On the basis of this IQ score, and because it was one of the few careers open that week, Richie Parsons was assigned to Personnel Technical School, at Scott Air Force Base, near St. Louis, Missouri. He was given a seven-day leave at home after basic training, where Mama slobbered over him at every opportunity, and he edged along walls more furtively than ever, and then he took the bus and reported to the school squadron at Scott Air Force Base.
The Personnel Technical School was ten weeks long, but Richie Parsons only lasted the first three weeks. Then, all at once, he was AWOL and running scared.
It was the petty thievery again. There were only fifty-six young men in the barracks with Richie at Scott, and the barracks had been given interior partitions, forming cubicles, in each of which slept four men. There were no doors on the cubicles, no way to seal them off from the outside world.
As usual, in an open or semi-open barracks, there was petty thievery. As usual, no one suspected bumbling Richie Parsons, who was having such a terrible time in school, and who still didn’t know his left from his right. No one paid much attention to the fact that most of the thievery was done on weekends, when everybody else was in East St. Louis, and Richie Parsons was practically alone in the squadron area.
Richie Parsons went to St. Louis twice, and East St. Louis once. St. Louis and East St. Louis have virtually the same relationship as Cincinnati and Newport. St. Louis is a clean town, where all the bars close at midnight, and the local churches have free Sunday breakfasts for the soldier boys from the air base and the Army camps that ring that city. East St. Louis is a hell-hole, where the bars never close, the cathouses have everything but neon signs, and the soldier boys work up their appetites for Sunday morning breakfast across the river.
The first time Richie Parsons went to St. Louis, he attended a major league baseball game, which was free to men in uniform. He’d never seen a major league baseball game, and it disappointed him. The second time, he went to the concert at Kiel Auditorium, which was also free to men in uniform. He’d never been to a concert either, and that bored him stiff.
The one time he went to East St. Louis, he was brought along by a few other guys and he was scared out of his wits. While the other guys trooped into the whorehouse, Richie stayed out on the sidewalk, furtive and scared and lonely, the gutless wonder to the end, incapable of either going inside to lose his virginity or going back to the base to save it. A dark-haired, evil-grinning girl in a ground-floor window of the whorehouse kept talking to him, saying, “Wanna make it with me, airman? We go round the world for fifteen, boy. Come on, live a little. Wanna see what I got for you? Hot stuff, airman. I do anything you want, boy, all you has to do is ask.”
Richie made believe he didn’t hear the woman, cooing at him from the window. He walked jerkily back and forth in front of the building, head down, staring hopelessly at the sidewalk and wishing he’d stayed at the base or gone to the USO in St. Louis. But all you could do at the USO was dance with high school girls, and he knew he’d be too afraid to ask a strange girl to dance with him. Besides, he was a terrible dancer; he danced the way he walked, furtively, sneaking and shuffling, round-shouldered.
Nobody noticed that the stealing didn’t happen when Richie Parsons was in town. But everybody noticed the stealing, and people began to get mad about it. The Captain, the commander of the squadron, heard about it, and he called a special formation of that barracks, because there was more filching than usual going on there. “I want you men to find the sneak-thief in your midst,” he told them, passing the buck. “You know the other men in your barracks with you. I want you to find him, and I want you to drag him to my office by the heels. And I won’t raise a fuss if you kick his ass before you bring him to me.”
Everybody liked that. The Captain was all right. Everybody watched everybody else, and nobody trusted anybody.
But still nobody noticed Richie Parsons.
Until that last Saturday night. A six-foot fullback named Tom Greery decided to find out who the hell the dirty crook was. He didn’t go to town that Saturday night, though he would have loved to spend another ten on that red-haired Bobbi in the cathouse on Fourth Street. He stayed in the barracks, lying on the floor under his bed, looking down the row of cubicles at the shoes and bed-legs. The partitions didn’t reach all the way to the floor, and he had a clear view all the way to the end of the barracks.
He spent four hours under the bed, impatiently waiting for something to happen. He kept thinking about red-headed Bobbi, with the pneumatic drill hips, and he kept getting madder and more impatient by the minute.
And finally he saw movement. Way down at the other end of the row of cubicles, a pair of feet came into view. They moved around in that cubicle for a minute, and Greery wondered whether he should make his move yet not. But this might not be the sneak-thief. It might be guy who bunked in that cubicle, and Greery didn’t want his presence to be known too early. Not until the lousy bastard son-of-a-bitch of a thief showed up.
The feet, moving very softly, left that first cubicle, and reappeared in the second. Greery watched, growing more and more sure of his quarry. When the feet moved on to the third cubicle, Greery was positive he had his man. Awkwardly, trying to be absolutely silent, he crawled out from under his bed and tiptoed down the center corridor, past the empty and defenseless cubicles, to the one where his man was waiting. He got to the doorway, looked in, and saw Richie Parsons with both hands in Hank Bassler’s foot-locker.
“All right, you son-of-a-bitch,” said Greery, and Richie leaped around, terror and confusion distorting his face. “Now,” said Greery, “I’m going to kick the hell out of you.”
“Please,” said Richie, but that was all he said. Because Greery was as good as his word. He kicked the hell out of Richie Parsons, and then he dragged him, with a painful grip on Richie’s elbow, out of the barracks and down the row to the Squadron Headquarters building.
But the Captain, too, was in East St. Louis, working up an appetite for Sunday morning. There was no one in HQ but the Charge of Quarters, an unhappy airman given the duty of sitting around the orderly room all Saturday night, in case the phone rang.
Greery shook Richie Parsons by the elbow, and an-nounced to the Charge of Quarters, “I got the bastard. The lousy sneak-thief.”
“This one?” asked the CQ in surprise.
“Caught him red-handed,” said Greery. He spoke in capitals. “Caught Him In The Act!”
“You want me to call the AP’s?” asked the CQ.
“No,” said Greery, considering. “The Captain will want to see this little son-of-a-bitch.” He shook Richie again, and glowered at him. “You hear me, you bastard?” he said. “You are going to go on back to the barracks, and you are going to hit the rack, and you are going to stay there until Monday morning. You hear me?” Richie nodded, quivering.
“Eight o’clock Monday morning,” said Greery, “we are going to go in and see the Captain. You better show up, too. If you don’t, you’re AWOL. You’ve got your ass in a sling as it is, so don’t add AWOL to everything else.”
Richie shook his head, mute and terrified.
Greery dragged the sneak-thief back to the barracks, booted him through the doorway, and went off to town to see the redhead, Bobbi.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in Richie Parsons’ position would have stayed and taken their punishment. Richie had only been in the Air Force four months, and he had been well-indoctrinated, as all recruits are, in the horrors of going AWOL. It was, all things considered, a much more serious crime than thievery.