W.e.b. Griffin - The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

Pickering chuckled.

"The management has authorized me to say that if the San Carlos could recoup just a little more by the week than it now gets for Friday and Saturday night," Gayfer said, "it would be delighted to offer the penthouse suite on a weekly basis. How does that sound to you?"

"I'm always willing to do what I can to help out a fellow hotelier," Pickering said. "That sounds fine."

They ceremoniously shook hands.

The good- looking blonde who had come to Pickering's table with the unsolicited Good Samaritan warning about Captain Carstairs stood up and walked out of the coffee shop. She had nice legs, and her skirt revealed much of the shape of her derriere. Pickering thought of himself, by and large, as a derriere man. This was one of the nicer derrieres he'd come across lately, and he gave it the careful study an object of beauty clearly deserved. Pity the owner was impressed with her role as an officer's wife.

And then he became aware that Gayfer was watching him stare.

"Some things do tend to catch one's eye, don't they?" Pick said.

There was not the understanding smile on Gayfer's face that he expected.

"I saw the wedding ring," Pick said. "No offense intended. Just a statement of appreciation."

"She's a widow," Gayfer said.

Pickering's eyebrows rose in question.

"Her name is Martha Culhane," Gayfer said. "Martha Sayre Culhane."

"Is that name supposed to mean something to me?" Pickering asked.

"Her father is Admiral Sayre," Gayfer said. "He's the number-three man at the Naval air station. Her husband is… was… a Marine pilot. He was killed at Wake Island."

"Oh, God!" Pickering said softly.

"She's not the only service wife around here to suddenly find herself a widow," Gayfer said. "This is a Navy town. But when she went home to her family, it was back into admiral's quarters on the base. I think that made it tougher for her. If she was back in Cedar Rapids or someplace, she wouldn't be surrounded by uniforms."

"What was she doing here this time of morning?"

"She hangs around the Marine fliers. The ones who were friends of her husband. They sort of take care of her."

Pickering would have liked an explanation of "hangs around" and "take care of her," but he suppressed the urge to ask for one.

No wonder, he thought, that she looked at me with such amused contempt.

"When you're through, I'll show you the suite," Gayfer said.

"I'm through," Pickering said, and stood up.

"Where's your car?" Gayfer asked as they entered the lobby.

The widow was standing, sidewards to him, by a stack of newspapers on the marble desk. Nice legs, Pickering thought idly, again, and then he saw how her skirt was drawn tight against her stomach, and his mind's eye was suddenly filled with a surprisingly clear image of her naked belly.

Goddamn you.' You sonofabitch! She's a widow, for Christ's sake. Her husband was shot down!

"Out in front," he replied to Gayfer.

"The Cadillac with the California plates?"

Pickering nodded.

"Give me the keys," Gayfer said, and Pickering handed them to him.

There was a new clerk behind the desk. Gayfer walked over to him, gave him the keys, told him to have the bellman bring the bags in the Cadillac convertible outside up to the penthouse, and then to put the Cadillac in the parking lot.

The widow (Martha Sayre Culhane, Pickering remembered), who couldn't help but overhear what Gayfer said, looked at Pickering with unabashed curiosity.

Gayfer, smiling, led Pickering to the elevator. When Pickering turned and faced front, Martha Sayre Culhane was still looking at him.

(Three)

Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, had learned from Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, USMCR, a number of things about the United States Marine Corps that were not taught in the Platoon Leader's Course at United States Marine Corps' Schools, Quantico.

One of them was that a commissioned officer of the United States Marine Corps was not required to use rail tickets issued to move officially from one place to another. Such rail tickets, Pickering had learned from McCoy, were issued for the officer's convenience.

"There's two ways to do it, Pick," McCoy had explained. "The best way, if you know they're going to issue orders, is to request TPA-Travel by Private Auto-first. If they give you that, they also give you duty time to make the trip… four, five hundred miles a day. Three days, in other words, to get from Washington to Pensacola. Then they pay you so much a mile.

"But even if you don't have TPA on your orders, you can take your car. You don't get any extra travel time, all you get is what it would have taken you to make the trip by train. But when you get there, you can turn in your ticket, and tell them you traveled TPA, and they'll still pay you by the mile."

There was more: "The duty day runs from oh-oh-oh-one to twenty-four hundred."

That had required explanation, and McCoy had furnished it.

"Whether it's one minute after midnight in the morning when you leave, or half-past eleven that night, that's one day. And whether you report in after midnight or twenty-three-and-a-half hours later, so far as the Corps is concerned, it's the same day. So the trick is to leave just after midnight, and report in just before midnight."

And there had been a final sage word of advice from McCoy: "And never report in early. You report in early, they'll find something for you to do between the time you reported in and when they expected you. Something nobody else wants to do, like counting spoons, or inspecting grease pits."

Second Lieutenant Pickering's orders, transferring him from U.S. Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C., to Navy Air Station, Pensacola, Florida, for the purpose of undergoing training as a Naval aviator, had given him a ten-day delay en route leave, plus the necessary time to make the journey by rail. The schedule for rail travel called for a forty-nine-hour journey. Since forty-nine hours was one hour more than two days, he had three full days to make the rail trip.

He had flown from his Authorized Leave Destination-in other words, New York City-to Atlanta, and then driven through the night to Pensacola. He had two days of travel time left when he got to Pensacola; and taking McCoy's advice as the Gospel, he had no intention of reporting in early and finding himself counting spoons or inspecting grease pits.

He went to bed in the penthouse suite of the San Carlos and slept through the day, rising in time for the cocktail hour. He had a couple of drinks at the bar, then dinner, and then a couple of more drinks. He looked for, but did not see, the Widow Culhane, and told himself this was idle curiosity, nothing more.

Suspecting that if he stayed in the bar, he would get tanked up, which would not be a smart thing for a just-reporting-in second lieutenant to do, he left the bar and wandered around downtown Pensacola.

It was, as Chester Gayfer had told him, a Navy town. Every third male on the streets was in Navy blue. There were fewer Marines, though, and most of them seemed to be officers. There were more service people on the streets of Pensacola, Pickering decided as he saluted for the twentieth or thirtieth time, than there were in Washington.

He went into the Bijou Theatre, taking advantage of the price reduction for servicemen, and watched Ronald Reagan playing a Naval aviator in a movie called Dive Bomber. He was fascinated with the airplanes, and with the notion-truth being stranger than fiction-that he might soon be flying an airplane himself.

When the movie was over (he had walked in in the middle) and the lights went up, he kept his seat and stayed for the Bugs Bunny cartoon and The March of Time, much of which was given over to footage of the "Arsenal of Democracy" gearing up its war production.