He imagines West Virginia girls as coarse hard-bodied laughers, like the young whores in Texas. Their sugar drawls always seemed to be poking fun but then he was nineteen. Coming down the street with Hanley and Jarzylo and the Shamberger the tight khaki making him feel nervous and the plains breaking away on all sides the horizon no higher than his knees it seemed and the houses all showing families sitting on sofas inside like chickens at roost facing TVs. Jarzylo a maniac, cackling. Rabbit couldn’t believe this house was right. It had flowers in the window, actual living flowers innocent in the window and he was tempted to turn and run. Sure enough the woman who came to the door could have been on television selling cake mix. But she said, ‘Come on in boys, don’t be shaaeh, come on in and heyiv a good taa,’ said it so motherly, and there they were, not as many as he’d pictured, in the parlour on old-fashioned-looking furniture with scrolls and knobs. That they were pretty homely made him less timid, just ordinary factory-looking women, you wouldn’t even call them girls, with a glaze on their faces like under fluorescent lights. They pelted the soldiers with remarks like balls of dust and the men sneezed into laughter and huddled together surprised and numb. The one he took, but she took him, came up and touched him, hadn’t unbuttoned her blouse more than one button from the last one and upstairs asked him in her gritty sugar voice if he wanted the light on or off and out of choked throat he answered ‘Off’ laughed, and then now and then smiled under him, working around to get him right, and even speaking kindly: ‘You’re alright, honey. You’re gone along all right. Oh yeaas. You’ve had lessons.’ So that when it was over he was hurt to learn, from the creases of completion at the sides of her lips and the hard way she wouldn’t keep lying beside him but got up and sat on the edge of the metal-frame bed looking out the dark window at the green night sky of Texas, that she had faked her half. Her mute back showing in yellow-white the bar of a swimming-suit bra angered him; he took the ball of her shoulder in his hand and turned her roughly. The weighted shadows of  her front hung so careless and undefended he looked away.