Somewhere West of Fiji

by Darrell Egbert

  He asked me how much longer I figured I would stay here. I told him my gout was cured but there was talk downstairs that my electrolytes were out of whack. I knew what they were, but it took some qualified explaining to make me understand that if your magnesium and potassium climbs too high you’re in danger of having a heart attack. Likewise if they get too low the same thing can happen. Mine were too high. The doctor thought it was because of my diet–again the high protein, and this time from a constant diet of bananas. He told me bananas were the highest in potassium of all foods. The solution: quit eating bananas, which I have done. Blood tests indicate it is coming down along with the magnesium. That’s about all they can do for me. That and try to fatten me up a little.

  He showed me where the mother lived on the map and then explained that most of the residents in the area had people. Maybe not formal butlers, but there were some of those too. He said they measured their yards in acres and that they all had gardeners. Most of them had swimming pools and many had tennis courts. All of them had at least one three-car garage, many with more than that. I jokingly asked him if he had been a meter-reader or something, he knew so much about them.

  He never answered me. But I knew if he had been around there, he wouldn’t have dated any of the young women. Off limits to all soldiers, sailors and CCC types, don’t you know? Now it all began to come together. Joyce had been from the other side of the tracks. Maybe born there, but I can testify to you that she was not from there. Lieutenant Harry Frankl knew it too. And somehow, he made me understand. I have always thought it was part of a long-range plan of his. I always thought he wanted me to know how much class she really had in spite of what his stepmother thought.

  I stayed for another three weeks and then reported to my new base. They gave me a another few weeks leave, telling me when I came back I would first check out in the latest fighter aircraft and then I would be retained as an instructor. It suited me just fine, all except the instructor part. My new supervisor explained that I wouldn’t be flying with students. He said they had recently switched from the difficult to fly AT-6 to the P-51. Students would come from the AT-6 directly to the single seated fighter used in combat. Once I became proficient, I would consult with students on the differences between the two aircraft. I would also be teaching ground school. It sounded good to me.

  ********

  I went to the drugstore in town and talked to a woman behind the counter. She was about Joyce’s age. She said she went to school with her but she hadn’t seen her in years. She said she had moved back from another city and hadn’t seen Joyce or thought much about her until I mentioned her name. She directed me to another woman. She said that person was sure to know where she had moved. Before I left, the pharmacist whispered to me, she said before I gave up looking, I should become familiar with a drug named Dilantin. That’s all she said, being kind of secretive, you know leaning in and whispering like she didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  But the person she referred me to denied knowing Joyce personally. However, she believed Joyce’s sister was living in New York. She didn’t know anymore about her than that. And if she did, she wasn’t talking.

  It was not what she said as much as it was the way she said it that made me more uneasy than I was.

  I spent a full week in her hometown talking to people who should have known where she moved. None of them could say for sure. I did find out that her older sister moved to New York about six years ago. Another of the townspeople was sure the sister had been offered a War job and had gotten married. She volunteered that Joyce’s sister would be able to tell me the details of what had happened to her.

  It was the term, “what happened to her” that set my mental alarm off again. When I asked her to explain further, she said she was busy. She said she didn’t know anything more about it. She closed the door. She didn’t mean to be rude; she just acted like she didn’t want to talk anymore.

  She didn’t mention Joyce’s name, just that she didn’t know anymore about it. What did she mean by “it”? I don’t know. What I do know is that a cold chill went through my body and I couldn’t wait to get shed of that town. Taken altogether, in the language of the streets, I had been getting the “strange dog treatment” from almost every person I talked to. But the more I thought about it the more it came to me that they all depended in some way on the Frankl family for their livelihood. That might explain why they were reluctant to talk to me.

  That afternoon found me on a bus headed for New York. No problem. If I couldn’t find Joyce there, then I was prepared to hire a good detective agency that could.

  ********

  It wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it was going to be. The police were no help at all. She hadn’t been reported missing and they weren’t in the business of looking for people unless there was suspicion of foul play. There was none that made any sense to them, so I found myself back on the street.

  I walked for a half block and went into a bar. I ordered a beer. There was nobody there but the barkeep and me. That’s what you do when in a strange town looking for information. You go to a bartender and order a beer. A beer is the usual price of admission. It will get you admitted but not a lot of information. I wanted to find out how a local would go about solving the problem. But the one-way conversation lasted a lot longer than I intended. In fact it lasted through a couple of more beers and then some. Before I shut up, I had told him most of my story–the personal part that’s for sure. I couldn’t help myself, I guess; he was one of those people you meet and within a few minutes you feel you’ve known them for years. At any rate, I stayed long enough to have paid my dues.

  They say New Yorkers are unfriendly and down right stuffy at times. Maybe so, but I never heard anything like that from anybody I knew in the service. And not in Chicago either, maybe they will become that way in a year or two. But right now I was welcome. It was as though the War was still on and I had just come back from combat overseas.

  He treated me as though I was a hero. In fact he invited me to stay at his place. He even had a cousin or a good friend who was a detective who he would introduce me to the next day. This guy, this detective, was supposed to be pretty good at least everybody in his neighborhood thought so.

  I was leery; yet what was to be gained by him doing what people usually did in the movies? I hadn’t flashed any money around. In fact I had deposited all I had in a bank. When I needed money, I wrote a check. He knew I was in the service and who wants to roll a serviceman. The idea is kind of revolting in the first place, to say nothing of the futility of robbing somebody with no money. Then, too, the services don’t take kindly to that sort of thing. Everybody knows if you want real trouble, you should rob a cop or a soldier. And I had already told a cop down the street part of the same story. No, I felt comfortable about the whole thing.

  Nothing of any consequence happened the next day. We had talked most of the night, me going through the story again while we emptied his refrigerator of cold beer. He wanted to help, maybe it was the beer talking but he genuinely wanted to help.

  It seems he owned part interest in the bar and a quick call to his partner got him off the hook for going in the next afternoon. A couple of more beers were consumed to stop our headaches. Then a couple more phone calls to his friends looking for his cousin. Everybody it seems wanted to help, and they demonstrated their sincerity by showing up and telling us so. An hour or two later, the small apartment was bulging with friends and relatives all talking at once. Nothing was accomplished.

  The next morning, however, the cousin appeared. He was ready to go to work or so he said.

  This guy was sober and appeared to be competent. I’ll go a step further by saying he looked a little bit like Humphrey Bogart–you know, Sam Spade, the detective in the Maltese Falcon, which was a recommendation in it’s self.

  I went through the story again with the intermittent help of my latest new friend. This time the essentials didn’t take nearly so long, sans the bee
r. I hired him for three days and paid him. No contract, no nothing, just a handshake with my bartender friend watching. He gave me to understand that this cousin of his was a straight shooter. At any rate, he said, he would break his cousin’s neck if he went off and spent the money getting drunk.

  The two days went by with me spending my mornings in his bar and sitting around reading magazines in the afternoon. Finally his cousin showed and low and behold he had results. He said a woman going by the name I had given him had moved around quite a bit but no problem. And since it had been so easy for the money he was being paid, he went out to see her. That is there was a woman living alone in this apartment that fit her description. He never asked her any questions. Playing like he was the meter-man, he got her name. The name she gave him was the same as the one I had been given, and he told me she resembled the description of Joyce I had given him. I concluded it must be her sister.

  The next day I went out to talk to her. I told her who I was and admitted the meter-man had been hired by me to find Joyce.

  She was reluctant to talk, giving me the same strange dog treatment I had gotten back in Joyce’s hometown. But she became a little more talkative when I handed her a bottle. The detective had hinted that she might be a lush. She had no visible means of support, and she was lounging around in her negligee late in the afternoon. He thought she might be too lazy to get dressed–sometimes, he said, this was a clear indicator that the person might have a drinking problem.

  She might also be a lady of the evening it was a possibility, he told me. He volunteered that she was pretty enough. But the one thing he noticed was her apartment. She wasn’t living that high on the hog. Not nearly as high as she might have been if he was correct in his latest assumption. After I questioned him some more, he admitted he really didn’t know or couldn’t tell much about her without talking to her at length.

  She definitely was not a drinker. She had one and that was all. How come my detective friend thought she was? I don’t know. And her reputation wasn’t in question either; all of which made me wonder about his perception of people. Good detectives like Sam Spade could tell a lot about somebody just by talking to him or her for a few minutes. If he missed by all that much, what good was he going to be when the real detective work started? I mean if we really had to lay-on a serious search for Joyce, how much good was he going to do? What made me think that? What had triggered in my subconscious that made me think something was amiss in the first place? And why was she hesitating to answer my questions? Not only was she hesitating but also I was beginning to think she didn’t know Joyce. Yet among the family pictures on her mantle, almost hiding in the middle out of sight was a photo of Joyce and her naval officer husband. Was the placing of it there an accident or was it done on purpose?

  I caught it out of the corner of my eye. No need to question what I had seen, I knew Joyce. But why was her sister acting this way? For that matter why was everybody acting this way? Strange, setting off thoughts, leaving me with funny feelings–the kind I was familiar with and couldn’t explain, the kind Emerson and Coleridge had on some of their trips searching for Nirvana and they couldn’t explain them either.

  I never pushed my luck with this woman that I now believed was her sister. Plenty of time–she hadn’t booted me out when she certainly might have if she hadn’t liked me. I asked if I might come back to talk some more and to my surprise she said yes. But she let me know that she didn’t want to talk about the woman I was calling Joyce. She said it again, she repeated it, and she didn’t know anybody by that name, acting as though she wanted to forget the whole thing. But then why did she appear to want to see me again? Was she lonesome? It must be something like that. I didn’t worry too much about what her reasons were I was just grateful she left the door open. Somehow, she impressed me as somebody that might be looking for help.

  Her name was Karen and I was to see her many times before I left. In fact, I wired my new supervisor asking for an extension of my leave. I had it accrued, what with the extra I had coming from being lost at sea. I hadn’t asked for it all in the first place, because it wasn’t customary to take more than two weeks, even if more time was on your record. The thinking was if they can afford to give you more than two weeks at a time, they might not need you. Anyway, I really hadn’t joined the organization yet, not in a way where they were depending on me.

  The two-week extension came to the address I had given them, that is the apartment of my bartender friend. I had moved out of his home after a few days and was living in a hotel. Not a good idea to wear out my welcome, don’t you know. But I had no permanent mailing address.

  That doesn’t mean we had severed any ties. On the contrary, I had gained even more friends and helpers–many more than I really needed. Sometimes I think they were there out of curiosity and sometimes it was because of my almost celebrity status. But it was becoming more and more apparent that they just wanted to help. Good people, no doubt about it.

  But this much I have to say: they are all worldlier than I am. They all made suggestions about what I ought to do, things that I would never have occurred to me. But most of them were of the opinion that there had been some sort of foul play, some things not open and above board–suspicions, and things most devious that might lend themselves more to their world than to mine. Yet this might be questionable, too, considering whom my associates have been, Aoki and Tash, for the past several years. These two, especially Aoki, had been major league when it came to intrigue and devious.

  Chapter 20

  Looking back on it now, it happened about the time I found the navy fighter and removed Harry Frankl’s dog tags. I haven’t mentioned it many times before but that was his name. Joyce, according to the papers in the library, was supposed to have been returning from a nightclub. She was accused of having been drinking with friends and she had an accident. Not just any accident, mind, but one that took her life. That’s bad enough, but she had hit a car carrying three young high school girls. They too were killed. That’s what the papers were saying, anyway.

  Her sister told me this, after she admitted she knew Joyce. She told me a lot more when I got to know her better. And I did get to know her better, much better. She said something really funny once that I thought a lot about before giving it up. There for a while I thought I might be reading something into it is one of the reasons I let it go. Anyway she told me not to make up my mind or come to any conclusions about Joyce. Then she said that anything anybody might have told me about her was going to be wrong. She said everybody had the wrong idea about Joyce and there was nothing I was going to be able to do about it if I knew the truth.

  I coaxed her to tell me the truth but she wouldn’t do it. She just kept repeating that I wasn’t going to be able to help Joyce if she did tell me. That’s what I guess I found odd if not downright confusing. I quit thinking about it after I concluded that Karen was talking about the memory of Joyce. That I wasn’t going to be able to change anybody’s mind about her and the cause of the accident that led up to it all.

  Karen suffered from depression, not the deep debilitating kind but a mild form. It was the kind that can be treated, the kind that sets in with some people who are suffering from stress coupled with assumed guilt. I figured it out later that the guilt bothering her came from knowing the truth about Joyce and not being able to prove that she hadn’t been drinking as much as the law said she had. In the end she moved away, attempting to escape her small town friends by acquiring new ones in New York.

  Karen had taken a job and had acquired a certain nest egg by saving and watching how she spent it. But following the War, she lost her job and the big bucks. That’s when the depression started. That’s when I came on the scene.

  The first time I really saw her and paid attention was the first time we spent some social time together. We agreed not to talk about Joyce that is we agreed without formally agreeing.

  I called on her; she looked like a million dollars. She looked like Joyce
the first time I saw her coming down the beach. She looked that good.

  I took her to dinner the next night and the one after that. I liked her, she was witty and classy, well educated and above all she was loyal. I could see the witty and classy immediately, the loyalty part came to me more slowly. But in the end it was the most important. But I was still very young: pretty, witty and classy were very important to me. That’s the way I felt just before I boarded the train and headed back to Arizona.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have been so infatuated had I spent more time with her. But all the way back to my base I thought about her, scarcely paying attention to the scenery, thinking and dreaming and occasionally falling off into deep meditation.

  It wasn’t hard. The clacking of the train wheels as we passed over the uneven breaks in the rails tended to lull me to sleep. But after I had plenty of sleep in the middle of the day, they also worked to put me in a kind of trance.

  It wasn’t like those I had on the island it was a kind of self-hypnosis, not unlike some of those Coleridge was most familiar.

  I didn’t care. I loved it, though, maybe not as much as I did on the island but I loved it just the same. I don’t think there was any mind bending or out of body experiences that went along with it. At first I couldn’t tell and then after several repetitions, I concluded I wasn’t experiencing the same thing. But without a doubt I was falling in love with Karen and it felt real good–and this meditating was making it feel even better.

  Was it a thought-transference from Joyce to Karen? One of the psychiatrists I talked to told me he thought it had happened between Gene and Joyce, now maybe it was happening all over again. I don’t know if he was right. And I never studied enough psychology to trust myself answering the question, although, I did wonder about it a few times. It didn’t matter; all I cared about were the results.

  I never understood much about psychology. I likened it to economics and algebra; too abstract for the real world. Who was going to use these things? Not me. After all I was going to be a military pilot. Good to know, only because you couldn’t call yourself educated unless you had a working knowledge of them.