Red gave a twisted smile and shook his head. Gerhart went on: "This is something they tell me is important, Red: were you able to keep her satisfied? A young, pretty girl like that?"
Red looked up quickly. He gave a strained little laugh. "That's none of your business," he said unconvincingly.
"Oh, sure it is," Gerhart soothed. "I want to find out about these things. I'm just an old country boy. Come on, Red, cut me in on the dope."
"Don't tell him nothing, Red," said Wiley. "He's getting too damn nosey." But Wiley kept smiling.
Gerhart didn't pay any attention. He continued softly: "You know what they tell me, Red? They tell me that once a woman has had a little, she just can't get enough after that. Is that true?"
Red didn't answer.
"Yessir," said Gerhart. "That's what they tell me. How long did you say you'd been out here? Eleven months?"
Red said nothing.
"Okay, say eleven months. Now your wife Margie, she looks like a nice, normal healthy girl. She got the same desires the rest of us got — hell, Red, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, Red," he finished, "eleven months is a long time."
Gerhart wiped the sweat from his face with a large flat hand and then he said: "Tell me honestly, Red— now tell me the truth. Do you really expect Margie to be faithful to you all the time you're out here? Things being like they are? Now do you honestly?"
Red had a startled look. He looked quickly at Gerhart and then over at Wiley, standing beside him, and then his eyes darted around the gun tub. He licked his lips quickly and he didn't say anything.
Gerhart was smiling kindly and saying: "Now I don't mean no disrespect to Margie. I think Margie's a fine girl. Yessir, a fine girl." His voice became paternally gentle. "But you know how things are, Red. Here you are, way out here. You've been away eleven months. You'll be out here a hell of a lot longer. Margie, she's a normal healthy girl. She's got those desires same as all of us. Hell, Red, you can't blame her if she has a little fun once in a while. A pretty girl like that. No sir, you got to figure on it. Why, I bet you right now, Red, while we're standing here, Margie might be dropping her pants and crawling into bed . . ."
That was when Red hit him. Wiley saw it coming, but he moved too late to stop it. There was a spanner wrench lying on top of the ready box just aft of the gun. It was two steps away from Red. Before Wiley could even raise his hand, Red had taken those two steps, grabbed the wrench, and hit Gerhart with it on the side of the head as hard as he could. He was drawing his arm back to hit Gerhart again when Wiley finally was able to move, and he grabbed Red's arm and stopped him. Gerhart curled up and dropped to the deck and the blood was running from his head. And all the time Red hadn't said one word or made a sound. He was actually smiling when Wiley took the wrench away from him.
It took thirteen stitches to close up the side of Gerhart's head and he was in sick-bay for a week. Red got a summary court-martial, but the officers on the court were sympathetic and he was only fined twenty-five dollars. Big Gerhart, as soon as he was up and around, started threatening that he would take Red apart, but the crew was all on Red's side, and it was made amply clear to Gerhart that he would do nothing of the sort. In fact, the only result of the incident, except for the stitches and the fine, was that Red was shifted to the five-inch gun crew. And the only result of that was that on a hot day the watches went slower than ever for Big Gerhart up on the three-inch.
CHAPTER TEN
The crew was ripe for a good liberty when the Reluctant got orders to sail to Elysium in the Limbo Islands. The ship was three years out of the, States and of her original crew there were only four members left. These were Johnson, the chief master- at-arms, and Yarby, the chief yeoman, and Olson and Dowdy. These four could and often did talk of liberties spent together in Boston and New York and Philly and Trinidad and Panama; and the crew would listen, excluded and jealous, to this reminiscence, and they would feel the unity and completeness of the four, and then they would go away sad — certain that this was something they would never have. In three years, their total liberty had consisted of three afternoon recreation parties on one of the inevitable islands, at which a couple of bottles of beer per man were doled out, and where a few of the more frustrated played a listless game of softball. That wasn't liberty — it was mockery of the word. The crew lived together and worked together and were bored together; they needed to play together, to remember playing together, and to be able to talk about having played together. Where was the tie of solidarity working in the smothering bottom of the hold? What was the bond of union standing the heated watches? They needed to raise hell together. So the news that they were going, not to Apathy again, nor to Tedium, nor to Ennui, but rather to Elysium, shook the crew like an explosion. v The word spread as infallibly as a pestilence, and a great deal faster. Not more than fifteen minutes after Lieutenant (jg) Billings, the communicator, got the inspired message, everyone on the ship knew about it. "Hey, did you get the word?" men shouted at one another. "This bucket's going to Elysium!" And with The Word were passed the few available facts on the place: that it was down in a nice climate, well away from the Equator, and that it was a lovely, civilized town of thirty thousand population, a British colonial town, and in peacetime quite a celebrated tourist stop on the steamer track from Australia to the States. As soon as the bald Word and these preliminary facts were thoroughly disseminated, the crew set to work to get additional information. They questioned all, and finally found one man who had been to Elysium in peacetime. That was Dowdy. Dowdy immediately became the target of a barrage of excited questions.
With the first-comers he tried to answer civilly and factually. Yes, it used to be a nice place; although he didn't know what it was like now with the Army there. The only women you could get were the natives, and most of them were dark and pretty rough. Some of them, though, were real beauties. Yes, there used to be plenty of whore-houses, but the Army probably closed them up. Maybe a few running on the sly. Liquor? — the liquor's lousy. In peacetime all they had was island gin and whiskey made from sugar-cane, and things would be even worse now. "That whiskey they make," said Dowdy, "is really panther-piss. Two drinks of that will knock you on your ass like nothing you ever saw!"
Dowdy was patient at first, but he was never patient for very long, and soon he tired of being a Baedeker. The questioners persisted all day, and they interfered with his work. His answers grew short, and then sarcastic, and finally inaccurate. The girls, he told them, were all very beautiful and promiscuous. The prices ranged from one to six shillings. All you had to do was step into a souvenir shop and announce that you wanted to see the turquoise necklaces. Dowdy did the boys no service with this information. Their natural, unencouraged expectations of Elysium were unreasonable enough without any prodding.
The atmosphere of the ship was normally not what you would call electric. It fell a little short of that. But now, on the nine-day run to Elysium, there was an unmistakable galvanism in the air. It manifested itself in many distinctive ways. You would have a clue to it in the suits of whites, most of them brand-new and never-worn, that were broken out of lockers and sea- bags. You could have detected it in the sudden passion for shining shoes, ordinarily an affectation as neglected as manicuring. Louie Wilkes, the barber, could have told you something was up from the fact that he now worked twelve hours a day cutting hair. Normally he got customers only during working hours on busy deck days. The ship's canteen could have furnished the incontrovertible evidence: the sale during the first two days of the eighteen jars of Mum which it had carried in stock for three years. Another conclusive indication was the sudden boom in prophylactics, also a very neglected item on the shelves of the canteen. (There was much bitterness about these prophylactics; they were so old, had been carried in stock for so long, that when the crew tested them by filling with water about ninety per cent turned out to be defective.)
In these rather direct ways the crew was getting ready for a liberty. One of the mess
cooks hung a calendar in the mess hall and every night with much ceremony he would X out a day. There was a red circle drawn around the ninth, the date of arrival. Stefanowski got fifty men to chip in five dollars apiece to an anchor pool, the first time in two years that any interest had been demonstrated in the time of the ship's arrival. At night after the tables had been cleared away, the crew would gather in the mess hall, in little groups and in large groups, and talk and plot and plan. Everything was planned to the nicest detail. Cliques were formed, costs were calculated, obstacles were considered, individual projects were announced. No military campaign was ever more elaborately prepared for.
There was one curious and, as it turned out, ironic thing about the crew's plans for Elysium: the way, by their very nature — violent, carnal, orgiastic — that they precluded David Bookser from participation. This was not intentional on the part of the crew — they liked Bookser to a man — but since there was such unanimous agreement on a program that included no spiritual values, they just automatically counted him out. He represented the spirit on the Reluctant and it was rather lonely and valiant of him to do this. David Bookser, a seaman in the first division, was a beautiful boy. He looked spiritual: he was a pure Adonis: his features were fine and flawless, his skin almost transparently white, and his blond hair grew carelessly about his head in graceful ringlets. He did not look effeminate, though, and the crew did not regard him that way. They were a little stunned by his beauty, even the dullest clod of them, and they made a sort of pet of Bookser. He was a quiet, earnest boy, and a hard worker, and he was going to enter the ministry when he got out of the Navy. The one time the crew held a "Happy Hour," devoted almost entirely to skits of the broadest and most animalistic sort, Bookser stole the show with his poised, true singing of "Adeste Fideles."
Because the crew liked Bookser, they rode him a great deal; but he was a match for them. All the way to Elysium, because the Elysium erected in the mind of the crew seemed such a classic antithesis of Bookser, he came in for a lot of attention. It tickled the crew members, the idea of Bookser loose in this blazing Sodom they were going to.
"Hey, Booksie," they would say, "how about us making a liberty in Elysium? Dowdy says he knows just the girl for you."
Or, more bluntly:
"Hey, Booksie, what do you say we go over and get laid? You and me, huh? How about it?"
Or, subtly:
"Hey, Booksie, how about selling me your liberty? You ain't going to be using it, are you?"
And Bookser would take all this and smile and say in his soft voice, not at all flustered: "No, thanks. I think I'll just go over and walk around." That was the way it went, all the way to Elysium.
The Reluctant sailed through cool blue days and shining blue water, and came at last to the Limbo Islands of the Pacific. It reached them six hours ahead of schedule, and possibly it was speeded along by the intense well-wishing of the crew. At daylight there they were, the wonderful Limbos, a faint, water-color line hovering low along the horizon. The entire crew turned out and stood along the rail and watched this line emerge from insubstantial tracery into clear, solid mass, beautiful with trees and tall brown hills and green fields neatly criss-crossed in the valleys. They were lovely islands, like nothing the crew had ever seen in the Pacific. The ship, following the channel, slipped in close ashore, and now with the naked eye the men could make out houses perched on the slopes, and people moving about, and even the sex of the people. Before they thought, many exclaimed, "Holy Christ, there's a woman, look!" And then they reflected, and remembered that a woman was now a commonplace—that these islands thronged with lovely women waiting for them—and they shut up, abashed. They stood quiet and watched, soaking up strange impressions, while the ship steamed along the coast. It was two hours later that the Reluctant rounded the tip of the island, swung wide in the stream, and there, then, scattered and bright in the bowl of the dark hills, was Elysium. The crew gasped.
And then they yelled. Elysium had very much taken their fancy. It ran up from the bay to the rim of the hills, red and green slate roofs and fine stucco houses pastel-shaded, and straight, narrow streets shady under tall trees, and it all had the warm, gay look of a water color. There were handsome public buildings and even two buildings of six or seven stories. There were cars and people moving about. The crew pounded each other on the back and yelled. They yelled, "Elysium, here I come!" and they yelled, "Hey, Dowdy, where's the whore-houses?" and they yelled, "When does liberty start?" The excitement was so extreme that when the ship finally tied up to a dock shortly after noon, it wasn't even commented upon that Stefanowski had won his own anchor pool—two hundred and fifty dollars.
Then began a maddening period of preparation and of waiting. On the theory that it had at least a one-in- three chance of making the liberty list, almost the entire crew gathered in the compartment and stripped down to skivvies, ready for a lightning change into whites. Plans made eight days ago were affirmed and reaffirmed. Money was borrowed. Dowdy was questioned exhaustively on the exact location of the whorehouses. David Bookser was seriously approached by five different people wanting to buy his liberty. "When the hell does liberty start?" was repeated everywhere like an incantation.
There was one final twist of torture. It was all that was needed: it had the effect of exploding the head of steam. While the crew huddled in the compartment, the word reached them that the Captain wasn't going to grant any liberty. "Screw them!" the Captain was quoted as telling the exec. "They try to screw me, now I'll screw them!" The crew sat like dead men: they had never even considered anything like this. That there might be poor liberty, yes; that it might be three- or even four-section liberty, yes; but that there not be liberty—no! But while they sat stunned, before they could even curse the Captain, there came a miraculous, inexplicable change in official plans, and the P.A. speaker squawked exultantly: "Li-ber-ty . .. will commence . . . immediately ... for the starboard section!" It was all right then; it was wonderfully all right! Two- section liberty!—even the port section took consolation in that. And the starboard section dived for its whites.
Lieutenant (jg) Ed Pauley, the officer-of-the-deck, had a hectic time at the gangway. At one time he had to inspect the liberty cards and check out seventy-three men of a seventy-four-man liberty list. They swarmed around the gangway and pushed and shoved and in general behaved exactly like men leaving a sinking ship by the-only escape hatch. He breathed a sigh of relief when they were finally gone. Fifteen minutes later the last man on the list, David Bookser, came up to the gangway. Pauley checked him out.
"Well, take it easy, Booksie," he grinned.
"Yes, sir," Bookser promised.
Pauley watched him amusedly as he walked down the dock, all alone. "Poor kid," Pauley thought, "what the hell's he going to do over there?" He smiled a little at the idea.
* * * *
Lieutenant Carney said he hoped the ship never had another liberty if it meant watches like the one he had that night. Carney had the eight-to-twelve, and he caught it all. It was the first time he had really been busy since he came aboard. The Doctor, too, had more business in that four-hour span than in the total sick calls of the last year.
Lieutenant (jg) Langston, with the four-to-eight, had a quiet watch. There was only one minor incident, although a prophetic one. Ringgold of the third division staggered up the dock leading a goat by the halter and tried to bring the goat aboard. Langston intervened, and Ringgold and the goat wandered amiably off. That was the only thing on Langston's watch.
Carney had been on watch only five minutes when a Navy pickup truck stopped on the dock and two shore patrolmen piled out. In the back end were five bodies in white uniforms. "These are your boys," the shore patrol called, "come and get ‘em." The gangway P.O. and the messenger dragged the five aboard, one by one. They were out cold, and because they were filthy with vomit and dirt, Carney ordered them laid out on top of number three hatch. They were soon to have a lot of company.
T
en minutes later the truck returned. It carried three more bodies in back, and in the front seat was Ringgold. The charge against him was stealing a goat. The shore patrol submitted it on a yellow slip to Carney. The bodies joined the others on top of number three.
The truck was back again in fifteen minutes, this time with twelve bodies. A few minutes later, Costello, three other first division men, and two M.P. s piled out of an Army jeep. Costello and the boys were very cheerful, even though considerably cut up about the face and hands. The charge was stealing a jeep and hitting and killing a cow. The M.P.'s said there would probably be civil charges brought about the cow. They gave Carney another yellow slip.
The arrival of the bodies became a commonplace and background event. The shore patrol truck delivered them all night long until twelve o'clock. The largest single load was fifteen. After the first few loads, Carney broke out a five-man working party and kept it standing by at the gangway to carry the bodies aboard.
There was more business for the Doctor at nine o'clock when Stuzyuiski, a third division man, weaved up the dock accompanied by his friend Redman and two angry, gesticulating natives. Stuzyuiski's trousers were smeared to the knees with blood, and there were deep scratches on his hands. He had jumped into an open lobster pit belonging to the natives and been severely clawed for his efforts.
The shore patrol was back at nine-fifteen with Kalinka, the shipfitter. The charge was making an indecent proposal to an elderly lady. These two particular shore patrolmen had already been out several times, and they stopped now for a cup of coffee. They told Carney that this was the first Navy ship in Elysium in a month and that since eight o'clock they had put on ten extra shore patrolmen.
Ten minutes after they left, two other shore patrolmen came aboard and announced that Schlemmer, the signalman, was being held by the local police on a charge of rape.
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