Marine Corpse

Marine Corpse by William G. Tapply

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Authors: William G. Tapply
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story. A good cigar, after all, is a smoke.” Ben made a show of checking his watch, and then put his hand on my arm. “You’re welcome to stay here, Brady, and toast yourself in the warmth of the fireplace and the heat of the discourse. As for me, I’ve got to make a couple of phone calls.”
    “I think I’ll freshen my drink,” I said, grateful for the chance to move.
    “Help yourself,” said Ben, waving to the table in the corner.
    I stood up. “Do come back and tell us what you think about Haiti,” said Meriam to me.
    “I don’t have any interesting views,” I said, thinking that Altoona would easily hold his own with all of them. “I go along with Harry, here. Vital national interests. Bananas and cigars. That sort of thing.”
    Meriam winked at me, and I went over to slosh some more Old Grandad into my glass. I wandered into the kitchen, where gleaming chrome and glass contrasted with the otherwise comfortable colonial decor of Ben’s home. “Neo Paul Revere,” Ben called his eclectic collection of braided rugs, overstuffed chairs, oil paintings, and antiques, but that was Ben’s point of view. By his standards, the rented junk in my apartment qualified as Early Conan the Barbarian.
    I nodded at the group that was playing wordgames at the big trestle table and shook hands with the two Woodhouse nephews I recognized. Then I moved over so I could gaze out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The pink late afternoon sky was studded with black submarine-shaped clouds, and the snow-covered landscape that rolled down toward the frozen river seemed to glow colorlessly as it gathered what was left of the daylight. The stark lines of a rail fence carved the pasture into neat geometrical shapes.
    It was a cold, dead world outside, a more appropriate setting, somehow, for a gathering to mourn the dead than the cheery interior of the Woodhouse mansion.
    I sipped my drink, grateful that nobody seemed to feel obligated to include me in the activities. I practiced no religion, but still I felt that I had been more moved, more motivated to speculate on big questions, than these members of Stu’s family, who seemed content to accept his death with a Calvinist fatalism that struck me as ironic. Calvinism with no God to impose order, however arbitrary, was randomness without redemption—the bleakest of all theologies, a black existential pit.
    I went to look for the football game. I had wagered a dollar on Miami with Charlie McDevitt. I suspected I would accept that loss, should it happen, with considerably less equanimity than Meriam and Ben accepted Stu’s death.
    I found a big color television in Ben’s study, a cozy bookshelf-lined room in the far corner of the house. There were two easy chairs pulled up in front of the tube. I took one of them. A young woman in her mid-twenties, I judged, sat in the other. She wore her black hair short. It looked like it had been chopped off hastily by a man wielding hedge trimmers. I supposed she had spent a lot of money to acquire this look.
    She glanced at me, smiled perfunctorily, and then returned her gaze to the television. In the instant of that smile I saw enormous eyes, almost black, the color of strong coffee, where the smile seemed to linger after the mouth stopped. When she turned, her nose dominated her profile—not the sharp, aristocratic Woodhouse beak, but a lumpy, meandering muzzle that seemed to begin at her forehead, wander down her face, and stop indecisively only because there had to be a place left for her mouth.
    “Any score?” I said to her.
    “Miami by ten and marching,” she said without turning.
    “Best news I’ve heard today,” I said. “I’m Brady Coyne, by the way.”
    She held her hand out to me without taking her eyes off the television. “Heather Kriegel,” she said. “The Jewish girlfriend. The only one around here who seems interested in mourning.”
    “It is a rather gay celebration, under the circumstances,” I agreed.
    She turned

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