by Homer Hickam
John-Bull Markham was a ten-year-old imp. Next to his mother, the Raiders thought John-Bull (his real name was John, of course, but the Marines had supplied his nickname) was the finest thing on Melagi. One of the Raiders, a shirtless, muscled brute with a cigarette dangling from his lips and a tattoo of a naked woman fondling a snake on the ham of his right arm, called out, “Hidy, John-Bull. Come on out to the ball field. We’re getting up a game.”
“Hullo, Elmer,” John-Bull answered. “Might I be allowed to bat?”
Elmer grinned around his cigarette. “Sure you can bat. Hit a home run if you want to. Your mama, I’m sure she’d like to come and see you hit a few, too, wouldn’t she?”
The other men, armed with razor-sharp K-bar knives strapped to their belts, brass knuckles in their pockets, and the odd Thompson submachine gun on their shoulders, chorused their complete agreement like schoolboys, even though they were all killers by training, trade, and inclination. The plucky little John-Bull reminded them of a time when they had also been boys, a time that now seemed to most of them as if it had been centuries ago. Besides baseball, they had taught John-Bull how to fieldstrip an M-l rifle, throw a grenade, cut a throat, break an arm, and even call in artillery. Making a pal of the boy was also a way to get close to his mother, or at least so they told themselves.
“Perhaps I will let John come out and play your game later, gentlemen,” Felicity said, lengthening her stride. “But now we have our rounds to make.”
“She visits the Monkey every day,” one of the Raiders said confidentially to a recent arrival. “She wants him to let her leave Melagi and go on up north, don’t ask me why.”
A redheaded Raider sporting a peeling sunburn on his nose and shoulders said, “She’s got a big plantation up there, you twerp. Island called Noa-Noa. I hear it’s got like the Taj Mahal for a house and everywhere you look Maries in grass skirts or wearing nothing at all.”
“A waterfall, too,” another Raider added. “Bathing beaurties sitting on the rocks in the lagoon below.”
“Playing flutes,” a Raider picking his teeth with a K-bar chimed in. Then he took on a beatific expression, as if he could see one of those beauties right before his eyes. “Ain’t no mosquitoes there neither,” he added. “And there’s plants what cures all kinds of sores and stuff, including the clap.”
“Well, the clap ain’t nothin’ any of us have to worry about, not around this place.”
“The Monkey ain’t never going to let her go, don’t matter how great Noa-Noa is,” another of the Raiders said. “He likes to keep her around to look at. He might even love her.”
“The Monkey, love someone besides himself?” That got a good laugh.
“But who could blame him if he loved a woman like that?” somebody else chirped, and heads were nodded up and down the line.
“She oughta try the chaplain,” a visiting sailor, all decked out in starched whites, said. “The Holy Joe’s a right square guy. He could help her, maybe.”
“Move along, swabbie. This ain’t your affair,” Elmer growled out of the corner of his mouth. The sailor did, rapidly distancing himself from the dangerous Raiders by going down into a stand of nearby palms where some native Melagians had spread out a blanket to sell poorly fashioned souvenirs, including one shrunken head, which looked suspiciously like nothing more than a carved coconut. He pretended to look at it but actually kept one eye on the woman as she continued on her way down the path. She was a fair package, for certain.
Felicity turned toward the beach along the path that led through some crepe myrtle bushes. “Why are we going this way?” John-Bull asked. “Aren’t we to see Colonel Burr?”
“Yes, dear, but I thought we might first visit with Captain McQuaid.”
“Oh, good. I like Captain McQuaid. Don’t you?”
“He is an interesting man, my dear,” Felicity answered in the most neutral voice she could manage.
The truth was Felicity did not like Captain McQuaid at all. He’d charged her twice what was normally asked for a voyage out to Malaita to pick up plantation workers, and for the money, the man had proceeded to blunder his boat, an old steam-driven schooner named Minerva, into the only well-marked reef in the Indispensable Strait. There they would have surely sunk if they hadn’t been spotted by a passing American landing craft and taken under tow. They had been lucky for the rescue but unlucky for the destination, it being the island of Melagi, where they had since been marooned not only by the condition of the Minerva but by order of Colonel Burr. Claiming concern for their health, Burr had ordered Felicity and John-Bull Markham quarantined on the island “for the duration,” which, since it referred to the war, was likely to be months, if not years.
But Felicity had neither months nor years to be trapped on Melagi. She had a plantation on Noa-Noa to run, coconuts that might already be rotting, and disaster in the making if she didn’t roast them into copra and get them to market soon. Copra was a by-product of coconuts and used, among other things, to make soap and a fine lubricating oil. The world needed both and would pay for it. But it took seven long years before a coconut palm matured, and all a plantation could do was hang on until that first crop came in. As luck would have it, 1943 was the year Felicity’s coconut palms had finally come to maturity. It was also the year the loan she and Bryce had taken with a bank in Sydney was due.
Felicity found Captain McQuaid sitting on the stump of a palm that the Raiders had chopped down to build their field fortifications, not realizing they were some of the plantation’s finest. The utter waste of war fairly took Felicity’s breath away. She knew that Brion Morrisette, the owner of the Melagi plantation, had worked his heart out to plant those trees and see them to maturity. Brion Morrisette. The name stirred memories in Felicity of a time that now seemed impossibly long ago, when all there were in these remote islands were the black natives and the white colonists. Together, they’d created their own little world. Some said it was a brutal world where the planters overworked and abused their boys. Others thought it a brave place where adventurous men and women tried to carve out a good life while offering a civilizing influence on the natives. But never mind, what nice parties Morrisette and his missus had once held on these very grounds! And where were the Morrisettes now? Languishing in Australia, Felicity supposed, or perhaps even back in England, where they would likely die when malaria came calling. Malaria was terrible but survivable in these climes. In the colder places, it was nearly always fatal.
Felicity had malaria, though it had been nearly a year since she had fever. Malaria was the fate of nearly every white man and woman in the Solomons, including the children, though John-Bull had so far escaped it, thank God. If the disease progressed to blackwater, where your urine turned dark and your fever raged, you simply died. That’s what had happened to her husband, after all.
Captain McQuaid seemed lost in himself, staring at his sad little boat. Felicity knew the schooner not only represented McQuaid’s entire fortune but was also the symbol of his probable future. Though a man might have thought his expression morose or even thoughtful, Felicity was a woman and could therefore better discern the true manifestation of his facial features. She knew it was shame that creased that sweaty face, shame for not only running into that wretched coral but for his entire life. She had known it from the moment she had clapped eyes on him when she had paddled out in her little canoe from her plantation to hail him down. Crime had chased Captain McQuaid out here, that much she knew. Most white men living in the Solomons who weren’t family men were on the run for one shameful thing or another, and Captain McQuaid was no family man, though likely he had left his polluted seed inside more than one poor black Marie.
“I see you’ve done nothing to patch your boat, Captain McQuaid,” Felicity observed. “A manifestation of your laziness, I presume.”
“Thank you, missus,” McQuaid replied, tipping his hat. “And good morning to you, too. I shall add your appraisal to my list of many character flaws.” He ti
pped his cap. “Good morning, John.”
“Hullo, Captain,” John-Bull responded politely, as he had been taught to do with all adults, white or black, then went off to look for shells on the beach.
“Are you ever going to make Minerva seaworthy, Captain?” Felicity asked. “I think a plank and a little caulking is all she needs.”
“The old girl needs a bit more than that, missus,” McQuaid replied dolefully. “Look at the size of that hole. I doubt if she will ever be repaired. Now, please leave me alone. Can’t you see I am thoroughly occupied by my misery?”
“You are more than miserable, Captain,” Felicity responded. “You are besotted with drink and black women.”
“Guilty! Hallelujah and amen!” McQuaid exclaimed, nearly smiling through his gray stubble.
“If you are afraid to go to sea,” Felicity continued, unshaken by his outburst, “then let me take the Minerva and go myself. My Malaitan boys can crew her. I will pay you a fine price for a short-term lease. Surely you understand, I have copra to harvest, and delay will ruin my business.”
“Business?” McQuaid laughed. “Missus, you have no business. Do you not see what is all around you? I should have left the islands months ago. Drink? Aye, there it is. My downfall, surely, that and an infernal optimism, but now I have seen the light. The only business around here is war, missus. War! A private vessel can no longer operate in these waters. If the Japanese don’t sink me, then the Americans will.”
Felicity raised her chin. “I did not see any Japanese or Americans around when you nearly sank us, Captain. You seemed to do very well simply by running into a reef.”
“It was because I was trying to avoid the Japanese and Americans that I struck that bloody reef,” McQuaid replied bitterly. “I was going farther south than usual.”
“You had a chart.”
“Yes, missus. I did. The reef we struck was misplaced on it.”
“It was not. You failed to put out a proper watch. I think you are a pathetic little man.”
“Yes, you have defined me. I am a pathetic little drunkard who toys with black women and has a boat which cannot float. My fortune is all misfortune.”
“You do not appear to be starving.”
McQuaid shrugged. “I provide a service to the Americans and they give me food. I look at their charts and tell them where I think there are reefs that aren’t on them. For instance, I know of one that isn’t where it’s supposed to be, as you are well aware.”
“That should be worth a stale loaf of bread a fortnight,” Felicity said.
“I pity myself for the day I met you,” McQuaid replied. “You have been nothing but trouble.”
Felicity narrowed her eyes. “You will rot on this island.”
McQuaid shrugged. “At least I’ll be alive.” Then he made another attempt at communicating the present situation by asking a question. “Missus, I am curious. If somehow you were able to harvest it, who do you expect to buy your copra?”
“I will send it to Australia. People must still wash, war or no war, so soap must be made. And palm oil is surely needed for the war effort. One need only try to succeed, Captain. It is an article of faith my husband and I have lived by all these years out here.”
Captain McQuaid raised his tangled eyebrows and resisted the temptation to tell the woman that her husband no longer lived anywhere and therefore, their article of faith was as bogus as any other dreams the English and Australian colonists might have had in this terrible place of heat and biting insects and disease and rot and ruin. Instead, he said, in as kind a voice as he could muster, “Well, I wish you well, missus. It is all I can do. Now, I really must get back to feeling sorry for myself, if you don’t mind.”
Felicity called for John-Bull. “Come, dear,” she said, taking him by the hand. She looked over her shoulder at McQuaid. “I shall pray you find an ounce of courage, Captain.”
McQuaid touched his cap, then watched Felicity Markham and her son walk back up the path toward the American camp. He had to hand it to the woman. She was no quitter like most of the plantation owners in the Solomons. At the first whiff of Japanese gunpowder, nearly all of them had absconded. Only the men who had turned coast-watcher remained, them and a few missionaries and this one lone, persistent woman. McQuaid leaned his chin on his hand and remembered how it had been when he’d first come out to the Solomons. It was good, then. The booze flowed across the islands like an endless river. And all those Maries—just for the asking of this chief or that for a small favor, or a twist of tobacco to their husbands, and those sleek black beauties had been his. Of course, he’d barely escaped with his head more than once, but it had all been a wonderful adventure.
With the coming of the damned Americans, things would never be the same. The locals were already infected by the black Americans who were actually whites in chocolate skins who drove the trucks and operated the bulldozers and generators and such on Melagi. Because of the example of these GI coloreds, the bushmen and saltwater boys were beginning to think they might be as good as any man.
McQuaid chuckled to himself. Of course, they were as good as any man and always had been. The trick for the European mastahs and missuses was to keep them ignorant of that fact. “Bloody Americans,” he muttered, then subsided on his stump, careless of life. Before him, his schooner and his future seemed to sag under their own weight.
“What’s up, Mac?”
Captain McQuaid looked up into the friendly face of an American sailor wearing a tub hat on the back of his head and a great blue tattoo of a dragon on his shirtless chest. McQuaid nodded toward his sad little boat. “There you see my situation,” he said.
“Yeah, me and the boys”—the sailor raised his chin toward where two similarly shirtless young and tattooed American sailors stood huddled beneath a leaning palm tree—”have been thinking about your old Minerva here. You see, we hear there are girls on some of those islands out there . . .”
“Girls?” McQuaid eyed the young man. “You mean black Maries?”
“Black or green, man in these parts can’t be too picky,” the sailor answered with a shy smile.
“That is so true,” Captain McQuaid replied. “A woman’s a woman,” he allowed, and rolled his eyes generally seaward.
“Captain, I can see you are a man of some experience,” the sailor said, and removed his hat to display his respect. “Let us now get down to cases. See, we’d like to rent your boat. . .”
3
After the battle for Melagi was fought and the last Japanese soldier hunted down and killed (a necessity since none of them would surrender), the Seabees, which was the nickname for the navy construction battalions (CBs), moved onto the island to build a base for the Raiders. The first thing they did was cut down the rows of tall, ruler-straight coconut palms on the old copra plantation. On the resulting grassy prairie, which quickly turned into mud, they erected two rows of gray Quonset huts. Then, after improving the harbor facilities (the Japanese had used it to support seaplanes), they left for the next island. When the Raiders transported their headquarters and logistics units from Guadalcanal, they packed the Quonsets full of supplies they had mostly stolen from the army, then erected hundreds of two-man tents with some larger tents for the officers. Air raid dugouts were added here and there, covered with palm logs, and their camp was complete.
Josh came down from his cave and saw the Raiders slogging along on their various missions, or resting in their tents, or cleaning their weapons, or reading and writing their letters in the shade of the few straggly palms that hadn’t been chopped down, or simply biding their time. Some were huddled together, singing their bitter song:
We sent for the army to come to Me-soggy,
But General MacArthur said no,
I’ll tell you the reason, it isn’t the season,
Besides you ‘ve got no USO.
Bless ’em all, bless ’em all. . .
Everything seemed normal, at least as normal as was possible for men who kil
led other men for a living and were also afflicted with malaria or dysentery or yaws or general jungle rot, inevitable in these parts. Josh’s nose detected the faint odor of something sweetly sour and he deduced that there was an applejack still nearby, probably just within that copse of bushes on the other side of the camp. When he saw with his keen eyes a wisp of wood smoke from the copse, his supposition was confirmed.
The path he was following led past the little swamp on the edge of the camp. Josh was a big man, broad-shouldered, with muscled arms and stout legs supporting a heavy chest, yet he was surprisingly light on his feet and so avoided a six-foot-long crocodile that suddenly pushed out of the water and snapped its jaws at him. “You got to be faster than that, Eleanor,” Josh said, recognizing the croc, which was something of a Raider pet and was guarding her eggs. Disappointed she hadn’t drawn blood, Eleanor slunk back into the muddy water, with just her pouty eyes showing.
Josh walked on, executing the Solomon Islands salute against a sudden swarm of the tiny, nearly invisible bloodsucking insects everybody called no-see-ums. They were vicious little creatures that especially liked to crawl into a man’s eyes to drink his tears before biting his eyelids. Josh had seen a Raider who, drunk from applejack, had fallen asleep on the beach one night. In the morning his face, ravaged by mosquitoes and no-see-ums, was so swollen, it was scarcely recognizable as a human face at all. Although the Raider was rushed off to the clinic on nearby Tulagi, Josh heard later that the man had died. It was a cautionary tale. The Solomons had lots of ways to kill you. The Jap was just one of them.
Josh came to a company command post, a large tent, its sides rolled up to let in the air. Inside the tent were two rows of field tables, with clerks sitting at them doing whatever clerks in the field had to do, collating orders, typing reports, keeping track of who was dead or alive, filling in supply forms, and such. Outside the tent, a dozen men lounged on the grass doing nothing. Their utilities were sweat-stained, and empty ammo pouches were strewn about, but their rifles were close at hand. Most likely, they were just in from some action, probably up in New Georgia, where the Munda airfield, the purpose for the battle there, had recently been captured. Soon, Josh thought, these men would be sneaking into the copse with their canteen cups so as to dull themselves with drink.
