Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 09 - Under Fire

"You'll have to do that yourself, Honorable Zimmerman-san," Ernie said.

"Baby, I really need a bath," McCoy said. "You don't want to know where Ernie and I have been."

"I can make a good guess from the way you smell, hon-orable husband," Ernie said.

"The only difference between a Korean outhouse and a Korean rice field," Zimmerman said, "is that some of the outhouses have roofs."

Ernestine Sage McCoy, still playing the Japanese wife, put her hands in front of her chest, palms together, stood to one side, bowed, and indicated that her husband was sup-posed to go into the house.

The living room, too, was unchanged from the last time he'd been in the house. McCoy had presumed their furni-ture was in a shipping crate somewhere, but he didn't know. Ernie took care of the house and everything con-nected with it.

He walked through the living room into the bedroom, also unchanged. The sheets on the bed were even turned down. He stuck his head in the bathroom, saw towels on the racks, and went inside and started to undress. He really wanted to put his arms around Ernie, and he couldn't do that reeking of the mud of human feces-fertilized Korean rice fields.

When he was naked, he turned the shower on, stepped into the glass walled stall, and let the water run over him for a full minute before even trying to soap himself.

He closed his eyes when he soaped his head and hair and was startled after a moment when he felt Ernie's arms around him, her breasts pressing against his back.

He raised his face to the showerhead, and after a mo-ment opened his eyes and turned in his wife's arms and held her to him. She raised her face to his, and they kissed.

She caught his hand and directed it to her stomach.

"You want to tell me what's going on?" Ken McCoy asked.

Ernie was lying with her head on his chest, her legs thrown over his.

"Going on about what?"

"It's starting to show," she said, softly. He caressed her stomach for a moment, and then, with a groan, picked her up and carried her out of the shower to the bed.

"About everything," he said. "The house, the Japanese-wife routine. Everything."

"Well, they're sort of tied together," Ernie said.

"Start with the house," he said. "How did we get it back? General Pickering?"

"Actually, it's ours," Ernie said.

"What do you mean, `ours'?"

"We own it," she said.

"How come we own it?"

"Well, when I went to the housing office when we first came to Japan, what they were going to give us was a cap-tain's apartment-a captain/no children's apartment. They give out quarters on the size of the family. A captain/no children gets one bedroom and a bedroom/study. I didn't like what they showed me, and I knew you wouldn't, so I went house-hunting...."

"And bought this, and didn't tell me?"

"I didn't tell you because you thought our having money was going to hurt your Marine Corps career," she said. "I was willing to go along with that, but the quarters were dif-ferent. I didn't want to live in that lousy little apartment. You really want to hear all of this?"

"All of it," he said.

"Okay. If you don't like what they offer you, you can `go on the economy,' and if you can find something to rent that your housing allowance will pay for, they'll rent it for you."

"You said you bought it?"

"What you can rent on a captain's housing allowance is just about what they have, a dinky little apartment. So I made a deal with the Japanese real estate guy. I would buy this place. He would say he was renting it to me. They would send him a check for your housing allowance, which he would turn over to me."

"Jesus!"

"Then, when they sent us home, I figured it would sell better with furniture in it... No, that's not true. I wanted to sell the furniture, except for a few really personal things- that Ming vase we bought in Taipei, for example. When we started our new, out-of-the-Marine-Corps life, I didn't want you to remember, every time you sat on the couch or something, how they had crapped all over you."

McCoy said nothing.

"So it didn't sell while we were in the States," she said. "So when you and Uncle Flem came back, I called the real estate guy and told him to take it off the market. Then I de-cided, what the hell, since we have a house in Tokyo, there's no point in me staying in the States all by my fuck-ing lonesome." She paused. "Are you really pissed, honey?"

"I'm shocked, is what I am," he said. " `Fucking lone-some'? `Crapped all over you'? `Pissed'? What happened to that innocent lady I married?"

"She married a Marine, and she now knows all the dirty words," she said. "Answer the question."

He exhaled audibly.

"No," he said. "I can never be... pissed at you."

"Good, because there's more," Ernie said. "Now that we know how the Marine Corps paid you back for all your loyal service, I don't care if the goddamn Commandant himself knows we're well off-"

"You're well off," McCoy interrupted.

"-we're well off," Ernie repeated, firmly, even angrily. "Don't start that crap again, Ken. I've had enough of it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"And we're going to live like it," Ernie said, firmly.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?" she asked, as if she had expected an argument.

"Okay," he repeated.

"Starting tonight with dinner in the best restaurant in Tokyo," she said.

"Fine," he said.

"Well, with that out of the way," Ernie asked, "whatever shall we do now?"

Her hand moved sensually down from his neck over his chest and stomach.

"Hart said Pickering said I get thirty minutes, no more, `personal time' with my wife."

"Fuck him," Ernie said. "He can wait a couple of minutes. The whole fucking world can wait a couple of minutes." "My thoughts exactly," McCoy said.

[SEVEN]

Captain Kenneth R. McCoy, USMC, came out of his bed-room in a crisp uniform fresh from the dry-cleaning plant of the Imperial Hotel.

He was just a little light-headed. It was probably due, he thought, to the sudden change of uniform, from foul utili-ties to clean greens, from foul and heavy boondockers to highly shined low-quarter shoes, which felt amazingly light on his feet, and he was, of course, freshly bathed and shaved.

And freshly laid, he thought somewhat crudely. Freshly laid twice. It'll be a long goddamn time before those guys on the Clymer and Pickaway get to share any connubial bliss again. If they ever do.

Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman, USMC, simi-larly attired, was sitting in one of the armchairs in the liv-ing room with Captain George F. Hart. They both had a drink dark with scotch in one hand, and a bacon-wrapped oyster on a toothpick in the other.

"Do I live here now, or what?" Zimmerman asked. "From the way the room I took a shower in looks, it looks that way."

"There's plenty of room," McCoy said. "You, too, George."

"The boss wants me in the hotel, but thanks."

That's the difference between a reservist and a regular. I never think of General Pickering as anything but "the gen-eral," and neither does Zimmerman. George thinks of him as "the boss." And George is perfectly comfortable with that drink in his hand at three o `clock in the afternoon, and I was just about to jump Ernie's ass about it.

Fuck it. We're entitled to a drink.

He walked to the bar and made himself a drink.

"How come we never came here before?" Zimmerman asked.

"I didn't know until fifteen minutes ago that Ernie owns this place," McCoy said. "Until then, I thought it was GI quarters; that we'd given them up when they sent me to the States."

"Ernie bought this?" Hart asked.

"Ernie didn't like the GI quarters," McCoy said.

"Good for her," Zimmerman said. "Mae-Su got us out of officer's housing at Parris Island just as soon as she could get a house built in Beaufort."