He finished his first drink and began on his second — he always ordered his drinks two at a time in this place — and lit another cigarette.
He was just flat tired of it — tired of all of it. He was tired of the flying, tired of the flyers, tired of the stink of the ship, the stink of the sailors, the stink of his flight suit. He was tired of Navy showers, tired of floating around on a fucking gray boat, tired of sitting in saloons like this one, tired of being twenty-eight years old with not prospect one.
“Hey, whatcha doin’ in there?” Flap Le Beau.
“What’s it look like, dumb ass? I’m waiting for a phone call.”
“From who?”
“Miss June. The Pentagon. Hollywood. Walter Crankcase. The commissioner of baseball. Whoever.”
“Hmmm.”
“I’m getting drunk.”
“You look pretty sober to me.”
“Just got started.”
“Want any company, or is this a solo drunk?”
“Are you waiting for a call?”
“No. The only one who could conceivably want to talk to me would be the Lord, and I ain’t sure about Him. But He knows where to find me if and when.”
“That’s comforting, if true. But you say you’re not sure?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Life’s like that.”
“Come on up to the bar. I’ll buy the next round.”
“Some of that Marine money would be welcome,” Jake admitted. He pried himself from the booth and followed Flap along the hallway and up the short flight of stairs into the bar room.
Flap ordered a beer and Jake acquired two more gin and tonics. “Only drink for the tropics,” he told Flap, who cheerfully paid the seventy-fìve-cent tab and tossed an extra dime on the counter for the bartender. These Americans were high rollers.
“Miss June, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Jake Grafton. “I wrote her a fan letter about her tits. Gave her the number of that booth. Told her when I was gonna be in Cubi. She’ll call anytime.”
“Let’s go play golf. We got enough time before dark.”
“Golf’s a lot of work. Whacking that ball around in this heat and humidity…”
“Come on,” Flap said. “Bring your drinks. You can drive the golf cart.”
There was a line of taxis in front of the club. Jake and Flap went to the one at the head of the line. Jake took huge slurps of both his drinks before he maneuvered himself into the tiny backseat, so he would be less likely to spill any.
And away they went in a cloud of blue smoke, the little engine in the tiny car revving mightily, the Filipino driver hunched over the wheel and punching the clutch and slamming the shift lever around like Mario Andretti.
The golf course was in a valley. Hacked out of the jungle were long, rolling fairways and manicured greens with sand traps and fluttering hole flags. Somewhere up there in the lush tropical foliage beyond the rough was the base fence, a ten-foot-high chain-link affair topped by barbed wire. Beyond the base fence were some of the world’s poorest people, kept in line by a Third World military establishment and ruled by a corrupt, piss-pot tyrant. The native laborers who maintained this golf course, and were of course not allowed to play on it, were paid the magnificent sum of one U.S. dollar a day as wages.
The whole damned scene was ludicrous, especially if you were working on your fourth drink of the hour. The best thing was not to think about it, not to contemplate that vast social chasm between the men running lawnmowers and raking sand traps and the half-tanked fool driving this shiny little made-in-Japan golf cart. Best not to dwell on the shared humanity or the Grand Canyon that separated their dreams and yours.
The heat and humidity made the air thick, oppressive, but it was tolerable here in the golf cart with the faded canvas top providing shade. Jake stuck to piloting the cart while Flap drove, chipped and putted.
“Hotter than hell,” Jake told Flap.
“Yeah. Fucking tropical rain forest.”
“Jungle.”
“Rain forest. Nobody gives a shit about jungle, but they bleed copious dollars over rain forest.”
“Why is that?”
“I dunno. I got a seven on that last hole.”
“That’s a lot of strokes. You aren’t very good at this.”
“When I play golf, I play a lot of it. The object of the game is whacking the ball.”
“Keep your own score. I’m just driving.”
“Driver has to keep score. That’s the way it’s done at all the top clubs. Pebble Beach, Inverness, everywhere. Gimme a six on the first hole and a seven on this one.”
“You wouldn’t cheat, would you?”
“Who? Me? Of course I’d cheat. I’m a nigger, remember?”
Jake wrote down the numbers and put the cart in motion. “You shouldn’t call yourself a nigger. It isn’t right.”
“What do you know about it? I’m the black man.”
“Yeah, but I have to listen to it. And I don’t like the word.”
“Bet you used it some yourself.”
“When I was a kid, yeah. But I don’t like it.”
“Just drink and drive. It’s too damn hot to think.”
“Don’t use that word. I mean it.”
“If it’ll make you happy.”
“I’m out of booze.”
“Well, you can get drunk tonight. Right now you can sit half-tanked and enjoy the pleasure of watching the world’s greatest black colored Negro African-American golfer while you contemplate your many heinous sins.”
“It seemed like a good day for a drunk.”
“I’ve had days like that.”
The problem was, Jake finally admitted to himself, somewhere along the fourth fairway, that he had no dreams. Everyone needs dreams, goals to work toward, and he didn’t have any. That fact, and the gin, depressed him profoundly.
He didn’t want to be skipper of a squadron, or an admiral, or a farmer. Nor did he want to be an executive vice president in charge of something or other for some grand, important corporation, luxuriating in his new Buick and his generous expense account and his comfortable semi-custom house in an upscale real estate development and his blond wife with the big smile, big tits and purse full of supermarket coupons. He didn’t want a stock portfolio and he didn’t want to spend his mornings poring over the Wall Street Journal to see how rich he was. Just for the record, he also didn’t give a damn about French novels and doubted if he ever could.
He didn’t want anything. And he didn’t want to be anything.
What in hell do people do who don’t have any dreams?
True, he had once wanted to be a good attack pilot. To walk into the ready room and be accepted as an equal by the best aerial warriors in the world. He had achieved that ambition. And found it wasn’t worth a mouthful of warm spit.
He had worked awful hard to get there, though.
That was something. He had wanted something and worked hard enough to earn it. And he was still alive. So many of them weren’t. He was.
That was something, wasn’t it?
He was still thinking about that two holes later when Flap dropped into the right seat of the cart after a tee shot and said, “There’s somebody in the jungle up by the next hole.”
“How do you know?”
“Two big birds flew out of there while I was in the tee box.”
“Birds fly all the time,” Jake pointed out. “That’s the jungle. There’s zillions of ’em.”