Losing Julia by Jonathan Hull Page B

me of an overgrown puppy that had never been loved.
    “Yeah, why the hell have you always got to talk about food?” said Lee Chatham, a Kansan with thick stubby fingers and a complexion that was frequently compared to no-man’s-land. A preacher’s son, Chatham had just joined the squad a few days ago, freshly minted and full of illusions. His brother had joined the Lafayette Escadrille two years earlier and been shot down over Verdun. Chatham was here to avenge him. I had tried to think if there was anything I could say to prepare him for what was to come but I couldn’t. You never could. Instead I made a note to myself to stay close to him during his first shelling.
    “I’d trade a herd of cattle for a good fuck right now,” said Lawton, whose favorite pastime was torturing us with descriptions of what it might be like to do so-and-so with so- and-so. His lisp—so at odds with his great bulk—gave dirty words an amusing urgency. (I could thur use thum puthy.)
    “Don’t even think about jerking off in here,” I said.
    “Yeah, why don’t you go up top and see if you can hit the German lines,” said Giles, who would take a good steak over a naked woman any day. “I’ll start a pool.”
    “I got ten Lucky Strikes says he can hit Berlin,” I said.
    “Aim for the Kaiser,” said Giles.
    “Or Ludendorff,” I said. “Yeah, hit the old bastard right in the fucking eye.”
    “You ladies are just jealous,” said Lawton.
    “You know what you are, Lawton?” said Giles, pausing to clear his throat and spit. “You’re a fucking goat.”
    “I know all about you farm boys from Ohio,” said Lawton, flicking the stub of his cigarette butt at Giles. Lately I’d noticed a certain strain in Lawton’s expression and I wondered whether maybe he talked about sex so much to cover up his fears.
    “So besides fucking, what do you intend to do with yourself when you get home?” I asked. “You going to stick with carpentry or maybe open a whorehouse or something?”
    “Hadn’t thought of that. I suppose I could build one from scratch.”
    “Yeah, but you’re going to have to share with your customers,” said Giles.
    “I’ll give you a first-timer’s discount,” he said.
    “Kiss my… I take that back, don’t kiss nothing.”
    I turned to Daniel. “What about you? What are you going to do when you get home?”
    He looked up from the letter he was writing. His hair was matted down and his lean face unshaven. “I don’t know. I’d like to write, or maybe teach. The war has sort of changed what’s important, don’t you think?”
    “So what’s important?”
    He thought for a moment. “Personally, I can only think of three things left that make sense doing.”
    “Well, let’s see, we’ve covered eating and fucking… I’m stumped,” said Giles, rubbing his jaw. Giles constantly suffered from toothaches (he’d had one pulled already), as well as debilitating heartburn, which he blamed entirely on the army diet, particularly the canned beef imported from Argentina by the French but widely derided as “monkey” or “Madagascar” meat.
    Daniel smiled, then turned back to his letter.
    “I’m listening,” I said.
    He looked back at me. “Well, I’d either like to reduce human suffering in some way, like being a doctor or helping the poor; create some sort of art, which is really a protest against suffering; or teach, especially young children, which might prevent further human suffering.”
    “Isn’t Daniel a fucking sweetheart?” said Lawton, who was now picking at his teeth with a small splinter of wood peeled from a nearby beam.
    “No shit,” said Giles. “My money says he’s gonna be famous someday.”
    “Bet you can get a scholarship somewhere,” I suggested.
    “Talk to Page, he’s the college man,” said Lawton.
    Nathaniel Page, a Harvard student, glanced up from the corner where he sat reading. Despite his education, upper-class background and good looks—tall, square