Call to Arms

by W. E. B Griffin

  The first time Miss Ernestine Sage noticed the young woman was when she drove the LaSalle into the parking lot of the Bay-Vue Super Discount Super Market. The young woman was attractive, if harried-looking, and in what appeared to be the eighth month of her pregnancy. The pregnant young woman seemed to be examining her, or maybe the car, with more than ordinary interest.

  But then, as she got out of the car, Ernie’s attention was distracted by a Navy airplane, an enormous, twin-engine seaplane, coming in over the ocean and then landing in the bay with two enormous splashes. The sun was shining (it shined just about all the time here), and the bay was blue, and the airplane landing, Ernie thought, was beautiful. It made her think of Pick Pickering, who was learning to fly.

  The pregnant young woman was standing in front of the plate-glass windows of the supermarket when Ernie grabbed a shopping cart and headed for the door. She smiled—shyly—at Ernie, and Ernie returned the smile.

  Inside the supermarket, Ernie took her shopping list from her purse and went first to the dairy cooler for eggs and milk and butter. As they were driving across the country, and since they had arrived here, she had been astonished at Ken’s enormous breakfast appetite. He regularly wolfed down four eggs and as much bacon or ham as she put before him. Once, for the hell of it, she had cooked a whole pound of bacon, and, with the exception of her own three slices, Ken had eaten all of it.

  Next she went to the meat cooler and bought bacon and ham and sausage. And then she had the most extraordinary feeling that she was being followed by the pregnant young woman.

  Ernie moved from the bacon and sausage display case into one of the aisles. Halfway down it, the pregnant young woman appeared, coming the other way.

  Without doing anything that would suggest she was trying to lose the pregnant young woman, Ernie tried to do just that. Fixing an “ooops, I forgot paprika” look on her face, she twice reversed direction, and pushed her shopping cart into another aisle.

  And both times the pregnant young woman, whose shopping cart held a loaf of bread and a quart bottle of ginger ale and nothing else, appeared behind her in the same aisle. The second time Ernie reversed direction she moved three aisles away, to the beef section, where she bought a half a dozen T-bone steaks; but that move didn’t shake loose the pregnant woman either.

  Ken never tired of steak. Which was a good thing, for her culinary skills were just about limited to frying eggs and bacon and broiling steak.

  As she maneuvered her cart, Ernie had managed to glance at the young woman (even to study her for a long moment in a curved mirror apparently installed to discourage shoplifters). And by now she was convinced that she had never seen the young woman before. But she was also convinced that whatever the young woman was—and she looked like a nice young woman—she was not a threat.

  But she unnerved Ernie. And feeling a little foolish, Ernie cut short her shopping trip. She had steaks for dinner and stuff for breakfast in the shopping cart. She could pick up bread and toilet tissue on the way to the checkout counter. What else she needed she would get tomorrow. Or maybe even later today, if Ken called up and said he would be a little late again.

  Ernie didn’t see the young woman as she went through the checkout line, but when she pushed the shopping cart out of the supermarket, the young woman was in the parking lot, between Ernie and the LaSalle.

  Ernie pushed the shopping cart off the concrete sidewalk onto the macadam and toward the car. The pregnant young woman was now looking at her. Ernie put on a faint smile (the only explanation for her behavior, she suddenly concluded, was that the young woman mistakenly believed that she knew her) and headed for the car.

  “Excuse me,” the pregnant young woman said, “you’re an officer’s wife, aren’t you?”

  Ernie hesitated.

  “I saw the Camp Elliott sticker,” the pregnant young woman said, making a vague gesture toward a sticker on the LaSalle’s windshield. It identified the car as having been registered on the post by a Marine officer.

  “The car belongs to a friend,” Ernie said.

  “Oh,” the pregnant young woman said, obviously disappointed, and then added, “I am. A Marine officer’s wife, I mean.”

  “Right now,” Ernie blurted, “that’s the great ambition of my life. To be a Marine officer’s wife.”

  The young woman smiled. It was a nice smile, Ernie thought, and the young woman was obviously a nice young woman.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” Ernie asked.

  The pregnant young woman dipped into her purse and came up with a wallet. She took from it a dependent’s identification card, which she thrust at Ernie. There was a photograph on it, which made the pregnant young woman look all of sixteen years old. Her name was Dorothy Burnes and she was the dependent wife of Martin J. Burnes, 1st Lt., USMCR.

  “Can I talk to you?” Dorothy Burnes said.

  “Sure,” Ernie said. “Mine is a second lieutenant.”

  “I’ve been following you around the supermarket,” Dorothy said.

  “I noticed,” Ernie said. A look of embarrassment crossed Dorothy Burnes’s face. “Why don’t you sit in the car?” Ernie added.

  “Thank you,” Dorothy said. She got in the passenger seat. Then Ernie unloaded the groceries from the shopping cart into the LaSalle and pushed the basket to a steel-pipe enclosure. When that was done she walked back to the convertible. The roof was down and the boot snapped in place. The car glistened. Ernie had waxed it, with Simoniz, partly because she had come to understand how important the car was to Ken, and partly because there wasn’t much to do with him gone all day.

  Ernie got behind the wheel, pulled the door closed, and turned to Dorothy Burnes.

  “I’m desperate,” Dorothy said. “They put me out of the motel today, and unless I find someplace to stay between now and half-past five, my husband’s going to put me on the Lark at half-past six.”

  “The Lark?”

  “The train to Los Angeles,” Dorothy explained. “Where you can connect with trains to Kansas City. We’re from Kansas City.”

  “Oh,” Ernie said.

  “I really thought if I offered them twice as much money, they’d let me stay,” Dorothy said. “But the lady said that wouldn’t be ‘fair to the other girls,’ and that I would have to check out.”

  “Oh, hell,” Ernie said.

  “So,” Dorothy said, trying and failing to sound amusing, “I got this clever idea that maybe if I asked some other officer’s wife, who looked like she had some place to stay, maybe she’d know of something. And then I decided the best place to find some officer’s wife who had a place to stay was at a supermarket. If she was buying groceries, she would have a place to cook them. So I came here and you came in.”

  “Good thinking, anyway,” Ernie said.

  She’s just like me. Or, there but for the grace of God and Pick’s father, go I.

  “But I suppose you’re living with your folks,” Dorothy said, “and have no idea where I could find a place…anyplace out of rain?”

  “I’m living on a boat,” Ernie said. “And I don’t, I’m afraid, know of any place for rent.”

  “A boat?” Dorothy asked.

  Ernie nodded. “One of those things that goes up and down in the water,” she said.

  “And you don’t have any idea—” Dorothy said.

  Ernie shook her head.

  “Damn,” Dorothy said, and then started to sniffle.

  The tears, Ernie knew, were genuine, not a pitch for sympathy. Dorothy Burnes was at the end of her rope. She was pregnant and didn’t have a place to stay, and her Marine was about to send her home.

  “Sorry,” Dorothy Burnes said, wiping her nose with a Kleenex.

  “If they threw you out, where’s your luggage?” Ernie asked.

  “In the motel office,” Dorothy said.

  “Well, you can stay with us tonight,” Ernie said. “And in the morning, you and I will start looking for a place for you.”

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p; “Have you got room?”

  Ernie nodded.

  “I’ve got money,” Dorothy said. “I can pay. I really thought if I offered them twice as much money…I wired my father for money, and I wasn’t going to tell Marty—”

  “Where’s the motel?” Ernie interrupted, as she pushed the LaSalle’s starter button.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Dorothy said.

  “I guess we camp followers have to stick together,” Ernie said.

  That made Dorothy Burnes giggle. She smiled shyly at Ernie. Ernie was pleased.

  Twenty minutes later, Ernie stopped the LaSalle near Pier Four of the San Diego Yacht Club. A hundred yards out on the pier, the Last Time bobbed gently up and down. It was separated from the wharf by five white rubber bumpers the size of wastebaskets, and connected to it by a teak gangplank and electric service and telephone cables.

  The Last Time, the property of a San Diego attorney whose firm did a good deal of business with Pacific & Far East Shipping, Inc., was fifty-three feet long, sixteen feet in the beam, and drew six feet. She was powered with twin General Motors Detroit diesels.

  Her owner had been delighted, when approached, to offer it, via the chairman of the board of Pacific & Far East Shipping, to the daughter of the chairman of the board of the American Personal Pharmaceutical Corporation for as long as she wanted it. Not only for the obvious reasons, but also because her normal three-man crew, carried away on a wave of patriotism, had enlisted in the Coast Guard, leaving the Last Time untended.

  “Oh, my God!” Dorothy Burnes said when she stepped down into the lounge. “I’ve never been on one this big. What is it, a Bertram?”

  Which question indicates, Ernie decided, that you are not entirely unfamiliar with yachts. And it follows from that, and from other things you have said, that while you obviously are a homeless and pregnant waif, you are probably not a poor homeless waif.

  “No,” she said. “It’s a Mitchell. It was made in Florida and sailed here.”

  “It’s yours?”

  “It belongs to a friend of a friend,” Ernie said. “We’re boat-sitting. The crew went off to the Coast Guard.”

  “I just hope I’m not dreaming,” Dorothy said. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

  “I’m glad to have the company,” Ernie said. And she realized then that although they would certainly look around the next day, and diligently, for some place for Dorothy Burnes and her husband to live, they almost certainly were not going to find one.

  Which means they will stay here. Which, on balance, may be a pretty good idea. It’ll give me company. And we are, in a sense, sisters.

  “Maybe I should have told you this before,” Ernie said. “I think the phrase for what my Marine and I are doing on here is ‘shacking up.’”

  There was a look of embarrassment in Dorothy Burnes’s eyes. “You didn’t have to tell me that,” she said, softly. “That’s none of my business.”

  “Ken doesn’t think that Marine officers, about to be sent overseas, should be married,” Ernie said.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ernie said.

  “Isn’t that all that’s important? I mean, really?”

  “So my reasoning goes,” Ernie said.

  “Maybe, when he sees Marty and me, it will be contagious,” Dorothy said.

  “That’s a nice thought,” Ernie said. “Come on, I’ll show you your room…cabin.”

  By four o’clock, Ernie Page and Dorothy Burnes had become friends. They were of an age, and of roughly comparable background. Dorothy’s father operated a large condiment-bottling business (pickles, relish, horseradish, et cetera) founded by his grandfather. She had gone to Emma Willard, and then on to Vanderbilt College, where, as a junior, she had married Marty, then a senior. Marty had gone to Quantico for the Platoon Leader’s Course when he graduated.

  “Ken went through Quantico,” Ernie offered, “with my childhood sweetheart. That’s how we met. And my childhood sweetheart’s parents fixed it for us to live on the boat.”

  “They know?” Dorothy asked. The rest of the sentence, “that you and Ken are living together on this boat?” went unsaid.

  “They know,” Ernie said. “My parents know, too, but they pretend not to. I mean, they know I’m out here with Ken. They don’t know about the boat.”

  “Where did Ken go to school?” Dorothy asked.

  “He didn’t,” Ernie replied, with a sense of misgiving. “He’s what they call a mustang. He came up from the ranks.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s very bright,” Ernie said. “And the Marine Corps saw it, and they sent him to officer’s school.”

  “He must be,” Dorothy readily agreed.

  A clock chimed four times.

  “Time to get him,” Ernie said, and then, “what do we do about yours? What will he do, go to the motel?”

  Dorothy nodded.

  “Well, then, I’ll drop you off there and go fetch Ken,” Ernie said. “You bring him here.”

  Ken, who was wearing dungarees, looked tired when Ernie picked him up behind the orderly room at Camp Elliott. When he was tired, he looked older. Sometimes, she thought, he looked like a boy. And in his dungarees, he did not much resemble the Marine officer in the recruiting posters.

  She pushed the door open and then slid halfway across the seat to let him get behind the wheel.

  “Been waiting long?” she asked.

  “No,” he said simply.

  “Don’t I get a kiss?”

  He graciously offered the side of his face. It wasn’t what she had had in mind, but she knew that it was all she was going to get. The official excuse was that there was a Marine Corps regulation—yet another regulation—that proscribed the public display of affection by officers and gentlemen. The real reason was that Ken was made uncomfortable by public displays of affection; the regulation just gave him the excuse he needed to treat her, when in public, like a sister.

  Sometimes, as now, this annoyed Ernie.

  She moved her hand and quickly groped him.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ken said, knocking her hand away.

  “There’s a time and place, right?” she teased. “And this isn’t it?”

  He looked at her and shook his head.

  “You’re something,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” she agreed.

  For just a moment, he touched her cheek very gently with the back of his hand.

  “Watch out!” she said in mock horror. “Someone will see, and they will cut your buttons off and drum you out of the Corps in disgrace!”

  He laughed softly and smiled at her.

  “How was your day?”

  “Noisy,” he said. He dug in his shirt pocket and handed her a brass cartridge case.

  “What’s this?”

  “Look at the stamp,” he said. “On the bottom.”

  “I’m looking,” she said. “What do I see?”

  “See where it says ‘FA 15’?” She nodded. “That means it was made by the Frankfurt Arsenal in 1915; before the First World War.”

  They were at the gate then. A Marine MP saluted crisply as he waved them through.

  “Do you think he’d do that if he suspected that you and I are carrying on?” Ernie said innocently after Ken had returned the salute. “Or do you think he’d turn you in? ‘Sir, I saw an officer today I just know is carrying on with a female civilian.’”

  He laughed again and smiled at her.

  “You just don’t give up, do you?”

  “Does it still work?”

  “Does what still work?”

  “Bullets made before the First World War,” Ernie said.

  “The bullet is the pointed thing that comes out the barrel,” Ken said. “The round consists of the case, the powder, the primer—and the bullet.”

  “Sorry,” she said, mockingly.

  “And the answer is most of the time,” he said. “It’s really surprising.”

  �
�What happens if it doesn’t work?” she asked.

  “Colonel Carlson came to see me today,” McCoy said, changing the subject.

  “What?” she asked, confused. It wasn’t the answer she expected.

  “Colonel Carlson came out to the machine-gun range,” McCoy said. “Looking for me.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He spoke to me in Cantonese,” McCoy said, and smiled. “You should have seen the looks on the kids’ faces when he did that.”

  “What did he want?” Ernie repeated.

  “Well, I guess he wanted to have a look at me, and to see if I really spoke Chinese.”

  “And?” she asked, impatiently.

  “He wanted to know if I had heard of the Chinese Route Army, and if so, what I thought about them.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What I thought he wanted to hear,” McCoy said. “That they do a pretty good job.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Oh, he asked me the usual questions; he was feeling me out,” McCoy said. “And then he told me he was forming a battalion, and asked if I was interested in joining it.”

  “And you, of course, said yes,” Ernie said.

  “That’s why they sent me out here,” McCoy said. “You know that. The whole idea was to get him to recruit me.”

  He suddenly pulled out of the line of traffic and stopped before a commercial laundry. He went in and came out a minute or two later carrying two enormous bundles of paper-wrapped laundry. He threw them in the back and got behind the wheel.

  “What’s for supper?” he asked.

  “Steak, for a change,” she said.

  He nodded his approval.

  “Well, are you going to tell me, or not?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Did he ‘recruit’ you, or not?”

  “He fed me a line about how he wanted to compare me against other volunteers,” McCoy said. “But that was just bullshit. He’ll take me. I’m a young old China Marine.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He wants old China Marines, people who may think like Orientals. And he wants young officers and men. He’ll take either. I’m both.”

  “Well, is he crazy, or not?”

  “I liked him,” McCoy said. “Ain’t that a kick in the ass?”