Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

IN FEBRUARY, 1945, Honolulu was a small blend of Los Angeles and prewar Shanghai, shaken up with the carnival end of a county fair, and poured out carelessly at the edge of the sea. Men in uniform, white, tan, khaki, grey, green, pullulated in the streets, looking for a place like home and not finding any.

We drove through town in Eric’s jeep from the Pearl Harbor side, past miles of gift and curio shops, bars and lunchrooms, Turkish baths, photographers’ studios, peep-shows. Be Photographed with a Hula Girl. Dispenser General of Alcoholic Beverages. Real American Hot Dogs. Dance of the Seven Veils Only Five Cents.

I had seen it before and it hadn’t changed, except that my year in the forward area made it seem more interesting and metropolitan. Still it was no substitute for Detroit.

“Where’s the drink you promised me?” I said to Eric.

The traffic ahead of us had been temporarily jammed by a Navy Yard bus taking on a load of sailors. Eric was scowling over the wheel. He was a fair-haired man of thirty, with the leanness and boyish quick gestures of twenty, and almost all of its hair. Since I had last seen him his collar had sprouted the double silver bars of a full lieutenant. I had noticed when I first met him in the Administration Building that afternoon that his mouth and eyes were still undecided between cynicism and sensibility.

The bus finally moved, like the key log in a log-jam, and the stream of traffic flowed on with our jeep nosing into the middle of it.

“I said how about that drink you promised me.”

“Hold your horses,” Eric said. “What are you, a dipsomaniac or something?”

“I haven’t had a drink since we left Guam. Before that I didn’t have one for three months. Does that make me a dipsomaniac?”

“Apparently. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty left for you.”

“Doesn’t the bar in Honolulu House close at six?”

“Theoretically it does. But we’ve all got bottles. If the drinking stopped at six, what would be the use of a ship’s party?”

Honolulu House was a decaying mansion standing in its own grounds on the eastern outskirts of the city. A rich planter built it there between the mountains and the sea at the end of the nineteenth century, in the hope that his descendants would live there from generation to generation. When he died his sons and daughters moved back to the mainland, and the house degenerated by degrees into a club of uncertain membership.

It was a three-story frame structure with a wide verandah on four sides. When we arrived the garden of flowers which surrounded it was smouldering in a thin smoke of early twilight.

We parked the jeep at the rear and went into the basement bar. There was a blaze of light, noise and women. Two long tables ran half the length of the narrow brick-walled room to hold the whiskey bottles. We found two unoccupied chairs, and I took one while Eric started off to the bar for ice.

Before he got there he joined a group that was standing near the door. There was a small dark girl with curly black hair, a naval officer with a brown moustache and a Vandyke two shades lighter, a tall heavy man wearing a war correspondent’s insignia, and a blonde with her profile to me, five feet seven inches of it. When I saw her the room came into focus and began to revolve about her like a shining wheel.

Eric had his head close to the dark girl’s, and made no move to break away. I got up and joined the group, and Eric introduced me. The bearded man was Dr. Savo, surgeon of Eric’s destroyer. The brunette with the keen pert face was Sue Sholto. The war correspondent was Gene Halford. His thick jowls and the bald half of his head were darkened by a tan which only the tropics could have given him.

“You’ve heard of Mr. Halford,” Eric said. “He writes for two magazines, and ninety-seven newspapers, isn’t it, Gene?”

I hadn’t heard of him, but I politely said I had.

“Sam used to be a newspaperman in Detroit himself.”

“Is that a fact?” Halford said. I didn’t like the faintly patronizing note in his voice, and I didn’t like the fact that his left shoulder was behind the blonde girl’s right shoulder, like a Reserved sign.

Her name was Mary Thompson. Their shoulders disengaged when she moved to give me her hand. When she smiled her eyes changed from blue to aquamarine. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Drake.”

She was a tall blonde, but not the cornfed type. Her body was sleek and disciplined, so well made that she didn’t look big. There was in her face a fascinating combination of things I liked and things I didn’t understand. I wondered what I could do about it. A man like Halford with a million readers, even though he was forty and balding, had glamor. Gene Halford looked at her as if he knew it.

While I was groping for a gambit he ended the game. “Let’s go out and get leis,” he said to her. “There’s an old woman selling them on the corner.”

As they moved away, Mary Thompson gave me a smiling look which seemed to imply that she’d see me later. I got some ice at the bar and went back to the table where the bottles were. I made a little celibate ceremony out of mixing and drinking a double highball. I concentrated on the good sharp clean taste of the whiskey and soda, the feel of the ice against my teeth, the cold wet glass in the circle of my fingers. Then the small expanding glow in my stomach, spreading from there through my body like a blob of dye in a beaker of water, finally working into my brain, warming and coloring my perceptions.

The first stages of drunkenness are delicate, illusive and altruistic, like the first stages of love. I became very pleased with the bright disorderly room, the merry drunken laughter, the sweet chiding clink of ice in glasses, the confusion of shoptalk and woman-talk, war and love. What pleased me most was the fact that the room didn’t move back and forth, sideways and diagonally. It was the most lovably stable room I had sat in for a long time.

“How you doing, Sam?” Eric sat down beside me and poured himself a drink.

“I was just thinking that I like this room and everybody in it. Even the lieutenant commanders. Where’s your girl-friend?”

“Went up to the powder-room to do her hair. But she’s not my girl-friend.”

“I’m not likely to tell Helen about it. That girl likes you pretty well.”

“I know it,” he said. His mood, which was evident in his face, was an uncomfortable mixture of vanity and shame. Vanity because he had a pretty girl in love with him. Shame because he had a wife in Michigan and should know better. “If you ever did tell Helen, it’d be just too bad.”

“Why should I?”

“Anyway, there’s nothing to tell.” He shrugged his shoulders awkwardly, and his fair transparent skin showed a flush. “It seems funny that you’ll be seeing Helen in a week or two. I haven’t seen her for two years.”

“I’ll look her up when I get home. Anything special you want me to tell her?”

“Hell, tell her I’m healthy. And, of course, I love her. Tell her there’s no danger when we’re operating around Pearl like this. She never believes me when I write her that in letters.”

He finished his drink, very quickly I thought. I poured him another and filled my own glass.

“They’re at it again,” Eric said. “Always talking about the war.”

An ensign with wings, across the table from us, was telling a faded blonde how it felt to go in through ack-ack at five hundred feet. He said it didn’t feel so bad because you didn’t really believe it until afterwards. Now the real hell was night landings on a jeep carrier…