High Hunt by David Eddings

bedrooms. The angle was just right, and I could see the rumpled, unmade bed where I assumed he and his wife slept. I thought of telling him that he might be making a public spectacle of his love life, but I decided that was his business.
    â€œWhat’d you take in college anyway?” Jack demanded. “I never could get the straight of it out of the Old Lady.”
    â€œEnglish, mostly,” I said. “Literature.”
    â€œEnglish, for Chrissake! Nouns and verbs and all that shit?”
    â€œLiterature, Stud,” I corrected him. “Shakespeare and Hemingway, and all that shit. I figured this would be the issuethat would blow the whole reunion bit. As soon as he gave me the “What the hell good is that shit?” routine, he and I would part company, fast. I’d about had a gutful of that reaction in the Army.
    He surprised me. “Oh,” he said, “that’s different. You always did read a lot—even when you were a kid.”
    â€œIt gives me a substitute for my own slightly screwed-up life.”
    â€œYou gonna teach?”
    â€œNot right away. I’m going back to school first.”
    â€œI thought the Old Lady told me you graduated.”
    â€œYeah,” I said, “but I’m going on to graduate school.”
    â€œNo shit?” He looked impressed. “I hear that’s pretty rough.”
    â€œI think I can hack it.”
    â€œYou always were the smart one in the connection.”
    â€œHow’s your beer holding out?” I asked him, shaking my empty can. I was starting to relax. We’d gotten past all the touchy issues. I lit another cigarette.
    â€œNo sweat,” he said, getting up to get two more. “If I run out, the gal next door has a case stashed away. We’ll have to replace it before her old man gets home, but Marg ought to be here before long, and then I’ll have wheels.”
    â€œHey,” I called after him. “I meant to ask you about that. I thought your wife’s name was Bonnie.”
    â€œBonnie? Hell, I dumped her three years ago.”
    â€œDidn’t you have a little girl there, too?”
    â€œYeah. Joanne.” He came back with the beer. I noticed that the trailer swayed a little when anyone walked round. “But Bonnie married some goof over at the Navy Yard, and he adopted Joanne. They moved down to L.A.”
    â€œAnd before that it was—”
    â€œBernice. She was just a kid, and she got homesick for Mommie.”
    â€œYou use up wives at a helluva rate, old buddy.”
    â€œJust want to spread all that happiness around as much as I can.” He laughed.
    I decided that I liked my brother. That’s a helluva thing to discover all of a sudden.

3
    A car pulled up outside, and Jack turned his head to listen. “I think that’s the Mama Cat,” he said. “Sounds like my old bucket.” He got up and looked out the window. “Yeah, it’s her.” He scooped up the empty beer cans from the coffee table and dumped them in the garbage sack under the sink. Then he hustled outside.
    They came in a minute or so later, Jack rather ostentatiously carrying two bags of groceries. I got the impression that if I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have bothered. My current sister-in-law was a girl of average height with pale brown hair and a slightly sullen look on her face. I imagine all Jack’s women got that look sooner or later. At any rate Margaret didn’t seem just exactly wild about having a strange GI brother-in-law turn up.
    â€œWell, sweetie,” Jack said with an overdone joviality, “what do you think of him?”
    I stood up. “Hello, Margaret,” I said, smiling at her as winningly as I could.
    â€œI’m very happy to meet you, Dan,” she said, a brief, automatic smile flickering over her face. She was sizing me up carefully. I don’t imagine the pint and the half-full beer can on the coffee