“You coming into town with us, George?” he asked. The gun crew had got a twenty-four-hour liberty. The whole ship’s crew was getting liberty in rotation while repair teams set the destroyer to rights again.
“I dunno,” George said uncomfortably.
“I dunno.” Dalby mocked not only his indecision but his flat Boston accent, which sounded especially absurd in the petty officer’s falsetto. “Well, you better make up your mind pretty damn quick.”
“Yeah.” George didn’t mind going into Honolulu with his buddies. He didn’t mind drinking with them, even if he got blind drunk. Part of him, though, did mind the idea of standing in line at one of Honolulu’s countless brothels for a quick piece of ass. He was married and had a couple of boys, and he’d never fooled around on Connie. Of course, he’d never been so far from her, either, or had so little chance of seeing her any time soon. When he was out on a fishing run, he made up for lost time as soon as his boat got back to T Wharf. He wasn’t coming back to T Wharf, or even to Boston, maybe for years.
And Fremont Dalby knew exactly what ailed him. The gun-crew chief gave him an elbow in the ribs. “What she don’t know won’t hurt her,” he said.
“Yeah,” George said again. Connie was a long way away. His pals, the men he ate and slept with, the men he fought beside, were right here. He didn’t want them to think he was a wet blanket. And I don’t have to stand in line at a whorehouse, he told himself. That helped salve his conscience. He nodded. “Sure, I’ll come.”
“Oh, boy.” Dalby made as if to bow. “Thank you so much. Well, come on, then, if you’re coming.”
Along with the other ratings given liberty, the gun crew showed their paperwork before leaving the barracks and then headed for the nearest trolley stop. From the Pearl City stop, they rode east past Custer Field, one of the many airstrips on Oahu. Even as they passed, Wright fighters were landing and taking off. An air umbrella floated over Oahu at all times.
“I wish we’d had some of those guys up over our heads when the Japs jumped us,” George said.
“Would’ve been nice,” agreed Fritz Gustafson, the loader on the twin 40mm cannon. The rest of the men from the gun crew nodded.
“Technically, we were under air cover,” Dalby said. Several people, George Enos, Jr., among them, let out snorts, guffaws, hoots, and other expressions of derision and disbelief. Dalby held up his right hand, as if taking oath in court. “So help me, we were. Fighters could have flown up from here to the ship and got back.”
“Big fucking deal,” George said. Others expressed similar opinions, some even more colorfully.
“Yeah, I know,” Dalby said. “It would’ve taken ’em most of an hour to get there, the fight would’ve been over by the time they did, and they couldn’t’ve hung around anyway, not if they did want to get back. But we were under air cover, by God. That’s how the brass sees it.”
The way George saw it, the brass was full of idiots. He would have found formidable support for that view among ratings-and probably more than he would have imagined among officers as well. Flabbling about it would just have ruined the day, so he made himself keep quiet. The Sandwich Islands were too nice a place to waste time getting upset and fussing for no good reason.
It wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t too cold. From everything he’d heard, it never got too hot or too cold. The air was moist without being oppressively sticky, the way it got in Boston in the summertime. It could rain at any time of the day or night all year around, but it rarely rained hard. The hills north of Honolulu were impossibly green, the sky improbably blue, the Pacific bluer still.
“I don’t just want to be stationed here,” George said. “I want to live here.”
“In a little grass shack?” Dalby jeered.
“Why not?” George said. “You don’t need anything more than that.”
Civilians started getting on as the trolley stopped here and there. The sailors eyed them suspiciously. Some were Orientals, and how could you tell if the Japs were loyal to the USA? And quite a few of the whites, especially the older ones, spoke with British accents. They probably wouldn’t be sorry to see the United States booted out of Honolulu, either.
Well, too bad, George thought. It’s not going to happen. He hoped it wouldn’t, anyway. The place where the islands were vulnerable was their dependence on the mainland for food and fuel. If the Japanese could cut off supplies, holding them might not be easy no matter what the actual battle situation looked like.
Then the trolley got into Honolulu, and he stopped worrying about things like that. The city had a filigreed, before-the-Great-War feeling to it. Not a whole lot had been built during the American occupation. The hotels that had accommodated visitors before the new war shut down tourism were the ones that had accommodated them before 1914.
Even the red-light district had been there a long time. The saloons and tattoo parlors and “hotels” that greeted sailors and soldiers had the look of places that might have greeted their grandfathers. The lurid neon signs a lot of them sported seemed afterthoughts, not essentials.
“We need a few drinks,” Fremont Dalby declared, and nobody presumed to disagree with him. He swaggered into a dive called the Swizzle Stick. The rest of the gun crew followed.
Dalby ordered whiskey. Most of the other sailors followed suit. George and Fritz Gustafson got beers instead. “What do you want to go and do that for?” somebody asked. “Haven’t you got better things to do with your dick than piss through it?”
“It’s good for both,” Gustafson said, which quelled that in a hurry.
Some of the barmaids were white, others Oriental. They were all female, and wore low-cut white blouses and short black skirts. Seeing them reminded George how long it had been since he’d set eyes on a woman, let alone touched one. He stared down at his glass of beer. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Connie-but he didn’t want to go without loving, either.
The facsimile of loving you could buy for money wasn’t as good as the real thing. You didn’t need to be an egghead to figure that out. It was a lot better than nothing, though. Was it enough better than nothing to make him decide to do it? That’s the question, he thought, and chewed on it as hard as Hamlet had grappled with To be or not to be.
He didn’t have to choose right away. They weren’t going anywhere for a while. Some of the sailors had already knocked back their whiskeys. They were waving their glasses for refills. George didn’t feel like drinking that fast. If he drank that fast, he’d get drunk. If he got drunk, he’d do something stupid. He could feel that coming like a rash. And if he did something stupid and he wasn’t lucky, he’d end up with a goddamn rash, too.
But his glass emptied, as if by magic. “You want another?” a slant-eyed, tawny-skinned barmaid asked. George found himself nodding. The next beer appeared in short order. It vanished in short order, too. So did the one after that, and the one after that. About then, George stopped counting them.
Fremont Dalby got to his feet. Considering how much he’d put down, that he could get to his feet proved he was made of stern stuff. “The time has come,” he declared, “and we’re damn well going to. Drink up, you bastards.”
George knew all the reasons he didn’t want to go to a brothel. He knew, all right, but he’d stopped caring. Connie was five thousand miles away-a lot farther if he had to sail it. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Dalby’s words came back to him, handy as could be. Everybody who went to stand in one of those lines told himself the same thing. If he drank enough beforehand, he might even make himself believe it.
The line moved forward at a good clip. “They hustle guys in and out, don’t they?” George said. The rest of the gun crew laughed as if that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. George had to listen to himself before he realized what kind of joke he’d made. Then he laughed, too.