* * *
Sometime after midnight, Marsh walked her back across the lawns of Hospital Point to the nurses’ quarters. When they arrived at the front steps they were surprised to see a woman sitting in one of the chairs, her face in shadow.
“Glory?” Sally asked as she started up the steps. “Is that you?”
Marsh followed Sally up the steps and then stopped short. Glory wasn’t sitting in the chair—she was sprawling. Her expensive hairdo had come apart, and the straps of her evening gown were missing. The fabric across her front was riding dangerously low, and she was barefoot. The glazed expression on her face said she didn’t really care what she looked like.
“Glory, honey,” Sally said, going down on one knee. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Marsh thought he knew. She had finally succumbed to Mick, and from what he could see, Lady Everest had been well and truly conquered. She saw him looking at her and gave him a lopsided smile.
“Well, Marsh,” she said. “What do you think of your dream girl now, hmm?”
Sally shot him a warning glance over her shoulder and then tried to lift the fabric of Glory’s gown.
“Oh, hell, Sally, don’t bother,” Glory sighed. “It’s thoroughly used goods just now. Anyone have a cigarette?”
Sally stood back as Marsh stepped forward with his duty pack of Luckies. Glory took one, stuck it in her mouth, and then cupped his hand when he extended his lighter. She might be putting on a brave face, he thought, but he felt her fingers trembling. He wanted to reach out and hold her but knew that was impossible. She took one deep drag, blew it out sideways, looked over at Sally’s face, and then gave him another crooked, lipstick-smeared grin.
“I guess I’m not the only sinner on the porch tonight, am I?” she said. Even in the semidarkness, Marsh could see Sally’s face go red.
“Ah, well,” Glory said. “Happy damn New Year. What better way to usher in yet another year of world war than with a good, wholesome romp in the hay. God knows I needed it.” She hiccupped, put a surprised hand to her face, and then did it again. “It got just a little bit drunk out tonight,” she said.
“I think it’s time we got you upstairs,” Sally said.
Glory took a drag on the cigarette and then pitched it into the bushes. “What, am I intruding?” she said. “Three’s a crowd?”
“Glory, please,” Sally said. Marsh started to say something but thought better of it.
“Okay, you two,” Glory said and lurched forward out of the chair. Her gown immediately fell down, exposing her white breasts as she stood up. Marsh could not take his eyes away.
“Well, looky here,” Glory said, cupping her breasts with both hands. “Like all this, Marsh? Want to hold them for me? Mick sure did.”
“Glory!” Sally cried.
“Oops, I forgot,” Glory said, swaying a little. “It’s yours he wants, not mine. Right. Fair enough. Fair enough.”
She reached down for the bodice of her gown and covered up as best she could while trying to remain upright. Sally took her by the arm, gave him a weary look, and helped a very drunk Glory Lewis into the building.
Marsh sat down in the chair from which Glory had just risen. There was a lingering scent in the chair, a heady blend of perfume, cigarette smoke, booze, and seriously aroused woman.
He tried to keep his brain in neutral, not wanting to dwell on the obvious fact that Glory was finally completely beyond his reach. His feeble efforts not to recall her nakedness weren’t working. Then he realized that it wasn’t the end of the world after all.
Sally had not been drunk when she sat back on that bed. Tipsy, maybe, but the look on her face had been that of a woman with a plan who was not going to be denied. Their lovemaking had been exciting, even the inevitable comic bits as they explored all the various ways they fit together. After that, she’d been all business, radiating an urgent, primal need with nothing romantic about it, at least not until the second time. That had been much slower, gentler, deeper, her kisses lingering as his own emotions welled up after years of a relatively sterile bachelorhood. They were in love, and they’d just confirmed that in the only and best way they could.
And Mick? What had happened here? Glory looked like she had been roughly handled, and that made him wonder. Was all that slutty dialogue just the booze talking or something else, a woman who’d finally realized she needed a man and who’d found just exactly what she was looking for? In all his fantasizing he’d never imagined Glory as a woman with all her clothes off, hands on hips, telling him or some other man: Okay, sport, here it is. Fuck me if you’re man enough. She’d been right all along: He’d formed some dreamy, love-soaked image of this woman, without ever considering what it might be like if she ever said yes.
He heard Sally coming back downstairs. He stood up and went to the screen door. She stopped behind it but did not come out.
“So,” he said. “Happy New Year again, secret admirer.”
She smiled. “I have to get back upstairs. The room’s a disaster area. Right now she’s decorating the bathroom. She thinks Mick went back to the club.”
He glanced at his watch. “Club’s closed,” he said. “Has she said anything? Was this—”
Sally shook her head. “She says she needs a bath, that she needs to scrub and scrub hard, as she puts it. Poor thing. So many men have lusted after her for so long since Tommy died. And now…”
“I was one,” Marsh said.
“Well I know,” she said through the screen.
“Until you came along,” he said.
She smiled again. “Good answer, Commander. Very good answer. Think you can come see me before you guys go back out to sea?”
“If the XO will let me off the ship one more time, I will.”
“I thought you were the XO.”
“Why, yes I am. I guess that’s a yes. Night-night, secret admirer.”
* * *
Marsh walked back across the lawns to the officers’ club, which was indeed at darkened-ship. There were a few official cars in the parking lot but not a soul about that he could see. He did hear one, though. Someone was singing in a low voice over near the front door of the club. The beer song. Twenty-nine bottles of beer on the wall, twenty-nine bottles of beer …
He walked over and found a bleary-eyed Beast, still in his whites, with his tunic unbuttoned and a bottle of beer in his hand. He was sitting on the front steps of the club. For some reason his white shoes were off and sitting next to him. He looked up as Marsh approached, tried to focus, but then gave it up.
“I’ll go quietly,” he announced. “Don’t fuck with the HASP if you know what’s good for you.”
Marsh sat down on the step above the one Mick was perched on. That put his face level with Mick’s.
“It’s Beauty,” he said quietly. “Not the HASP.”
“Beauty Vincent, as I live and breathe,” Mick said. “You get to third base with that Sally-Wally tonight? She was positively cookin’ with gas, man. Lady with a mission. I thought I saw you guys sneakin’ out.”
Marsh didn’t say anything. Mick took another swig of beer, examined the empty bottle, and then threw it into the bushes, where it clinked against others already expired there. Then he looked sideways at Marsh.
“You’ve been back to the nurses’ quarters, haven’t you.”
“I took Sally back, yes,” he said. “We found Glory out on the front porch.”
“Was she now,” Mick said and then let go an enormous belch. “Came out to cool off, I imagine.”
“Cool off.”
“Yeah, classmate, cool off,” Mick snarled. “’Cause when I left she was still so hot her lipstick was melting. You don’t like hearing that, do you, lover boy?”
“That’s between you and her, I guess,” Marsh said. “None of my business.”
“Bullshit!” Mick spat. “You wouldn’t have come looking for me if that were true. You think I raped her, don’t you?”
Marsh finally looked ba
ck at him. “Thought crossed my mind, Mick,” he said.
“’Cause it was me, right? Mick McCarty, fleet fuckup. Got the girl drunk and then had my evil way with her. Is that it? That what you think?”
“What should I think, Mick?”
“Okay, Mr. Lingering Eye. I’ll tell you what to think. That was always the difference between you and me when it came to Glory Hawthorne. You think. I do.”
“Lewis,” Marsh said.
“What?!”
“Lewis. Her last name is Lewis.”
“Not anymore, classmate. Tommy Lewis is toast. Tommy Lewis, old Mr. Three Point Eight, he’s just part of that bad smell you get when you walk downwind of Ford Island. No, sir, there was no Lewis tonight. She let me know that in no uncertain terms, too. I don’t know what was going on between her and the pretty doctor, but tonight? No more Lady Everest. Out on the dance floor, all the way back to her room, and then when she pushed me down on that bed and looked me in the eye, it was time to get to it in a big, big way. I’ve got the fingernail grooves in my back to prove it. Wanna see?”
“No. I don’t want to see.”
“But somehow I’m the bad guy here, hunh?”
“I think you took advantage.”
“And that pisses you off? You who never had the balls to make the first move in your whole life? The guy who liked to watch? I remember you, classmate, when our little gang would go out cruising Crabtown. Mooning from a distance, so desperately in lu-u-u-v, but not man enough to take what was on offer.”
“Glory was never on offer,” Marsh said.
“Little you know, snake,” Mick said. “Here’s a secret—this wasn’t our first time, okay? My only problem was that back then? I wanted her so bad and I fucked her so hard and she climaxed so big, I scared her, and then she ran to Tommy, and Tommy, that old slash, made exactly the right moves and won the girl. Didn’t know all that, did you?”
Marsh was stunned. “No, I didn’t.”
“Listen to you,” Mick snorted. “‘No, I didn’t.’ Because you were too scared. I’ll bet you’ve been scared ever since this war started, haven’t you? This is man’s work, classmate. Warrior’s work. You better hope that cute little nurse doesn’t find out what you’re really made of, because she’ll write your fluttery ass off just like Glory did.”
“Glory made her choice a long time ago, Mick, and it wasn’t me or you. Nothing to do with being scared.”
“Bullshit. You’re still scared, aren’t you? Scared every day you’re out there with the Big Blue Fleet. Been scared since you first went to sea, am I right? And now? Watching you still pining like a damn dog around Glory? Time’s gonna come, Vincent. Time’s gonna come when you’ll get to meet the elephant, as the Civil War boys used to say, and that’s when you’ll find out what you’re made of. Personally, I think you’ll fuck it up.”
That stung. Marsh told himself it was just the booze talking. He said nothing.
“Oh, get the fuck out of here,” Mick said disgustedly. “Right now I’m a sailor on liberty. I just got laid, now I’m gonna get really drunk, then I’m gonna puke. Then I’ll go back to the ship with the rest of the liberty party. And tomorrow or the next day we’ll go back to sea, find some Japs, and kill ’em all.”
“And Glory?”
“What about her?”
“What happens to her?”
“Happens? What the fuck are you talking about? Oh, I get it. You’re a gentleman and she’s a lady. Yeah. Okay: Here’s what happens to Glory. She retires to a convent, takes the veil, and gives her life over to Christ to make up for the stain on her sacred honor, caused by a guy most appropriately nicknamed—Beast!”
Marsh got up and started to walk away.
“Eat your heart out, Beu-tee-e-e,” Mick yelled after him. “She’s a woman, not a saint. They all are. They’re women, first and last. Everything else, all that love and romance, that’s just our imagination. God put ’em all on earth so we could breed ’em, nothing more.”
Marsh turned around to stare. Mick suddenly grinned back at him.
“Now that’s the look you want, Tiger. That I-want-to-kill-you look. Practice that in front of a mirror. Think of me making Glory yell, if it’ll help. Then when the day comes and you’re looking Death in the face, lay it on him. Sometimes he blinks. Now get outta here. I gotta piss.”
* * *
Glory sat on one of the park benches at the very tip of Hospital Point and listened to a bugle playing taps over the outdoor announcing system at Hickam. The night was settling in as the yard tugs huffed back to their piers across the harbor and the steady stream of aircraft going in and out of Hickam began to thin out. She tried to ignore the dark wreck of Arizona, visible against the lights on Ford Island as little more than a black lump in the harbor. They’d removed her salvageable guns and the great bulk of her superstructure, so now she looked more like a dead animal than a warship. The removals did not change the fact that Arizona was now a tomb. There’d been talk of trying to remove all the bodies, but a diver’s report had settled that issue. The damage to her internal structure made work inside much too dangerous.
If she sat on the far right end of the bench, she couldn’t see the ship at all. She lit up a second cigarette, telling herself that it was to ward off the seaside mosquitoes, and watched the channel buoys blinking. She concentrated on trying to keep her mind empty when she came out here, and lately the cigarettes seemed to help. The events of New Year’s Eve were never too far from her mind, and today’s argument with Sally hadn’t helped things. It had been trivial, but the tension between them had, if anything, built since that night. She knew it was mostly her fault and that she was going to have to solve it pretty soon or get a new roommate.
She heard someone coming across the grass from the quarters, took one last drag on the cigarette, and pitched it over the seawall.
“Well, speak of the devil,” she said when she saw it was Sally.
“Devil is it now?”
“I was just thinking about how to apologize for being such a bitch. It’s all my fault, and I am truly sorry. Please forgive my bad behavior.”
“That’ll do it,” Sally said, “and you don’t have to throw away your cigarette on my account.”
“Old habits,” Glory said. “My mother would be appalled to see me smoking in public.”
“Mine had a three-pack-a-day habit,” Sally said. “It finally killed her, too, back in ’thirty-nine. I even got to watch. How are you doing with Superman these days? I don’t see the two of you joined at the hip so much.”
Glory laughed quietly. “I think he got the shock of his life at that party.”
“Not used to being upstaged, is he.”
“I did kind of throw it in his face,” Glory said.
“That’s what he gets for taking you for granted. Probably did him some good.”
“Probably why I’m back to all day in OR Two and not spending my days in perpetual meetings. When I think about it, that’s an improvement.”
“I have a delicate question to ask,” Sally said.
“Let’s see if I can guess,” Glory said. “Is there any biological reason for me to be throwing up in the bathroom every morning before everyone’s up?”
“Um, yes, that’s the one.”
Glory sighed. “Why not?” she asked the night air. “Why should my life presume to get back to some semblance of normal when the whole world is turned upside down?”
Sally didn’t answer that one. They sat there in the dark for a few minutes before Glory continued. “And no, I’m not in search of some back-alley abortionist, if you’re curious.”
“You’ll have the baby?”
“Of course I will. The baby didn’t do anything wrong. It shouldn’t be killed for my indiscretion.”
“How will you manage that?” Sally asked. “I mean, once they find out, they’ll—”
“They’ll what? Banish me to Molokai with the lepers? It’s not contagious, the last time I checked. I can
work up through the second trimester. After that I’ll go on medical leave of some kind. The chaplain says there’s a Catholic convent downtown where women in my ‘delicate condition’—his actual words, God love him—can go to deliver and then get the baby adopted.”
“Wow” was all Sally could manage.
“The hard part will be dealing with everyone in the hospital. Lady Everest finally got hers. Knocked up like any common sailor’s girlfriend.”
“It’ll be a couple months before you show,” Sally said. “Maybe even longer.”
“Oh, I can’t imagine anyone saying anything, but they’ll think it. Even if they don’t think it, I’ll believe they’re thinking it. I’m just sorry that my first child wasn’t Tommy’s. We’d talked about it, but he was afraid that, with war coming, something might happen. And, boy, did it ever.”
“Who, I mean, do you, um, oh my goodness, I didn’t mean—”
Glory smiled. Poor Sally had embarrassed herself. “Do I even know who the father is?”
“No, no, no, I didn’t mean anything like that,” Sally protested.
“It’s okay, Sal, relax. I do know, and no one else needs to know, especially not Marsh Vincent or Mick McCarty. They have enough on their plates right now. This is my problem, and for now, my secret. The rest of the world can either like it or lump it.”
ELEVEN
Mick grabbed a second cup of coffee and then dropped into a chair at the back of the ready room as the air intelligence officer got ready to start the brief. The whole squadron was there, and the Big E’s air-conditioning was barely keeping up. Topside he could hear cables scraping on the flight deck as the various flight deck crews, called “shirts” for their color-coded jerseys, got the launch ready. He’d been with Bombing Eight for seven months now, ever since his short stint in P-cola. It was going okay, so far. He wasn’t going to get promoted anytime soon, but he hadn’t managed to piss off anyone of consequence. Yet.
He flexed his hand. For the most part it was doing what he wanted, although it still didn’t look right. The flight surgeon had kept his word. The doctors back at Pensacola told him pretty much the same thing about his hand, that it was one of those borderline injuries that could be a ticket out of aviation if he was tired of it, or that he could do some surgery and rehab work and get the hand quasi-operational. Mick had opted for the latter, which had turned out to be a lot more painful than the original injury. He’d gone back to drinking, but the daily tempo of flight operations in the training pipeline meant that he had to keep it under control. He’d finally been cleared to go back to war and then caught up with the Enterprise, which had been in Pearl for Christmas through New Year’s just before the Central Pacific offensive really got under way. He had not exactly been a patient and understanding flight instructor, and the CO of his training squadron was beginning to complain about the number of “downs” Mick was handing out. Mick was failing new guys in their flight syllabuses, and he was beginning to complain about the levels of chickenshit and Mickey Mouse rules in the training command. The transfer orders came just in time.
Pacific Glory Page 21
