Free Hold Tight by Christopher Bram Page A

will get along beautifully.”
    Anna’s hand clutched tighter. Each time she drew on her cigarette, a soft red face glowed beside him. Without the colors of her makeup, Blair could see the young girl she really was. She never smoked in front of her father, she said. She was still her father’s girl, which pleased Blair. The war had loosened the morals of so many women, but not Anna’s. He occasionally thought about sleeping with her and was relieved to know she could never sink to that.
    She was unlike any woman he had ever met, neither a giggly tease nor an obsequious tramp, and Blair thought he was in love with her. Or maybe it was the cause and world behind her that he loved. When she first told him what she was, he feared she was making fun of him, or that she was another screwball trying to make herself interesting. But she was real, it was real. After being alone with his wisdom for so long the wisdom had turned sour, Blair found Anna, who brought love and political action into his life, in a single glorious explosion. He already thought about marrying her, only he did not know enough about her background.
    “Let’s get away from here,” he said. “Catch a cab back to Manhattan. Go someplace where I can be myself again.” He missed the shell of composure the right kind of nightclub gave him.
    “Can we wait a little first? We shouldn’t leave too soon after Papa.”
    “Of course.”
    There was a new thudding out over the ocean, deep and steady. Destroyers hunted for a U-boat, their depth charges detonating below the horizon.
    Anna sighed and squeezed his hand again. “Poor guys,” she said. “All of them.”
    Blair admired her pity and decided he felt pity too. It was as sad as it was shameful that men who should be fighting side by side were killing each other. If it took defeat to shake his country awake, Blair was willing to do all he could to bring about that defeat. But one did not have to be vicious.
    They held hands in the dark and listened to explosions deep beneath the ocean. It was wonderful. They had each other and the great task before them.

5
    “N EW GUINEA,” SAID THE voice, and there was a gray hillside, a palm tree like a great burnt match and the blackened bodies of midgets in a ditch. “Fried Jap,” the voice called them. An American with sooty face, white eyes and teeth grinned at the camera. “All in a day’s work for this happy GI.”
    Hank wanted to meet the GI, have a beer with him, kill Japs with him and feel like brothers. Hank felt funny having the GI out there while he sat safe and cool in the Lyric Theater, sock feet propped on the balcony railing. His half-empty seabag filled the seat beside him. This might be his last trip to the movies for weeks, but Hank fidgeted with the impatience and embarrassment that always came over him during the newsreel. Funny. On the McCoy all he ever thought about was getting into port and getting laid. Now that he was getting laid regularly, and starting a duty where he would do nothing but get laid, all he thought about was getting back to the tin can. He was homesick for familiar faces, crowded quarters and a routine so solid you felt free to grouse about it, like a family, without that grousing leading to distrust or doubt. Hank disliked doubt; it was too much like thinking. And it seemed unclean right now, what with the war and all.
    Even one of the cartoons today included the war: a frantic black duck with a Hitler moustache. There was nothing about the war in the feature, but it was about a suffering woman, a secret marriage to a man who soon dies, a baby put up for adoption, and Hank quickly lost interest. Down below and up here in the balcony, the usual men began to move around.
    Hank had been coming here regularly since his release from the brig a month ago, while he lived at the Y and waited for the Navy to make up its mind. Hurry up and wait, as they said, and it was already June. Coming to this theater was what had gotten him