“I hoped I’d have a chance to talk to you before you left,” she said.
“I was going to call you if we didn’t. I go out tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? That’s very soon.”
“Not too soon for me. Hawaii’s going to have a funny taste for me from now on.”
“For me too. I’m beginning to feel that nothing good can happen here. There’s something ominous and antihuman about those mountains, and the clouds, and the bright green sea, and a climate that’s too good all the time.”
“Something good can happen here.” I was impressed by her feelings but unwilling to be carried away by them. “If you’ll have dinner with me.”
“I’m afraid I’m not very cheerful company. But I’d like to.”
“I think we should try to forget the whole business for a while. What do you say to driving up to the north shore for a swim? I can get a jeep from the Transportation Center.”
“I’d have to go home and change, and get my swimming-suit.”
When I picked her up she had changed to white linen, and a bandana for her hair. Then we drove across the island. It was warmer inland, but the wind blew freshly in the open sides of the jeep and whipped the color into her cheeks. The air was suffused with light, the tender green of the young pineapple shoots was like a whispered promise in the fields, the palmtrunks rose straight towards the sun like a high song. But here and there along the road, more frequently as we went higher, there were ribs and boulders of volcanic rock, as if hell had thrust a shoulder through the earth.
By tacit agreement we avoided talking of Sue’s death. In fact we did very little talking at all, saving our breath for swimming and running. There was no reef to break the surf, and it came into the white beach high and strong, as hard to ride and as exciting as a mettlesome horse. Mary was like a porpoise in the waves. She forgot her earlier depression, and lived in her senses like a young animal.
When we were tired out we lay in the clean coarse sand, and she slept while I watched her. I watched her smooth shoulders, her honey-colored hair curled in the nape of her neck, her round arms, her long brown thighs, the delicate decline and fullness of her back and buttocks. I didn’t touch her or speak to her, but I memorized her body.
Only after night fell was there a recurrence of her unhappy mood. We were walking on the beach below the inn where we had eaten dinner. The evening breeze was beginning to blow in from the disappearing sea. The half-visible breakers, approaching and receding, kept up a muttering which rose and fell like a sad native chant.
“I’m cold,” Mary said. She shivered slightly against my arm. “And I’m afraid.”
“What you need is another drink. Or maybe two.”
“Ten would do the trick, I guess. But that would only postpone it until tomorrow.”
“Postpone what?”
“The way I feel. I feel awfully bleak and desolate, and frightened. I hate this island, Sam. I have a feeling that something terrible will happen if I stay here.”
“Something terrible has happened, but not to you. It’s a selfish way to look at it, but I’ve seen men die, and the pity and terror are always alleviated by the fact that it isn’t one’s self. The war develops scar tissue in everyone’s sensibilities.”
“Surely the war has nothing to do with this. Has it?”
“I was explaining my point of view. But I don’t know. Remember what Gene Halford said about enemy agents in these islands? It was about then that Sue’s mood changed, and soon after that she – she died. It’s barely possible, isn’t it, that there’s a connection?”
“Don’t say that, please. You’re frightening me more.” We were standing facing each other now, all by ourselves in a remote corner of the dim and deserted beach. I moved closer to look into her face. Her eyes were dark as the night sky, and her mouth was an anguished dark-red gash, tremulous and pitiable.
“Why are you afraid?” I said. “I don’t get it. Unless you had the same idea.”
“What idea?”
“The idea that Sue’s death was connected with the war. Did you?”
“No, not exactly. But we worked in the same place, and did the same things. If she was killed, whoever, or whatever, killed her may try to kill me too. I know I must sound childish, but I’m afraid.”
“That’s what you said before, but I don’t see any reason for it. Unless you know more about it than I do?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t. That’s what makes it so terrible. The whole thing has no reason to it.”
“All right, if you’re afraid, why don’t you leave the island? Go back to your folks in the States. Oahu gets some people down, and you seem to be one of them.”
“I am going,” she said softly and firmly. “I couldn’t go on in the station without Sue, anyway. I resigned this morning.”
“It’ll be a blow to the station to lose both of you at once.”
“Do you think I’m a welcher?”
“Hell,” I said. “People have to work out their own lives. If Oahu frightens you, obviously you have to leave it.”
Far down the shore to our left as we turned seaward there was the chatter and crash of guns. Mary moved against me and I put my arm around her shoulders, feeling the tiny vibration of the nerves throughout her body.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “They have anti-aircraft practice out here nearly every night.”
The tracers were rising into the sky like luminous juggler’s balls in gentle and terrific flight. The tempo of the guns increased, rising in a raucous crescendo. The long white gaze of searchlights began to scan the empty blackness, crossing and intertwining like desperate searching fingers.
Mary turned inwards to me as my other arm went around her waist. “Kiss me,” she said.
We stood interlocked, dizzy and warm, under the zebra-striped sky, until the sound of the guns and the beating of our hearts were a single clamor.
Part II
DETROIT
4
FIVE thousand miles and two weeks later I met Mary again. It was not a coincidence. We had known each other for only a little more than twenty-four hours, but neither of us was willing to let it end there. Before we parted that night in Hawaii, we exchanged Stateside addresses and telephone numbers.
I had kept on my bachelor apartment in Detroit by subletting it to a friend. When I got home I moved in with him. During my first week in Detroit not much happened to me externally but a good deal happened inside. I went to visit my old girl-friend Sandra, and found that she had flown the coop. She was in Florida with her very new husband, a very new flier stationed at Pensacola. The thought of Mary cushioned the blow, and I was surprised at how little I cared.
I was content to lead a bachelor life with my subtenant, a reporter on a morning paper named Joe Scott. I did a good deal of sitting around catching up on my reading and my drinking. The drinking was mostly beer and in the evenings, because I had nothing to escape from and was where I wanted to be. I went to a few shows and one or two parties, where I found myself mostly among acquaintances, not friends. Nearly all my friends were in the services, or in Washington, or in the OWI overseas. Still, it was good to be home for twenty days. Before the week was up I had begun to wonder how I could ever bring myself to go back out to the Pacific. I felt half like a civilian again, and even when I was bored it was good to be bored by something different from sea and sun and bogies on the radar screen.
With the war, Sue Sholto’s death receded like a nightmare in the morning. More vivid and frequent in my memory was Mary’s long brown body in the sand, the freshness of her mouth, the way she held me on the last night. The bad business came back and hit me hardest the day before Mary telephoned. I went to Ann Arbor to make a duty call on Eric Swann’s wife.