The Real McCoy — Davy Jones — took his place at the podium and adjusted the microphone. He was wearing long underwear, which he and Jake had decorated with a bottle of iodine last night in a vain attempt to paint fish, octopi and other sea creatures. Alas, the outfit just looked like a bloody mess, Jake decided now. McCoy was enjoying himself immensely, and it showed on his face.
Flap Le Beau stood up again in his chair. “Hey, King! How’s it going?”
McCoy frowned, CAG frowned, Neptune frowned.
“Sit down, wog! Show some respect in the royal presence.”
“Uh, Davy, you don’t seem to understand. I’m King Flap of Boogalala. Being a king my very own self, I shouldn’t be here in the company of these slimy pollywogs. I should be up there on a throne beside ol’ Neptune discussing the many mind-boggling mysteries of the deep and how he’s making out these days with the mermaids.”
“Well pleaded, King Flap.” The onlookers seemed to disagree, and hooted their displeasure. Davy looked over at Neptune. “What say you, oh mighty windy one?”
Neptune scowled fiercely at the upstart Le Beau. “Have you wogs no respect? The dominions of the land are irrelevant here upon the briny deep, where I am sovereign. I suggest, Davy, that the loud-mouth pretender kiss the royal baby three times.”
“Wog Le Beau, you heard the royal wish. Thrice you shall kiss the royal baby. Now sit and assume a becoming humility or you will again face the awesome wrath of mighty Neptune.”
Le Beau sat. He screwed up his face and tried to cry. And almost made it. A gale of laughter swept the room.
It was good to be a part of this foolishness, Jake Grafton thought, good to have a hearty laugh with your shipmates, fellow voyagers on this journey through life. He and the Real had worked hard to get some laughs, and they succeeded. Many of the wogs were hailed individually before the royal court and their sins set forth in lurid detail. Major Allen Bartow was confronted with a book labeled, S’il Vous Plaît—really a NATOPS manual with a suitable cover — from which spilled a dozen Playmate-of-the-Month foldouts.
“Reading dirty books, slobbering over dirty pictures…shame, shame!” intoned Davy Jones, and King Neptune pronounced the sentence: three trips through the tunnel of love.
After about an hour of this nonsense the wogs were led up to the hangar deck, then across it to an aircraft elevator, which lifted the entire Ready Four pollywog/shellback mob to the flight deck. There the remainder of the initiation ceremonies, and all of Neptune’s verdicts, were carried out.
The tunnel of love was a canvas chute filled with garbage from the mess decks. All the wogs crawled through it at least once, the more spectacular sinners several times. At the exit of the tunnel were shellbacks with saltwater hoses to rinse off the garbage, but the wogs were only beginning their odyssey.
Next was the royal baby, the fattest shellback aboard, who sat on a throne without a shirt. His tummy was liberally coated with arresting gear grease. Victims were thrust forward to kiss his belly button. He enthusiastically assisted the unwilling, grabbing ears and smearing handfuls of grease in the supplicants’ hair. After kisses from every three or four victims, able assistants regreased his gut from a fifty-fìve-gallon drum that sat nearby. A messy business from any angle…
A visit to the royal dentist was next on the list. This worthy squirted a dollop of a pepper concoction into his victim’s mouths from a plastic ketchup dispenser. Expectoration usually followed immediately.
After a visit to the royal barber — more grease — and the royal gymnasium, the wogs ended their journey with a swim across royal lagoon, a canvas pool six inches deep in water. No, Jake learned as he looked at the victims splashing along, the water was only about one inch deep. It floated on at least five inches of something green, something with a terrible smell. Shellbacks arranged around the lagoon busily offered opinions about what the noisome stuff might be. The wogs slithered through this mess to the other side, where shellbacks helped them out, wiped them down, and congratulated them heartily. Without hesitation Jake flopped down and squirmed his way through the goo while his squadron-mates on the other side — the ones who had beat him over — cheered and offered impractical advice.
Jake joined Flap Le Beau on the fantail, where they stood watching the proceedings and comparing experiences as they wiped away the worst of the grease with paper towels.
The ship wasn’t moving, Jake noticed. She lay dead in the water on a placid, gently heaving sea. Around her at distances ranging from one to three miles her escorts were similarly still. All the ships were conducting crossing-the-line initiation ceremonies. Painted ships upon a painted ocean, Jake thought.
With a last glance at the sea and the sky and the merry group still cavorting on the flight deck, he headed below for the showers.
“Getting shot down was a real bad scene,” Flap Le Beau told Jake. They were on a surface surveillance mission along the southern coast of Java, photographing ships. To their right was the mountainous island with its summits wreathed in clouds, to the left was the endless blue water. They had just descended to 500 feet to snap three or four shots of a small coaster bucking the swells westward and were back at 3,000 feet, cruising at 300 knots. The conversation had drifted to Vietnam.
Perhaps it was inevitable, since both men had been shot down in that war, but neither liked to talk about their experiences, so the subject rarely came up. If it did, it was in an oblique reference. Somehow today, in a cockpit in a tropic sky, the subject seemed safe.
“It was just another mission, another day at the office, and the gomers got the lead right and let us have it. I hadn’t even seen flak that morning until we collected a packet. Goose was killed instantly — one round blew his head clean off, the left engine was hit, the left wing caught fire. All in about the time it takes to snap your fingers.”
“What were you doing?”
“Dive-bombing, near the Laotian border. We were the second plane in a two-plane formation, working with a Nail FAC.” A FAC was a forward air controller, who flew a small propeller-driven plane.
“We were on our second run. Oh, I know, we shouldn’t have been making more than one, but the FAC hadn’t seen any shit in the air and everything was cool during our first run. Then whap! They shot us into dog meat going down the chute. I grabbed the stick, pickled the bombs and pulled out, but the left engine was doing weird things and the wing was burning like a blowtorch and Goose was smeared all over everything, including me. Wind howling through the cockpit — all the glass on his side was smashed out. Real bad scene. So I steered it away from the target a little and watched the wing burn and told Goose good-bye, then I boogied.”
“How long did you wait before you ejected?”
“Seemed like an hour or so, but our flight leader told me later it was about a minute. All the time he was screaming for me to eject because he could see the fire. But we were at about six thousand feet at that point and I wanted a little distance from the gomers and I wanted the plane slowed down so I wouldn’t get tore up going out. There was so much noise I never heard anything on the radio.”
Jake remembered his own ejection, at night, over Laos. Just thinking about it brought back the sweats. He didn’t say anything.
“When I got on the ground,” Flap continued, “I got out my little radio and started talking. Now I’d checked the battery in that jewel before we took off, but I could barely hear the FAC. I found a place to settle in where I could keep an eye on the chute. Then the rescue turned to shit. The gomers were squirting flak everywhere and it was late in the afternoon and darkness was coming. What I didn’t know until way afterward was that the guy flying the rescue chopper got a case of cold feet and decided his engine wasn’t right or something. Anyway, he never came. It got dark and started raining and I decided I was on my own.”