OCR Text |
Show Anting Alone Page 240 whimpered petulantly. "There's only a.few of them in the whole world. Don't start making fun again, Sammy. I'm tired cause we been in maneuvers all morning." Sam tried to laugh meanly and with scorn from his canvas cot, but laughing meanly and with scorn pulled his stitches so he shut up. He was still convalescing from being bounced by Bouncy. Apparently the Army doctors here at Fort Carson had seen fit to remove Sam's spleen or something; he didn't care, he didn't recall, and his beard was so long and bushy now that he couldn't read his new medic alert dogtag, so cold and tinny around his . neck. He was ambulatory and everything these days, but was in a perpetually rotten lying-down mood because of the hideous, unnatural tugging sensations the stitches gave him whenever he got ambitious and tried to move. Besides, he was an officially designated "dependent" on a hideous army base now, for some godawful reason, and the only place to move to was from one green shoebox to another. So he lay flat and fiddled idly with his dogtag and was mean to Shanny to cut through the boredom. He feigned jealousy as a motive. "You know why that pin's a valuable collector's item now?" he sneered. "For the simple reason that the pig executives at General Mills decided to introduce and kill one of their tooth-dissolving breakfast confections in a single month. Even though it was the November of Reagan's landslide, nobody was patriotic enough to buy 'Flag Flakes' because the filmy little strawberry- and vanilla- and blueberry-flavored flakes made people gag. And the prizes - such as your memento of that fascist who almost killed me - kept getting stuck in people's teeth and poked through people's gums. |