by Peter Albano
With one table ladened with liquor, mixers, pretzels, and crackers, and with a record player blaring Tommy Dorsey, Kay Kyser, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller, the party had become instant bedlam. Rodney had paired off with a slender blond named Joyce Brockman while Dick Jordan and Paul Stolz became immediately enamored with Christine and Sylvia—Rodney never did learn their last names. There was jitterbugging on the floor, on the tables, in the kitchen, and eventually in the two bedrooms.
Joyce Brockman vaguely reminded Rodney of Kay Stockard. Her hair was blond, but her eyes were hazel and set too far apart and her features were sharp instead of soft. But her tight satin dress emphasized her slender hips, small waist, and large breasts. She was very sexy and was quite aware of k. She drank her whiskey with Coke and after two drinks her dancing became so close Rodney’s arousal became an embarrassment. However, all four couples were dancing close, arms wrapped around each other, a mating ritual more than a dance. After his fourth drink, Rodney felt everything slip away except the feel of the slim body pressed to his. “Nothing but foreplay,” Stud Horse had smirked into Rodney’s ear.
As midnight approached, Colburn slipped into one bedroom with Katherine while Paul Stolz and Sylvia rushed into the other. Watching the doors close, Joyce whispered into Rodney’s ear, “Let’s get out of here. They’ll be in there all night.”
“We can wait,” Rodney said.
“I can’t.” She took him by the hand and pulled him to the door.
They hurried through the lush gardens down to the beach where the surf crashed under a bright moon shining in a clear sky. The star-studded skies held that spectacular kind of beauty one can only find in Hawaii. Rodney spread his tunic on the sand in a spot sheltered by an outcropping of rock. They made love. It had been so violent, so devoid of emotions except for the hunger for release, the young lieutenant had felt like a rutting animal. Joyce clawed, whimpered, and finally shrieked so loud a SP came running.
“Nothing at all. Nothing at all,” Rodney managed, coming to his feet and pulling up his trousers. “Sat on a rock. That’s all.” Joyce crammed her panties into her purse, stood, and straightened her dress.
The SP looked them both up and down and said, “I understand, sir.” He saluted and left. Rodney could hear him chuckling.
Rodney had called a cab, escorted the girl back to her apartment, in Waikiki, promised to phone, and left. He knew he would never dial that number.
His mind wandered through the shadows of half sleep and Kay Stockard was there again. He would never forget the last time he saw her. It was the night before he met his uncle Major Randolph Higgins at Clover Field in Santa Monica. He had decided to surprise her—could not wait for the delighted look on her face when she first saw him. He found her house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood—the house actually owned by the designer Gertrude Foot.
He remembered entering the big airy frame house with the dark wood interior so loved by Californians. Gertrude Foot was big and burly with features fashioned by a hatchet and piercing eyes that glowed with latent malevolence. She looked to be about forty. She was dressed in slacks and a blouse that was more like a man’s shirt than a woman’s blouse. Kay, as lovely as ever with the folds of her long blond hair flowing almost to her waist, had taken both his hands in hers and kissed him on the cheek. She avoided the full mouth kiss and he did not seek it. She was obviously disquieted, perhaps embarrassed. Her cheeks were the color of sunset when she asked him to have a drink.
He took a chair facing a couch where Kay and Gertrude sat. He and Kay had talked of New York, family, friends while Gertrude glowered. There was a challenge in Gertrude’s eyes, and possessiveness dwelled there, too. Kay asked about his duty, station, length of stay. Galled by growing discomfort, Rodney had answered quickly and excused himself early, promising to phone. Then he left, and although he was to remain at the BOQ on Terminal Island for three more weeks, he never phoned Kay. He could never forget the picture of the two women in the doorway as he left; Kay standing in the porch light with a tortured, defeated look on her face, Gertrude close behind with her hands on the girl’s shoulders, grinning triumphantly. He had heard the price of success in Hollywood could come high, but the amount Kay was paying was exorbitant.
He wondered about himself and women. Certainly, his cousin Marsha had left him with a self-loathing that had endured. Then, Kay, a stunning woman who he had truly loved. He had heard of women who loved women, but it had seemed like a disease that struck others in a distant country. He knew there were men who preferred other men to women. In fact, he had punched one in a Manhattan bar after the creature had patted him obscenely. But to lose Kay to another woman was not only the loss of a beloved, but a blow to his manhood, an insult beyond measure. Clearly, she had enjoyed him in bed. Then where had he failed?
He had wanted Joyce Brockman and had made love to her fiercely. No. With Joyce it had been a coupling. A frantic hunger for release that had left him weak, drained, but strangely unsatisfied. There had been no attachment to the girl. He was convinced he was incapable of love. Craved release, true. Why not just find a whore and be done with it? No complications. A lot of his shipmates found it that way. Maybe they knew something he didn’t know.
He turned in his bunk and an ache just behind his eyes began to exact its toll for the excesses of the previous night. The eyelid fluttered open and he found the clock. It was only 0630 hours and the big lieutenant rolled away from the light streaming in from the room’s single porthole. The pain diminished. His mother was back and then his Uncle Randolph.
They loved each other. He was sure of it. Yet, they seemed to hold each other at arm’s length.
He had watched his uncle put the new North American Mustang fighter through its paces. Flying out over the sea, Randolph had climbed until he became a speck in the vast vault of the sky—even in Rodney’s seven-ten binoculars. Then the screaming power dive and pull-out low over Santa Monica Bay, the rolls, stalls, brutally sharp turns. When Randolph had landed, Rodney accused him of trying to tear off the fighter’s wings.
“You’re bloody well right, nephew,” Randolph had said, laughing. “If you have a Messerschmitt on your arse, that’s exactly what you’ve got to do.”
With the dull throb banishing sleep, he laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the sagging springs of Colburn’s bunk overhead. His mind wandered to his mother’s letters. She wrote him at least three times a week and her last letter had been four pages long. His mind riffled through the pages. Uncle Lloyd’s wounds were healed but he was still at home in Fenwyck on recuperation leave. He was involved in some sort of investigation into an incident in North Africa. Rodney knew his uncle was itching to return to action in North Africa where the Eighth Army’s Operation Crusader had driven the enemy back into Libya. Uncle Randolph, too, was home and back in the air with Number 54 Squadron. But with the Germans bogged down in Russia in the grip of the coldest winter in 140 years, things had been relatively quiet over the Channel. But in some ways, Rodney knew his uncle better than his mother. Rodney was sure Randolph would take his Spitfires in over Occupied France and hunt the Germans down, if they refused to come to him. His grandmother was well, Aunt Betty in good health, and Marsha still attended Columbia. Marsha. The overheated bitch. He actually felt hatred for his cousin.
Nathan was still training at Camp Pendleton in California. Rodney had been surprised to read Nathan had actually been promoted to corporal. His cousin Anthony Borelli was an ensign and had been sent to Florida for small craft training. He would probably get one of those new submarine chasers. They were very small, wooden, and Brenda considered them very dangerous. “Not safe like that big battleship you’re on,” Brenda had written.
The saddest parts of all the letters were in his mother’s anxious scribbles about Regina. Still no word from Warsaw. There had been horrifying rumors of mass killings and Brenda believed them all. Rodney would assure
her in his letters that the rumors must be false. Atrocities could not be hidden from the International Red Cross. But he could never convince his mother.
Colburn’s voice from the upper bunk interrupted his reveries. “Hey, mate, time to rise and shine. It’s almost oh-seven-hundred.” Rodney looked at the clock. He was amazed. Almost thirty minutes had slipped by unnoticed.
Colburn’s long skinny legs dangled down from the upper bunk. With a shout of “Look out below!” the young officer dropped to the deck. He was dressed in white skivvies that were exact duplicates of those worn by Rodney. “Got to meet the gunnery officer in number two turret,” Colburn said. “Number one rammer isn’t working right. And I’m the turret captain. So when the shit hits the fan, you know who’s in the middle of the breeze. That goddamned rammer has never worked right.”
“You didn’t have any trouble with your rammer last night, Stud Horse,” Rodney said, coming erect in his bunk and rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Chuckling, Colburn walked a few steps to the tiny head, switched on the light over the mirror, and reached for his shaving mug. “If the breech were a pussy and my dick was the rammer, that goddamned gun would be automatic. Yes, sir.” Laughing, he rotated and shook his hips in a series of bumps and grinds. “Just like ol’ dad, man. Just like ol’ dad.” And then, gesturing at Rodney, “You did all right yourself, ol’ Biz,” Colburn said, stopping the dance and fixing his eyes on his reflection. Colburn had attached the sobriquet ‘The Bismarck Kid”—usually contracted to “01’ Biz”—to Rodney the day they met. Every man in the crew knew of Rodney’s presence on King George V during the engagement with Bismarck, Rodney did not find the notoriety unpleasant. In fact, he rather enjoyed basking in the limelight of being the only man on board who had been in a major engagement between capital ships.
Rodney was troubled with a sudden unsettling thought. “I thought you were going to move that black powder? There’s a ton of it on the second deck. It belongs in the magazine, not on top of it,” he said.
“Tell it to the gunnery officer, I just work here. Just another powder monkey, ol’ Biz. He says ‘stack it,’ we stack it. He had the whole turret crew piling the shit for two days.” Colburn reached into a small cabinet above the sink and removed a shaving mug.
“It’s against regs. Isn’t it?”
“You’re fuckin’ A,” Colburn said, whipping up a lather. “But it would take a fourteen-inch shell to set it off. So don’t abandon ship yet, o1’ Biz. This old battle wagon‘ll still be here tomorrow.”
Whipping lather on his face over a reddish stubble, Colburn leaned close to the mirror, staring at his reflection. Everything about him was red. His hair flamed like a forest fire, his brown eyes had a reddish tint as if they reflected the fire, and freckles were scattered across his nose and cheeks as if splattered by a careless painter’s brush dipped in red paint. The tiny nose, slightly tilted eyes, pointed chin, and mischievous grin gave his face a subtle air of good humor like a pixie about to play a practical joke. And, indeed, he was a joker. He had played only one joke on Rodney.
Late one night, Rodney had returned on board after playing poker and drinking with a group of junior officers in the officers’ club at the destroyer base. He found a condom filled with at least a quart of water under his sheets. Donald Colburn was snoring in his bunk. The snores were too loud. Rodney broke the condom over the turret captain’s head. There were screams of protest, laughs, but no more jokes.
In the ten weeks the pair had shared the cabin, Rodney and Donald Colburn had become very close. Don’s ready smile, quick wit, and boundless generosity made him easy to like. Under the jocularity, he had a deep respect for Rodney and never carried his kidding to the point of antagonizing his roommate. In front of senior officers and enlisted men. Lieutenant Donald Colburn was the model of decorum. It was always “Mr. Higgins,” or “Lieutenant Higgins.” Rodney considered him his best friend and felt he had known the young man for a lifetime.
The grating sound of a boatswain’s pipe screeched from the bulkhead-mounted speaker. “Get your ass in gear,” Rodney grumbled. “They just piped the forenoon watch to chow and I’ve got the oh-eight-hundred quarterdeck watch.”
“Christ, I can hear. Don’t get your balls in an uproar, ol’ shipmate. Almost finished.” And then with uncharacteristic seriousness, “Roosevelt’s really cruising for a showdown with Adolph.”
“What do you mean?”
“He scrapped the Neutrality Act, didn’t he?”
Rodney felt anger begin to stir. He had managed to keep his interview with the president secret. He had even sworn his family to secrecy. He was determined the specter of presidential favoritism would not haunt his career. However, he could not help but feel an attachment to the president; empathy for a man faced with the greatest problems in the history of the world. And the brilliant Roosevelt seemed to be handling it despite violent opposition. “Congress did it, and they had no choice,” Rodney said.
“We’re going to be in the middle of this thing yet.”
“So? What do you get paid for?”
Donald turned from the mirror. “Hey, man, cool it. It’s no big deal.” He turned back to the mirror. “Anyway, the Heinies are stopped outside Moscow. Hear they’re freezing their asses off.” And then thoughtfully, “But you know, those goddamned Nips have a wild hair up their ass.”
Rodney nodded. Washington had issued three war warnings in five weeks. Every officer on Arizona had been briefed. Now there were ominous reports of Japanese convoys moving south. Everyone concluded the most practical objectives of a Japanese attack, if, indeed, one were imminent, would be Malaya or the Netherlands East Indies: Malaya for its rubber and strategic location, the East Indies for the oil that flowed from the ground in some places so pure it could be burned without refining. “They’re up to something. That’s for sure. Probably the N.E.I,” Rodney said.
“They won’t screw with us.”
“No way. They wouldn’t take on this battle line,” Rodney agreed.
“They’d have to be nuts,” Colburn offered, wiping his face with a small towel and stepping back.
“Okay, Bismarck Kid. You’re up.” Patting his face with bay rum, Colburn walked to the tiny closet and pulled his white service uniform from a hanger.
Yawning, Rodney walked to the basin.
Rodney had time for a cup of coffee and two doughnuts before relieving the watch at 0745. Leaving the wardroom, he entered the typical glorious sunlight of a Hawaiian morning. He blinked his eyes and rubbed his forehead where a dull ache still persisted. Walking aft on the starboard side of the ship, he cursed the antiquated repair ship Vestal that was moored alongside. Tied up forward, she cut off the breeze and filled the air with fumes from her auxiliary engines and odors from her bilges. Across the harbor the young lieutenant could see naval housing on McGrew Point and the Naval Supply Center. Despite Vestal, all of Southeast Loch was visible and the submarine base with a half-dozen fleet boats nestled in groups of three. Behind the submarines were fueling and supply docks. Across the loch, he could see the Naval Shipyard where Arizona’s sister ship Pennsylvania and two destroyers sat on their blocks in the great graving dock. Cranes, backs bent like arthritic old men, hunched over the ships while in the background row after row of huge warehouses, barracks, and shops stretched in an ugly sprawl like an unplanned city built for giants. Forward of Arizona, battleship Nevada squatted low and gray. However, the Arizona’s upper works obscured the five battleships moored astern.
Reaching the ship’s quarter, he grasped a ladder and climbed up to the boat deck. From here the view of Oahu was spectacular. Rodney never tired of the beauty of the island. The sky was patchy so that the water and shoreline was dappled with sunshine and shadows. However, to the east the sun was brilliant in an arching blue amphitheater of its own. To the north, low-lying Ford Island showed thick growths of green undergrowth along the sh
ore. The hangars of her airfield were busy already. He could see mechanics working on three PBYs (Consolidated Catalina flying boats), four or five transports, and a pair of observation planes. Four Brewster Buffalo Marine fighters and a half-dozen Grumman F4F Wildcat Navy fighters were lined up neatly on the tarmac.
Crossing the deck he stared at the mountainous interior of Oahu looming behind Ford Island. Sunlight streaming through the broken clouds heightened the green of the foliage mounting the escarpments like a great verdant staircase behind Honolulu and Aiea, blending into the majestic grandeur of the Koolau Mountains. The infinite shades of green and splashy colors of blooms were breathtaking. Cane fields stood out like trays of emeralds. Stands of acacias, banana, mango, guava, and the slender elegance of bamboo added their subtle greens and yellows. Rodney knew hibiscus, orchids, plumeria, ginger, epiphytes, and hundreds of other varieties of flowers crowded in the shade of the trees, but at this distance the rioting colors of their blooms were not visible. Raising his eyes, he stared at the enormous buttresses and citadels of sheer rock of the Koolaus rising in the center of the island. Here, dominating like great silent sentinels, Mount Tanalus and Mount Olympus were wrapped with their usual moisture-laden clouds. Driven by the northeasterly trade winds, they swirled around the mountaintops like lacy nightcaps, the morning sun painting them with delicate strokes of apricot and gold. Here and there rainbows flashed as pregnant clouds pushed high by the slopes of the mountains dropped their moisture in glinting, slanting sheets like ground rhinestones. He sighed, thinking of home. The mean concrete, steel, and brownstone warrens of New York City were suddenly carnal and vulgar.
He passed the crane amidships, two whaleboats, and the captain’s skiff. Forward, the tripod mast and great foretop with its huge main director and array of antennas blocked the view to the east. Astern, the aft mast with its director, where he manned the range finder at general quarters, soared high into the sky on its three steel posts. Below the director and level with his head was a Vought OS2U Kingfisher observation plane tied down on its catapult on top of number three turret. Rodney could see the three fourteen-inch guns of the turret inclined slightly upward in battery position. The other nine fourteen-inch guns of Arizona were not visible.