PARTISAN REVIEW
My seesters are very nice and clean girls and wish to be teachers
in
a school. They have taught me to sew."
We were sitting
in
the treatment room of the hospital. The lazy,
warm quiet of the afternoon palled the activity of the whole building.
Two other corpsmen sat at one of the treatment tables, playing a
desultory game of cribbage. From behind the closed door of the
X-ray darkroom came the muted murmur of voices.
Murphy, the tall, scrofulous-looking pharmacist mate in charge
of the X-ray lab, came out of the darkroom, crossed to Ernesto and
me and slapped down upon the table before us a still limp enlarge–
ment of a snapshot. "Take a look at that, will you," he commanded.
"Some snatch!"
The photograph glinted faintly, the light catching in the linger–
ing moisture of the developer.
It
pictured a rather large but not bony
woman standing completely naked in a narrow, rocky stream, a
stream just like the ones I used to see on weekend liberty trips into
the low Sierras outside Los Angeles. The woman wore an intangible
expression of torpid eagerness, but I had the feeling she hadn't known
quite what to do with her hands when the picture was taken. You
could see the slow, cool break and ripple of the water above her ankles.
I looked at her, trying to show more interest than I felt in the snap–
shot. She had too much pubic hair, as I guess most peasant women
must have, but it did match the dull, darkish hair of her head.
"This ain't one of them professional pictures," Murphy said.
"This here is a nice girl, one of them decent babes everyone had for
a shack-up deal back stateside, back in pretty California."
"It
was made from a Kodak picture, wasn't it?"
"Sure," Murphy sniggered. "One of them little old box gadgets
you take with you on picnics and weener roasts."
"Where'd you get the original print?"
"Offen a chief laid up
in
Ward D. He traded us a couple pic–
tures of hls old girl friends-must be getting rid of his past. Traded
'em to us for taking a couple shots of him all dressed up
in
his new
chiefs cap to send to his old lady."
Ernesto was standing rigidly at my side, in one of his rare quiet
moments, staring
ove~y
shoulder at the photograph, and he seemed
to be almost holding his breath.
"What do you think of it, huh?" Murphy asked him.
798
