Pat Frank - Hold Back the Night

He made it sound as bad as it actually had been. That was his intention.

“Jeepers!” said little Nick Tinker. “That must’ve been rugged!”

“Them wild Japs!” said Beany Smith. “They must’ve been awful!”

“They were pretty shrewd,” the captain said, “and pretty tough. But we licked ’em on The ’Canal, and we won out in the end.” The flame in the earthen pyramid was dying in blue spasms, each weaker than the last. “All right!” Mackenzie commanded. “Off your butts and on the way!”

Mackenzie, walking in the van with the bottle snug in the sack-like pocket of his parka, wondered if the crags and hills ever would begin to lose height, and give him hope of the coastal plains beyond; but as far ahead as he could see the truculent hills brooded over the gorge. Ahead the road veered from the protection of the cliff, and twisted out to touch the winter-paralyzed stream that in flood had so brutally eroded this tortured land. He did not like the looks of it. He called Ekland. “What d’you think?” he said.

“It looks chancy, sir,” said Ekland.

“It does, doesn’t it? But there’s only one way to go, and that’s ahead.”

Yonder, where the road ran in team with the stream, Dog Company would be naked, exposed to fire and assault from every direction. But the point of danger was still a mile distant, and his mind returned to Kato’s question. There’d been another temptation, not long after Guadalcanal, that he’d omitted.

They’d sent him out of the fleet hospital in Noumea with a Purple Heart and a couple of other ribbons pinned on a uniform so fresh it still bore its warehouse creases. They gave him two weeks’ leave in Sydney.

Her first name was Kitty, and he was never quite sure of her last name and so he had not written her afterward. He met her on the last day of his leave. An artilleryman, hurrying back to the New Guinea front, introduced them during the lunch hour at Romano’s. When you were on leave in Sydney you rendezvoused for lunch, or a late breakfast with martinis, at Romano’s, just as you went to Prince’s at night. Now that he thought of it, he was pretty sure her last name was Turcott. That was it, Kitty Turcott, “more white and red than doves or roses are,” and stacked like a Venus in miniature to boot. It was strange that he should remember the name, after all the years, just now. Perhaps it was true that once you tucked a fact in your brain it was there for keeps, never truly lost.

He took her to Prince’s that night. All the Aussie girls at their table—the table of the First Marine Division—were attractive, but she was the prettiest, and vivacious and gay, almost, he thought, to the borderline of panic. She laughed the loudest and drank the most. It didn’t matter. He wanted her. They danced every dance in the tiny oval of the merry, noisy amphitheater, with the tables, immaculate in linen and silver and crystal, rising in concentric circles around them. She was a tantalizing, golden sprite, first pressing close to him, then fending him off with practiced grace. His share of the check was sixteen pounds, Australian, which did not seem exorbitant at the time.

At midnight the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then, “God Save the King,” and as they stood erect, her hand alive and warm on his arm, she whispered, “No more drink after twelve. Austerity, you know. I do wish I had another drink.”

“Know any place where we can get it?” Mackenzie had been a child during prohibition, but he remembered his dad’s tales of the speakeasies.

“We don’t have any bottle clubs in Sydney. We aren’t civilized. In London they have bottle clubs and therefore are civilized—so they say.”

He whispered, “I’ve got a bottle at the pub.” In Australia, you called your hotel a pub.

“Let’s get it,” she said, as the band rolled to its crescendo. “Let’s get it and go up to my flat.”

So they managed to find a cab in the brownout, and they went to the Hotel Australia and picked up a bottle—this bottle. The captain pressed it close to his side. It seemed crazy now, but it had seemed important at the time. On his last night in Sydney, it was important not to lose that golden, rounded, sprite of a girl, for in the morning he had to catch a SCAT plane back to the Solomons. SCAT. It meant Southern Cross Air Transport, the wildest, coolest, most reliable airline that ever took off nonchalantly with a two-ton overload. He wondered whether anyone beside himself remembered, and blessed, SCAT now.

Then the cab took them to her flat, on Point Piper, overlooking Lady Martin’s Beach and Rose Bay, and of course it had reminded him of San Francisco. It was not only the marine view. He remembered the advertisements in the San Francisco newspapers that always began, MARINE VIEW… A marine view in San Francisco might mean a slice of the bay an inch wide, but in Kitty Turcott’s apartment the marine view meant the whole wide sweep, through a curved picture window, of one of the magnificent harbors of the world. It was not only the marine view, but the flat itself. Just such an apartment, furnished with a flair for style and still in good taste, you might find in the newest buildings on Telegraph Hill. If you were lucky. It was surprising that two cities, and two peoples, could be separated by the whole thickness of the world, and yet be as close, in spirit, as cities split by rivers only, like Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Omaha and Council Bluffs. They were very close, San Francisco and Sydney, bound together by ties of language and humanity, and common blood and aspiration that transcended geography. When you looked out across the bay from Kitty’s flat, only the stars were different.

That’s what the flying machine had done for the world. Distance was not measured in miles, any longer, but in time. One day when they solved the problem of fuel supply for jets, Sydney would be a one-night hop from San Fran.

Mackenzie prowled Kitty’s flat, absorbing it, admiring it. There was a tricky bar built into the wall. When you touched a button it revolved and opened itself up. But all the bottles were empty.

The bookcases were full of books, and not merely used for knickknack shelves. They were books that a man enjoys in the shadow of the evening, or the insomniac hours just before the dawn. There were Maugham and Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and a beautifully bound set of C. S. Forester. There was Gunther and Pierre van Paassen, and Negley Farson, and the same edition of Kipling that Mackenzie had read from the time when he was twelve.

“Like it?” she asked. He realized that she had been following him, unobtrusive as a discreet sales girl.

“It’s perfect. I don’t want to leave.”

“Yet tomorrow you must leave.”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

Her eyes were desperate. “Well, the bottle.”

“Sure. The bottle.”

He unzipped the leather case, and brought it into the open, and she took it in her tapered fingers, and held it up delicately to admire, and revolved it slowly before a soft light. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one like this,” she said. “You Yanks do all right by yourselves, don’t you? All the cigarettes you want, and all the drink, and the fine uniforms and ribbons.”

“Oh, Scotch doesn’t rain from heaven. This is a very special bottle.” And he told her the story of the bottle of Scotch, but when he finished he found he’d spoken more of Anne Longstreet than of the bottle. He’d talked more of Anne than was proper or politic at the moment. Yet it was good for him. It emptied him. It was a cathartic.

Kitty listened well. She said nothing until all was ended, and then he saw she was crying, not loudly, but deeply. He took her hands. “What’s the matter, Kitty?”