Better Times Than These by Winston Groom Read Free Book Online Page B

States. But within a year, he wasn’t going to be in the Army and he would have to attend to his own burial, or at least, make sure it would come off without hitches.
    That would be a wry irony—no hitches at his own funeral.
    All his life he had tried to bring things off without hitches, but somehow it had never worked out that way. The ideas were good, but in the end he usually bungled them—or let them be bungled for him. Just last week the Supply people had screwed up his requisition forms, and his ass had been chewed royally by the colonel when they’d run out of fresh radio batteries on a field exercise . . . And then there had been Mannheim . . .
    “DEATH IS A SUBJECT WE AVOID DISCUSSING.” He had never contemplated his own death before except in the most abstract ways. But now, for the first time in years, there was a possibility he would die—a very slight possibility, but a possibility nevertheless. In two weeks, the Infantry brigade he was assigned to would be leaving. In the Infantry a certain amount of death was inevitable.
    “Richard, if you don’t begin to get ready now I am going on to the club without you,” Maria said sharply. “We cannot keep everyone waiting.”
    “Come in here for a minute,” he said.
    He handed her the letter.
    “I want you to know that I am going to buy a plot from these people.”
    “What?” she said. “What people?”
    “They’re selling plots at a cemetery.”
    “Yes, I can see that, but . . . Oh, Richard, please come and dress.”
    “I will, damn it, but I want you to know so that if something happens to me I want to be buried there.”
    “Oh, darling, nothing is going to happen. Are you thinking something is going to happen to you?” She ran her fingers through his gray hair.
    “Just in case it does,” he said. “I want to be buried there—in this cemetery. I don’t want to be buried in an Army cemetery—will you remember that?”
    “But Richard, what are you saying? Nothing is going to happen to you. I know it.”
    “Goddamn it, Maria, it might—don’t you understand that? Don’t you understand Mostellar probably wants to kill me off—that he’s going to give me every shit detail in the book? That’s a real live war over there now, you know,” he said harshly, shaking her hand from his head.
    “Oh, darling, why do you think these things? You are only torturing yourself.”
    “Because it’s true, that’s why,”
    “How do you think that?” she asked.
    “Because he knows—about Mannheim. Don’t you understand I know what he thinks?” He put his head in his hands.
    “Darling, you’ve been drinking. None of this is true. Colonel Mostellar likes you. He told me that himself.”
    “No, it’s you he likes,” Dunn said.
    “That is ridiculous,” she said impatiently.
    “Like hell.”
    She knelt in front of him, but he would not look straight into her face.
    “Richard,” she said softly, “you must stop talking about it. Mannheim was long ago, in the past. You have got to stop telling everyone about it. Nobody cares about it. You’re only making it worse.”
    “It can’t be any worse than it is,” he said.
    Far below, Dunn could hear the prow growling through the seas and see the V-shaped spray of white foam across the darkening waters. The rushing sound, the boiling foam brought it back again. Eight years, but not a week went by . . . Mannheim . . .
    They had been fording the Neckar during a field exercise in a cold, blue-white German winter.
    He had been in charge of a Signal section assigned to lay wire across the river. They had given him a pontoon boat, but the river was running high and the boat, even with an outboard motor, had been pulled downstream into snags. He turned back to shore and ordered half the men out of the boat to lighten it, then sent it back across again. He himself had walked back to an outpost to radio Battalion about conditions on the river. When he returned, the men on shore were frantic. The boat had