He was smiling a little. “Maybe it would at that!”
“I’ll get you another highball.”
“Yeah,” he said, absently. He returned from his day-dream. “Oh. Yes. Please do. My face hurts like hell.” He called after her, “And make it stronger than iced tea.”
It was going to go on all night.
But Beau began to think, began for the first time to let himself think, that life might not forever be a round of hard work, of figures and facts and statements, of miles of tape from adding machines, of coming and going in traffic that kept you on the verge of insanity, of the aching anxiety of home finance and stretched funds, of eternal self-sacrifice for a wife and daughter three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with only an hour snatched here and there for personal pleasures or recreation—a redhead kissed in the dim Cyclone Bar, a bet made on a pay telephone.
Things could be better. He deserved them better.
And a man, a self-respecting man, couldn’t take a slugging lying down.
X-Day Minus Sixty
1
It was a peculiar farewell. Chuck thought it was probably like thousands of farewells said by soldiers.