“I’m sure he is,” Rhodes struggled to his feet. “The party is for nineteen hundred day after tomorrow, Ginty. Be there!” He turned to the red-headed woman.
“We’d like to extend an invitation to you, ma’am.”
“I appreciate your gallantry,” she said, rising from her chair in an easy graceful motion. “But I think all the good and true husbands of that area would run for the Outback if they saw me come in the door! I’ll deliver Arnold to the party and pick him up and I do thank you for being so nice.”
“Hendershot?” Rhodes said. “You seen him around?”
“Yeah,” Ginty said. “He’s with a girl friend of this ugly old woman. I’ll bring him along. I know where all my gang is and I know where DeLucia is. He should know where most of his people are. I can round up maybe thirty guys if this old woman will have her chauffeur drive me around. You ought to see this guy, Chief, both legs off at the knees and only one arm yet he drives like he had everything he was born with.”
“He’s my first cousin,” the Bluey said softly. “He has a wife and two children and there are very few jobs for a man with two artificial legs and one arm. I’ll make sure that we find at least half of your crew, Chief. There’s not much that goes on in Brisbane that I don’t know about. It’s been a pleasure meeting you and if either of you are lonely…” She let the sentence hang in midair.
Rhodes smiled. “John and I are married. We can wait. We know our wives wait.”
“You are four very lucky people,” she said. “Would you accept an invitation to dine with us Sunday? Fourteen hundred, as your charming Navy puts it? I’ll expect you both.”
The party was held in the gymnasium of the local school. The ladies of the suburb outdid themselves in decorating the gym and provided huge platters of sandwiches and freshly baked cakes. The men of the community made a fruit punch in an enormous cauldron. Ginty, immaculate in his white uniform, tasted the mixture and made a face.
“No stick in this crap,” he growled to Johnny Paul. “You get your ass outside and tell that one-armed dude who drove us over here to take you back to Bluey’s house. I seen a couple of empty cases of Coke bottles out back of the house and I stowed two five-gallon cans of alky in her kitchen. Fill a dozen, fourteen of them Coke bottles with alky and get back here in a hurry.” Paul nodded and ran off to do the errand. When he got back he found Ginty waiting outside.
“I got some pitchers in the place where we stowed our white hats,” Ginty said. “Put them Coke bottles in your belt, as many as you can, and go in and fill a couple of pitchers. Stow the rest of the bottles under the hats.”
Emil Masters was standing nearby when Ginty poured two big pitchers of the 180-proof torpedo alcohol into the punch.
“Have to, sir,” Ginty replied. “You people kinda forget that a submarine sailor doesn’t get any fresh fruit at sea. This stuff is so strong that I’ll break out with pimples or something! Thought I’d weaken it a little. Otherwise the men won’t drink it and your people would feel bad.”
“Never thought of you chaps not having all the fruit you wanted. Yes, what we’re used to would seem a bit rich for you.”
“You take me,” Ginty said, stirring the punch vigorously with a big ladle. “I never eat no salads. Don’t like that green stuff. I’m a meat and potatoes man. But when we got in from this war patrol I found myself buying a whole head of lettuce and I ate it like a big green apple, walking down the street. Lady I met who knows about things like that said it was something I couldn’t help, that my system demanded green stuff.”
“My word,” Masters said. “It’s a very difficult subject, isn’t it, diet? Never thought about such things. But I can see the sense of her words. Yes.”
The high point of the party was a “sing-song” in which the partygoers sat in long semi-circles on the floor of the gymnasium and sang songs, led by two of the women of the suburb.
The curved lines formed, each Mako sailor flanked by two civilians, arms stretched out and embracing their neighbors’ shoulders. As they sang the lines rocked from side to side. Ginty and Johnny Paul kept themselves busy carrying pitchers of the spiked punch to the singers, filling glasses and joking. After a half-hour of vigorous singing and drinking the choristers got to their feet to rest bottoms unaccustomed to sitting on hard wooden floors. One matron in a flowing dress of bilious green with a necklace of sea shells resting on the shelf of her bosom took a deep draught from a glass Ginty had filled for her.
“You know,” she confided to Ginty, “I always say you can have ever so much fun without boozing. Don’t you agree?”
Ginty looked at the rivulets that her perspiration had carved through the layer of powder on her neck and bosom and nodded his head in agreement. She belched deeply and smiled, wholly unaware of her social gaffe. Ginty patted her large fanny with a meaty hand and she giggled.
“You make me feel like a young girl!” she lisped, her rouged Cupid’s-bow mouth forming what she thought was an attractive pout.
The party rocked on but no one bothered to get down on the hard floor to sing. They gathered together in small groups, each intent on singing its own songs, breaking the singing for frequent trips to the punch bowl.
At eleven in the evening the school’s janitor began blinking the lights as a warning that the party had to break up. Dusty Rhodes and John Barber, both of whom had correctly assessed the reason for the excessive conviviality of the party, stood to one side, watching, as the guests streamed out. Four of the husbands couldn’t find their wives and Rhodes wondered which of his crew had gone off with the missing women.
Sitting in the Masters’ neat kitchen the next morning, Rhodes waited while John Barber boiled a kettle of water and poured it over the Nescafe crystals he had put in two cups. Barber reached over to the sideboard of the kitchen sink and picked up a Coke bottle with a half-inch of clear alcohol in it. He carefully divided the alcohol between the two cups and filled the bottle with water from the tap and stood it beside another Coke bottle full of alcohol and corked.
Rhodes sipped his coffee gently. “After last night a little stick in the java tastes good,” he said. “Where’d they hide the stuff?”
“Under the white hats in the cloakroom,” Barber said. “One bottle had that little bit in it, the other one is full. Wonder how many bottles they dumped in that punch?”
“Enough to liven up the party,” Rhodes yawned. “Some of those people are going to wake up this morning and wonder what the hell hit them!” He turned as Emil Masters came into the kitchen dressed in a bathrobe, his thin gray hair standing up in a ruff at the back of his head.
“You chaps did something to the punch, didn’t you?” he said, grinning.
“Coffee, sir?” Barber said, his voice innocent of guile. “I went out to the ship yesterday and brought back a case of Nescafe, since you and Mrs. Masters like it. Thought it was the least we could do in return for your hospitality.”
“You’re very generous,” Masters said. His eyes glistened merrily. “But you did do something to the punch, didn’t you? I’ve never seen the pastor’s wife in such a festive mood!” He lowered his voice, nodding his head at the ceiling. “I saw her patting one of your bit bucko sailors on his rear end! Those tight white trousers you chaps wear! I bet she hasn’t patted the Reverend on his bottom in ten years!”
“Well, yes,” Barber said. “We did do a little something to the fruit punch. Spiked it with a little American Indian whiskey.” He raised the Coke bottle he had emptied of alcohol and filled with tap water and took a long swallow. He put the bottle down and reached for the Coke bottle that was full of alcohol and pulled the cork.