Better Times Than These by Winston Groom Read Free Book Online

he decided to tuck it away in his memory in case his geology career ever led him into oceanography, which was unlikely—but even if it didn’t, it was still an interesting postulation, given his newfound conviction that even with the most sophisticated seismic devices known to man, the passing of the transport over such a chasm would probably have no effect whatsoever.

7
    I n the bow of the ship, Major Richard Arlo Dunn, Signal Corps, was fiddling with his transoceanic radio, trying to locate a certain California station he knew was carrying the Dodgers baseball game. Once he thought he had it, faintly, but then some earthly interference injected itself, and he continued vainly to twist the dial and turn the radio on top of the big ventilator where he had set it down.
    This was Dunn’s third crossing. The first, in nineteen forty-three, had taken him to New Georgia, in the Solomon Islands, where he received a field commission from buck sergeant to second lieutenant. The second, in nineteen fifty-one, took him to Korea as a captain in the Signal Corps.
    This would be his final tour.
    He had not succeeded in making the promotion list three consecutive times and was due to be separated within the year. But it really did not matter to Dunn; his life had already fallen apart years earlier, at Mannheim. He wondered now, softly, as he turned the dials, what life would have been like had he gone to work in his father’s little radio shop, or to college—where he might have won a football scholarship . . . But then the war had come, and afterward, with the commission, the Army had seemed like a good career . . . and then he had gotten married—but something had gone wrong with that too . . .
    He gave up on the radio and squinted out toward the fiery sun, which was precisely tangent to the horizon, almost as if it had been brought down in the lens of a sextant. The ocean waves marched by like giant tombstones—at least, that was the way he saw them—and the tombstones reminded him of that day three weeks ago in his little house at Fort Bragg and his German wife, Maria. It had been the Fourth of July, and he had been drinking gin since noon.
    Maria made the first one for him, a gin and tonic, but after that he was on his own. He had given up adding a twist of lime after the second, and by the third, the ratio of gin to tonic grew to two to one, and when he finally ran out of tonic he settled for what he called his “very dry martini.”
    “Is there anything from the mail?” Maria asked, standing in the bedroom doorway in her slip.
    “I haven’t opened it yet,” he said, picking up the half-dozen letters from an end table.
    The heat was unbearable. That was why he drank, he decided. Even in their little air-conditioned house on post, the heat closed in on Dunn in a fierce, evil way, driving him first to thirst, then to drink, and then to more drink until the heat and the thirst and the drink finally blended into a warm, soggy mush in his mind. The heat and the drinking—it had been that way for weeks, but the heat really didn’t matter until he came home because there were so many other things he hated about his work.
    “Please don’t drink any more, darling. You know we have to be at the club. Why don’t you start dressing?” she said.
    “I’d rather open the mail.”
    She came up behind him and rubbed the back of his head. “Richard, please, we must not be late. Why don’t you take a nice shower now?”
    “I don’t feel like it right now. I’ll take one . . . in a minute. I want to read the mail.”
    “I must finish getting dressed,” she said, drawing her hand tenderly across his shoulder as she pulled away. He looked through the Venetian blinds across Ste.-Mère-Église Drive to the field of low scrub brush shimmering in the North Carolina heat. Fourth of July, he thought—the last Fourth of July they would spend together in this house. The Army would permit her to live here while he was gone, but when