If she got it, she was in for life, like me. I got the impression her application to the 110th was make-or-break for her. But she was also a little frustrated about her own individual progress. The military had been integrated for forty years and she said she found it to be the most color-blind place in America. She had joined the ROTC and in her junior year the scholarships ran out and the military picked up the tab in exchange for five years' future service. She was good at the book work too, and had assembled a patchwork of minor scholarships and moved out of state to a college in Georgia. She had always been small, but she was nimble, and she parlayed a talent for gymnastics and dancing and jumping rope into a way of getting noticed at school. She had nothing bad to say about it, but she gave me the impression that she knew even then there were better ways to grow up than poor and black in Alabama at that time. So she shrugged and started at the beginning, which was outside of Birmingham, Alabama, in the middle of the sixties. Her lips were slightly parted and every minute or so she would run her tongue across her teeth.
She had them resting lightly on the wheel. Then I spent twenty minutes watching Summer. We stopped for gas early, and we bought stale sandwiches that had been made in the previous calendar year.
What might have taken Kramer six hours was going to take us less than five. Summer drove as fast as she dared, which was plenty fast. The world outside our windows looked dark and quiet, cold and sleepy. We set off on the most direct route we could find, straight back to the motel and the lounge bar. Kramer's dead, his wife is dead, and the other two are missing." "And what about Vassell and Coomer?" she said. He put the word out, and within about two hours the widow was dead too." But something about that event led directly to Mrs. She was doing about ninety, looking at me, sideways. She sounded disappointed, like an actress who had failed an audition. I offered to take the wheel, but Summer wouldn't let me. Garber left to drive himself back to town and Summer and I climbed into the car and headed south again. Nobody seems to know where the hell they are." "They checked out of their hotel, but they didn't fly to California. They can tell us whether there was anything in it worth worrying about." So I called Germany and reported the death, but I kept the details to myself. Looked him up and found he was a XII Corps guy.
"You set out to do your thing and I called the town cops and got Kramer's name. Told me the Fort Bird MP duty officer had palmed it off. Told me they'd found out by circuitous means that we had a dead two-star down in North Carolina. I kissed a whole bunch of people, as I recall. "A one-star general and a colonel, Vassell and Coomer.
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