awake at seven. He wandered around the campus for a while looking for a cup of coffee and after breakfast came to one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions which it is always fun to wonder about afterward. "Hey Rizzo," he said, shaking the sergeant. "Anybody comes looking for me, the general or the secretary of the army, tell them I'm busy, okay?" Rizzo muttered something which might have been obscene and went back to sleep.
Levine hitched a ride down to the pier on a battalion jeep and hung around for a while watching them bringing in bodies. Finally when one of the tugs had almost offloaded he sauntered down to the dock and climbed on board. No one, apparently, noticed him. There were half a dozen army personnel and as many civilians, sitting or standing, not talking; smoking or looking at the gray swamp which crawled by. They passed the pontoon bridge, which the engineers had almost completed, pushing past it into flotsam and between shattered trees. They chugged over Creole, past the top floors of the courthouse, toward the outlying farms that were still standing, which had not yet been searched. Occasionally a helicopter would chatter by overhead. The sun rose, weak through a thin overcast, heating the unstirred and reeking air over the swamp.
It was mostly this that Levine remembered afterward, the peculiar atmospheric effect of gray sun on gray swamp, the way the air felt and smelled. For ten hours they cruised around looking for dead. One they unhooked from a barbed wire fence. It hung there like a foolish balloon, a travesty; until they touched it and it popped, hissed and collapsed. They took them off roofs, out of trees, they found them floating or tangled in the debris of houses. Levine worked in silence like the others, the sun hot on his neck and face, the reek of the swamp and the corpses in his lungs, letting it all happen, now exactly unwilling to think about it nor quite unable; but realizing somehow that the situation did not require thought or rationalization. He was picking up stiffs. That was what he was doing. When the tug pulled in around six to offload bodies, Levine walked off as carelessly as he had climbed aboard. He hopped a deuce-and-a-half back to the quadrangle, sitting in back dirty and exhausted and sick at his own smell. He got clean clothing out of the truck, disregarding Picnic, who was almost finished with Swamp Wench and who had started to say something but had thought better of it, walked to the dormitory and stood under the shower for a long time, thinking it was like rain, summer and spring rain, all the times he had ever been rained on, and when he came out of the dormitory in a clean uniform he noticed it was dark again.
Back at the truck he dug the blue baseball cap out of his bag and put it on. "Going formal," Picnic said. "What's up?"
"Date," Levine said.
"Fine," Picnic said, "I like to see young people get together. It's real exciting."
Levine looked at him, dead serious. "No," he said. "No, I think 'sheer momentum' is better."
He went over to Rizzo's truck and swiped a pack of cigarettes and a De Nobili cigar from Rizzo, who was sleeping. As he was leaving the sergeant opened one eye. "Why it's good old reliable Nathan," he said. "Go to sleep, Rizzo," Levine said. He started walking, hands in his pockets, whistling, heading in the general direction of the bar he had been in the night before. There were no stars and the air felt like rain. He walked through the streetlit shadows of big ugly pines, listening to the voices of girls, the purr of cars, wondering what the hell he was doing here when he should be back at Roach, having a pretty good idea that when he got back to Roach he would start wondering what the hell he was doing there, and that maybe wherever he went from now on he would be wondering this. He had a momentary, ludicrous vision of himself, Lardass Levine the Wandering Jew, debating on weekday evenings in strange and nameless towns with other Wandering Jews