“Funeral’s at ten,” Dad warned.

“I know. I’ll want to take a bath, too.” After so long on the train, Joe felt grubby all over. “Be nice to get in the tub for a change. I haven’t had anything but showers since I went back East.”

At that hour, the parking lot was almost empty. Next to no traffic was on the roads. They went back to San Francisco on the Bay Bridge. Joe remembered the hoopla with which it had opened in 1936. It was a hell of a lot more convenient than the ferry that had linked San Francisco and the East Bay. It would have been, anyhow, if they could have gone faster than the crawl the new, strict blackout regulations imposed.

Something else occurred to Joe. “You all right for gas, Dad?” He hadn’t paid much attention to gas rationing since becoming a cadet. He didn’t have a car, so it wasn’t his worry.

His father shrugged. “It’ll be okay. And this-this is more important than crap like that.” Joe bit his lip and nodded.

He was damned if he could figure out how his old man navigated in the pitch blackness. Masking tape covered all but the narrowest strip of headlights. What was left didn’t let you see far enough to spit. Dad managed, though. He didn’t clip any of the other cars groping their way through the night, and he got back to the house with no wrong turns anywhere.

After months of bunks and cots, Joe’s bed seemed ridiculously soft. Lying down on it made him feel like a kid, as if he’d shed years. He wondered if the ticking of the alarm clock on the nightstand would bother him. It did-for ninety seconds, maybe even two minutes. After that, he heard nothing.

When the alarm clock went off, he had to figure out what it was and how to turn it off. Reveille had been rousting him since he joined the Navy. He realized he didn’t have to change out of his pajamas before he went to breakfast. Now there was luxury.

His mother burst into tears when she saw him. His brother Carl was sixteen, and stared at him in awe. His sister Angie was twelve. She just seemed glad to have him back. He shoveled down breakfast with the single-minded determination he would have shown back in Pensacola. Carl gaped. Dad grinned. His mother brought him seconds. In Pensacola, he would have overloaded his plate the first time around.

With all the talk at the breakfast table, he didn’t have time for a bath after all. He zipped through the shower and put on his dress uniform. When he came downstairs again, his mother started crying for a second time. Carl’s eyes damn near bugged out of his head. His brother and father wore almost identical black suits. Joe ignored the faint smell of mothballs.

They all piled into the car to go to church. When they got there, they found reporters waiting outside. Joe hadn’t expected that. Goddamn vultures, he thought. Along with the rest of his family, he pushed past them without a word.

Relatives and friends and neighbors packed the church. Joe solemnly shook hands again and again. Dominic Scalzi set a hand on his shoulder. “Garage ain’t the same without you, kid,” the mechanic said. “Guy who’s filling your slot ain’t half as good. But what you’re doing, it’s important. You make all of us proud.” His suit gave off that chemical tang, too.

“Thanks, Mr. Scalzi.” Joe’s mind was only half on what his ex-boss was saying. “Excuse me, please.” He went over and sat down with his folks. There were the coffins, looking dreadfully final-and all the more so because they were closed. He knew what that meant: the mortician hadn’t been able to clean up the bodies enough to let anybody look at them.

Even in the wool dress uniform, he shivered. He’d seen more than one Yellow Peril crash, and he’d seen what happened afterwards. The first time, he’d thrown up right on his shoes. To imagine something like that happening to his aunt and uncle and his cousins… His hands slammed shut into fists. He felt as if he’d let them down.

That was ridiculous. The logical part of his mind knew as much. A funeral, though, wasn’t made for the logical part of the mind.

The Mass helped steady him. The genuflections and the sonorous Latin were made, not to drive grief away, but to put it in channels made for its flow. The dry tastelessness of the Communion wafer on his tongue brought the ritual to a close. When the priest intoned, “Ite, Missa est,” at the end, he did feel better.

But then came the funeral procession and the burial itself. He was a pallbearer, of course. He was young and strong and healthy, and he’d been twenty-five hundred miles away from where he could do anybody any good. Watching and hearing dirt thud down on the coffins made him bury his face in his hands.

“It’s okay,” his father whispered in a ravaged voice. “This once, it’s okay.”

Joe shook his head. It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t going to be okay. If it were okay, he would still have been back at Pensacola, and his relatives would have been going on about their business. Instead, he was here, five of them lay in holes in the ground, and the sixth wouldn’t get out of the hospital for at least another two weeks. Tears dripped out between his fingers and fell on the green graveyard grass.

After the burial, everybody went back to his folks’ house. People packed it to overflowing. The war was supposed to have made things hard to come by. The food his mother set out and the booze his father set out made a mockery of that. He wondered how big a hole they’d dug for themselves with such a big spread and with the cost of five funerals. As soon as he did, he shrugged the thought away. At a time like this, you didn’t stint.

Everybody kept pressing drinks on him. If he’d drunk all of them, they would have had to carry him aboard the eastbound train on a stretcher. He poured down enough to put a thick glass canopy-like that of a fighter plane-between himself and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Then he walked around with a half-filled glass in his hand, which kept most people from offering him a new full one.

They kept telling him-sometimes in alarmingly explicit detail-what to do to the Japs when he got the chance. He would nod and try to move on. He wanted to do all those things to them. But nobody here seemed to have the slightest idea that the Japs were liable to shoot back.

With everything from Hawaii to Burma lost, with Japanese troops and planes at Port Moresby looking across the Coral Sea towards Australia, Joe didn’t see how people could be so blind, but they were. Civilians, he thought. He hadn’t had much to do with civilians the past five months. He had been one of them. No more. He wasn’t a naval officer yet-he wasn’t what he was going to be-but he sure wasn’t what he had been, either.

Late that night, his father drove him back across the Bay to Oakland. Dad had put away a lot of booze, too, but not even the craziest drunk-which he wasn’t-could do anything too drastic at the speeds blackout permitted. “Take care of yourself, Joey,” Dad said on the platform. “Take care of yourself, but pay those bastards back.”

“I will,” Joe said. I hope I will.

He had no trouble sleeping sitting up, not that night he didn’t. When he woke, the sun was hitting him in the face. His head felt as if someone were dancing on it with a jackhammer. He dry-swallowed three aspirins. Slowly, the ache receded. Coffee helped, too.

After so much time cooped up in a seat, Joe felt like an arthritic orangutan when the train pulled into the Pensacola station again. He had trouble straightening up to grab his duffel bag from the rack above the seat. All his joints creaked and popped.

When he got out, he found Orson Sharp waiting for him on the platform. “Hey, you didn’t have to do that,” Joe said, touched. “I was gonna flag a cab.”

Sharp looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Japanese. “We’re on the same team.” He might have been talking to a moron. “I borrowed Mike Williams’ De Soto. Big deal. If you don’t help the guys on your team, why should they help you?”