Читать книгу Honolulu Story - Leslie Ford - Страница 6

THE THIRD TIME TOMMY DAWSON SAID, “JEEPERS, it’s time for us to go home,” I realized it was double talk, and not meant for himself alone of the three boys there. The only move he’d made when he said it was forward in his chair a little until some gal with bare brown arms and legs and a red or yellow hibiscus in her black hair had passed along the street out of sight of his roving eyes.

The four of us—Tommy Dawson, Dave Boyer, Swede Ellicott and I—were sitting in the broad open lounge of the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. The three of them were lieutenants in the Army Air Force, back from the Marianas for ten days’ rest. And I thought, at the time, that I was Grace Latham, just arrived in Honolulu from Washington, D. C., on what they call “invitational orders.” They seemed important and even impressive the day they were issued, but they were a snare and a delusion, as perhaps I should have realized before I heard any one else say so. It’s clear to me now that what I actually was was nothing other than a plain booby-trap, the brain child of my old friend Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers U. S. Army (Retired) and acting special agent in Military Intelligence. And no doubt it’s the chief reason why Colonel Primrose’s guard, philosopher and friend, and self-styled “functotum,” Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, doesn’t really have to worry—dreadfully though he does—about his colonel’s ever marrying me. He’d have to find another lady fall guy if he did.

Tommy Dawson craned his red head forward again. “Baby!”

Dave Boyer growled irritably.

“Oh, shut up. For cripe’s sake lay off, can’t you?”

His sensitive sun-blackened face went a shade darker and his mouth tightened. Of the three he was the only one who looked as if he really needed the rest he’d been sent back to get. The casual way he sat there was deceptive, but his finger nails were chewed down to the quick. Twice Tommy Dawson had stuck a foot out, given him a quiet nudge and said, “Hi, boy,” and I’d seen the hunted shadow in his brown eyes disappear as he’d raised his thumb and forefinger in a circle with a quick “Okay, thanks.” But he was sore now.

“Just lay off,” he said. “For about ten seconds.”

Tommy Dawson lay back in his chair, grinning.

“Why, David,” he said. “My dear old friend and brother officer, don’t get me wrong. All I’m saying is, I can’t take it. I just can’t take lolling here in this whispering paradise of sunlight and palm trees. It’s sapping my fiery determination to win the Pacific war single-handed. Listen to the sapphire wavelets caressing the silver strand. Listen to the haunting melody of romance floating through the tender moonlit stillness——”

“Just shut up, is all I said.”

The only haunting melody of romance audible at the moment was coming from the juke box across the streaming Sunday afternoon madhouse of Kalakaua Avenue, and it was all but drowned out by the jeeps and taxis and buses and the shrill congress of mynah birds in the palm tree outside. The wide street, glaring white in the intense clarity of the afternoon sunlight, was a swarm of sailors and seabees, soldiers and marines. A few of them were with girls—Waves, Wacs and the little lady Marines in their bright green and scarlet and white. A few were with the civilian girls with bare brown arms and legs and red or yellow hibiscus in their coal-black hair. Most of them hunted singly or in packs. They jammed the curio shops with the grass skirts in the windows. They stood endlessly in line for food or a movie or a bus to take them somewhere to stand in other lines for food or a movie or a bus to take them somewhere else, wishing to a man they were back at the corner drug store on Main Street.

To our left across the lounge, the line to the dining room already stretched half the length of the lanai. GI’s and sailors, officers and men and an occasional civilian, stood drearily inching forward, paying no attention to the sapphire wavelets on the famous beach at Waikiki. It was just at the end of the crowded courtyard, within what Sergeant Buck would have called spitting distance and could easily have proved it. The silver strand was hardly visible for sun-tanned bodies, but beyond it were thousands of blue miles of ocean, as calm as an inland lake except where the long low rollers broke for an instant in great white feathers on the coral reef. Surfboards and a few outrigger canoes gave it a slight touch of the tourist ads, a semi-tropical Coney Island, but chiefly the whole scene was like a cross between the Grand Central Station and Market Street when the Fleet’s in.

Tommy Dawson’s hair was red, his face freckled, and he had in him what Lilac, who’s my cook and friend in my house on P Street in Georgetown, District of Columbia, calls a devil as big as a house.

“Jeepers!” he said again.

Dave Boyer’s lean body moved.

“—Relax, David. Just relax.”

Swede Ellicott reached a long leisurely arm out of the deep wicker chair beside Tommy and knocked the dottle out of his pipe into the ash stand between them. He was big and blond and unhurried. The Central Pacific had bleached his eyebrows so they looked like thick patches of straw above his light blue eyes. His face was burned and weather-beaten, not handsome and in fact far from it, and curiously ingenuous, I thought, for anything so rugged and hard-bitten. He had the casual matter-of-fact air that seems to be as much a part of a flyer’s uniform as the dog-eared nonchalance of his cap.

“Don’t pay him no mind, David,” he said placidly. “I’m deaf. I ain’t heard nothin’ he been sayin’.—Hullo, they must be looking for somebody.”

He pointed out the window. I saw two small planes that looked like white birds flying very low against the back drop of the mountain range above the city. They were moving so slowly that they looked stationary until they banked and wheeled back, mounting a little higher each time until they were against the blue sky.

We had all bent down and looked at them, and we were all silent for a moment, watching them. I can believe, now, that we were each aware of some subtle kind of premonitory warning, coming maybe out of the deep substratum of primitive mysticism that’s lingered on in the Hawaiian atmosphere in spite of the missionaries and in spite of modern science. I don’t insist on it, but we were silent, for a moment, watching those searching planes, and no one else seemed to be interested, and it was the four of us, of all the people there in the Moana lobby or on the street, who were to be caught up and vitally affected . . . Swede Ellicott, who’d noticed them first and commented on them, the most vitally and fundamentally of us all.

Maybe, of course, it was only because Swede and the other two were just back from an area where it’s important to be acutely conscious of any plane that’s acting in an unusual fashion. But there were other flyers just back too, not even aware of the two white ships, searching, against the hills and the sky. And we dismissed them at once, rejecting the warning if it was a warning. We’d not heard then that a sentry had been killed on the other side of the Island, or that a man had come up out of the Pacific Ocean who had forfeited every right of God or man to set his foot ever again on Hawaii nei so long as he lived. Nor did we recognize, a very few minutes later, in what appeared to be a purely personal matter between the three boys and a girl, another stone in the bridge already building that would reach, when it was finished, far across the grim valley where death sits, waiting.

Swede Ellicott turned back to me.

“How’s Washington, Grace? And how’s the ancient and honorable, my aunt?”

Up to that point none of the three had so much as mentioned Washington, not even in asking what kind of a flight I’d had and when I started on it. Since it was in Washington I’d seen them last, and had met them in the first place, when the three of them and a boy named Ben Farrell were keeping what is sometimes called bachelor hall at Swede’s aunt’s place next door to mine, I’d assumed they were avoiding the whole subject with reason. I was avoiding it with what I thought was tact.

The reason was a girl named Mary Cather. The tact was because I’d never been very sure as to what had happened. I knew they’d all been in love with her and that Swede Ellicott had been engaged to marry her. It was one of those things that happen with the speed and brilliance of light, for Swede and Mary. The enchantment she wore like a star in her shining gold hair that night wasn’t visible to me, but it was devastating magic to the three young men who’d just got their wings, and to Ben Farrell newly commissioned in the Marine Corps. It wasn’t a full two days later before Swede told me they were going to be married. Right away, he said, but I knew Mary’s mother would see to that, and probably Swede’s aunt, because Mary was a stranger in Washington. She was there with her mother as a reluctant evacuée from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, resenting it silently but bitterly. That may, of course, have been part of the magic glamor she had for the four boys that night. It was definitely part of the situation there that moment when we were sitting in the lobby of the Moana Hotel, because Mary Cather was back in Honolulu.

Her engagement to Swede hadn’t lasted very long. It was about three months, in fact, from the night they met at my house, that Mrs. Cather called on me and told me it was broken. She didn’t say why, except that Swede had acted very badly. She also said Mary was being very difficult. It had been too sudden to last, anyway, she thought, and she’d been opposed to it from the beginning—which I think was not quite correct. She was genuinely disturbed about Mary, there was no doubt of that, though why again she didn’t say. Chiefly what she said was she was determined their paths should not cross again. If I ever heard from Swede’s aunt next door that Swede was coming back, she wanted me to let her know so she could take Mary to New York until he left. She didn’t want them ever to meet again. Swede’s aunt, on the other hand, a very rigid Washington cave-dweller of the old and almost extinct species, maintained a tight-lipped silence about the whole thing, including Swede, even when I asked her how and where he was.

So it was a peculiarly ironic full turn of the wheel for Swede Ellicott to be here in Honolulu when Mary had just returned from the Mainland, their paths converging at the crossroads of the Pacific. Whether they were going to do more than converge and actually cross was in a sense in my hands just then . . . and I’d been thinking about it, not too happily, ever since I’d taken down the phone that afternoon and heard Swede’s voice at the other end. All three of them had avoided mentioning Mary Cather, but I wasn’t sure that now they’d got around to Washington and Swede’s aunt they wouldn’t get around to her.

“Washington’s fine,” I said. I went on for a moment about the ghastly winter and about Swede’s aunt. Then I stopped, aware that neither he nor either of the other two was hearing a word I was saying. None of them had moved, but their attention was fixed, intense and concentrated, out of the open window. There was a curious light in Swede’s eyes that neither of the others had. All three of them were staring at a girl coming quickly along, out there, through a barrage of quite uninhibited public admiration.

I glanced back at Tommy Dawson, expecting to hear a really heartfelt “Jeepers!” this time. The girl didn’t have a hibiscus in her hair, but she had a carnation lei around her neck and she was certainly the type. She had dark, almond-shaped eyes and high, full cheekbones and her lips were very red, and she came through the uniformed stag line that opened and formed again behind her with the smiling assurance of a veteran, slim and lithe and quite unabashed. But Tommy Dawson was silent, his lips tight. Dave Boyer’s eyes burned with a sharp antagonism that he looked down abruptly to conceal.

Swede Ellicott took one foot down slowly from the sofa, then the other, and got up, not looking at either of them.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got to shove.” He put on his cap and pulled it down in back. “Nice seeing you, Mrs. Latham. I’ll give you a call. So long. So long, you guys.”

“So long,” Tommy said. It was clipped off so short that Swede hesitated an instant. He turned and made his way deliberately across the lounge and toward the main entrance and the girl with the carnation lei.

It wasn’t hard to see where she was. Being a woman in a practically womanless hotel lobby she was where everybody was looking. Even the men waiting with duffel bags and blue and khaki canvas gripsacks at the elevator brightened up and looked as long as she was alone. As she spotted Swede Ellicott all heads turned in unison to look at him. It was a curious pantomime, and so was her meeting with Swede. It was obviously prearranged and she was perfectly aware of Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer in our corner. She glanced over and turned back, laughing up at Swede. He didn’t look around, not even when they got into a taxi outside and passed directly by the open window where we were sitting, the silence between the two men about as grim as silence can be.

I was silent too. Any idea I’d had of mentioning Mary Cather I decided to put quietly away until I knew what was going on. Where Swede Ellicott’s interest was at the moment was all too clear, and something I would never for an instant have thought of. The fact that Tommy and Dave were taking it as they did was a relief to me. I’d have hated to think I was shocked at anything they would take for granted.

When Dave Boyer spoke his voice was abrupt and bitter, and he had to make an effort to keep it steady.

“I told you to lay off.”

“Nuts,” Tommy said. “She’s got him hooked. He hasn’t got a prayer—not a whisper. I wish to——”

He turned to look at Dave and stopped.

“Steady!” he said quietly. “Come on—take it easy, boy. Come on, David—snap!”

Dave Boyer was quite white and his hands holding his pipe were shaking.

“She hasn’t got him,” he whispered. “It’s not going to happen—not again. She’s not going to marry Swede.”

His voice rose. “By God I’ll kill her first.”

“—Easy, boy.”

I don’t suppose I actually repeated the words “marry Swede,” but they were certainly framed on my lips. I couldn’t believe I’d heard them. It wasn’t possible. Swede Ellicott must be out of his mind to think of marrying a girl . . . I hesitated. I knew nothing about her, only that regardless of everything else she was of an alien race. I looked blankly at the two boys.

Tommy Dawson glanced around us. The strangled intensity of Dave Boyer’s voice had carrying power. Only the mynah birds and the traffic and the general din of too many people in too small a space had kept what he’d said from being a public declaration.

“—I wouldn’t,” he said quietly. “It isn’t Corinne’s fault. She’d never have got to first base by herself. It’s that she-buzzard in Washington.”

It hardly seemed to me the way to speak of my next door neighbor, though I did have a sneaking feeling there was something to be said for the point of view. But inasmuch as Swede had at least politely referred to her as the ancient and honorable his aunt, I couldn’t see what she had to do with the situation this far out in the Pacific. She would certainly be the last person in the world to approve of the girl with the carnation lei.

Dave Boyer looked at him. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “You’re right.”

Tommy Dawson pulled in his long legs and got up. “I guess I was right in more ways than one,” he said. “I guess it’s time for us to go home too. There’s a bus pretty soon. Come on, David.”

He put out a sunburned freckled hand.

“That’s the only thing we’ve ever held against you, lady,” he said. “We were four happy Joes—calabash brothers, they call ’em here—till you brought the little Cather into our lives. And the little Cather’s ma. It was a lousy deal, lady. Now one of us is dead on her account, and the big Swede . . .”

He tried to grin.

“Well, the big Swede wouldn’t have been a pushover for this babe you just saw if your friend Mrs. Cather hadn’t pulled a fast one the minute he got his back turned. That’s how she got poor old Ben. We’re damned if she’s going to marry the Swede too. So . . . the big Swede’s on your head—do what you can, will you?”

He dropped my hand and turned to pick up his cap. “Come on, David. Let’s shove. Let’s get the hell out. Let’s get the hell back to Saipan. . . .”

I sat there for several minutes simply staring after them, upset and shaken. Ben Farrell, the fourth of what they’d called the Organization when they came to batch next door to me, was dead, and he’d been married to the half-Japanese girl. And it wasn’t Swede’s aunt they were calling a she-buzzard. It was Alice Cather . . . the little Cather’s ma. The whole thing was incredible. Above all, how either Mary or her mother could be responsible for either Ben’s death or his marriage, was more than I could conceive. Or how they could call Alice Cather what they had, for that matter. If Alice was a she-buzzard she was also a genius at camouflage. I didn’t know her intimately, but I did know her well enough to know that much. Between her saying Swede had behaved very badly and Tommy’s obviously sincere conviction that both she and Mary had behaved worse, I was stranded on an unhappy and bewildering middle ground. I was very glad indeed that I hadn’t told Tommy or Dave—or Swede—that the two of them, Mary and her mother, were there in Honolulu, or that as soon as they left I was going to the Cathers’ to have dinner and spend the night.