Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  He realized he needed some local help. Big Kam came to mind.

  * * *

  Three days later the big Samoan appeared in Marsh’s office in his HASP uniform. Beside him was a very frightened local, a scrawny old man who looked like a stick-figure doll next to the giant patrolman. He was dressed just like the other boatman—khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a faded Hawaiian shirt. He had dirty casts on both shins, and he was walking stiffly with two canes.

  Marsh invited the old man to sit down. He dropped into the chair, licking his lips nervously, looking around at all the uniformed haoles. The Samoan stood behind the chair, baton in hand, slapping it quietly into his enormous palm. Before Marsh could say anything, Kam nudged the old man with the end of his baton.

  “You tell’m now, alla same you tell me,” he ordered.

  The old man nodded, looked at Marsh, and then looked away, cleared his throat, and told the story. As soon as Marsh heard him say the haole woman got into the boat demanding to go to the Arizona, not the Utah, paying twice the fare in cigarettes, he knew.

  Would if I could, she’d said. Glory had gone back to Tommy in the only way she could.

  Marsh could not imagine why she would do such a thing. He had long thought that she’d come to grips with Tommy’s passing and that the night of the New Year’s party had marked a milestone of sorts, where she decided to come back to life.

  As he sat there contemplating the enormity of what the old man had just told them, Marsh realized that he had finished talking. The Samoan detective was studying the floor. Big Kam obviously understood that he had stumbled onto what the haoles would call a very hot potato and was trying hard to become invisible. Me, too, thought Marsh.

  “You want we take him in?” Kam asked.

  “No,” Marsh said. “He told the truth, I believe. You think this was his fault?”

  Big Kam thought about that. He was HASP, and they only dealt with guilty bastards, but then he shook his head. “No.”

  “Then let him go,” Marsh said. “I think the Lewis case is finally closed.”

  Kam nodded. “What you gonna do now?” he asked.

  “Beats the shit out of me.”

  Kam gave a big grin, then prodded the old boatman none too gently with his baton. “You go now,” he said, “and you keep mouth shut about haole woman.”

  The old man stared up at him blankly, as if he didn’t understand. Big Kam launched into some high-speed Hawaiian dialect, which produced a series of urgent nods. As they prepared to leave, Marsh asked him what he’d said.

  “I tell’m, ghost of haole woman know where he lives. I tell’m, he talk about haole woman, her ghost come to his house, eat all his children.”

  “That ought to do it,” Marsh said.

  Oxerhaus and Marsh went in to see the admiral that afternoon. Marsh told him the story and waited for some kind of tirade, but it didn’t come.

  “You think that’s where she is? Inside the Arizona?”

  “I don’t think that old man was making this up,” Marsh said. “I learned earlier that the nurses sometimes go out into the harbor with these guys, just as a lark. They pay in cigarettes, which sounds right. If she jumped over the side right above that hole, she’d have gone straight down into whatever remains of the boiler rooms.”

  “Jesus,” the admiral said softly. “And she was not a swimmer?”

  “No, sir,” Marsh said. “Tommy Lewis, her husband, was the main propulsion assistant in Arizona on December seventh, and he was aboard that morning. He had the duty.”

  The admiral grimaced. “So the question now is, do we send divers down there to find her remains.”

  “I think we have to,” Oxerhaus said. “Her body might not be, um, intact at this point in time, but there will be women’s clothing, something…”

  “I disagree,” Marsh said. Both of them looked at him in surprise. “First, it would be a very dangerous dive. When that magazine blew, it sent a fireball all the way back through the ship, confined internally by the armored box section. That included the boiler and engine rooms. God only knows the condition of bulkheads and decks down there.”

  “Go on,” the admiral said.

  “Second, everyone’s already talking about the Arizona as some kind of shrine, a monument to be dedicated to the memory of the Jap attack and the thousands who died that day. That’s a noble prospect. Do we really want to contaminate that with a suicide?”

  “But,” Oxerhaus began. Marsh held up a finger to interrupt him, not something people ordinarily did to Hugo.

  “If we really have to know what happened to Ensign Lewis, then we’d of course have to investigate the wreck. But here’s the thing: This sounds like a reasonable explanation for her disappearance. She was depressed after having had an illegitimate child, probably still being semi-shunned in the hospital, and she had a breakdown. Suppose we send divers down there and something happens? A deck collapses, a boiler falls over on them while they’re looking? If she did kill herself, is it worth losing more men in that ship just to prove that thesis beyond a reasonable doubt? Perhaps most importantly, is anyone besides us asking?”

  The admiral swiveled around in his chair and looked out the big windows. From his office he could see the spot where the Arizona lay, still bleeding oil.

  “All good points, Commander,” he said softly. “You’re recommending that we close this case with what we know and what we surmise?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. The Navy does not need something like this coming out just now.”

  “Or ever,” the admiral said. “Hugo?”

  “I can live with that, Admiral.”

  The admiral nodded. “Make it so, gentlemen.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” they both said and left his office.

  “This is personal, isn’t it?” Oxerhaus asked as they rolled together down the hallway.

  “Yes, it is,” Marsh said. “Very.”

  “Okay, then. The Navy owes you one. I’ll support it. Was she beautiful?”

  Marsh was suddenly having a problem seeing as they approached their respective offices. Oxerhaus pretended not to notice.

  “Beyond compare, Commander,” Marsh said. “Beyond compare.”

  That night Marsh went to the O-club, rolled himself up to the main bar, and told the bartender he needed to get very drunk. The bartender took one look at his face, called over a waiter, and handed him a bottle of Scotch and a glass. He told the waiter to roll Marsh over to Crips Corner and make sure he ate something in the next hour. Marsh reached for his wallet, but the bartender waved him off. “Sometimes, Commander, we drop a bottle, it breaks, and we gotta write it off. I think I just broke one.”

  * * *

  Sally arrived two weeks later, just in time for Marsh’s first prosthesis, a cuffed clamping-hand replacement. The rehab plan was to get that attachment up and working to the point where he could operate crutches, and then proceed to the next step: an artificial lower leg. After all the operations, Marsh had about three inches of forearm left below the elbow, which was enough to support the cuff attachment. The clamping mechanism was operated two ways. To pick something up, he would wrap the clamps around the object, and then close them using his left hand. To let go of it, all he had to do was bump the button on the bottom of the cuff on any hard surface, and the spring-loaded device would open.

  The whole contraption could come off for cleaning and for what the nurses euphemistically called stump hygiene. The first day he wore it, he managed to knock just about everything off his desk and break not one but two coffee mugs. Oxerhaus told him if he couldn’t do any better than that he’d get him an eye patch because obviously he didn’t have any depth perception.

  Sally showed up at the base headquarters at 1600 and surprised Marsh in his office. She was in uniform, a lieutenant junior grade now, and she looked wonderful to him, albeit thinner than he remembered. He introduced her to Oxerhaus and all the yeomen, whom she charmed with her brilliant smile. She then insisted on pushing his cha
ir all the way back to the BOQ. His room was on the ground floor because there were no elevators in the building. Once inside the room she pulled the shades, took off her cap, and sat down in his lap.

  “Hey, sailor,” she said, and then she kissed him. When they came up for air she began unbuttoning his shirt. Then she unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She told him to remove her bra.

  Marsh laughed. “One hook or two?” he asked her, waving the stainless steel prosthesis at her.

  “Left hand, if you please.”

  “Not sure I know how to do that with one hand.”

  “Time to learn,” she said, and so he did. She helped by pressing her front into his face.

  “Can’t breathe,” he mumbled.

  “Then die happy,” she said. “But first? Get closer to the bed and then set the brakes on this thing. We’re about to fall.”

  Marsh would never have thought of that. In fact, he wasn’t doing that much thinking just then. After a little while, neither of them was.

  * * *

  Much later, they had dinner at the O-club. Sally rolled his chair to a regular table and asked the waiter to bring a cushion so he could get his one and a half arms up over the edge. He waved at the guys over in Crips Corner and then explained to Sally who they were.

  “That’s terrible,” she protested. “Making you into lepers just because you’re in a wheelchair.”

  “Seemed fine to us,” Marsh said. “Better service, too. But it is kind of nice to be back with the whole folks.”

  “You going to turn martyr on me?” she asked.

  “Every chance I get,” he said.

  The waiter brought their drinks and a menu. He toasted Sally, and then he asked her to marry him. She was in the middle of taking a sip of her drink when he dropped that little bomb. She put down her glass and cocked her head to one side.

  “Seriously?”

  “I love you dearly,” Marsh said, marveling inside at how easily that came out. “I’m tired of living alone, and after Leyte I have a whole lot better appreciation for life. I’d like to share it with you.”

  She looked down at her left hand and then extended it to his hook. “On one condition,” she said. “This horrible thing comes off at bedtime.”

  “Aw, I’m beginning to really like this hook.”

  “I do not love your hook, for reasons I should not have to go into.”

  “You want me to take it off right here?” he asked. “Maybe wave the bloody stump around? Probably get us a better table.”

  “Don’t you dare,” she giggled.

  “So the answer is yes?”

  “The answer is yes. I would be thrilled to marry you.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Fine.”

  “Oops,” he said. “I forgot to get an engagement ring.”

  “I think I’ll survive,” she said.

  “Maybe we can use this,” he said and slipped off his naval academy ring. He put it on her ring finger. It promptly fell right off. She retrieved it, put it back on her finger, and held up her hand. “This works,” she said. “But since it will just get lost, why don’t you keep it warm for me.”

  * * *

  That night, as they lay in bed in his BOQ room, he told her about what they thought had happened to Glory. She went rigid for a moment, then sighed and wiped away some tears.

  “I often wondered if it had been something like that. She seemed so sad when I left for Guam. I was worried about her.”

  “Beast McCarty is missing, too.” He told her of Oxerhaus’s vindictive determination to find him and take away his wings. “There’s a story going around that he was the one who crashed into that cruiser. I think I told you about that. We don’t know the truth, and I don’t suppose we ever will unless a better witness comes forward.”

  “He was the father, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Marsh said after a moment. “I do.”

  She was silent for a few minutes. The subject of Glory was still a delicate one between them, something of a double-edged sword. He worried that she’d interpret his telling her about what had happened as a sign of some lingering love.

  “What would you think,” she said, “if, after we get married, we go find that baby.”

  “Wow,” Marsh said. “That’s an amazing idea. We could adopt him, raise him as if he were our own.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We could.”

  “Then maybe add some brothers and sisters?”

  “Count on it,” she said.

  He held her close that night. Taking Glory’s foundling into their brand-new family was the one way they both could lay her ghost to rest, and Mick’s, too.

  * * *

  A year and a half after the end of the war, Marsh was the admin officer at the naval base. Hugo Oxerhaus had managed to have one temper tantrum too many, stroking out in his office one day after a particularly violent episode. The new naval base commander asked Marsh if he could just step in and take over the whole office. With no other prospects for naval service, a postwar recession building back on the mainland, and a brand-new wife and baby, Marsh quickly said yes.

  The Navy had come out with a notice that they would be offering early retirement at the fifteen-year point to officers in the grade of commander and above. They needed to cull the service of an unbalanced number of senior officers. Combined with a medical disability rating, his pension would be almost as much as if he had gone the full twenty, so he elected to get out before they changed their minds. Sally was enthusiastic about his decision. She wanted to go back to the World, as people who’d been in Hawaii for a long time often called the mainland. Hawaii was a nice place to visit as long as you knew you could leave whenever the urge struck. After four years of war, that urge was very much there, for both of them. Between his pension and her ability to earn as a nurse, they’d be all right until Marsh could find a gainful career.

  The paperwork war continued unabated after the Japanese surrender in the fall of 1945. The fleet was demobilizing from ten thousand ships down to one-tenth that number, and, while the ships were being mothballed back on the mainland, much of the Pearl Harbor operational infrastructure was also being shut down. The other major effort was the repatriation of American remains from distant Pacific battlefield islands and atolls back to the brand-new National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. This was a cemetery located in Puowaina Crater, an extinct volcano referred to by the locals in Hawaii as Punchbowl because of its shape. The Army had begun something called a database project at Tripler Hospital, because the repatriation of remains offered an opportunity to conduct a final accounting of the missing and the dead. It was a somber project, done all by hand, and it was expected to go on for the next decade, if not longer.

  The Punchbowl memorial wasn’t scheduled to be dedicated formally until 1949. Sally and Marsh had settled in San Diego by then, so Marsh was surprised to receive a formal invitation in 1948 from the Navy Department for both of them to attend the first reinterments, which would be some seven hundred sets of remains from the Japanese attack on December 7.

  Marsh wanted no part of a return to Pearl Harbor, with all its painful associations. He was still experiencing bouts of depression whenever he allowed himself to brood about everything that had happened. His physical disabilities were less onerous than he’d anticipated, but there were many times when memories ambushed him. It was difficult for some of his civilian friends to fully understand why he’d drift away from a conversation and stare out into that mental middle distance. He was getting around on a cane and a crude artificial leg, but the wheelchair had not yet been fully retired. That said, he knew that, as a disabled vet, some doors had opened to him in his new career as a law student that might not have opened to someone with both his wings and wheels. He decided to decline the government’s invitation.

  Sally seemed to accept his decision, but a week later, she apparently changed her mind. Now she said they had to go. She said that the
best way to face down the ghosts of war was to commit them to consecrated ground. Besides, she argued, the president was going to be there. He apparently wanted to see Punchbowl before the formal opening next year. Mr. Truman was in the middle of his own presidential election campaign—his first, since he had become president upon the death of Roosevelt in 1945. Marsh was surprised he would take the time to go all the way out there to an American territory, where there were no votes to be had. Sally told him that he clearly didn’t understand anything about civilian politics.

  Marsh’s real problem remained, however. He really didn’t know if he could stand going back. He hadn’t been there for Pearl Harbor, as the December 7 attack was universally called now, but he’d seen the wreckage of the Pacific Fleet soon after. More importantly, the association of Pearl with Mick and Glory was like one of those small red-hot coals that lurk in what appears to be a spent charcoal briquette that suddenly burns the hell out of you. He didn’t want to relive any of that again, both for his sake and for Sally’s, but of course he couldn’t come out and just say that. After three years of marriage, though, with two kids, one adopted and a little girl of their own, Sally got her way. She told him he wasn’t fooling anybody but himself by not talking about it. Finally he gave in and agreed to go.

  Once he responded to the Navy Department, they received an official travel manifest to board one of the few remaining Army troop transports still operational for the five-day trip out to the islands. Sally’s mother came out from St. Louis to take care of their little ones. The week before they embarked, Marsh learned that two hundred vets and their spouses had been invited. Sally said that would make it easier, since everyone on board would have experienced the same things.

  Marsh didn’t find that news comforting, either. He had already met some wounded vets who were obviously going to make a life’s work of whining about their injuries. Just being at sea again, even on a converted ocean liner, he had to be careful to fully occupy his time and his mind, sometimes with inane activities or conversations, so as not to brood too much about all the friends, classmates, and shipmates who were still out there and who would never be coming back. Even as the transport plowed its way to Hawaii, he was aware that on another transport, at another time, they’d been burying shipmates at sea on this very route.