by Mandy Sayer
She rested her boots on the rungs of the stool and sighed heavily. When Charlie pulled up a stool beside her and ordered some water, she didn’t even bother to acknowledge him.
‘Well, where is he, then?’
Pearl shrugged.
The puppy stood up and walked across to them, sniffing at Pearl’s boots. Its tail curled up at a weird angle, as if it were pointing over its head to the left side of the room.
Charlie suggested that she change out of her costume before somebody twigged that she was a girl.
‘I’m turning myself in.’ Pearl drained her glass. ‘I’m going home.’
‘You can’t leave now. We’re a team. We need you.’
She rested her forehead against her folded hands on the counter and groaned. The puppy began gnawing at her bootlaces.
‘What about James?’ Charlie reminded her.
‘James is gone. Deserted yesterday.’ She leaned down, scooped up the puppy and placed it in her lap, where it curled up under the touch of her hand. It smelled a little strange, like rotting fruit. It whimpered for a moment and nosed her stomach.
‘I didn’t chuck it in after Blue died,’ Charlie complained.
‘You can’t chuck it in,’ she said. ‘You’ve been drafted.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes, gazing down at the puppy. ‘You’re just like a gutless little girl,’ Charlie said at last.
‘I am a girl.’
‘Go on, then,’ he dared. ‘Hand yourself in. I’m really surprised though. I thought you had more balls.’
Pearl drained her glass and slammed it on the bar. She was angry with herself and also with Charlie, because she half-suspected he was right about how cowardly she was behaving.
He pulled an envelope from his shirt pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, throwing it down on the bar. ‘This came for you.’
She picked it up and recognised her mother’s handwriting.
‘At least your man’s alive,’ Charlie added.
She ripped open the envelope, and began reading her mother’s letter. My Dearest Boy . . . The censors had blacked out some passages. She skimmed the legible parts, detailing the death of another neighbourhood boy in Crete, and the fact that Mikey Michaels’ mother had moved them both in with her sister’s family. There was a paragraph about Hector, who, within a period of three weeks, had met a woman ten years his senior, had proposed to and then married her. They were now honeymooning at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. The letter finished with a reference to her ongoing anxiety over her missing daughter. Frankie the Butcher swore that he saw Pearl just the other day, walking down Macleay Street with a tall blonde woman, but we haven’t seen her since you left for Port Moresby. The tone, as usual, was slightly hysterical, and hearing her mother’s voice in her head again was unnerving, confusing her now about what she really wanted to do. At least Hector was happy, and the news of his marriage relieved a little of her guilt. But she still hadn’t had word from Martin. Was he on the farm with Nora and Pookie or not? She folded the letter and pocketed it.
Charlie called to the attendant and ordered more beers.
The man nodded, pulled two bottles from a cupboard.
‘Hey,’ said Charlie. ‘You know the bloke who deserted yesterday? A Negro?’
The attendant smiled. ‘If he’d a been here, he woulda jammed with you all today. Washer plays a mean sax.’
Pearl sat up straight and looked more closely at the man. He seemed curiously familiar. ‘You know him?’
‘Hell, man. Wash and me done many a detail together.’
‘Well, what happened to him?’ she demanded.
The man looked surprised. ‘Ain’t you heard?’
‘All the CO said was that Washington had deserted. Didn’t know where he was.’
The man threw his head back and laughed. ‘Ol’ Washer stuck a rifle up the CO’s ass, I tell you.’ He nodded at the puppy, still nestled in Pearl’s lap. ‘That there’s his dog. Or was.’
‘Washington’s?’ said Pearl. ‘This was Washington’s dog?’
‘Loved that pooch more’n anything. Bought her off a native kid last month for a pack of cigarettes, right after she was born. Fed her canned milk through an eyedropper. Can you believe that?’
Pearl looked at the puppy in an entirely new light. She patted it gently and it whimpered again and licked her hand. This same tongue would have licked James’ hand; he would have run his fingers through the same fur. She picked a burr from behind the pup’s left ear.
‘If he loved her that much, why didn’t he take her with him?’
The man shook his head. ‘It’s fucking dangerous out there. Can’t be marching with commandos and playing fetch at the same time.’
‘Marching with commandos?’ asked Charlie, sliding forward on his stool. ‘But I thought he’d deserted.’
‘He deserted the US Army, man. The segregated Labor Corps—not the cause.’
A white GI walked into the PX and ordered a beer from the other end of the counter.
The attendant eyed him. ‘Tell you later,’ he murmured. He walked down to serve the man, leaving Pearl numb. She picked up the puppy and cuddled her, and felt a warm wet tongue against her earlobe. When the attendant turned towards her again, she suddenly recognised him.
‘Your name wouldn’t happen to be Tyrone, would it?’
The man looked puzzled. ‘How’d you guess?’
She smiled. ‘Do you reckon you could meet up with me and Charlie later tonight, when there aren’t so many people around?’
As he had threatened, Sergeant Thomas ordered Pearl and Charlie to do overnight guard duty. But instead of guarding one of the posts of the camp, they were ordered to stand duty at a single hut. Pearl thought this must be some kind of joke until a GI later explained that great quantities of canned meat, crates of beer, powdered milk and eggs were disappearing from the hut, so much so that the camp was now running out of supplies. Snap inspections of every tent had yielded no clue as to where the goods were being stashed. White soldiers reckoned that the Negroes had stolen them and buried them in the forest for themselves. The Negroes speculated that the mess sergeants were responsible, and Sergeant Thomas was the ringleader. Morphine, anaesthetic and antibiotics had also gone missing from the supplies hut, but no one could really account for that.
The hut they had to guard was about the size of a three-roomed cottage, thatched with palms and with a door of bound bamboo, and had been built at the edge of the camp near a mangrove forest. It stood on two-foot stilts to keep the supplies out of flash floods, with a little gallery that ran around the outside walls.
At first Pearl and Charlie stood on the gallery, almost at attention, poised for an attack. But after half an hour of hearing only hooting owls and the odd, distant snoring of sleeping soldiers, they sat and leaned their backs up against the wall. They’d only been sitting there for a few minutes when they heard a whistling sound coming through the trees. They jumped to attention and raised their rifles, aiming blindly into the darkness, until they heard a voice, much closer now, say, ‘Hey, boys, it’s only me: Tyrone.’
He joined them on the gallery, rolled a cigarette, and lit up. Between drags, in a hushed, uneasy voice, he told Pearl and Charlie everything they wanted to know.
‘Our CO, Thomas, he’s from Georgia. Washer, he grew up in Louisiana, so he used to dealin’ with crackers like him. Anyways, Washer asked for permission to marry an Australian girl—a white girl, that is—and from then on Thomas had it in for him. He made him wash the same jeep ten times in one day. He’d deny him passes for no reason, and make him do ten-mile hikes in the mornings. When we got to Lae, Wash tried to put in for a transfer into one of the entertainment units, but Thomas wouldn’t allow it to go through.’
The trouble escalated, Tyrone explained, when James, angry at having his transfer denied, tried to enter the PX in Lae for a beer. A runty little private from Texarkana refused to serve him and James, furious by now, picked up someone’s beer and
threw it into the private’s face. A brawl broke out. Glasses were smashed, about six or seven guys jumped James, and a couple of MPs finished him off, punching, kicking, pistol-whipping his head. He spent four days in the company hospital, followed by three weeks in the brig.
Pearl was shocked. There seemed to be more fighting between the black and white Americans than between the Americans and the Japanese.
After that, Tyrone continued, James tried to stay out of trouble. He came out of the brig quieter, and he rejoined the Labour Corps, unloading ships, washing out mess tents, scrubbing floors. He bided his time and tried to keep his nose clean.
‘But it was hard for Wash to stand back with a mop in his hand while we was all being shelled and strafed by the Japs, and Thomas not letting us arm ourselves.’
‘Not enough ammunition?’ asked Charlie.
Tyrone snorted. ‘Whitey’s already fighting a bunch of coloured folks—the Japanese. He don’t want no niggers with guns. Hell, they might band together and turn. Run off with ol’ Tojo.’
The transport company was then transferred from Lae to Nadzab. There were many casualties at the time and James, Tyrone and the rest of the unit worked around the clock, digging foxholes, ferrying ammunition to observation points, carrying the dead and injured out of the jungle to the camp’s makeshift hospital.
It was around this time that an Australian independent company was flown in from Moresby. Most of the soldiers were big jazz fans and they had an old gramophone. At night they’d play records they’d bought from an American. One night, they discovered James and Tyrone sitting outside their tent, listening to the music, and invited them in to join the party. They passed around their whisky. Shared some cigars. They allowed James to play any record he wished. ‘But things really hotted up,’ Tyrone recalled, ‘when they found out who Wash really was—the famous tenor player from the Basie band. They even had one of his records! Man, they treated him like a king.’ James would sit around with them at night and reminisce about his gigs in New York, when he was on the road with Jay McShann. And then one day an Aussie turned up from Wau with a soprano saxophone. ‘Well,’ said Tyrone, ‘Washer went to town, playin’ so loud and swingin’ that Thomas went nuts and threw him in the brig again for three days.’
‘For playing music?’ asked Pearl.
‘Thomas reckoned the music’d attract the Japs. And after that, things got real bad.’
The tensions had peaked only two days before Pearl had arrived at the camp, when enemy planes had bombed the valley. Shells and gunfire blasted out of the ranges as the Japanese tried to regain the territory they’d recently lost and reclaim the nearby airstrip. As pockets of earth exploded around them, James and Tyrone carried out Thomas’s orders, filling sandbags with dirt and hauling them off to the trenches.
The Aussies were positioned in a shallow foxhole near the river. James and Tyrone were each carrying a bag towards it when they saw bushes moving on the other side of the stream and realised that the enemy was only about forty yards away. A mortar exploded and Tyrone dropped his bag and jumped into the hole. One of James’s Australian jazz buddies stood up and fired his rifle three or four times. They heard a Jap yelp and then suddenly the Aussie was hit too, and as he fell backwards he dropped his gun. The next thing Tyrone saw was James ditching his sandbag and snatching up the dead man’s rifle. He fell to the ground behind the bag, then writhed through the mud, beyond the foxhole, pushing the sandbag ahead of him for protection. The crowns of palm trees were swaying, even though there was no wind. He slowly raised the rifle, squinted, and aimed at the crown. Tyrone glimpsed a flash of black amid the palms and James pulled the trigger and fired. A Japanese soldier arched backwards, head first, and dropped to the ground. Tyrone lurched back to see James reloading, when he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, the barrel of a rifle pointing from behind a tree trunk to his right. Before he had a chance to shout a warning he heard an explosion and saw James collapse.
‘And then I saw the most scary thing of all,’ Tyrone told them. ‘It wasn’t a Jap firing from behind the tree to the right. It was Thomas.’
Charlie snorted in disbelief.
‘Listen, man, I was in the foxhole. I saw it all. Washer, he rolled into that hole with us faster than you can say Ku Klux Klan.’
‘Was he hurt?’ Pearl wanted to know.
‘Nah, only a flesh wound, but when he knew it was the sergeant who’d tried to shoot him he sure did panic.’
‘So did you blokes report it to anyone?’ asked Charlie.
‘Who’s gonna believe the word of two niggers against a white officer? Happens all the time. See, nothing frightens a cracker more than a nigger with a gun.’
‘But what about the Aussies?’ asked Charlie. ‘They must’ve seen it too.’
‘They went one better. Hell, Wash knew his way around a gun. He grew up on a farm. And the Aussies knew he weren’t goin’ to be safe round here no more. So when they got transferred late that afternoon, they smuggled him out with ’em. Aussies didn’t care if he was black, blue, pink or purple, long as he could hit a target.’
An owl sang one low note over and over. Pearl slumped over her rifle. It all seemed impossible, unreal.
‘Well, where is he now?’ she asked.
Tyrone gestured vaguely up the Markham Valley. ‘Pushin’ the Japs north, up into the ranges.’
‘They’ve already got two days on us,’ said Charlie. ‘But hey, there can’t be too many Aussie units with a big black American.’
‘That’s if Thomas lets us go on,’ said Pearl. ‘He’s recommending to Rudolph that we return to Lae.’
They heard a soft scratching against the gallery floor. The little puppy came bounding around the corner and into Pearl’s lap.
Pearl scratched its belly. ‘What’s the dog’s name?’
Tyrone laughed briefly. ‘Called her after that girl he was sweet on,’ he said. ‘Man, he loved that dame. Talked about her all the time.’ Tyrone shifted and crossed his legs. ‘He called the dog Pearl.’
It seemed to Pearl, after hearing Tyrone’s story, that the mosquitoes were nipping less frequently and the heat was not so unbearably sticky. James had talked about her, had missed her. She now felt emboldened by the risks she’d taken. The puppy nestled in her arms and fell asleep, while Pearl and Charlie dozed against the wall of the hut.
Near dawn, she woke to the sound of footsteps drumming against the other side of the gallery. She gave Charlie a nudge and jumped to her feet, her fingers finding the trigger of her .303. Dashing around a corner of the gallery, she and Charlie were astonished to see, in the half-light, two American privates running from the back of the supplies hut, carrying what looked like boxes and crates.
‘Halt!’ Pearl cried, echoed by Charlie, and when that didn’t work she and Charlie ploughed into the mangrove swamp after them. They followed the shadows flickering through the mist, through puddles and sludge, until Charlie leaped forward and managed to tackle one, who dropped the box he was holding. Pearl was now only a few feet to the left of the second man, who was sprinting through the swamp. She raised her rifle, aimed at the soldier’s leg and squeezed the trigger. The gun jumped in her hand and she watched him fall face-down in the mud with a brief cry that was almost erotic. Shocked by what she’d just done, she ran forward and turned him over. She could hardly believe her eyes: the man was clothed in an American uniform, a two-piece jungle suit and M1 helmet, but his eyes were slanted and his skin was burnt-egg yellow. The Japanese had been removing the clothes of dead soldiers and masquerading as Allies in order to steal food and medicine.
A plane was due in from Lae the following afternoon, carrying ammunition, food and some overdue medical supplies. Scores of men had been wounded further up in the Markham Valley during the night and they were now being borne back to the camp on stretchers by native carriers. The extra food was vital, too, given what the Japanese had stolen. Sergeant Rudolph would also be on the plane. He was flying in to supply them wit
h more props and costumes for the show, and to check on the welfare of his men since Blue had been killed. The drummer, Marks, who’d been feverish and vomiting throughout the night, was now in the camp hospital.
The plane was over two hours late. Most pilots were reluctant to fly in the afternoon because of the heavy clouds that obscured almost everything, including the tops of mountains. When the aircraft finally landed and taxied along the airstrip, the troubadours lined up to meet their commanding officer.
When Rudolph appeared at the rear of the plane the three surviving band members and Wanipe stood at attention and saluted him. Rudolph jumped to the ground and ordered them at ease. James’s puppy had followed Pearl out to the airstrip and sat at her feet, as if she were now part of the company. Already Pearl had grown attached to the dog, carrying her around in her pocket, or down the front of her shirt. She felt that finding the puppy was a positive sign, an encouragement from James himself to continue her journey until she found him.
