A band pumped at a lagging march somewhere up the street and Hank felt that lagging beat hammer at his temples in the brassy glare. Maybe he needed a straw hat, he thought, and plucked one from the head of the first passer-by who looked like he had the same head size; the hatless man stared with his mouth open, but seeing the look on Hank’s face remembered he had a better hat at home on the draining-board anyway. Hank rolled the cycle against a pole where a flag hung limp in the windless heat and went into a grocery for a quart of cold beer; he held the paper sack twisted about the bottleneck and drank the beer as he worked his way down the sidewalk in the direction of the band music. He tried to smile, but his face felt as baked as the farmers’. Besides, why bother? The hicks look like hicks and the tourists and townspeople keep glancing from left to right, looking for photographers from Life or watching out for exploding torpedoes from the smart-ass kids. Everyone, he thought, looks like they’re waiting for something to happen, or pissed because they just missed it. “Oh, just the heat,” he told himself. He’d seen these same faces fixed with these same looks in every town and city he’d driven through since he’d left New York. “The trouble,” he told himself, “is nothing but the heat, and the World Situation.” Still, the people he met, why were they all either hurrying nervously to some deal, some big shady deal that they didn’t really believe would ever materialize? or all bitching halfheartedly because that deal had just fallen through? Their alert preoccupation annoyed him. Dammit, he’d just returned from a police action that had taken more lives than the First World War, to find the Dodgers in a slump, frozen apple pie just like Mom useta make in all the supermarkets, and a sour stench in the sweet land of liberty he’d risked his life defending. Plus an unusual foreign worry on the Average American Guy he’d just saved from the insidious peril of Communism. What the hell was wrong? There was a kind of bland despair and the sky was filled with tinfoil. What was wrong with people? He didn’t remember people around Wakonda being so damned watered down, or so revved up either. “Those boys out West, they got style...grit.” But as he pushed his face into the arid American wind and moved through Missouri, Kansas, Colorado without observing any evidence of that style or grit, he had grown more and more uneasy. “The heat, and that muddle overseas”—he tried to diagnose a national malady. “That’s really all it is.” (But how come it’s every place I look? from the littlest kid to the oldest rummy?) “And of course the humidity,” he added lamely. (But how come I felt like I was going wild with a sort of bloated exasperation and I had to hold in for all I was worth to keep from popping one of those sunstruck faces and yelling wake up, blast your ass, wake up and look around you! Here I am just back from risking my hide in Korea making America safe from the Commies ...Wake up an’ take advantage. I bring this up, this occasional urge to pop somebody and wake them up, because it was one urge I knew I was going to have trouble with now that the kid was back. The urge generally follows that feeling of bloat and exasperation. Like it wasn’t long after I got that bloaty feeling cycling across country that me and some gleef in a bar got into it pretty good. In that town where I met Viv. A big guy, about three sheets gone and me about the same. He made some crack about the military when he saw a drunk soldier on the street outside the bar and I told him if it wasn’t for that soldier out there he’d maybe be over in Siberia right now working off that spongy gut instead of sitting with his ugly nose in a beer....He came back with something about me being a typical product of Pentagon propaganda and I said something about his looking like the product of somebody’s bullshit himself and before we knew it we were in a devil of an argument. Now I knew better. I knew even before we got it rolling that this here was the type asshole that subscribed to magazines like the Nation and Atlantic and probably even read them, and that I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance against him in an argument; but I was too oiled to keep my mouth shut. And it was like it usually is when I get in an argument with somebody who knows more asleep than I do wide awake: I talked myself out on one of these little crickety limbs to no place and ended up hanging out there like a damned fool; with the adrenalin pumping and my mouth flapping its wings to try to fly farther ferchrissakes out instead of retreating back along that same illogical limb I got my dumb ass out on in the first place. So after I’d talked myself out far enough with this guy I got down to doing what I’d been working up to all along.) As he walked down the sidewalk of the small Colorado truck-farming town during fair time, feeling the brass band beat at his ears, his anger mounted with the mercury in the thermometer. His kidneys throbbed from the long jarring on the cycle. The quart of beer had given him a dull headache. The slow, stumbling, worn-out beat of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” was a stinging insult to a man just out of uniform. And when a suntanned stroller in a bar with his flowered shirt unbuttoned to his hairy navel decided to calmly discuss some of the faults of the current foreign policy it was the last straw; (and just like I should of known better than to get into it with a guy who I could tell was bound to beat my ears down with facts and figures, this gleef should of known better than to kept on arguing with some guy who he could tell was eventually going to have to kick the living shit out of him . . .) after ten minutes of discussion Hank found himself cursing that ragged red and white and gold high-school band with the lagging beat through the bars of his cell window. (And I ended up the day cooling my heels in the local jug.) He hollered at the band until he became hoarse and self-conscious under the gaze of a crowd of large boys who gathered under his window to watch him; then he retired to his cot and plopped down in a cloud of dust that drifted through the beams of sun streaming between the bars. He smiled to himself. Apparently he’d made quite a spectacle out there, been the big event of the day. Through the window he could still hear the awed story of his fight being told and retold by the fortunate witnesses. Within an hour he had grown six inches and had a terrible scar running across his face, and it had taken ten men to subdue his drunken frenzy. (Of course, this feeling doesn’t last long—in fact, my cross-country exasperation was gone as soon as I’d busted that guy in Rocky Ford, so I didn’t even much mind the little rest with the law; and that’s where Viv and me met for the first time, too, in that jail—but that’s getting off the track . . .) Hank was wakened by a rapping on the bars. The cell was stifling and he lay soaked in sweat. The bars undulated grotesquely before his eyes for a second, then snapped straight; there stood a cop in khaki sweated dark under both arms; at his side was the tourist Hank had swatted, his face swollen and blue under the tan. A girl drifted past behind the two, half-transparent in the heat like some creature glimpsed uncertainly out of the corner of the eye. “Accordin’ to your things,” the cop said, “you just got back from overseas.” Hank nodded, trying to smile, trying to catch another glimpse of that girl. In the limbs of the chinaberry tree beyond the bars a bug creaked in the heat. “You were in the Marines,” the tourist informed him, a little nostalgically. “I served in the Pacific during the war ...did you se............