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

Ernest Sage nearly choked on a shrimp. "Good God, honey!" he said.

"I'm a chip-maybe a chippie?-off the old block," Ernie said, "who is frequently prone to suggest that people 'cut the crap.'"

"Whatever you are-and that probably includes a fool," Ernest Sage said, "you're not a chippie."

"Thank you, Daddy," Ernie said. "I'm sorry you missed him, too. I think you would have liked him."

"At the moment, I doubt that," he said. "I wonder what the penalty is for shooting a Marine?"

"In this case, the electric chair, plus losing your daughter," Ernie said.

"That bad, eh?" her father said, looking at her.

She nodded.

"God, you're only twenty-one."

"So's he," she said. "Which means that we're both old enough to vote, et cetera, et cetera."

"Okay, so tell me about him," Ernest Sage said.

"Mother hasn't?" Ernie asked, as she finished her last shrimp.

"I'd rather hear it from you," he said.

"He's very unsuitable," Ernie Sage said. "We have nothing in common. He has no money and no education."

"That's the debit side," her father said. "Surely there is a credit?"

"Pick likes him so much he almost calls him 'sir,'" Ernie

said.

Her father nodded. "Well, that's something," he said.

"He speaks Chinese and Japanese… and some others."

"I'm impressed," her father said.

"No, you're not," Ernie said. "You're looking for an opening. I'm not going to give you one. Not that it would matter if I did. You're just going to have to adjust to this, Daddy."

"You're thinking of marriage, obviously?"

"I am," she said. "He's not."

"Any particular reason? Or is he against marriage on general principles?"

"He's against girls marrying Marine officers during wartime," she said. "For the obvious reasons."

"Well, there's one other point in his favor," her father said. "He's right about that. There's nothing sadder than a young widow with a fatherless child."

"Except a young widow without a child," Ernie Sage said.

"That doesn't make any sense, Ernie," he said sternly. "And you know it."

"I'm tempted to debate that," she said. "It's not as if I would have to go rooting in garbage cans to feed the little urchin. But it's a moot point. Ken agrees with you. There will be no child. Not now."

He looked at her for a long moment before he spoke again.

"You have to look down the line, honey," he said. "And you have to look at things the way they are, not the way you would wish them to be. Have you considered, really considered, what your life with this young man would be, removed from this initial flush of excitement, without the thrill…?"

"I had occasion to consider what my life would be like without him," Ernie said. "He was reported missing and presumed dead. I died inside."

He looked at her with curiosity on his face.

"He's an intelligence officer," she said. "He was in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. For a week they thought he was dead. But he wasn't, and he came home, and I came back to life."

Ernest Sage looked at his daughter, his tongue moving behind his lip as it did when he was in deep thought. "There seems to be only one thing I can do about this situation, honey," he said finally. "I go see your young man, carrying a shotgun, and demand that he do right by my daughter. Would you like me to do that?"

She got up and bent over her father and put her arms around him and kissed him. And laughed. "Thank you, Daddy," she said. "But no thanks."

"Why is that funny?" he asked.

"There is one little detail I seem to have skipped over. He didn't tell me. Pick did. They call him 'Killer' McCoy in the Marine Corps."

"Because of the Philippines? What he did there?"

"What he did in China," Ernie said. "I think I'll skip the. details, but I think threatening him with a shotgun, or anything' else, would be very dangerous."

"I'd love to hear the details," her father said.

"He was once attacked by four Italian Marines," Ernie said, after obviously thinking it over. "He killed two of them."

"My God!"

"And, another time, he was attacked by a gang of Chinese bandits," she went on. "He killed either twelve or fourteen of them. Nobody knows for sure."

"I think we can spare your mother those stories," her father said.

"You asked," she said simply.

"Have you considered, honey, that just maybe-considering your background-"

She interrupted him by laughing again. "That I am thrilled by close association with a killer?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I fell in love with him, Daddy," she said, "the first time I saw him. When I thought he was some friend of Pick's from Harvard. He was sitting on the patio wall of one of the penthouse suites at the Foster Park. The very first thought I had about Ken was that the Marine Corps was crazy if they thought they could take someone so gentle, so sweet, so vulnerable, and turn him into an officer."

"And when you found out what he's really like?"

"I found that out the same day," Ernie Sage said. "I didn't find out about the Italians and the Chinese until later."

Her father looked at her (she met his eyes, but her face did blush a little) until he was sure he had correctly taken her meaning, then asked, "When do I get to meet Mr. Wonderful?"

"Soon," she said. "Now that he's back in Washington, he doesn't think they'll be sending him anywhere else. Not soon, anyway."

Twenty minutes after Miss Ernestine Sage returned to her office at J. Walter Thompson, she received a telephone call from Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, USMCR, from Washington, D.C.

Lieutenant McCoy told Miss Sage that he had been transferred to a Marine base near San Diego, California. He would write. Or call, if he had access to a phone. He was sorry, but there would be no chance for him to come to New York; he was getting in the car the moment he got off the phone.

If he was going by car, Miss Sage argued, there was no reason he couldn't go to the West Coast by way of New York. If not New York, then Philadelphia. If she left right now from New York, she could be at the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia just about the time he could get there by car from Washington.

"Honey, goddamnit," Miss Sage argued. "You can't go without saying good-bye."

Lieutenant McCoy agreed to meet Miss Sage at the Thirtieth Street Station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia.

"But that's it, baby," Lieutenant McCoy said. "There won't be any time for anything else."

"I'll be standing on the curb," Ernie Sage said, and hung up.

(One)

The San Carlos Hotel Pensacola, Florida 8 January 1942

When Pick Pickering woke in the morning, he decided he would not go to the coffee shop for breakfast. It was entirely possible that Captain Mustache would be there. And Pick was not anxious to run into Carstairs again, not after the captain had eaten his ass out for being sloppy and unshaven. And there was a good chance that Martha Sayre Culhane would be there as well. He couldn't quite interpret them, but he saw danger flags flying in the territories occupied by the blond widow with the flat tummy and the marvelous derriere.

Discretion was obviously the better part of valor, Pick decided, if he decided to find some gentle breast on which to lay his weary head while he was in Pensacola, he would find one that did not belong to the widow of a Marine aviator who was not only the daughter of an admiral but who was also surrounded by noble protectors of her virtue. There was no reason at all to play with fire.

He called room service and had breakfast on his patio, surprised and disappointed that the orange juice had come from a can. This was supposed to be Sunny Florida-with orange trees. He tasted the puddle of grits beside his eggs and grimaced. There must be two Floridas, he decided, the one he knew and the one he was condemned to endure now. On Key Biscayne, which was the Florida he knew, the Biscayne Foster would not dream of serving canned orange juice or, for that matter, grits.