Double Play
Chapter One
Joseph Burke got it on Guadalcanal, at Bloody
Ridge, five .25 caliber slugs from a Jap light machine gun,
stitched across him in a neatly punctuated line. The medics
put on pressure bandages and shot him up with morphine
and nothing much made any sense to him afterward. It was
a blur of tubes and nurses and bright lights and descents into
darkness, surgeons, frightening visions, and bad smells and
the feel of ocean. One day he looked around and he was in
bed in a hospital.
"Where the fuck am I?" he asked a nurse.
"Chelsea Naval Hospital."
"Am I going to live," he said.
She was a fat gray-haired woman with deep circles under
her eyes. She nodded.
"Yes," she said.
For weeks he was paranoid delusional. He heard the nurses
whispering together at night. They had husbands in the
army; they hated Marines. He could hear their husbands
whispering with them, visiting them on the floor, parking
their cars with the motors running just outside his window.
The ceiling lights were recessed. He saw small figures in
them, a man being greeted by a butler in an ornate hallway.
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