Pacific Glory

EIGHT

After a bath, Glory slipped into a muumuu and went out to the verandah of the nurses’ quarters. It was just after midnight, and she had brought down one lone cigarette. Everyone she knew at the hospital smoked, but she consumed precisely two a day: one with her first morning coffee, and another before going to bed at night. She smoked in private because her mother had drilled it into her that ladies did not smoke in public. In these days of global war, Glory knew those rules of female propriety were hopelessly old-fashioned, and yet she still abided by them whenever she could.

The moon was somewhere behind the building, but the night was clear with just a hint of a tropic breeze coming in from Diamond Head. The bougainvillea was in bloom, along with a few stray orchids. It was almost too beautiful, she thought. Sally had said she’d be delighted to write to Glory’s “handsome” lieutenant commander, as long as Glory did, too. Glory had promised to write and then realized she didn’t have his address. She’d have to check with the Fleet Post Office to find out how to send mail to the USS Evans. Or perhaps not, she mused. If Sally struck up a warm correspondence, then she wouldn’t have to.

She heard voices coming from the darkness of the street. The Pearl Harbor blackout was still being observed, so there were no streetlights. Finally she saw shapes moving up the sidewalk toward the nurses’ quarters. Four nurses in uniform were accompanied by a tall, dark-haired man wearing khakis. The girls were giggling like teenagers surrounding a movie star, and Glory guessed this must be the new surgeon everyone in the nurses’ lounge had been talking about. What was he doing here?

She rubbed out the cigarette on the rocker of the chair and bent forward to get up and go inside. Then she realized she was naked under the flimsy muumuu, a fact that would be obvious to anyone who saw her in the doorway. She sat back down and adjusted the fabric so that it draped less revealingly.

The nurses came up the walkway, saw Glory, and happily introduced her to Dr. Stembridge. He was indeed tall, dark, and very handsome, and his voice was soft and refined, with a hint of New York City.

“Nurse Hawthorne,” he said, taking her hand and squeezing it gently. He had to bow slightly because Glory had remained seated, and it seemed a movement to which he was accustomed. His hand was soft and rock-hard at the same time, a surgeon’s hand.

“Doctor,” she replied. “Welcome to Pearl.”

“Oh, c’mon, Glory,” one of the girls said. “Say aloha — we’re in Hawaii!”

“I don’t speak Hawaiian,” Glory said. “I think it sounds silly when Americans use their words.”

There was much rolling of eyes and then several giggling good-nights and thanks-for-walking-us-backs. The verandah emptied out quickly, but Stembridge hesitated. He appeared to be sniffing the air.

“Is that bougainvillea?” he asked rhetorically. He went to the side of the verandah. “I haven’t smelled that since a trip to the Botanical Gardens. And those look like orchids.”

“Yes, all of that grows almost wild here,” she said from her rocking chair. “If you like flowers, you’ll love Hawaii.”

He came back and sat down sideways on the top step. “You’re an OR supervisor, correct?” he asked.

“Yes, I am. OR Two.”

“Super,” he said. “I look forward to working with you. Where did you train, if I may ask?”

“Penn,” she said.

“Very good,” he said. “That’s a first-rate school. Have you been working since you graduated?”

“We got married at the Naval Academy after Tommy’s graduation,” she explained, “but then he went to sea right away, and so I went to work. There were a few years where I didn’t work, but mostly I stayed with it. It paid better than the Navy.”

“Most anything does,” he said with a wry smile. “Is your husband in the Pacific Fleet?”

“For all eternity,” she said. “He was MPA — assistant engineer — in Arizona.”

He inhaled and then blew out a long breath before replying. “Wow,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t left Hawaii.”

“They needed me, especially right after the attack. They offered me a commission immediately, and I took it and moved on base. Our apartment downtown got requisitioned, so, if nothing else, I needed a home, I guess.”

“Makes perfect sense.”

“Then 1942 wasn’t such a great year, either. So here I still am.”

“Inertia has its way, doesn’t it,” he said. “I know how that works. I lost my wife and two children early last year. A truck hit them head-on. The Merritt Parkway, of all places. Not supposed to be trucks on that road. Turned out the driver was drunk.”

It was her turn to say wow.

“I was working in New York City at the time. I took a month off, found myself going crazy, so I went back to the grind. It just seemed like the thing to do.”

“Yes, exactly,” she said. A breeze came up and stirred the fabric of her muumuu, pressing it against her breasts. She sensed that he was looking.

“Now I smell lilacs,” he said. “Let me guess: This is the end of a long day, you’ve just had a bath, and then put on some lilac water.”

She felt her cheeks redden. That was precisely what she had done. Her rearrangement of the fabric hadn’t worked at all. She suddenly felt exposed.

“Sorry,” he said, putting up a hand. “My wife used to do that, too. In fact, the lilac water was our secret signal.”

“Secret signal?”

“You know. You were married. I’d be working late, reviewing records in my study, and she’d show up wearing not much at all. I’d smell the lilacs and then she’d be right there.” He laughed softly. “As in, time for bed, and now would be nice.”

She felt her breath catch. She and Tommy had done something very similar. She looked straight ahead, really feeling the red in her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve embarrassed you again, haven’t I. I’ll go now. It’s been a pleasure to meet you and talk a little. Tomorrow it will be much more formal, I assure you.”

“Good night, Doctor,” she managed.

He nodded, doing that formal little bow in the process of starting down the steps.

“You didn’t embarrass me, by the way,” she called after him. “You just caught me unawares.”

He turned around. “That happens to me all the time,” he said. “I keep telling myself I’ll get used to it, but then I wonder. Good night.”

The next time Glory saw Surgeon Stembridge was in OR Two. The patient was a Marine with a through-and-through gunshot wound to the chest. One lung had been partially compromised, and a rib had been shattered near the exit wound. The patient had been prepped and anesthetized by the time Stembridge entered the OR from the scrub room. He came to the side of the operating table and introduced himself to the nurses.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said. “I’m Dr. Allan Forrest Stembridge, thoracic surgeon. Please tell me your names, and a little bit about your training.”

Glory, being the senior nurse, went first, describing her nurse’s training and her work experience. She was followed by the other four nurses. Ordinarily there would have been another surgeon present, but the naval hospital was running five operating rooms, and with a heavy flow of casualties coming in from the climax of the Solomons campaign, there were no spare surgeons. Stembridge took it all on board, listening carefully and with such fierce eye-to-eye concentration that a few of the nurses stumbled with their résumés.

“Thank you,” he said. “My turn. I’m forty-six, graduated from Brown and then Harvard Medical College. I’ve been doing thoracic surgery for fourteen years, lately specializing in traumatic injury. This will be our first operation together. I will debrief Nurse Lewis when we’re finished, and she will in turn debrief you.”

He then asked the anesthesiologist if the patient was stable and ready for surgery. The doctor tending the mask said that the patient was stable but somewhat precarious, having only one functioning lung. Stembridge glanced up at the X-rays hanging from light boxes above the table.

“Super,” he said. “Then we’ll need to go fast. Ladies, step up, please.”

Ninety minutes later he was done, and Glory was exhausted. Stembridge had become like some kind of a machine, cutting swiftly and seemingly without a pause to see what he’d done or where he was going. Neither of those things appeared to have been in question, ever. The quiet scramble to keep up with him had had some of the younger nurses tripping over each other to get instruments into those ever-demanding hands. Prior to closing he had announced the sponge count, in and out. Glory, as supervisor, always kept a running count, and he was right on. Usually the surgeons roughly kept track but really depended on one of the nurses to make damned sure.

When they were finished, Stembridge left the table to go sit down in a far corner of the OR for a few minutes before the next surgery began. The anesthesiologist, an older doctor, nearing sixty, gave out a low whistle as they began their preps to remove the Marine to recovery.

“Superman,” he murmured. “He’s here.”

Glory took off her mask, hairnet, and gloves. “That was pretty amazing,” she whispered.

“Let’s see how he does after six of ’em,” the gas-passer said.

“That kid going to live?” Glory asked.

“Maybe,” the doctor said, “but probably not. Long time getting here. You know — operation was successful, comma…”

By the end of the day, which came at around seven in the evening, Glory was ready to concede Stembridge the title of Superman. Each operation had been like the first, with the same fiery concentration, a sense that time was being altered when he was working, the frantic silence as hands came from everywhere across the table to hand him the next instrument, preferably before he called for it. When their last patient had been rolled into recovery, the OR crew was ready to drop. Stembridge reappeared in the doorway and called for Glory to meet him in the hospital cafeteria in fifteen minutes.

Her feet hurt, and her brain was awhirl. She’d never seen anything like this guy, and only then realized that she already was dreading the post-op conference.

“Glad it’s you and not me, honey,” one of the girls said. “That guy’s not real.”

“Scrub it good, Doris,” Glory said. “He’ll be back tomorrow morning, and so will we.”

Glory went to the nurses’ locker room and changed out of her scrubs and back into her day uniform. Then she went to the cafeteria to find Superman. He was already there, having a coffee and a cigarette. He waved when he saw her come into the room and stubbed out his cigarette when she sat down.

“Don’t do that on my account,” she said. “I have two a day, but the rest of the time I feed my cravings from other people’s cigarettes.”

He smiled, and when she saw the lines in his face, she realized that perhaps even Superman was tired.

“It went well today,” he said. “We need to work on your people’s anticipatory readiness.”

Glory raised her eyebrows.

“By that I mean they’re slowing me down somewhat. If a bleeder pops, I expect suction and then clamps. I shouldn’t have to ask for either one.”

She nodded. “I recommend you ask anyway,” she said. “Normally you’d have an assistant surgeon in there. The girls have to get used to you. Some surgeons get angry if the nurses presume to anticipate them.”

“That will soon not be a problem,” he said.

“Really,” she said. She knew two surgeons who could be real jerks about that, and they were both older than this guy.

“I guess I should tell you,” he said. “I’ve been brought in here as chief of surgery.”

She blinked. She’d thought he was just another surgeon, drafted or cajoled out of civilian life to aid in the monumental task of salvaging the thousands of young men being harvested by this war. Then she saw the silver oak leaves insignia on his shirt collars. He was a commander?

“That’s right. I chose OR Two as my theater because the hospital CO said you were the best OR supervisor we had.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” she said. “I’ve had more experience in more hospitals, but there are plenty—”

He waved his hand to shut her off. “Me, too,” he said. “So here’s what I’m going to want from you. I watched you today. You didn’t know it because you were watching everyone else like a hawk. When one of your girls was about to screw up, you intervened, quietly, inconspicuously, before she gave me reason to squawk.”

She shrugged. “That’s just my job,” she said.

“I’m going to float through all the ORs. It’ll be at random. Once I have a complete picture, I’ll corral the surgeons and get them calibrated to my standards. I want you to rotate with me, and then I want you to calibrate the OR teams to your standards.”

“That’s going to hurt some feelings,” she said. “Besides, I think some of the other OR supes are as good as I am, if not better.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “If that’s really the case, we’ll move on to the next one. Five ORs in one facility is a pretty big surgical suite, especially for a small hospital like this. Can you imagine twenty?”

“Good God, no,” she said.

“Well, start thinking about it,” he said. “We’re beginning, just beginning, to advance on Japan. They’ve demonstrated that surrender is not an option. When we have to invade the Home Islands, the casualties are going to be in the hundreds of thousands. Before that happens, the teams here are going to be staged forward as seed corn for over a dozen forward-based hospitals. My job is to ensure they’re ready for that.”

“And why me, again?”

“I move fast, Nurse Lewis. You saw that today. I make a judgment, and I act on it. Doesn’t always pan out, but usually it does. I need someone closer to my own age to be my assistant, and the fact that we’ve both been through a similar personal loss, well, that actually makes things easier.”

“What?” she asked, surprised that he had interjected a personal note.

“I assume you’re still not over the loss of your husband, certainly not with that wreck still sitting out there in the harbor. And I miss my wife terribly. You and I are going to work closely. I’m saying that I want our relationship to be strictly professional.”

Glory was taken aback by that. “What other kind of relationship would we have, Doctor?”

“Don’t get mad,” he said. “Young nurses are impressionable. They tend to fixate on older doctors. You’ve seen that.”

“And us old battleaxes don’t fall for that?”

He grinned at her. “Correct,” he said.

“Even when the doctors are tall, dark, and handsome?”

“Even if the nurses are stunners in their own right,” he said. “C’mon, Glory, don’t be a pill. You know I’m right.”

“Oh, it’s Glory now?”

“Right. And please — feel free to call me Doctor.”

She tried to maintain her expression of indignation, but the twinkle in his eye was unmistakable. He was most definitely having her on. Finally she smiled. “Very well,” she said. “This should be interesting.”

“Then you’ll do it?

“There’s a war on, Doctor. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

He leaned back in his chair and beamed at her. “Super,” he said.

Glory met with the other four OR nurse supervisors in the nurses’ lounge. The operating rooms were all shut down for sanitizing. The first one finished was then designated as a ready room in case a plane came in overnight from the western Pacific with urgent surgical patients. Three of the four nurses had been here since December 7. The fourth was brand-new.

“Okay, ladies, you’re wondering why I asked everyone to come down for a meeting,” she said.

“This has got to have something to do with that new surgeon,” Etta Mae Beveridge said. She was the closest in age to Glory, and they were friends.

“Is it true he’s a full commander?” Janet Wright asked.

“Yes, he is, and that’s kind of why we’re meeting,” Glory said. “He’s not just another surgeon. Apparently he’s been sent here as the chief of surgery, and to get us all ready for a big expansion.”

“Here?” asked Etta Mae. “There’s hardly room for what we’re doing right now.”

“Not here,” Glory said. “Somewhere out west. He didn’t exactly say where, or even when, but this has something to do with when we invade Japan.”

There was an immediate outburst of excited gabbling at this news, but Glory quickly brought them back to the business at hand. She told them what Stembridge wanted and then waited for their reactions. She didn’t expect what happened next.

Etta Mae started giggling, and the other nurses soon joined in.

“What?” she asked.

“Oh, honey, you’re such a peach. You think he chose you to be his assistant because you’re the oldest?”

“Well, I am the oldest, and I’ve been a surgical nurse longer than anyone else here,” Glory said. “I feel like I ought to apologize in advance to the rest of you, though.”

“Glory,” Etta Mae said, “a man who looks like that did not pick you out because you’re the oldest woman in this motley crew.”

Glory felt herself reddening. “There was absolutely nothing—”

“Oh, we know, we know — and you don’t have to apologize. We’ll help out any way we can. Just watch yourself, dear heart. He will be looking for a close working relationship, unless I miss my guess.”

“Hell, I’m ready for a close relationship with him,” said Janet. This provoked more hoots of laughter, and Glory realized that her first official meeting as Stembridge’s new assistant was totally out of control, even if they were entirely wrong about him. And her.

The next evening, Glory was sitting out behind the nurses’ quarters with the rest of the girls, nursing a beer and cooling her weary feet in the long green grass of Hospital Point. The ever-present tropical breeze was blowing through the palms and riffling the water in the harbor entrance channel, which was only a few hundred feet away. The sun had set, but there was still a beautiful tropical afterglow.

“Oh, look,” one of the nurses said. “That’s an aircraft carrier, right?”

Glory shaded her face to look into the sunset. Sure enough, the bulky silhouette of an Essex-class carrier was pointing into Pearl, followed by a long line of smaller ships.

“I think it’s Lexington,” another nurse said. “Scuttlebutt in the cafeteria was that she’s coming in for a week.”

Glory was always surprised at the speed of ships coming through the narrow reef channel. Tommy had told her that there were strong currents off the outside reef and that ships had to scoot in order to maintain good steering control. The carrier came abeam of Hospital Point and passed the nurses in their lawn chairs at a distance of only a few hundred yards. Many of the crew were topside on the flight deck, and sailors were waving at the nurses, who were waving back. They could hear the sound of the big ventilation fans under the flight deck overhang. An announcement being made down on the hangar deck echoed across the water as the ship’s wake broke over the coral flats between the channel edge and the shore. Glory sneezed when a strong whiff of sulfurous smoke from the carrier’s single massive stack wafted over the lawn.

Lexington, she thought. That will mean Beast, and possibly Beauty, if his ship was still assigned to the Lexington group. She knew they’d both be calling, probably as early as this evening. She made up her mind to put them off, and then to make sure that if she did see them, it would be with both of them together. She was pretty sure that Marsh would be satisfied with that arrangement, and Beast? He would simply have to cope. The last thing she needed was an evening spent trying to keep Beast’s big hands off various parts of her anatomy, especially once he got some booze in him.

“I’m going to turn in,” she announced. “My feet are killing me.”

“Sure you don’t want to come with us to the O-club?” one of the nurses asked. “With a carrier in, it’ll be jumping tonight.”

“Jumping is precisely what I don’t need right now,” Glory replied. “Anyone calls, somebody please just take a message.”

It almost worked. At eleven, one of the girls, Betty Billings, knocked quietly on Glory’s door. Glory, who’d been just about to turn off the light, put down her copy of Time. “What now?” she asked.

“There’s this really big guy down on the lanai?” the girl said. “He’s got two mai tais, and he said if you didn’t come down and have a drink with him, he’s coming up.”

“He damned well better not,” Glory said, reflexively pulling up her sheet.

“Glory — he’s huge. I think he’s a pilot. I can’t stop him if he really wants to come in. Please?”

“Betty, just tell him to go away, and if he doesn’t, call the base shore patrol. They know what to do with drunks.”

“He’s not drunk, I swear. Well, not very. He’s kinda cute, too. He says he knows you’re here because he checked with the hospital.”

“Glo-reeee!” a voice called from the downstairs hallway.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Glory said.

“Glo-reeee!”

“All right,” she said. “Go down there and tell him to shut up and I’ll come down.”

Ten minutes later she pushed open the front door of the quarters and looked around. Beast was sitting in one of the rattan armchairs at the far end of the front porch, balancing a large, fruity-looking drink in each hand. Glory had put on cotton pajamas and a long bathrobe. She went over to where he was sitting and pulled up a chair. She’d put a few curlers in her hair just to make herself frumpier.

“Beast, for cryin’ out loud — what are you doing here?”

“I’m in love. I’m also in lust. And just a bit drunkit.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah, well, what can I say. You’re the best-looking thing west of San Diego, and I just had to see you. Like my jeep?”

“Your jeep?”

“Yeah, my jeep,” he said, draining half of one of the mai tais. “Over there. The one with the spiffy aerials.”

“And you acquired the jeep how, exactly?”

“Army pukes. They think they own the place. Leave the keys in their jeeps when they go to our O-club. Who the hell would steal a jeep, right? Couldn’t walk so well, so I drove. Here, this one’s for you. Didn’t spill a drop, even if I did drive on the grass a coupla times.”

“Mick,” she began.

“Beast,” he said. “Hate Mick. My CO calls me Mick. I’m gonna get fired, I think. Again. Not a team player, is what they’ve been saying. Even though I’m an ace. Twice over, in fact. Twelve Nips, gone to Jesus. Or Buddha, maybe. Yeah, Buddha. He’s the one likes Japs. Take your mai tai, for Chrissakes, my arm’s getting tired.”

She took the fragrant drink and set it down on the arm of her chair.

“An ace means you’ve shot down five enemy planes, yes? I seriously doubt they’d fire a pilot who’d managed that.”

“Twice,” he said, followed by a burp. “Damned rum. I can feel the hangover coming.”

“So maybe stop?”

He looked at what was left of his drink. “Stop? I never stop. Never. Isn’t a woman in the world who’s ever told me stop, stop.” He leered at her. “Not you either, Miss Glory of the heavenly breasts, legs—”

“Stop,” she said. “There — now it’s happened. Look at me.”

“All I want to do,” he mumbled. “Look at you.”

She thrust her left hand into his face. “See this ring?”

“Oh, God,” he said. “That’s your miniature?”

“Yes, it is, Mick. Still there, too. So you can quit with the masher routine. Why are you going to get fired?”

He finished his mai tai and threw the glass over his shoulder into the shrubbery.

“I lost two wingmen. Skipper says it’s my fault. Says I’m a glory hound.” He looked over at her for a moment and tried to leer. “He has no idea, actually,” he said.

“How do you ‘lose’ a wingman?”

“Wingmen,” he said. “Two of ’em. It’s all the rage these days. No more solo fighting. You go up in pairs. One guy’s the shooter, the other guy’s the wingman. Shooter’s job is to kill the Jap. Wingman’s job is to protect the shooter from all the Jap’s buddies. Statistics. Now it’s all about statistics.”

“I thought you were a bomber pilot?”

“I used to was,” he said. “Not much to bomb these days, so I transitioned to fighters. Big mistake. These people take everything seriously.”

“I take it you were always the shooter?”

“Oh, hell yes,” he said. “You gonna drink that?”

“No, I’m not, and neither are you.” She poured the drink into the bushes.

“Hey,” he said. “I paid good money for that hooch.”

“Too bad,” she said. “You’ve had quite enough.”

He leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh. He was enormous, she thought. She wondered how he fit into a cockpit.

“You’re supposed to talk, see?” he said. “You’re supposed to be a team. You always let your wingman know what you’re gonna do, so he can cover you.”

He took in a long breath and let it out. The scent of rum filled the air. “But that’s not me, okay? I’m a lone wolf. I do crazy shit in the air. Japs, they go by their rules, just like all our fighter jocks these days. Execute the approved doctrine. I show up, start my crazy-Beast shit, poor rigid bastards can’t figure out what’s happening, and then I smoke ’em.”

“How did this do in your wingman?”

“Wingmen,” he said again. “Two of ’em. Rookies, that’s how they start, flying wing on the more experienced guys. Show ’em how it’s done, okay?”

She nodded.

“Like I said, I do crazy shit. Drop my gear in the middle of a dogfight. Turn upside down. Go head-to-head. Nips can’t believe what they’re seeing. Then I start shooting. Hell, it’s not hard. Word is, they lost most of their best carrier guys at Midway. These land-based Japs are mostly all nuggets now. But it takes all my concentration. Can’t be worrying about a goddamned wingman.”

“So, what — they get left behind in the middle of one of your stunts? And then the Japs gang up on the rookie?”

He gave her a surprised look. “Yeah, babycakes, that’s exactly what happened. Twice, for my sins. Jesus, you’re too beautiful for words.”

“Mick,” she said, “your Irish is showing. This is the rum talking.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “I’ve carried the torch for you since boat school, ever since, well, you know. Ever since Tommy, too.” He put up a hand. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Tommy was the best. Best man, got the best girl. Okay. But that doesn’t mean a man can’t dream.”

“You’re out of bounds here, Mick. You need to get back to the ship, sleep it off. We’ll blame it all on the booze. Then we’ll forget about it.”

He seemed to relax into the chair, his huge frame going soft, his knees spread wide, and his hands hanging down. She was surprised to see a defeated expression creep over his face.

“I’m a case, Glory,” he said quietly. “I think I hit my peak at the Army-Navy game, first-class year. After that, I’ve been a professional fuckup. If the war hadn’t come along they’d have boarded my ass out a long time ago. Midway was my best day as a pilot. Now they want to send me to the amphibs. Backwater Navy. No more fleet carrier ops. All these big-deck skippers are on the make, heavy duty. No place, no time for a killer-diller like me, ace or no ace.”

“We all do our part, Mick,” she said gently. “You guys out there in WestPac, pushing the Japs back. Back here we do twelve on, twelve off, day in, day out, on this phony paradise island, putting the pieces back together. One day, we’re going to win, and then what?”

“Fucked if I know,” he said, “but I actually dread the thought of that. Peacetime? Guy like me? I’ll be lost. No, I’m gonna go out in a blaze of — hah — Glory!”

She smiled at him then, and he grinned back, removing the past decade from his face. She suddenly realized that that was what he’d come for.

“Marry me,” he said.

“What for?” she asked.

“Because I lo-o-o-o-ve you,” he cooed.

“Sure you do.”

“I do, I really do.”

“You want to marry me?”

“Yep.”

“Then give up booze, stay away from O-clubs, hew to the straight and narrow path of righteousness, and become a model naval officer.”

“Jee-sus, Glory,” he complained. “You sound like my wife already!”

They both laughed, and suddenly it was okay between them.

“You know who really does want to marry you, don’t you?” he asked.

“He drive a destroyer?”

“He does indeed. And he would give up the booze, hew to whatever the hell that was, and do anything else you asked. Brother Marshall’s been in love with you from the very beginning.”

“I know,” she said.

“But.”

“Yeah, but,” she said, wishing just now that she hadn’t thrown the mai tai into the bushes. “Let me try to put it all into words.”

“I’m all ears,” he said. “No, I guess that’s Beauty’s line.”

“You approach women like a caveman. Me hero, you wo-man. On your back, wo-man. Beauty? He stands off in the corner, the perfect gentleman, his heart on his sleeve, waiting for a woman to recognize that golden heart, right over there.”

“And Tommy?”

“Bastard.”

“He won the day, Glory. Only fair.”

“Tommy was the smart one. He never did make advances. He never put his arm around my shoulder and his hand on my backside. He just took my hand one day and said, ‘Come with me.’”

“Don’t say backside,” he said. “Say derriere. God, I love that word. The French know a thing or two.”

“I was talking about your hand, Beast.”

“That one doesn’t work so good anymore,” he said, holding up the black-gloved right hand. “This one, however…”

“Mick,” she said.

“Glory Hawthorne,” he said.

“Glory Hawthorne Lewis,” she said.

“Not anymore.”

“Forever, Mick. Forever.”

He stared at her, and she saw a longing, a desperate longing. She would never have expected that, not from him. It startled her, and then aroused her, for the first time since that terrible day. She clamped down on that feeling, immediately.

“I have surgery at seven,” she said. “Time for you to go home.”

“Home.”

“Let me call you a taxi. Leave the stolen jeep. The shore patrol is probably already looking for it.”

“Glory, Glory, Glory. It must be hard being you.”

“Hard?”

“All these men, pressing in. Desiring you, lusting after you, loving you, approaching you, and lingering when nothing happens.”

“It happened once, Beast,” she said. “That was enough.”

“Never.”

“Always.”

He puffed out a breath. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I tried.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I’m going to die out there, you know that?”

“I hope not.”

“One way or another, I will. When I get into that airplane, strap in, taxi up to the midships hold line, and then give it full military power, release the brakes, gun that bastard down the centerline and right off the bow, dip down a little, scare the bridge while I kiss those green waves with the landing gear, that’s when I’m alive, Glory. Really alive.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“You let me love you,” he said. “You’ll get the picture soon enough.”

There was no answering that, she thought.

“Okay,” he said, after a moment. “I guess I’m officially a pumpkin.”

“Good night, Beastie McCarty. Fly low and fast, now.”

“Keep me in mind, beautiful lady. And remember, one Roman candle trumps a hundred sparklers.”

Beast walked away from the nurses’ quarters on unsteady legs, which he immediately attributed to having been at sea for a long time. Couldn’t be the booze, because he still needed another drink. When he got to the bar at the O-club, he found the staff putting chairs up on the tables. He sat down at the bar and ordered another mai tai.

“Sorry, boss,” the bartender said. “We closing up now.”

“You can make one more,” Mick said. “I know you’ve got them all premixed. Just add the rum, and I’ll be quiet.”

The bartender was a large Samoan, with a placid and friendly face. “No can do, boss,” he said. “I’ve closed out for the night. You’ve had plenty. Lemme call you a taxi.”

“I don’t want a fucking taxi,” Mick snarled. “I need another drink.”

The bartender just shook his head and moved away. The guys stacking chairs out on the floor were watching but not alarmed. They’d seen this a hundred times before. Tonight, though, when the bartender turned around, he found Mick behind the bar, rooting around for the mai tai mix.

“Hey!” the bartender shouted when Mick, who couldn’t find what he was looking for, began sweeping bottles onto the floor with a loud crash. The cleaning crew stopped working. There was entertainment.

“Stay out of my way,” Mick said. “You won’t make me a drink, I’ll do it myself.”

The bartender, who was as wide as Mick was tall, sized him up for a minute, then shrugged. “Hey, Benny,” he called across the room. “Call the HASP.”

Mick ignored him, poured a large amount of rum into a glass, added some mix, and then walked over to a table in the corner and sat down. Five minutes later, the Hawaiian Armed Services Police arrived in two of their distinctive jeeps. Four of them came into the bar area. One was an Army officer, the other three Navy enlisted. The officer was a diminutive, bespectacled first lieutenant who came up to Mick’s shoulders; he was wearing Army khakis and highly polished boots and sported a Colt .45 on a pristine white holster belt. The three sailors were all large, strong men. They wore plastic helmets and pressed dungarees with white leggings and carried batons in their gloved hands.

The officer approached Mick at his corner table. “Let’s see some ID, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Up yours, Army,” Mick said. “My uniform’s my ID, and I’m not bothering anybody.”

“ID, please,” the officer said again while his three military policemen spread out behind him.

Mick ignored the officer and examined the three big HASP policemen. “You guys want some action?” he asked, finishing his drink and gathering himself to get up.

“Love some,” said the largest of the three. “Or you can come with us, peaceable like. We’ll all go downtown, see the nice man at the Navy desk, do some paperwork, and then you can sleep it off in one of our officer rooms.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Mick said. “With you or anyone else. So why don’t you pussies just beat it.”

The officer looked over his shoulder at the big man, who nodded and then slapped his baton against his thigh. The officer stepped aside as they moved in. Mick got up and started forward, fists ready, only to trip over the officer’s extended foot and fall flat on the floor. When he tried to get up, the HASP went to work on him with their batons, whaling on his upper arms, thighs, elbows, shins, and knees. When Mick stopped resisting, the big guy stepped in and tapped him once expertly behind the right ear, and Mick was out for the count.

The next morning, Mick found himself in the officer wing of the drunk tank at HASP headquarters in downtown Honolulu. He felt nauseous and badly hung over. His head throbbed with a vicious headache, and every one of his major muscles hurt from the baton workover. There was a large knot behind his right ear, and every time he tried to stand up he got dizzy. He finally stopped trying.

The steel door clanked open, and a HASP cop handed him a mug of black coffee. “Head’s down the passageway to the right. If you gotta puke, do it down there. You puke here, you clean it up. Use the head, then come back here and wait. Sir.”

Two throbbing hours later Mick was taken out front to the booking desk, where they gave him back his wallet, watch, and academy ring. Two more HASP cops were waiting. The desk sergeant told him he was going to take a ride back to Pearl, where somebody wanted to see him.

“I’ll just bet,” Mick said.

“Easy way or hard way, Lieutenant?” the sergeant, a middle-aged Marine, asked. The HASP cops, ever optimistic, had their hands on their batons.

Mick waved a hand. “I’m all done,” he said.

“Smart move,” the sergeant said. “Go with them, please.”

The two cops put him in the right front seat of a HASP jeep, with one of them driving and the other sitting right behind Mick. The fresh air felt good, but when they arrived at their destination, Mick groaned. They’d taken him to the naval base headquarters building. There were senior officers in there, and the last thing Mick wanted to see right now was a senior officer. His uniform was wrinkled and stank of booze. He had not shaved, and his head felt like a fermenting pumpkin. He figured he was probably black and blue all over, but the HASP guys knew where to hit a fella so that his uniform would cover the bruises.

The cops parked the jeep and escorted Mick into the building, where they took him to an office and told him to take a seat. The label on the office’s outer door read NAVAL BASE ADMINISTRATION. They then stood at a casual parade rest behind him until a yeoman came through from the inner office and said the commander would see him now.

Mick got up and followed the yeoman through some batwing doors into the inner office. There he confronted none other than Commander Hugo Oxerhaus, sitting in a wheelchair.

“Who says there’s no God,” Oxerhaus said, rubbing his hands together.

Mick spent the next three weeks temporarily assigned to the naval base headquarters as Commander Oxerhaus’s brand-new personal assistant. He spent his nights in hack at the BOQ and took his meals in the naval station’s enlisted mess hall. He was forbidden to consume alcoholic beverages or to enter any of the island’s military officers’ clubs. Because of the HASP incident, Mick’s squadron had issued temporary administrative duty orders leaving him behind when the carrier sailed.

His days consisted of manning a desk in Oxerhaus’s outer office while dealing with an unending stream of personnel issues and the attendant mountains of paperwork. Once an hour Oxerhaus would yell for him to “get in here” and then chew him out for one administrative infraction or another. Oxerhaus was confined to a wheelchair after breaking his back on a ladder trying to escape the sinking Yorktown. He made Mick wheel him to the head when necessary and then stand outside until he was ready to be wheeled back to his office.

The other officers working at headquarters left Mick alone, being very much aware of Oxerhaus’s special ability to humiliate an individual all by himself. It took the full three weeks for Mick’s body to heal from the HASP beating, during which he learned that such beatings were standard operating procedure for the HASP when dealing with troublemakers. When he complained about it, the other people looked at him as if he were nuts: Everyone on the island, including civilians, knew not to mess around with the HASP, ever.

He also found out that being denied alcohol was its own special form of hell. For the first three nights of his confinement he was able to talk some transient aviators into bringing beer back from the club, but then Oxerhaus made him swear on his personal honor that he would not drink while in hack. Mick kept his word, but the transition from drinking man to abstinence made his nights worse than his days.

His right hand, which had been healing at a glacial pace since the incident on Guadalcanal, was now turning colors again, courtesy of a HASP baton. He worked to keep it out of sight as best he could, because he was sure that if Oxerhaus ever focused on it, he’d use it as a way to board him out of naval aviation. Mick did not want to spend the rest of the war at this naval station backwater. In his third week of BOQ restriction, however, Oxerhaus did notice the hand. He surprised Mick by sending him to see the senior flight surgeon over at Kaneohe Air Station. The doctor gave him a general physical exam and then sat down with him to talk about his hand. Mick explained how it had been injured and then reinjured.

“That HASP love tap didn’t help things,” the doctor said. “If you were looking for a way out of naval aviation, this could certainly be your ticket. But that’s not what you want, is it?”

“Absolutely not,” Mick replied. “All I can do is fly and kill Japs, and that’s all I want to do. But lately I’m getting the impression that the fleet carrier Navy is equating spit-and-polish procedures with Japs in the water. I admit to being a little rough around the edges, but I’m starting to wonder if the Navy really needs people like me anymore.”

The doctor, a fifty-year-old commander in the Medical Service Corps, got up and shut the door to his office. Then he produced a pack of Camels, offered one to Mick, and lit one for himself. Mick had been an indifferent smoker until he’d quit the booze, but now he was well and truly hooked.

“Naval aviation is changing, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. “I’m seeing it every day. Back in early ’forty-two, it was all about survival. Extended peacetime, the Depression, the pay cuts, all that turned a Navy career into a longevity game where people kept their jobs by keeping their heads down. Someone had to die or retire for someone else to get promoted. The Japs helped thin out the upper ranks here in Pearl, but now the smoothies are getting into it. Careers are being advanced, reputations polished. I’m seeing senior aviators more afraid of screwing up than they are of Jap fighter pilots. You academy?”

Mick nodded.

“From the size of you, I’ll bet you played ball and you were good at it.”

“They seemed to like me back then,” Mick said. “Called me Beast. They even had a special cheer whenever I lined up.”

“Yeah, I went to an Army-Navy game once in Philly. Great stuff. And you’ve seen some good action?”

“I got a carrier at Midway, if that counts.”

The doctor nodded. “That where you ran into Oxerhaus? On the Yorktown?”

Mick was surprised. “You know him?”

The doctor took a deep drag on his cigarette and then ground it out in his ashtray. “Yeah, I know him. Had to deal with him back in Pensacola, before he became air boss on the Yorktown. Guy’s a prick, always has been. Did you know his wife left him for another brownshoe?”

“What flavor brownshoe?”

“Three guesses, Lieutenant, and the first two don’t count.”

“An SBD guy?”

The doctor nodded. Mick just shook his head.

“So the first thing we have to do is get you out of Oxerhaus’s clutches, or he’ll bury you there at that naval station. The way we do that is to send you back stateside for treatment. Special surgery, maybe, then some rehab. I’m thinking the training command, back at Pensacola.”

“Will surgery fix this?” Mick asked, holding up his battered hand.

“Probably not,” the doctor admitted. “Eventually, the circulation in that hand is gonna shut down, and then you may lose it. But I’ve got the authority to order you back stateside, and that will get your ass out of that paperwork cage.”

“When could I go?”

“I’ll write the orders today, and I’ll write the medical report in such a way that the docs back there will get the bigger picture. After that, it’ll be up to you to figure out how to get back to a big-deck and killing Nips. Deal?”

Mick finished his cigarette. “Best offer I’ve had all year,” he said. “Deal.”

Marsh was surprised to see a letter on his bed when he got back to the cabin. It was one of those tiny airmail envelopes, smelling faintly of a woman’s perfume. It had been mailed three weeks ago, according to the frank from the Fleet Post Office in Pearl.

Glory?

The return address only had initials, but there it was: the nurses’ quarters at Pearl.

Glory had written him. He felt his heart leap.

He opened the letter, trying not to tear the flimsy paper. His hands were wet from the rain, and he immediately smeared the ink on the top of the almost transparent paper.

Marsh re-read the letter and then smiled. This had to be that young nurse he’d met on the front porch of the nurses’ quarters when he’d gone to see Glory. He was a little disappointed that it wasn’t Glory herself writing him, but he could understand that, too.

Glory was never very far from his thoughts, when he had time to think, which wasn’t that often. The ship had been going full bore since leaving Pearl as the Big Blue Fleet waged a war of attrition on various Jap bases in the Solomons and farther north. In a way, though, he knew she was moving away from him. Truth be told, he had to admit, it was only in his imagination that she’d ever been moving toward him. He had hoped that with Tommy gone he might have a chance to resume at least his long-distance love affair. After the Pearl visit, even he could see that she was still very much in love with her departed husband, and that no man was going to invade that longing anytime soon. Nevertheless, he’d jumped at the chance to start a correspondence with her as a way of maintaining contact. There was always the chance that she’d finally grow tired of mourning Tommy, and if that happened, he wanted to be right there, if only on paper.

A secret admirer. He smiled again. Sally, that was her name. Sally something, beginning with an A. Well, he’d certainly write back — it was nice getting mail from someone, and she had mentioned “our mutual friend.” Perhaps by writing Sally he might keep in touch with Glory. They were roommates in the quarters, and sometimes they probably talked about people they knew. Or wrote to.

There was a knock on the door. The bridge messenger said the captain wanted to see him on the bridge.

“Be right up,” Marsh said, folding the letter and putting it in his to-do basket.