Semper Fi

by W. E. B Griffin

  I will send further orders as necessary.

  R.B. Macklin 1/Lt. USMC

  McCoy realized there was absolutely no “I Told You So” pleasure in his reaction. He felt sorry for them, and he felt a little sorry for himself. Sooner (if he could get through on the telephone now) or later, Captain Banning was going to eat his ass out for letting them get their asses in a crack.

  “Well, what the hell does it say?” Zimmerman asked.

  McCoy handed him the note.

  “I figured it was something like that,” Zimmerman said. “How come you didn’t go? You knew they was going to get caught?”

  McCoy shrugged.

  “You figure the Japs’ll find out Sessions is an officer?”

  “What makes you think he’s an officer?”

  “Come on, McCoy,” Zimmerman said.

  “Christ, for his sake, I hope not.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We wait twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours to see what the Japs do.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I don’t know,” McCoy said. “There’s reason the guys have to hang around here, but I don’t want them getting shitfaced in case we need them.”

  “Okay,” Zimmerman said. He walked out of the hotel lobby, and McCoy went up the wide stairs to the second floor and knocked on Mrs. Feller’s door.

  When she opened it, her hair was up in braids again, and she was wearing a pale yellow dress just about covered with tiny little holes.

  He handed her the letter addressed to her. She raised her eyebrows questioningly and then tore open the envelope.

  Even with her hair up again, she still looks pretty good. And Christ, what teats!

  When she had read the letter, she raised her eyes and looked at him, obviously expecting some comment from him.

  “Nothing to be worried about,” he said. “They’ll show them marching troops and barracks, and feed them food they know they won’t like; and tonight they’ll probably try hard to get them drunk. But there’s no danger or anything like that. If there was, they wouldn’t have let them send the letters.”

  “My husband doesn’t drink,” she said.

  “He probably will tonight,” McCoy said.

  She seemed to find that amusing, he saw.

  “His letter says that you will look after me,” she said. “Are you going to look after me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Starting at dinner? I missed you at lunch.”

  “I had something to do over lunch,” he said. “And I’m afraid I’ll be busy for dinner, too. If you’d like, I can ask Sergeant Zimmerman to have dinner with you.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said coldly.

  Fuck you, too, lady!

  “Are you going to do anything about this?” she asked. “Notify someone what’s happened?”

  “If I can get through on the phone,” McCoy said.

  It turned out he couldn’t get through to Captain Banning in Shanghai, which didn’t surprise him—and was actually a relief. Getting your ass chewed out was one of those things the longer you put off, the better.

  And then he realized there was a way he could avoid it entirely. He thought it over a minute and went looking for Ernie Zimmerman.

  (Three)

  The Hotel am See

  Chiehshom, Shantung Province

  0815 Hours 17 May 1941

  McCoy had just finished a hard day and night in the country and was now lowering himself all the way into a full tub hot clean water when there was a knock at his door.

  “Come back later,” he yelled in Chinese.

  “It’s Ellen Feller,” she said.

  “I’m in the bathtub.”

  Her response to this was a heavy, angry-sounding pounding on the door.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he called. “I’m coming.”

  McCoy hoisted himself out of the tub, wrapped a towel around his waist, and walked dripping to the door.

  The moment it was opened a crack, she pushed past him into the room. She was wearing her robe, and her hair was again unbraided and hanging nearly to her waist. When he came back she must have seen him from her window talking to Ernie Zimmerman in the courtyard, he decided.

  She walked to his small window, turned, and glared at him.

  “Close the door, or someone will see us in here,” she ordered.

  In his junior year in St. Rose of Lima High, there had been a course in Musical Appreciation. They had studied Die Walküre then. That was what Mrs. Ellen Feller looked like now, McCoy thought, smiling. Obviously pissed off, she stood stiff and strident-looking, with her long hair flowing, her cheeks red, and her teats awesome even under her bathrobe—a goddamned Valkyrie.

  “What are you smiling about?” she demanded furiously. Then, without waiting, demanded even more angrily, “And where have you been?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” McCoy said.

  “You’ve been laying up with some almond-eyed whore in the village,” she accused furiously. “You’ve been gone all night!”

  “Don’t hand me any of your missionary crap,” McCoy said angrily. “Where I have been all night is none of your goddamned business. What did you do, come looking for me?”

  He could tell from the look in her eyes that she had, indeed, come to his room looking for him.

  “Why?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I just wondered where you were,” she added awkwardly.

  McCoy was still angry. “So you could start playing games with me again?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said automatically.

  “You know goddamned well what I’m talking about,” he said.

  “So that’s what you thought,” she said, after a moment.

  “Go find some clown in the mission,” he said, warming to his subject, “if you get your kicks that way. Just leave people like me out of it.”

  “How can you be so sure it was a game?” she asked.

  “Huh!” McCoy snorted righteously.

  “Maybe you should have considered the possibility that it wasn’t a game and that you didn’t have to go buy a woman,” she said. “Maybe what you need, Corporal Killer McCoy, is a little more self-confidence.”

  “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  “What’s your given name?” she asked.

  “Ken, Kenneth,” he said without thinking. Then, “Why?”

  “Because if I’m going to get in that bathtub with you and scrub the smell of your whore off you, I thought it would be nice to know your name.”

  “There was no whore,” he said.

  She looked intently at him and almost visibly decided he was telling the truth. She nodded her head.

  “Then the bath can wait till later,” she said. “Lock the door.”

  (Four)

  Room 23

  The Hotel Am See

  Chiehshom, Shantung Province

  1015 Hours 18 May 1941

  “This is very nice,” Ellen Feller said, picking the camera up from the chest of drawers and turning to look at him. She was naked. “Very expensive.” That was a question.

  “It’s a Leica,” he said. “It belongs to the Corps.”

  She held it up and pretended to aim it.

  “Pity we can’t use it,” she said. “I would like to have a memento of this. Of us.”

  “For your husband to find,” he said.

  She laughed and put the camera down. It had been practically nonstop screwing (with breaks only for meals and trips to make sure none of the Marines had gone off on a drunk someplace); but this was the first time either of them had mentioned her husband.

  “It’s possible he could walk in any minute,” McCoy said. “And catch us like this.”

  “You don’t have to worry about him,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with your officers. Are they really likely to
come back soon?”

  “Can’t tell. Why wouldn’t I have to worry about him?”

  “You mean you couldn’t tell? Not even from the way he looked at you?”

  “What are you saying, that he’s a fairy?”

  She shrugged.

  “Then why do you stay married to him?” he asked. “Why did you marry him in the first place?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she said. She leaned against the chest of drawers and arched her back.

  She inhaled and ran her fingers across the flat of her belly. And then she told him.

  “When I was fourteen, my father had a religious experience,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “He accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal saviour,” Ellen Feller said, evenly. “And brought his family, my mother and me, into the fold with him. She didn’t mind, I don’t suppose, although I suspect she’s a little uncomfortable with some of the brothers and sisters of the Christian & Missionary Alliance. And I just went along. Girls at that age are a little frightened of life anyway; and when the hellfire of eternity is presented as a reality, it’s not hard to accept the notion of being washed in the blood of the lamb.”

  “Jesus Christ,” McCoy said.

  “Yes,” Ellen said wryly. “Jesus Christ.”

  She pushed herself off the chest of drawers and walked to the bed. Then she leaned over him and ran the balls of her fingers over his chest.

  “So I passed through my high school years convinced that when I had nice thoughts about boys, it was Satan at work trying to get my soul.”

  “I was a Catholic,” McCoy said. “They tried to tell us the same thing.”

  “Did you believe it?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t sure,” he said.

  “I was,” she said. “And I went through college that way. It wasn’t hard. I was surrounded with them. Whenever anyone confessed any doubts, the others closed ranks around her. Or him. We prayed a lot, and avoided temptation. No drinking, no dancing, no smoking. No touching.”

  She moved her hand to his groin and repeated, “No touching.”

  “So how come you married him? Where did you meet him?”

  “I was a senior in college,” she said. “The Christian & Missionary Alliance is, as you can imagine, big on missionaries; and he came looking for missionary recruits. Came from here, I mean. With slides of China and all the souls the Alliance was saving for Jesus. He told us all about the heathens and how they hungered for the Lord. Very impressive stuff.

  “And then that summer, right after I graduated, he came to our church in Baltimore…I’m from Baltimore…to give his report to our church. My father is a pillar of our church, and he was important to my husband, because my father is pretty well off. He stayed with us while he was in Baltimore.”

  “And made a play for you,” McCoy said. “Jesus, that feels good!”

  She chuckled deep in her throat and bent over him and nipped his nipple with her teeth. He put his hand on her breast and dragged her down on top of him.

  “Do you want to hear this, or not?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “It’s all right with me if you don’t,” she said.

  “Finish it,” he said.

  “What I thought I was getting was a life toiling in the Lord’s Vineyard,” Ellen went on. “With a man of God. Saving the heathen Chinese from eternal damnation. What he knew he was getting was a wife, and a wife who would not only put to rest unpleasant suspicions that had begun to crop up, but a wife whose father would more than likely be very generous to his mission…he had the mission in Wang-Tua, then…but probably to him personally.”

  “When did you find out he was a faggot?” McCoy asked.

  “We were married at nine o’clock in the morning,” she said. “At noon, we took the train to New York. And then from New York, we took the train to San Francisco. I decided that it was wrong of me to think that anything would happen on a railroad train. And we boarded the President Jefferson for Tientsin the same day we arrived in San Francisco.”

  “And nothing happened on the ship?”

  “Something happened on the ship,” Ellen said. “I was not surprised that I didn’t like it very much, and that it didn’t happen very often.”

  “Then he can get it up?” McCoy asked.

  “Not like this,” she said, squeezing him so hard that he yelped. “But he can, yes. I suspect he closes his eyes and pretends I’m a boy.”

  “So why the hell did you stay married to him?”

  “You just don’t understand. I just didn’t know. I was innocent. Ignorant.”

  He snorted.

  “Meaning I’m not innocent now?” she asked.

  “No complaints,” McCoy said.

  “There was somebody else, obviously.”

  “Who?”

  “None of your business,” she said, but then she told him: A newly ordained bachelor missionary with whom she’d been left alone a good deal when the Reverend Feller had been promoted to Assistant District Superintendent. They had been caught together. They had begged forgiveness. After prayerful consideration, the Reverend Feller had decided the way to handle the situation was to send the young missionary home, as “unsuited for missionary service,” which happened often. A church would be found for him at home. As a guarantee of impeccable Christian behavior in the future, there was a written confession of his sinful misbehavior left behind in the Reverend Feller’s safe.

  McCoy was sure there’d been more than one “somebody else.” She had done things to him he hadn’t thought American women even knew about. Things that one missionary minister wouldn’t have taught her. But he could hardly expect her to provide him with a list of the guys she had screwed. She wasn’t like that. He was somewhat surprised to realize that he had come to like Ellen Feller.

  “After that,” Ellen went on, “he never came near me. I thought he was either disgusted with me or was punishing me.”

  “You still didn’t know he was queer?”

  “I didn’t find out about that, believe it or not, until just before the Alliance called him home for consultation. That was the reason I didn’t go home with him.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “I walked in on him,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  He was aware that she’d stopped manipulating him and he had gone down. She still had her hand on him, though, possessively, and he liked that.

  “What did he say?” McCoy asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “He didn’t even stop. So I just closed the door and left. Very civilized.”

  “Why didn’t you leave him?” McCoy asked.

  “It’s not that simple, my darling,” Ellen said.

  McCoy liked when she called him “my darling,” even though it embarrassed him a little. He couldn’t remember anyone ever saying that to him before. It was a lot different from a whore calling him “honey” or “sweetheart” or “big boy.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Well, there’s Jerry’s detailed, written confession, for one thing,” she said, as if explaining something that should have been self-evident.

  “So what?”

  “He would show it to my father.”

  “So what? Tell your father he’s queer.”

  “I wouldn’t be believed,” she said. “He’s a man of God. My father is very impressed with him. He would think I made the accusation in desperation, to excuse my own behavior.”

  “Then fuck your father,” McCoy said.

  Her eyebrows went up. “I know how you meant that,” she said.

  “Jesus!” he said.

  “I’m thirty years old,” she said. “I have no money. I can play every hymn in the hymnal from memory on the piano. I speak Chinese. Unless I could find a job as a Chinese-speaking piano player, I don’t know how I could support myself.”

  Thirty years old? At first I thought she was older than that. Then
I thought she was younger. Thirty is too old for me. What the hell am I thinking about? In a week, she’ll get on a ship, and that will be the last I’ll ever see her.

  “Can you type?” McCoy asked. She nodded. “Then get a job as a typist, for Christ’s sake.”

  “For my own sake, you mean,” she said. Then she added, mysteriously, “I have something else that might turn out. I won’t know until I get to the States.”

  “Like a couple of thousand-year-old vases, for example?” McCoy asked. “Or some jade?”

  Her face clouded, and she took her hand from his crotch and covered her mouth with it. “What did you do, look in the crates?”

  “No. A stab in the dark,” McCoy said.

  “My God, does anybody else know?”

  “My officer thinks that’s the real reason your husband came back to China,” McCoy said. “He doesn’t believe the selfless patriot business.”

  “I have three Ming dynasty vases and some jade my husband doesn’t know about,” Ellen said. “I thought I could sell them and use the money to get a start.”

  “You probably can, if you can get them through customs,” McCoy said.

  “Your…officer…isn’t going to say anything?”

  “It’s none of his business,” he said.

  “And the other officers? Do they know?”

  “You’ve just seen how smart they are,” McCoy said.

  “It left us alone, my darling,” she said.

  “I like it when you say that,” McCoy said. She looked into his eyes and it made him uncomfortable. “And I like it when you put your hand on my balls.”

  She stiffened. She didn’t like him to talk that way, he thought. But she shifted on the bed and cupped her hand on him again.

  “I would like it, too, if you said that to me,” she whispered.

  “Said what?”

  “My darling.”

  “My darling,” McCoy said, and flushed. It made him uncomfortable. “And I like to suck your teats,” he added almost defiantly.

  She stiffened again, and he wondered why he said that, knowing it would piss her off.

  “I like the thought but not the vocabulary,” she sighed. “Cows have teats, ladies have breasts.”

  “Pardon me,” McCoy said.

  “You’re forgiven,” she said.