by Homer Hickam
“Get those guns cranking!” Josh yelled, and was rewarded by a blast from Again in the forward turret followed by a steady barrage aft from the starboard blister gun. The Rufes ignored the bullets and swept in, all barrels blazing.
Phimble put the Catalina into a howling dive, then threw the wheel hard over. Aft, the boys were yelling, and they were oddly jubilant. After a few seconds, Phimble figured out why. American fighter planes, covering the landings on New Georgia, had pounced on the Rufes while the Japanese pilots were distracted by Dosie. Phimble came about and hoped the American P-40s wouldn’t mistake Dosie for a Japanese seaplane. In the heat of air combat, anything was possible.
Phimble pointed Dosie’s nose along the beach until Mbanga and Lambete finally crept into view. He spotted a decent-looking cove and dropped the Catalina down, not even worrying about the direction of the wind, and set her on the water. He peered through the cockpit windshield and saw three men in lap-laps standing like ebony monuments on the beach. “Looks like you got a reception.”
Josh climbed out of his seat. “Head south to Santa Cruz and secure PT-59. Kennedy will skipper it back to Melagi. I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”
“How will you get back to Melagi?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure something out. Maybe Whitman has a boat.”
“Why don’t I just drop Kennedy off, then turn around and pick you up?”
Josh couldn’t find fault in the idea except that it exposed Phimble to some risk, probably including night flying. But the entire mission was a risk, any way you cut it. “All right, Eureka. Get back up here as soon as you can.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m sorry for being in a foul mood.”
Phimble grasped Josh’s hand. “Me, too. Just take care of yourself. I don’t like the looks of those black birds on the beach.”
Josh climbed out of the Catalina, walked along its wing, and stepped onto its pontoon and then into the surf. The three men on the beach looked like hard men. Their eyes were sullen, and their painted faces looked to have permanent scowls, as if they had something stuck in their craws. Shell necklaces were draped around their necks, dilly bags hung from their bare shoulders, and cartridge belts were strapped around their waists. They were carrying rifles, En-fields from the looks of them. Josh raised his hand and greeted them in his best pidgin, or Beche-de-Mer, as it was formally called in the Solomons. “Good fellas! You all right?”
The three maintained their glowering expressions, but one, a tall, majestic man with slick, oiled skin, unbent long enough to reply. “What you do along this place?”
“Look-see-talk big fella Whitman.”
“What name you?”
“Thurlow.”
“Whitman no say bring one fella Thurlow.”
“No worry-worry,” Josh replied.
“Whitman no say bring one fella Thurlow,” the man insisted in a truculent tone.
“My word. Boy talk too much,” Josh snapped. “You take me to Whitman, double quick! Savvy?” He put his hand on his pistol, even though he was outnumbered by three Enfields.
Josh knew the game. It was a contest of wills. His eyes bore into the man who’d spoken. Malevolent eyes probed his in return. After a long minute, the other two men shifted on their feet and started looking a bit sheepish. At last the man blinked. “We go,” he said. Without another word, he turned and walked into the jungle at the edge of the beach, his fellows following.
Behind Josh, Dosie roared, then lifted off. Josh turned to watch her, feeling quite alone. The bushmen had completely disappeared. He hurried to catch up with them, all the while hoping they weren’t waiting in ambush to take his head, though he supposed they might.
10
All was peaceful as the Darlin’ Dosie, suspended between fluffy cotton clouds and an empty turquoise sea, droned down the Slot. In the Solomons, such rare moments were known as lulls, as between the deadly storms, which were surely forming, created by nature or man, but always on their way. The crew were enjoying this particular lull, mainly by sleeping, except for the pilot, Phimble, and the passenger, twenty-six-year-old John F. Kennedy, the second son of Ambassador Joe and Mrs. Rose Kennedy of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
Kennedy sat in the port blister, nursing a cup of coffee brewed for him by Millie before the cook/medic found a nook in the rattling airplane to take a nap. Kennedy admired the sleepy indolence of Thurlow’s crew. Even the bosun, Ready O’Neal, announced that he was going to climb in the rack (which meant curling up beneath the navigator’s table with Dave the megapode), leaving only Kennedy to sit behind one of the machine guns and look out for the Jap.
Kennedy was tired, terribly tired. He realized now it was the ultimate foolishness to go along with Thurlow. He started to think of a way to get out of it. Perhaps he’d simply check himself into the hospital at Santa Cruz. One look at him and the doctors would surely put him to bed.
Truth, Kennedy thought as he stared through the blister view port. Tell the truth to yourself. The court-martial won’t do it. You ‘ll not be able to confess to it, not now, not ever. Truth was, after all, what the priests and nuns told him Jesus the Christ had come to give: You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Kennedy had never completely understood the phrase until now.
On the first little island they’d swum to after the sinking of the PT-109, Kennedy had realized his crew was in a bad way. One man was horribly burned. Another had a broken leg. All were battered and bruised, and the infections of the Solomons were surely already rampant in their bloodstreams. Without water or food or medical attention, they weren’t going to last long. They scarcely had energy to move as it was. In contrast, Kennedy had suddenly been infused with tremendous energy. His crew had commented on it. “Jesus, Mister Kennedy,” one of them said, “you’re acting like you can walk on water!”
Where had all that energy come from? Tell the truth. On that little island, he had seen in his mind an image of his father, and then his brother Joe, and he had imagined how they would share knowing glances when they heard for the first time that he, the second son, the younger brother, had come out to the Solomon Islands as a representative of the Kennedy family and had royally screwed up!
On that nasty little spit of sand, with his men dying, and Jap all around, Kennedy had panicked. The Japanese destroyer had not made him afraid. Swimming with a strap between his teeth towing one of his men across shark-infested waters had elicited no fear. Even being captured and tortured by the Japanese was not his primary concern. What concerned him most was that he’d given both his father and his older brother yet another opportunity to ridicule him and to find fault in him.
As the sun lowered itself on the horizon that day and transmogrified itself into a gigantic red ball, Kennedy felt as if it were frying his brain. He had ricocheted from hopelessness to despair. He had to get off that island, had to get back to his base right now and explain what had happened before the announcement went out to his father and brother that he’d disgraced himself, a message that would land surely like a dead, stinking fish on the desk of his ambitious, scheming father and be like a prayer answered to Joe Jr., who was always in competition with his younger brother for their father’s approval.
Kennedy stared unseeing through the blister window of the Catalina and clenched his teeth, although he didn’t realize it. Joe Jr., the great Joe, the literal fair-haired boy, the apple of his father’s eye, a cliche that was the truth and always had been and always would be. Joe, the favored son who was to set the world afire with his brilliance, the favored son who had all his life made certain that the world knew how much better he was than his weak little brother. And now Kennedy had given him all the ammunition the bastard would ever need to keep braying it forever. He had screwed up the worst way an officer could in the United States Navy. He had lost his boat!
Kennedy remembered the night he swam alone into the darkness, the cold seeping remorselessly into his bones. Sometime during the night, a phantom had appeared before him. It
was Rosemary, his sister. She was wearing a white hospital gown, and there was a scar on her forehead, throbbing as if her skull were experiencing an internal earthquake. She watched over him with a gentle, loving smile for a long time. “What is it, Rosemary?” he’d finally asked her. She’d replied with one word: Father. And then Rosemary had shimmered away, and Kennedy found himself staring into the blackness. He’d been staring into it ever since.
Kennedy understood now that men who are about to die have no use for falsehoods. They seek the truth because they require it to be their last thought. As the sea of the Ferguson Passage drained him of what little warmth was left in his frail, bowel-constricted body, Kennedy had looked into his soul and found it filled with darkness.
The Catalina bumped through turbulent air, and ribbons of white vapor streaked past the blister window. Thurlow’s boys kept sleeping. Kennedy wished with all his might that he could join them in their peaceful, innocent state, but peace and innocence were things he knew very well he was never going to be allowed. But then he woke suddenly. To his surprise, he had fallen asleep, after all. He looked through the blister window and saw they were flying across a great mountainous island. He was awestruck by its emerald beauty, its volcanic peak rearing heavenward, and then allowed himself to be further amazed at what appeared to be a vast city covering its southern edge. He made his way forward. “That’s our base on Santa Cruz” Phimble said as Kennedy climbed into the cockpit.
“My God, it’s huge!” Kennedy marveled.
“If Jap could see it, he’d be smart to give up,” Phimble replied. “All that stuff down there is aimed directly at him.”
For a reason that he couldn’t discern, Kennedy’s favorite poem condensed into his mind:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air.
It wasn’t spring. It was never spring in the Solomons. It was always summer: hot, wet, rampant summer. But that didn’t matter. What the poet, a soldier in the Great War, had meant by his words was that if a man was truly lucky, he would meet death in a state of grace, and even gratitude. He was thinking about all that when Phimble splashed the Catalina into the water. The impact was so sudden and hard, Kennedy thought it surely had knocked the fillings right out of his teeth. While Phimble taxied the aircraft toward the beach, Kennedy was suddenly infused with the idea of making the ensign his friend. He figured he could use one. “Mister Phimble, I have a favorite poem,” he said. “Would you care to hear it?”
Phimble was busy nudging the throttles and steering the Catalina and didn’t have the time or inclination to talk. His silence Kennedy naturally took for acquiescence, and he quoted the first stanza of the poem, adding afterward, “Very meaningful for our present situation, wouldn’t you say?”
Phimble’s expression was one of aggravated disbelief. “I take that poem as both shallow and ignorant of war,” he said.
Kennedy felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He replied with sarcasm. “Thank you for listening to it, just the same.”
“I told Captain Thurlow I didn’t think you’d be anything but trouble,” Phimble shot back.
“I’m sorry for your low opinion of me,” Kennedy replied. “I’ll endeavor to improve my character.”
“Just don’t go spouting that rendezvous-with-death crap around the boys. They’re close enough to dying out here without a sad sack like you turning it into poetry. Savvy?”
“I savvy,” Kennedy replied, his expression turned to stone.
“Good. Now, you can do one thing for me.”
Kennedy’s countenance softened. To provide a man a favor was often the beginning of a friendship. “What’s that?”
“Get the hell off my airplane.”
11
Whitman’s men were not waiting in ambush for Josh. In fact, they were not waiting at all. They had slipped quietly through the surrounding vegetation, like fish swimming through a coral reef, and had simply disappeared. Josh plunged in the direction he thought they’d gone. Wait-a-minute vines entangled him, and catch-and-keep thorns stuck him in the arms and legs. He sweated and panted in the hot, stagnant air and pushed aside vast leaves, some as big as elephant ears, only to be blocked by huge trees, their exposed roots like the legs of gigantic octopi. The air seemed thick and nasty. Dim spokes of light filtered through the layers of canopy overhead. Dripping moisture made a staccato patter on the moss-covered floor. He fell into a vast spider’s web, and the sticky strands enveloped him like a net. He tore at the tendrils of the web stuck to his face and pushed on, slogging past steaming piles of vegetation that exuded an evil stink of decay. A high-pitched scream erupted not far away, an animal with a warning or a death scream, he didn’t know and couldn’t tell.
If this was what the army boys had faced on New Georgia, Josh was beginning to understand why they had panicked. He wondered, too, if the jungle had somehow gotten to David Armistead, had pushed him over an edge in his mind that the lieutenant had not even known was there. It had happened before to others, and Armistead had been in combat for over a year.
Josh finally staggered into a small clearing, where he stood, his utilities soaked with sweat, and tried to figure out which direction to go. His neck felt as if something were crawling on it, and he slapped himself there, hitting something hard and knocking it down his back. He pulled out his shirttail and shook it until the thing fell into the moss, so heavy it made a thumping noise on the green cushion. He sought it out, a writhing yellow and black millipede, and stomped on it. Josh felt as if he were suffocating. Every direction he looked disappeared into green darkness. He was hopelessly lost.
But then . . .
“Cheerio, mastah,” came a lilting, feminine voice.
Where a moment before there had been but a charnel house of massed vegetation, there now stood a young Marie wearing a bright blue lap-lap that started at her slim waist and ended about six inches above her pretty, dimpled knees. She walked toward him, her bare feet somehow impervious to the thorns and stickers that littered the clearing, and came so near that Josh had to lift his eyes from where they’d naturally been diverted, her round and gorgeous breasts. Her skin, black as the night sky, was oiled, and she exuded the scent of sweet coconut. There was a bright pink hibiscus pushed into her curly hair just above her left ear. She smiled at him with fulsome lips, seemingly taking delight in his openmouthed astonishment at her appearance. “You afraid good fella Marie?” she asked.
“No,” he said, although for some reason, he was.
“Are you lost?” she asked, cocking her head and inspecting him with eyes that were big, brown, and intelligent, though they seemed a size too large for her round, inquisitive face. She had a correspondingly small nose, and when her lips parted, Josh saw that she had ivory-white teeth. Put all together, she was mesmerizing, and Josh couldn’t tear his eyes from her. “I’m looking for the Truax plantation,” he croaked.
She pointed off in a direction that seemed random. “Go this way. No worry-worry. I saw your airplane. It is a nice one, I think. Will it come back?”
“I hope so,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”
Her train of thought seemed to shift. “You should give me a present,” she said.
Josh was still trying to get his eyes to focus somewhere other than her breasts. “Why should I give you a present?” he asked, even though he was willing to give her most anything he had, at least at that moment. It had been a long time since he’d been near a naked female.
“I directed you to the Truax plantation, and therefore you owe me a gift for my work. That is the local custom.”
“But I don’t have a present.”
“Look in your pockets.”
Josh looked in his pockets and brought forth a small copper wire he’d picked up on the cave floor near Stobs’s radio, a washer found on the deck of the Catalina, and a spool of brown thread he kept t
o patch tears in his uniform. He’d lost the needle. ‘The thread, please,” the girl said.
Josh handed it over. “How do you know English so good?”
“I know English well,” she corrected him. “I attended a missionary school.”
“I see. Do you live nearby?”
“Yes,” she said, then walked past him and disappeared into the bush, leaving behind her sweet scent.
Josh wondered over the encounter for a long second, and waited, hoping the girl would return. When she didn’t, he headed in the direction she’d pointed. To his surprise, he almost immediately stepped through the jungle onto a lawn of short-cropped grass. Across the lawn was a rock fence overhung with bougainvillea and wild roses. The fence circled a white plantation house that had a wide front porch and dormer windows. It was a pleasant, congenial scene except for the fact that bullet holes riddled the house and its windows were shattered. What had appeared at first as the site of intensive gardening proved to be shell and bomb craters, and scattered among the flowering bushes were cartridge belts and helmets, bloody remnants of uniforms, and there, just beside a pretty oleander, a boot with a gory foot still inside it covered by a stream of ants. The Marie’s fresh coconut scent had been replaced by the stink of death, and Josh’s nose further directed him to a mound of bodies, all Japanese from their uniforms.
Whitman was on the porch, sitting in a swing, watching him. Josh judged him to be in his midforties, a short, thick, though imperial-looking man, bald but with a thin mustache and neatly trimmed beard, both graying. He was wearing a khaki shirt and shorts, midcalf tan socks, and brown army boots, the uniform of the coast-watchers. Despite his reputation for toughness, he looked for all the world like a kindly uncle. Josh couldn’t say he knew Whitman, but he had been around the man a couple of times on Melagi when the coast-watchers had gathered for a meeting with Colonel Burr. Whitman never lacked for an opinion, and it was always to the point and without equivocation, but Josh had noticed he was a man who knew when to keep his mouth shut, too.