She hangs his uniform neatly in a closet and follows her trick into heat, bright steam, the walls of the seething room invisible, feathered hairs along his legs, enormous buttocks and back beginning to come up dark with the dampness. Other souls move, sigh, groan unseen among the sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless—the room could be any size, an entire city’s breadth, paved with birds not entirely gentle in twofold rotational symmetry, a foot-darkened yellow and blue, the only colors to its watery twilight.

“Aaahhh, hot damn,” Marvy slithering fatly down, sleek with sweat, over the tiled edge into the scented water. His toenails, cut Army-square, slide under last. “Come on, everybody in the pool,” a great happy bellow, seizing Manuela’s ankle and tugging. Having taken a fall or two on these tiles, and seen a girl friend go into traction, Manuela comes along gracefully, falling hard enough astraddle, bottom hitting his stomach a loud smack, to hurt him, she hopes. But he only laughs again, loudly abandoned to the warmth and buoyancy and sounds encompassing—anonymous fucking, drowsiness, ease. Finds himself with a thick red hardon, and slips it without ado into the solemn girl half-hidden inside her cloud of damp black Spanish lace, eyes anyplace but on his, aswing now through the interior fog, dreaming of home.

Well, that’s all reet. He isn’t fucking her eyes, is he? He’d rather not have to look at her face anyhow, all he wants is the brown skin, the shut mouth, that sweet and nigger submissiveness. She’ll do anything he orders, yeah he can hold her head under the water till she drowns, he can bend her hand back, yeah, break her fingers like that cunt in Frankfurt the other week. Pistol-whip, bite till blood comes… visions go swarming, violent, less erotic than you think—more occupied with thrust, impact, penetration, and such other military values. Which is not to say he isn’t enjoying himself innocently as you do. Or that Manuela doesn’t find herself too, in some casual athletic way, liking the ride up and down the stubborn red shaft of Major Marvy, though her mind is on a thousand other things now, a frock of Sandra’s that she covets, words to various songs, an itch below her left shoulderblade, a tall English soldier she saw as she came through the bar around suppertime, his brown forearm, shirt rolled to the elbow, against the zinc top of the table… .

Voices in the steam. Alarms, many feet clopping in shower shoes, silhouettes moving by, a gray cloudy evacuation. “What in thee hell,” Major Marvy about to come, rising on his elbows distracted, squinting in several directions, rapidly getting a softoff.

“Raid,” a voice going past. “MPs,” shivers somebody else.

“Gaaahh!” screams Major Marvy, who has just recalled the presence of 2½ ounces of cocaine in his uniform pockets. He rolls, walrus-heavy, Manuela sliding away and off his limpening nervous penis, hardly aroused but enough of a professional to feel the price includes a token puto and sinvergüenza now. Scrambling up out of the water, skidding on the tiles, Duane Marvy, bringing up the rear, emerges into an ice-cold changing-room to find the last of the bathers fled, the closets stone-empty except for one multicolored velvet something or other. “Hey where’s my uniform!” stomping on the floor, fists at his sides, face very red. “Oh you motherless bastards,” thereupon throwing several bottles and ashtrays, breaking two windows, attacking the wall with an ornate umbrella stand, feeling better for it in his mind. He hears combat boots crashing overhead and in rooms nearby, girls screaming, a phonograph record knocked screeching into silence.