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Show Anting Alone Page 243 She stood up, trotted a bewildered circle around the cheap linoleum floor, then flopped down on her own cot to pout. Sam noticed the dark sopping places around the Iron Horse Division insignia on her little breasts. She must've been backpacking up the sides of mountains with her trainee buddies already today. Sam said, "You could've stayed in college and gotten yourself educated and never had to sweat like that again except in bed." She looked over at him with a mean face, but remained silent. She hadn't the verbal skills, thank Christ, to say any of the several devastating things that could have been said in reply. She rolled over, showed him her sweaty little backside, and began speaking in a tiny hiccoughing wice to the particleboard wall. "Nobody else in the whole PX wanted to buy them two little books. I go up to the counter and I go, 'I wanna buy these,' and the guy, he goes, 'Oh?' you know, like it's weird or something. They was all alone next to the empty Hustler racks. I seen that they was the kind of books without pitchers that you like, Sammy. 'Xept fuckbooks, which you like to read, which have got pitchers. But I didn't have enough money for fuckbooks, and they was out of Enema Digest anyhow, and I wanted to buy you a present cause I was sorry that your spleens hurt and I was sorry I didn't make enough money in the Army here to buy you a lot of wine and George Dickel and cocaine and codeine and stuff to kill the pain, so I buyed all two copies of them two little books for you. And they was at a dixcount." Sam was feeling too comparatively polite this morning to say the first three words that came to his. mind as he gave the books a quick glance: big |