It centers around Nathan Levine, a lazy Specialist 3/C in the Army stationed at New Orleans who, along with several of his companions in the battalion are assigned to help with the cleanup at a small island named Creole, which has just been hit by a hurricane.

Rocco leaves for home, and Bolingbroke, Bodine, and Dennis turn in for the night, swapping sea stories as they doze off.

A weekend-long lease-breaking party devolves into disarray as Meatball Mulligan entertains a revolving door of cronies, servicemen, and jazz musicians while, in a hothouse room, Callisto and his lover Aubade ponder the everpresent condition of enclosed systems creating disorder while trying to nurse a baby bird back to health.

The temperature outside remains 37 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the day, fueling apocalyptic paranoia in Callisto, who pontificates on the discoveries of the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Clausius theorem, and Gibbs and Boltzmann, finally deciding that entropy is an adequate metaphor to apply to American consumerist society, "a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos."

Meanwhile, Meatball juggles his attention between conversations about communication theory and personal relationships, keeping the musicians from smoking marijuana in his place, and the unexpected entrances of three coed philosophy majors lugging gallons of Chianti and, later, five sailors searching for a whorehouse.

As the musicians discuss music theory, the girls and sailors chant drunken songs together, and childish chicanery break out all over, Meatball debates whether to hide in a closet until the party subsides its second wind or try to calm everyone down, one by one.

Callisto's bird fails to improve under the unchanging conditions, which causes Aubade to smash out a window of the hothouse with her bare hands, displacing the constant temperature of inside and outside and leaving the story in a state of hovering uncertainty of where the next moment will lead.

Sixteen years later, Goodfellow surveys a motorcade containing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, upon hearing rumors of a possible assassination.

Their "Inner Junta" talk about planning elaborate practical jokes, financed by collecting milk money from school kids.

The meeting adjourns to their secret hideout: the four of them depart, through a lush section of forest they dub King Yrjo's Woods, then down a stream aboard a refurbished flat-bottomed boat they christened the S.S.

McAfee can't afford to pay for the bottle of whiskey, much less the room he's staying in, and breaks down into screaming and crying in his bed, passing out in-between fits.

Later that year, the Junta discusses their parents’ concerns about Carl Barrington's family's arrival, and how it will affect the neighborhood and community.

Carl's family is a sort of trigger for the gentrification of the area, an easy target, an explanation for the racist remarks made by Tim's mother and reflected around the neighborhood, and gives light to the mockery of Hogan's dispatch to Mr. McAfee's aid.