Very slowly the girl pocketed the money and tugged her hair free from the ribbon. She slipped the sandals from her feet and gently unwound the cloth from around her waist. The swish of material sent dust motes spiraling among the sun bars.
Without removing her chemise she went and lay on the bed. Lydecker stood, his chest heaving, his erection straining against his cotton undershorts.
“I said take it all off.” He spoke quietly, a tremble in his voice.
The girl did nothing, her hands clenched by her slim brown thighs.
“All of it, baby. That means the fuckin’ shirt.” Lydecker awkwardly slipped down his shorts and moved over to stand by the bed. The girl didn’t look at him.
“I’m waiting,” Lydecker said harshly.
In response the girl raised the hem of her chemise to her waist and spread her legs. Lydecker gulped. A blob of sweat fell from the tip of his nose.
Suddenly he grabbed the girl’s hand and jerked her roughly to her feet.
“Take it off!” he shouted. “I fuckin’ paid you.”
“No,” the girl said evenly. “No good.”
Lydecker seized her and crushed his mouth on hers, clashing their teeth together. Then Lydecker drew back. He had seen her eyes. On fire with disgust. Ashamed and angry, he wrenched at the chemise. It tore slightly at the shoulder. At the sound of the ripping cotton the girl’s eyes registered alarm.
“No, Johnny,” she said as though only half-remembering the unfamiliar whore’s argot. “No good.” She made vague passing movements with her hands in front of her face and soft explosion noises in the back of her throat. “Number ten. No lie G.I. Not good for you, Johnny.”
What the fuck was she talking about? Lydecker wondered in desperation, as her thin hands still swooped to and fro.
“Strip, damn you. Off. All of it,” he gasped.
She saw she could do nothing more. His purple swollen sex stood out from his belly like a clenched fist salute, an absurd symbol of his domination. Crossing her arms in front of her, she swiftly pulled off the chemise.
Lydecker looked at the firm, pubescent girl’s body. “That’s more like it, baby,” he said, trying to sound kind. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.” His gaze cautiously returned once again to her eyes, hoping to find some more amicable response. “What’s all the trouble been about, eh? C’mon, honey.” But then he was perturbed to see a look of almost contemptuous triumph cross her face. She turned abruptly to reveal her back. And as she turned, Lydecker’s beer-numbed mind grasped feebly at the reasons for her evasiveness. “It’s all right, baby,” he said reflexively, but it was too late by then.
When he saw her back, Lydecker’s brain screamed in silent horror. His hands rose involuntarily to his mouth. The girl looked at him over her shoulder.
“Nay-pom,” she said quietly in explanation. “Nay-pom, G.I.”
Lydecker wrenched his bulging eyes away. Her back was a broad stripe, a swath of purpled shiny skin where static waves of silvery scar tissue and blistered burn weals tossed in a horrifying flesh-sea.
Lydecker emptied his stomach into his cupped hands, and his vomit splashed over his naked body.
On the Sea King taking him back to the Chester B., Lydecker sat slumped in white-faced, silent depression. The throb of the rotor’s beat sounded remorselessly in his head. He considered his hatred and the girl’s. Now he knew why he had been so fascinated by her. They were the same. Siblings. He looked into her eyes to find himself staring back. They were both burning up inside with their hate and it was wrong. Their hate had no consequences outside of themselves. It made them sick, ate them up. It accrued only inside of them, like a miser’s hoard, poisoning everything. Their bodies couldn’t nourish such a parasite for long. Lydecker saw that. He didn’t want to end up like that girl. Infernal decades of grief and agony beamed out from those eyes. Perhaps what he needed was to cast it out into the world and let it flourish there. Like Pfitz did.
As the Sea King approached the carrier, a great steel playing field plowing through the choppy waters of the South China Sea, Lydecker was aware of a palpable change going through his body. He felt his breathing become shallower and perspiration break out on his forehead. It seemed as if his chest were hollow and filled with throbbing, pulsating air.
Lydecker reported sick on landing and was found to be running a high temperature. The shipboard medics shot him full of penicillin and told him not to report for duty for two days. During that time Lydecker uneasily roved the corridors of the ship, a thinner and more consumptive figure than before, his mind obsessed with the violent images of his shore leave; of his casual unsatisfactory sex, fragments of obscene anecdotes he had heard, murmured accounts of battle-zone atrocities, and above them all, endlessly repeating itself like a video film loop, the vision of the young girl’s ghastly pirouette to expose her ravaged back.
Even Lydecker’s normally uninterested crew-mates commented on his yellowish pallor, the sheen of sweat forever on his forehead and upper lip, his staring red-rimmed eyes. They jokingly accused him of contracting some recondite strain of venereal disease and roared with laughter when he tried haltingly to tell them about the whore and her loathsome scars.
Gradually the nomadic circuit of Lydecker’s thoughts began to focus once again on Pfitz and his Crusader. Covertly, he haunted the below-deck hangar, distantly supervised the fueling and rearming of the plane, observed Pascual and Huq trundle the fat napalm canisters from the magazine elevators. He even took to following Pfitz discreetly whenever he moved from the officers’ quarters, studying the man’s corridor-filling bulk, the contours of his large skull revealed by his razored crew-cut, the pink fleshiness of his neck above the stiff collar of his flying suit. The glimmerings of an idea began to form in Lydecker’s mind. He started to plot his revenge.
His nervous debility persisted, his temperature was regularly above normal and he collected sickness chits without problem.
Then one afternoon he was lounging in a hatchway a few feet from the Crusader’s arming bay. Pfitz was talking to Lee Otis as the mechanic checked a faulty shackle on a napalm canister. Lydecker strained to catch his words.
“… Yeah, there just ain’t nothing to beat this jelly, man. It’s gonna win us the woah. Shit, I can remember the original stuff. It wasn’t so hot. If the dinks were quick enough they could scrape it off. So the scientists come up with a good idea. They started adding polystyrene — yeah, polystyrene. Hell, man, now it sticks better ’n shit to a blanket.” He chortled. Lee Otis’s eyes were glazed with boredom but Pfitz carried on, unaware in his enthusiasm. “Trouble was, if the dinks were fast enough and jumped underwater, it stopped burning. So some wise guy adds white phosphorus to the mix, and — get this, boy — now it can burn underwater.” He reached down and patted the nose cone of the canister. “That thing on okay, now?”
Crouched in his hatchway, Lydecker waited and watched until Pfitz hauled his bulky body into the narrow cockpit of the Crusader. He tasted acid bile in his throat, his fretting hands picked unconsciously at his olive green jacket and a slight shivering ran through his wasted body. It was clear now. Beyond doubt. He couldn’t understand why he had waited so long. Pfitz was the guilty one. For that girl’s sake, Pfitz had to suffer too.
It didn’t take Lydecker long to work out the technicalities of his revenge. The next day he was back on the catapult crew, silent and withdrawn, waiting for his time. In the evenings, with a rubber-based glue bought from the PX, and with sand from the fire buckets, and spare bolts and shards of metal from the machine rooms, he packed the beer can Pfitz had thrown at him with this glutinous hard-setting amalgam until it weighed heavy in his hand, a bright solid cylinder. To his fixated mind it had seemed only right that the beer can should be the agent of Pfitz’s destruction. There was a kind of macabre symmetry in the way events were turning out that he found deeply satisfying.