Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me. “So? I’ve heard of it, I guess. What is Spam, anyway?”
I gave her a wry smile. “S-P-A-M, Spare Parts, Assorted Meats!” That was the standard Army answer. “Actually, nobody knows for sure. I think it’s all the leftover pieces of ham you get when you carve up a pig. They grind it up and cram it into cans. It’s not the worst stuff in the world. Hell, my old man eats scrapple, that’s even worse!”
“What’s scrapple?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but from what I’ve seen, it’s the stuff rejected by the Spam people.”
Marilyn said, “Yuck!” I just nodded in agreement.
“Anyway, I mention that because Hawaii has four times the per capita consumption of Spam as anywhere else? It dates back to World War II,” I told her.
“What’s it taste like?”
I shrugged. “Like ham sausage, sort of. It’s okay. I prefer it sliced or cubed, and then fried.” Heaven knows, if you hang around the army long enough, you’ll get to eat Spam. “I’ll get some with my eggs and you can have some.”
There was a message light lit on the phone when we got back to the room. Before I could check on it, the phone rang again. I was closest, so I picked it up. “Fortress of Solitude, Superman speaking.”
A loud bass laugh came from the other end. “In a pig’s eye! If you’re Superman, I’d prefer Lex Luthor!”
“Harlan, how they hanging?”
“Just like always, one below the other. You just getting up?”
“We’ve already been out to breakfast. We just got back.”
“Well, drive on up. I’ll meet you out at the main gate. Half an hour,” he said.
I looked over at my wife “Make it an hour. Half an hour to drive and half an hour to get Marilyn out the door.” I hung up and turned to Marilyn. “Let’s put everything away and go.”
“Okay, first we need to change a diaper.” She picked up Charlie and headed towards his bedroom.
We made it there in just under the hour I had allotted. Marilyn didn’t take as long as I thought she would, but we had to get the car from the valet and get directions back to the highway. We ended up on H2, which ended just after you passed Wheeler Air Force Base and dumped us on Wilikina Drive. Harlan was sitting in the Ford Fairmont on the grassy shoulder of Wilikina. I beeped the horn at him and he simply waved, and then made a ‘Follow Me!’ gesture and pulled out. I followed him through the gate and to a residential area. He pulled up in front of a small duplex. I parked behind him and we all got out of our cars.
“Damn, boy, every time I see you, you just keep getting uglier and uglier! I almost didn’t recognize you with that faggoty mustache and beard,” he asked.
“When Halloween comes around, I’m buying an eye patch and a sword, and I’ll pretend I’m a pirate. You’re still as ugly as ever. Who’d you have to blow to get a cushy gig like this?”
“Screw you.” We shook hands and then he looked over and said, “Marilyn, what are you still doing with this guy? You could be doing so much better!”
“I keep telling him that, too.” She handed me Charlie in his car seat. “Where’s your better half? I need a beer and somebody to complain to about men.” She kissed him on the cheek and then headed towards the house.
“Is that any particular men, or just a general men?” my friend asked me.
“Probably both. Say hello to the latest transgressor.” I lifted up the car seat and Charlie looked at Harlan with wide eyes.
“Damn, he’s too cute to be your son.” As we watched, Charlie’s little face screwed up and he looked like he was concentrating, and then he relaxed happily. “I think I know what that means.”
“It means it’s time to go inside and find his mother!”
“We’re having sandwiches for lunch and a barbecue later,” said Harlan.
“Sounds good!”
We went inside and then on through to the back yard. All the windows in the house were open, and the breeze was blowing through. “No air conditioning?” I asked.
“Don’t have one. Don’t need one. Same with the furnace. Don’t have it and don’t need it. However, we do have a fireplace,” he told me.
“A fireplace?!”
Harlan grinned. “Everything was built before the war, and they used blueprints from somewhere on the Mainland. Since officer’s quarters had fireplaces, well…”
I just shook my head in disbelief. That sounded like perfect Army thinking.
I remember when I was on the Big Island my first time through, seeing the construction standards and telling Marilyn that if I even looked at blueprints like that, I could get arrested back home. Housing construction was marginal at best compared to stateside, but it was satisfactory for paradise. It never got hot enough to need to cool down and never got cold enough to need warming. There were no floods or blizzards. Most homes had no insulation. On the Big Island, where the topsoil was only an inch deep, if that, and under which was volcanic rock, a lot of houses had the water and sewer lines lying on top of the ground. Un-fucking-believable!
I gave Charlie back to his mother and grabbed a chair around the table on the back patio while Harlan went back inside and grabbed some Budweisers. Marilyn picked up Charlie and held him to her nose, then looked daggers at me and took him inside. “I think I just got busted,” I whispered.
“No shit, Sherlock!” he said quietly back.
Roscoe toddled out through the open door, wearing his diaper and a t-shirt/shorts outfit. He had a binkie in his mouth and came over to me, looking up at me with curiosity. Who was this new guy in his house? Satisfied, he kept moving along, to a Little Tikes playhouse in the corner. “He’s growing like a weed,” I commented. The last time I had seen him he hadn’t been much younger than Charlie was now.
“Tell me about it! It’s a good thing I’m in shape, because he has more energy than Anna Lee and I do together.”
“Charlie, too. He’s just figured out crawling, and he doesn’t go around things, he goes through them!”
The moms came out of the house, with Anna Lee carrying Charlie and Marilyn holding a beer and an iced tea. She set the iced tea down in front of Anna Lee. Charlie was deposited in his seat on the side of the table and the ladies sat down with us. I cocked my beer bottle over at our hostess. “Not drinking?”
She shook her head and smiled. “I can’t, or at least, I shouldn’t.”
“Huh?”
Anna Lee gave Harlan a sly smile but didn’t say anything else. It was Marilyn who twigged to it first. “Oh my God! Congratulations!”
I looked at my wife. “What are you talking about?!”
“She’s pregnant, silly!”
I swiveled my head to my old friend, who was grinning back at me. “I assume you had something to do with this.”
“So I’ve been told. She keeps telling me she’s going to get an outside contractor, though.”
I snorted and rolled my eyes. “Well, congratulations the pair of you. Now I will never hear the end of it from her.”
“That’s right!” gushed Marilyn. “We need to catch up!”
“Catch up? With him around, I can’t even catch my breath!” I answered.
“I can chase one while you chase the other.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. “Then we can’t do it. With my leg, I’ll never be able to keep up.”
Marilyn simply wagged her finger at me. “Forget it! I don’t want to hear it!”
I just rolled my eyes and drank some more beer. Marilyn and Anna Lee sat there and discussed baby and maternity related topics, which interested me not in the slightest. I shifted my chair around to keep an eye on them, but more to face Harlan.
He did the same. We talked about when the baby was due, and then the conversation invariably drifted to the Army. “So, what’s the army got you doing out here, defending this little slice of Heaven?” I asked.