One of the firemen lowered the pilot’s boarding ladder. Jake safetied his ejection seat and unstrapped. He left the helmet and mask in the plane when he climbed down.
The thermal casing on the armed bomb had indeed been peeled back by the blast of the slipstream, pulling the arming wire and freeing the fuse propeller.
Jake Grafton was standing there looking at it when he realized that a chief petty officer in khakis was standing beside him.
“I’m Chief Mendoza, EOD.”
Jake nodded at the weapon. “We were running an attack. I just happened to look outside for other planes just before we went into a cloud and saw the propeller spinning.”
Flap came over while Jake was speaking. He put his hands on his hips and stood silently examining the bomb.
“If you’d dropped it like that, sir, it might have gone off when the ejector foot hit it,” the chief said.
Neither airman had anything to say.
“Guess you guys were lucky.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I gotta screw that fuse out. We’ll snap a few photos first because we’ll have to do a bunch of paperwork and the powers that be will want photos. I suggest you two fellows ride on the fire truck. You don’t want to be anywhere around when I start screwing that fuse out.”
“I’ll walk,” Jake said.
Flap Le Beau headed for the fire truck.
The chief turned his back on the weapon while the firemen took photos. He was facing out to sea, looking at the sky and the clouds and the shadows playing on the water when Jake Grafton turned away and began walking.
The pilot loosened his flight gear. He was suddenly very thirsty, so he got out his water bottle and took a drink. The water was warm, but he drank all of it. His hands were shaking, trembling like an old man’s.
The heat radiated from the concrete in waves.
He wiped his face again with his sleeve, then half turned and looked back at the plane. The chief was still standing with his arms folded, facing out to sea.
As he walked Jake got a cigarette from the pack in his left sleeve pocket and lit it. The smoke tasted foul.
14
A week after Jake and Flap visited Cubi point for three whole hours, Columbia maneuvered herself against the carrier pier.
Subic Bay, Olongapo City across the Shit River, the BOQ pool, the Cubi O Club with its banks of telephone booths and the Ready Room Bar out back — Jake Grafton had seen it all too recently and it brought back too many memories.
He got a roll of quarters and sat in a vacant telephone booth with a gin and tonic, but he didn’t make a call. Callie wasn’t in Hong Kong — she was in Chicago. Mail was arriving regularly but there were no letters from her; in fact, she hadn’t written since he called her from Hawaii.
Somehow he had screwed it up. He sat in the phone booth smoking a cigarette and sipping the drink and wondered where it had gone wrong.
Well, you can’t go back. That’s one of life’s hard truths. The song only goes in one direction and you can’t run it backward.
Morgan McPherson, Corey Ford and the Boxman were gone, gone forever. Tiger Cole was undergoing rehab at the Naval Aeromedical Institute in Pensacola and working out each day in the gym where the AOCS classes did their thing, in that converted seaplane hangar on the wharf. Sammy Lundeen was writing orders at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington, Skipper Camparelli was on an admiral’s staff at Oceana. Both the Augies had gotten out of the Navy — Big was going to grad school someplace and Little was in dental school in Philadelphia.
And he was here, sitting in fucking Cubi Point in a fucking phone booth with the door open, listening to a new crop of flyers get drunk and talk about going across the bridge tonight and argue about whether the whores of Po City were worth the risk.
They’re up there now near the bar, roaring that old song:
“Here I sit in Ready Room Four,
Just dreaming of Cubi and my Olongapo whore.
Oh Lupe, dear Lupe’s the gal I adore,
She’s my hot-fucking, cock-sucking Olongapo whore…”
All his friends were getting on with their lives and he was stuck in this shithole at the edge of the known universe. The war was over and he had no place to go. The woman he wanted didn’t want him and the flying wasn’t fun anymore. It was just dangerous. That might be enough for the Real McCoy, but it wasn’t for Jake Grafton.
He finished his first drink and began on his second — he always ordered his drinks two at a time in this place — and lit another cigarette.
He was just flat tired of it — tired of all of it. He was tired of the flying, tired of the flyers, tired of the stink of the ship, the stink of the sailors, the stink of his flight suit. He was tired of Navy showers, tired of floating around on a fucking gray boat, tired of sitting in saloons like this one, tired of being twenty-eight years old with not prospect one.
“Hey, whatcha doin’ in there?” Flap Le Beau.
“What’s it look like, dumb ass? I’m waiting for a phone call.”
“From who?”
“Miss June. The Pentagon. Hollywood. Walter Crankcase. The commissioner of baseball. Whoever.”
“Hmmm.”
“I’m getting drunk.”
“You look pretty sober to me.”
“Just got started.”
“Want any company, or is this a solo drunk?”
“Are you waiting for a call?”
“No. The only one who could conceivably want to talk to me would be the Lord, and I ain’t sure about Him. But He knows where to find me if and when.”
“That’s comforting, if true. But you say you’re not sure?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Life’s like that.”
“Come on up to the bar. I’ll buy the next round.”
“Some of that Marine money would be welcome,” Jake admitted. He pried himself from the booth and followed Flap along the hallway and up the short flight of stairs into the bar room.
Flap ordered a beer and Jake acquired two more gin and tonics. “Only drink for the tropics,” he told Flap, who cheerfully paid the seventy-fìve-cent tab and tossed an extra dime on the counter for the bartender. These Americans were high rollers.
“Miss June, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Jake Grafton. “I wrote her a fan letter about her tits. Gave her the number of that booth. Told her when I was gonna be in Cubi. She’ll call anytime.”
“Let’s go play golf. We got enough time before dark.”
“Golf’s a lot of work. Whacking that ball around in this heat and humidity…”
“Come on,” Flap said. “Bring your drinks. You can drive the golf cart.”
“Oh Lupe, dear Lupe’s the gal I adore,
She’s my hot-fucking, cock-sucking Olongapo whore…”
There was a line of taxis in front of the club. Jake and Flap went to the one at the head of the line. Jake took huge slurps of both his drinks before he maneuvered himself into the tiny backseat, so he would be less likely to spill any.
And away they went in a cloud of blue smoke, the little engine in the tiny car revving mightily, the Filipino driver hunched over the wheel and punching the clutch and slamming the shift lever around like Mario Andretti.
* * *
The golf course was in a valley. Hacked out of the jungle were long, rolling fairways and manicured greens with sand traps and fluttering hole flags. Somewhere up there in the lush tropical foliage beyond the rough was the base fence, a ten-foot-high chain-link affair topped by barbed wire. Beyond the base fence were some of the world’s poorest people, kept in line by a Third World military establishment and ruled by a corrupt, piss-pot tyrant. The native laborers who maintained this golf course, and were of course not allowed to play on it, were paid the magnificent sum of one U.S. dollar a day as wages.
The whole damned scene was ludicrous, especially if you were working on your fourth drink of the hour. The best thing was not to think about it, not to cont
emplate that vast social chasm between the men running lawnmowers and raking sand traps and the half-tanked fool driving this shiny little made-in-Japan golf cart. Best not to dwell on the shared humanity or the Grand Canyon that separated their dreams and yours.
The heat and humidity made the air thick, oppressive, but it was tolerable here in the golf cart with the faded canvas top providing shade. Jake stuck to piloting the cart while Flap drove, chipped and putted.
“Hotter than hell,” Jake told Flap.
“Yeah. Fucking tropical rain forest.”
“Jungle.”
“Rain forest. Nobody gives a shit about jungle, but they bleed copious dollars over rain forest.”
“Why is that?”
“I dunno. I got a seven on that last hole.”
“That’s a lot of strokes. You aren’t very good at this.”
“When I play golf, I play a lot of it. The object of the game is whacking the ball.”
“Keep your own score. I’m just driving.”
“Driver has to keep score. That’s the way it’s done at all the top clubs. Pebble Beach, Inverness, everywhere. Gimme a six on the first hole and a seven on this one.”
“You wouldn’t cheat, would you?”
“Who? Me? Of course I’d cheat. I’m a nigger, remember?”
Jake wrote down the numbers and put the cart in motion. “You shouldn’t call yourself a nigger. It isn’t right.”
“What do you know about it? I’m the black man.”
“Yeah, but I have to listen to it. And I don’t like the word.”
“Bet you used it some yourself.”
“When I was a kid, yeah. But I don’t like it.”
“Just drink and drive. It’s too damn hot to think.”
“Don’t use that word. I mean it.”
“If it’ll make you happy.”
“I’m out of booze.”
“Well, you can get drunk tonight. Right now you can sit half-tanked and enjoy the pleasure of watching the world’s greatest black colored Negro African-American golfer while you contemplate your many heinous sins.”
“It seemed like a good day for a drunk.”
“I’ve had days like that.”
The problem was, Jake finally admitted to himself, somewhere along the fourth fairway, that he had no dreams. Everyone needs dreams, goals to work toward, and he didn’t have any. That fact, and the gin, depressed him profoundly.
He didn’t want to be skipper of a squadron, or an admiral, or a farmer. Nor did he want to be an executive vice president in charge of something or other for some grand, important corporation, luxuriating in his new Buick and his generous expense account and his comfortable semi-custom house in an upscale real estate development and his blond wife with the big smile, big tits and purse full of supermarket coupons. He didn’t want a stock portfolio and he didn’t want to spend his mornings poring over the Wall Street Journal to see how rich he was. Just for the record, he also didn’t give a damn about French novels and doubted if he ever could.
He didn’t want anything. And he didn’t want to be anything.
What in hell do people do who don’t have any dreams?
True, he had once wanted to be a good attack pilot. To walk into the ready room and be accepted as an equal by the best aerial warriors in the world. He had achieved that ambition. And found it wasn’t worth a mouthful of warm spit.
He had worked awful hard to get there, though.
That was something. He had wanted something and worked hard enough to earn it. And he was still alive. So many of them weren’t. He was.
That was something, wasn’t it?
He was still thinking about that two holes later when Flap dropped into the right seat of the cart after a tee shot and said, “There’s somebody in the jungle up by the next hole.”
“How do you know?”
“Two big birds flew out of there while I was in the tee box.”
“Birds fly all the time,” Jake pointed out. “That’s the jungle. There’s zillions of ’em.”
“Not like that.”
Jake Grafton looked around. He and Flap were the only people in sight. There weren’t even any Filipino groundskeepers. “So?”
“So I’m going to hit this next one over into the jungle on that side, then go in there to look for the ball. You just sit in the cart and look stupid.”
“I’ve heard that some locals like to crawl under the fence and rob people on this course.”
“I’ve heard that too.”
“Let’s get outta here. You don’t need to play hero.”
“Naw. I’ll check ’em out.”
“I hear they carry guns.”
“I’ll be careful. Just stop up there by my ball and let me slap it over into the jungle.”
“Don’t go killing anybody.”
“They’re probably just groundskeepers working on the perimeter fence or something.”
“I mean it, Le Beau, you simple green machine shit. Don’t kill anybody.”
“Sure, Jake. Sure.”
So Flap addressed his ball in the fairway and shanked it off into the rough. He said a cuss word and flopped into the cart. Jake motored over to the spot where the ball had disappeared into the foliage and stopped the cart. They were still sixty yards or so short of the green.
“I think this is the spot.”
“Yeah.”
Flap Le Beau climbed out and headed for the jungle, his wedge in his left hand.
Jake examined his watch—5:35 P.M. The shadows were getting longer and the heat seemed to be easing. That was something, anyhow. Damned Le Beau! Off chasing stickup guys in this green shit — if there were any stickup guys. Probably just a couple of birds that saw a snake or something.
He waited. Swatted at a few bugs that decided he might provide a meal. Amazing that there weren’t more bugs, when you thought about it. After all, this was the jungle, the real genuine article with snakes and lizards and rain by the mile and insects the size of birds that drank blood instead of water.
Jake had seen enough jungle to last a lifetime in jungle survival school in 1971, on the way to Vietnam that first time. They held the course in the jungle somewhere around here. He ate a snake and did all that Tarzan shit, back when he was on his way to being a good attack pilot.
For what?
That had been a stupid goal.
It had been a stupid war, and he had been stupid. Just stupid.
He was still sitting in the cart five minutes later trying to remember why he had wanted to be an attack pilot all those years ago when Flap came out of the jungle up by the green and waved at him to come on up. He was carrying something. As Jake got nearer he saw that Flap had a submachine gun in his right hand and his golf club in his left. The shaft of the club was bent at about a sixty degree angle six inches or so up from the head.
He pulled the cart alongside Flap and stopped. “Is that a Thompson?”
“Yeah. There were two guys. One had a machete and one had this.” Flap tossed the bent club in the bin in back of the cart.
“Is it loaded?”
Flap eased the bolt back until he saw brass, then released it. “Yep.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Nope. They’re sleeping like babies.”
Jake got out of the cart. “Show me.”
“What do you want to see?”
“Come on, Le Beau, you moron. I want to see that these dumb little geeks are still alive and that you didn’t kill them just for the fucking fun of it.”
Jake took three steps and entered the foliage. Flap trailed along behind.
The vegetation was extraordinarily thick for the first five or six feet, then it thinned out somewhat and you could see. For about ten feet.
“Well, where are they?”
Flap elbowed by him and led the way. One man lay on his face and the other lay sprawled ten feet away, on his back.
Jake rolled the first man over and checked his pulse. A machete lay a y
ard away. Well, his heart was still beating.
Jake picked up the machete and went over to the second man. He was obviously breathing. As Jake stood there staring down at him, taking in the sandals, the thin cotton shirt and dirty gray trousers, the short hair and brown skin and broken teeth, the man’s eyes opened. Wide. In terror. He tried to sit up.
“Hey. You doing okay?”
His eyes left Jake and went behind him. Jake glanced that way. Flap was standing nonchalantly with the Thompson cradled in his left arm, peering lazily around. Yet his right hand was grasping the stock and his forefinger was on the trigger.
The man slowly got to his feet. He almost fell, then caught himself by grabbing a tree.
“Grab your buddy and get back across the fence.”
The Filipino worked on his friend for almost a minute before he stirred. When he had him sitting up, he looked at the two Americans. Jake jerked his head at the fence, then turned and headed for the fairway. Flap followed him.
Jake tossed the machete into the bin beside Flap’s rented golf bag and the bent club. Flap dumped the Tommy gun there too and sat down in the passenger seat.
“You’re really something else, Grafton.”
“What do you want to do? Play golf or discuss philosophy?”
“I’ve heard it said that golf is philosophy.”
“It’s hot and I’m thirsty and a little of your company goes a hell of a long way.”
“Yeah. Tell you what, let’s go see what the rest of this course looks like. Drive on.” He flipped his fingers and Jake pressed the accelerator. The cart hummed and moved. “Just drive the holes and we’ll ride along like Stanley and Dr. Livingston touring Africa. Nothing like an evening drive to settle a man’s nerves and put everything into perspective. When we get back to the clubhouse, I’ll buy you a drink. Maybe later we can go find two ugly women.”
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