Hanging on

could account for. "Don't you ever call me anything like that. Blade, the rest of them like Blade, on both sides of this fucking war, aren't a whole hell of a lot different. They're the throw-backs, the brutes, the cavemen. Don't you goddamned ever call me something like that!" He dropped Liverwright back on his cot, without regard for the man's hip.
        Liverwright blew his nose again, wiped at his eyes. "Am I dying?" he asked.
        "Probably," Kelly said. "We all are, bit by bit."
        Liverwright smiled slightly. "Okay," he said. "Okay."
        Nauseous, ashamed of himself, Major Kelly went up front where Lily and Nurse Pullit were treating the last of the wounded.
        Amazingly enough, the major and Lily Kain had escaped injury, though they had been directly under the bridge when the Stukas glided in. Lily told Nurse Pullit all about their escape as the two of them treated the wounded. "He was lying there, flat on his back, shoved right up in me. You know?"
        Nurse Pullit giggled.
        "Even if the Stukas hadn't glided in, we probably wouldn't have heard them any sooner. Anyway, when the first bombs hit the far side of the bridge, he got his hands and feet under him and started off."
        "With you on top?" Nurse Pullit asked.
        Lily explained how it was. Kelly, his back still parallel to the earth, Lily still screwed on tight, had pushed up and scuttled along the riverbank like a crab. Two minutes later, when they were a quarter of a mile downriver from the bridge, he was still lodged firmly inside of her, and she had climaxed at least half a dozen times. It had been like riding a horse with a dildo strapped to the saddle. She wanted to try it again, Lily told Nurse Pullit, but she thought it might be best to wait until the bridge was likely to be bombed again. After all, the fear of death was what had given the major the energy to perform these acrobatics.
        When Kelly came up front, after the confrontation with Liverwright, Nurse Pullit said, "I heard all about it!"
        "It wasn't like she said," Kelly told the nurse.
        "He doesn't remember," Lily said.
        She and Nurse Pullit giggled.
        So far as Kelly was concerned, Lily's story was fantasy. One moment, he was under the bridge watching it come apart over him; the next moment, he was a quarter of a mile downriver, by the water's edge. He couldn't figure out how he got there, and he refused to believe the grotesque picture Lily painted. He chose, instead, to believe that he had pretended to be out from under the bridge- and therefore was out from under it, just as Danny Dew had pretended to be white.
        "Just like riding a horse with a dildo," Lily Kain said, shaking her head and laughing.
        Major Kelly couldn't take any more of that. He turned away from them and walked to the far end of the bunker. As he passed Liverwright, he said, "You're dying." Liverwright seemed pleased by his honesty.
        Private Tooley, who was stationed at that end of the bunker, washing out scrapes and cuts which his new batch of patients had sustained, said, "If you'd heeded Kowalski's warning, you wouldn't have been under the bridge in the first place."
        "Who in the hell would ever think Kowalski knew what he was talking about?" Major Kelly asked, turning to look at the mad Pole who lay quietly in his cot, staring at nothing. "Kowalski is a zombie, a bag of shit. He can't even feed himself any more. How in the hell was I to know that this dumb bag of shit would be right?"
        Private Tooley daubed some grit out of a sliced forearm, then sent the man to the front of the bunker where Lily and Nurse Pullit were dispensing antiseptics and applying bandages. He said, "I wish you wouldn't call him names like that."
        "What should I call him, then?"
        "Private Kowalski," Private Tooley said. "That's his name."
        Major Kelly shook his head. "No. That isn't the Private Kowalski that I knew. The Private Kowalski that I knew always laughed a lot. Has this bag of shit laughed recently?"
        "No, but-"
        "The Private Kowalski I knew liked to play cards and used to bitch a blue streak when he lost. Has this man tried to get up a poker game since he was brought here, or has he cursed you out?"
        "Of course not, but-"
        "Then this isn't Private Kowalski," Major Kelly said. "This is nothing more than a bag of shit. The sooner you accept that, the