The Enlisted Men's Club by Gary Reilly

Author:Gary Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gary Reilly

Chapter Sixteen

Palmer will turn twenty-one at midnight, but he keeps this fact to himself, the third and last of the most significant birthdays—sixteen meant a driver’s license, eighteen meant 3.2 beer and a draft card, but he knows that the biggest change now will be only that he can get bombed in strip joints.

He has already made his plans for his private celebration on Saturday. No more long marches in the drunk dark, he will take a taxi down into San Francisco like other troops do on weekends, and get out at Market Street and walk into bars at random and order boilermakers, though in each bar he will drink only one scotch and a beer to toast the party he won’t have but had long looked forward to celebrating in Denver with his high-school friends, a kind of disappointment.

Courtney is his road partner on the last day-shift before they go back to the swing-shift. Palmer can’t believe that three weeks have already passed by. One more week on the road, and then they start the training cycle for a month, then detail month, then back on the road again. He hates the way his army duty has turned out. He wants to pull MP duty all the time. Then Courtney mentions that he and Cheryl had their first fight the previous evening.

“What about?” Palmer asks, not that he wants to know. He doesn’t want to know anything about anybody, but he knows it’s expected of him.

“She wants to get a roommate.”

This is interesting. It could make them a foursome. “How come?”

“Money. She isn’t making enough at the shop to live on decently.”

Decently. Palmer had lived two years after high school on fifty-dollar weekly paychecks. There were no parents or priests in his life, just a senile landlord and a door with a lock on it. That was pretty decent.

“Before we met she was thinking about finding a roommate, but then she put it on hold,” Courtney says. He steers the car onto a descending dirt road skirting a stone wall, the south perimeter of the Presidio.

“So now that she’s had her fill of you, she wants a roommate?” Palmer says.

Courtney doesn’t laugh. But after a moment says, “Fill of me is right.”

They’re both chuckling as they come to the bottom of the hill, the end of the road not far from the flat oval of a putting green. Flagpole still in the cup. No vandals on a military golf course. Courtney makes a U-turn and drives back up to Arguello Boulevard.

“Shit, Palmer, a roommate!” He bashes the steering wheel with a fist. “She has a Murphy bed for crying out loud. I can’t date a woman who has a Murphy bed and a roommate.”

Palmer doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t have enough experience with beds and women to offer an insight—not nearly enough, if none at all can be defined as “nearly.”

Courtney stops the car at the intersection and lets the engine idle. “I offered her a deal. I said I would pay half her rent.

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