I don’t know what I wish! Damnation.
He was writhing on the horns of this dilemma when the door opened and the Real McCoy staggered through. He flopped into his bunk and groaned. “Wake me up next week. I am spent. Wrung out like a sponge. That woman turned me every way but loose. There are hot women and there are hot women. That one was thermonuclear.”
“Tough night, huh?”
“She was after me every hour! I didn’t sleep a wink. Every hour! I’m so sore I can hardly walk.”
“Lucky you escaped her evil clutches.”
“Never in my born days, Jake, did I even contemplate that there might be women like that walking the surface of the earth. Australia is merely the greatest nation on the planet, that’s all. That they breed women like that down there is the best-kept secret of our time.”
Jake nodded thoughtfully and flexed his right fist. It was sore and a little swollen.
“I’m getting out of the Nav, arranging to have my subscription to the Wall Street Journal sent to me Down Under, and I am going south. May the cold, blue light of Polaris never again meet my weary gaze. It’s the Southern Cross for me, Laddie Buck. I’m going to Australia to see if I can fuck myself to death before I’m forty.”
With that pronouncement the Real McCoy turned on his side and curled his pillow under his head. Jake looked at his watch. The first gentle snore came seventy-seven seconds later.
Were the women bigots? Well, Flap should know. If he said those three stews were prejudiced, they probably were. But what about Nell?
And what about you, Jake? Are you?
Aaugh! To waste a morning in port fretting about crap like this.
He pulled a tablet around and started a letter to his parents.
The liberty boat for the enlisted men was an LCI — landing craft infantry — a flat-bottomed rectangular-shaped boat with a bow door that flopped down to let troops run through the surf onto the beach. Jake often rode it from the beach to the ship. This evening, however, he was dressed in a sports coat and a tie and didn’t want to get soaked with salt spray, so he headed for the officers’ brow near Elevator Two. The captain’s gig and admiral’s barge had been lowered into the water from their cradles in the rear of the hangar bay. In ten minutes he was descending the ladder onto the float, then he stepped into the gig-Jake knew the boat officer, a jaygee from a fighter squadron, so he asked if he could stand beside the coxswain on the little
midships bridge. Permission was granted with a grin and a nod.
The rest of the officers went below into either the fore or aft cabin.
With the stupendous bulk of the carrier looming like a cliff above them, the sailors threw the lines aboard and the coxswain put the boat in motion. It stood out from the ship and swung in a wide circle until it was on course for fleet landing.
The water was calm this evening, with merely a long, low swell stirring the oily surface. The red of the western sky stained the water between the ships, gave it the look of diluted blood.
The roadstead was full of ships: freighters, coasters, tankers, all riding on their anchors. Lighters circled around a few of the ships, but only a few. Most of them sat motionless like massive steel statues in a huge park lake.
But there were people visible on most of the ships. As the gig threaded its way through the anchorage Jake could see them sitting under awnings on the fantails, sometimes cooking on barbecue grills, talking and smoking on afterdecks crowded with ship’s gear. Most of the sailors were men, but on one Russian ship he saw three women, hefty specimens in dresses that reached below their knees.
“Pretty evening,” the jaygee said to Jake, who agreed.
Yes, another gorgeous evening, the close of another good day to be alive. It was easy to forget the point of it all sometimes, easy to lose sight of the fact that the name of the game was to stay alive, to savor life, to live it day to day at the pace that God intended.
One of Jake Grafton’s talents was to imagine himself living other lives. He hadn’t been doing much of that lately, but riding the gig through the anchorage, looking at the ships, he could visualize sitting on one of those fantails, smoking and chatting and watching the sun sink closer and closer to the sea’s rim. To go to sea and work the ship and spend quiet evenings in port in the company of friends — it could be very good. I could live that way, he reflected.
Maybe in my next incarnation.
The Intercontinental was a huge, modern hotel built on a slight hill. The lobby was a cavern seven or eight stories high. Marble floors accented with giant potted plants, a raised bar with easy chairs in the middle, all the accents a plush burgundy, polyester fabric glued to the walls — yuck!
Jake settled into one of the bar’s overstuffed polyester chairs and tilted his head back. You could almost get dizzy looking up at the balconies, which were stacked closer and closer together until they met at the ceiling. Tropical plants hung from planters along each balcony, so the view upward was green. Dark green, because the lighting up there was very poor.
“Grotesque, isn’t it?”
He dropped his gaze from the green canopy above to the young woman walking toward him. He stood and grinned. “Yep.”
“The interior designer was obviously demented.” Nell Douglas settled into the chair opposite. A waiter appeared and hovered.
“Something to drink?” Jake asked her politely.
“A glass of white wine, please.”
“Scotch on the rocks.”
The waiter broke hover and disappeared behind a large potted leafy green thing.
“So how was your flight in?”
“Bumpy. Storms over the South China Sea. How’s your hand?”
“You heard about that, huh?”
“The other girls were all atwitter. Your black friend really impressed them.”
“Flap can move pretty fast when he wants to. He’s handy to have around.”
“If the necessity arises to knock people senseless. Is he lurking nearby now, just in case?”
Vaguely uneasy, Jake flashed a polite smile. “No, I think he came ashore earlier today hoping to cheat some opal merchants. And my hand’s fine.” He wiggled his fingers at her, pretending she cared.
Their drinks came and they sat sipping them in silence, both man and woman trying to sense the mood of the other.
After a bit Nell said, “He’s some kind of trained killer, isn’t he?”
That comment was like glass shattering. Amazingly, Jake Grafton felt a tremendous sense of relief. It had been a nice fantasy, but this woman was not Callie.
“I guess everyone in combat arms is,” he said slowly, “if you want to look at it that way. I deal in high explosives myself. I fly attack planes, not airliners.”
He took the plastic stir stick from his drink and chewed at it. Why do they put these damn things in a drink that is nothing but whiskey and ice? He took it out of his mouth and broke it between his fingers as he examined her face.
“I started the fight,” he continued, now in a hurry to end it. “One of the soldiers referred to Captain Le Beau as a nigger. He happens to be my BN and a personal friend. He is also a fine human being. The fact that his skin is black is about as important as the fact that my eyes are gray. That word is an insult in America and here. The man who said it knew that.”
“The only black people in Australia are aborigines.”
“I guess you have to be an American to understand.”
“Perhaps.”
The waiter reappeared with his credit card and the invoice. Jake added a tip, signed it and pocketed the card and his copy.
Her face was too placid. Blank. Time to get this over with. “Would you like to go to dinner?”