THE BOOK OF REUBEN by Tabitha King

Author:Tabitha King [King, Tabitha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1994-09-23T21:00:00+00:00

XX

Earl Partridge went to bed with a bad headache one February night and didn’t wake up. His wife, Alma, had had a series of bad winters, plagued with bronchitis and pneumonia, and she wasn’t up to trying to run the store without Earl. So she shuttered it and hung a For Sale sign on it and sat down at her kitchen table to wait for a buyer or the Grim Reaper, whoever came first. Much to her surprise, there was no immediate interest from anyone meeting the description of either party.

Rotated to West Germany, Sonny got busted back to buck for insubordination and then wrecked a jeep under the influence of pruno and glue. It wasn’t his first tangle with the MPs or the first black mark on his record. Shortly thereafter he found himself abruptly returned to civilian status, with a large good-of-the-service boot print on his rear end.

To Reuben Sonny confessed he counted himself lucky not to be in Leavenworth or worse—there was some business involving the sale of some grenades and handguns that weren’t, strictly speaking, his, to a West German woman who had picked him up in a bar and turned out to be a student radical—but apparently that was embarrassing enough to rate a cover-up, and just then the military justice system had a lot more badasses than him to chew up.

“Drugs,” he told Reuben. “You wouldn’t believe the goddamn drugs. You want to know why we can’t win this fucking war, it’s on account of the whole goddamn outfit’s on the nod. And there’s so much money in it—they’re stuffing stiffs with smack like turkeys to smuggle it into this country. Some poor fucker bought it out there in jungleland gets his dead ass used to bring the junkies their shit. And then there’s the ever popular race riot—here you got the gooks killing each other left and right, and we’re supposed to be stopping it and our own guys are at each other’s throats all the time, fuck you dinge and honky motherfucker—shit”—Sonny crumpled his beer can in disgust—“it’s all a big fucking joke. I’m glad to be out of it.”

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