After living seven years with the mechanic Aldo, having a daughter with him, the simple woman Irma is informed that her absent husband had just died in Sydney. She becomes upset when Aldo proposes to marry her and she tells him that she is going to leave him. Unable to explain how much he loves her, Aldo takes their daughter Rosina and travels with her, meeting different women in different places, trying to establish a new relationship and fill the emptiness of his sentimental life. He visits his former lover Elvia; he meets and lives with the widow Virginia, who owns a gas station; he lives with the prostitute Andreina. But these relationships never complete the needy Aldo.

Cody Jarrett is the sadistic leader of a ruthless gang of thieves. Afflicted by terrible headaches and fiercely devoted to his 'Ma,' Cody is a volatile, violent, and eccentric leader. Cody's top henchman wants to lead the gang and attempts to have an 'accident' happen to Cody, while he is running the gang from in jail. But Cody is saved by an undercover cop, who thereby befriends him and infiltrates the gang. Finally, the stage is set for Cody's ultimate betrayal and downfall, during a big heist at a chemical plant.

After Confederate officer Blayde Hollister's home and family are destroyed by the Marlowe Brothers during the Civil War, he swears revenge, refusing to surrender and becoming a wanted man. In order to pursue the three brothers into Texas, Hollister fakes his own death in a staged gunfight with his friend Wild Bill Hickock. He then befriends Martin Weatherby, the newly appointed U.S. Marshal to Dallas, an affable, but not very experienced lawman, who agrees to let Hollister assume his identity. The eldest of the Marlowe brothers, Will, masquerades as a law-abiding real estate dealer while feigning righteous indignation over the brutal acts of lawlessness and violence visited on the honest citizens of Dallas by his sociopathic brothers, Cullen and Bryant. (Their parents were evidently fond of the renowned poet William Cullen Bryant). When Hollister becomes a rival for the affections of Weatherby's aristocratic fiancee Tonia Robles, Martin wonders whether he should let Blayde know that ...

The story concentrates on the social re-adjustment of three World War II servicemen, each from a different station of society. Al Stephenson returns to an influential banking position, but finds it hard to reconcile his loyalties to ex-servicemen with new commercial realities. Fred Derry is an ordinary working man who finds it difficult to hold down a job or pick up the threads of his marriage. Having had both hands burnt off during the war, Homer Parrish is unsure that his fiancée's feelings are still those of love and not those of pity. Each of the veterans faces a crisis upon his arrival, and each crisis is a microcosm of the experiences of many American warriors who found an alien world awaiting them when they came marching home.