John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

And just then Colonel Billy Brice, the Corps artillery specialist, wearing only the important bits of fruit salad, came barreling up, scowling like thunder, and gave Mike a punishing smack on the biceps and said, “If I’d known what you were going to send off Saipan, you son of a bitch, I’d have shot you myself.”

“Always a pleasure to write up one of my heroes, Colonel, sir.”

Brice gave him a tight grin. “Or maybe you could have saved me the trouble on the Canal, zigging instead of zagging. Say, I got an old drinking buddy of yours on my staff. Jamison. I took him off the line three months ago. He’d had his share.”

“Where is he?”

“Stick around. He should show.” Brice strode off.

“Isn’t that Billy Brice?” the fat one said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I caught your name,” the thin one said hesitantly.

“Mike Rodenska.”

“Bell Syndicate?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ!” the fat one said. “I thought you’d be older. You been out here since the Crusades. Was I telling you all about island warfare? Jesus Christ.”

It was one of the pleasurable moments in a long war.

Captain Troy Jamison arrived about twenty minutes later. By then the club had gotten too noisy for coherent conversation. They walked down and sat on the docks in the chilly night, with a bottle to keep the chill off. They talked half the night. Troy had seen more than his share. He was no longer ill at ease about being an officer. He had lost a lot of his people. It had rarely been his fault. And he had protected and saved a lot of his people, and that had always been his design, within the range of his orders.

It was, Mike thought, a narrow maturity, an encapsulated and forced version which left the eyes old and the mouth still young. He had seen a lot of it, and seen it in death when the eyes were merely empty, and the mouth forever young.

“One last island,” Troy said in the night, “the biggest one of all, and that ends it. I feel so goddamn remote. Once upon a time I wrote a hell of a lot of copy about a new shopping center. And kissed a girl named Bunny. Hell, Mike, I’ve got to go back into that and it’s got to become important again. That’s the deal. Is it going to become important?”

“For nearly everybody.”

Troy offered the bottle, then killed it and hurled it into Naha Bay. “I wanted a lot. But in a dreamy half-assed way. Now I’m going to want a lot — more than my share. And one damn way or another, I’m going to get it. What do you want?”

“I didn’t have the same war you did, Cap.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“Mom’s apple pie.”

“Screw you, Rodenska.”

“Twice on Tuesdays. I’m a newspaper bum. All I want is my byline. And Buttons. And beer. Alliteration.”

“Now without drama, Mike. Listen. Some of the guys I had, they’ll never even begin to find their way back. And there are some who’ll have no trouble at all. I can see them, but I can’t see me. I’d just like to know how I’m going to be.”

“You’re going to be fine.”

They were on the same dock with another bottle early in the evening when word came that it was over. Within a half hour the six hundred ships in the area and most of the shore installations were hurling bright hardware into the sky. By then they had a bottle apiece and they crawled under a Navy warehouse. Twenty-one men died that night when the fragments of celebration fell out of the sky and down on their joyous heads. There were a million men on the island, all suddenly technologically unemployed.

“You seem to be breathing,” the girl said. Mike, startled, rolled up onto one elbow and stared at her. She sat cross-legged in the sand beside his towel, wearing a yellow swim suit. He had been so far away it took him several sun-bleared moments to remember where he was and identify her as Debbie Ann, Mary’s pretty daughter.

“Hello. Slow reaction time. I was fighting an old war.”

“That’s where you and Troy got to know each other?”

“That’s right.” He could not avoid an instinctive wariness where Debbie Ann was concerned. He knew she was twenty-three, but she managed to look fifteen. Her voice was thin and high and childish, and he suspected that the effect was intentional. She had been Deborah Ann Dow, and then she had, without adequate warning to her mother or stepfather, left Wellesley to become Mrs. Dacey Hunter of Clewiston, Virginia, for two years. Troy had told Mike about her on the drive down from Tampa. Debbie Ann had her own money from Bernard Dow’s estate. Last August she had come back to stay with them and, six months later, in accordance with the Florida divorce laws, she had become Mrs. Deborah Dow Hunter.

But she looked fifteen, and she was very pretty, and she looked like trouble. She was a little girl, with rusty-blond hair and delicate, rather pointed features. She had a flavor of wanton mockery about her, of sexual cynicism. She gave an erroneous impression of plumpness, despite her obvious — at a distance — slenderness.

On the way back from Tampa, Troy had said, “I don’t know how long she’ll stay, but Mary is happy to have her home again. The two of them stopped off with us for a week in fifty-seven when they were on a four-month honeymoon. Mary was sick about it. Hunter was about thirty-five then. Big red-faced type. Traveled with a lot of expensive gear. Bottle-a-day man. Called up friends all over the country. Gave Debbie Ann a belt across the fanny every time she got within reach. Then he took her back to his horse farm to live.”

“Why did they break up?”

“She never said. I’d guess that after sex wore a little thin, he bored her. She gets good alimony until she marries again. The closest she came to telling us why it went sour was when she said she got sick of being cooped up in the old homestead with a lot of Hunter women around clucking over her narrow pelvis while Dacey went galloping cross-country tipping over all his old girlfriends in box stalls.”

Debbie Ann slowly scratched a bug welt on a perfect shin and said, frowningly, “I get the scoop that Daddy Troy was on the heroic side. Or is that a new family legend?”

“He was good. He had a squad and then a platoon and then a company, and he earned it every time.”

“Somehow it doesn’t fit.”

“He was twenty-three when I met him, Debbie Ann.”

“Oh, I don’t mean age. I’m not stupid, Mike. Anyhow, after my own father, Troy seems more like my generation. It made Mary a little jumpy at first, marrying Troy, worrying about what her friends would think, I guess. Daddy’d been dead two years, and he was nearly sixty when he died. More like my grandfather, I guess. I never did get to know him real well.”

“I didn’t know there was such a big difference in Mary’s age and your own father’s age.”

“He married her when she was eighteen, and she had me when she was nineteen. He was a business associate of my grandfather. And he fell in love with Mary. He’d never been married. There was a lot of opposition. But it worked out. It was a good marriage, and Mother told me once she didn’t really fall in love with him until after she had me. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about age, talking about Troy.”

“About what, then?”

“Skip it. I can’t explain it. How long did the party go on after I left with Rob? You met him, didn’t you? Rob Raines, the earnest attorney. I’ve known him forever.”

“I remember meeting him. When I folded at one, the party was still going on.”

“Rob brought me back about three. I was afraid he woke you up, the fuss he made. Did he?”

“Didn’t hear a thing.”

She sighed. “We left here and went to a damn beach party. A couple of miles down the Key. I used to adore them when I was young and gaudy. But I’ve outgrown them, I guess. Charred meat and drinks that taste of paper cup, and a zillion bugs and somebody who can’t quite play a guitar, and dirty songs and somebody throwing up and then the inevitable routine — a prolonged interval of skinny-dipping in the romantical moonlight. I feel all over fingerprints. I swear to God I thought at one point Rob was making a sincere effort to drown me, but all he had on his mind was some sort of amphibious lovemaking. He was a good kid, but he certainly has turned out pretty self-important and dull.”