The Last Supper: And Other Stories by Howard Fast Page B

Rights, so much a month, until someday it was his, and his kids grown and educated, and he and his wife comfortable in their older years, in the warm, good years that were the gift of a land of freedom and opportunity. There was his house. He walked home almost every evening. He liked to walk home.

Coca Cola
    T HIS AND THAT HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT COCA COLA, AND many hold that it is more and less than a soft drink; and there are parts of the world where they refer without love to a “Coca Cola civilization.” Be that as it may, I have my own feelings about the matter, which I sometimes recall as my “Arabian adventure.”
    Nor am I in any fashion sold on the romance of Arabia, which I hold as one of the less favored spots on earth. In any case, during the month of June, it’s hotter than hell, which I know for a fact; for hell is the product of gullible imagination and an Arabian summer actually exists. This I know, for I happened to be in Arabia one June during the Second World War, traveling from Africa to the Far East and satisfying my curiosity meanwhile about what was happening on the Arabian peninsula. Perhaps in the winter season, I would have developed the kind of interest in Arabia that others have shown; as it was, a few days of the heat, sand and indescribable poverty satisfied my curiosity, and I turned my attention to getting out of Arabia.
    This was not as easy as it might seem, for apparently nothing in the way of Army Air Transport went directly out of Arabia, but instead to another airstrip. And the handful of miserable GIs at each of these airstrips, living in a perpetual state of intense dehydration, talked not of sex or the war, but of the superior quality, taste and quantity of water at some other airstrip. And in between their rather profound discussions of water, they spent their pay on Coca Cola. It’s amazing how much Coca Cola an American in the Arabian desert can consume.
    Time passed and it became hotter, and when I landed one day on an airstrip in the central part of the peninsula, staggered into the shade, and read on the thermometer there that the temperature was one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit, I knew that I had enough of Arabia. I inquired for the next plane out.
    I was told that in the next forty-eight hour period, only one plane would be taking off, and that one a C46, due in this very afternoon and scheduled to take off as soon as it had refueled and loaded cargo. What sort of cargo it would load at this godforsaken place in the center of a glaring, burning white-salt desert, I neither knew nor cared, just as I neither knew nor cared what the future destination of the C46 might be—secure in the knowledge that wherever that destination was, it was superior to the place I was in now.
    There were three hours before the C46 landed, and I spent those three hours dying slowly, drinking rancid yellow water, swallowing salt tablets, and joining this or that officer or enlisted man in a Coca Cola. They all looked at me as the permanent inhabitants of Death Valley—if there are any—must look at tourists in air-conditioned cars, and some of them, as they sat over Coca Cola, wept with envy and self-pity. The only spark of life they evidenced animated them when they boasted about the heat at their station. There was no denying that they had more and fiercer heat than possibly any other place in the world.
    â€œIt’s also hot at Abadan,” I remember remarking, just to make conversation, for Abadan was well known and spoken of wherever there were GIs as the “second hottest place in the world.”
    â€œAbadan,” they nodded sadly. “It’s never really hot in Abadan. We go to Abadan on leave, and when we tell them how hot it is here, they get angry because they think we’re running down their place.”
    It was that way, and when the plane finally landed, I felt like a doomed man miraculously reprieved. I slowly shuffled to the