3.

His blood count was finally normal. He did a hundred pushups and a hundred situps and a hundred pullups every day. He ran a hard two miles every day. He had lost fifty pounds after he got shot and he appeared to have no muscle at all. But his weight was back up to 190 pounds now. He had done high ironwork before the war and it had given him a lot of muscle density and the density persisted, dormant, until he got well enough to exercise.

By himself, he went to the Paramount Theater and watched The Best Years of Our Lives on a Wednesday afternoon. Then he went home and made himself a scotch and seltzer and sat in the chair by the window that looked out onto the street and lit a Lucky Strike and sipped the scotch. He looked at the white package of Luckies. Lucky Strike Green has gone to war. He smiled to himself with no amusement. Didn’t we all.

They hadn’t lived here long. The furniture had come with the apartment. She had done nothing to personalize it. There were no pictures. He went to the kitchen and made himself a salami sandwich and brought it back in and ate it and drank scotch and looked out the window some more.

There were more cars on the street than when he’d first got out of the hospital and sat staring all day out this window. Gas rationing had ended. There were new models for the first time since the war began. A thick-bodied, black and tan German shepherd dog trotted past the window, alone, going somewhere. Women walked past, some of them good-looking. Burke watched them go. Again, alone in the darkening room, he smiled slightly. For more than a year he had been focused on not dying. Now here he was eating, drinking scotch, smoking a Lucky, looking at girls. He glanced around the small, nondescript, uneventful apartment.

He said aloud, “I gotta get out of here.”

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