Landel was vomiting from pain, lack of food, alcohol, and fatigue. Crouched in a corner, he had an empty bottle beside him.
Whiskey would help! He shrugged: who's Johnny Walker? Down in Panama, years ago, the gambling rooms of the Palacio Rivas had been fabulous: coco palms in a lush garden, macaws on perches, gardenias floating on the swimming pools ... lovely whores ... copitas. But he had gotten drunk and killed a man, shot him through the lungs and heart ...
When the war ended he planned to settle in Germany and horn in on the black market graft: army supplies, PX supplies: sell, buy, swap: a sure way to stack up the dough!
PM was snoring.
Zinc lay on his side, watching one of the B-29 guys mess with his lighter: a nearby tankman removed his shoes and sox and massaged his feet: Zinc felt the smallness of his body: other men had something to be proud of: muscles were jerking around his mouth: he rubbed the muscles halfheartedly: closing his eyes he tried to think of home but home had not existed for a long time. Mom had been dead for four or five years ... Millie ... where was she? He turned onto his back. It seemed to him his spine was injured. Certainly something was wrong with his stomach: there were too many aches there.
A cloudy moon hung above Olpe ... in the gutted inn night was eventful: food began arriving in the early hours: the old walls heard a few cheerful sounds; the smell of food roused some of the men.
Sometime in the night Landel woke, chilled, afraid: he couldn't find a cigarette and woke Dennison and asked him for his pack. He tried to talk to him--wishing to talk about his past: most of all he simply wanted to talk. Drags on his Luckies helped. He found a blanket. That helped. With Dennison lying nearby he thought of admitting what a bastard he was and yet that seemed stupid: everything seemed stupid, everything was stupid, torn apart, like Olpe.
Under the ribs of an adjoining building--a long shed--fifteen or twenty tankmen ate breakfast, fog around them: fog had seeped in with a yellowish thickness, a thickness that seemed related to old masonry, old walls and crumbling plaster. The eaters appreciated the hot food, untroubled by the fog; as they ate they simply stared.
Go to Morb ... Panzers ... Serious.
That was the morning radio directive: the Corps was dispatched onto the autobahn again, now crammed with one-way military and civilian traffic. It began to drizzle as the Shermans and Lees grumbled forward; then the drizzle changed to a downpour that sloshed over turret, periscope and viewer. Dim-outs popped on. Olpe traffic jammed: a jeep had crashed: a truck had stalled: a civilian truck resembled an oiled animal under its flapping tarp.