Last Orders: The War That Came Early (15 page)

Bend your knees. Roll when you hit. Don’t let the canopy blow you all over the place. The first time Pete McGill jumped out of a C-47, he had to think about all that stuff. No more.

This was his seventh jump now. He knew what it was like to step out of a plane and come to earth under a king-sized umbrella. Somebody’d told him that was just what the Germans called them, that their word for
paratrooper
literally meant
umbrella rifleman
.

He’d discovered he enjoyed floating down out of the sky. It was as close to flying as you could come without strapping on an airplane. And you were out in the air yourself with a parachute, not inside a machine that smelled of gasoline and lubricating oil.

He was only a couple of hundred feet off the ground and bracing himself for the landing when a little bird fluttered past him. Maybe he was imagining things, but he thought he saw surprise in its beady black eyes. What was a human doing up here in bird country?

“Oof!” he said when he landed. He bent his knees. He rolled. He wrestled the canopy into submission and detached himself from it.
Then he lit a cigarette while he waited for a jeep to come by and pick him up.

The C-47 from which he’d parachuted was droning off toward the horizon. When he went in for real, the transport would fly in lower, so the men inside wouldn’t have so far to drop … and so the Japs on the ground wouldn’t have long to shoot at them while they hung in the air like ripe fruit dangling from a tree.

Here came the jeep, with a couple of leathernecks already in it. Pete stuck out his thumb, as if he were hitching a ride. When the jeep stopped so he could get in, the driver asked, “Where to, Mac?”

“Take me to the nearest saloon,” McGill answered. “If it’s next door to a cathouse, that’s better.”

Everybody laughed. One of the other guys who’d gone out of the C-47 said, “That sounds good to me, too. Let’s go do it.”

“Fuckin’ comedians, that’s what you are,” the driver said.

“I want to be a fuckin’ comedian. That’s how come I asked for a bar with a cathouse next to it,” Pete said.

“Funny. Funny like a truss,” the driver said, shaking his head. “Yeah, you’ll be on the radio next week, tellin’ dumb jokes for fuckin’ Palmolive soap.”

He took them back to Schofield Barracks, as Pete had known he would. No fleshpots there. The Marines climbed aboard a bus that hauled them back to Ewa, the base west of Pearl Harbor. Before they got there, though, a roadblock manned by MPs stopped them.

“The fuck is going on?” the bus driver, a Marine himself, bawled out of the window. “What are you guys doing here?”

“Ewa’s under quarantine,” one of the MPs answered. In case the driver didn’t know what that meant, he amplified it: “Nobody in, nobody out.”

“You nuts? What for?” the driver said.

“On account of a couple of guys down there are down sick with cholera, that’s what for,” the MP said. “I hear one of ’em’s dead, but I don’t know that for sure. They don’t want it getting loose all over the place.”

“Fuck me,” Pete said to the leatherneck sitting across the aisle from him. “Didn’t we get shots for that shit?”

“I think so,” the other Marine answered. “We got so many shots, both my arms swole up like poisoned pups and my ass was too sore to sit down on it for two days. I ain’t had an ass like that since my old man used to lick me before I joined the Corps. They say the training is rough, but, man, it was a walk in the park after my pa, I tell you.”

“I know what you mean,” Pete said. His father hadn’t walloped him that hard, but he hadn’t had an easy time growing up, either. He didn’t know many Marines who had. Most guys who joined the Corps were tough to begin with, and boot camp only made them tougher.

Meanwhile, the bus driver was saying, “Well, what am I supposed to do with these guys now?”

“Take ’em to Pearl,” the MP told him. “They’ll find somewhere to stash ’em till things at Ewa get straightened away.”

“Goddamn pain in the ass,” the driver grumbled.

“Don’t blame me, buddy,” the MP said. “Blame the stinkin’ slanties. They’re the ones keep dropping that poison shit on Hawaii.”

“It’s a crock of crap, is what it is,” the driver said. “How many bombers fly outa here two, three times a week to pound the crap outa Midway? But the Japs still keep sending planes back here.”

“Write your Congressman if you don’t like it—I can’t do nothin’ about it any which way.” The MP jerked his thumb eastward, toward Pearl. “Write your Congressman after you take these apes where they gotta go.”

Since they were coming from the direction of Ewa, the sentries on the road into the Pearl Harbor naval base didn’t want to let them in. The driver threw a tantrum a four-year-old would have been proud of. The sentries had a field telephone. They spent twenty minutes going back and forth with their superiors. Finally, shaking their heads as if they were dealing with a busload of plague-carrying rats, they let the leathernecks proceed.

Pete counted himself lucky that the mess hall hadn’t closed by the time he finally walked in. The fried chicken was rubbery and the mashed potatoes were tired, but he didn’t care. By the time he finished, he had enough bones on his plate to build himself another bird.

He also didn’t care where they put him for the night. It was Hawaii,
for crying out loud. He would have curled up on some grass somewhere and slept like a log till the sun woke him up come morning. No, on second thought he wouldn’t. Some damn Shore Patrol clown would have rousted him in the middle of the night.

At last, the paratroopers were given a hall in a barracks that, by the musty smell, hadn’t been used for anything for a long time. Except for the risk of prowling SPs, Pete would rather have slept outside on the grass. He didn’t get to make such choices, though. People told him what to do, and he did it. That was what being a Marine was all about.

He didn’t get to the mess hall late the next morning. Eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, toast, coffee … He filled himself very full again. It wasn’t fancy food, but it was the kind of stuff even Navy cooks had trouble ruining.

Then he and the rest of the paratroopers had to get the brass to notice that things were screwed up for them. As far as the people at the airstrip where the C-47s took off and landed knew, they’d gone back to Ewa the way they were supposed to. As far as the brass at Ewa knew, they were AWOL. Yes, Ewa was under quarantine, but what did that have to do with anything?

They spent most of the day getting all that straightened out. By the time it was fixed, or Pete thought it was, he’d got good and disgusted. “We should’ve gone straight into Honolulu yesterday, had ourselves a spree on Hotel Street,” he said. “They still woulda figured us for AWOL today, and we coulda got smashed and laid.”

“What about the bus driver?” one of the other paratroopers asked.

“Hell, he coulda come, too,” Pete said magnanimously. “I mean, he was a Marine himself, so why shouldn’t he have a good time along with us?”

“You got all the answers,” the other leatherneck said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

“I wish,” Pete said. “If I’m so goddamn smart, how come I ain’t rich?” He stuck a hand in his pocket. A few coins clinked inside there, but only a few. Unless he got lucky rolling poker dice or something, he wouldn’t have had much of a spree in Honolulu’s red-light district.

In spite of the snafu, he and his buddies jumped from another
C-47 the next day. This time, nobody tried to take them back to Ewa. As far as Pete was concerned, that was progress.

Peggy Druce lit her first cigarette of the morning as she poured herself her first cup of coffee. She put in cream and a teaspoon and a half of sugar. She would rather have put in two, but they were more serious about rationing sugar than they were about most things. She smiled as she drank. It might not be exactly the way she would have wanted it, but it was better than anything they were drinking in Europe. For starters, the coffee was real coffee. The tobacco was miles better than the harsh, adulterated stuff they had over there, too.

She popped two slices of bread in the toaster and fried a couple of eggs in lard. As she sat down to breakfast, she opened the
Philadelphia Inquirer
to see what had gone wrong in the world since she fell asleep the night before.

MORE JAPS GERM BOMBS HIT HAWAII!
was the front-page headline. Peggy shook her head as she buttered her toast and slathered it with strawberry jam. “Filthy bastards,” she muttered to herself—who else was going to hear her?

She read the story below the headline. The War Department and the Navy Department admitted to a few small, isolated outbreaks of disease among military personnel on Oahu. Peggy smiled a tight, cynical smile as she worked her way through the story and her breakfast. If they admitted to a few small, isolated outbreaks, the real outbreaks were bound to be not so small and not so isolated. Dr. Goebbels didn’t oversee news here in the USA, but people who thought like him sure did.

A War Department spokesman was quoted as quoting the Bible on sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. That sounded good: no two ways about it. How the United States was going to make it come true … The
Inquirer
didn’t quote the War Department spokesman on that. Which, Peggy supposed, meant the illustrious spokesman had no idea, either.

She almost said as much out loud, just so Herb could make some pungent comment of his own in return. Little by little, though, she was
getting used to the idea that Herb wasn’t sitting across the table from her, wasn’t and wouldn’t be. Herb was either reading the
Inquirer
after making his own breakfast in the little apartment near his law office or, more likely, sitting at the counter of some greasy spoon and reading the paper there.

Peggy had thought about selling the house. It was really too big for one person. She rattled around in it like a solitary pea in a pod. An apartment would be more sensible.

But she’d lived here most of her adult life. And moving was a colossal pain. Packing up all the books and dishes and knickknacks and clothes and furniture … Even thinking about it was enough to tire her out.

So she rattled around. When she didn’t feel like being by herself any more, she would go into town. Some of her former friends and acquaintances, though, raised their eyebrows when she came around. Being a divorcée was nowhere near so shocking as it would have been before the start of the last war. Then women who remained married didn’t raise eyebrows; they cut you dead. Divorce did still bring a breath of scandal, but only a breath.

Outside of Philadelphia, her marital status or lack thereof wasn’t whispered about behind her back. That meant she looked forward to her trips out of town to flog war bonds and to raise money for the Democratic Party more than she ever had while she was still married to Herb. They gave her something to do, and there was no room to rattle around in a hotel room in Easton or York or Shamokin or any of the other towns she’d seen on such trips.

She washed the breakfast dishes. Then she did some sweeping and dusting. If she took care of part of the house every day, she wouldn’t get too far behind with any of it. She sorted dirty clothes into two piles: the ones that had to go to the cleaners and the ones she could put through the washing machine and the wringer. She did those, and hung them up on the clotheslines behind the house to dry.

She hoped they would dry. It was hot, but it was muggy. Things always took longer in weather like this. Something in the sticky air, though—she couldn’t have said what, but she could feel it—said summer wouldn’t last much longer.

When she went back inside, she turned on a fan in the front room.
It didn’t do enough to cool her down, so she went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. That felt wonderful, but she had to repair her powder and her eye makeup. Lots of mascara claimed it was waterproof, but she’d never found any that lived up to the claims.

She had a half-gallon milk bottle in the refrigerator full of ice water. Drinking a glass from that also helped beat the heat. She looked at the clock over the stove. It was lunchtime. She didn’t know how that had happened, but it had. Housework kept you hopping, all right.

Two slices of bread. Ham and cheese and mustard and pickles. A little mayo—only a little, because she didn’t like gloopy sandwiches. A couple of softly purple plums. Another cup of coffee to wash everything down. Not a fancy lunch, but not a bad one, either.

Peggy was washing the knife she’d used to spread the mustard and mayonnaise when the telephone rang. She quickly dried her hands on a dish towel and hustled into the living room.

“Hey, good-lookin’!”

“I’m sorry. You must have the wrong number,” Peggy said, smiling.

On the other end of the line, Dave Hartman laughed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “How you doing?”

“I’m okay,” Peggy said. “How are
you
?”

“At my lunch break,” he answered. He’d found a factory that would let a machinist who knew what he was doing perch on a stool so he could do it. “Long as I’m not on my pins from morning till night, I’m happy as a cow in clover. Only they pay me better, and I don’t think I’ll end up roast beef.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Yeah, but I have fun,” Dave said. “Want to watch the new Bogart movie tonight? It got a pretty good writeup in the paper this morning—did you see?”

“I just glanced at it, but that sounds fine. Shall we meet downtown?”

“Why don’t I pick you up? I’ve got gas—and I haven’t even eaten yet.” Dave laughed at his own joke.

“Har-de-har-har,” Peggy said, which only made him laugh some more. He knew he came out with some cornball stuff. He would have been much less fun to hang around with if he hadn’t.

He came by just past six. He drove an old Ford, but he kept it clean and shiny, and it ran quiet as a watch. He did almost all the work on it himself. He wasn’t an auto mechanic, but he understood machinery the way a pianist understood Beethoven. If it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, he could fix it.

He pecked her on the cheek when she got into the car with him. He didn’t paw her as if he thought he might never get another chance. If he had pawed her like that, he wouldn’t have. Unlike some men, he had sense enough to understand as much.