Well, better that than go on about how I ought to handle Compton.

I was just thankful Compton and I didn’t have much cause to cross paths in the coming days, except at the captain’s briefing sessions. And there, the captain would just mostly run down the next day’s plans and Compton would snap out Yes, sir like he’d personally see the plans got carried out.

Though when something didn’t go just right, he’d find a way to make it sound like my doing.

“You ought to fight back,” Sam said more than once. Working in the headquarters office, he heard most of what went on.

“I guess,” I always answered.

But I didn’t know how, and that was a lack in me. I thought once or twice about talking things over with Pops, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Asking for advice would have meant admitting I wasn’t sure what I was doing.

Anyway, about then we entered a time when Compton and I were too busy helping the military staff organize our guys to get in each other’s way.

As soon as the weather warmed up some—if you could call going from thirty below to three above warming up—we had us our hands full digging out the rest of the camp.

And we ferried hay up into the mountains to a Fish and Wildlife crew trying to keep an antelope herd from starving. Sam reported that the CO dithered about that one, trying to decide what district would think.

Apple asked, “Why can’t he do a job just because it needs doing?”

Sam answered, “Sergeant Ruffino says Hakes is bucking for a promotion and is weighing everything against that.”

“What I’d like,” Apple said, “is to promote him out of here! What’s he want to be promoted to?”

“To major, of course,” Nate said. That’s what comes after captain.

“And out of here, too,” Sam added. “The sergeant said Hakes thinks the CCC’s a career dead end.”

Myself, I didn’t much care why the captain okayed work like the hay delivery. It kept the fellows busy and content during the day.

Chapter 26

Keeping them occupied in the hours after supper was trickier. They’d begun complaining they could play just so much Ping-Pong, and that Thursday movie night only rolled around on Thursdays. Even the newsreels about the winter Olympics going on in Germany were wearing thin. Adolf Hitler had opened them, to a great big cheering crowd.

And as for using their free time to write letters—well, it seemed like the mail didn’t bring anything anybody wanted to answer.

One Saturday Sam got a note from home that made him purple up in rage.

“I do not have asthma,” he exclaimed.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Just . . . nothing!” he answered.