Jerry Dover’s eyes got very wide. He looked around to see if anyone else could have heard the rallying cry that, here, was anything but. Evidently satisfied no one else had, he wagged a finger at Scipio, for all the world like a mother scolding a little boy who had just shouted a dirty word without even knowing what it meant. “You’ve got to watch your mouth there, Xerxes.”

“Yes, suh. I knows dat.” Scipio was genuinely contrite. He knew what kind of danger he’d put himself in.

Dover went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “You’ve got a nice family. I saw them. You want to leave them without their pa?”

“No, suh.” Again, Scipio meant it. Still clucking, the restaurant manager let it go and let him alone. He’d told the truth, all right. Here, though, how much did the truth matter? His family, like any black family, was all too likely to be torn to bits regardless of what he wanted.

Chester Martin couldn’t have been more bored if the Confederates had shot him. As a matter of fact, they had shot him, or rather, ripped up his leg with a shell fragment. Everybody kept assuring him he would get better. He believed it. He did feel better than he had right after he was wounded. Thanks to sulfa powder and pills and shots, the wound didn’t get badly infected. A little redness, a little soreness on top of the normal pain from getting torn open, and that was it.

Everybody kept telling him he’d get back to duty pretty soon, too. He also believed that. People kept saying it as if it were good news. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why. Hey, Chester! The Confederates’ll get another chance to maim you or kill you before too long. Ain’t that great? Maybe he was prejudiced, but it didn’t seem great to him.

Meanwhile, he lay on a cot with the iron frame painted Army green-gray. Once a day, he got exercise and physical therapy. The rest of the time, he just lay there. The Army gave him better rations in the hospital than it had while he was in the field. That struck him as fundamentally unfair, but then, so did a lot of other things about the Army.

He also got his pay here. Money in his pocket let him sit in on a poker game whenever he felt like it. The only trouble was, he didn’t feel like it very often. Sometimes he sat in even when he didn’t much feel like it. It was something to do, a way to make time go by.

Because he didn’t much care whether he won or lost, he had a terrific poker face. “Nobody can tell what you’re thinking,” one of the other guys in the game grumbled.

“Me? I gave up thinking for Lent,” Chester said. Everybody sitting around the table laughed. And he had been joking… up to a point.

He’d just come back from his exercise one day when a ward orderly stuck his head into the room and said, “You’ve got a visitor, Martin.”

“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Chester said. “I’m not bad enough off to need the padre for last rites or anything, and who else is gonna want to have anything to do with me?”

The orderly didn’t answer. He just ducked back out of sight. Rita walked into the room. “You idiot,” she told him, and burst into tears.

Chester gaped at his wife. “What are you doing here?” he squeaked.

She pulled a tiny linen handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “When I found out you got wounded, I asked the War Department where you were,” she answered. “They told me, and so I got on a train-got on a bunch of trains, really-and here I am. Carl’s with Sue and Otis till I get back.”

“All right,” Chester said dazedly. His sister and brother-in-law would do fine with his son. “Jesus, sweetie, it’s good to see you.”

Rita gave him a look laced with vitriol. “If you like seeing me, why did you go put that stupid uniform on again? You could have stayed in L.A. and seen me every day.”

He sighed. “It seemed like a good idea when I did it.” How many follies got perpetrated because they seemed a good idea at the time? Was there any way to count them? Chester didn’t think so.

By the way Rita drummed her fingers against the painted iron of the bedstead, she didn’t, either. “They told me you weren’t hurt bad enough for them to discharge you from the Army,” she said. “That means the Confederates will have to shoot you at least one more time before I get you back, doesn’t it?”

“I… hadn’t thought of it like that,” Chester said, which was true.

“No? Maybe you should have.” Rita could be devastating when she felt like it. “How many pieces of you will be missing when you finally do come home?”

“For all either one of us knows, I won’t get another scratch the rest of the way,” Chester said.

She didn’t laugh in his face. She didn’t say anything at all. Her silence made his remark sound even more foolish than it would have anyway. He grimaced. He knew that as well as she did.

At last, she unbent enough to ask, “How are you?”

“I’m getting better,” he answered. “As soon as the leg is strong enough, they’ll send me back.”

“Swell,” Rita said. “I thought I was going to die when I got the wire that said you’d been hurt.”

“Chance I took,” Chester said. “It’s not that bad.” That was true. He would recover, as he had when he got hit in the arm during the Great War. He’d seen plenty of men crippled for life, plenty of others torn to pieces or blown to bits.

Rita’s first husband hadn’t come out of the Great War alive, so she knew about that, too. “What will it be like the next time?” she demanded pointedly. “I love you. I couldn’t stand getting another ‘The War Department deeply regrets to inform you…’ telegram. I’d die.”

No, I would. Chester swallowed the words long before they passed his lips. Rita wouldn’t find them funny. He did, but only in the blackly humorous way that didn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t been through the things front-line soldiers had.

Rita came over, bent down, and laid her head on his shoulder. She really started to bawl then. “I don’t want to lose you, Chester!”

“Hey, babe.” Awkwardly, he put his arms around her. “Hey,” he repeated. “I’m not going anywhere.” He did laugh then, because that was literally true.

Almost to Chester’s relief, the orderly came in then and said, “You’ve got to go, ma’am. Doctors don’t want him tired out.”

The look she gave the man should have put him in a hospital bed. She kissed Chester. His eyes crossed; nobody’d done that since he reenlisted. Then, reluctantly, she let the orderly lead her away.

When she’d left the ward, the guy in the next bed said, “Must be nice, getting a visit from your wife.” He wasn’t even half Chester’s age. By pure coincidence, the two of them had almost the same wound.

“Yeah, it was,” Chester said, more or less truthfully. “She sure caught me by surprise, though.” That was also true.

“Too bad you don’t have a private room.” The kid-his name was Gary-leered at him.

“Yeah, well…” Chester didn’t know why he was embarrassed; the same thought had crossed his mind. He went on, “If I wasn’t just a noncom, if I was an officer like the snotnose whose hand I was holding, maybe I would have one. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”

“Would we be here if it wasn’t?” Gary was a buck private. To him, a top sergeant was as exalted a personage as any officer, at least this side of a general.

“You’ve got a point,” Chester said. Of course, instead of ending up in a military hospital, they could have ended up dead. Or they could have been maimed, not just wounded.

Or we might not have got hurt at all, Chester thought resentfully. But he knew too well how unlikely that was. If you stayed in the meat grinder long enough, odds were you’d brush up against the blades.

Gary was looking at him. “You’re not a lifer, are you?”

“Me? Hell, no,” Chester said. “Do I look crazy?”

“Never can tell.” Gary wouldn’t get in Dutch for sassing a sergeant here; the rules were relaxed for wounded men. “It’s like your wife said-if you’re so smart, how come you signed up for round two when you’d already been through round one?”