Later, when he was working for the Conner Courier as a flunky with photojournalist dreams, he would have shot pictures of the tired old paddle-wheel tug pushing the barges up the river. In fact, he would have broken his ass then to get pictures of it. And he would have been thrilled to fucking death if Mr. Greene, to be nice to him, found space for one of them on page 11 of the Courier. Now, even though he had Sergeant Lomax's 35mm Leica on the seat beside him, he couldn't imagine taking pictures of the paddle-wheel tug and its barge train if the tug and all the barges were gloriously in flame and about to blow up.

He'd wondered earlier why he sort of had to keep carrying Lomax's Leica around with him. Christ knew, no one was going to use anything he shot with it, not that there was anything worth shooting.

But he did get a chance to see the print of the shot he took of Lieutenant Dunn shaking Secretary Knox's hand when Knox gave him the Navy Cross. They'd run that on the front page of The Kansas City Star. He didn't get a credit line for it, though. All it said was OFFICIAL USMC PHOTO. But he knew he took it.

Even though he told Mr. Greene that, it was pretty clear that Mr. Greene thought he was bullshitting him.

Still, there was no reason now to be carrying Lomax's Leica around; he wasn't going to use it. So why wasn't he able to just put the fucking thing in his bag? Or maybe see if he could find out where Lomax's wife was, so he could send it to her?

It's funny, he thought to himself now and again, if Lomax didn't get himself blown away, he wouldn't be able to call me "Easterbunny" anymore; he'd have to call me "Sir. "

You weren't supposed to talk ill of the dead, but the truth was that on occasion, Lomax could be a sadistic prick.

When he pointed out the picture of Dunn to his mother and told her he took it, she smiled vaguely and said, "That's nice." Meaning: "You always wanted to be a photographer; photographers take pictures. What's the big deal?"

For that matter, he wasn't entirely sure that his mother really believed he was an officer, and that she didn't privately suspect he just bought the goddamned gold bars and pinned them on to impress people. At breakfast this morning, she'd made a point of making a big deal about his cousin Harry, who was four, five years older than he was and a graduate of Northwestern University. Harry had been drafted and was going to Officer Candidate School in some Army post someplace; he'd written home that it was nearly killing him, but he was going to try to stick it out, because if he could, he was going to be an officer in the Ordnance Corps.

In other words, here was an older guy than you are, with a goddamned college degree, who had to go through OCS, which was nearly killing him.... So how come you're an officer?

As for his father, he wouldn't even let him use the goddamn car. He claimed it was because of the gas rationing and the tire shortage, and because he didn't know what he'd do without it. But the Easterbunny just happened to notice in The Kansas City Star that ran his picture on page one that servicemen on leave could go to the ration board and get gas coupons. So he'd gone down to City Hall, and it turned out that the guy on the ration board was in the Corps in World War I. And one thing ran into another: The guy asked where he'd been; and when he told him, he asked about the 'Canal. And so the Easterbunny walked out of the ration board with coupons for sixty gallons of gas (you were supposed to get only twenty), and coupons for four new tires (you weren't supposed to get tires at all).

And even then, before he'd let him borrow the goddamn car, the old man gave him a "don't speed, don't drink, be careful" speech as if he was seventeen and got his license the day before yesterday.

Once he had the car, he looked up the kids he'd gone around with in high school, of course. But that was a fucking disaster, too.

It was partly his own fault, he was willing to admit. He should have kept his fucking mouth shut. There was no way they were going to believe he'd just been in Hollywood, staying in a place on the ocean in Malibu... much less that he not only met Veronica Wood there, but that he and she were now friends... and that she took him to Metro-Magnum Studios one morning in a limousine and let him watch them make the movie she was in.

It was partly, too, that they all seemed to be very young and very stupid. They didn't want to know about the 'Canal. That was so far away that it was nowhere, as far as they knew. They wanted to know shit like Eddie Williams asked him: "Since you're in the Marines," he said, "did they ever let you shoot a tommy gun like Robert Montgomery did in Bataan?" The Easterbunny hadn't seen that movie, but that didn't matter.

"Yeah," he told him, "they let me shoot a tommy gun; it was great." He didn't tell him about the one he took from Lieutenant Minter when the knee mortar round landed right next to him and blew his legs off. Or that he still had the heavy sonofabitch; it was in the closet of his bedroom at Major Dillon's house on the beach in Malibu. Eddie and the others wouldn't have believed that, either.

He ran into Katherine Cohan, too, on the street; and she sort of rubbed against him then.... She wasn't nearly as pretty as he remembered her. He knew that if he called her up and asked her to go to the movies, she'd probably go. She'd probably also let him a cop a little feel, maybe even a little bare teat; but that would be all she'd let him do. So he didn't call her up.

And he certainly couldn't tell anybody about Dawn Morris. Nobody would believe any of that, either how good-looking she was... or that she'd done it with him at least dozen times... or what she'd done to him.

Though it made him feel guilty as shit, the thing he really wanted to do was get the hell away from here and go back to Los Angeles and be alone with Dawn Morris in his bedroom at Major Dillon's house. He'd even been prepared to lie to his mother and father, to tell them he'd been called back early. That was a really shitty thing to do to your parents, lie to them, when they were so glad to see you. Still, he'd called the airline and asked if he could move his reservation up. But they told him no; the priority he had was for a specific seat on a specific flight; he'd have to get another priority if he wanted to change that.

Even if he wasn't able to do it, it made him feel shitty that he tried.

Lieutenant Easterbrook looked at his wristwatch. It was time to go home. His father expected to eat ten minutes after he walked in the door, and he'd expect his son to be there, too. If he wasn't, he'd think he was in jail for drunken driving... after driving the car a hundred miles an hour the wrong way down a one-way street and hitting an ambulance with it.

Easterbrook drained his warm beer.

He picked up the other two empties, left the car, and threw all three as far as he could out in the river. Then he got back in the car, lit a cigarette, and started the engine. He was backing away from the railing when he braked to a stop; he had to fish through his pockets for the package of Sen-Sen. He spilled maybe a third of it into his mouth.