And so Bullitt's triumph was complete. That evening, his euphoric state maintained by pride or by alcohol or by both, he announced to Williams that he would go ashore with him on liberty to celebrate. The idea did not appeal strongly to Williams. Bullitt's triumph affected him oddly. It left him with a bad taste in his mouth, a feeling almost of depression, which he did not understand. Wasn't Bullitt's triumph a vindication of his own defense of the chief? Yet it seemed anticlimactic. There was no satisfaction in a victory that the victor claimed in advance as his rightful due.
He could think of no valid reason to refuse to go with the chief. And, besides, he remembered how Bullitt had looked the day before, after the mail had been distributed. Reading his own letter in the sick bay, Williams had seen him walking alone on the deck, looking disdainful and bored, until he had found an excuse to interrupt Williams with the news of the coming inspection. This was all the life Bullitt had, a life as cloistered and removed from the larger world as if he were a monk in a monastery. He could not refuse to share this moment of triumph with him.
They went ashore in the small boat together and walked up the long path toward the base commissary. They had learned from Kerensky that the native workmen employed by the base for construction sometimes managed to smuggle in contraband rum in empty soft-drink bottles, and if you were fortunate you might meet one of them on this path. It was excellent rum, Kerensky said. After his tonsillectomy he had thought his throat would never heal or feel the same again. To eat soft food was painful and even to swallow was an effort. But one evening he had been approached by a workman on the path, and he had bought a Coke-bottle of rum, and had sat down on a rock and drunk it down. This story came out when the usually taciturn Kerensky had come to the sick bay the following day for a routine examination of his throat, and Doctor Claremont had been startled to see the scar tissue suddenly gone. "It burned like hell going down. Doctor," Kerensky said, "but it sure does feel better now." It was one of the few times that Doctor Claremont, at least before the birth of his son, had ever been known to laugh. "I don't know that I could recommend it officially," he said, "but it certainly seems to have done the trick."
And, halfway to the commissary, a workman did step out from behind the shrubbery, just ahead of them, and Williams bought a Coke-bottle of rum for two dollars. He insisted on paying for it, possibly from his feeling of guilt at not being able to rise to the occasion, and as they drank from it, passing it from hand to hand, he hoped that it would lighten his mood and raise his spirits.
A shipment of French perfume had been received at the base commissary, where, since the base was outside the continental limits of the United States, the boys might buy it without tax to take home as gifts. A long line of hopeful lovers waited at the counter, and Williams, since he could think of nothing else to do, joined them. When he was third in line, the supply ran out.
He turned away without disappointment, and with Bullitt went back down the path. They had finished the rum, and Bullitt began to sing. "My repertoire is vast," he said, "although I do have some trouble with the words." He began to shout out "O Sole Mio,'' but since these three words were all the words he seemed to know of the aria, the effect was monotonous, even if loud. He was, Williams could see, almost drunk.
Ahead of them, near the shore, they could see the lights of the refreshment area. Under flowering trees, looking theatrical above the glaring light of the unshaded bulbs, tables and benches of wood, faded by weather, were set out. Here the boys from the ships at anchor in the bay could sit and drink beer and eat sandwiches prepared by native cooks. The sandwiches were called "cube steak," but the boys, who ate them anyway, were convinced that the steak was actually goat's meat. The tables were crowded, and raucous with noise and laughter. Bullitt bought beer, and he and Williams squeezed in at the end of one of the long tables. Most of the others, like themselves, had come from the commissary, and their loot was placed on the table in front of them; native maracas, castanets stamped with the Marine Corps insignia, identification bracelets intended to enslave some distant, longed-for girl, the eternal, garish pillow cover dedicated to Mother, and bottles of perfume.
Bullitt, his voice raised above the din, lucid with the first phase of intoxication, began to talk to a young coxswain beside him. "Are you sure your girl friend is the right type for this perfume?" he asked, his tone doubtful, picking up the bottle from in front of the coxswain and examining its label.
"Huh?" the ruddy coxswain answered, his mouth stuffed with goat's-meat cube steak.
"Perfume is a very personal gift," Bullitt said, in a rather patronizing, confiding tone. "Mercy, you can offend a girl with the wrong type of perfume." He put the perfume bottle down.
An uneasy hush fell on the group within immediate hearing. "Whad'ya mean, Chief?" the young coxswain asked.
Bullitt shrugged and took a long pull from his bottle of beer. "Perfume has its own language," he said. "Especially French perfume. That perfume might insult a nice girl, but I suppose you've got a girl you couldn't insult, even with French perfume."
The young coxswain flushed scarlet, and a shout of laughter went up about him. "Ha-ha, buddy," the sailor sitting on the other side of him said, slapping him on the back. "I always told you so. I always said she was that kind of girl, didn't I, buddy, huh?"
The flushed young coxswain was on his feet, fists doubled. "You take that back!" he said. "I'll beat the hell out of you!"
The fight was on, Bullitt sat elegantly as it milled around him, holding himself erect and protecting his bottle of beer, as now and again the fighting boys fell against him. But meanwhile an opportunist, of the sort to be found on almost every ship, had taken over at the table. He was busy buying up the perfume from suddenly nervous owners. Bullitt waited until all the perfume bottles in their cardboard cartons were piled in front of the speculator, and, as he was about to scoop them up and leave, Bullitt reached over with a proprietary air and deftly took one. "My cut, sir," he said grandly, with a nod of his head. The buyer looked up at him, with the sharp, calculating look of his nature; then he laughed at the joke, gathered up the rest of the bottles, and went off in the dark.
"Here," Bullitt said, handing the bottle to Williams.
"No, Chief," Williams said. "I don't want it. Not that way."
"Take it," Bullitt said. He was very drunk now, and his face clouded in a moment of anger. A crowd had gathered, and the fight still went on around them, the grunting and scuffling, the crack of knuckles on flesh and bone. Williams took the perfume and set it down hard on the table. The bottle cracked, and above the smell of beer and fried meat and male bodies rose the heady, hothouse scent of French perfume.
But now the coxswain had won the fight. He had defended his lady's honor. His face was swollen; blood trickled from his nose and from the corner of his mouth, but he stood, feet braced wide, his bruised fists at his sides, in triumph over his fallen foe.
Someone struck up a tune on a guitar. The crowd turned away from the fight, ready for new diversion, while friends helped the beaten fighter to his feet. Williams had drunk a bottle of beer on top of the rum, and he felt disembodied, as if the scene were happening on a screen in front of him. It was like a painting by Brueghel the Elder of a peasant reveclass="underline" the healthy, laughing, shouting faces, flushed with drinking, the large, work-coarsened hands clutching beer cans, pounding on the table in time with the music; the laughing boys dancing in the dust.