Yates had abstained from breakfast and lunch to make room for seconds. They served gristly beef, canned peas and mashed potatoes, and Yates ate voraciously.

There were four other freshmen at the head table with him, and five brothers: Clarence Maurino, Larry Cross, Phil Pomaczchek, Harry Publicover and Kessler. Except for Kessler, all the brothers were veterans.

Kessler was a short, emaciated man with awesomely waxen skin and a wandering left eye. He sat at the end of the table, eating sporadically, listening thoughtfully and belching in basso as contrapuntal remark on the tales his brothers swapped about fraternity life. When the brothers had ultimately talked out Gamma Gamma Gamma's history as a brotherhood of white Christian men, one of the freshmen, between his requests for another slice of bread and someone to pass the butter, inquired if any of the veterans had seen combat. Kessler's digestive commentary picked up tempo.

Yates quickly discovered that the fraternity had an impressive complement of heroes.

There was Larry Cross, civil-engineering major, house maintenance manager. He was the only holdover from the Korean War. He had decided late on a college education and was somewhat of an oddity; for in addition to being the oldest among the brothers, he was the only veteran underwriting his own college expenses. The GI Bill had forsaken him the year before and he was paying for his own senior year, save for the small sum that still came to him for being disabled. He betrayed with only a slight stiffness of gait that all was not right with his left leg. As ranking corporal in the motor pool, he had been Colonel Dunbier's driver following the Inchon landings. The two hit it off well, until they had a falling out over a land mine on a battered Korean road. A liberation party of the disinterred R. O. K. underground had wrestled the jeep off Cross' leg and collected the unconscious colonel from under a nearby tree. When the two were reunited in a field hospital, Dunbier, being a religious man but also a nice guy, had personally pinned the Purple Heart on Cross and ordered his expatriated left leg packed in ice and flown back to the United States, where it was buried in the Cross family plot in Temple, New Hampshire, next to the grave of his mother.

And Clarence Maurino, physical education major, right guard on the university football team, had been a corporal in the Marines and had also received the Purple Heart—at Tayninh, when he pounced on a fumbled grenade in his trench and threw it up over the edge in time to kill three charging Cong and sever a blood vessel in his own shoulder with shrapnel.

Phil Pomaczchek, chemistry major and house social director, had been a seaman first in the Navy and had been busted for operating a still on board the destroyer Pierpont. Officially he was busted for operating the still, but unofficially for maloperating it, because it exploded during the shelling of Binh Dinh and sent the chief radio operator and a gunnery officer to sick bay with wounds from flying glass. It couldn't be overlooked, as it endangered the efficiency rating of the ship in combat. Pomaczchek was given the attic of the fraternity house to carry on peacetime operations for probation parties and similar emergencies.

The biggest hero, though, was Harry Publicover, Yates' buddy. As a fraternity president, Publicover was a good sergeant. By his own admission, he ran a spirited, (continued on page 202) Gamma (continued from page 120) fighting outfit. He had been in tanks in Vietnam. "I used to command one of those armored flame throwers, before they decided it wasn't really practical against water-filled drainage ditches. But there's a weapon," he recounted to the freshmen, who listened raptly. "It could throw a flame the length of a football field, and if you were good—I mean really good—you could arc one into a Cong hole and watch those little bastards come busting out like sparklers, their eyes popping right out of their heads, screaming and rolling all over the damned place. I saw one of 'em run thirty yards once, nothing but fire with feet, before he finally dropped. And occasionally, clanking along some road or through a field, you'd come across some of those sonsabitches lying dead and all bloated up. If you could ease one tread of that baby up over them, they'd sort of pop, like those dried puffballs you used to stomp on in the woods when you were a kid. Pop! Pop! Poof!"

Among other honors, Publicover had won the Bronze Star when he distinguished himself and his crew in what began as a temporary withdrawal in the face of a North Vietnamese assault. ("It was during either our third or fourth Take Honquan Day. They came up about the last of each month. We'd rush in and take Honquan, chase Charlie and the villagers out, burn the houses and then withdraw in time for Take Quinhon Day. A week later, the villagers were back, rebuilding their huts; two weeks later, the Cong were back; and then it would be Take Honquan Day again.") In this instance, in command of his steel dragon, Publicover had ground his way with Patton speed to the rescue of a company of Infantry on an open hilltop outside the village, shooting the gap over what was left of their lines, roaring down a slope, spouting a flame from under, rising to meet the North Vietnamese thunder, blowing fire from his metal nostril in a wide, sweeping arc. In panic, the enemy had turned back, stumbling over their own burning comrades in their retreat—until Publicover had run out of lighter fluid. Then he had ground his way with Patton speed back up the burning slope, shooting the gap over what was once his own lines, spouting exhaust from under as he tried to escape their thunder, spitting little wasps from his .30-caliber machine gun back at the counter-counterattacking North Vietnamese, who hurdled over their burning comrades to chase a madman in a tank—right into the middle of an air strike that surprised not only them but Publicover, too. In short order, they were charging back through what was once the American lines and down the slope, over their own smoldering comrades, to regroup and try again. But by then, the whole episode had consumed enough time to allow the main body of American troops to withdraw safely to a more tactically defensible terrain. The high command was so pleased that it disregarded the request from Publicover's commanding officer, Colonel Torpito, that Publicover be court-martialed. The request cited as grounds the willful disobedience of an order to withdraw and included the now-memorable reply received by the colonel over the field radio: "Balls. Damn you, Torpito, I ain't even started fighting yet."

And Publicover had disobeyed orders ever since. It was his ambition to bring the same kind of glory to Gamma Gamma Gamma. "That's the spirit of Gamma Gamma Gamma. We're a tough outfit and we select only those people who really want to be here. We don't give a damn for the others. And it's a great house. It really is. We have a ball," Publicover said, winking at the visitors. The visitors were delighted—with the meal, with the stories, with the brothers of Gamma Gamma Gamma. The brothers were wonderful. They were witty. They were enviable. Kessler belched. Yates was uncomfortable; he had hoped there would be seconds, but almost everyone was talking too much to eat even the first serving. Except for Kessler and one of the freshmen, a fat boy with porcine eyes, who was seated next to Yates. When he was served, the boy seemed momentarily nonplused, because some of the mashed potatoes had trespassed on the meat and several peas were trapped in the potatoes. It took him a few pains-taking, disgruntled moments to establish order with the tines of his fork, segregating the greens and browns and whites. Ultimately, he situated the peas in an area from 12 o'clock to 3 o'clock on his plate, the meat from 3 to 9 and the potatoes from 9 to 12, and he began to eat his way contentedly clockwise.

Toward the end of the meal, when the brothers discovered that they were hungry and began talking less and eating more, Kessler spoke for the first time, leaning slightly forward over his empty plate and looking, with his steadier eye, at the fat boy.

"Mr. Reimers. It is Mr. Reimers, isn't it?"

The boy nodded expectantly.

"Yes, it had to be. What do you think of this appetizing preview of the good life?" Kessler tilted his head while he spoke and smiled benignly.

"It's appetizing," Reimers said, looking from Kessler to Publicover to see where the joke lay. Publicover was frowning, busy over his meal.

Kessler sighed.

"Et tu, Mr. Reimers," he said with a profound trace of sadness. But he went on: "I understand you represent something of a gold mine to us. It it true that, besides your good looks and superior intellect, your father owns a profitable missile-parts corporation?"

"He owns a plastics company," Reimers said. "He makes ballpoint pens for hotels."

"Oh. I'm sorry. But, in any event, it's profitable and that's all that really matters, isn't it? You're a fortunate young man. If we ever get off social pro, a grade point average like yours will help keep us off and, of course, money like your father's will help keep us solvent enough to remain social. You may rest assured that you are one of the selected few who really want to be here. My friend—no, rather, my brother—you are indispensable to us."

"Well, I think there's more to it than that," Reimers said modestly.

"Brother Reimers," Kessler said fraternally, "there at the other end of the table sits our president, Brother Public Cover. If you were to turn to him now and say, 'Dear Brother Public Cover, I think you and your whole fraternity are strictly chicken shit,' I'm sure he would pretend he had a fly in his ear."

"Why don't you shut up for a while, Kessler? You've been talking all night," Publicover said. "Don't pay any attention to him," he told Reimers good-naturedly. "That's just his way of being funny."

Publicover looked at Maurino and jerked his head in the direction of the door at the other end of the room. Then he excused himself from the table.

"Be right back," he said and made his way swiftly along the aisle between the tables and the wall. Maurino got up and shuffled out of the room after him.

"That's just my way," Kessler was saying. "That's right, you know. That's just my way."

Reimers took his cue from Publicover.

"Who let you in?" he asked, smiling uncertainly, and one of the other freshmen responded by blowing a short snort of incredulous laughter through his nose.

"Me? They had to let me in. I'm the only soul they have. That's right. I'm the sole soul of Gamma Gamma Gamma. Which is not to be confused with the sweetheart of Theta Chi," Kessler said.

"Hey, funny, Kessler. Fun-nee," Pomaczchek said suddenly, grinning irritably.

A telephone rang somewhere in the back of the house and, a moment later, Publicover stuck his head in the door at the end of the room.

"Hey, Kessler, it's for you."

Kessler looked up. Then he smirked. "That's the spirit of Gamma Gamma Gamma, too. Every week is National Shaft Your Brother Week around here." He got up, bowing solemnly to all, and made his way slowly along the line of tables and followed Publicover out of the room.

That was the last Yates saw of him that evening.

Reimers leaned confidentially toward Pomaczchek, who sat on the other side of him, and asked quietly, "What is wrong with him?"

"Hah!" Pomaczchek said in sudden outrage. "He's a dirty yellow bastard, that's what's wrong with him. He's a goddamned peacenik, that's what's wrong with him. While I was in Vietnam slopping through mud and death, that creep was over here dodging the draft."

For a minute, no one said a word, and Pomaczchek began to blush.

Finally, Larry Cross said calmly, looking at Reimers, "We don't try to hide our skeletons. We just try to open the doors on them gently, so as not to shock anyone. If you wish to know about Mr. Kessler, I'll tell you. When they first began to send American troops to Vietnam, Kessler embarrassed his draft board by refusing to be drafted. And while Maurino and Pomaczchek here, and Publicover and all the others were risking their lives to save the system that allowed Kessler to object publicly to war, he was resting safe and secure in some Federal penitentiary. That is what is wrong with Mr. Kessler."

"Well, then, how come he's a brother in this fraternity?" Reimers asked.

"I'll be damned if I know," Pomaczchek burst out again. "He's one of those professional students or something. He was already here when the rest of us got here, so we had to keep him. But why the hell they let him in at all I'll never know. The chapter here must have been full of creeps like him before we came."

Yates, who had been listening intently, tried to imagine a whole fraternity house full of Kesslers; but it was too overwhelming, like trying to visualize infinity: There just couldn't be that many wandering left eyes in the world.

"I suppose it's not my place to say so," Reimers said, "but I don't like him. He's a disrupting influence. He just doesn't know how to get along."

• • •

The party began innocuously, as Yates had expected of a party behind closed curtains with no women present. Each of the brothers filled his plastic cup with some of Pomaczchek's home beer and gathered in the living room to toast the newest members of the fraternity. The new members toasted the old. Then Yates toasted Reimers and it started another round, with each brother toasting his roommate. Except for Douval, who was Kessler's roommate. So Yates toasted Kessler and was met by a sudden roomful of silent stares, interrupted by Reimers' nervous cough. Kessler smirked politely and bowed to Yates and the party began again.

It was quite obvious to Yates that the brothers hated Kessler. It was easy to hate Kessler. He was, from what Yates could see, an obnoxious worm of a person. He might have hated him like the rest, if he hadn't controlled his emotions with an element of dispassionate interest. Kessler was a frail young man who objected to war. This was why the brothers hated him. But this was what interested Yates about him. He had never known a draft resister, not a real, convicted, breathing one. Now, through the metamorphosis of a secret oath, he had become brother to one. It gave him certain unique privileges, such as being able to stare unashamedly at him whenever he pleased, while he tried to imagine what it must be like to be a person with a frail body and a wandering left eye who actually resisted something as natural as war.

Yates had never resisted. During those high school years, when he spent his afternoons helping out in his father's drugstore, he stole every moment he could to read the day's accounts of the war from the newspapers in the rack—like following a favorite comic strip. He had been too young to be interested in the Korean War; he had missed that one, but he wouldn't let Vietnam pass by. He studied all the accounts and printed maps and diagrams, trying to visualize the dotted lines and curving arrows for what they were: companies, battalions, task forces. It seemed strange that anyone could have objected to the dotted lines.

More and more of Pomaczchek's beer was consumed and, by nine o'clock, the party was under full steam and, once again, war had broken out.

"Here's how it happened," Maurino said, 220 sodden pounds swaying precariously back and forth in the center of a ring of brothers that had formed around him. "This stupid jerk of a corporal was next to me and he pulls the pin on this damned grenade. Here, Pom-Pom, you be the stupid jerk and pull the pin on this damned grenade and then drop it." He thrust his empty plastic cup at Pomaczchek, who pulled the pin on it and dropped it on the carpet next to Maurino.

"Live grenade! Live grenade! You stupid jerk," Maurino suddenly bellowed and fell thunderously on the cup, smashing it like an eggshell beneath his stomach. He reached under himself and pulled out a fragment, ponderously raised himself to his knees and threw it into Kessler's face. Kessler had just moved in front to get a better look.

"Bwoom!" Maurino said, smiling victoriously, and collapsed on the floor.

Reimers giggled a little drunkenly and took a manful swallow of beer. Cross nudged Maurino with his real foot.

"Come on, Mo. Party's just starting," he said.

"Leave him alone," Publicover said sharply. "He went through hell. Let him sleep."

Cross looked at Publicover.

"Oh, I forgot," he said dully. "He had all kinds of bad man experiences, didn't he?" He whacked his left leg with his empty cup and the incongruous solidness of the sound made him wince.

"Nobody said you people didn't have it bad, too," Publicover said quietly.

"Bad! Try lying for three hours under a ton and a half of steel, numb with fear, freezing cold and wet from your own blood. If it hadn't been for the old man, my leg would still be over there and I'd never be whole again."

"That's Cross for you." Kessler said. "Thirty-four years old and he's already got one foot in the grave."

Cross turned on Kessler.

"Do you know what it's like knowing a part of you is already buried in the ground?" he wailed. "Do you know what it's like? I used to go up there to Temple some weekends to put flowers on my mother's grave and I'd turn cold seeing my own headstone next to hers. I can't go there anymore."

"Rest in pieces," Kessler said solemnly.

"That's not fair." Reimers suddenly shouted. "You have no right to say that, no right at all. I'd give my right arm to be able to say I lost my leg for my country. I hope I'm able to. As it is, I have little enough right to call these men my friends, let alone my brothers. But you have no right at all. You had every chance in the world."

Publicover put an arm around Reimers' shoulder.

"That's all right, kid. I'd have been proud to have you in my outfit."

"Ditto," Cross said and glared at Publicover.

"There you are, Mr. Reimers," Kessler said, smirking. "Now you have your choice between two wars. I stand rejected."

Pomaczchek jumped in to save the moment by blowing up the U. S. S. Pierpont again.

"You should have seen it," he said enthusiastically. "You really should have seen it. It was almost as big as that freakin' adam bomb. And all that booze. Whoosh! All over the goddamned deck." And he threw his cup of beer into the air to demonstrate, calling down a chorus of cheers and catcalls when it splashed off the ceiling and showered his audience.

But when Publicover began his story of the Bronze Star, the group remained respectfully silent.

Except for Kessler.

"Why don't you tell them how it really was, Public Cover?" he said, just as Publicover was shooting the gap for the first time.

Publicover rolled his invisible tank to a halt and looked at Kessler.

"Look," he said slowly, "I've told you before, wise guy, don't call me that. I swear you're going to end up gumming your meals. You don't know a thing about what's going on over there."

"I know there's a whole lot of dyin' going on. I also know what you told us before about your heroic contribution to it, when you had had a little more to drink. There were extenuating circumstances, remember? Circumstances like your believing you actually were with drawing when you ran into that North Vietnamese attack. Circumstances like a damaged radio precluding any kind of communication outside the tank. Circumstances like——"

"Are you calling me a liar, you crud? Are you saying I didn't deserve that medal?"

"Oh, my Lord, yes, you deserved the medal," Kessler said with great seriousness. "If I had my way, I'd give every man who went to war a medal for bravery. In fact, I might give them the medal before they went, so they could all stay home winners. But if you're going to sing the glories of combat, at least make them factual. These young people, I imagine, want to know what it's really like, so when it becomes their turn to go win medals——"

"But it's not going to come their turn, you dumb clod," Pomaczclick screamed out. "What the hell you think we're fighting for? We're showing them we mean business. Nobody's going to screw around with us. And we've got that freakin' big bomb, so how's it going to be their turn if there isn't going to be no war?"

A softly comical expression crossed Kessler's face.

"That's wonderful," he said. "I've finally met someone who seems to believe it. I had thought innocence died in the explosion of that freakin' big bomb. I remember that was supposed to ensure that nobody would screw around with us anymore. And what was your little war all about. Larry?"

"You'really looking for it, buddy. You're looking for a bust right in your freakin' mouth," Pomaczchek said.

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Public Cover has priority. You'll have to wait your turn."

It seemed to Yates that, for someone as drunk as he appeared the moment before, Publicover was remarkably agile. Before anyone quite knew he had moved, he had crossed the ring of brothers, leaping over Maurino's prostrate form in the center, and slammed head down into Kessler, his shoulder and forearm in Kessler's gut. He hit with such force that he kept going, carrying Kessler before him, knocking down two of the newly brothered veterans in his path, and sharply and audibly separating Kessler from the air in his lungs. If there hadn't been a wall in their path to stop them—Kessler's head snapping up and bouncing off the plaster, and the shoulder in momentum in his midriff squeezing one more wheezy dram of air from him—the two might have plowed on for another 50 feet. For an instant, Kessler hung limp over Publicover's shoulder, until Publicover straightened up, knocking Kessler's head on the wall again, grabbed Kessler's shirt collar in both hands and thrust a knee between his slumping legs to hold him up.

"Go ahead. Say it again. Say it just once more," Publicover said between gritted teeth.

Kessler groaned.

The rest of the brothers crowded forward, leaving Yates and Maurino suddenly on the fringe.

"Hit the bastard." Pomaczchek screamed. "Don't give him a chance, just hit him."

"It's probably not my place to say, but he's been asking for it," Reimers said.

"Disrupting."

"Go ahead," Publicover said to Kessler. "Say it just once more."

Kessler's face was almost birch white and his wandering eye was doing loops. He was laboring to catch his breath. Under Publicover's insistent shaking, he apparently regained some of his equilibrium. He attempted to replace the smirk on his trembling lips. Publicover tightened his grip on Kessler's shirt and brought fist fuls of collar up under his chin.

"Go ahead, you yellow bastard," he said again.

"I'm obligated—to warn you," Kessler said weakly, between fitful breaths, "I hold the black belt—in the gentle art of imprecation. If you continue—to molest me—I shall be forced to curse you soundly. Please believe me, I've had to register my tongue with the police."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, hit the wiseassed bastard," Pomaczchek said with disgust.

"Don't listen to the sonnabitch," Maurino said thickly, raising his head suddenly off the floor like a sleeping dog that had heard a noise. "What you listen to 'm for? He doesn' know. He wasn' efen dere, for chrissake. Y' know where he wass? He wasn' efen dere, dass where he wass." And he lowered his head into his arms. "He don't know. Nobody knows," he said in a crooning voice.

Publicover let go of Kessler, who sank down the wall to the floor, and pushed his way through the group to Maurino.

"Sure, buddy, we don't even pay the crud any attention," Publicover said, squatting down next to Maurino and placing a hand on his shoulder.

Maurino shrugged the hand off.

"Get 'way. You don't know."

"Sure. OK, Big Mo. I'm your friend. Your old buddy knows. We don't pay any attention to a dirty coward. We almost got our asses shot off for that bastard."

"He's notta bastard, he's a sonnabitch. He wasn' efen dere. He shoulda been dere and got it, then he'd know," Maurino raised himself on his arms and tried to get to his feet.

"Here, let me help you, buddy," Publicover said and grabbed him under one arm, helping him up.

"I don't need help," Maurino said once he was up, throwing out his arm and pushing Publicover away with the ease of flinging open a screen door. He staggered through the ring of silent onlookers, heading deviously for the hall.

"Look, let us help you upstairs, buddy," Publicover said plaintively. "We'll get you to bed all right."

"Don't need it," Maurino said and tripped on the first step.

Publicover turned savagely on Kessler.

"You stinking rat. You started him off again."

"He's never stopped," Kessler said, rising from the floor. He walked over to the bar in the corner of the room.

It was evident that the party was over, but no one was leaving. The veterans tried to start up conversation again, changing the subject from combat experiences to sorties in the whorehouses of the world, but they faltered. They kept stealing uneasy glances toward the hallway, as though they were waiting for something, perhaps Maurino's return.

Yates sat alone in a chair with his beer, feeling sorry it was ending. He secretly wished that Kessler might forget for a moment his aversion to people and apologize to Publicover for his behavior. It would probably startle Publicover into dropping his guard long enough for Kessler to get a clean, swift shot at his golden teeth. Yates wasn't quite sure why he wished this, except that he felt somewhat sorry for Kessler, standing alone on the fringe of things. In fact, by then Yates had had enough of Pomaczchek's beer to feel he even liked Kessler. He decided the best way to find out would be to talk to him, and he got up from his chair and walked over to where Kessler was standing by the bar.

"Kessler, you bastard, what is it with you?" he asked by way of striking up a conversation.

"I beg your pardon?" Kessler asked mildly.

"What's your mission? Who's paying you to be a clod?"

"My mission? Ah, my mission," Kessler said and sipped his beer distastefully. "I suppose brotherhood. Which, as they tell me, is its own reward."

"Brotherhood! There isn't a guy in this room who doesn't hate your gutless guts, and I'll probably hate myself later for even talking to you now," Yates said.

"Then why do you do it?" Kessler asked, smirking.

"Because I like you, that's why. You're an obnoxious boob full of self-righteousness and you make me sick," Yates said. He was beginning to feel dizzy, because he had thoughtlessly focused on Kessler's wandering eye.

"That's not my intent," Kessler said.

"Then what do you hang around here for?" Yates asked, attempting to concentrate on Kessler's stationary eye, which was concentrating on him. But it was like trying to follow a magician's trick: The wandering eye kept drawing him away.

Kessler shrugged.

"All the other houses have mascots." he said. "Unfortunately, Gamma Gamma Gamma can't afford one that is unable to pay its own way, so I'm it. It's a pleasant existence, though. They play with me and kick me occasionally to keep me in my place. But if I left, the house would be empty."

"What, are you queer or something?" Yates asked, beginning to shift from liking Kessler back to his old, more comfortable dispassionate interest. That way, he didn't have to look him in the eye.

"If you mean, am I homosexual, I am not. I'm simply in love with man."

Yates frowned. "What man?"

"Why, you, man," Kessler said, smirking one of his most obnoxious smirks.

Yates eyed him suspiciously. "Well," he said. "Well, just remember, I've done nothing to encourage it." He turned and walked away, back to his chair.

Reimers went over and dropped into the chair next to Yates. He was breathing heavily and Pomaczchek's beer was oozing from his flushed face and neck in large shiny drops. For the past 15 minutes, he had been flitting from group to group in the room, trying to save the party from disintegrating. He had patted backs and laughed shrilly at jokes until his little pig eyes watered, and he was exhausted.

"Nothing but a disrupting influence," he muttered. "Why don't you do something?" He turned to Yates.

"I am," Yates said. "I'm thinking."

"Completely disrupting. You and I seem to be the only sane ones left." He hesitated a moment and then seemed about to say something else, when a cannon went off somewhere upstairs and sent him leaping out of his chair.

"What's that?" he cried.

The others had stopped talking and were looking beyond the doorway to the stairs in the hall.

"It's nothing," Publicover said quickly. "Don't worry about it."

"It must be something," Reimers persisted, and his assertion was reinforced by two more reports in rapid order.

"Never mind," Publicover said.

"You want to know what it is?" Kessler said from the bar. "Come on, I'll show you." He started across the room.

"Kessler, leave him alone," Publicover said.

"Come on, don't be an ass, Kessler," Pomaczchek said.

"Someone has to negotiate a cease fire," Kessler replied calmly. He stopped in the doorway between the living room and the front hall and looked at Reimers.

"Are you coming? Don't be afraid."

Reimers' face turned scarlet.

"I wouldn't go anywhere with you," he said and sat down emphatically.

Kessler shrugged and walked out of the room.

"I hope he kills you," Publicover yelled after him.

Yates looked at Reimers and asked, "Now how am I going to know?"

"You want to go with him, go ahead," Reimers said irritably.

"I make it a policy never to investigate anything I don't know about," Yates said. He got up. "But I do need to go to the bathroom."

He caught up with Kessler at the top of the stairs and followed him down the long corridor in the new wing in back of the house, past the doors to the sleeping and study quarters, until they reached the end room on the right. It was Maurino and Publicover's room and the door was closed.

Kessler opened it without knocking and Yates saw Maurino Kneeling in the center of the room, facing the wall adjacent to the door. For a second, it came to Yates that Maurino was praying. Then he saw the hand holding the .45 come up from his side and he heard the deafening explosion, saw the gun and hand leap upward and smelled the bitter powder—all in that instant that he threw himself across the hall and against the opposite door. The door opened against his weight and he toppled into the dark room.

Kessler never moved. He stood in the doorway to Maurino's room, looking down on him.

"Did you get him, Mo?" he asked quietly.

Maurino looked stupidly up for a moment. Then a light appeared in his eyes.

"Get 'way from here, you sonnabitch," he said, and he began to wave the gun at Kessler, motioning him out.

"I can't," Kessler said. "That would be deserting under fire. Besides, I've brought a correspondent with me. This young fellow has never been to war and apparently he wants to know."

"Get out. Go 'way." Maurino waved the gun again and Yates bit his lip, waiting for the explosion that would send Kessler flying off the floor. "They tried to kill me first. They were all tryin' to kill me—dead, dead, dead. I had to get'em. That sonnabitchin' stupid jerk. I got 'em first. Bwoom! Those Cong bastards, that stupid jerk Ellison——" And suddenly Maurino was crying, blubbering like a child, rocking back and forth. "Elly ... goddamn it, Elly, ooh, goddamn it."

"Come on in, Yates," Kessler said. "Come watch Mo shoot them down."

Kessler walked over to Maurino and bent over, taking the gun. He tossed it onto one of the two cots.

Yates crossed the hall and stopped in the doorway. The wall Maurino had fired at looked like a relief of the moon. It was punctured by scores of large black holes, the plaster chipped and cuffed around each of them. The souvenir North Vietnamese flag that Yates remembered normally covered that area lay bunched on the floor.

"Does he do this often?" Yates asked with all the force he could gather to bring his voice above a whisper.

"Whenever he's drunk. Which is to say, often," Kessler said.

"How does he keep in condition for football?"

Kessler had turned his attention back to Maurino.

"Come on, Mo. War's over for tonight. Let's go to bed."

He pulled on Maurino's arm, but he couldn't move him.

"Get 'way from me, you dirty yellow. You weren' efen dere."

"I was there, Mo, Now come on. Let's get into bed."

"You weren', either. I know, 'cause nobody shot at you."

"I was there, Mo. You don't think so, but I was."

"Elly was the best sonnabitchin' friend in the world," Maurino said, looking sadly at his hands and then wiping them on his chest. "Why couldn' it of been you?"

"It was me, too, Mo," Kessler said. He had stopped trying to pull on Maurino and was kneeling next to him, leaning around to look at his face, with one hand resting lightly on Maurino's hunched shoulder. "Do you think I didn't know what was going on? I knew it strong enough that I was sick each night. My brother's over there. And my dad never came back from Germany. I can't even go home anymore."

Maurino looked at him a moment. "You have a brudder?"

Kessler shook his head. "Had."

Maurino cocked his head slightly and a quizzical little smile flicked across his mouth. "I'll be a sonnabitch. Can ya 'magine?"

But then he seemed to remember something and he jerked his shoulder, twisting out from under Kessler's hand. "Why don't you leave us alone?"

Kessler turned toward Yates. He was smirking, as usual, but his eyes were shallow and moist and, for the first time, it seemed to Yates that they focused on the same plane.

"Get out of here, Yates," he said. "The show's over."

• • •

It was four weeks later when Yates went home for the weekend. He wasn't there when it happened. Reimers told him about it when he came back and found nothing left of the Gamma Gamma Gamma house except a charcoaled skeleton over a gaping cement foundation.

"Pomaczchek's damned still," Reimers said, shaking his head as though he still didn't believe it. They were standing on the sidewalk, staring at the ruins.

"How?" Yates asked.

"Nobody knows exactly how. He had a double-header going up in the attic—beer in one corner and that damned still in the other corner. We got the word Saturday that we were going off social probation next week. They wanted plenty of stuff to celebrate. Pomaczchek came downstairs about midnight to go to bed and he swears he woke Johnston to go stand watch to make sure the Bunsen burner didn't go out. But Johnston says he doesn't remember being waked at all. You know how hard it is to get him up once he's asleep. Well, about three o'clock in the morning, all hell broke loose. It was complete disorder," Reimers said sadly. "I didn't know anything until Publicover woke me up and said the whole house was on fire. I guess there wasn't an explosion. Douval says all he heard was a loud Poof! and then he smelled smoke. He's the one who routed everyone else out. I tell you, Yates, all hell broke loose. There were guys yelling and running all over the place and the smoke was so thick it could have choked you to death. It was a wonder anyone got out."

"So, how did they miss Kessler? He roomed with Douval," Yates said.

"I know. Douval says they both left the room at the same time. But after that, who knows? All I know is, we're all standing outside and the fire department's hooking up their hoses, and Cross is sitting in the middle of the lawn with that god-awful contraption slung over one shoulder, and suddenly he yells, 'Jesus Christ, it's Kessler.' We looked up and there he is in the window of Publicover's room. How he got there I'll never know, but I swear to God, I'll never forget that face. That's about all you could see of him and it's white as paper, the fire glowing behind him, and his eyes are standing out like a frog's. It looked like he was screaming for help, but with the noise of the fire, and people yelling outside, and the pump engines and sirens and all, you weren't about to hear anything he was saying. Thank God."

He paused and closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and finger.

"It's just so stupid. There wasn't anything we could have done. I mean, you could see there wasn't. It stands to reason, if the firemen couldn't do anything, we couldn't. But Publicover is standing next to me and Maurino, and suddenly he starts shaking all over and says, 'That sonofabitch. That sonofabitch.' That's all he said. The next thing I knew, he was running across the lawn and in the front door. Two firemen went running in after him, but they both came out a moment later. The heat was too much for them and Publicover had already disappeared. Another four threw a ladder up to the window where Kessler was. We couldn't see him anymore. One of the firemen went up the ladder and stopped just below the window and broke the pane with his ax and the whole window blew out. Suddenly, there was nothing but flames where Kessler had been. And then Maurino went berserk. He started jumping up and down, beating his temples and screaming, 'That stupid jerk, that stupid jerk.' When two firemen tried to restrain him, he just plopped down in the middle of the lawn and began moaning about some girl named Elly. I was scared to death."

"God," Yates said softly. And then suddenly, "Goddamn, that must have been something."

"It just doesn't stand to reason," Reimers said forlornly. He sat down on the low stone wall that held off the slope of the front lawn, his back to the ruins, and his little piggish eyes brimmed with tears.

Yates stood looking at the few blackened timbers that remained of Gamma Gamma Gamma and he tried to rebuild from the debris a picture of Kessler's froggy eyes where the window used to be and Publicover grinding with Patton speed into the burning house. Behind his eyes, he watched the silent flames draw the house erect, like a movie in reverse; and out of the fire, Kessler appeared at the upstairs window, his agonized waxen face haloed in broiling Technicolor, his wild eyes imploring last call to his brothers below. And in that moment, Yates understood how easy it was to hate him. The sonofabitch would do anything to call a bluff.