his country. When Maria finally disappeared, it took Cornball several minutes to absorb the full impact of it. Hernandez kept telling him, "Cornball, she's just a who-er." But Cornball wasn't buying any of that line; if Maria was with someone, it damn well must be against her wishes. So Cornball staggered out and up the street and started pounding on that line of doors because he couldn't remember which was Maria's. When he finally found the right one and discovered the door was locked from the inside, he hunted around until he located a long stick and then stuck it in at the bottom corner of the door and pulled up. Everything gave at once. The door flew open. Maria was up beside the bed, screaming, and a long, thin, startled male face peered anxiously from the bed. And there, confronting them, was Cornball, with a stick in his hand, not really knowing what to do next. Every other door along the line was open, too, and everyone had some advice or complaint to offer at the top of his Spanish voice.

But in the meantime the rest us had closed in on Cornball and got him, not pacified, but subdued. We got him to the Hupmobile and decided to go home while we could. So we drove back to Dago in the moonlight with Cornball mumbling about Maria all the way. He wanted Hernandez to write her a letter when we got back.

Then love occupied Cornball for the rest of the year, nearly. He fell in love with a theater usher, or usherette, if you like, from Lemon Grove, and one week-end the two of them took her dad's car and drove to Las Vegas. It was just like Cornball not to know the girl was having her period, and just like him not to find out until after the civil ceremony had been performed. And just like him to be immoblized by the news. He lay awake all night, tortured with what he took to be some sign of the beast on their love affair and didn't touch the girl; and then the next day he drove her back to Lemon Grove. She got an annulment, and then the war broke out.

That left the world. Cornball and Tod Harris and I sat up on Pacific Boulevard eating avocados in the black-out one night after war had been declared, and decided to sail around the world just as soon as the thing was over. We were a little premature, but that was all right as there were a number of preparations to be made. Cornball had never been immersed in anything larger or deeper than a swimming pool in Des Moines, Iowa, and Tod had never navigated anything more complicated than a surf board. So the bulk of the responsibility developed on me because I had sailed a dingy in Green Lake, Wisconsin, once. But poor Tod got caught smoking the wrong kind of cigarette and had to take a dishonorable discharge. And Cornball got impatient, not for action but for glory, and signed up with a unit which scuttlebutt said was going overseas first. It went over, and Cornball got there after a while. Their ship sailed around the Pacific while the Solomon battle was going on, and then Cornball and his unit got garrison duty in the Solomons . . . for two years, eight months and four days.

I was back in the States a year before Cornball, and married. Jill and I had an apartment just down the hill from the El Cortez. In the meantime, before he left, Cornball had seen a picture of my cousin, Josie; and with nothing to do in the Solomons for two years, eight months and four days, he started to write her. She wrote him, and back and forth went the V-mail. They fell in love and Cornball thought it would be a good thing, since I had two beds in the apartment, if Josie was there when he got back. So she was.

Cone

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