Hot Springs by Stephen Hunter Read Free Book Online Page A

stomach.”
    “Jesus,” said Earl.
    “I wasn’t going to tell you until after the ceremony, because I wanted the ceremony to be all for you. But then you went off and you didn’t show up all afternoon.”
    “I’m sorry, sweetie. I never would have guessed.”
    “What do you think happens? You can’t grab me four times a week without getting a baby out of it.”
    “I thought you liked it when I grabbed you.”
    “I love it. You didn’t ever hear me saying no, did you?”
    “No ma’am, guess not.”
    “But it doesn’t make a difference, does it?”
    “I promised them. I said yes. It’s more money. It’s a better life.”
    “Think about your boy, Earl.”
    But Earl could not. Who’d bring a kid into a world where men fry each other with flamethrowers, machine-gun each other or go at it hand-to-hand, with bayonets and entrenching tools? And now this atom bomb tiling: turn the earth into Hiroshimas everydamn-where. He looked at her, indistinct in the dark, and felt her distance. He thought of the tiny being nestled in her stomach and the thought terrified him. He never asked to be a daddy, he didn’t think he was man enough for it.
    He was scared. He had a sudden urge, almost overwhelming, to do what he’d never done in the Pacific: to turn, to run, to flee, to leave it all behind him.
    He saw his own melancholy childhood, that weary cavalcade of fear and pain. He didn’t want that for his boy.
    “I— I don’t know what to say, Junie. I never thought about no boy or girl before. I just never figured on it.”
    He had another feeling, one he felt so often: that he was once again failing someone who loved him.
    He wished desperately he had a gift for her, something that would make it all right, some little thing.
    And then he thought of it.
    “I will make you one promise,” he said. “It’s the only one. I will quit the drinking.”

Chapter 6
    The kid was hot. The kid was smoking. His strawberry-blond hair fell across his pug face, a cigarette dangled insolently from his lips, and he brought the dice, cupped into his left hand, to his mouth.
    “Oh, baby,” he said. “Jimmy Hicks, Captain Hicks, Captain Jimmy Hicks, Jimmy Hicks, Sister Hicks, Baby Hicks, Sixie from Dixie, sexy pixie, Jimmy Hicks, Baby Hicks, Mamma Hicks, oh, baby, baby, baby, you do what Daddy says, you sweet, sweet baby six!”
    A near religious ecstasy came across his face as he began to slowly rotate his tightly clutched fist, and sweat shone brightly on the spray of freckles on his forehead. His eyeballs cranked upward, his lids snapped shut, but maybe it wasn’t out of faith, only irritation from the Lucky Strike smoke that rose from his butt.
    “Go, sweetie, go, go! said his girlfriend, who hovered over his shoulder. She looked about ten years older than he, had tits of solid, dense flesh, and her low-cut dress squeezed them out at you for all to see. Her lips were red, ruby red, her earrings diamond, her necklace a loop of diamond sparkle, her hair platinum. She touched the boy’s shoulder for good luck.
    With a spasm he let fly.
    The dice bounded crazily across the table and Earl thought of a Jap Betty he had once seen, weirdly cart wheeling before it went in. The Betty had settled with a final splash and disappeared; the dice merely stopped rattling. He looked back at the kid, who was now bent forward, his eyes wide with hope.
    “Goddamn!” the boy screamed in horror, for the cubes read three and four, not the two and four or the three and three or the five and one he needed, and that was the unlucky seven and he was out.
    “Too bad, sir,” said the croupier with blank professional respect, and with a rake, scooped up what the kid had riding, a pile of loose twenties and fifties and hundreds that probably amounted to Earl’s new and best yearly salary.
    The kid smiled, and pulled a wad of bills from his pocket thick as Dempsey’s fist.
    “He crapped out,” Earl said to D. A., who stood next to him in the crowded