“He panicked.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He must be out of his mind,” said Brinker energetically, “to do a thing like that. I’ll bet he
cracked up, didn’t he? That’s what happened. Leper found out that the army was just too much
for him. I’ve heard about guys like that. Some morning they don’t get out of bed with everybody
else. They just lie there crying. I’ll bet something like that happened to Leper.” He looked at me.
“Didn’t it?”
“Yes. It did.”
Brinker had closed with such energy, almost enthusiasm, on the truth that I gave it to him
without many misgivings. The moment he had it he crumbled. “Well I’ll be damned. I’ll be
damned. Old Leper. Quiet old Leper. Quiet old Leper from Vermont. He never could fight worth
a damn. You’d think somebody would have realized that when he tried to enlist. Poor old Leper.
What’s he act like?”
“He cries a lot of the time.”
“Oh God. What’s the matter with our class anyway? It isn’t even June yet and we’ve already got
two men sidelined for the Duration.”
Two?”
Brinker hesitated briefly. “Well there’s Finny here.”
“Yes,” agreed Phineas in his deepest and most musical tone, “there’s me.”
“Finny isn’t out of it,’ I said.
“Of course he is.”
“Yes, I’m out of it.”
“Not that there’s anything to be out of!” I wondered if my face matched the heartiness of my
voice. “Just this dizzy war, this fake, this thing with the old men making ...” I couldn’t help
watching Finny as I spoke, and so I ran out of momentum. I waited for him to take it up, to
unravel once again his tale of plotting statesmen and deluded public, his great joke, his private
toe hold on the world. He was sitting on his cot, elbows on knees, looking down. He brought his
wide-set eyes up, his grin flashed and faded, and then he murmured, “Sure. There isn’t any war.”
It was one of the few ironic remarks Phineas ever made, and with it he quietly brought to a close
all his special inventions which had carried us through the winter. Now the facts were re-
established, and gone were all the fantasies, such as the Olympic Games for a.d. 1944, closed
before they had ever been opened.