by Greg Jolley
I knew about the biweekly donations Mr. Nash made to the police, having been asked to deliver these from time to time.
“Let me call his office—” I started to say when a billy club struck my ribs hard and a fist punched the side of my head. Three sets of boots began kicking as I first knelt, then lay prone on the pavement. I was awake long enough for the initial explosions of pain, bombs going off on all parts of my body. Then everything went black.
I woke in an infirmary in the rear of a police station. I lay there with tubes and bandages, my goggles gone, the only sound coming from the medical equipment and the rain on the window high up on the wall. No one entered the room the first day, not a nurse, not a doctor. I wasn’t going anywhere—my right ankle wore a thick leather strap connected to the bed frame with a chain.
The window up on the wall became a black square at night, and the only light in the room was the faint green glow of the bulbs of the medical equipment. When the door finally opened, I watched a large man enter from the light in the hall. He wore a long coat and a dark fedora. I watched him cross the foot of the bed. He scraped a chair to my side and sat down with a grunt.
“Your Mr. Nash has gone down. Hard. No more movies. No more of his sickness with girls. We don’t need your testimony, which you should appreciate. We’re not even gonna have you sign the statement that’s been written on your behalf. A Mr. Ezra Mayer has yanked a few chains, greased your slide, if you will. And speaking of your slide, yours is at an intersection. But no worries, okay, Mr. Danser? We’ve made some choices for you. You’ve got two more days here to heal up, and then your whole new life begins. Rest up, boy.”
I wanted to ask for an explanation. I wanted to ask about what happened to Heidi Ho. I asked the officer if he knew where my goggles were. He pointed to the nightstand as he left the room.
View
To see; to behold; especially, to look at
with attention, or for the purpose
of examining; to examine with
the eye; to inspect; to explore.
Scene 9
I was greeted warmly by the recruiter, who was expecting me and had my ASVAB results, though I’d never taken the test. Someone had completed all of my paperwork prior to my arrival including my request for a seat in the Seabee school. All I really had to do the first two days was take the oath, watch my long, black hair get buzzed to the floor, and remove my goggles.
I didn’t mind the missing hair, but parting with the goggles was difficult. There was no choice, and I was told I could keep them with my few other personal belongings. Within twenty-four hours, I was functioning well without them. There was no reason for eye contact, which wasn’t possible. Instead, I followed verbal orders constantly screamed into our faces.
I called the guesthouse every chance I got. Hilda reassured me that Pierce was well, and they were doing fine.
“Thank you, and give him my love.”
I also told her where the cash packets were.
MY FELLOW recruits and I were marched onto a train where we spent the next two days traveling to boot camp. It was two days and nights in a crowd of voices, most of us sleeping on the floor.
On the military base, I discovered that I made a good Seabee—a puppet, if you will—staying on course with instructions and orders without questioning, without thinking. Those weeks were a blurred scramble of fall in, fall out, before dawn to way past dark. It was a swirl of intense mental and physical training including close-order drills and long marches and classes on shipboard conduct. I learned to live in close quarters with strangers in bunks stacked three high.
Later, there was construction operations training before I was sent to an adjunct specialty school for filming documentaries and camera operations and maintenance. That was followed by three weeks of basic combat training where I was qualified on different weapons and learned how to set up defensive perimeters for combat zones.
Following the completion of combat training, I received deployment orders and took another train trip. I was assigned to administrative duty in SFAC—the Seabee Film Archive Center.
I quickly learned my new duties. I worked in film restoration and archive filing, learning the indexing system that made no sense, but was also perfectly logical, I was told. During this assignment, I discovered the massive library of stereoscope reels. During World War II, 3D images had played a big part in measuring details of terrain and structures for bombing. I enjoyed the work, and the assignment was eerily appropriate for my qualifications making me wonder if strings had been pulled and by who.
Midway through my first six months, I received my first—and only—stateside parcel. Six-year-old Pierce and Hilda had baked a dozen sugar cookies which arrived in crumbs inside the battered box. I savored each broken bit, eating them slowly over the next two weeks. In my next letter to Pierce, I wrote:
My darling Pierce,
Thank you for the wonderful cookies. I love that you helped make them.
I miss you and will be home as soon as my tour of duty ends. Please stay close to Hilda’s side.
I can’t wait until we are back to making movies.
You are in my heart,
Dad
I HAD the archive films and the stereoscope reels to live within during the day. When off duty, I took to studying the sky from within my 3D goggles. Often the moon brushed my cheeks as the stars tapped and tickled the tip of my nose and brow.
It was during one of my rooftop idyllics that I was visited by Lieutenant Ezra Mayer, who climbed the ladder to where I lay on the tarpaper. He sat down beside me. I quickly sat up to salute his seniority, but he waved that off.
“At ease. Hello, BB. If you’ve been wondering who has been guiding your path in the service, look no further. Your training has been sculpted, you might call it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Drop the formalities. For right now, we’re just a couple of movie makers up on a roof.”
“Sir?”
“Ezra, please. A long time ago…I was inappropriately and madly in love with your mother, your Mumm.” His words sounded as though planned carefully.
In the following silence, I aimed my goggles at the moon and stars.
“Sir…Ezra, where is she?” I asked.
“She…departed.”
“Is she alive?”
Ezra lay back fully and viewed the night sky.
“That’s the magic of a film career,” he said in a contemplative tone. “She lives on. Forever. Shame that she can’t duck out from under those plodding scripts.”
“Sir, what happened to her?”
“It’s Ezra. And that’s your mystery to unravel. Your puzzle to find the pieces to and put together. I can’t help you with that. Before she left me—left us—she asked that I do what I could for you. And I have. When your duty is complete, you should be well set for a studio career. That said, I am now casting you off.”
“Sir, you haven’t answered any of my questions.”
“That’s true. I can offer you this. You’re being reassigned. You’ll be documenting a clandestine operation. A rescue. It’s off the books. Before you ship out, buy yourself a transistor radio.”
“Sir?”
“No more talk. Relax. Lay back. View the heavens, or heaven, if you prefer.”
WHEN MY orders came, I went to the base store and bought a wallet-size AM radio.
Eleven days later, I was aboard a large ship where I was introduced to the five Seabees and four Specwar soldiers we would be supporting. We were assigned tight quarters in the metal belly of the ship near the bow segregated from the Navy personnel up above. Lt. Madera led the Specwar guys, and we reported to Lt. Dirks, who was tall and soft-spoken and very smart. Our two groups tried to get along, but we spoke different languages. There was some mutual joking and laughter during meals, and that was about it.
We were at sea for twenty-three days during which I learned as much as I could from my fellow Bees. The Seabees have many specialties—ai
rmen, fireman, seaman, and many more. Our team was made up of construction men. Lt. Dirks ordered my camera equipment to remain stowed as I listened and learned about their expertise and plans.
We debarked on a moonless night into calm seas, the nine of us and all our supplies loaded onto a motorized pontoon. We reached shore without incident and worked throughout that first night unloading and setting up a base camp under the supervision of Dirks. The Specwars got their supplies to shore and disappeared into the trees. Using the draping of the jungle for additional camouflage, we constructed their camp and ours two hundred yards up the rocky beach. Seabee Near was assigned to security as the sun rose, and we tented for three hours of sleep.
I awoke to heat and humidity and swarming, low clouds of sand flies. I sprayed my skin and face with repellent as I looked down to the shore and the sea. The transport ship was gone.
The mealtime chatter was that we were near an oil depot that wasn’t on any maps. Lt. Dirks pulled all five of us together and explained that our first task was to build a bridge over a river I could hear but hadn’t seen. I was ordered to film the construction and help in any way I was asked or ordered.
The talk was that the bridge was for civilian use, though no roads were connected to it. That first day, our work was started, stopped, and redone for the training film. I filmed with a 16mm handheld. These starts and stops were not my doing. Specwar Lt. Madera had different thoughts on the focus of the film. He wanted to be the star. He was a lean, tan, muscular officer in his late twenties, a handsome man whose uniform fit better than most. Now that we were on shore, he took to wearing a pair of very dark sunglasses above his fine nose. He was letting a mustache grow in. He and his men didn’t work on the bridge but were featured in their armed and ready security movements and positions.
Fifty yards up into the trees and growth, the river straightened out for twenty yards, and this was where the bridge would be built. We had winches and saws, cables and jacks. Two sections of our landing pontoon were dismantled and used as the primary crossing structure. We also moved and used trees and stone. The bridge was at the head of our track from the beach and just a way from a basin that filled from a twenty-five-foot waterfall.
We worked with our shirts off, our skin smeared with sunblock and bug spray. The work was difficult and exhausting, and during our ordered breaks, rules and regulations were relaxed. Some smoked cigarettes when not gulping water. In my case, I asked for permission to wear my 3D goggles—my corrective lenses.
Madera gave my goggles a single arched eyebrow, nodded approval, and barked, “Go see that your movie cameras are at the ready.”
The 16mm handheld was good to go. I unpacked two cans of fresh film to take to the next shoot. The left side of my equipment crate held the hefty, military-designed stereovision camera under its tripod and film cans. I was loading that camera with two reels of film and mounting it on the tripod when I was ordered back to bridge construction. I covered the camera with canvas to protect it from the probable rains and definite humidity.
We were ordered back to camp at sunset for a meal of MREs.
“Eat quick,” I was ordered. “You have night duty.”
I was told to march down to the shore and stand guard.
I stood in the sand at the tree line and watched the moonless, western sky and silver waves washing the rocks.
Late that night, when the sky was black silk and the stars were tapping my face and fingertips, I heard distant voices carrying from the jungle. They were the sounds of a party punctuated by small arms fire.
AT FIRST light, I was relieved by Dirks, who looked like a train wreck survivor. His eyes were red, his movements had lost all confidence, his lips were wet, and he was mumbling to himself. He didn’t take up the post but led me back into the jungle.
The camp looked like the scene of Dirks’ train wreck. The fire was out, and men were sleeping here and there, wherever they had dropped at the end of the night.
Madera was the only man awake. He stood at the far side of the clearing, hip high in the green brush with the jungle rising high above and around him. He was sharpening a machete with a square stone, his eyes harsh on his efforts while he talked to himself in Spanish.
Without looking up, he spoke to Dirks, who ordered me to “Get some winks before 0800.”
Sleep came fast in my shaded tent with the front flaps open in case we got a breeze. When I was woken two hours later by Nears just outside my tent, all the Seabees were up and about. The fire had been rebuilt and stoked, the camp was cleaned up, and there was order once again. A quick breakfast was eaten, and by 0830, we were looking and acting orderly. Madera pulled us together at the radio pack on a large, granite rock. Three of the four Specwars appeared, and Madera gave us our new orders.
“We are going to build an airstrip.”
Referencing his map, he explained that the site was eleven clicks away.
“We’ll be moving all equipment to the next location and setting up a new camp.”
I was ordered to film the packing and the departure of the team and then gather my camera and follow.
Two hundred yards into the foliage, we started climbing a narrow footpath that rose across the face of the southern cliff. Fifty yards up, we came to the first in a series of landings cut into the rock. From there, we carried equipment up a series of Z’s that traversed the mountain face. The climb was slow, but we completed it two hours before sunset when we were informed that the return trip would be used to improve the trail.
Working with pry bars, picks, shovels, and machetes, we worked downward, widening the trail and carving steps in the rock under ripe, green foliage. We also dug and moved stones to expand the mid-turn landings, which had views of the sea below. These, we were told, would later be used as sentry posts.
As ordered, I split my time between manning a shovel and pick and filming Madera’s skilled and firm leadership of our efforts. After we had cut the second sentry post, I filmed him standing strong and tall with the western sky at his back pointing and giving orders.
At nightfall, I was ordered down to our first camp to guard it. The two teams climbed away up the mountain to set up the second camp.
It took all the following day to finish the work on the steep trail and carry our remaining supplies up to the new camp. As before, my machete and shovel work was stopped from time to time by Madera to film him and the construction work. Our second camp was at the edge of a field of a crop gone to seed.
Standing in the shade of the high jungle, I was opening an MRE and trying to decide what the crop in the field had been.
“Have a banana?” Dirks offered from behind.
I turned, and he held out a small bunch—a few were yellow, but most were green. I accepted the bananas and watched him cut another bunch with the sharp edge of a hoe from the tree overhead.
“Tomorrow, we’re going to turn that mess into an airfield,” he said as he chewed and pointed.
I looked out into the overgrown field. It was eighty yards wide and nearly a half-mile long.
“How?” I asked.
He handed me the hoe.
“Just kidding,” he said, laughing.
I was again ordered to night security detail, and I was given four phosphorus flares to be placed twenty yards apart, forming a square in the north end of the field. I was told to light them at 0200.
I headed out while one of the Specwars distributed small tin cans and rags to all the men standing around the low campfire. I walked to the north end of the field with my four flares listening to their voices growing loud in a mix of laughter and confusion. I had stowed my transistor radio in my pocket thinking I might get reception from the top of the mountain.
At 0200, I lit the first flare. Ten minutes later, the four corners of a square were formed by white phosphorous. The white light from the flares was both blinding and beautifully sparkling, filling my goggles and fluttering on my cheeks and nose.
The helicopter came into view fas
t and loud, rising to the mountaintop from the ocean. It waddled above the phosphorus square just long enough to release an immense pallet that landed heavily, shaking the ground under my boots. The cables were released, and the helicopter flew away. We had been resupplied, including two odd-shaped vehicles.
The flares extinguished around the shapes before I could make out what they were. I assumed my fellow Bees would come out, and we would begin unloading, but I was wrong. After waiting a half hour, I sat down in the sticky, fragrant field looking up into the stars. In the distance, the team’s sporadic and chaotic voices carried off and on. When automatic gunfire scattered loudly, I was glad to be lying low in the hemp grass.
AT DAWN, I watched Near enter the field. He walked on uncertain feet and was weaving and whimpering to himself. He gave the pallet a half glance, nodded to me, and said, “You’re relieved.”
Without another word, he lay down on his side and pulled his knees up to his chest.
Back at the camp, I set up my tent and found sleep. An hour later, I was startled awake by the rumbling start of vehicle engines from the field.
Over the next eight days, the mountaintop was plowed under and graded. The field was leveled and then compacted. I alternated between camera work and manning hand tools as ordered. In the evening of the eighth day, Madera climbed up on the side of the bulldozer and spoke with Near, who was operating the vehicle. The two talked for a few minutes while referencing the map that Madera held.
Near drove the bulldozer to the southwestern end of the airstrip and turned into the jungle cutting a single swath, forming a rough and narrow track. I set up to film this and was ordered to stand down, so I stood and watched the bulldozer disappear into the far jungle. Both teams were ordered back to camp. From the west, I could hear the faint puffing and plowing of the bulldozer. Around sunset, it went silent. Neither he nor the bulldozer were ever seen again