and the skin had turned to blisters. The K.P. began to get on my nerves. For the first time in years I started to think of my father and the hunchbacked boy and Sister Rose’s lessons on my duty.
After lunch I took the Jap aside, and asked the cooks for tannic-acid ointment. There wasn’t any in the kitchen, and so I told them to boil tea and put compresses to his arm. Suddenly, I realized that two hours ago I had been busy setting fire to a dozen people, or two dozen, or had it been a hundred?
No matter how I tried to chase the idea, I could never get rid of the Japanese boy with his arm and his smile. Nothing sudden happened to me, but over a time, the thing I felt about most of the fliers went false. I began to look at them in a new way, and I didn’t know if I liked them. They were one breed and I was another; they were there and I was a fake. I was close to things I had forgotten, and it left me sick; I had a choice to make. My missions were finished, my service was over, and I had to decide if I wanted to sign for a career in the Air Force. Trying to make up my mind I got worse, I had a small breakdown, and spent a season in the hospital. I was not very sick, but it was a breakdown, and for seven weeks I lay in bed and felt very little. When I got up, I learned that I was to be given a medical discharge. It no longer mattered. Flying had become too difficult and my reflexes were going. They told meI needed eyeglasses, which made me know how to feel old at twenty-two. But they were wrong, and I did without the eyeglasses, and my eyes got better, even if the rest of me didn’t. Resting in bed, I remembered the books I read when I could get away from the orphanage, and picturing what my life would be like outside the Air Force, I could feel an odd hope when I thought that maybe I would become a writer.
For such a purpose, Desert D’Or may have been a poor place to stay, and in truth, I hardly wrote a word while I was at the resort. But I was not ready to work; I needed time, and I needed the heat of the sun. I do not know if I can explain that I did not want to feel too much, and I did not want to think. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children’s homes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans. It was better not even to think of this. I liked the other world in which almost everybody lived. The imaginary world.
But I write too much. In a few days the winter season began, and all of that routine I divided between Dorothea at The Hangover and Eitel at the Yacht Club was altered. Before the movie colony had been in Desert D’Or a week, what little story I have to tell was fairly begun.
Part Two
CHAPTER SEVEN
W ITH THE BEGINNING of the season, there was some rain, not a great deal, but enough to put the desert flowers into bloom. Which brought the crowd from the capital. The movie people filled the hotels, and the season residents opened their homes. Movie stars were on the street, and gamblers, criminals with social cartel, models, entertainers, athletes, airplane manufacturers, even an artist or two. They came in all kinds of cars: in Cadillac limousines, in ruby convertibles and gold-yellow convertibles, in little foreign cars and big foreign cars. Then with the start of the season on me, I came to like the wall around my house which was always safe in the privacy it gave, and I would think at times how confusing the town must be to the day tourist who could drive through street after street and know no more of the resort than the corridors of an office building would tell about the rooms.
Eitel did not take to this invasion. He had come to prefer being alone, and was rarely to be seen at the hotel. One day when I stopped by his house, the phone rang in Eitel’s bedroom.From the den I could hear him talking. He was being invited to visit somebody who had just arrived at the Yacht Club,
After lunch I took the Jap aside, and asked the cooks for tannic-acid ointment. There wasn’t any in the kitchen, and so I told them to boil tea and put compresses to his arm. Suddenly, I realized that two hours ago I had been busy setting fire to a dozen people, or two dozen, or had it been a hundred?
No matter how I tried to chase the idea, I could never get rid of the Japanese boy with his arm and his smile. Nothing sudden happened to me, but over a time, the thing I felt about most of the fliers went false. I began to look at them in a new way, and I didn’t know if I liked them. They were one breed and I was another; they were there and I was a fake. I was close to things I had forgotten, and it left me sick; I had a choice to make. My missions were finished, my service was over, and I had to decide if I wanted to sign for a career in the Air Force. Trying to make up my mind I got worse, I had a small breakdown, and spent a season in the hospital. I was not very sick, but it was a breakdown, and for seven weeks I lay in bed and felt very little. When I got up, I learned that I was to be given a medical discharge. It no longer mattered. Flying had become too difficult and my reflexes were going. They told meI needed eyeglasses, which made me know how to feel old at twenty-two. But they were wrong, and I did without the eyeglasses, and my eyes got better, even if the rest of me didn’t. Resting in bed, I remembered the books I read when I could get away from the orphanage, and picturing what my life would be like outside the Air Force, I could feel an odd hope when I thought that maybe I would become a writer.
For such a purpose, Desert D’Or may have been a poor place to stay, and in truth, I hardly wrote a word while I was at the resort. But I was not ready to work; I needed time, and I needed the heat of the sun. I do not know if I can explain that I did not want to feel too much, and I did not want to think. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children’s homes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans. It was better not even to think of this. I liked the other world in which almost everybody lived. The imaginary world.
But I write too much. In a few days the winter season began, and all of that routine I divided between Dorothea at The Hangover and Eitel at the Yacht Club was altered. Before the movie colony had been in Desert D’Or a week, what little story I have to tell was fairly begun.
Part Two
CHAPTER SEVEN
W ITH THE BEGINNING of the season, there was some rain, not a great deal, but enough to put the desert flowers into bloom. Which brought the crowd from the capital. The movie people filled the hotels, and the season residents opened their homes. Movie stars were on the street, and gamblers, criminals with social cartel, models, entertainers, athletes, airplane manufacturers, even an artist or two. They came in all kinds of cars: in Cadillac limousines, in ruby convertibles and gold-yellow convertibles, in little foreign cars and big foreign cars. Then with the start of the season on me, I came to like the wall around my house which was always safe in the privacy it gave, and I would think at times how confusing the town must be to the day tourist who could drive through street after street and know no more of the resort than the corridors of an office building would tell about the rooms.
Eitel did not take to this invasion. He had come to prefer being alone, and was rarely to be seen at the hotel. One day when I stopped by his house, the phone rang in Eitel’s bedroom.From the den I could hear him talking. He was being invited to visit somebody who had just arrived at the Yacht Club,
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