“Just one. Sergeant Winslow.”
“Is he new?”
“No. He’s been with us since Guadalcanal.”
The second gambler proved to be the most nervous when undergoing questioning. He fidgeted nonstop. Only after his lieutenant offered him a cigarette did he stop drumming his fingers.
“Settle down, son. This isn’t a court martial.”
His boots stopped tapping the floor. “Thank you, sir.”
“But there will be one if you lie to me, boy! Who won the most money in your card game?”
The boots started tapping out what sounded like Morse code. “That would be Jason.”
“So after he cleaned you out you followed him up on deck, got into a fight, and he accidentally fell overboard. You got scared. Instead of yelling, ‘man overboard’ like we trained you to do, you hightailed it on back to your bunk and hid under your blankets.”
“Huh? The last I ever saw of Jason he was talking to that ensign friend of his. The one he calls the Professor. He’s the one you should talk to, not me. I didn’t do anything.”
“Who was the dealer for your game?”
“Sergeant Winslow.”
“Thank you, send in the last man.”
“Yes, sir.”
The third soldier bumped into the table as he balanced himself on a chair against the rolling motion of the ship.
“Have a seat, private. You old enough to be in the Army? You look too young for it.”
“My parents signed papers so’s I could join up when I turned seventeen, sir. I’m eighteen now. I know how to fight. Just ask the lieutenant there. He’ll tell you all about it.”
The lieutenant smiled. “No doubt about any of that.”
“I see. Well, it sure would be a crying shame for them to start getting letters from you from the prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. That’s where they send all of you doughboys right? I remember a few from World War I that I personally had shipped there because they didn’t want to follow my captain’s way of doing things aboard his ship. You’re a good fighter, huh? You’re going to need to be one sharing a cell with some other soldier who went bad. Because based on what I know so far you’ll probably get twenty, maybe even thirty years for being an accessory to PFC Dalrumple’s murder.” Captain Uley hoped his glare backed up his accusation, tossed out in hopes of ending this unscheduled ordeal.
“Murder? They killed him? I just heard Winslow grumbling and cussing that he was going to get his money back. That didn’t make any sense because he was just the dealer and didn’t place a single bet. You think maybe he fronted one of the other players some money? The rumor is that he’s a loan shark. I heard he charges a hundred percent interest.”
“That’ll be all. Lieutenant, please go get Sergeant Winslow and bring him here. Have him bring some of the hootch he served last night.”
“Have a seat, sergeant.” Captain Uley studied the buck sergeant’s beady eyes, which reminded him of the rattlesnakes he had shot as a youth on his grandparents’ ranch. But this was one snake of more value alive than dead, at least when it came to retrieving the last man who went overboard. “Did you deal all of the hands for PFC Dalrumple’s games last night?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll address the captain as sir, Sergeant Winslow!” The lieutenant’s face turned red. His spittle flew toward his trooper.
“Yes, sir.”
“How many hands did he win?”
“Thirty six out of fifty-nine hands. I keep track every time I deal.” He pointed at his head. “Obviously, he was cheating. No one wins that many times. I learned how best to spot cheaters because the casinos count on the dealers to catch them so they can toss them out on the sidewalk. That’s where I’m headed before too long. Las Vegas, here I come, right back where I started from.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together.
“I have a witness that you served a shot of hootch every time a player won three hands. Let me have some of it.”
He pulled a thin metal flask from his pants pocket and handed it to him. Captain Uley splashed a drop on his finger and tasted it. “About the strength of wine. How many shots did you give him?”
“Twelve. One for every three times he won.”
“What size were they?”
“About a fourth of a canteen cup each time.”
The captain turned to the lieutenant and asked for a conversion of the alcohol served by grimacing, shrugging, and holding his palms face up.
“That would equal about a bottle and half of wine, sir.”
“Thank you. Okay. So the hootch that you gave PFC Dalrumple and the cards you dealt from the bottom of the deck to your partner Corporal Bittendorfner weren’t good enough for the two of you cheating polecats to keep Dalrumple from winning. So maybe you drank a little too much moonshine and started thinking crazy, something that comes real easy to you dogfaces. Not that I blame you. You get to do all your killing up close and personal while us Navy boys get to sit back, relax, and blast the Japs to hell and back again with our guns miles offshore. You follow him up on deck and put a knife in him, take his money, and throw him overboard as shark bait.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must’ve tasted too much of my hootch.”
“Okay. You knocked him over the head, took his money, and then threw him over the side because he saw it was you.”
“Maybe someone else but not me. Jason was a real first class dumb ass. He was waving his wad of dough around so the whole company could see it. Any one of more than a hundred guys besides me could’ve mugged him for it. Why are you picking on me?”
“So, in other words, you went up on deck just to knock him out and take the money. But he fought back and accidentally fell overboard. That’s only manslaughter. Odds are you won’t be executed for that.”
Silence.
“I knew it!” Captain Uley jumped to his feet and pounded the table. “I’ve served on nine ships in my career and watched your type operate on two oceans. In my book you’re nothing but a bunch of no good two-bit sharks just waiting for your next sucker to come along so you can take him for every cent he has.” He leaned over the table until his face was a foot from Sergeant Winslow’s. “Just tell me what time he went overboard so we can narrow down the search or they’ll never find him, you idiot!”
Silence.
Captain Uley pulled his right hand back behind his head and made a fist.
“Go ahead and hit me. General Patton did it to one of his troops and they put his butt into a sling over it. At least you could get your name in the papers so’s folks back home could read about you.”
“Guard!” Captain Uley collapsed into his chair.
“Yes, sir?”
“Take this man to the brig and strip search him. Report back to me on how much money he has on him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s go search his locker and belongings, lieutenant.”
“So far, we’ve got nothing.” Captain Uley pounded his fist into a palm bruised by similar repeated blows of the past seven hours. “Sergeant Winslow had three dollars and change all together. But his snake eyes tell me he’s knows exactly when your friend went overboard.”
Ensign Rhinehardt’s Adam’s apple bounced up and down. “What can we do now, sir? I’m more scared for him than I ever was about going down because of some Jap sub getting off a lucky shot at us.”
“Pray, son, that either your friend drowned shortly after he hit the water or that one of the planes will somehow spot him.”
***
Makata the tiger shark spotted Jason first during his second afternoon of his being adrift and feeling more like driftwood than a soldier. Such an odd shape of a man inserted in a life preserver reminded the shark of a meal from a year ago. That life vest had been uneatable but the flesh of what it supported had proved tasty. Jason’s lack of food and water and the relentless sun combined with a hangover had dropped him into a never land of hallucinations. He had fi
nished talking to his parents and was now speaking with his girlfriend Thelma, or so he imagined.
“Yeah, that’s right, Thelma. Now that the war’s finally over we can get hitched and you can have the kids you always talk on and on and on about. Maybe we can even buy that little place you like so much. Is it still for sale…What…Who bought it…Oh. I guess we’ll just have to find another place, huh?”
The tiger shark could not hear the human’s words but instead the conversations of a pod of dolphins passing overhead screeched into her brain as the growing pups in her womb demanded nourishment of any sort. Let the dolphins have whatever it is up there. There is always a dolphin calf or one that is old or sick at the back of their packs. She circled back for easier prey. Perhaps there might even be enough left over to share with brother and sister sharks once first blood is drawn by rows and rows of teeth.
From the southwest, a seaplane droned two hundred yards above the choppy waves. Pilot watched the water to his left. Co-pilot scanned to his front and the right. They were the only crewmembers so as to conserve fuel and lengthen their search time. Two large thermoses of coffee kept eyes from closing.
“Hey, there’s something down there!”
“Where?” The pilot craned his neck.
“Three o’clock.”
The pilot shifted his eyes to the blue skies to their front. “Okay. I’ll do a 180 so we can take a closer look.” He banked the plane to the right. After completing a long, lazy about face, he dropped the plane to fifty yards above the water. “Looks like a whole bunch of somethings.”
The co-pilot focused his binoculars on what he had reported two minutes earlier. “Dolphins! A whole raft load of them!” He cursed.
The pilot shrugged and climbed back to 200 yards above the Pacific. He scanned the gauges. “We’re down to half a tank. Time to head back to base.”
“Yeah. I guess so. Too bad we couldn’t find that sailor.”
“The word I heard was that the guy was a grunt who went missing off of some transport ship.”
“Oh. Maybe he should’ve signed up for the Army-Air Force instead. No way those Jap torpedoes or kamikaze pilots can get to you way up here in the wild blue yonder.”
The pilot laughed. “Maybe so. But those Zeroes sure can do some damage.” He ran his hand over the patched cockpit, which had been riddled by enemy bullets three times and then stretched his left leg, through which one of the bullets had traveled. Since then the leg either ached or throbbed, depending on the temperature and humidity.
At first Jason thought the seaplane was a bird. But when it passed overhead 800 yards to his left he heard its twin engines. Too weak to wave his arms, he yelled at his rescuers instead. “Hey! Over here! About time you flyboys showed up.”
But the plane droned back to base, search and rescue slowly ending after two days of trying to spot a tiny dot in a sea of blue that stretched to every horizon. After the first three hours of staring at the water and listening to the engines’ nonstop drone, even the best of searchers were lulled into a state of being semi-hypnotized. As the plane continued to shrink back to what looked like a bird, Jason ran out of time to curse, cry, or pray. Now he was in the middle of the dolphins’ pod. One of its more inquisitive members bumped him with his long nose. The fins of his fellow dolphins terrified Jason.
“Ahh! Sharks!” Every story Jason had heard about the predators and the mangled remains recovered after one of their feeding frenzies paraded through his sleep-deprived mind. Some of the storytellers claimed it was better to take in lungs-full of water and drown than be torn limb from limb by razor sharp teeth. “Oh, God! Please let it be over quick!”
Fear, dehydration, and mania quickly exhausted the last of his reserves and he slipped into semi-consciousness. For the next hour, the most rambunctious of the dolphins played a game of water polo by using Jason as a ball. Their goal was a small island two miles distant; one that Jason would have passed by if not for the impromptu game. The dolphins decided the game was over when they left their unconscious ball 120 yards from shore. Three-foot waves pushed Jason onto the beach.
***
“You’ve got to snap out of it, boy! I can’t have any of my crew walking around like zombies all the time. You’ll either get yourself or the rest of us killed. It’s been weeks now since you lost your best friend. War is nasty. I’ve lost more friends since Pearl Harbor than I have fingers.” Captain Uley sat. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“You gave that up, too? You still doing penance because you think your method of winning at cards killed him?”
“No. I guess coffee just doesn’t taste as good anymore is all.”
“I need your help, son.”
He raised his head further. This was the first time in almost two years of service to Captain Uley that he had heard such a request, or from any superior officer for that matter.
“Yes, sir?”
“What do you know about atomic bombs?”
“Not a whole lot. I took physics in college. That professor lectured a lot about Einstein’s theory of energy. He talked like he actually understood it. Einstein was his patron saint.”
“Do you think the ones we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki really did as much damage as the reports we’ve heard about? It doesn’t seem possible for just two bombs to destroy two whole cities.”
“I don’t know. I…” He looked down at the floor again.
“Stay with me, ensign. No drifting off back into your dream world. In another couple of days we’ll be docking in Nagasaki. I’m going to send you ashore to visit at least one of those two cities that we blew to kingdom come with those atomic bombs just so you can see what happened first hand.”
“But why, sir?”
“Word is that they’re going to be doing some more tests on atomic bombs now that the war is all over. They’re going to need more than a few Navy ships for it from what I’ve been told by the Admiral. It would mean that you would have to extend for a while; my guess is probably for a year. Best I can tell it would be best for you to do it.”
“Extend? Why me? I just want to go home. Isn’t that all everybody wants to do now?”
“Ensign Rhinehardt, you’re still a certified basket case. I’ve seen what you’re going through happen to at least twenty of my men during this war. You need time to pull yourself back together. You’re not Humpty Dumpty. You’re a man. But you still are probably going to need a whole lot of time judging by the way you’ve been acting. You’re even losing weight.”
“I am?”
“Yes. Look, I’m telling you all this as a friend. I can’t order you to extend but I think you really need to decompress slowly back into being a civilian. Lord only knows you’re not meant to make the Navy a career. But to be fair I want you to see the aftermath of an A-bomb before you decide one way or the other on whether to extend.”
***
Kong had been the first one to welcome Jason to Monkey Island. When he did, the rest of his troop screeched and hollered warnings to not get close to the species that had kidnapped their ancestors from lush jungle filled with many fruits and then abandoned them on this tiny island of sand and coral.
In the 1800s a Spanish galleon sailing from Mexico to the Philippines had made an unscheduled stop on the island to conduct a funeral. Diego Luis Salvador Esperanza Vargas’ appendix had burst during the voyage. Try as he might, the ship’s surgeon’s operation failed to save him. Diego’s wife Lucia blanched at the thought of her husband being buried at sea until the captain agreed to put ashore for a burial. “Oh thank you, captain! Now the fishes won’t eat my husband.” She left the two monkeys her husband had bought in Mexico on the island because, “they serve no other purpose than reminding me of my dearly departed Diego.”
A male and female, the monkeys survived on the coconuts and breadfruit that grew high up in the trees. They formed a loose alliance with birds that nested in them. Together, they battled rats, the only other mammals t
hat inhabited the island. Survivors, the rats would scale the trees in search of eggs, baby birds, and later on, baby monkeys to devour. But the growing band of monkeys hated the vermin and enjoyed knocking them to the ground. After high tides receded, the rats gobbled up anything edible left on the beaches. Always resourceful, the rats dug up Diego’s corpse and feasted on it. Crabs that came ashore at high tide finished off what little the rats left.
Generations of monkeys later and two years before PFC Jason Dalrumple washed up on shore, a PT boat crew had been temporarily marooned on the island. A squadron of Japanese Zeroes used the PT boat for target practice until it ran aground on a reef a hundred yards from the nearest beach. The crew spent two weeks on the island before being spotted by a flight of P-47 Thunderbolts who were returning to base. What first drew the American pilots’ attention was the lone Zero that was strafing the island. Two of the P-47s peeled off from their formation and approached the Zero from ten o’clock high and two o’clock high, the favorite tactic of their two pilots. Whenever they did so, the enemy aircraft in their sights was caught in a deadly crossfire and either ended up as a statistic painted on the sides of the Thunderbolts or if lucky, limped back to base.
After sending the flaming Zero into the Pacific, the two pilots buzzed the island to see why the enemy aircraft had strafed it. When the surviving PT boat crew waved from a beach, the two P-47 pilots dipped their planes’ wings in response and radioed base to launch a rescue of the survivors. Later, one of the pilots died during the liberation of the Philippines, the other went to work for the airlines after the war ended and retired from the cockpits of Boeing 707s.
The monkeys on the island rejoiced at the rescue of the PT boat crew’s survivors, who had overstayed their welcome by hunting down some of its inhabitants. Eleven of the monkeys died as hungry sailors shot them for the meat on their bones. That was why the remaining troop of simians chattered and screeched fiercely as Kong approached the waterlogged Jason, who lay unconscious on the beach and bruised from the dolphins’ game of water polo.
One yelled at Kong in the language understood by their kind. The noise partially roused Jason. He thought he heard the monkey say, “Don’t do it! He looks like those who killed and ate some of us. The two-legged creatures are worse than the rats.”
Day of the Bomb Page 2