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.

He checks out this plush or velvet rig, finds it to be a pig costume complete with mask, considers slyly that no MP would bother an innocent funseeking pig. As humorless limey voices move closer through the rooms of Putzi’s, he rips frantically at silk lining and straw padding to make room for his own fat. And, struggled at last inside, whew, zipped up, mask hiding face, safe, clownish-anonymous, pushes out through bead curtains, then upstairs to the bar, only to run spang into a full division of the red-hatted ’suckers coming his way, all in step, swear to God.