The men in Joe's hut wondered if there was any truth in what the man said. It stood to reason you took atabrine only to keep something in check. If they were hopping you up with dope, only so you could work without falling down, that was bad enough. But what if taking atabrine for three months, say, made you lose your power? Did it mean you couldn't ever have any babies? Or did it mean something worse? With wonderful funds of ignorance and superstition Joe and his friends considered the question from all angles. They found no answer to their informer's devastating insinuation: "All right! All right! How do you know you ain't losin' your power?"
Joe had no way of knowing. In fact, like hundreds of men on the rock, he had no reason to believe that he had any power. He had been in love once or twice, but he had never married. Nor had he slept with a girl. He had wanted to, once or twice, but morals, lost opportunities and all those strange things that keep men from doing what they otherwise want to, had intervened. He had to guess about his power, but he sure didn't want to lose it. As days passed and he became more yellow, he began to wonder darkly if maybe that guy was right. He wanted to talk to somebody about it, but he had noticed that whenever you got started on something like that, you got into trouble. Bad trouble.
Two months before, Joe was lying in his bunk. It was about eleven-thirty at night. Suddenly he heard a loud shout and sounds of a fight. With the rest of his hut he scrambled from bed in time to see two officers and three enlisted men rounding up a chief petty officer and a young seaman whose nose was bleeding.
A third officer hurried to each of the huts. "All right, men!" he said quietly. "Back to bed. Break it up, men. Break it up!"
Next morning hushed whispers flamed through the camp. No one ever said anything officially, but the C. P. O. and the seaman disappeared. Later Joe got the word. The chief got sixteen years in Portsmouth and the seaman two years in Mare Island. Eight nights later Louie sneaked into the nurse's room. The one whose plane was forced down. Louie went to jail, too. After that Joe just stayed away from everything to do with sex. It was an expensive luxury on the rock. "And," he had sworn, "it ain't gonna get me!"
Fortunately, a smart young doctor got wind of what was troubling the men. He wrote to Washington for an official statement that atabrine did not affect virility. It was signed by a Jew, an Irishman, a Protestant, and a doctor from a little town in Missouri. Eight hundred copies were made, and each man on the rock got one. But the young doctor's second idea was even better. He got a clever photographer who could copy pictures from magazines. Then he found two photographs of prominent movie stars who were attracting great publicity as bedroom athletes. He had the photographer make a poster seven feet by ten feet. The two movie stars were leering at one another. Below in big letters was their confession: WE JUST LOVE ATABRINE! Men came from all over the island to see the sign. It did a lot of good.
Joe had fought it out on the rock for sixteen months when two important events occurred in his life. He got a new skipper, and a liberty ship carrying some SeaBees stopped at the island for engine repairs. Joe's old skipper was sent home under some kind of a cloud. Either he went to pieces mentally or he got into trouble over the accounts of the officers' club. Joe never got the right of it.
The new skipper was a Navy type. He was a commander fifty-two years old. He would never go higher. He was a hard-drinking man who could not be relied upon. Yet he was an excellent fellow, and no one would prefer charges against him. So he dragged on and on, from one unimportant job to another. Many loved him but few respected him. Ambitious young men sought to leave his command at any opportunity, but they buttered him up while he was their superior. Some of them even bit their lips in silence when he made passes at their lovely wives. Before he was on the rock a week even Joe knew that he had been sent there as some kind of punishment. Something he had done in the States. Joe never got the right of it.
The Skipper, as he was known, started innovations at once. By God, he was the boss and things were going to be different. If he had to come to this god-forsaken island, he'd show them a thing or two. His first order was that each man must sleep under mosquito nets at all times. He almost had a mutiny on his hands, and the ringleader was Joe.
The huts in which enlisted men slept were foul things. Quonsets for eight men housed twenty-four. Men slept in double deckers, and even though there was a breeze at night, it could not penetrate the crowded quonsets. On some nights Joe lay in bed and sweated all night long. When the order came for mosquito netting, therefore, he rebelled. He tried it for two nights and found that he had what a doctor would have termed claustrophobia. He struggled with the net and almost strangled. In the hot, sweaty night he swore he'd not use a net again. He tore it off.
Next day he was before the new skipper. "I'm going to make an example of you," that red-faced man said.
When the words were spoken, Joe visibly trembled. For sixteen months he had kept out of trouble, and now he was in, up to his ears. "Get me out of this! Get me out of this!" he prayed. "I don't want no trouble!"
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" the Skipper shouted. "You think you can get away with murder around here?" He looked up at the frightened seaman. Joe licked his lips. The Skipper was about to throw the book at Joe when he remembered why it was he had been sent to the rock. "Got to start over!" he muttered to himself. "This time I'm starting over!" he promised under his breath.
"Young man," he said aloud, "don't you like the Navy?"
"Oh, sir!" Joe replied in the seaman's stock reply to the Skipper's stock question, "I love the Navy!"
"You'd better show it!" the Skipper said gruffly. "If I catch you in trouble again, I'll bounce you right out of the Navy." Then he added the crusher: "And you'll find yourself in the Army!"
Joe came to attention and left. After that he slept under a mosquito netting. It was strange, but out there in the middle of the Pacific, with an island almost to himself, Joe was cramped and stifled. He would wake up at night gasping for breath. He finally solved the problem by compounding his earlier felony. He stole a dynamotor and rigged up an electric fan. "If they ask me about it," he muttered to himself, "I'll say I got it from one of them wrecked planes." He scuffed the dynamotor up a bit to make it look like salvage. The fan was a wonder and helped him to breathe. Once he stuck his hand in it, and several times mosquito netting got caught in the blades. But it was worth it!
The SeaBees landed late one evening. Joe was on the rude dock when they came ashore. He was surprised to see how happy they were to be on land again, even a place like the rock. He guessed that everybody in the Navy wanted to be where he wasn't. He often thought of that night in later years. It was the time he met Luther Billis!
Joe had never seen anybody quite like Luther Billis. The SeaBee was big, fat, and brown. He wore a gold ring in his left ear and several bracelets. He was beautifully tattooed. Billis was accompanied by a young Jewish boy who trailed along behind him. He accosted Joe in a bright, breezy manner. "Hiya, Joe! Whaddaya know?"
"Hello!" Joe replied.
"Got a ship's store here?" Billis asked.
"Over there!" Joe pointed.
"Well, come along, Joe, and I'll set you up! Won a lot of money on this trip. Teaching the boys a few facts of life!" He whisked out a bundle of banknotes. "Come along, Hyman!" he shouted peremptorily at the Jewish boy.
When Billis had treated half a dozen men whom he had never seen before, he pointed admiringly at his Jewish friend. "I want to tell you," he said. "There's a genius. A college professor!" Billis smiled proudly and his friend grinned. "Professor Hyman Weinstein, but it could just as well be Einstein!" He laughed uproariously at his joke. "The Professor can speak five languages. Toss them a little Yiddish, Hyman." Weinstein, who found in Billis both a champion and a wonderful friend, spoke a few words of the Old Testament in Yiddish.
"He ain't kidding, either!" a boy on the sidelines whispered. "The Psalms."
"German, Hyman!" Billis ordered like a ringmaster displaying the
tricks of a prize lion. The Professor rattled off some German words.
"Wouldn't that kill Hitler!" Billis shouted. "Professor, give them some Latin." Hyman obliged with some legal phrases, and Billis thereupon asked for French. When his friend had spoken several phrases in French, Billis demanded quiet. "This one will kill you, guys. Give them some Russian, Hyman."
As Hyman rattled off a long series of Russian words, Billis started singing "Yo, heave ho!" to the tune of the Volga Boatmen. His listeners started to laugh. "Knock it off! Knock it off!" he shouted. "Them Bolsheviks ain't doin' so bad! Hitler ain't laughin'!" He threw his big hand around Hyman's shoulder and pulled the little Jew to the bench on which he and Joe were sitting.
The next three hours were the most wonderful Joe had spent on the rock. He didn't know that sailors could be such fine people. Billis wasn't afraid of anything, had been everywhere. And Weinstein could speak five languages. They talked about everything. Billis thought there was a God and that after the war there would be a big boom in aviation. Weinstein thought France would be a great country again. "What do you think, Joe?" Billis inquired. Joe was flabbergasted that a stranger would want to know what he thought. But, encouraged by their inquiry, he blurted out his philosophy.
"I think it's dumb to be on this rock when you guys are going out to do some fightin'. All I do is sit here day after day. Three times a week planes come in, and I gas them up. The rest of the time I try to keep out of trouble. It's a hell of a way to spend the war. I feel ashamed of myself!"
Billis was appalled at Joe's statement. "Whatsa matter?" he demanded. "You ain't thinkin' right at all, Joe! You make me very surprised! I thought you was a much sounder man than that!"
"What did I say wrong?" Joe inquired.
"About you not bein' of any use? If you wasn't here, who would be?" Billis asked contentiously. "You know damn well who would be here. The Japs! And supposin' the Japs was here when we broke down? Where would we go for repairs? We would be in a hell of a mess, wouldn't we?" He appeared to be furious at Joe for turning the island over to the Japs.
"I never thought of it that way," Joe replied.
"We all can't fight the Japs," Billis added sagely.
"That's right, Luther," Joe agreed. "Are you and Hyman goin' up to the front?"
They didn't know where they were going, but they had a lot of heavy machinery. Probably going to some island. Going to invade some island. What you goin' to do when peace comes?" Billis asked. "Back to my shop in Columbus, Ohio. I'm a shoemaker."
"What you goin' to do if we all start wearin' plastic shoes?" Billis demanded. "Won't have to have them mended?" The thought shocked Joe. He had never thought of such a thing before. He had no answer. People would always have to have their shoes fixed. But Luther Billis' agile mind was on to new problems. "You got a girl?" he asked. "No," Joe replied. "I ain't."
"You ain't got a girl?" Billis shouted. "What the hell kind of a sailor are you?"
"I never went with girls very much," Joe explained. "I tell you what I do," Billis said with his hand about Joe's shoulder. "I'm gonna get you a girl. I like you. You're a real Joe, ain't he, Hyman?" Hyman agreed.
"Look at the moon over the water!" Weinstein said. Billis turned to study the rare sight of moonlight upon tropic waters with palm trees along the shore and a ship at the dock.
"God, that's beautiful!" he said. "You ought to come down here lots, Joe. You ought to look at that. Like Hyman just done."
The three men sat there in silence and watched the moonlight wax and wane along the waves. Never before in sixteen months had Joe seen that strange and lovely thing. He suddenly wanted to go with Billis and the Professor. He wanted to be with men that talked happily and saw new things. He wanted...
But at midnight the boat pulled out. The SeaBees were gone. Joe followed the ship as long as it rode in the moonlight. He had never before felt so strange. Great inchoate thoughts welled up within him. He could not sleep, and so he walked along the edge of the island. The airstrip shone in the moonlight. "It's beautiful," he said. "And look at the water bouncin' on them cliffs. It's beautiful."
The world was beautiful that night. It was beautiful as only a tropic night on some distant island can be beautiful. A million men in the South Seas would deny it to one another, would ridicule it in their letters home. But it was beautiful. Perhaps some of the million would deny the beauty because, like Joe, they had never seen it.
Something like this was going through Joe's mind when he became aware that men were behind him. He started to walk along the edge of the cliff when a light flashed in his eyes. "No you don't!" a voice shouted. Quickly two men ran up and grabbed him.
"Here's another of them," the voice with the light cried. Joe was hauled off to a jeep.
"Bunch of damned bootleggers!" a gruff voice said as he was thrust into a small truck. He looked at the other prisoners. He knew none of them.
"He ain't one of us!" the apparent leader of the gang said. "Keep your mouth shut!" the gruff voice ordered. "But he ain't one of us!"
"Shut up!"
"On your way, big time!" the leader of the gang grunted in surly tones.
That night Joe slept in the brig. He found himself among a group of six enlisted men who had been running a still in a cave along the cliffs. They had finally been caught. They were making pure alcohol from canned corn and sugar. They had a market for all they could make. Each man had been clearing two hundred dollars a month.
Joe studied them. They were guys just like him. He wondered why they got mixed up in such a racket. He wondered if Luther Billis was like them. Luther had lots of money. But somehow he felt that Luther was different. These men were in trouble.
"I'm gonna spill the whole story!" a little machinist's mate said. He had built the still. "If they try to pin a rap on me, I'll spill the whole story!"
"You do," the leader whispered hoarsely, "and I'll kill you. That's a promise!"
But next morning the little machinist's mate did spill the whole story. Joe was shocked. The revelation came shortly after the Skipper had ordered Joe to stand aside. Obviously Joe wasn't implicated. So there he stood, by the window, while the machinist's mate told how a lieutenant had sold them canned corn by the case and sugar by the barrel. He had taken one-fourth of the profits. Made four hundred bucks a month.
That was one time the Skipper didn't bellow. "Get him right away," he said in a very low voice. No one spoke until the lieutenant appeared. He was a young man. He took one look at the six culprits, grew faint, and sat down. "Have you anything to say?" the Skipper asked.
"No, sir!" the lieutenant replied.
"You are confined to your quarters!" the Skipper said briefly. "Take the rest of these men to the brig." Joe felt all funny inside. He knew his turn was next.
"Well," the skipper said. "So it's you again! Always in trouble!"
"Oh, no, sir!"
"How did you happen to be down at the cliffs? One of their watchers?"
"Oh, no, sir! I never had anything to do with these men. Never." What were you doing at the cliff?"
Joe swallowed hard. At first the words wouldn't come. "I was watching the ship go, sir!"
In a flash, the Skipper saw himself, once on Haiti. A ship was leaving the bay. He was an ensign then, and sure that he would be an admiral one day. He could understand why young men look at ships. "You better stay out of trouble, young feller," he said. That was all.
It would not be fair to say that Joe had forgotten Billis. But he had ceased thinking constantly about the strange fellow when a letter came to the rock. It was for Joe and came from Miss Essie Schultz, Perkasie, Pennsylvania. Joe read the letter avidly: Dear Joe, Please excuse me for writing when we haven't been introduced, but my good friend Mr. Luther Billis told me that you didn't have any girl to write to. I write letters to seventeen sailors and one soldier. I think you boys are the bravest men in America. I would never be brave enough to fight against the Japs. I am glad we have boys like you to fight for u
s. I wish I had a good looking photograph to send you, but you know how it is these days. One or two prints is all you can get. So I am sending you this one. The one in the middle is me. Skinny, eh? I work in a pants factory. At present we are making sailors pants, so if yours don't fit, blame me. (Ha!) I like to dance and like Benny Goodman and Louie Prima the best. I listen to the radio a good deal and read some books every year. Mr. Billis said you were a very swell guy and that I would like you. I believe I would. Won't you please write and tell me all about yourself? I promise, to answer right away.
Yours (?)
Essie Schultz.
P. S. Send me a picture.
The letter simply bowled Joe over! It passed his comprehension that Luther Billis would have taken the trouble to do such a thing. But that Essie should have written to him... That was a true miracle! He read the letter eight or ten times. It was so nicely written, in straight lines. And it smelled good. And there was Essie in front of a building. And there was snow on the ground! He looked and looked. Essie wasn't the worst looking, either. Not by a long shot!
He got seven more letters from Essie, sweet, cheerful letters. He showed her picture to several of his friends. You couldn't see much of her face, but what there was looked mighty neat and clean. Joe felt fine. Then one day he got a brief letter. "I am going to marry the soldier," Essie said. "He thinks I ought to stop writing to the rest of you boys. I tell him he's jealous of the Navy. (Ha!)"
Joe was glum for several days. He tore up Essie's picture. "Don't want no picture of no married woman," he said to himself. "I wanta stay out of trouble."
But he was miserable. Essie's letters had been... Well, he couldn't say it in words. All he knew was that weeks were a lot longer now. What if she had been writing to seventeen other fellows? She had also written to him, and that was what mattered. Joe tried four times to send her congratulations, but couldn't find the words. Then one day he was at the airstrip when some enlisted men flew in from Noumea. One of them had a grass skirt, a lovely thing of yellow and red.
Tales of the South Pacific Page 17