Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘You tell him, Kevin. You’re sitting on your arse in Brisbane running things. Catch a plane and come and tell Joe Popkin what you think about us educating these island kids.’

  ‘Nick, wassa matta wit you? You crazy or sumthin’? Joe “Hammer-man” Popkin, he’s my brother. We bin buddies since way back! He took care of me when we was in the kid clink upstate Illinois. The Hammer-man ain’t gonna take no profit-and-loss shit from me! He’s gonna tell me to jam my profit column up my ass. From you, Nick . . . dat’s different . . . he got respect.’

  On paper it must have seemed an unlikely partnership and it had certainly come about in an unusual manner. I have already recalled the horrific murder on the beach in Java, when I’d observed the nine sailors from the Perth being slaughtered by the Javanese islanders. What I didn’t mention was that the USS Houston had been sunk in the same battle and that the nine Australians had rescued an American, hauling him from the sea onto their life raft where he collapsed unconscious. Coming ashore they’d laid him, still unconscious, under some bushes at the top of the beach to keep him out of the sun. Shortly after, the Australian sailors had all been killed while the Yank had gone unnoticed by the murderous mob. The American was, of course, Kevin Judge. We’d sailed together to Fremantle or, perhaps more correctly, as he proved more of a hindrance on board than an asset, I sailed and he recovered from severe concussion and told me his story.

  The little street-smart Irish–American brought up in a tough Chicago Catholic orphanage and later reform school had been given an ultimatum by a judge. ‘Da judge says to me, “The US Navy or prison, son. Make up your mind.”’ Kevin explained, ‘So, I’m stupid ain’t I . . . I chose the fuckin’ navy and next thing boom-boom and I’m swimmin’ fer dry land! Nick, I want yer ta know, I ain’t no fuckin’ hero!’

  There was very little that was stupid about Kevin. After his basic training, which built on what he’d learned when he’d worked in the library as well as the loading bay at Illinois State Reformatory, he’d put in a request to join the quartermaster’s division. This meant that he was assigned to the ship’s quartermaster every time he was posted to a new ship. ‘Nick, a man gotta be on the influence end o’ the supply line, that way you gonna make a buck an’ earn a little respect.’

  When we had arrived in Fremantle after our escape from Java on Madam Butterfly, Kevin had been repatriated to the States to recover and several months later had returned to Australia with Purple Heart and Bronze Star ribbons on his chest and a petty officer’s chevrons on his sleeve. Situated in Brisbane he was a part of the vast organisation supplying the US Navy’s requirements in the South Pacific region. His job was to assist US Navy Chief Petty Officer Bud Lewinski to issue contracts to the locals for navy supplies. Kevin, under the guidance of this navy veteran, was in business at the sharp end of just about everything. He thought he must have died and gone to heaven.

  Now in a position of enormous influence on the navy supply line, he’d somehow managed to get Joe Popkin transferred from the Negro unit in San Diego to become his personal driver at the Brisbane depot where they’d spent the remainder of the war together, linking up with me again in the process. Kevin ensured that a small percentage, in cash, was added to every supply contract and secretly deposited in my father’s missionary bank account, where I was a signatory, so that by the time the Pacific War ended, Kevin was worth over twenty thousand pounds, in those days a king’s ransom.

  It would have been impossible for Kevin to take the money back to the States without risking an investigation from either the navy or what he referred to as the ‘eternal revenoo’. ‘Nick, unnerstand, buddy, if I take dat stash back Stateside dey gonna lock me up in San Quentin twenny years!’

  With Joe Popkin, he returned to America without the funds to be demobbed. Before they left, Joe and I had attended several US Army war-surplus auctions in Brisbane and, with a bit of jiggery pokery, had purchased most of the basics needed to start our scrap-metal business in the islands. Before I’d been demobbed I’d also hit the jackpot in Rabaul where a friendly US officer, Captain John Tulius, had allowed me to buy a small landing craft for next to nothing and in a moment of generosity had thrown in a second one. ‘That’s a small thank-you from the US Marines,’ he’d said at the time, then added, ‘Nick, if you’re half smart you’ll drop into Luganville. Our boys are being repatriated States-side to be demobbed so quickly they’re short of labour to dismantle the infrastructure and move the equipment. Should be an item or two you could usefully pick up.’ He’d given me a written introduction to his superior officer, General Lachie Urquhart, and another to a certain Sergeant Bill Moss. ‘See Moss first,’ he’d advised, ‘it’s the non-coms in Supply that run the army and navy supply lines.’

  I’d also picked up two wooden coastal vessels for a song, probably for half a chorus if the truth be known. With some difficulty I’d managed to get the four vessels to Australia to load up our auction gear.

  Now our little convoy had left Brisbane, the two wooden vessels loaded with our purchases. I’d decided to take the advice of Captain Tulius and visit Espiritu Santo, the largest island in the New Hebrides, and go to see the huge US military supply and support base at Luganville. We still had a wish list, in fact we were probably starting our salvage operation on the smell of an oily rag, Kevin as usual being the tight-arse.

  ‘Buddy, we don’t wanna land in dem islands wid a heap of crap we cain’t use,’ the ever careful Kevin had cautioned when Joe and I had wanted to buy one or two more items at auction.

  On arrival I’d gone to the general’s office to make an appointment, handing the grizzled senior sergeant in the front office the letter of introduction from Captain Tulius. ‘You a civilian?’ he snapped, pushing the unopened letter aside and not bothering to introduce himself or to ask me my name. He was clearly unimpressed.

  ‘Yes, sergeant, now I am,’ I replied. Then hoping to use more influence than I had, I added rather diffidently, ‘Before that I was with the US Marines at Guadalcanal.’

  He looked at me sharply. ‘What you say your name was?’

  ‘I didn’t, it’s Nick Duncan, sergeant.’

  ‘The Australian lootenant? Navy?’

  ‘Yes, sergeant,’ I replied, surprised.

  He pointed to the letter addressed to the general. ‘Who that come from?’

  ‘Captain Tulius, salvage officer, Rabaul.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ He opened a file that seemed to include the rest of the day’s mail and telexes and dropped it in. Then his demeanour changed and he grinned, sticking his hand across the desk for me to shake. ‘Bill Moss, Nick. Pleased ta’meetcha. You know a good buddy of mine, Chief Lewinski, in Bris-bane.’

  Chief Lewinski was Kevin’s boss at the Navy Supply Depot in Brisbane. ‘Yes, of course, we became good friends. But he’s in the navy. How would you . . . I mean, how did you get to know him?’

  ‘Lieutenant, how do you think we won this war? Departmental cooperation, it’s the American way. We all know each other, army, navy, air force, we all have the same understandin’ with Uncle Sam, if you know what I mean.’ I nodded. It seemed skimming off the top was standard procedure in supply. ‘Chief Lewinski sent me a signal to say maybe you’d be calling in aroun’ these parts to say howdy.’ He rose. ‘I’ll tell the general you’re here.’

  He was back in less than two minutes and ushered me in without the formality of a salute to his superior officer.

  To my surprise General Lachie Urquhart rose from his desk and shook my hand. ‘Lieutenant Duncan, I’m proud to know you, son,’ he said in a booming voice. He appeared to be straight out of a Hollywood movie – a big man, going a little to fat; leathery face, pale blue eyes, snowy white crew-cut hair and a ham-fisted grip on him like a gorilla. A cigar seemed permanently positioned at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Nick, please, sir,’ I said hurriedly.

  When we were seated he came right to the point. ‘I like what you did at Guadalcanal, Nick. Navy Cross, e
h? That ain’t for beginners. What can we do for you, son?’

  I was somewhat taken aback – I hadn’t mentioned being decorated by the Americans – but then realised he’d been briefed by Moss, who’d been briefed by Lewinski. ‘Well, sir, I was hoping to buy some equipment.’ I went on to explain to him that we wanted to get into the war salvage business, tidying up the islands.

  He laughed. ‘Well, Nick, when can you start? Tomorrow?’

  I explained that it might be a year or so yet before my two partners were finally demobbed from the US Navy and were able to return to the islands. ‘It’s my job to set things up, sir.’

  ‘Pity, I haven’t got a year, Nick. More like three or four months, and the goddamned Frogs and Limeys are trying to screw me!’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  General Urquhart explained that he’d offered the French and the British a twenty cents in the dollar deal for every US military item on Espiritu Santo. Lock, stock and barrel, the whole goddamned shooting match! ‘Those bastards came back with a counteroffer – they’ll take it off my hands for nothing, not even one cent in the dollar! Jesus H. Christ, what kind of bullshit offer is that! They want a whole goddamned city, the whole shebang, for nothing!’ he shouted, the cigar hanging on for grim death in the corner of his mouth. ‘Uncle Sam ain’t goin’ to stand for that kind of blackmail crap!’

  ‘Well, yeah, it does seem rather mean-spirited, sir,’ I said, not quite knowing how to react to his outburst.

  ‘It’s greedy, son, that’s what it is, greedy! Sons of bitches thinking they can exploit Uncle Sam! Battle of the Bulge, America’s saved their prissy Frog asses more than once, invasion of Normandy, Yankee know-how, the last time the goddamned Brits saw that coastline they escaped from it in dinghies at Dunkirk! I’m going to leave the four electricity plants for the island people, then give every island family anything they want. Put a refrigerator in every goddamned hut, diesel generator in every village! Then I’m going to dump the rest straight into the goddamned sea. Two hundred yards beyond the surf the island shelf drops near two hundred feet, that’s where it’s all going, son, off the point into Davy Jones’s goddamned locker!’ He’d said all of this seemingly without drawing breath.

  ‘You mean you’ll . . .?’ I wasn’t sure I understood. Surely he was just kidding, wasn’t he?

  ‘Trash the lot, every goddamned nut and bolt, groundsheets to grenades, shit paper to Sherman tanks. Nobody screws Uncle Sam, leastwise not a jerking-off Frog or a goddamn Limey swallowing his consonants!’

  It was all so outrageous I thought General Urquhart must be drunk, but it was only a few minutes past nine in the morning and there was no smell of grog on his breath. ‘I guess it isn’t much of an offer, sir,’ I stammered.

  ‘Goddamn right it ain’t. We’ve already reduced everything. If they’d offered me one cent in the dollar, then maybe I’d have gone along. That would mean you could have bought a Jeep still in its goddamn packing case for three bucks.’ He removed the cigar from his mouth and, as if he’d pulled a cord from the plug, seemed to instantly calm down. ‘So, have you brought your list, Nick?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘Well . . . er, yes, sir.’

  He looked at me. ‘Navy Cross, eh? Well I reckon that deserves a small tribute. You’ve got two American partners did you say?’

  ‘Yessir, US Navy.’

  ‘Well that’s real nice, son, shows fraternity and brotherhood. I like that. Now you go into Sergeant Moss’s office, sit yourself down real quiet and think. Think about every goddamn thing you’re going to need – everything! You take all day, all week. Take a jeep, look around. Bill Moss will give you an all-areas pass. Then give the sergeant your cheque for ten bucks . . . ’ He thought for a moment. ‘That’s five pounds, just so we can give you a receipt, make everything kosher.’

  I wasn’t sure I understood. Was he asking me to give him five quid to look around and make a list or was he . . . ? No he couldn’t, surely not. ‘Sir, we don’t have unlimited finances, but I’ve worked out a budget, and we’d be happy to pay 20 cents in the dollar.’

  ‘Son, ten bucks, that’s the deal. Anything you want. You going to help me to kick Frog ass and British butt? Anything!’ he repeated, then added, ‘You put your life on the line at Bloody Ridge for our American boys. Marines don’t award a sailor the Navy Cross for picking his goddamn nose. Now Uncle Sam wants to show a little appreciation. Don’t be shy. Either you take it, or we dump it. The Frogs and Limeys can go screw ’emselves.’

  I spent the following week in Luganville with my three skippers and ships engineers and the supercargo, a drunk from Auckland, to organise the loading. We ate in the officers’ mess and slept in a Nissen hut equipped like a luxury hotel with clean sheets and towels and hot running water, all of it compliments of General Urquhart.

  By week’s end, with the help of Sergeant Moss and one of the engineers, who made sure I got the right gear in top condition, I had scored an almost new landing craft and sufficient equipment to run four separate salvage operations with an entire workshop and spares for everything we’d purchased. In one fell swoop we had become the best-equipped small salvage operation in the Pacific. Our equipment manifest, if it were to be bought on the open market, was worth at least one hundred thousand American dollars! Remember, this was 1945; in today’s money that would be over five million dollars.

  We left for Rabaul with Gideon, a Gilbert Islander crew member from one of the other landing craft, handling the new one. The Gilbertese are the great seamen of the Pacific, undertaking major sea voyages on their bauruas – large outrigger sailing proas – long before Europeans arrived on the scene. They had developed a unique navigation system over vast distances by not only using the stars, but also sitting naked and cross-legged on the deck to ‘feel’ the direction of the swell through the movement of their testicles (fortunately the weather is generally warm in the Pacific).

  Gideon, who would be in my employ for the next thirty years and would eventually become a certified skipper in our fleet, told me a story that, given that he grew up in the islands, I was inclined to believe, even though it seemed incredible.

  He had been working on an inter-island freighter moving heavy equipment to another island when a bulldozer and other heavy machinery broke loose during a sudden squall one night and shifted to one side of the deck, flipping the ship in less than a minute. By dawn he was alone in the water, where he stayed all day, flayed by the hot sun. That night, exhausted and ready to die, he closed his eyes and he believes he actually dozed off. He awoke suddenly to find that he was being lifted, and realised it was a large tiger shark buoying him up. He grabbed at the dorsal fin and was carried on. That night he was attended by three large sharks, one on either side to cling to and the other swimming beneath him. Every time he was too exhausted to stay awake or even to hang on and started to sink, the shark beneath him would hold him up. All night and the next day the sharks remained with him. On the morning of the third day he saw land, whereupon the sharks started to nudge and pull him towards the shore. Then, guiding him to the opening of the reef where he would be carried ashore by the current, they finally abandoned him.

  I recall asking him, ‘Gideon, the sharks . . . did they not frighten you at first?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I am a member of the shark totem on my home island. When they first appeared I knew they were members of my totem, brothers who had come to help me.’

  I readily admit that having been brought up for a part of my formative years in New Guinea I may well have picked up, almost by osmosis, a certain susceptibility to superstition. But this was only one of a number of strange stories I had heard over the years and found myself, in many instances, inclined to believe. Whereas we Caucasians tell untruths as easily as we breathe, this is not the case for islanders, who have little or no reason to conceal their motives. For instance, Gideon’s story would have been far more heroic had he struggled manfully and survived three days at sea on his own, rather
than claiming to receive the assistance of three tiger sharks.

  However, I later checked and discovered that the freighter had indeed been lost at sea on the date he had given me and that Gideon was listed as crew but was not the only survivor. Two women clinging to a wooden crate were picked up after twenty hours at sea. Of thirty passengers and crew only the three of them survived.

  We eventually arrived in Rabaul and I organised four permanent moorings and a lock-up warehouse for our gear, leaving Gideon behind as caretaker.

  General Urquhart was true to his word. After allowing the islanders to take what they wanted, and under the direction of Sergeant Bill Moss, he dumped tens of millions of dollars of US Army ordnance over the island’s lip to the ocean bottom from what is still known today as Million Dollar Point.

  As a postscript to what the Paris Match termed ‘The biggest act of vandalism in the history of the Pacific Islands’, the local French administration, calling it the property of the French Government, confiscated all the equipment given to the islanders, down to the last kerosene-powered refrigerator.

  With all our equipment warehoused in Rabaul, the French couldn’t confiscate it, and besides, I had receipts to cover everything. So, in the nearly nine months before my partners, Kevin Judge and Joe Popkin, returned to this side of the Pacific, I set about negotiating contracts to remove the veritable mountains of valuable scrap left by the defeated Japanese and the victorious allies. We were ready to begin work by the time Kevin arrived in Australia to marry Brenda O’Shaunnesy, his wartime sweetheart, nicknamed Bren Gun because of her rapid-fire speech. Joe Popkin, an African American, was not permitted to live in Australia under the White Australia Policy, and came to work with me in the islands.

  Kevin ran our business affairs from Brisbane. As usual he’d selected the cushy job while Joe and I did the blood, sweat and toil in the jungle. This was just as well. The slightly built Kevin was both physically and mentally unsuited to island life. Joe Popkin, on the other hand, had the ideal looks and personality for work in the islands. He was everything the white commercial expatriates and administrators were not. Not only did the colour of his skin match the local people’s, but the way he handled them soon earned their admiration and respect. He bore no grudges, took no bullshit and was generous to a fault. Eventually, as a sign of their respect, they named him Uncle Joe, even though he was still a young bloke.