Free Finding a Girl in America by Andre Dubus

knew—when girl after girl year after year touched his flesh and sometimes his heart and told him he was cool.
    He went into the bar, feeling the bass drum beat as though it came from the floor and walls, and took the one untaken stool and ordered a shot of Comfort, out of habit checking his pocket although he knew he had three ones and some change. Everyone he saw was drunk, and the bartender was drinking. Vic was at the end of the bar, wearing a bandana on his head, earring on one ear, big fat arms on the bar; Mike nodded at him. He drank the shot and pushed the glass toward the bartender. His fingers trembled. He sipped the Comfort and lit a cigarette, cold sweat on his brow, and he thought he would have to go outside into the cold air or vomit.
    He finished the shot then moved through the crowd to Vic and spoke close to his ear and the gold earring. ‘I need some downs.’ Vic wanted a dollar apiece. ‘Come on,’ Mike said. ‘Two.’ Vic’s arm left the bar and he put two in Mike’s hand; Mike gave him the dollar and left, out onto the cold street, heading uphill, swallowing, but his throat was dry and the second one lodged; he took a handful of snow from a mound at the base of a parking meter and ate it. He walked on the lee side of buildings now. He was dead with her. He lay on the bridge, his arm around her, his face in her hair. At the dormitory the night shift detectives would talk to the girls inside, out of the cold; they would sit in the big glassed-in room downstairs where drunk one night he had pissed on the carpet while Robin laughed before they went up to her room. The girls would speak his name. His name was in that room, back there in the dormitory; it was not walking up the hill in his clothing. He had two joints in his room and he would smoke those while he waited, lying dressed on his bed. When he heard their footsteps in the hall he would put on his jacket and open the door before they knocked and walk with them to the cruiser. He walked faster up the hill.

The Misogamist
    I N THE SUMMER of 1944 Roy Hodges was back from the Pacific. He was a staff sergeant, a drill instructor at the Recruit Depot at San Diego. He was twenty-six years old, and he was training eighteen-year-old boys. He was also engaged to marry Sheila Russell, who was twenty-six and had been waiting for eight years in Marshall, Texas, to marry him. At eighteen, and still a virgin, her goodbye kiss was sad, loving, and hopeful. She told him she would not go out with other boys while he was gone. After boot camp he went home on leave, and on the first night he took her virginity. She believed he was giving his too; he had bought out of it with a middle-aged whore when he was fifteen. He took her much more easily than he had expected. Every night and sometimes the afternoons for three weeks he made love with her, and she aroused in him an excitement he had never felt before with a woman; nor did he ever feel it again. In the evening she drank beer with him and learned to smoke his cigarettes, and he liked that too. Then they drove in his father’s Ford out into the country, the woods. It was early spring and there were no mosquitoes. Gently with her on the blanket he sometimes remembered with a heart’s grin the attacking mosquitoes as he lay with Betty Jean Simpson in high school; with her, he had often thought of Sheila at home, and thinking of that pure side of his life had increased his passion for Betty Jean. Now, memory of Betty Jean and the mosquitoes on his rump waxed his passion with Sheila. And he finally felt in control of her: she was both his sweet, auburn-haired brown-eyed girl and his lustful woman. When he left her again, her goodbye kiss was erotic, fearful, and demanding.
    He had told her, the night before leaving, that they would get married when his tour was up. She could tell her family and friends; he would write to his parents. Which he did: from sea duty, on a battleship. But