W E B Griffin - Corp 01 - Semper Fi

by Semper Fi(Lit)

  There had been another bus with bars over the windows waiting for them along with three Marines carrying pistols in white web gear and three-foot-long billy clubs they kept slapping in the palms of their hands.

  All the prisoners were scared shitless, and two of them- one of the fairies and the great big guy who was going to do ten years before he was dishonorably discharged for slugging an officer-had actually cried.

  There was a little ceremony when the prison signed for the prisoners. Then one of them tried to ask a question and got the end of a billy club in his gut for it. Hard enough to knock the wind out of him and knock him down.

  And that fucking lieutenant just stood mere and made believe nothing had happened. He knew goddamned well it was a violation of Rocks and Shoals (The Disciplinary Code for the Governance of the Naval Services) to hit somebody with a billy club like that, but the chickenshit sonofabitch didn't do a thing about it.

  He was more concerned with important things like taking McCoy aside and telling him he was willing to admit a mistake about him and that he had probably been put off by McCoy's Tijuana chevrons. Anyhow, the lieutenant went on, he wanted to tell McCoy his deportment during the trip was all and more that could be expected of a good Marine noncom and that when he got back to San Diego he was going to write his commanding officer a letter of commendation.

  What that was going to mean after he got to this fucking truck company in Philly (and McCoy believed the chickenshit sonofabitch was serious about writing the letter) was that whenever some poor sonofabitch had to be transported to Portsmouth, that shitty detail would go to Corporal McCoy since he was so good at it. But fuck that. The first thing he was going to do when he got to the 47th Motor Transport Platoon was ask the first sergeant for the forms to buy himself out of the Corps.

  There was a bar in the station in Boston, and McCoy walked by it half a dozen times waiting for the Philly train without going in. He wanted a drink. He wanted lots of drinks, but he was going to wait until he was safe on the train-had left Portsmouth Naval Prison behind him for good- before he took one.

  The first time he noticed the guy looking at him was on the platform. He was a regular candy-ass, about his age, wearing a regular candy-ass seersucker suit; and McCoy thought he was probably a kid going home from college, except that it was now the middle of July, and colleges were closed for the summer.

  The candy-ass wasn't just looking at him, he was sort of smiling at him, as if goosing up his courage to talk to him. Christ, there were fairies all over. Goddamn-the-Bitch Ellen Feller's husband wasn't the only one. And he never would have guessed that hairy machinist's mate second on the Whaley was a cocksucker. And now here was this kid making eyes at him who looked like an Arrow Shirt Company advertisement for a choirboy Boy Scout.

  On the train the club car steward put McCoy in a velvet plush chair by a little table and handed him a menu. Fifty cents (not counting tip) was a hell of a lot of money for one lousy drink of Scotch whiskey; but he didn't give a fuck what it cost, he was entitled. He'd been thinking about this drink practically from the moment he went aboard that fucking fleet oiler in Shanghai. Just as the waiter was about to take his order, the guy who had been making eyes at him on the platform walked up.

  "This free?" he asked, putting his hand on the back of the velvet plush armchair on the other side of the table.

  "Help yourself," McCoy said.

  How am I going to get rid of this pansy without belting him?

  "Scotch," McCoy said to the waiter. "Johnnie Walker. Soda on the side."

  "Same for me, please," the pansy said.

  McCoy gave him a dirty look.

  "I'm about to be a Marine myself," the pansy said.

  "You're what?" McCoy asked, incredulously.

  "I'm about to join the Marine Corps," the pansy repeated.

  "I'm about to get out of the Marine Corps," McCoy said.

  "You are?" the pansy-who-said-he-was-about-to-enlist asked, surprised. "I thought all discharges were frozen."

  "I'm getting out," McCoy said firmly. He remembered hearing rumors of a freeze, or a year's extension, or something like that, but he hadn't paid a hell of a lot of attention.

  Jesus Christ! What if this candy-ass is right? Then what?

  "You sound as if you're not happy in the Marine Corps," the young pansy said.

  He doesn't talk like a pansy, and wave his hands like a woman, but then, neither did the machinist's mate second.

  "Do I?" McCoy replied, unpleasantly.

  "Then you're just the guy I want to talk to," the young man said. "The way the recruiters talk, it's paradise on earth. All the food you can eat, all the liquor you can drink, and all the prettiest girls throwing themselves at you."

  "You're really going in the Corps?" McCoy asked, his curiosity aroused'-and his suspicions diminished just a little by the pretty girls.

  "I'm really going in the Corps," the young man said. He put out his hand. "Malcolm Pickering," he said.

  McCoy took it.

  "Ken McCoy," he said. Pickering's grip was firm, not like a pansy's.

  The steward set their drinks on the table.

  "Put that on my tab," Pickering said.

  "I can buy my own drink," McCoy said.

  "Put the next round on your tab," Pickering said reasonably.

  McCoy nodded. He twisted the cap off the miniature bottle and wondered idly if putting it in its own little bottle was how they got away charging half a buck for one lousy drink. He picked it up and read the lable. It held 1.6 ounces. That brought it down to 37.5 cents an ounce, which was still a hell of a lot more than he was used to paying for liquor.

  "Can I ask you a question, Corporal McCoy?" Malcolm Pickering asked.

  McCoy looked at him and nodded.

  "I saw you in Chicago on the track with some strange-looking guys," Pickering said. "What was that all about?"

  Chicago? What the hell does he mean by that?

  And then he understood. There had been an hour's wait while the railroad switched locomotives. The lieutenant had the bright idea that the prisoners should exercise. Since they couldn't do calisthenics or close-order drill handcuffed and with their feet shackled, what the lieutenant had done was send them shuffling up and back down the track for half a mile or so. This Pickering guy had obviously seen that.

  "We were exercising the prisoners," he said. "That what you mean?"

  "What did they do?" Pickering asked.

  "Three of them were fags," McCoy said. "One of them slugged an officer. The rest of them found out the hard way that once you enlist, you're in until they let you out."

  "They were Marines?"

  "Sailors," McCoy said. "The Marine Corps does the Navy's dirty work, like guarding and transporting prisoners."

  "What happened to them?"

  "We took them to the Naval Prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to serve their sentences," McCoy said.

  "Is that what you do in the Marine Corps?" Pickering asked.

  "No," McCoy said. "I just got to San Diego when they needed a couple of corporals for the guard detail."

  "What do you do?" Pickering asked.

  "I'm a motor transport corporal," McCoy said. Though he didn't like the sound of it, that's what he was on paper. "I work in the motor pool."

  "You like it?"

  "No. I told you, I'm just waiting to get out of the Marine Corps."

  "Then what will you do?"

  McCoy didn't want to tell this nosy guy that he was going back to China. That would trigger a whole new line of questions. And aside from going back to China, he couldn't think of a thing he was likely to do. He had been in the Marine Corps since he was seventeen. It was the only thing he had ever done.

  "What made you join the Corps?" McCoy asked.

  "My father was a Marine," Pickering said. "In the World War."

  "And he didn't warn you off?" McCoy said.

  "He was a corporal," Pickering said. "What he warned me to do was get a commissi
on."

  Then he realized what he had said.

  "I didn't mean to offend..." he began.

  "Your father was right," McCoy said.

  "So, with war coming, I figured I had better get one," Pickering said. "A commission, I mean."

  "You seem sure that we're going to get into this war," McCoy said.

  "You don't?"

  "Christ, I hope not," McCoy said.

  "We're probably going to have to do something about the Japanese," Pickering argued.

  "The Japs are probably thinking the same thing about us," McCoy said. "And you wouldn't believe how many of the bastards there are."

  "But they're not like Americans, are they?" Pickering asked.

  "The ones I've seen are first-class soldiers," McCoy said. He saw the surprise on Pickering's face.

  "The ones you've seen?" Pickering asked.

  "I just came from China," McCoy said. "I was with the Fourth Marines in Shanghai."

  Now why the fuck did I start in on that?

  "I'd like to hear about that," Pickering said.

  'I'd rather talk about something else," McCoy said.

  "Like what?" Pickering said, agreeably.

  "I'm going to be stationed in Philly," McCoy said. "For a while, I mean, say a month or six weeks, until I can get my discharge. If you know anything about it, why don't we talk about the best way to get laid in Philadelphia?"

  "The best way, I've found," Pickering said, "is to use a bed. But there is a school of thought that says that turning them upside down in a shower is the way to go."

  McCoy looked at him for a moment and then laughed out loud.

  "You tell me about the Marines in China, McCoy," Pickering said. "And then I will tell you about getting laid in Philadelphia. Maybe with a little luck, when we get there- that's where I'm going, too, to the Navy Yard, to give them my college records-we could conduct what they call a 'practical experiment.' "

  If I keep drinking with this guy and then start chasing whores with him, I am probably going to get my ass in deep trouble. But right now, I don't give a fuck.

  He raised his hand above his head, snapped his fingers at the steward for another drink, and turned to Malcolm Pickering.

  "You can buy a fourteen-year-old virgin in Shanghai for three dollars," he said. "What's the going rate these days in Philly?"

  "There are no fourteen-year-old virgins in Philadelphia," Malcolm Pickering said solemnly.

  I'll be goddamned if I don't really like this candy-ass civilian.

  (Three)

  The Bellevue Stratford Hotel Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 0905 Hours 17 July 1941

  The first thing McCoy remembered when he woke up was that there had been a woman in bed with him, which meant he was likely to find his money and his watch gone.

  The second thought was more frightening: The "Guaranteed Officer's Checque" from Barclays Bank, Ltd., Shanghai, had been in his money belt with the three hundred bucks. The whore probably wouldn't be able to cash it; but sure as Christ, she would have taken it, and it was going to be a real pain in the ass to get it replaced.

  When he sat up, his head hurt like a toothache, as if his brain had shrunk and was banging around loose inside his skull. His lips were dry and cracked and the tip of his tongue felt like the sole of a boot.

  How the hell am I going to get from wherever the hell I am to the Navy Yard without any fucking money? Or for that matter, out of the hotel? Jesus Christ, I hope at least they made me pay in advance!

  He looked around the room, and that made it worse. This was no dollar-a-night hot-sheet joint. This was not only a real hotel, but a fancy-hotel hotel. Great big fucking room, drapes over the windows, a couch and a couple of armchairs, and Christ only knows what he had paid for the bottles sitting on a chest of drawers across the room. Before the whore got his money, he thought, at least he'd spent a hell of a lot of it.

  And then he saw the money belt. It was on the little shelf over the wash basin in the bathroom. That figured. Just before she left, the whore had taken the money belt into the bathroom, just in case he should wake up and see her going through it. Once she'd emptied it, she hadn't given a damn where she left it.

  He needed a glass of water, and desperately. Maybe, if he hadn't been rolled, too, he could borrow say, ten bucks, from Pickering. It wasn't the end of the fucking world. He had his pay record with him, and he had at least two months' back pay on the books. All he had to do was come up with enough money to get from here to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and he could draw enough money to keep him going.

  And he would go to some bank and ask them what you were supposed to do when you lost a 'Guaranteed Officer's Checque.' He would say he lost it. And since he hadn't signed it, they would have to sooner or later make it good.

  He staggered across the room to the bathroom and saw that it was really a high-class place. There was a little button marked ICE WATER that operated a tiny little chrome water pipe. And when you pushed the button, it really produced ice water.

  He drank one glass of ice water so quickly it made his teeth ache. He drank a second glass more slowly, from time to time looking at his reflection in the mirror over the sink. His eyes were bloodshot, and-he had to check twice to make sure what it was-his ears were red with lipstick.

  He looked down at other parts of his body.

  Well, I apparently had a very good time, even if I can't remember the details.

  There was something under the empty money belt, making a bulge. Idly curious, he pushed the money belt off it. It was his watch.

  "I'll be goddamned," McCoy said, then told himself that just because the whore hadn't stolen the watch, it didn't mean she hadn't helped herself to the cash and the "checque." It wasn't that good a watch, he knew. He had bought it primarily because it had a lot of radium paint on the hands, so that he could see them at night. He picked up the money belt and worked the zipper. There was money in it, $250, and the "checque."

  "I'll be goddamned," he said again.

  Now he had a cramp in his bladder, so he went to the toilet and relieved himself. He saw that the bathroom had two doors: one led in from his fancy bedroom, and one went out into some other room. When he was finished taking a leak (an incredibly long teak), he tried the knob. It was unlocked, and he pushed it open.

  Malcolm Pickering (McCoy remembered at that moment that sometime during last night, Pickering had told him to call him " 'Pick") was on his back on a double bed, stark naked. His arms and legs were spread. And he was awake.

  "Please piss a little more quietly," Pick Pickering said. "I woke up thinking our ship was going down."

  "Shit." McCoy laughed.

  "I have come to the conclusion, Corporal McCoy," Pick Pickering said, "that you are an evil character who rides on railroads leading innocent youth such as myself into sin."

  "It looks like we had a good time," McCoy said.

  "Yeah, doesn't it?" Pickering said. "What time is it?"

  "A little after nine," McCoy said.

  "I treat my hangovers with large breakfasts and a beer," Pickering said. "That sound all right to you?"

  "I don't want to report smelling of beer," McCoy said.

  "They have Sen-Sen," Pickering said, and suddenly sat up. "Jesus!" he said, and then he swung his feet to the floor and reached for the telephone. "Room service," he ordered, and then: "This is Malcolm Pickering, in 907. Large orange juice, breakfast steak, medium, corned-beef hash, eggs up, toast, two pots of coffee, and two bottles of Feigenspann ale. Do that twice, please, and the sooner the better."

  Very classy, McCoy thought. That'll probably cost three, four, maybe five dollars. But what the hell, I've still got most of my money.

  "What's this place costing us?" McCoy asked.

  "I probably shouldn't tell you this. Killer," Pickering said. "It is only because I am an upstanding Christian that I do. We flipped for it last night, and you won. It's not costing you a dime, and I don't want to think about what it's costing me."

/>   McCoy was surprised that Pickering called him "Killer." The only way he could have known that was if he had told him. And the only way he would have told him. as if he needed another proof, was that he was pretty drunk.

  "I want to pay my share," McCoy said.

  "Don't be a damned fool. If that quarter had landed on the other side, you would have paid," Pickering said. He got to his feet and walked across the room. "But since I am paying. I get first shot at the shower.

  If anything, McCoy decided. Pickering's room was larger than his. And then he noticed that a door and not just the bathroom connected both rooms. He went back to his own room, found his seabags in a closet, and took out a clean uniform. It was clean but mussed. He hated to report in a mussed uniform, even if the first thing he was going to do when he reported in was ask for the buy-out papers.