Lieutenant Foster clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That’s what they all say. Sometimes it’s the last thing they say.” He eyed Joe. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I can swing it,” Joe said stubbornly.
Foster looked down at the card on which he’d recorded Joe’s marks for the session. “Maybe you can, by God. Next time you go up, you’ll go up by yourself.”
“Thank you, sir!” Joe wanted to get all excited. He did get all excited, but he didn’t let most of it show. He was damned if he’d act Italian in front of somebody who looked the way Wiley Foster did.
He did head back to the barracks at the next thing to a dead run. When he first got to Pensacola, he and his roomie had shared a tent. Some cadets still slept under canvas-no enormous handicap in the steamy Pensacola summertime. But he and Orson Sharp had graduated to better things.
By the time he got to the two-story brick barracks building, he was drenched in sweat. San Francisco hadn’t come close to getting him ready for Florida heat and humidity. His father was a fisherman; he’d gone out of Fisherman’s Wharf with his old man on weekends and during summers before he landed the job at Scalzi’s garage. Till he got here, though, he’d never understood what a lobster went through when you dropped it in boiling water.
Heat and humidity or not, he took the stairs two at a time. He ran down the hall and threw the door open. Orson Sharp sat in a chair by his bunk, studying navigation. The cadet from Salt Lake City was big and fair and even-tempered. He didn’t swear and he didn’t drink coffee, let alone beer. Sharp was the first Mormon Joe had ever met. Joe sometimes thought he was too good to be true, though he never would have said so.