W Griffin - The Corps I - Semper Fi

McCoy had a good time in the morning. He made some remark about what a nice hotel it was, and Pickering then took him on a tour. This was fascinating to McCoy; and it was a complete tour, kitchens, laundry, even the little building up above the penthouses where the elevator machinery was.

McCoy saw that there was more to the tour than showing him around. Pickering looked inside garbage cans, even went into rooms with open doors. He was inspecting the place, looking for things that weren't as they were supposed to be. The other side of that was that he knew how things were supposed to be. He might be rich as shit, but he understood the hotel business.

He wondered if Pickering had learned that in school, and asked him. Pick laughed and told him that the first job he'd had in a Foster hotel was as a twelve-year-rold busboy, cleaning tables.

"I can do anything in the hotel except French pastry," Pickering said. "I've never been able to handle egg white properly."

About one o'clock, as they sat in the sitting room in their shirts and trousers drinking Feigenspann XXX Ale from the necks of the bottles, the hotel started setting up for the cocktail party. There was an enormous turkey, and a whole ham, and a piece of roast beef. And all kinds of other stuff. Thinking of how much it was costing made McCoy uncomfortable. No matter how nice Pick was being, McCoy was beginning to feel like a mooch.

It got worse when the people started showing up for the party: It wasn't hard to figure that if all the guests weren't as rich as Pick, they were still rich. And he had nothing in common with them. The only thing he had in common with Pick was the Marine Corps. And then there was one particular girl. She really made him uncomfortable.

He had never seen a more beautiful girl in his life. She was fucking near-perfect. She had black hair, in a pageboy, with dark, glowing eyes that made her skin seem pure white.

She wasn't dressed as fancy as the others, just a sweater and a skirt, with a string of pearls hanging down around her neck.

His first thought was that he would happily swap his left nut to get her in the sack, and his second thought was that she wasn't that kind of female at all. She wasn't going to give any away until she had the gold ring on her finger-not because she was careful, but because that was the kind of woman she was. Once, when she caught him looking at her, she looked right back at him, as if she was asking, "What's a scumbag like you doing looking at me? I'm not like the rest of these people."

And for some reason, she kept him from putting the make on anybody else. Not all of Pick's "friends and acquaintances" had shown up with two girls, but a lot of them had. And a bunch of women had come by themselves. One of them, a sharp-featured woman with blond hair down to her shoulders, had even come on to him, smiling at him and touching his arm when she asked him if he was in the Marines with Pick.

But he saw the girl in the pageboy looking at them with her dark eyes and didn't do anything about the blonde. After a moment, she went away.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the smoke in the place (there must have been a hundred people, and they were all smoking) got to him; and he realized he'd had more Scotch than he should have. He didn't want to get shit-faced and make an ass of himself and embarrass Pick in front of his friends. So he took another bottle of ale from the refrigerator, walked into "his" bedroom, where he interrupted a couple kissing and feeling each other up, and went out on the patio for a breath of cold, fresh air.

The sun had come up, there wasn't much wind, and it wasn't as cold as he thought it would be. It was nippy, but that's what he wanted anyhow. He sat on the wall, carefully, because they were twenty-two floors up, and looked down at Fifty-ninth Street. When that started to make him feel a little dizzy, he looked into Central Park.

He was pretty far gone from where he thought he would be on Thanksgiving afternoon, he thought, sanding the fucking deck. Then he remembered he was really far from where he had been last Thanksgiving, a PFC machine-gunner in Dog Company, First Battalion, 4th Marines, in Shanghai. He'd taken the noon meal in the mess hall. They always sent in frozen turkeys on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that was the only time there was turkey in China. They even bent the rules for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and you could bring guests who weren't European. He remembered that Zimmerman had brought his Chinese wife and all their half-white kids to the mess.

"Don't go to sleep," a female voice said to him. "That's a long step if you walk in your sleep."

Startled, he stood up and then looked to see who was talking to him.

It was the perfect fucking female in the pageboy haircut.

"I wasn't about to go to sleep," he said.

"You could have fooled me," she said. "You looked like you were bored to death and about to doze off.''

"I was thinking," McCoy said.

The string of pearls around her neck had looped around one of her breasts. It wasn't sexy. It was feminine.

"About what?"

"What?"

"What were you thinking about?" she pursued.

She sat down on the wall, and looked up at him.

Jesus Christ! Up close she's even more beautiful!

"Where I was last Thanksgiving," he said.

"And where you might be next Thanksgiving?"

"No," he said. "I wasn't thinking about that."

"I thought you might be," she said, and she smiled. "Why?"

"Well, you're a Marine," she said. "Don't they wonder where they'll be moved next?"

"I don't," he replied without thinking. "Not any further than the Corps, I mean. I know I'm going to be in the Corps. It doesn't matter where I'll be. It'll still be the Corps."

She looked as if she didn't understand him, but the question she asked was perfectly normal: "Where were you last Thanksgiving?" she asked.

"Shanghai," he said. And added, "China."

"So that's where Shanghai is," she said brightly. "I knew it was either there or in Australia."

I knew fucking well that I would show my ass if I tried to talk to somebody like this. What a dumb fucking thing to say!

She saw the hurt in his eyes.

"Sorry," she said.

"It's all right," McCoy said.

"No, it's not," she said. "There are extenuating circumstances, but I shouldn't have jumped on you."

"What are the extenuating circumstances?" McCoy asked. "I'm an advertising copywriter," she said. "I don't know what that is," McCoy confessed. "I write the words in advertisements," she explained. "Oh," he said.

"Our motto is brevity," she said. "Oh," McCoy repeated.

"We try not to say anything redundant," she said. "It's okay to jump on somebody who does." "Okay," he said.

"I had no right to do that to you," she said. "I didn't mind," McCoy said. "Yes, you did," she said, matter-of-factly. When she looks into my eyes, my knees get weak. "What did you do in China, last Thanksgiving?" "I was in a water-cooled Browning.30 crew," he said. "Browning machine gun, you mean?" she asked. He was surprised that she knew. He nodded. "I somehow didn't think you were up in Cambridge with our host," she said.

"I guess that's pretty obvious, isn't it?" She understood his meaning.

"Different means different," she said. "Not better or worse." The door to the sitting room opened, and six or seven people came onto the patio and headed for them.

They sure as hell don't know me, which means they're headed for her. Probably to take her out of here. And if she goes, that's the last I'll ever see of her. "Prove it," McCoy said. "Huh?"

"Go somewhere else with me," McCoy said. "Where?" she asked, warily.

"I don't know," McCoy said. "Anywhere you want." She was still looking at him thoughtfully when Pickering's friends came over to her.