by James Jones
Mrs Kipfer shook her head hopelessly to Stark. “What are you going to do with one like that?”
“He’s a character, aint he?” Stark said.
“Are you hurt, too, Maylon?”
“No, Maam,” Stark said. “Nothing but this.” He touched a sizeable lump on his cheekbone that was gradually spreading a purple sunset up into the hollow of his eye.
Mrs Kipfer examined the eye and clucked her tongue.
“Hows your First Aid, Gert?” Warden said. His eyes sparkled at her devilishly. “You think you need a refresher course?”
“I wish you would stop calling me Gert,” Mrs Kipfer said irately. “Its vulgar. To me the name Gertrude always has the connotation of a whore.”
Warden laughed out loud.
“And you know it, Milt Warden. If I didnt know you were being playful, I’d really resent it.”
“I’m sorry, Gert,” Warden grinned at her. “You know quite well I never mean to be vulgar.”
“I know,” Mrs Kipfer said. “And thats the only reason I dont have you thrown out.”
“Noww, Gert,” Warden grinned at her.
“Well, come on,” she said irritably. “You two cant go out front looking like this. You’ll have to wash up, and I have some stray uniforms lying around you can both change into.”
She led them down the hall like a hostess conducting her guests, Warden keeping up a laughing patter all the way.
“I’ve always said you missed your calling, Gert. You should of been a fraternity mother.”
Stark followed them, looking around curiously. It was the first time he had ever been out in back, in the “living quarters.” The bathroom was scented with feminine powders and ointments and bathsalts, and a soap that smelted like gardenias. He was going to enjoy washing up, voluptuously,
“Hey!” he said suddenly. He had his hand in his pocket. “Hey, my money’s gone.”
Warden began to laugh. “Whats the matter. You didnt lose that precious hundred bucks?”
“I cant find it,” Stark said dully.
Warden leaned back against the wall and began to laugh uproariously. Stark was still trying pockets. He tried them all, numbly, even the watch pocket. The folded sheaf of bills was gone.
“Maybe,” Warden said between peals of laughter, “maybe Gert’s got a flashlight so you can hunt all up and down the alley. No, I forgot. Its still daylight, aint it?” He began to laugh again, his head leaned back weakly on the wall, his big hands hanging at his sides.
“Whats this about the alley?” Mrs Kipfer said. She was coming down the hall with an armload of CKCs.
“Oh,” Warden gasped, rolling his head back and forth on the wall and leaving a grease spot, “oh. Oh. This damn fool lost his roll in the fight. He is without doubt the biggest sucker I ever seen in my life. What’d you flash it for? Thats probly why they started the fight in the first place.”
“It was you started the fight,” Stark said dumbly, his hands still working at the pockets.
“Oh, thats right, I did, dint I? Oh,” Warden gasped. “Oh Christ. Oh.”
“I think its unkind of you to laugh, Milt,” Mrs Kipfer said.
“It is,” Warden said. He began to laugh uproariously again.
“How much did you have in your roll, Maylon?” Mrs Kipfer said.
“Hundred and thirteen bucks,” Stark said dully.
“Oh, that is too bad,” she said. “Is there anything I can do?”
“You can loan him a hundred and thirteen bucks,” Warden said, still laughing.
“Naw,” Stark “said. “I couldnt find it anyway.”
“Flashing a roll like that in that joint,” Warden gasped. He burst out laughing uproariously again. “No wonder somebody rolled you. I’ll bet it was Rose! What’ll you bet; I’ll bet it was Rose.”
“Naw,” Stark said. “She was never near me.”
“Oh, Brother!” Warden gasped. He shoved himself away from the wall weakly. “You better re-enlist, Texan.”
“Well, I guess that cooks me,” Stark said. “I’m done. I might as well go home.”
“You could sit out in the waiting room and wait for Milt, I suppose,” Mrs Kipfer said sympathetically. “Of course, its terribly crowded,” she added. “I doubt if you could find a seat.”
“Well, I guess I better get into this uniform,” Stark said dully.
“Wait a minute,” Warden said. “Dont go yet.
“I tell you what,” he said. “Its crowded as hell out front. They’re lined up outside all the way down to the corner. Its worse than Payday when the fleet’s in.”
“Well?” Mrs Kipfer said cautiously.
“I got two hundred and six bucks here, Gert,” Warden said effervescently, getting out his wallet. “I’ll give you a hundred and fifty of it, if you’ll go out front and get me and my pal two of your lovely young ladies and bring them back here to us and let us have this place the rest of the day.”
Stark turned around and looked at him disbelievingly, the CKCs still hanging from his hand.
“But they can make more money than that out front,” Mrs Kipfer said carefully, “on a day like this.”
“I doubt it,” Warden said irrepressibly. “I sincerely doubt it. But I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go up to two hundred bucks, if you’ll provide us with a bunch of steaks and half a dozen bottles.”
“Steaks!” Mrs Kipfer exclaimed. “Where on earth would I get steaks.”
“Dont kid me,” Warden grinned. “Dont try to snow an old bull like me, Gert. I know you keep steaks around here for when the big brass comes down from Shafter for a party. Now what do you say? Two hundreds bucks, and you throw in the steaks and whiskey.”
“Well—” Mrs Kipfer said dubiously.
“We’ll cook them ourselves,” Warden said. “I love to cook steaks. The Texan here is the best Mess/Sgt in the Army. If you furnish your own steak, I’ll have him cook you one, too.”
“Heavens, no!” Mrs Kipfer said. “If I ate a steak today, the nervous strain I’m under, it would kill me. I dont know,” she said doubtfully.
“Yes, you do,” Warden grinned. “You know you’ll never get a better deal. And if you think you can get any more, you’re crazy. Two hundred bucks is all I got. What do you say? Its nearly noon.”
“Its ten-thirty,” Mrs Kipfer corrected.
“Its nearly noon and we’ll have to leave at five-thirty to make it home before the curfew. How about it? Take it or leave it. Is it a deal?”
“Well,” Mrs Kipfer said.
“Its a deal!” Warden said irresistibly. “Its a deal. If you love me, Gert. You always said you did.” He grabbed Mrs Kipfer and danced her, capering, around the hallway.
“For goodness sake!” Mrs Kipfer said breathlessly. “Let go of me!” She stepped back, blushing, and smoothed her hair. “I’ll go out and get them. You know where the icebox is. And the stove.”
“I want that new gal,” Warden said, wiggling his eyebrows. “That Jeanette.”
“All right. Who do you want Maylon?”
Stark, who liked to spend money himself, but who had been too flabbergasted to say anything at all, scratched his head. “I dont know. Lorene?”
“Lorene left on the Lurline today,” Mrs Kipfer said. “But Sandra’s still here. She’s not leaving till next month.”
“Well,” Stark said.
“Thats all right,” Warden put in irrepressibly. “Thats all right. We’ll suffer that inconvenience. This time.”
“Sure, thats all right,” Stark said.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go get them.”
“Come on,” Warden said as she left. “Lets fry a steak. Right now, I’m hungry as hell. Come on, lets fry all four of us a steak.”
“We got to get into these uniforms first,” Stark said.
“I’ll put the steaks on,” Warden said. “You go ahead. I’ll be right with you.”
“You know something?” Stark said excitedly. “Something’s happened to me.
I’m not drunk at all. I used to have to be drunk as hell. I’m changed.”
“You used to be an American male,” Warden said. “Now you’re a man of the world, like me. Its the same thing as going to Europe and seeing the uncensored movies before they cut them in this county. You’re never the same again.”
“Its something,” Stark said.
“Would you like your steak rare, medium or well?” Warden said. “We serve them all ways.”
“Rare,” Stark said.
When the two girls came in and locked the big metal door against the hubbub behind them, the smell of the frying porterhouses was already floating through the place.
“Oh!” the little dark girl Jeanette, the new one, squealed. “This is going to be a lovely party. I love lovely parties.”
“Thank the man there,” Stark said.
Warden, standing at the stove, laid down the spatula and bowed. “Come here, little thing,” he said. He sat down and picked her up and set her on his knee like a doll. “Tell me, are you French?”
“Wheres the liquor?” Stark said.
“My momma and pappa are,” Jeanette said. “Oh, this is going to be a lovely party!”
“I’ll get some,” Sandra said. “What did you show the old bitch? to make her loosen up like this?”
“Then you and I have much in common,” Warden said. “I got French ancestors myself.”
“Money,” Stark said. “Get the liquor.”
“Tell me, little thing,” Warden said. “Do you love me?”
“Yes, I love you,” Jeanette squealed happily. “I’d love anybody who’d get me out of there, on a day like today.”
“Well, I love you, too,” Warden said.
“Oh, honey,” Sandra said, setting two bottles on the table. “Do I love you. I’ve been hungry for the past hour and a half. Do I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Stark said.
“Me and my dollbaby are going down the hall,” Warden said, “and play some pattycake. You watch the steaks.”
Stark, sitting half on the chair beside Sandra with his arm around her, turned his head over his shoulder toward the door as Warden went out through it.
“You hurry back,” he said.
“Dont you burn those steaks,” Warden said.
Chapter 57
KAREN HOLMES, STANDING at the promenade deck railing of the ship and looking back, thought it was too beautiful a place to leave.
She had stood there while the confetti had been thrown and the Navy band had played Aloha Oe and the bunting streamers had come down with the gangplank and the yoohooing passengers had crowded the rail to wave good-by. And now, while they slid out past Fort Armstrong through the channel past Sand Island and on out through the reef and the restlessly excited passengers began to thin out and go below, she still stood there.
They said there was an old Hawaiian legend that if you threw your lei overboard as you passed Diamond Head it would tell you whether you would ever come back again. Don Blanding had squeezed a few poems and a great many tears out of it. Karen did not think she would ever be back but she decided to try the legend anyway, as they passed Diamond Head, and see.
She was wearing, altogether, a total of seven leis. The bottom one was a red and black paper lei the Regiment gave to all its short-timers and there were, progressively more expensive, a carnation lei from the Officers’ Club, another one from Major Thompson’s wife, one from Holmes’s old Battalion Commander’s wife, a ginger lei from Col Delbert’s wife, a pikaki lei from General Slater, and on top the pure white gardenia lei Holmes had bought her when he saw her off. The seven leis made a collar of flowers that came clear up above her ears, as she stood on at the rail.
Dana Junior, freed from the necessity of standing at the rail to wave good-by to his father, was already back toward the rear of the ship in the middle of the deck at the shuffle-board courts with two other lovable small boys screaming at each other that they were shuffleboards and pushing each other up and down the slick wood courts to prove it. He was out of harm’s way there, and she would let the stewards worry about the damage to their shuffleboard courts. That was one of the fine things about being on shipboard, and she might as well avail herself of it.
Behind them, seeming to wheel as the big ship swung out of the channel east down along the reef, the city clustered around Fort Street and Nuuanu Avenue with that antheap look all downtown cities have. Behind it climbing the shoulders of the mountains sat the profuse multi-colored houses of the suburbs, their windows every now and then catching the sunshine gaily. And above it all the solid unchanging mountains stood in their tropic greenness that seemed to drip down in patches and threaten to engulf the carefully man-constructed streets and houses. And between them, ship and shore, nothing but air. Air reaching clear down to the water and clear up into the sky, with that expansive far-vista look that you got nowhere else except on the sea or the tops of high mountains. There was no more true a picture of Honolulu anywhere, than from out here.
On shore straight in front of them she picked out Kewalo Basin the harbor for the fishing fleet. Next would come Moana Park, and then the Yacht Basin. Then pretty soon Fort De Russy, and then Waikiki.
“Its very beautiful, isnt it?” a man’s voice said beside her.
She turned to find the young Air Corps Lt/Col, who had been standing beside her in the press when they left the pier, leaning on his elbows on the rail a few steps off and grinning ruefully. After they had lost sight of the pier and the crowd had begun to thin he had moved away up the rail, and then he had gone off somewhere, probably to take a turn around the deck, and she had forgotten all about him.
“Yes it is,” she smiled. “Very beautiful.”
“I think its the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in my life,” the young Lt/Col said. “Let alone had a chance to live in.” He flipped his cigaret overboard and crossed his ankles, and the effect was the same as if he had made a fatalistic shrug.
“I feel the same way about it,” Karen smiled. She could not get over a feeling of astonishment at how young he was, for a Lt/Col, but then they were all like that in the Air Corps.
“And now they’re shipping me back home to Washington,” he said.
“How come they are sending a pilot like you back on a ship?” Karen smiled. “I should think you’d fly.”
He touched his left breast, where there were some ribbons but no wings, deprecatingly.
“I’m no pilot,” he said guiltily. “I’m in the administrative corps.”
Karen felt a twinge but hid it. “Still, I’d think they’d fly you back?”
“Priority. Priority, my dear lady. Nobody knows what it is. Nobody understands it. But its priority. Anyway, I’d just as soon go by boat. I get air sick, but I dont get sea sick. Aint that a riot?”
They both laughed.
“Thats the God’s truth,” he said earnestly. “Thats what washed me out. They say its something in my ears.” He sounded as if it was the greatest tragedy of his life.
“Thats too bad,” Karen said.
“C’est la guerre,” the young Lt/Col said. “So, now I am going back to Washington where I know absolutely no one. To help the War Effort. After I’ve been here two and a half years and know every place and damn near every body.”
“I know quite a few people in Washington,” Karen offered. “Maybe I can give you some addresses before we leave ship.”
“Would you really?”
“Surely. Of course, they’re not any of them Senators or presidents of anything, and none of them know Evelyn Walsh McLean.”
“Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” the young Lt/Col said.
They both laughed again.
“But I can promise they’re all nice people,” Karen smiled. “You see, my home is in Baltimore.”
“Not really!” the young Lt/Col said. “Is that where you’re going?”
“Yes,” Karen said. “My son and I are. For the duration.”
“�
��and six months,” the young Lt/Col said. “Your son?”
“Thats him over there. The biggest one.”
“He looks like a lot of boy.”
“He is. And all of it already betrothed to the Point.”
The young Lt/Col looked at her then, and Karen wondered if she had not sounded bitter.
“I’m originally an ROTC man, myself,” he said.
He looked at her again, carefully, out of the boyish eyes and face, and then he stood up. Karen felt subtly complimented. “Well, I’ll be seein you. Dont forget about those addresses. And dont wear your eyes out on that shoreline.”
Then he put his hands on the rail. “Theres the Royal Hawaiian,” he said ruefully. “They’ve got the most beautiful cocktail lounge in that place I ever saw. I wish I had a dime for every dollar I’ve spent in there. I wouldnt be rich but I’d have a lot of poker money.”
Karen turned to look and saw the familiar pink gleam from among the green, way off there on shore in the distance. It was the first thing everybody pointed out to her, when they had first come in. That was almost two years ago. And right next to the Royal was the dead white gleam of the Moana. As she remembered, she did not think anyone had pointed out the Moana to her, coming in.
When she looked back the young Air Corps Lt/Col was gone. She was alone at the rail except for a small slight girl dressed all in black.
Karen Holmes, for whom love was over, felt a little relieved. She also felt even more complimented. Still looking up forward toward the bow, she watched Diamond Head slowly coming towards them.
If the lei floated in toward shore, you would come back. If it floated out to sea, you wouldn’t. She would throw them all over, all seven of them; it would be better than keeping them and seeing them dry up sourly and wither. Then she amended it. She would keep the red and black paper lei from the Regiment. That would do for a souvenir. Probably every Enlisted Man who had ever served in the Regiment and gone back Stateside had one in his footlocker. Karen had acquired a new understanding, and a very powerful affinity, for the ways of Enlisted Men in the past ten months.