by Helen Wells
Cherry said slowly, “No, that isn’t all.” And she told her brother about the strange metal fragments the surgeons had taken from Gene’s shoulder, and the strange wound. Charlie’s face tightened as she carefully described it. “So that’s why I think,” she concluded, “that Gene is brooding over something the rest of us know nothing about.”
“Strange,” Charlie muttered. “It’s downright mysterious.”
“Mysterious certainly is the word. Now tell me,” Cherry demanded briskly, “every single thing you can remember about the flight on which Gene was wounded.”
“All right, honey, I’ll do my best.” Charlie hitched his crude chair closer to Cherry’s desk, thought for a moment, then began.
“We were about forty minutes away from Island 14. We were in the general direction of those forward islands, where you hear the guns from, but we circled away as much as we could. Everything seemed to be going all right. Gene went back alone to the middle of the ship to check some cargo that was rattling around. The rest of us were way up front. Then all of a sudden, the plane sort of rocked, for no reason I could see. It could have been a shot, or it could have been an air pocket that rocked us. The noise of the propellers and engines might have drowned out the sound of a shot, you know. Gene said—” Charlie drew his blond brows together “—Gene said, ‘There they are, boys! Enemy aircraft!’” He fell silent.
“Go on,” Cherry prompted.
“It doesn’t make sense. The rest of us took a quick look all around us. There weren’t any enemy planes. There wasn’t any smoke, any fire. There wasn’t anything!”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. He never spoke again.”
Cherry buried her face in her hands. She tried to think but the flier’s drawn face, especially his haunted eyes, kept rising up on her closed eyelids. She opened her eyes hastily to wipe out that pathetic vision.
“Charlie,” she said in a choked voice, “there’s no sense in our getting upset about this. We’ve got to keep our wits, if we’re going to help him. And the way to help Gene is to find out what happened. Gene saw or experienced something the rest of you didn’t see. To cure Gene, we’ve got to solve this mystery.”
Charlie laughed mirthlessly. “Think you can solve it? Let me tell you something, Sis. There’s more to this than saving just this one man. If the enemy has a secret weapon, then the lives of thousands of men are at stake!”
Cherry shuddered, then drew herself up. “All right, the first thing is to keep a cool head. The enemy would just love to get us all scared and panicky. But facts can be uncovered, and, for Gene’s sake if for no other reason, we must get to the bottom of this.” She hesitated a moment, then asked, “What’s Gene like when he’s well?”
“The finest man you ever knew,” Charlie replied softly. “Cherry, we fellows all think he’s swell. He’s so quiet and good and modest and unselfish. I could tell you things he’s done for us, at risk to himself—And he never did talk much. Sort of kept his thoughts to himself. But when he did talk, it was highly intelligent talk. Still, no one ever really knew him.” Charlie’s voice grew rough. “Gene was always sort of—remote. And now he’s farther away than ever.”
“Hold tight!” Cherry commanded. “We’ll get Gene to talk again! We’re going to solve this mystery, or my name isn’t Ames.”
“My name is Ames, too,” Charlie reminded her. “Let’s go!”
Brother and sister settled down at the desk and soberly went over the facts they had between them. Charlie said the Intelligence Officer was disturbed because the crew could not give him an adequate report of what had happened. Captain May had been questioning them until their heads ached, trying to jog their memories. More interrogations were coming.
Cherry could not report much, only that the wounded flier was merely sleeping and eating, slowly regaining his strength, the shoulder slowly healing. She could have sworn that he knew perfectly well what was said to him, and that his failure to reply was no lack of comprehension, but came from another source. But what source? Shock? Yes, probably hysterical muteness caused by shock. Cherry suggested: either he did not want to talk, lest he would have to talk about what he alone had seen, or else the memory of it was holding him frightened and silent. Cherry explained to Charlie that Gene’s vocal chords were all right but that people can be stricken temporarily blind, deaf, or mute by shock.
“It’s almost a psychological mystery,” she murmured.
Charlie vigorously shook his head. “It looks to me like a mechanical mystery. That strange kind of metal fragment—it must mean a new kind of smokeless shell. Maybe a new metal, or a new chemical. Or both? And the way you said it acted—little holes entering, a big hole at the back.” Charlie puzzled over various answers. But Cherry could see her brother was not satisfied.
“Besides,” Charlie went on, “where did the shell come from? Planes? But we saw no planes and, believe me, we were watching. Hidden on land? Hidden on camouflaged ships? Funny. There didn’t seem to be any flak.”
But even between them, Cherry and Charlie had only incomplete, contradictory, cloudy impressions of what had befallen Gene.
Suddenly Charlie pounded his fist on the desk. “What am I thinking of? Talking of mechanical—and I forget to tell you the most important thing of all! Gene is a gun expert. He’s one of the most valuable men in the flight forces. He’s irreplaceable! And he’s going to be needed for—he must be cured in time for—Oh, gosh, I shouldn’t be telling this! Not even to my own sister!”
Cherry said evenly, “Tell me as little as you can.”
Charlie grinned. “Thanks. You’re a real pal. Well, you hear the guns, and you see us bringing in ammunition. You’ve guessed for yourself that something big is coming. The date is set. Gene is slated to play a key role. The Transport Command is lending him to the combat air forces. He has a special mission. We might lose without him. Cherry, you have to get him cured—if you can cure him at all—within a month.”
“Yes, sir,” Cherry said. “Within a month, sir. I take that as an order.” Her tone was light but her determination was deadly serious.
Then they went out into the hot, starry night, through the chigger-infested palms. It did not seem like the third week in March. They headed for the silent soldier’s tent. As they walked over, Charlie told Cherry:
“Maybe Gene is suffering from shock at whatever he alone saw or experienced. But I want you to know this. His silence is not the result of fear. He is the bravest, steadiest man in our crew. They don’t come any better than Gene. And if he can be shocked into silence, then this strange new thing must be something really dangerous.”
“All the more reason,” said Cherry, trying to keep her own courage steady, “why we must keep and use our heads!” She was glad her brother was here to help her. “Maybe,” she said, lifting the canvas flap into the private room, “maybe when Gene sees you, Charlie, he will talk.”
The little, crude room was quiet and almost dark, lighted by a lantern. The corpsman at the bedside rose as Cherry and her brother came in. The silent airman saw them from the high bed; he moved his head a little on the pillow. Cherry told the corpsman he might go off duty now, and he left. She and Charlie went over to the bed.
“Hello, Gene,” Charlie said in a cheerful voice. “How’s the shoulder? Tough you had to get it.”
The airman did not answer. His eyes clearly recognized his crew mate Charlie, but his expression did not change. Charlie struggled to pretend nothing was wrong, and kept up a one-sided conversation. “We sure do miss you, Gene. Hurry up and get well, will you? We need you. I guess you remember a certain date.”
The airman’s lips moved, but no sound came. And then Cherry realized that his eyes were not on Charlie at all, but on herself, standing behind her brother. He looked at her like a dependent child.
She forced a smile. “Charlie told me you’re a pilot and an expert gunner. And he—” Cherry hesitated, then decided to risk mentioning the dread subject �
�—he told me all he could about what happened when you were hit.”
The flier’s eyes flickered nervously, but remained focused on Cherry’s face. She tried to continue, to make this sound like a normal conversation, but it was eerie talking to someone who never answered. Charlie was so shaken he had turned his back to the bed.
“I think I’d better go, Cherry,” her brother whispered. “Maybe another time—–”
She nodded and stepped outside the tent with Charlie. Clasping his hand tightly, she encouraged him, “Don’t feel too bad about Gene, Charlie. We will find some way to help him!” Her brother silently returned her warm handclasp, turned quickly and disappeared into the dark.
It was very late by now, very quiet in the isolation tent. The flier was still lying there with his dark blue eyes wide open. His expression altered ever so slightly as Cherry softly re-entered. He looked as if he had been in some world of dream or memory, and returned to the present as Cherry approached his bed.
She smiled at him as cheerfully as she could, and said, “Aren’t you getting sleepy by now? I think I’m going to give you a glass of milk.”
She went over to the bedside table to get the thermos—her own precious thermos bottle—and poured a glass of cool milk, then a glass of water from the pitcher, to follow the milk. As her hands worked, her mind was at work too. She did not know much about psychoneurological nursing—except that the ancient Greek word, taken to pieces, meant the nursing of soul, nerves, and reason, and that it would require all her sympathy and imagination. After she had given the airman his milk and settled him more comfortably on the pillows, Cherry started to talk, with great care in her choice of words and ideas.
“Gene, Charlie and I know that something extraordinary happened to you. Now, look. We can’t cure you until we figure out what happened, and clear it out of your memory. And I have an idea—” she looked into his eyes and knew he was relaxed and listening closely, “—that you are trying to remember. In fact, I think you can’t quite remember, and that worries you, and so you are trying to reconstruct everything that happened. Isn’t that right?”
She waited tensely. The soldier briefly closed his eyes to say Yes! Cherry caught her breath. Then she felt her way with her next sentence.
“And I think too that, while you are making an effort to remember, you are also trying to avoid the memory, because it is so horrible. You want to remember and get it straight, but still you would rather not think about it. Isn’t that right? So your mind is sort of—locked—between the two efforts. And that’s why you can’t talk. Isn’t that right, Gene? Oh, Gene, try to tell me!”
The soldier uneasily turned his head on the pillow. He was breathing hard. What she had said had distressed him. “He wouldn’t be so upset if I hadn’t stumbled on the truth,” Cherry thought. Suddenly she had an inspiration. She had never thought of it before, never tried it before, because until now, Gene had lacked the strength for even this.
“Gene, try this! Please, Gene, help me to help you!”
She pulled out of her voluminous pocket a pencil and a small pad of paper. Gently, she fitted the pencil into the boy’s right hand, his good hand, and held the pad under it. She hoped he was strong enough to write. Yes, his fingers gripped the pencil and held it!
“Tell me what happened. Whatever bits you can remember. Write it. Write for Charlie, for me.”
He looked deeply into her face, as if wondering whether he could trust her. Then his dark blue eyes dropped to the paper and slowly, painfully, the pencil started to move. Cherry’s hand trembled as she held the pad for him. The pencil wrote, waited, wrote again, and slid off onto the blanket. The airman’s face and hands were covered with perspiration but he had a look of infinite relief. He had written, in big, weak, clumsy letters:
“Concealed guns—maybe—I am trying—–”
CHAPTER VIII
Monkey and Other Business
THE TROUBLE WITH THIS PARTICULAR MONKEY BUSINESS was that it involved a real live monkey.
The girls were in their back yard, teasing Cherry and asking her what she was going to do about this new situation. Gwen, pinning pink panties neatly on a guy-line attached between the Ritz Stables and a palm tree, remarked:
“That monkey is a whole lot cuter and nicer than some people I know!”
Cherry lifted her dripping, soapy head from a bucket, where Vivian was giving her a shampoo. “I never said anything against the monkey. It’s a lovely monkey. One of the best. Who am I to go around slandering a poor, innocent, helpless little monkey? It’s just that——”
“Put your head down,” Vivian commanded. “This is the Ritz Beauty Parlor. Monkeys not allowed here.”
“I saw a doe and two doelets stroll into camp the other day,” Josie Franklin offered conversationally, standing around in the hot sun.
“Not doelets, dear, fawns,” Cherry sputtered, as Vivian firmly seized her by the hair and poured clear water mostly down the back of her neck.
“But about that monkey,” Gwen relentlessly insisted.
“All right!” Cherry exclaimed. She got up from her knees, tied a towel turban-fashion about her head, and announced, “We will now settle that monkey business for once and for all!”
“We’ll come along!” the girls chorused and trooped down the dusty, sandy road with her. “To make sure justice is done,” Gwen said between her teeth.
“Monkey justice, I suppose,” Cherry said disgustedly. “To be really fair, he deserves a jury of his peers.”
“What’s peers?” Josie Franklin asked, looking quizzical behind her glasses.
“Equals. In this case, a jury of monkeys. And a monkey judge,” Cherry explained to naïve Josie. “If anyone says ‘monkey’ to me just once more——”
“Monk—” Gwen started.
Cherry chased her, in and out among the coconut trees. She could not catch her but Gwen did sober up.
The monkey in question belonged to Private First Class Joe Troy. He had caught the little creature, tamed it, and found a leather collar and a chain for it. Where he had gotten these was one of the minor mysteries of Pacific Island 14. It was amazing what articles the soldiers could rustle up, such as extra watch hands, springs for a bed, and a bass horn. The monkey, whom Private Troy had named Tojo to show his questionable estimation of the Japanese Emperor, always rode on his master’s shoulder. The soldier had a lonely and difficult job: he was a G.I. spotter, sent out alone into the jungle to watch the sky for Jap planes. So Tojo’s company meant a great deal to him. Cherry certainly did not want to take his pet away from him, but it had been impossible to find the source of infection that had sent Private Troy to the malaria ward. Monkeys can catch malaria too, and Cherry felt there was a vague chance that the soldier might have contracted malaria from his pet. The animal had been examined twice before, but no proof that Monkey Tojo was guilty had been found. There was no other source, in this case, to prove him guiltless, either. Meanwhile, other soldiers were taking care of the heartbroken monkey. No more boys had reported to the hospital—so far—with the headaches and feverishness and hot burning that spell malaria. But, to take no chances, Tojo had better go. It would be a move that would hardly add to Cherry’s popularity, but an epidemic would not help matters either. Cherry felt badly about this. It would have been easier for her if she had been positive the monkey was a health menace, but she did not want to take the chance to wait for definite proof.
First, Cherry and her delegation went to see Private Troy and tell him that his pet’s days were about to come to an end. Private Troy was too sick to care.
Then the stern, turbanned Chief Nurse and her party marched down to the barracks where Tojo was quartered. A howl went up from the men when Cherry took the monkey’s temperature and pronounced him a suspect, as a carrier of disease. If the animal were ill with malaria, he probably could not be cured. The monkey did not like this examination: he blinked his tiny bright eyes and chattered angrily and tried to pull off Cherry’s turban.<
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“Sorry, gentlemen,” Cherry said, including the monkey too, “but Tojo is about to go to monkey heaven.”
The boys called her unfeeling, hard-hearted, a murderess.
“You’ll be dead if he isn’t,” Cherry warned them. “Malaria is nothing to monkey with—and that’s not a pun. I mean it.”
She was sorry: the men here were so lonely and homesick that even a little animal could engage their affections.
One boy went up to the little brown animal and took its paw. “Prepare to meet your Maker,” he said, making a horrid face at Cherry.
“Oh, come now!” Cherry said in exasperation, “You can find yourselves another monkey, one you’re sure is healthy. Why don’t you,” she suggested with tongue in cheek, “hold burial services for this one?”
As a matter of fact, they did. The Chief Nurse did not attend. “I really feel like a meanie, this time,” she confided to Gwen. “But it had to be done.”
A number of other ticklish duties had to be done, and they fell on Cherry’s shoulders. One of them was disciplining her nurses. The girls were not having an easy-time of it, and Cherry’s carefulness that they always let her know just where they could be found, and that not more than ten per cent of them ever could leave the hospital area at one time, did not sweeten tempers. Then on top of that, she insisted on drilling them, in the heat, after a full day’s work when their feet already were protesting.
“I don’t like this any better than you do!” Cherry shouted as she stood before the line of girls in khaki coveralls and heavy shoes and helmets and gas masks. “I’d rather be sipping a soda or going to a movie, too! But if the Jap planes come over, we’ve got to be ready and in practice to take care of ourselves.”
